This way! I scream. Through the door!
But even as I speak, I hear a groan above us, the sound of something failing, wood giving way, and they are starting forward toward me, the pair of them, and I scream No! and stagger across the burning floor, scorching my feet, passing across the center just as a beam crashes downward in an explosion of sparks, hitting the ground behind me.
I don’t stop. I gallop on like some kind of greyhound, grab Portia by the arm, grab the small boy by the arm, urge them upstairs to where the fire is already burning through the floor. I can feel its heat on my skin, licking through the wall of the hallway, trying to find a way through from the room above the kitchen. The girl’s room, I realize, Evelyn’s room. Smoke fumes through the cracks in the molding, and it’s going to ignite, it’s like a bomb, I have no choice, I lead them down the hallway to the great staircase sloping back to earth, where the air is full of smoke but not yet fire, feet pounding and lungs coughing, the sharp crack of gunfire splitting the air, until we spill out onto the portico where the fragrant pink dawn illuminates a pair of automobiles.
A Packard and a Model T Ford.
Epilogue
Cocoa Beach, Florida, April 1924
Something wakes him, in the hour before dawn.
Happens all the time. The house makes noises, or else his dreams take a wrong turn. A man’s nerves, honed by war and by crisis, don’t settle back into a peacetime lull simply because peace has arrived.
So he knows what to do. He remains still on his bed, eyes open, listening first for the steady music of his wife’s breathing and then the larger rhythm of the surrounding atmosphere. The sleeping house, the velvet night. The scent of orange blossoms from the vase on Virginia’s dresser, the smoky warmth of the sheets covering their bodies, nested one into the other: her bottom curving into his groin, his arm draped over the large, firm ball of her pregnancy. He counts the beat of her pulse. Lays his lips on her skin to test her temperature. Waits for the reassuring stir of the baby beneath his hand. A month to go, and he cannot stop checking these signs; his anxiety for wife and child cannot be satisfied. His world, from the moment almost of conception, has shrunk inside the boundaries of Virginia’s skin.
And Sam and Evelyn. When his wife’s heartbeat remains ordinary, and a tiny foot twitches against his palm, he eases himself from his haven and pads across the floorboards to the door. Lifts his dressing gown from its hook. Slips through the door and down the hallway to check on the children.
There was a moment, as he lay in the dirt of the road to Cocoa Beach, when he thought he might never see his own daughter.
He remembers how his mouth tasted of dirt and blood and salt. How he lay there without moving, aware only that something terrible had happened; something more terrible than the injuries to his body, of which he was aware without knowing, exactly, which parts of him were injured, and how. More terrible than the night that surrounded him, and the dirt and blood in his mouth, and the appalling confusion in his head.
Something had happened to Virginia. Samuel. Samuel had taken her away. Driven off. Beaten him.
He remembers how he spat out the grit and the blood, the awful taste of copper that made him sick. How his stomach heaved. How he lifted himself on his elbow and vomited into the earth, and by this action was made aware that his injury, at least the primary one, had something to do with his shoulder. That his head was sticky with blood, and he had lost the top part of his ear to Samuel’s bullet.
He remembers how his heart beat wildly, but not because of this new awareness, the shock of discovering one’s blood, realizing one’s wounds. His heart beat wildly because Virginia was gone, Virginia had driven away with Samuel—he remembers the Ford, the smell and strength of Samuel heaving him over the side of the car and into the road—and Samuel would take her to Lydia, who had escaped from her prison—that much Simon learned from Marshall, in that brief telegram two days earlier, just before leaving Cuba, sending him into a frenzy of worry—and Lydia would do what Lydia had always done. Lydia would punish him, through Virginia.
Through his daughter.
He remembers how he made a fist and cried out again, a keening lament, and because the thought of Evelyn was nearly unbearable, he did the thing that hurt less: rose up on one hand, and then, with great effort, to his knees. And then, greater effort still, broken ribs straining under the necessary expansion of his chest, climbed to his feet, popped his dislocated shoulder into place—terrible agony—and listened carefully for the sound of the ocean.
How, when he found it, he set off in the opposite direction. Toward Cocoa. Toward Virginia and Evelyn.
Because he could not possibly die without seeing his daughter, just once.
He could not die without finding some way to save her.
She’s safe now. Lying on her bed, tucked under blankets, clutching a doll to her cheek. The window’s open a few inches, screened against the damned mosquitoes, because Simon believes firmly in the virtues of fresh air. How she’s grown in that year—now nearly two—since he first saw her! Bouncing against Lydia’s hip, framed by the terrible billowing smoke that poured from the windows of Maitland. So small and flushed and confused. Crying out Mama! over and over, as he jumped free from the Packard, Clara shouting out something he couldn’t hear—Clara, who had encountered him on the street outside the hotel, who had driven him to Maitland while he drank from a flask of rum and bandaged his own wounds—and then Evelyn’s little head snapping sideways as Lydia slapped her.
That cheek now rests on a clean, white pillow, and the beautiful dark hair is brushed and shiny, the skin washed pink, the mouth full and twitching slightly under the influence of some dream. He doesn’t quite remember how he saved her in that terrible dawn—he knows he attacked Lydia, he knows he snatched Evelyn away, he knows Lydia pulled a gun out of nowhere and threatened to shoot his daughter, he knows Samuel then took the gun and shot his lover—but these are details that were told to him later. In his memory the entire brief exchange is nothing but a grotesque blur, and maybe it’s better that way. Maybe it’s better that he only remembers the relief of collapsing in the dirt, clutching Evelyn to his breast, and looking up to find Virginia staggering across the portico with Portia and little Sam. Smoke pouring out behind her, bloodied and brave and alive, the kind of woman worth waiting for. Fighting for. Dying for. Living for.