“Okay,” Rosie says.
Grace races into the sea to wet the blanket. Men in jackets and caps carry children toward the water, as if in a great and horrible sacrificial act. The women, with provisions, follow. She lays the blanket over Rosie and her children just as she said she would. Then she sets her own children in the sand and wets another blanket. Tugging the dripping wool, she fetches Tom and lies down facing up, pulling the blanket to her face and anchoring it with her feet. She beckons for Claire to come to her. When she has the children securely beside her, she lets go for a second and flips onto her stomach, making three air pockets. She rolls the children over so that they are all facedown in the sand. Holding her hair back with one hand, she drapes the blanket up and over their heads. She checks around Claire and Tom to make sure nothing is sticking outside the covering.
She hears screams—not of pain, but of horror, and she guesses that the waterfront houses are about to go. People who have not managed to get out of town are trapped like rats running for the sea. She prays an animal will not step on her or, worse, try to burrow inside.
The heat on their heads and backs is just this side of bearable. The blanket won’t stay wet for long.
“Rosie!” Grace shouts.
Grace can hear nothing.
“Rosie!”
“Still here!”
“Squiggle back into the water till it’s up to your thighs, just short of the kids’ feet.”
“Why?”
“Do it, please.”
Grace follows her own instructions and is in water nearly to her waist. She wishes she had thought to make a cave for her stomach. She creates new air pockets for herself and the children.
“Whatever you do, don’t look up. Rosie, did you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Did you look up?”
“Yes.”
Grace takes shallow breaths, afraid she might inhale sand. She wonders if she and her children will die like this, the fire advancing to the dune grass at the seawall and then igniting Grace’s blanket. Would it be too late by the time she felt the pain, or would she have a few seconds to get Tom and Claire into the water up to their shoulders? She might have to dunk herself and the kids if the fire gets that close. Does sand burn?
She can do nothing but wait until the fire exhausts itself. The seawater must be in the mid-sixties, and she has begun to shiver under the blanket. She has on only her cotton nightgown. The children are hardly more dressed than she. She can’t tell if the shivering is simply because of the cold, or if it stems from fear. Heat leaves the body quickly when one is lying on the ground, though the top of her feels as if it might sear at any minute. She would rather suffer the cold until the fire is well and truly out. How long will that take?
Around her, she hears timbers crashing, grass crackling. How many people are on the beach now? She doesn’t dare look. She wishes she could calm herself, but it’s impossible with the shivering. She has only one task now, to save her children.
And then Rosie’s children and Rosie.
The shaking becomes so severe, the children seem to catch it. Nature’s way of keeping them warm inside.
When she can no longer resist peeking, the moon is red. Burned trees fall to the ground amid showers of sparks. The entire town, for as far as Grace can see, is ablaze. Nothing moves but the fire—hungry, angry, relentless.
This must be what hell is like, she thinks as she lowers the blanket.
Grace worries for her mother. She must be safe, she decides. Her two friends would have rescued her. Gladys has a car. Perhaps they evacuated her earlier, and her mother, having no way to communicate, could not alert Grace. Or maybe her mother is at the other end of the beach, over a mile away, hovering near the water, as she is.
Claire begins to cry. Afraid that the child might inhale sand, Grace removes her arm from her daughter and as best she can fills the hole.
“Look at me,” she says to Claire. “Just lie your head down facing me.”
Grace brushes the sand from her daughter’s face. “Go to sleep now,” she says. She reaches back to cover her child with her arm.
When Claire is settled, Grace turns to her son. His face is covered with sand. She fills his hole and turns his head to face hers. She can’t understand his strange quiet. His eyes are open, and he is breathing, but he ought to be crying like his older sister. Instead, his expression is solemn, as if he were in shock. She wishes the children would fall asleep. But how can they, when death threatens a mere twenty yards away? They know this is not a game. Not at night. Not in the wet sand.
Grace wants to think of Gene, but her thoughts are muddy because she can’t picture where he is or what he is doing. Does he have a shovel in his hands? Is he cowering in a river as she is in the ocean? Or is he sitting in someone’s kitchen having a cup of coffee and a donut in order to keep his energy up?
It would have been impossible, Grace understands now, for him to get a message to her, never mind come home to save her. How is it that they all read the fire so wrong, that no one understood that the town and possibly the people in it would be dust by morning, nothing but hot embers, a whistling wind?
The shaking in Grace’s body is so intense that she feels as if her limbs will break apart. Her hands barely work when she reaches beyond her children to make sure nothing is sticking outside the blanket. Not a tendril of hair, not a foot.
She will not allow herself to picture the advance of the fire to the water. They will not burn. They will not drown.
“Rosie!” she yells.
No voice answers her. She doesn’t dare open her blanket. The heat has not abated.
She waits another minute.
“Rosie?”
Hour after hour, Grace holds her children. She tries to keep them warm with her body. Her limbs stiffen and ache.
A sensation of natural light. A cessation of sound. Only the wash of the water, the odd comment from afar.
She tries to bring Tom and Claire closer to her, but her muscles are so cramped and numb, she can’t move.
“Over here!” a man yells.
Two men Grace has never seen before kneel on the sand and peer into Grace’s eyes.
“Are you hurt, ma’am?” one asks.
“Take the children,” she manages. “Please. Warm them up.”
“Will do,” one says, and the two men lift the blanket off Grace.
“Jesus,” the other man says.
She knows the skirt of her nightgown is raised, but she can’t care about that now. One man takes Claire, the other Tom. Awakened from their nightmare, only Claire begins to wail, a reassuring sound.
“Don’t you worry, ma’am. We’ll be right back for you.”
Grace follows her children with her eyes.
The only signs that what she sees was once a town are the perfectly intact brick chimneys, tall druids with awful stories to tell. In one chimney, two fireplaces are visible, one over the other, the brick of the second-story hearth still protruding.
She spots a large vehicle the size of a bread truck parked across the street. The children are handed over to someone inside. Grace can still hear Claire crying.
One of the two men comes back for her.
“The other man’s wife is in there with your children. Can you move?”
The pain in her back and shoulders is searing, nearly unbearable. She shakes her head.
“Have you been here all night?”
“Yes.”
She can see only his boots and then his knees.
“I’m going to try to roll you over,” he says.
She can feel his hands under her shoulder and hip. She does all she can to help him, rolling with a thud, as if she were a frozen block of ice. She sees him lower her nightgown, but she has no sensation in her legs.
“You’re pregnant,” he says, alarm evident in his voice. “We’ve got to get you to a hospital.”
“Why? Hospital?”