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PART THREE. Next

KEVIN IS AIRBORNE, but unlike his moment of caesura on the bridge, he’s not falling, he’s rising straight up into the air. The lovely receptionist is rising, too, her eyes wide, her hair flying, her mouth a startled O, her sweater rucked up to bare her firm midriff. In this alarming and vivid moment of super slo-mo, Kevin recalls a picture he saw years ago, by a famous photographer of his youth, that showed a young Richard Nixon with his jacket buttoned and his legs together, jumping straight up off the floor of some government office or hotel suite. His hands were spread beatifically and there were two or three inches of air between the pointed toes of his Oxfords and the nap of the carpet. He wore a bemused smile. Imagine that, thinks Kevin — Nixon, beatific, bemused — as the interior window of the conference room disintegrates into infinite points of light. Beyond the glittering scrim of splintering glass, the conference table hangs in the air, the chairs orbiting it six inches off the floor, their little wheels spinning. Meanwhile the outer window bursts out into the void, fifty-two stories up. Kevin’s ears fill with the disintegrating hiss of glass and a cracking rumble like rocks tumbling in a drum.

Then he’s bouncing painfully on the hard, cold floor of the reception area. He hasn’t landed on his feet (the way Nixon did, presumably), but on his hip, bruisingly, his shoes over his head, the heel of his hand skidding across the floor. Everything around him is also bouncing — the two stylish black leather chairs, a large potted fern, the receptionist — and from behind the reception desk all sorts of things that were airborne a moment ago — pens, pencils, a legal pad, a stapler, a cell phone, a ring binder — are tumbling end over end. Marble from the desktop shatters against the floor, and atomized glass skitters like popcorn, surging across the floor like incoming surf. Kevin tumbles through all this chaos, just another bouncing thing, until he hits his shoulder blade against the floor, whacks his knee on something, and lands finally on his back with his arms curled over his head and his fists clenched. Directly above him the suspended ceiling is rippling, panels cracking, cables and wiring jigging like snakes. Grit streams toward the floor. Dust trembles in the air all around him.

Kevin is shaking all over, though whether that’s just him or the floor is still moving, it’s too early to tell. All around him he hears cracking and clattering and rumbling, and from a more specific direction, somewhere out of sight, the sharp, percussive spitting of something electrical. He lifts his head but he can’t see sparks anywhere. He does see that he’s lying with his feet splayed and the right leg of his new trousers pushed up past his knee, baring his bandage with its pink stain in the center. From his left foot he’s missing his shoe, and beyond the reinforced toe of his brand-new sock he sees that the conference room has been nearly emptied out. The long table is gone and only three chairs remain, two of them lying on their sides coated in dust and glass and shredded drywall. The third chair has landed on its wheels, its seat slowly turning on its axis as if somebody has just gotten up out of it. Harsh sunlight streams through the swirling dust where the outer window used to be, and Kevin can already feel the blush on his face as the heat from outside swells into the room.

Now his trembling has become rhythmic and rapid, synchronous with the thunder of his own pulse. The air is dusty and acrid, something chemical stinging the back of his nostrils. Oh God, does he smell smoke? He can’t tell, he can’t place the odor, and he tells himself desperately that it’s probably not smoke. His throat is dry, though, and he gags on the dust in the air and spits to the side to expel the grit from his mouth.

“What happened?” he says aloud. He loosens his tie and undoes the top button of his new shirt. The cracking and rumbling has diminished, though it hasn’t entirely stopped — something, somewhere, creaks menacingly like ship timbers — and he can still hear that electrical smacking sound like someone cracking a whip. His whole body still shakes. Warm air courses all around him now, cutting the dust a little, and he lifts his head. Through the gap to the outside he sees the bleached Texas sky and the skeletal top of the nearest unfinished condo tower, the Tinkertoy crane above it still slowly turning. Whatever’s happening over here, those guys over there are still working. Maybe what’s happening isn’t what he thinks it is. Maybe it isn’t happening at all.

Above him the ceiling has stopped rippling, but from broken ceiling panels and twisted framing hang loose wires and bent pipes and an AC duct split at a seam. A crack in a concrete beam slowly drips a stream of dust, and it occurs to Kevin that maybe he should get out from under it. But he can hardly move. His entire body beats like a drum, and when he unclenches his fists his fingers tremble so alarmingly that he clenches them white again. What do you do in a situation like this? What’s the first step? Should he pinch himself? Maybe this isn’t real, maybe he’s only nodded off in the cab listening to the radio, or maybe he’s still on the plane from Michigan, maybe he’s asleep high over Kansas with Joy Luck deep in her novel next to him, and he’s worried himself into a nightmare. Maybe he’s still in bed back in Ann Arbor, with more room to be restless than usual because Stella’s away in Chicago and not pressed against him with her hair scraping his cheek and her humid breath against his chest. Wake up, Kevin tells himself. Computer, freeze program.

Then he remembers the receptionist, and he starts violently, as if he’s been stung by that electric whip he keeps hearing. Oh God, where is she? He jackknifes to a sitting position without touching his hands to the floor, which is graveled with broken glass and shards of black marble. Before he can imagine the worst he sees the girl curled in a fetal ball on the floor a few feet away, just this side of a heap of crumpled wall where a corridor used to run deeper into Hemphill Associates. She’s clenched like a fist, her knees drawn up, her fingers dug into her upper arms, her hair spilled over her face and jeweled with broken glass. Kevin tries to speak, but his mouth is dry and his tongue seizes up, and he hacks and clears his throat and spits again. Careful of the glass all around him, he sets his heels against the floor, one shoe and one sock, and drags himself on his backside a quarter-inch toward the girl.

“Hey,” he rasps, then pauses to spit more dust. He can’t tell if she’s conscious, but at least her rib cage is rising and falling. She’s just a couple feet beyond his stocking foot, and if he could only bring himself to unclench the muscles in his leg and extend his knee, he could nudge her with his toe. But he can still hear that nautical creaking, and he’s wondering if he should move at all. What if the slightest gesture from him brings the ceiling down? What if he slides forward and the whole goddamn peak of the building comes down on top on them? He’s not doing either of them any good if he does that. What if all it takes is the thunder of his pulse? Or a sharp intake of breath?

Another startling, electrical whip crack freezes him. It sounds like it’s getting closer, as if the wire is snaking through the rubble, seeking him out, and he says aloud, “That’s really getting on my nerves.” At which the girl shudders all over, to Kevin’s vast relief. “Hey,” he rasps, “can you hear me?”

She stiffens, catches her breath, gingerly lifts her head. Fragments of glass tumble from the hair spread over her face.

“Careful.” Kevin scoots another quarter-inch. “You’ve got glass in your hair.”

Someone is shouting in his head that he should go to the young woman and brush the glass off her, but someone else is shouting equally loud, don’t you fucking move. He’s afraid of the glittering glass all around, afraid he’ll embed it in his hands and his stocking foot. He’s afraid the room will start lurching again, that the electrical snake will bite him finally and fry him to a blackened crisp like a cartoon cat, that the cracked beam overhead will split and pulp his head like a melon. Through the windowless gap a hot, steady wind is clearing the room of its haze of dust. He can breathe a little easier. Meanwhile the girl has propped herself on her elbow. With trembling fingers she parts the hair over her face, gingerly combing kernels of glass to the floor. Now Kevin’s like the guy at the toga party in Animal House, alone with a passed-out sorority girl, a tiny angel on one shoulder and a diminutive devil on the other, but this time their roles are reversed. Go to her, says the angel. Stay where you are, says the devil.

“That’s good,” he says, trying to keep his voice steady. He manages to extend his feet toward her. “You’re getting it.”

Through her hair he can begin to see her more clearly; her face is bloodlessly white and her eyes are squeezed shut. She licks her lips, she blinks, she opens her eyes and looks up at him, and then the floor abruptly splits under Kevin’s thighs with an almighty crack, expelling a puff of dust all along the seam, leaving Kevin’s feet dangling in the air as the floor beyond it tilts violently away. On the other side of the crack everything — broken glass, office chairs, girl — slides toward the gap to the outside. Instinctively Kevin lurches back, heedlessly pressing his palms into glass, hauling himself frantically away from the split. Downhill from the sliding girl, the upright conference room chair rolls over the edge and out into the air, its seat still turning. One of the upended chairs slides after it. The girl meanwhile has erupted into frantic action, scrambling uphill on her hands and knees through the cascading glass and drywall and debris, her wild eyes fixed on Kevin from behind her jeweled veil of hair. Before angels or devils tell him otherwise, he twists on his bruised hip and thrusts his hand over the edge for her, his palm stinging with glass and already oozing blood, but before she can even reach for it she puts her foot on something sliding past her — it’s Kevin’s missing shoe — and loses her purchase, landing flat on her belly, sliding backward.

“No!” she shouts fiercely, her palms dragging against the floor. At the last instant she clutches the armrest of the one remaining chair, but the chair’s sliding, too. Then she slithers over the edge and she’s gone, followed by the chair, its little wheels spinning uselessly.

Kevin convulses away from the crack in the floor. He’s really shaking now, it’s not just his racing pulse. His palms are burning and dripping blood. Oh God, he thinks, oh God oh God oh God. He’s trembling so hard he’s afraid he’ll vibrate right over the edge and out the window after her, so he curls his stinging hands over his chest and scrabbles with his feet away from the crack, banging past a leather chair on its side, plowing through the spilled soil of the potted plant, leaving a wake through broken glass, until his back is up against the inside wall of the lobby and his knees are drawn up to his chest, the soles of his feet — one socked, one shoed — pressing hard on the floor.

Oh God, he thinks, I just saw someone die. He presses the back of his head against the hard, merciless wall behind him and squeezes his eyes shut, but then all he sees is the girl splayed against the Austin skyline, just hanging there, arms and legs spread like a skydiver’s. Which is not even what he actually saw, but it’s what he sees now in the pulsing darkness behind his eyelids. One moment she was just beyond his reach, and the next she was over the edge. I almost had her, he thinks, but I waited too long, I hesitated. If I’d spoken to her sooner, if I’d nudged her quicker with my foot, if I’d gone to her right away…

… you’d be dead, too, says his fucking little devil, you’d have been on the wrong side of the crack, and you’d be spinning weightless through the air, watching the pavement hurtling toward you.

“Oh God,” he says aloud, but he’s afraid to open his eyes for fear of seeing worse, for fear of seeing the crack widen and the floor tilt again, of seeing the Austin skyline framed by the maw of the shattered window, in the last minute before he himself is pinned against the sky like a specimen. Still not opening his eyes, he tugs his rucked-up pant leg down over his bandage and slowly lets his feet slide forward. As soon as his legs are spread against the floor, as if a passage has been unblocked, a damp warmth spreads through his groin. The skin of his inner thigh begins to sting lightly, and then he’s stung as well at the back of his nostrils by the smell. He cracks an eyelid. The stain of his piss is darkening the inside of his left trouser leg. The ammoniac tang joins the other acrid smells, of fried chemicals and burned plastic and powdered concrete and Christ knows what else — ozone, maybe, whatever ozone smells like, from that loose, crackling, still-invisible wire. The stain spreads nearly halfway to his knee; it’s all that tea he’s been drinking since he landed, he thought he’d emptied his bladder in the men’s room at Wohl’s, but no, there’s a reserve he hasn’t tapped, and now his brand-new trousers are ruined. Second pair today, and he’s damned if he’s buying another. He starts to laugh and cry at the same time. Two ruined pairs of dress slacks in one day, that’s his limit.

He slumps against the wall. Pissing himself has calmed him a little; the stinging warmth is reassuring. He’s not dead yet. He plucks the wet cotton away from his leg and then remembers the glass in his palms, and he turns his hands over. Blood has darkened the cuffs of his jacket — I’m just leaking all over, thinks Kevin — but the glass in his hands doesn’t look as bad as it feels. It’s not in jagged shards, but rough little kernels, like broken auto glass, a few in one palm and even fewer in the other. He’s tempted to just slap his hands together as if he has sand all over them, but even now he’s still got enough sense to know that that would really, really hurt. So instead he licks blood off the thumb and first two fingers of his right hand, then lifts his knee and steadies his left hand against it as he attempts to pluck a fragment out of the heel of his palm. The glass is slick with blood and hard to get a grip on, and oh God, it stings like a bitch, but he pries the nugget loose with his nails and flicks it away, watching blood well into the tiny white hole it has made. He squeezes his eyes shut and shudders all over like a wet dog, then opens his eyes again and brings his trembling fingers to bear on another fragment of glass.

Something buzzes rhythmically nearby, over and over, like a wasp trapped behind a window screen. Fuck off, thinks Kevin, whatever you are — another loose wire, a shredded ceiling tile thrumming in the hot wind, some crumbling bit of masonry about to vibrate onto his head and kill him. Fuck off. You’re in shock right now, says one of his little familiars — could be the angel, could be the devil, he can’t tell the difference — you should pull yourself together, clear your head, start thinking about what you need to do to get out of here. Yeah, says Kevin back, but what about my hands? They hurt. He flicks another kernel of glass away like a booger.

The buzzing continues, angry, insistent, suspiciously regular, and Kevin lifts his head from his minor surgery to listen, holding his breath. It’s a familiar sound, and he latches onto it, numbly wondering if the buzzing is proof that this is all a dream — it’s his alarm going off and he’s going to wake up any second now, disoriented and groggy, to see the pale green numerals of his clock glowing in the dark, he’s going to feel Stella stirring against him, muttering for him to shut it off. The buzzing is like a rope thrown into his well of sleep, and all he has to do is grab on and haul himself to safety.

It comes in threes: Buzz, buzz, buzz. Pause. Buzz, buzz, buzz. It’s quite near, and suddenly his devilish little angel says in his ear, answer the fucking phone. Kevin lowers his knee and drops his hands palm up in his damp lap and stares slack-jawed beyond his shoeless toes at a little black flip phone buzzing amid the glass near the crack in the floor. The phone rotates a quarter turn with each trio of pulses.

“Oh,” breathes Kevin, and then, as if that electrical snake has at last sunk its fangs into him, he jerks his legs under him, curls his hands spastically against his chest, and slides knee by knee, his toes pressed flat behind him, toward the phone dancing on the edge of the abyss. The weight on his right knee revives the pain of his first laceration of the day and squeezes blood through the bandage into his brand-new trousers, but then they’re already ruined, says his angelic devil, so what the hell difference does it make? His heart’s pounding again because any second now another foot or so of the truncated floor is going to crumble off like pie crust and tilt him into oblivion. When he’s within fingertip reach of the vibrating cell he sinks back on his butt and leans forward, but his hand trembles so hard that he jerks back, afraid he’ll fumble the throbbing little phone — his lifeline, his ray of hope, his salvation — over the side.

He inches forward on his knees, heart thundering. Not so fucking close! The phone vibrates through another cycle, and Kevin snatches the cell and yanks it back to his chest. He rocks painfully back onto his toes, and plucking at his lapel with two smeary fingers he shoves the phone inside his jacket. Then he swivels onto his butt again and, crying out at the sting of glass pressed deeper into his palms, hauls himself back from the crack and up against the wall, his wake through the debris punctuated with bloody palm prints. The phone pulses against his chest like another heart. Braced against the wall, his legs splayed, he can hear someone whimpering, and it takes him a moment to realize it’s him.

Then the phone stops and it’s as if his own heart has stopped, as if whoever was calling has already given him up for dead. “No!” he cries, and thrusts his hand inside his jacket again, smearing his tie and his new shirt with blood. He holds the cell by the tips of his fingers, steadying his wrist with his other hand. The glossy black burnish of the phone is already dappled with red. He wipes his fingertips on his trousers and licks his lips. He tries to breathe more deeply, but it’s as if his ribs are wrapped tight in gauze. He flips open the phone. The keypad is impossibly miniature and pristine and he nearly flips it shut again, not wanting to bloody this immaculate little artifact. And anyway, who’s he going to call? What’s he going to say? Then the phone starts to buzz again, and Kevin nearly drops it. After everything that’s just happened, his startle reflex should be fried, but he’s still jumpy as a cat. So jumpy, in fact, that for a moment he’s not sure what to do with the phone, how it works, what it’s for. The little screen has lit up with the message BLAKE CALLING. Blake who, Kevin wonders. I don’t know anyone named Blake. He licks his forefinger clean and presses Talk and shakily lifts the phone to his ear. He can’t think of a thing to say.

“Hey sweetie, can you talk?” says the phone.

Kevin can’t make a sound. His throat feels like someone’s crushing it with both hands. He can’t even grunt or groan or squeak. The inside of his mouth feels like it’s coated with talc.

“Sweetie?” says a young man’s voice. “You there?”

What Kevin feels like doing, what he wants to do, is start screaming. In fact he can feel a scream boiling up inside him all the way from his bowels, like vomit, and he actually pinches his lips shut.

“Leslie, c’mon.” The guy on the other end sounds impatient. He’s a just a kid, Kevin can tell. Just a boy.

“Lez?” says the boy. “Quit goofing around.”

Kevin unpinches his lips and whispers, “Hello?”

“Hello?” Now the caller is puzzled. Even at a whisper, Kevin’s voice doesn’t sound like the person the guy on the other end expected to hear. “Who’s this?” he says.

“Who’s this?” answers Kevin, stupid as a monkey.

“Where’s Leslie?” Right now the kid, wherever he is, is looking at his own screen to make sure he’s got the right number. “Who is this?”

Kevin’s exhausted. It’s all he can do to keep his head up. He has no idea whose phone this is, for all he knows it could have bounded in from another room, but as he slumps in the dusty ruin of Hemphill Associates, as a sultry breeze blows in from the vast hole of the empty window and courses uphill along the fatally tilted floor, carrying the distant wail of sirens, Kevin figures he has to act on the assumption that the little black phone belongs — belonged — to the girl who just slid over the edge.

“I’m all alone here,” Kevin manages to rasp through his tight, dry throat.

“I’m serious, dude,” says the kid’s voice, trying to sound tough. “Where’s Leslie and why have you got her phone?”

“It was buzzing, and I picked it up.”

“Okay.” The kid’s voice is noncommittal. The boy has decided to bank his anger because clearly he thinks the guy he’s talking to is some kind of moron. “Where’d Leslie go?”

Involuntarily, Kevin’s gaze drifts across the crack and down the tilted floor and over the edge, where, through the haze of dust and the glare of sunlight, he can see the condo tower with a ragged-edge hole in it, two floors laid bare like a doll house, a tangled venetian blind flapping in the breeze forty stories up. A thin haze rises out of the hole, but no gouts of flame or smoke. That’s good, thinks Kevin.

“Where’s Leslie?” the kid demands again, no longer disguising his anger. “Why have you got her phone?”

“She’s gone. I’m all alone here.” Across the street, on an upper floor of the neo-deco building with the Starbucks on the ground floor, a woman in a red blouse stands in a window, looking in Kevin’s direction. She presses both hands to her mouth while someone behind her rubs her neck — Kevin can just make out the flexing hands. I’d get out of there, Kevin thinks, if I were you.

“Where’d she go?” Who is this idiot on his girlfriend’s phone, and what has he done with her?

“Out.”

“Out where?”

Kevin says nothing. He’s not certain of much at this moment, but he does know that he doesn’t want to be the one to tell this guy the worst thing he’s ever heard. He’s not getting this individually from either of his little Animal House familiars, he’s getting it both from the devil and the angel, loudly and simultaneously, cowardice and compassion in equal measure. Keep Your Mouth Shut, they remind him.

“What’s your name?” The kid tries another tack.

“Kevin,” says Kevin, dully.

“Well, Kevin, you’re kind of freaking me out.”

“I’m sorry.” Kevin’s as monotone as a somnambulist. “That’s not my intention.”

“Can you at least tell me, is Leslie coming back soon?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Seriously, dude, who are you?”

Just hang up, say Kevin’s voices, so he says, “I gotta go” and lowers the phone, searching for the End Call button with his trembling finger while the tiny voice of the kid chirps at him.

“Is she okay?” the boy is saying. “Can you just tell me that?” Kevin presses the button, the voice goes dead, the screen tells him helpfully CALL ENDED. He shuts off the phone, flips it closed, and sticks it inside his jacket. He sags back against the wall, bone tired. He closes his eyes.

I need to stay awake, he’s thinking. I can sleep later, but there’s something I need to attend to right now, if I could only remember what it is. It’s a mix of feelings he’s had before, a simultaneous urgency and lassitude, sort of like his competing angel and devil, but with no obvious moral component: Get up and do something in a tug of war with Just let me sleep for a minute, like the night his grandfather died on the Quinn family farm west of Lansing, a couple miles of dirt road north of the Grand Ledge Highway. Like courtiers hanging about the death chamber of a king, the family had congregated at Grampa Quinn’s eighty-acre empire, in his sagging old farmhouse where the floors creaked alarmingly underfoot and all the doorways were slightly out of true. Kevin was a new graduate of Michigan and working at Central Café, and he had driven up from Ann Arbor through a late Christmas Eve blizzard in his deathtrap Pinto, braving whiteout on I-96, the snow finally limiting visibility to the fuzzy cones of his headlights. He saw no other cars, coming or going; no one else was stupid enough to be driving in weather like this. He crawled the last few miles up the unplowed county road to Grampa’s at fifteen miles an hour — which was still too fast, but any slower and the Pinto would terminally stall out — and he watched for Grampa’s drive through the snow streaking at his windshield, afraid that he’d never find the farm in the dark, afraid that he might already have passed it. Just when he despaired of ever seeing the mailbox, just when he thought he’d either freeze to death in a snowbank or drive all the way to Mackinac City, out of the blizzard crawled Grampa’s indestructible steel mailbox on its sturdy length of iron pipe, with the family name, missing the Q, in sliding letters across the top. UINN said the snow-covered letters, making the name sound even more Gaelic than it already was. Kevin inched off the road and fishtailed up the snowed-in driveway, squeezing in between the weighty pickup trucks of his farm cousins. The trucks, the lawn, the leafless maples were all thickly blanketed by snow, and more snow fell endlessly through the yard light that hung from the roof beam of the barn.

From his car, Kevin tramped through the drifts in his Converse All-Stars and thin denim jacket. He stamped the snow off his sneakers on the porch and then hauled the storm door aside and pushed open the kitchen door without knocking. The overhead light cast a superfluous yellow glow over everything in the kitchen, all of which was already yellowed with age: the ancient Frigidaire, the Formica-topped table, the patterned linoleum that crackled under foot. The only remotely new thing in the kitchen was a yellowed Mr. Coffee on the yellowed counter, where Kevin’s Aunt Mary, his father’s sister, was fortifying herself with a huge cup for the night’s vigil. She lifted her head at the scrape of his sodden feet on the mat and by way of greeting said, “Take off your shoes.” And then, turning away, “Where’s your mother?”

“She isn’t here?”

“Nope,” said Aunt Mary, evoking with a monosyllable a lifetime of tension between the Quinn and Padalecki families. “Kathleen’s here,” she added, and Kevin found his sister asleep under a garishly orange afghan on the swaybacked sofa across the living room from Grampa’s old black-and-white Motorola. The TV and the little ceramic Christmas tree on top of it provided the only light in the room. The tiny red and white bulbs on the tree cast very little light, while on the screen Alistair Sim was trembling his way silently through A Christmas Carol, the grainy image hauled in through the storm from Channel 10 in Jackson by Grampa’s skeletal rooftop aerial. Kathleen wasn’t the only one not watching the redemption of Scrooge: his cousin Kyle in jeans and a huge cable-knit sweater sprawled snoring in Grampa’s recliner, presenting in the flickering TV light a clear view of his basketball gut, the threadbare soles of his white socks, and his cavernous nostrils. One of Kyle’s kids, whose names Kevin could never keep straight, curled on the ancient carpet before the TV with his or her blond head on an embroidered throw pillow. Standing in his wet socks under the oppressive woodwork archway between Grampa’s dining room and living room, Kevin sensed that the house was murmurous with comatose Quinns; just below the threshold of hearing he was vaguely aware of snores and sighs and farts fumigating the clammy old farmhouse in the middle of the night. Only he and Aunt Mary were awake at the moment, and she touched him lightly on the arm as she passed, startling him a little.

“Merry Christmas,” she whispered, perhaps to make up for her brusqueness in the kitchen, and she beckoned him to step carefully through the sleepers in the living room to Grampa’s bedroom door, which stood open and which, in fact, was probably impossible to close in the humidity of all that snoring, sighing, and farting. In the doorway she stopped Kevin with another touch and tiptoed to the bed, bending over the figure on the right side of the mattress. Kevin’s grandmother had been dead for nine years, so Grampa could’ve lain in the middle of the mattress if he wanted to, but even at the end he kept to the side of the marital bed he’d occupied for fifty years. Or perhaps it was just easier for his daughters to tend him there. A lamp on the bedside table cast a nimbus of yellow light around a bent straw in a half-empty glass of water, a little brown bottle of morphine with an eye dropper in it, and a box of baby wipes. The bed’s usual blankets and bedspread were neatly folded on a chair, and its bottom sheet had been replaced with a fitted, rubberized sheet, a reminder along with the baby wipes that colon cancer was not a tidy way to die. Kevin had expected at least an IV drip, but the old man lay untethered under an incongruously new blanket, baby blue. His head was centered on a single pillow, his hands, as pale as exposed roots, curled on his chest, and his feet, in red woolen socks, sticking out beyond the end of the blanket. From the doorway, Kevin could not see or hear his grandfather breathe. In fact Grampa looked like he was already dead, and Kevin realized that his own heart was pounding, perhaps because he was seeing something that had been denied to him the night his father died. On that summer night in Royal Oak, still floating from the weed he’d smoked an hour before, he’d been shuffled into his own bedroom by his mother’s awkward priest while his father’s body had been bagged and gurneyed and wheeled down the hall. The priest hadn’t even let Kevin peek through his curtains to watch the gurney being lifted into the ambulance, and the next and last time he saw his father he was looking surprisingly youthful in the coffin at the funeral home. But now Kevin was standing at the threshold of the inner sanctum, where the thing itself was taking place, where his grandfather’s breaths and heartbeats were counting down to nothing, where each exhalation measured an increasingly large fraction of what remained of his life. Above the bed, at the margin of the dim lamplight, a pointillist blot of green mildew had been spreading slowly across the bedroom ceiling for years, and it looked to Kevin now like the stain of his grandfather’s last, diseased breaths.

“Can you hear me, Dad?” Aunt Mary said, taking one of the old man’s hands in both of hers.

Kevin heard no reply, but Aunt Mary nodded for Kevin to come to the bed, and he jerked into the room as if someone had pushed him. Aunt Mary slipped the old man’s limp, waxy hand into Kevin’s and stepped away. What do I say? Kevin almost asked her, but it wouldn’t have mattered, because his throat tightened and his eyes watered and the best he could do was utter a tremulous “Hello?” Grampa Quinn’s eyelids fluttered open, and his eyes, faded to a milky blue, fixed on Kevin. His face was as pale as his hands, and his lips were papery and blue. His tongue moved weakly inside his mouth, as if he couldn’t even muster the energy to dampen his lips. Then, for an instant, his gaze brightened and his cold hand moved in Kevin’s, and he managed to whisper, faintly but distinctly, “Frank?”

Kevin couldn’t speak. He looked helplessly at his aunt, who slipped in beside him and took the old man’s hand and said, “No, Dad, it’s Kevin. Frank’s son. Your grandson,” and Kevin watched the light in his grandfather’s eyes fade as quickly as a bright stone dropped into dark water. Then his aunt caught Kevin gently by the arm and escorted him to the door, and he left the bedroom feeling worse than he had when he’d come in, guilty that he wasn’t the one his grandfather wanted to see at the end, then angry at his father for letting them all down by dying eight years before, then angry at his grandfather for not hiding his disappointment, then angry at himself for being angry at his father and his grandfather for things they could not control. Through the contention in his head he was dimly aware of Aunt Mary murmuring to Grampa Quinn, lifting his head to offer him water, dropping morphine between his lips with the eye dropper, and he pulled himself together when she came out of the bedroom and led him tiptoe through the living room and the dining room and up the cold, creaking stairs to the last empty bed in the house, in a unheated, high-ceilinged back bedroom, lined with peeling wallpaper and stacked all around with moldering old boxes of God knows what. With a farm wife’s no-nonsense tenderness she turned him out of his denim jacket and maneuvered him onto a canvas cot, tucking him in like a child with a scratchy old army blanket.

“Don’t take it personal, hon.” She cupped his face with her cold hands. “It’s all running together for him at the end. He don’t know who’s here anymore and who isn’t.”

Kevin was still too choked up to reply, so she just patted him and said, “You try to sleep, and we’ll come fetch you when it’s time.”

But then they didn’t. Aunt Mary, God bless her, had too much on her mind, and no one else knew that he’d arrived. Ever since that night Kevin has lacerated himself for not being present when his grandfather died, for sleeping through it. He could have stayed awake, he could have offered to sit up with his grandfather, but instead he’d let himself be stashed out of sight like one of those mildewed old boxes, so that when Kyle, who was awake at the time, said, “He’s going,” and a dozen Quinns all over the house rose from their beds or sofas or recliners like vampires from their coffins to troop into the bedroom and witness Grandfather Quinn’s last, stertorous breaths, Kevin was fitfully asleep on the stiff old cot upstairs, still humiliated by his grandfather’s undisguised disappointment. For years afterward Kevin was angry at himself, because out of all the nights he’d stayed up for no good reason — to finish a paper in college, to party until dawn, to fuck, to restlessly channel surf because he couldn’t sleep even if he wanted to — this was the one night when he should’ve made the effort to stay awake and he didn’t, and the old man died without his witness. And the worst of it was, he’d known that night, as he let Aunt Mary steer him upstairs and onto the cot, that it was his responsibility and nobody else’s to keep himself awake. In the end his body betrayed him, clouded his consciousness, dragged his eyelids down, lied to him like a seducer by saying, “Just rest your eyes for a minute, you’ll feel better afterward,” so that when Aunt Mary finally remembered and shook him awake in the leaden dawn of Christmas morning, Kevin woke up angry at himself, at her, at the world.

“Why didn’t you wake me?” he’d whined as he thundered down the stairs in his stocking feet, and Aunt Mary had said, “I’m so sorry, hon, I forgot all about you upstairs, I’m so sorry,” leaving Kevin to face a houseful of cousins, glum and smug in equal measure, while Kathleen lifted her eyebrows at him, saying only “Hello.” But the voice he’s hearing now is louder, practically shouting, and the touch is rougher than his Aunt Mary’s, fingernails digging into his arm. “Hello!”

“What?” He opens his eyes and clenches his stinging fists. A woman is squatting next to him, not his Aunt Mary, not Kathleen, but someone else. Disheveled brown hair, watery blue eyes, cracked lipstick.

“Are you hurt?” says the woman, gripping his shoulder. Her skirt is a little too tight for her to be squatting, and her touch is as much to steady herself on the toes of her pumps as it is to reassure Kevin.

“No,” he says. Then, wincing and opening his fingers, “Yes, a little. I picked up some glass.”

She lightly cups one of his hands with one of hers, and her warm touch thrills Kevin like a lover’s. He’s seen her somewhere before, but where? He doesn’t know anyone in Austin. The woman says nothing, but looks away through the ruin of the outside wall and into the hazy glare. She tightens her grip on his hand and says, “Where did you come from?”

“Ann Arbor, Michigan.”

The woman winces. “No. I mean, where did you come from in this building?”

“Oh.” Kevin doesn’t want to disappoint her. He doesn’t want her to let go of his hand. “Nowhere. I mean, I was right here, on this floor, with…”

“With whom?” Ever the copy editor, even now Kevin notes the correct use of the objective pronoun. Then the full horror of what just happened jolts him again, an electric shock to his heart. “There was a girl,” he says. “A young woman, I mean.”

The woman glances around, still cupping his bleeding hand, still steadying herself on his shoulder. “Is she going for help? Did she find a way down?”

She did, thinks Kevin, but not what you have in mind. “No.” He wishes he hadn’t mentioned her. “She’s gone.”

“Gone?”

Kevin lifts his chin toward the gap, over the edge. “I didn’t know her name.”

The woman closes her eyes and sighs, twisting slowly down on the toes of her pumps as if she’s deflating, ending up next to Kevin against the wall. There’s soot on her face and her brown hair is tousled. She’s his age, maybe a little younger, though it’s hard to tell — she’s a little too made-up for him to be able to see the woman underneath clearly — and now he remembers where he’s seen her before. She’s the woman from Starbucks, the woman with the laptop and the little suitcase on wheels, the woman who asked his opinion about letting some guy down gently. The woman with the fancy coffee who’d never heard of Damon Runyon. The Yellow Rose.

Kevin starts to speak, but his throat tightens up. She turns her wide, cornflower blue eyes to him, not seeing him, her gaze entirely inward. He notices that one of her false eyelashes lies like a caterpillar just under her eye. “Where did you come from?” he says.

She gazes at him unblinking, He nudges her and says again, “Where did you come from?”

Her gaze snaps into focus. “Below. One floor down. I think.”

Kevin notices her nostrils flaring, a little Bewitched twitch of the nose. She’s sniffing the air like a mouse.

“I peed myself,” he says.

“What?”

“I pissed myself.” Kevin gestures feebly at his damp, stinging lap. “That’s what you’re smelling.”

Involuntarily the Yellow Rose glances at the dark stain, then meets his gaze. “Hon, if that’s the worst thing that happens to you today, you’ll be a lucky man.”

“Yeah.”

Now she’s tucking her heels under her again, balancing on the toes of her shoes and steadying herself against the wall. She combs the tangles out of her hair with her fingers, scowls at the soot on her palm. “I’m not exactly feeling fresh at the moment, either.”

“Why are you here?” Kevin says.

She’s got that directionless gaze again, the thousand-yard stare. Perhaps she misunderstood the question, the way he misunderstood the one about where he’d come from. Perhaps she thinks he’s asking her an existential question. Aw hon, she’ll say, why are any of us here?

“Why’d you come up,” he says, “instead of down?”

She narrows her eyes at him. “How bad are you hurt? Can you stand?”

“I’m fine. It’s just my hands.”

“Come on.” She hooks her fingers under his elbow and tugs, helping him slide up the wall to his feet. His knees are a little wobbly; she senses it and tightens her grip, but when she tries to pull his arm around her shoulders so that she can support him, he shakes her. I can do it, Mom. Still, she clutches his sleeve, and Kevin almost apologizes.

“Will you help me find a way down?” Her eyes struggle to focus.

“Sure,” he says, “why not,” as if he’s doing her a favor.

She tugs him between the elevators, where the six doors, three on each side, are buckled to various degrees. The woman keeps close to Kevin, tightly gripping his arm; Kevin curls his bleeding hands spastically close to his waist, holding them stiffly so that they don’t shake. The ceiling above is crumpled, too, but it hasn’t fallen in, though Kevin can feel grit under his stocking foot. Together they scuff along like runners in a three-legged race. With only one shoe on, Kevin limps as if one leg were an inch shorter than the other. The hot breeze from the gap presses at their backs, carrying the smell of something burning. Kevin tries to ignore it. The Yellow Rose leads him up to one of the crumpled elevator doors and gingerly taps the warped metal with the tips of her fingers. Her nails are long and bright red, and she bends her fingers back, jerking them away and then touching the metal again. She takes care of her hands, Kevin notices; they look younger than her face.

“We probably shouldn’t take the elevator,” Kevin says, and the woman looks sharply up at him. She’s petite; without her pumps she would come up only to his chin.

“They say don’t take the elevator in emergencies,” he says.

“I know.” She’s placed her palm flat on the buckled door. “That’s good,” she murmurs, then tugs him farther on, past the elevators into the hall beyond, which splits right and left. At the junction they each tug in a different direction, then stop and pull close again, the woman clinging to Kevin’s sleeve. Each direction is the mirror image of the other: a narrow hallway with a high ceiling and a couple of tall, anonymous doors. The Yellow Rose’s hall on the left is full of glaringly lit haze and dust. Kevin’s hall, on the right, is hazy, too, but more fitfully illuminated by a flickering light around the corner.

“This way.” She tugs him to the left, and they hobble together to the first door. The woman tests it nervously with her fingertips, then lays her palm against it before trying the handle, while Kevin hovers at her side. It’s locked, so they scuttle to the next door, which is also locked, and then follow the hall around a sharp corner into the glare of twin emergency spotlights. They stop short, squinting into the white light at a door with a red-lit EXIT sign above it. The haze is thicker here, though not enough to make their eyes water, and without speaking Kevin pulls free of the Yellow Rose and hobbles, sock, shoe, sock, shoe, toward the door. The floor is cool under his stocking foot.

“That’s the way I came up.” The woman hangs back by the turn in the hallway.

Kevin stops inches from the door, hands still curled, hip poised at the crash bar. He looks back at her. In the harsh glare of the emergency lights, her disheveled hair looks like a wig, and her makeup looks like a mask.

“The stairway’s full of smoke.” She’s squinting into the bright light, nervously opening and closing her hands.

Kevin lays the back of his hand against the door. It’s not warm, so he licks his lips, glances at the woman, and nudges the crash bar with his backside. The door clicks open, and black, acrid smoke gusts out of the entire length of the opening. Kevin can feel heat, too, and he recoils from the door. It swings slowly shut and pinches off the smoke, which gathers in an ugly thundercloud up under the high ceiling. Kevin’s already running now toward the Yellow Rose, who has both hands clasped to her mouth, her eyes gone even wider. Forgetting the pain in his hands, he hooks her by the elbow and hauls her around the corner and back to the junction in the hallway, his one shoe grinding dust, his shoeless heel hammering the hard floor. The Yellow Rose’s sharp heels clatter alongside him. They clutch each other panting by the elevators, not looking at each other. Her gaze has gone glassy again, and Kevin’s is wild, glancing all around without seeing much.

“Was it like that before?” His throat is nearly too dry to speak, and when she doesn’t say anything, he rattles her a little. “Was it like that when you came up?”

No, she shakes her head.

“Is it worse now?” Kevin’s almost angry at her.

Yes, she nods.

“You might’ve said something before,” he says. “About, you know, the building being on fire.”

He’s gripping her tightly despite the bitter stinging of his palms. She looks up wide-eyed, almost as if she’s beseeching him.

“I couldn’t go down, so I thought maybe I could come up”—she shakily glides her palm up, across, and down like an airplane—“and then go down the other way.”

“Fuck,” he says. “Fuck.”

She flinches suddenly, looking past him, forcing him to wheel with her. He turns to see what she’s looking it, and the cloud of smoke he let in through the emergency door glides like a shadow around the corner under the ceiling, as if it’s following them. Kevin looks over her head down the other, darker hallway, with its sinister flickering light.

“Wait here.” He lets go of her, leaving two bloody palm prints on the sleeves of her jacket, and he hurries up the hallway to another locked door and pounds on it with his hands. But it stings too much to ball his fists, so he backs up and kicks the door savagely with the toe of his expensive shoe, making black scuff marks along the bottom of the door. “Hello!” He kicks and kicks. “Can you hear me? Can anybody hear me?” He backs up and kicks the door flat with his shoe, like a TV cop, and his stocking foot slides out from under him and he ends up sprawled on his ass, grinding the glass into his palms again. He’s on the verge of tears as the Yellow Rose stoops to haul at his elbow, helping him to his feet.

“We should stick together.” She slaps the dust off his suit.

He ignores her, starting into the haze down the darker hallway, and she clutches at him, trying to hold him back.

“We have to check down here,” he says, breaking free. “There’s got to be another stairwell.”

“Don’t,” she says, but she doesn’t stop him, and around the corner he sees, in the flickering light, that the end of the hallway has collapsed. Not just the ceiling, but a concrete beam from the floor above has come down, along with most of a wall — a heap of rubble like an ancient ruin. A light fixture spits and fumes, floating orange sparks that fade and die in the haze. This is the source of the whip-crack he heard before. The emergency door and lights are buried behind the heap of concrete and drywall. In the maddening flicker of the fixture, Kevin sees an arm thrust out of the rubble a foot or two above the littered floor. It’s hard to tell in the unsteady light, but he thinks it’s a man’s arm, from the blue dress shirt buttoned at the wrist. The arm sticks out from just above the elbow, palm up, the hand limp.

Kevin balances on the balls of his feet, ready to flee. He glances at the ruined ceiling, at the haze all around, anywhere but at the arm. Above the tangle of rubble he can make out the glow of the emergency lights, but he can’t see the exit sign. And he’s glad, because the word EXIT would read like a cruel joke. NO ENTRING is what it would really say.

“Come back!” cries the Yellow Rose from around the corner.

“Don’t go,” said his Aunt Mary from the porch of his grandfather’s house, clutching her elbows in the cold. “Give ’em a chance to clear the roads first.”

“I gotta get back,” Kevin said. “I promised my mom I’d be there for Christmas.”

But it was already early Christmas morning, and he knew as he scuffed through the snow of the farmyard to unbury his Pinto that he wouldn’t get to his mom’s until noon at the earliest, even if the roads were clear all the way back to Royal Oak. But he couldn’t spend another moment in the house with all those rural Quinns and his dead grandfather. Not after having been mistaken for his dead father, not after having slept through the old man’s death, not after having been the last to know. Kathleen loomed behind Aunt Mary, watching him blankly with the sleeves of her massive sweater pulled over her fists. He didn’t even ask her if she wanted to come; she and their mother weren’t on speaking terms at the moment. Go, stay, her look said, it’s all the same to me.

So while his sneakers soaked up snow, he flailed at the accumulation on his car with the little brush on the end of his windshield scraper, until the faces watching from the farmhouse realized he was serious, and Kyle and a couple other burly farm cousins tromped out in their boots with the laces undone and helped manhandle Kevin’s Pinto through the snow down the drive and into the road, then stood by the mailbox in their shirtsleeves and watched him fishtail down the hill. Kevin barely made it down the road, his wheels churning snow and gravel, but the Grand Ledge Highway had been plowed and the tires gripped the scraped gray pavement gratefully. A haze hung over snowy fields on either side, and a weak winter sun, just risen, hovered above the skeletal branches of some farm’s woodlot. He fiddled with the radio but found only Christmas music, and every tune, from “Run, Run Rudolph” to the “Hallelujah Chorus,” sounded like a taunt, so he drove with the radio off, listening to the rush of the heater and the clatter of his shitty little car.

East of Lansing on I-96, bored by the freeway, he got off at the Okemos exit and headed south through Mason, hoping that the storm the night before had passed mostly north of the freeway and that the back roads were clear. By now the sun had climbed higher into a crystalline blue sky, and the snow on either side of the road glittered so painfully that Kevin regretted not having brought his sunglasses. The road itself was clear and dry and the streets of Mason were empty early on a Christmas morning, so he decided to risk an even smaller road, Dexter Trail, that wound around small lakes and through woods and past ranch houses and farms. On a long, straight stretch of the Trail east of M-52, just north of Stockbridge, he impulsively pressed the accelerator to the floor and pushed his rattling little deathtrap as fast as it would go on the cracked pavement — which, luckily for him, wasn’t very fast, so that when the road passed through a gloomy patch of woods where the low winter sun hardly ever shone, and the car hit some ice and began to spin, he wasn’t instantly propelled into a tree. Tree trunks slid sideways past his windshield, then the road behind him, then trees sliding the other way. When he was facing forward again, his adrenaline kicked in and he stomped on the brake, screeching to a halt on a dry patch of pavement just beyond the woods and stalling out the car. As he sat panting in the sudden silence, he saw that someone else had hit the same ice and spun out not long before, only without as much luck as he’d had. In the steely winter light falling across a farmyard just beyond the woods, Kevin saw a pair of tracks plowing through the snow across the yard and past the front of a derelict farmhouse. The twin tracks ended at a green pickup truck tipped on its side at the edge of the field beyond the house.

His heart racing, Kevin sat in his ticking car in the middle of the road. The tracks looked fresh, unblurred by later snow or wind. The old farmhouse, though, was heaped with snow. Its front porch had long ago collapsed like a shopkeeper’s shutter over the first-floor windows and the peak of the farmhouse roof had caved in, so that he could see bitter blue sky through the empty window frames of the second story. Across the weathered gray siding someone had spray painted, in huge letters, NO ENTRING. Even under the blanket of snow Kevin could see the tangle of untrimmed bushes across the farmyard, the angular heaps of rusting farm machinery, and the splintered uprights of a barn that had long since burned or collapsed completely into itself. The tracks of the overturned pickup seemed to aim straight through the only unobstructed path across the yard and into the field beyond.

Still trembling, Kevin restarted his car, checked his mirrors, and pulled the car as close as he could to the side of the road without getting stuck. He put on the emergency blinker, left the motor running, and got out. Clutching his denim jacket shut at his throat, he slipped and slid in his soaking sneakers up the track of the pickup, calling out weakly in the bitter cold, “Hello?” The empty farmhouse seemed bigger and gloomier now; through its broken windows he saw that the first-floor ceiling had also caved in, too, so that the interior of the house was stuffed full of splintered gray timbers like a box full of pickup sticks. Even if you wanted to, there’d be no entring that house, making the blunt warning across the front seem both superfluous and more menacing. Scuffing up the track on his icy feet, Kevin thought the handpainted warning might as well have read ABANDON ALL HOPE.

Kevin called out again, “Anybody there?” but his words froze and died, leaving only a ringing, icy silence. He was shivering, and his feet were beginning to sting. The snow around the truck was disturbed by the truck’s final topple onto its side, and Kevin steadied himself with one hand on the freezing side panel as he edged along its rust-eaten and salt-rimed undercarriage. He kicked through the snow around the front of the truck, trailing gusts of white breath. The truck’s hood was still warm under his hand, so he called out again, “Anybody in there?” The windshield was cracked but not shattered; it might even have been an old crack, an elongated S that snaked from one side to the other. The cold light fell across cracked black vinyl seats that were patched with duct tape and leaked sickly yellow foam stuffing. Kevin put his shaking hand on the cold, cracked glass and peered into the cab. The driver’s door window was rolled up and intact, while the passenger door window, pressed into the snow at Kevin’s feet, was crazed with fractures. His pulse throbbed in his throat, and he angled this way and that, peering into the foot wells and the narrow space behind the seats, briefly misting the glass with his breath. There was no one in the truck.

The hair rose on the back of his neck as if someone were watching him from behind, and he spun suddenly around. The field of snow glittered away into the distance, poked through with the dried stalks of last year’s corn. No one there, either. He glanced at the gloomy house, gray wood heaped with white, then at the ruins of the barn, blackened uprights frosted with snow. He stepped back into drifts up to the calves of his jeans to get a wider view of the truck. There was no snow on it, so it must have crashed since the storm, but the only footprints around it were his own, coming up from the road. He trudged along the top of the truck, noting the empty bed and the intact window at the rear of the cab. Standing behind the sideways tailgate, he saw the truck’s tracks and his own coming up from the road, saw his Pinto with its lights flashing dimly in the bright sun, saw its thin plume of exhaust rising straight up in the brittle, windless air. He turned completely around, stamping a hole in the snow. There was no one in the truck, and no tracks led away from it.

Suddenly the cold penetrated deeper, not just the freezing air through his thin jacket, but an all-encompassing cold that seemed to flow from the truck, the ruined barn, the decaying equipment, the slowly collapsing house.

“Hey!” he shouted, as loudly as he could, but the syllable disappeared into the cold as quickly as the mist of his breath, leaving no trace that he had ever cried out at all. The snow glittered painfully in every direction, except in the interior of the derelict house. Even though the roof had collapsed and the windows were all broken out, none of the relentless winter light seemed to make it into the house’s interior, where all he saw were the shadows of shattered and upended timbers, curling peels of ancient wallpaper, sheets of water-stained lath and plaster, and where, he knew, with absolute certainty, that if he stared into the shadows long enough — trembling in the cold, up to his knees in snow — something would move and beckon him.

He started to run, clumsily, back toward the road. He threw his arms out for balance and let his jacket flap open, lifting his knees high to punch his sodden, freezing sneakers through the drifts. Halfway across the farmyard it occurred to him that he might tread on something sharp under the snow, that he ought to retrace his original path back around the truck, but there was no way he was going back there. He plunged through drifts up to his knees, caking his jeans with snow, and he struggled past the front of the ruined house without looking back, finally bursting through onto the pavement, gasping white clouds, his whole body shaking, his throat raw. He yanked open the Pinto’s door, fell into the bucket seat, and put the car in gear even before he slammed the door or buckled his seat belt. The wheels whined in the snow, ratcheting Kevin’s panic even higher, but then treads caught pavement and he skidded out onto Dexter Trail and rocketed away from the house and the empty truck, warmed as much by sheer relief as by the car’s wheezing heater. He didn’t look back, he never drove that road again, and he never mentioned what he’d seen to another living soul.

Now, as he hesitates in the smoky, flickering hallway, Kevin thinks, that’s two tests I failed in twelve hours: not staying awake for Grampa Quinn and not reporting the overturned truck. The memory of that Christmas has haunted him for twenty-five years. He’s imagined alternate versions, where his grandfather clutches his hand and calls his name, the last words Grampa Quinn ever said, or where Kevin pulls an unconscious driver out of the truck and drags him through the snow to his car and races him to the emergency room in Stockbridge or Pinckney. Sometimes he thinks he’s exhausted the memories of that day, that they’ve stopped making sense, but now the hand sticking out of the rubble — motionless, fingers curled — is another test, and it’s as if he were standing beside the truck again, in the cold, cruel winter sunlight. His eyes are beginning to sting from the smoke, from the flickering light, and he knows he ought to touch the hand, to see if the guy’s still alive under there. But he’s more scared of touching that hand than he’s been of anything else, ever, in his whole life. What if it has a pulse, or, worse, what if it twitches? What can Kevin do? He can’t lift the beam, he can’t pull the guy out, he’s not sure if even clawing at the rubble would do anything but bring the rest of the ceiling down on top of them both. What if it’s still warm? What if it clenches in pain, like a dying spider in its last throes? What if, in a moment out of a horror movie, it clutches him tightly and won’t let him go?

“He’s dead.” The Yellow Rose is just behind him. She’s edged into the hallway after Kevin.

“Did you check his pulse?” Kevin asks without turning around. When she doesn’t answer, he turns to see her fingers plucking at the air near his sleeve, as if she wants to pull him away.

“Did you?” he says.

“Yes.” Her eyes flicker side to side. “He’s gone.”

Are you telling me the truth? Kevin wonders. Or are you just trying to get me out of the hallway? Before he can think about it, he’s pinched the thumb of the hand between his own thumb and forefinger and waggled it side to side. It’s warm to his touch but completely limp. Kevin puts two fingers on the wrist, the way he’s seen actors do it on television, feeling nothing and leaving a pair of bloody fingerprints. What if he’s doing it wrong? What if the wrist has a weak pulse and he’s just not feeling it, not with his own pulse racing and the woman tugging at his elbow?

“Come on,” she says. “Please.”

At last he lets her pull him away by his elbow, back around the corner.

“I told you not to go down there,” she says, and for a moment Kevin and the Yellow Rose are a longtime couple, bickering but affectionate, strolling arm in arm. But only for a moment, because as they step between the elevators, they both see that smoke is now rising from the gaps between and around all six sets of crumpled doors and pooling in a cloud over their heads. The woman whimpers at the back of her throat, two descending notes, the sound she might make in another context, if she’d just discovered that her cat was on the counter, say, or that her cake had fallen, or some other vexing but minor quotidian disappointment. She sags against Kevin, and he has to slip his arm around her waist to prop her up, planting more handprints all over her nice suit.

“Come on.” He urges her on rubbery legs past the smoking elevators and onto the ledge of flooring where she first found him. She’s positively shuddering now, and the best he can do with his injured hands is grasp her clumsily by the elbows and lower her slowly to the floor against the wall, even as he tries to scuff the broken glass away with his shoe.

“It’s okay.” His own voice is breaking. “It’s all right.”

He drops her the last six inches and she thumps against the floor, nearly toppling onto her side. Her face has crumpled, her eyeliner is running. The stray eyelash is gone, who knows where, and she shivers against the wall, her hand pressed to her mouth, her cheeks streaked with black. Kevin squats unsteadily before her, wanting to dab at the inky tears, but his hands are still stained with blood.

“Oh God,” she says. “I thought if I came up…”

The best he can do is brush her hair with his knuckles. She clutches one of his wrists with both hands and gazes at him with brimming eyes. “The floor was on fire,” she says in a hoarse whisper, as if she’s afraid of being overheard. “So was the floor below me.” She snuffles, swallows. “I could hear people screaming.”

“Jesus.” Kevin strokes her hair with the back of one hand, while letting her cling tightly to the other. He’s almost in tears himself now. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

The woman’s sobbing uncontrollably now, and Kevin folds her in an awkward hug, the two of them crouched in the intersection of floor and wall. He can feel her heart beating. Then her sobs subside almost as quickly as they started, and she looks up, their faces close enough to kiss. Behind her blusher and lipstick and runny eyeliner, she’s very pale.

“I didn’t want to lose hope,” she says in a weak but steady voice. Her eyes are glistening, but no longer overflowing. “I believe hopelessness is a sin?” Her rising inflection makes her sound uncertain. Kevin swivels clumsily off his feet to sit beside her, his arm around her shoulders. He sniffles, gasps, knuckles his own tears away. She tips her head back against the wall, watching him.

“There’s always hope in God.” Her voice is weak but steady.

“Unless there isn’t.” Kevin’s not looking at her, he’s watching sunlight shafting through the smoke rising across the wide gap where the conference room used to be. He’s already thinking, this is the last sky I’m ever going to see.

“Don’t you believe in God?” She’s watching him with a childlike intensity.

No atheists in burning skyscrapers, thinks Kevin, but she’s still giving him that innocent look, so he says, “Maybe we shouldn’t get into this right now.”

“If not now,” she says, with a directness that pierces him and annoys him in equal measure, “when?”

Acrid smoke penetrates to the back of his sinuses. He glances back. Black tendrils ripple along the ruined ceiling, struggling against the hot wind blowing from outside. Kevin looks at the woman.

“What’s your name?” He tightens his arm around her.

She presses against him, twisting her knees toward him. “Melody.”

“I’ve never met a Melody before,” says Kevin. “That’s a lovely name.”

“What’s yours?”

“Kevin.”

She pats his lapel and sniffles. “I’m glad you’re here, Kevin.”

“I’m not,” Kevin says before he can stop himself, and he starts to laugh. He squeezes her with his stinging palm.

She laughs, too. “Me neither, I guess.” Then, “You didn’t answer my question.”

“What question?”

“About God?” Melody says, but before Kevin can answer, the phone in his jacket starts to buzz, startling them both. She recoils and clutches him at the same time, digging her polished nails into his jacket.

“You have a phone?” she says.

“It’s not mine,” Kevin says.

“For God’s sake!” Melody yanks at his lapel and plunges her hand inside his jacket. “Why didn’t you say you had a phone!” She plucks out the cell and turns away from him, expertly flipping it open and pressing Talk.

“Who is this?” she demands, her voice suddenly sharp, and Kevin, speechless, can hear the tinny voice of the boy he talked to earlier.

“Yes, I know. I’m in the building.” She listens a moment, then says, “Hang on, I’ll ask.” She presses the phone to her chest so the guy on the other end can’t hear.

“Leslie?” she whispers, and Kevin shakes his head and makes a diving motion with his hand.

“She’s not here,” says Melody into the phone. “I think she got out already.” The tinny voice speaks, but Melody interrupts him. “Sir, what’s your name? Blake? Listen, Blake, could you call 911 and let them know there are two people trapped on… what floor is this?”

Kevin gasps, stammers, says, “Fifty-one, I think. Maybe fifty-two.”

“Go see if it says.” She jerks her chin toward the elevators. Kevin stiffly levers himself up off the floor with his throbbing hands, and steadying himself against the wall, which is beginning to get warm, he peers around the corner into the elevator lobby. If the floor is marked, he can’t see it. Now smoke is pouring out of the hallways beyond the lobby and out of the elevators themselves, trembling against the breeze blowing through the gap.

“It’s the fifty-first or fifty-second floor,” Melody’s saying in a steady voice. “Tell them to hurry, please, won’t you, Blake? We’re counting on you.”

Kevin slides to the floor next to her. “The smoke’s getting worse.”

But Melody’s not listening; she’s cut Blake off and is thumbing in 911 with intense concentration, biting her lip and splaying her legs before her. She lifts the phone, listens, groans in frustration.

“It’s busy,” she says. “How can that be?”

“I think they probably know by now what’s going on.”

She holds up her finger to silence him and enters 911 again, listens, cuts it off, enters it again, cuts it off again. “Damn it all! How can it be busy?”

Kevin feints feebly with his hand toward Melody. He’d like to have the phone back. He’s thinking he might want to call his mom. He’s thinking he might even want to call Stella. The idea that it might be the last time he’ll ever speak to either of them is seeping into his mind like black water. Meanwhile Melody has closed the little phone within her trembling fist, and she’s staring blankly into the smoky sunlight coming through the gap. “If 911 doesn’t work now, when is it supposed to?”

I could ask you the same about God, thinks Kevin, but he doesn’t say it. Melody’s staring into space, sucking in her lips.

“Is there someone you want to call?” he says as he gingerly reaches for her closed hand. He’s wondering if he’ll have to pry apart her fingers to get the phone.

“Take it,” she says, and abruptly pitches the cell at him. He fumbles for the phone, but it thumps off his chest, clatters off the floor, and bounds over the crack in the floor, sliding toward the edge. Kevin and Melody simultaneously catch their breath. The cell phone glitters in the sunlight at the last moment, and Kevin’s not sure, but he thinks it starts to buzz again as it sails over the edge and out of sight. Kevin turns to the woman beside him. She’s pressed one hand over her open mouth, and with her other she’s digging her red nails into his forearm. She looks at him wide-eyed.

“I’m so sorry!” she says from behind her palm.

Kevin just sighs. Now he’s going to die alone, drowned in black water. He clutches her wrist and pries her fingers loose from his arm.

“I’m so sorry,” she says again in a tiny voice. She lays her hand on his upper arm. “Was there someone you wanted to call?”

Kevin lets his feet slide out straight like Melody’s, and he slumps against the wall. Only the friction of his new dress trousers keeps him upright, and any second now he could just melt like wax in the growing heat and ooze across the crack and dribble over the edge.

“Will you forgive me?” She strokes his arm.

“It’s okay.” His sinuses and throat are beginning to feel raw. Even with the wind from outside, the ruined lobby is filling from the ceiling down with black smoke. “I really didn’t want to make that call, anyway.” He looks at her. “You know what I mean?”

“I do.” She wipes inky tears away with the heel of her hand. “I know exactly what you mean.”

“Seriously, what would you say?” He can see Stella in her professional suit, the slim, narrow-waisted one that attracted him to her in the first place that morning in Expresso Royale. He sees her striding in her heels across the imperial lobby of some convention hotel in Chicago, the vertiginous atrium of the Embassy Suites or the dim, clubby lobby of the Sheraton. She might even be sharing a midafternoon cocktail with some guy she’s met at the convention; she may even be flirting with him a bit, because flirting is Stella’s default mode, not that it would mean anything, it’s just how she is. And because she’s Stella, and not Beth, she wouldn’t even notice the image of the burning Texas skyscraper on the TV over the bar, but she would interrupt the conversation if her phone rang, and Kevin sees her sly smile of apology to the guy with her at the bar as she dives into her bag for her cell. That’s the age difference between him and Stella in a nutshell: he’d shut his phone off in a situation like that, but because she’s younger than he is she answers the thing instinctively, no matter whom she’s talking to. On one of their early “dates,” after they’d already been sleeping with each other for three weeks, she kept answering her phone during dinner one night at a tapas bar on Main Street, so that finally, while she was in the middle of a call, he excused himself, went outside, and called her from his own cell, watching through the restaurant window as she said to whomever she was on the phone with, “Hang on, I have another call,” then looked puzzled as she glanced at the screen and saw it was him. Then he heard her saying, “Kevin?” and he’d said, “Hi, remember me? The guy you’re having dinner with? The guy you’re sleeping with? The guy whose house you moved into?” On more than one occasion he’s glanced at the screen on his own phone and, when he’s seen that it’s her calling, he hasn’t answered, he’s let the call go to voice mail, then lied to her later about leaving his phone turned off. But when she sees it’s him, she always answers his call — always — and that thought pierces his heart. Of course if he’d called her today from Leslie’s phone, she wouldn’t have recognized the number on the screen—“I don’t know this number,” she might even say out loud to the guy at the hotel bar — and then Kevin would have heard her saying her own name in a noncommittal, businesslike voice, and he pictures the mask she makes of her face when she’s talking to someone she doesn’t know. And then he’d’ve said, if he could choke it out, “It’s me,” and the thought of her mask relaxing, of her voice saying, “Hey, you,” and then the thought of what exactly he’d say to her next — it all makes his throat tighten as if someone has just seized him around the neck with two rough hands. Either that, or the increasingly acrid air is choking him.

“Maybe they’re already coming for us,” Melody says.

Kevin coughs. “Who?”

“Rescuers?” Melody’s tears are running clear now. Her eyeliner’s all washed away.

“Didn’t you say the floors below are on fire?”

She nods, weeping.

“Then how would they get to us?”

She’s trembling again, so Kevin rouses himself, pushes himself up on his stinging palms, puts his arm around her.

“I’m sorry about the phone,” Melody says.

“It’s all right.”

“I’m not sure I’d want to make that call either.”

“Who would you call?”

“My kids.” Melody coughs. “My father. My ex-husband.”

The air is hotter and the smoke is thicker, black and roiling against the ruined ceiling above. It’s slowly lowering, filling the room from above, and some of it is beginning to stream through to the outside. He doesn’t hear sirens anymore. In the distance Kevin can still see the construction crane towering above the condo tower. The narrow catwalk alongside the cab, forty stories up, is lined with little figures in orange safety vests and yellow plastic hard hats. They look like figures from a Bob the Builder playset, little round-top wooden dowels painted with bright hard hats and happy faces, plugged into round slots on top of the Tinkertoy crane, watching Kevin die. You guys should get down from there, he thinks, you really, really should.

“I want to talk to my kids,” says Melody, “but I don’t.”

“I know.” He pictures Stella bloodlessly pale on a stool in the convention hotel bar, snapping around to look at the image on the TV. He hears her sharp incredulity: “What are you doing in Austin? Why didn’t you tell me you were going?” If she didn’t put it together right away, she would later on, and he’s not sure what will hurt her more, that he’s about to die, or that he was thinking of leaving Ann Arbor to get away from her. The guy at the bar with her is feeling awkward. He sees she’s upset, but he hardly knows her. The decent thing would be to stick around, but all he really wants to do is make an excuse and hurry away. Kevin pictures Stella clutching the guy’s sleeve the way Melody’s clutching his, and he’s grateful that she’s not alone. He pictures her trembling uncontrollably. He pictures her knees buckling. Would she faint? Do people faint anymore?

“I wouldn’t want this to be their last memory of me,” says Melody, and Kevin says, “I know.” He holds her tight, drawing her face to his chest. “I know, I know.”

She mutters something against his shirt, and he relaxes his grip.

“You smell like coconut,” she says.

He sighs and looks up. The ceiling of smoke is even lower now. If they were standing, their heads would be in the cloud. More smoke is coming from over the rubble that chokes off the hallways to either side.

“We need to get lower,” he says, and before she has a chance to reply, he lifts his arm from around her and starts sliding on his butt toward the crack in the floor, clutching her wrist and pulling her with him. He no longer cares about the glass on the floor but pushes heedlessly through it as if it were sand, hauling with his heels, pushing with his other hand. He feels a resisting tug, and looks back. Melody is balling her fist and trying to pull her wrist out of his grasp.

“No,” she whispers, ghostly pale. “I’m not ready for that.”

“Neither am I,” Kevin says firmly, not letting go of her, “but we need to get lower, away from the smoke. Okay?”

Without unclenching her fist, she looks up. The smoke cascading along the ceiling is a torrent now, a roiling, snaky, upside-down black river. She inches slowly alongside him, and sitting thigh to thigh they hang their legs over the crack and down the slope. Like a pair of schoolchildren they’re holding hands. Kevin’s hand still stings, but he doesn’t loosen his grip.

“It’s not as steep as it looks,” he says.

“Maybe we should take off our shoes,” says Melody. “For better traction.”

Kevin nods, and without releasing hands, they each use a free hand to bare their feet. Kevin lets his remaining shoe drop and it skids to a stop halfway down the slope. He peels off his socks one-handed and tosses them limply after the shoe. Melody bends at the waist, demurely twisting her knees, and takes off one pump and then the other, placing them neatly side by side next to her, at the edge of the crack. They sit with their bare feet brushing the sloping floor, which, to Kevin’s touch, is feeling warmer than it ought to. Waggling their backsides, they press closer together, shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh, their hands squeezed together between them. This, thinks Kevin, is the last time I’ll ever touch a woman.

From behind them comes a rush of heat, as if someone has opened an oven door, and simultaneously they look back to see orange flame sheeting through the smoke along the ceiling, swelling like a tide up and back, up and back, a little closer to the gap with each surge. Kevin and Melody can feel each rising increment of heat on their backs, can feel it tightening the skin of their cheeks and foreheads. They look at each other, and neither of them speaks for a moment.

“You’re a Christian?” he says.

She nods.

“I know a story about this martyred saint, I forget his name.” Kevin had heard this from Father Vince, his mother’s priest. “The Romans roasted him alive over a fire, and just before he died, he said, ‘You can turn me over now, I think I’m done on this side.’ ”

Melody’s eyes fill with tears. “This isn’t a time to joke.”

“If not now,” says Kevin, “when?” He nudges her. He’s crying, too.

“Will you pray with me?” she says.

What for? thinks Kevin. To whom? And suddenly he’s angry at the God he doesn’t believe in for abandoning them to this, for looking away when they need him, for lying down on the job. Way to go, lord. Nice work, asshole. Thanks for nothing, motherfucker.

“Why don’t you pray for both of us?” he says.

Melody tightens her grip on his hand, making it sting almost unbearably, and as the heat from above begins to sting their backs and singe their hair, she closes her eyes and says, “Heavenly Father, please forgive my sins and the sins of this good man here—”

Actually, I’m not so good, thinks Kevin.

“—and take us both quickly to Your bosom—”

A-fucking-men. As quickly as possible. We’re going to burst like water balloons.

“—and please, dear Lord, look after my family and this man’s family and ease their sorrow and help them know that we reside in Your house now, with You, where there’s no more pain and uncertainty and fear, forever and ever.”

This is unbearable, thinks Kevin. I’d rather jump than listen to this. But at the same time, he thinks, keep talking. Don’t stop.

“In Jesus’ name,” says Melody, opening her eyes, “amen.”

Kevin’s eyes are stinging with tears and smoke. The smoke’s lowering slowly over their heads like a hood, and he can feel the backs of his ears blistering, can feel the heat pounding through his jacket and his shirt and scalding his back. Kevin grips Melody’s hand, and without speaking they scootch over the crack and bump onto the tilted floor below. Right away gravity drags at their ankles, and they slide too fast, their bare feet scuttling like crab legs without purchase.

“No,” whispers Melody, as if she’s afraid of being overhead, “no no no no no no no.” She grips his hand so tightly that his blood squeezes through their fingers. Their feet are scrabbling like cartoon feet, and the edge of the drop slides irrevocably toward them, but at the last moment Kevin and Melody simultaneously plant their feet and skid painfully to a stop, their momentum almost, but not quite, tipping their center of gravity over the edge. Instead they rock back onto their backsides, squatting barefoot a few inches from the drop like a pair of shoeless peasants. Kevin’s heart is pounding, and he can feel Melody’s pulse, too, through the warm, slick grip of their palms.

“Know any more jokes?” Melody says breathlessly.

Kevin starts to laugh, and for a moment he’s afraid he’ll never stop, that he’ll laugh so hard that he’ll rock them over the edge. A scrim of smoke rises from below, dimming the blue sky and obscuring the construction crane and the condo tower with a hole in it and the tiny white faces watching them from windows in the building across the street. Kevin can see past his knees straight down into the street below, and it makes his stomach churn. He sees the little oblongs of fire trucks and ambulances and cop cars, all at irregular angles to each other. He sees dots scurrying between them.

“Guy falls off the top of a skyscraper,” he manages to say, and Melody catches her breath.

“No, listen.” Kevin squeezes her hand. “Guy falls off a skyscraper, and halfway down, he passes the window of a guy he knows, and the guy in the window says to him, ‘Hey, Bob, long time no see. How you doing?’ And the guy who’s falling says…”

“ ‘So far, so good,’ ” says Melody. “Everybody knows that one.”

Kevin shrugs. “I guess.”

At least it’s a little easier to breathe here. The sheet of fire is still some ways above them, and the smoke is being carried upward through the gap above them. Through the scrim of smoke Kevin can see a helicopter, its rotors sparkling in the sun. It looks like a toy. He’s afraid to move, afraid to make the slightest shift, afraid to even turn and look at Melody. They’re both trembling, and it doesn’t seem to matter how tightly they cling to each other, they shudder like a pair of dry leaves in the wind.

“I’m sorry,” says Kevin.

She’s looking at him, but he can’t bear to look back at her.

“For what?” she says.

“For everything.” Kevin’s mouth is very dry. He turns to her finally. Stella’s not here, Beth hasn’t spoken to him in ages, who knows where Lynda or the Philosopher’s Daughter are these days, so Melody will have to do. “Will you forgive me?”

He realizes that he’s left her an opening to bring up God again, but instead she dips her head and nuzzles him. Her hair scrapes his cheek, and she presses his hand to her heart. He takes her chin in his hand and lifts her face. Both their faces are sooty, and where they aren’t sooty, they’re sweating and reddened from the heat. But their eyes are dry, and she looks at him as if she’s known him for years, knows everything about him, all his secrets, good and bad and in between, and loves him anyway.

“Yes,” she says. “I forgive you.”

He kisses her. Her lips are salty, and he feels the fingers of her other hand trembling on his cheek. They embrace at the edge, cheek to cheek, and through her singeing hair, Kevin can see the inverted river of fire, filling the space above where they’d been a few moments before. Kevin shuts his eyes and dips his head and whispers hoarsely in her ear, “Are you ready?”

“No,” she whimpers.

“There’s no more time.”

“I can’t do it.”

“It’s all right,” Kevin says. “I’ll do it.”

She tightens her arms around him. “Don’t let go of me.”

“I won’t,” Kevin says, and in one sudden movement he presses their joined hands to his chest and jerks his shoulders forward, pitching them over the edge.

For an instant Kevin thinks, maybe prayer works! because they just seem to hang there, buffeted by the wind. His eyes open to the whole Google Maps panorama of Austin turning slowly below them — the ant-busy street below, the buildings thrusting up toward them, the hammered verdigris green of the river, the sun-faded hills studded with red roofs — and for a nanosecond his heart swells with the hope of a miracle, that they will soar like angels, wafting hand in hand to the pavement below to land gently on the balls of their feet like the risen dead before the eyes of breathless office workers and astounded first responders. But it’s not a miracle, it’s not a moment of salvation, and let’s hope Melody didn’t think her God was rapturing her at the last moment. She’s not an angel — not yet, anyway — and Kevin’s not either, he’s just Wile E. Coyote, and he’s overshot the edge of the cliff to hang there just long enough to make a mournful face and hold up a sign that says HELP! The next instant they’re plummeting into a sixty-mile-per-hour wind, Kevin’s jacket snapping behind him like a cape, his blood-stained tie whipping over his shoulder. Melody’s hair is streaming, her skirt is pressed between her legs, her jacket puffed with wind. The two of them are pinned, no doubt, against the faded blue sheet of Austin’s sky, or against the gashed, rectilinear facade of the burning building, by the lenses of cell phones and news cameramen, witnessed live over cable news networks and the Web, doomed to be replayed endlessly in a loop, YouTubed over and over and over again, the pair of them a tragedy or a rallying cry or a sick joke, stripped of their individuality in the three and a half seconds it takes for them to fall.

Then their hands are pulled apart and they’re falling separately, from fifty stories up, at a terminal velocity of fifty-five meters per second. Kevin’s got just three seconds to live, and he wants to know a lot of things all at once. Is this going to hurt? Why doesn’t anyone stop this? What did I do to deserve this? Isn’t my life supposed to be flashing before me? Where’s my highlight reel? I want a fucking highlight reel! Turns out I was middle-aged at twenty-five, only I didn’t know it. Where’s Melody now? Did she let go of me or did I let go of her? He’ll never know now, but so what? Everybody dies alone, but at least she’s got a family, she’s got children, someone’s going to miss her. Who’s going to miss me? Nobody I know even knows I’m here, and nobody here knows who I am. Who’s going to remember me? Who’s even going to notice that I’m gone, and how long is it going to take for them to notice, and how long is it going to take for them to figure out where I was when I died?

The wind is punishing his eyes, but Kevin keeps them open, watching the upturned faces below scattering from his descent. None of them know who I am, I might as well be a 180-pound sandbag as far as they’re concerned. Who will mourn me? Who will write my eulogy and what will they say? Will I even have a eulogy? He was too young to give the eulogy at his father’s funeral, and it fell to his father’s brother Tim, who showed up drunk at the church and rambled and sobbed and lost his place in his notes. Later he typed up what he’d meant to say and mailed a copy each to Kevin and Kevin’s mom and Kevin’s sister, and now Kevin doesn’t know where his copy is anymore, he never read it anyway, it’s one more worthless piece of paper he’s leaving behind for someone else to dispose of. Who? Kathleen, probably, he can’t imagine Mom doing it, she’ll slide deeper into her bottle of Gordon’s, staring out through the glass while Kathleen shoulders the burden, which is what Kathleen always does, but then there’s also Stella, his de facto widow; Stella will cry buckets and shudder with grief and no one will ever know how much she means it, maybe not even Stella.

Kevin writhes in the air, the wind thumping in his ears, the tower streaking past. He glimpses Melody one last time, her legs pedaling, her arms flailing, her face obscured by her hair. Still alive, though, as he still is, if only for another instant. So far, so good.

What’s Stella doing right now? What is she doing right this instant? His watch is still set to Michigan time, but he’s dying in the Central Time zone, and it’s the same time in Chicago that it is here, and that brings her closer to him somehow. She’s not in the bar with some guy, she wouldn’t do that, Stella loves me, I’m pretty certain of it, she wouldn’t do that. She doesn’t know what’s happening to me, she can’t sense it, but she’s thinking of me anyway, she’s on her way out of the Sheraton on an errand that has to do with me, and it’s poignantly ironic because she’s passing the bar where a crowd is watching the breaking news on CNN and she’s not turning to see what all the fuss is about as the growing knot of midday drinkers and conventioneers draws a collective breath at the video of two wriggling figures falling from a burning office tower in Austin, Texas. Déjà vu all over again. But Stella’s too wrapped up in her thoughts of me at the moment, she’s stepping out of the Sheraton briskly and expertly on her high heels, her purse slung over her shoulder, out onto the streets of Chicago where it’s as midsummer hot as it is in Texas, and she’s carrying herself with that lovely feral walk that I still love even though she annoys me and terrifies me, she’s carrying herself purposefully in search of a CVS or a Walgreens, she’s already got the address from the hotel concierge, and she marches up the fluorescent lit aisle of the store in search of a home pregnancy test, the one she used last month didn’t tell her what she wanted to hear, but now she’s missed her period again, and she buys the little box at the pharmacy counter from a bored young black pharmacy clerk, and Stella twinkles at the young woman, trying to get her to share in Stella’s anticipation, but the clerk’s not going for it, it’s just another boring moment in the middle of her boring shift. But Stella doesn’t let that bother her, she never lets the indifference of others bother her, and no, she doesn’t want a bag, thanks, she just sticks the box and the receipt in her purse and sails out of the store into the sticky heat again, eating up the sidewalk in long strides like a runway model, though her legs are too short and too muscular for that, and she hardly notices the crowds on Michigan Avenue or the bleary sun or the odor from the sluggish river alongside the hotel, though it seems like a longer walk going back than it did coming, even though it’s the same distance, silly, I know that, but even Stella understands the psychology of it, she’s carrying a secret, or the promise of a secret and she can’t wait to be back in her room, and that’s where she is right now, her purse and her suit jacket dumped on the bed, her pumps kicked off on the carpet, the box of the pregnancy test ripped open on the bathroom counter along with the folded sheet of instructions, which she hasn’t bothered to read because she’s done this before, she knows the drill, and she’s sitting on the toilet with her skirt tugged up and her panties around her ankles, and she’s pigeontoed, holding the stick under her stream, concentrating with her lips pursed like it’s painful. The bathroom door’s open and the TV’s on with the sound off, not CNN, thank God, that would be too poignant, but Bravo, probably, showing a marathon of one of those hideous housewives shows she likes so much, and apart from the upholstered hush of the room and the rumble of ventilation, the only sound is the patter of Stella’s micturition against the stick and into the bowl. Then she sets it aside, pulls up her panties, tugs down her skirt, stands barefoot on the icy bathroom floor, washing her hands and watching herself in the mirror — is that the face of a mother? — and then she picks up the test and pads out onto the carpet, instinctively shaking the stick as if it were a thermometer or a Polaroid, and she sits on the end of the tall bed with her bare feet dangling like a little girl and watches the zaftig, bitchy housewives with the sound off, until at last the test is ready, and she reads the result by the light of the TV, then looks up at herself again in the mirror over the desk. Hi, Mom! Still holding the stick, her heart pounding, happily oblivious to the tang of her own pee, she plunges her hand into her purse on the bed and comes up with her phone, then rises from the bed and floats barefoot over the carpet to the window, where she gazes out at the sunlight glinting on the dirty water of the Chicago River below, then lifts her eyes to the glittering meniscus of Lake Michigan, in what she guesses is roughly the direction of Ann Arbor, and she starts to tear up at the thought of her boyfriend, her landlord, her lover, not quite her husband, the man she isn’t entirely sure loves her. She flips the phone open one-handed, turns it on, cants her head to one side like Carrie Bradshaw, lets her middle finger hover over his speed dial number — think fast, Kev, you’re going to be a father — but she doesn’t press the button, because on second thought maybe it’s not such a good idea to tell him over the phone, it’s the middle of the day, he’s at work, he doesn’t always answer his phone and even if he does, he might not take it well. Because anyway you look at it, this is going to be a difficult negotiation. Stella’s too savvy not to know that. Better work up to it and tell him in person, tell him after dinner tomorrow night, after a heavy meal, get a bottle of wine in him and cuddle with him on the sofa, where she can tell him face to face while she’s touching him, reassuring him, coddling him along like the big baby he is, before she starts to remake him into the man she needs him to be. She flips the phone shut again and stands at the window hugging her secret to herself with her phone in one hand, her other hand cocked at the wrist and brandishing the pregnancy stick like a cigarette holder. I’m ready for my close up, Mr. DeMille. She’s crying from happiness, sure, but from anxiety, too, and from anger, because what’s that grump of a boyfriend going to do when she tells him?

Kevin’s crying, too, but tearlessly, because the wind of his descent is sandblasting his face. I love you! he wants to shout, but the wind’s also pummeling his lungs, he’s dizzy and lightheaded and he might even pass out before he hits the pavement, which would be a blessing, but he desperately wants her to know this one thing, he wants it to wing through the ether via some sort of telepathic wormhole, he wants to tell her that he loves her, that he always did and he always will, though the future tense doesn’t mean much at the moment and is losing value fast, at fifty-five meters per second. But I want you to know that, Stella, I want you to remember that I loved you when you hear the news, I want you to remember that I loved you when you realize I went to Austin without telling you, I want you to remember that I loved you when you understand what I was doing there, I want you to remember that I loved you when you realize that I was thinking of leaving you — I want you to know that I loved you and was thinking of you at the very last moment of my life.

Will she forgive him? Is there time for that? Maybe not, that’ll have to come later, if at all, and Kevin hasn’t got any more time. What’s he got to look forward to now? He won’t be there when she comes home on Tuesday to an empty house, he won’t be there when she gets a call from his sister, Kathleen, because when they pull his driver’s license from his pulped remains, Kathleen’s his emergency contact, he never got around to changing it to Stella, and Kathleen and Stella don’t get along — Stella sets my teeth on edge, Kathleen told him in a rare moment of candor, and Stella’s always offering to help Kathleen lose some weight, if, you know, she really wants to make the effort — Stella’s going to have to hear it from her, maybe even off the answering machine or voice mail, as she stands in Kevin’s empty house, carrying his child. Oh, she’s gonna hate me, she’s gonna despise me, she’s going to be mortally wounded, well, maybe not mortally, since Kevin is getting a sudden, instantaneous tutorial in what “mortally” really means, and in this last, infinitesimal moment of his life, as the litter in the street and the grain of the pavement rush at him, he’s hoping that she takes it in stride, and he’s pretty sure she will, Stella is nothing if not a survivor, Stella’s a fighter, Stella has an uncanny way of landing on her feet, Stella keeps her sunny-side up, Stella makes lemonade. Stella’s going to be okay, Stella will get another man, even though that might be harder to do if she has a kid, and not just a kid, but a kid by a man who died in some spectacularly public and horrible fashion, who’s even a kind of minor celebrity now, one of the two jumpers from the tower in Austin. Look at the mess I’m making, and I’m not even dead yet. But even if she doesn’t get another man, she’ll raise the kid all by herself, she’ll buy every baby book in the baby book section and she’ll clean out Baby Gap and Ikea and stuff the house to the rafters with kid paraphernalia — no, it’s the kid he ought to be worried about at the very last, the son or daughter who right now is only pee on a stick and few thousand cells in Stella’s belly, it’s the kid who’s going to have to face life without a father, it’s the kid who’s going to learn at a tender age that his father died before he even got the news that he was going to be a father, it’s the kid who’s going learn that her father’s death will have been seen by millions before she was even born. Deal with that, munchkin, it’s bad enough to lose your dad at a young age, and I ought to know, but my own kid will have to live with the knowledge that the most important fact he’ll know about me is the way I died.

I’m sorry, thinks Kevin, please forgive me, winging that through the ether, too, and into the future, to a kid who won’t understand any of the circumstances of her birth for years yet, and who may never understand them at all, because who does, really? But I’m sorry for that, I’m sorry you’ll never know me and I’m sorry I’ll never know you, it’s all my fault, I should have stayed in Ann Arbor where I had it good, where I had a woman who loved me, where I had friends and a history, where I had a job I was good at, where I didn’t realize just how good I had it until it was gone. I’m sorry that I’ve hurt you, even before you’re born, but I want you to be happy, I want you to be strong, I want you to love your mother even if she gets a little frantic and needy at times, I want you to understand that you’re the center of her life, you’re all she ever wanted, and I know it’s asking a lot, but I want you to live up to that responsibility, though of course if you do live up to it, you won’t have gotten that from me, but that’s the nature of fatherhood, isn’t it, that you want your kids to be better than you were? I wish I believed that I’ll be looking over you and your mother, but I don’t, though who knows, I could be wrong, perhaps I’ll come to you in a dream, looking younger and fitter, perhaps, without the hair in my ears and the laugh lines and the enlarged prostate, perhaps I’ll come to you both, I’ll hover over your crib wearing a white linen suit, smiling down as your mother tucks you in, saying, sleep tight, your daddy loves you, he’s watching over you, he’ll keep you safe, that’s just the sort of thing Stella will believe, a little anxiously, perhaps, but that’s what she’ll tell herself. And she’ll never, ever tell you I was planning to leave her, that I was, without knowing it, planning to leave you both, instead she’ll tell you that I was in Austin because I knew you were coming and I wanted to be prepared with a better-paying job, I wanted to do the right thing, and you’ll believe every word of it, because Stella’s your mother and a good saleswoman, besides, and because there’s no reason for you not to believe it, and anyway, it’s true, I would have adored you if I’d known you were coming, I would have stepped up and done the right thing, I would have made you the center of my life and happily paid for clothes and shoes and tennis lessons and ballet classes and baseball camp and orthodonture and trips to Europe and college tuition, and I’d gladly have given up all the pointless things I stupidly thought made my life worth living, because I’d realize that you made my life worth living, and I’d have laughed with you and lost my temper at you and burst into tears at the sight of you and begged fate or God or the universe to deal you a better hand than they’re dealing me, and I’d have done my best to make sure you turn out okay, that you had a good start in life, because I’m here to tell you, kiddo, there’s nothing certain about it, and you make all the preparation you can and then hope for the best. It’s a little late for me to be doing “My Boy Bill”—the way my dad, your grandfather, whom you’ll never know, either, used to sing it in the shower — but I’d have laid down my life for you, and who knows, maybe that’s what I’m doing right now, but it’s not so bad, it’s not so hopeless, I’m not so far gone that I can’t wish you every good thing, every happiness, and all the love in the world with my dying breath.

And as the ground rushes up to meet him, Kevin Quinn, for the first time in a long time, for the first time in years, and maybe even for the first time in his life, is looking forward to what comes next.