“Thanks,” Grace says.
When she opens the mill door, she sees that the rooms are being used as temporary shelters. She scans faces but doesn’t recognize anyone. She studies the bulletin board with no result. Through the large window of the mill, Grace can see Matthew reading a newspaper in the truck. She slips closer to the window for better light. She opens the letter.
Dear Grace,
Rosie was never much good at letter writing, so I am writing you instead. But she’s sitting at my elbow telling me what to write, if you can imagine her there. First, I have to thank you for saving her life and the lives of our children. From what Rosie has told me, if it hadn’t been for your instructions, she almost certainly would have been caught up in the fire. I cannot even think about that.
Rosie doesn’t know where you are, and she asks that you write to the address on this envelope. You might notice that it’s a Nova Scotia address. We aren’t there yet, we are still driving down east, but we are headed to the town where my parents live. There we’ll settle for a bit, see if I can find work. There is nothing for us in Hunts Beach. The house is gone with no insurance. The auto mechanic shop burned. As soon as you get this, please write where you are staying. Rosie misses you so much. She feels as though she abandoned you, but she had no choice when the fire department came and made her get into the truck. They promised her they would go right back for you.
I wish I could tell you something about Gene. As you know, five of us went to the edge of town to make a firebreak so that we could stop the blaze from entering Hunts Beach. Before we knew what was happening, the fire came roaring down the hill straight at us. Two of us fled, I and one other man fell flat onto the ground, pushing our faces into the dirt. We were sure we were going to die. But as luck would have it, the fire crowned and leapt over us. When we stood, Gene was no longer with us. One of the men swore he saw Gene walking toward the fire, which was not a completely insane thing to do. If you can bury yourself in the dirt, it can sometimes be but a short moment until the fire passes, and then you’re safe because everything behind the fire has already burned. I cannot and do not want to say that Gene perished in the fire. He was the smartest of all of us. I pray that he escaped unharmed.
Rosie says she will die of boredom in Nova Scotia, so you must be our first visitor when everything is settled.
Your good friends,
Rosie and Tim
Grace slides down the wall to a bench, holds the letter to her chest, and is doubly pained by the true destruction of Hunts Beach: Everyone will move away. What is there to go back to? A barren land with no house upon it. She can’t even begin to think about rebuilding. Not without Gene. Even with Gene. Where would they find wood that wasn’t charred? How would they come up with the money? How could they, as a family, live alone on a cinderscape?
After some exploring, Grace finds a side shop that sells remnants. Most pieces are too big or oddly shaped to work for day dresses. But she discovers, beneath a small mountain of fabric, a piece of navy blue cotton, enough to make a dress for her and something for Claire and Tom, too. Joan gave her a dollar bill as she left the house in the morning.
The cost of the navy blue cotton comes to $1.04.
“I have only a dollar,” Grace says.
The cashier hesitates. Is it worth ripping away a fragment of a fragment?
“Just take it,” she says. “What you have is fine.”
“Thank you,” says Grace, holding her wrapped parcel.
“Matthew, I wondered if you would do something for me,” Grace asks when she climbs back into the truck.
“If I can.”
“I’d like to go to Hunts Beach to see if anyone I know is still there.”
“The fire department has been pretty thorough about searching all standing houses, but it never hurts to try.”
“My father was a lobsterman,” Grace offers.
“Was he now.”
“He died when I was fourteen. Went overboard in January.”
No need to explain to Matthew what happened then.
“I’m sorry,” Matthew says.
“It would have been quick,” Grace says, relying on that not-very-comforting old saw. She has too many times pictured the minute her father was in the water before his respiratory system shut down from the shock and the cold.
“Yes, it would have been.”
“It took my mother years to get over it. She lives on what the League of Lobstermen can provide. Some years the money is adequate, sometimes not. I went to secretarial school to help out. But then I met Gene.”
“I’m sure she was happy about that.”
“Yes, she was.”
They drive through blocks of yellow and orange foliage and then through passages of black, as if flitting in and out of a train tunnel. In the green, Grace searches for pumpkins or colorful mums, anything that is a sign of normalcy.
When Matthew turns a corner, she can see from several blocks away that her entire neighborhood is gone. Her mind’s eye can trace every wall of her house, every chair, every kitchen tool, her mother’s favorite tea mug. What is she already forgetting?
“This is unbearable,” she says.
“Can’t wait for the first snow,” Matthew says. “I’m not sure I ever said that before.”
“I need to get out.”
The setting sun gives the water a shade of blue Grace has always loved. She used to think the sea the one blessing of winter: even though the world around her was bleak, the water seldom lost its color. Today, the contrast between the dead black and the rich blue is almost impossible to believe in.
She removes her shoes and puts her feet into the sand. Two or three inches down, her toes connect with wet. She moves toward the water.
She sticks a foot into the sea and then snatches it back. She is not tempted to go in—she knows the water chill of November, but she has come on a mission, even as she knows how strange it is. She thanks the ocean, that vast indifferent entity, for saving her and Claire and Tom.
News
Alone in her room, Grace sits on her bed, propped up by pillows, and reads the several newspapers she discovered in Joan’s kitchen. She learns that fires ravaged Hunts Beach and that 150 of 156 homes in another seaside community burned to the ground. Along with Hunts Beach, five other towns were completely destroyed. She discovers that 3,500 people who were trapped on a pier at Bar Harbor were saved by the Coast Guard. She had no idea the fire had reached so far down east. She reads of a couple who moved all their furniture to the barn, only to have the house saved while the barn burned. Men in planes tried unsuccessfully to make rain with dry ice, fire victims ranged in age from sixteen to eighty, and some farmers would not leave their livestock. Fire damage was estimated at $50 million, home builders planned to build one thousand homes, and Halloween was banned in Maine.
Newspapers are strewn all about her, the collection telling of the immensity of the fire and its terrible toll. From the articles, she doesn’t have a precise map of the fire, but it seems to have hugged the coast of Maine from Bar Harbor to Kittery.
The carnage of the fire amazes her yet again. So many homeless, injured, or dead. She shudders at the report of the sixteen-year-old girl who died in an evacuee motor crash. Grace imagines the panic, the speed, and the horror in the realization that in leaving the danger zone, the girl was put in harm’s way. Grace puzzles over the list of the dead and a Mr. Doe from Sanford or Biddeford. Might the body have been named Mr. Doe by a coroner, pending an investigation, while a reporter took the name literally?