Edward and Thomas abandoned their disbelief almost immediately, and soon they were crossing through, placing their hands on anonymous shoulders, kicking their knees up to step over rubble, holding their shirts over their mouths, working towards the glow.
A fireman had reached her before they could, had shoved her from risk, and as they approached, he looked down at Edith as though she were a total impossibility. She opened and closed her mouth but it was apparent, without being able to hear over the roar, that it produced no words, did nothing, a door blown unlocked by bad weather. When they got to her, when they each took a flaccid elbow, he had brought a small black box to his mouth and was speaking into it. “Yeah, I need an escort for a possibly disoriented older woman. That’s correct. She almost walked right into a fire here.”
“There’s no need for that,” Thomas said in the brawny man’s general direction, determining his confidence in the statement as he went. “We’re her neighbors. We can take her home.”
“Just across the street,” Edward said, motioning with a quick shrug, as though denying his involvement in a crime. The man raised his hat a little to look at them, the odd slump of the taller one’s body, the established sweat and food stains on the shorter one’s shirt, and pressed a button on the device, preparing to issue some further instruction.
A sound filled the next moment, something like the forcing of an object into a space much too small for it, and the man in the heavy black cloth was gone. The two neighbors, briefly meeting eyes over the meager fluff of their landlord’s hair, began to advance, their fingers still fixed to the crooks of her arms. Thomas took naturally to small reassurances, the restrained lilt of them, and with each step he offered another. “We’re just going to head home. We’re just going to get you out of this heat. It’s only a little farther now.” Twice Edith looked up at them, examining their faces, giving off benign blinks. The crowd parted like water around a rock, and they watched her shuffling in the same way they’d watched the windows of the ignited building buckle.
Outside their home Thomas and Edward waited, their backs turned to the heat, for her to speak. When she couldn’t, they began the work of filling the air. “Here we are,” Thomas said. “There’s your kitchen window, Edith, with the spider plant and the rosemary soap you like and the tall blue kettle.” Rattled by the pressure to comfort her, Edward spoke too loudly. “And there’s the front door, and just inside the brass mailboxes and that ridiculous sign that says No Flyers What-So-Never.” As Paulie untucked himself from his sister, he seemed to spring into his full height, the jungly curls of his hair moving half a second behind the momentum of his body. Confused by the nature of the game, he mentioned objects as though they were questions. “A bucket full of umbrellas no one uses? All the doors painted differently?” Edith’s stare remained fixed on something they couldn’t see, and her mottled arms hung limp as dishrags.
Claudia, behind Paulie, made faces at Edward and Thomas, raked her teeth over her lips. The men looked at each other, mouthing words: Well? What now? The night had become, after the swiftness of the lights and sirens and the unremitting whip of the heat, very long.
After a minute Edith moved, her shoulder blades working, her feet flexing tentatively against cushioned sandals. “Oh, forgive me,” she said, picking up some unknown conversation where it had left off. “It’s gotten late.” As she climbed up the stairs, both hands on the left railing, her torso contorting to meet its line, she murmured, “Good night, good night,” and the sound of it paralyzed them, her inflection like that of a young woman turning in after a long, amorous outing in a car.