Lee Martin - Late One Night

By this time, nearly four o’clock, the moon was already rising — Hannah could see it low in the sky just above the treetops along Locust Street — and the temperature was dropping. She could feel the cold’s bite on her face and through the fingers of her woolen gloves. She stamped her feet, and her toes tingled inside her boots.

She called Angel’s name, and Angel stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and turned back to see who had called out and why. Two boys wearing Phillipsport letterman jackets split apart to move past her. Hannah knew the boys were football players. She could see the gold helmets they’d won for good plays pinned to the red wool of the jackets. Beefy, bareheaded boys laughing about something before they got onto the bus.

“Go home,” Angel told Hannah.

“Where are you going?” Hannah ran down the sidewalk to where she was standing. “We’re supposed to go right home. You know Dad wants us to watch Sarah and Emma.” He’d said as much that morning. He’d pick up Sarah and Emma at their school and drop them off at Brandi’s for Hannah and Angel to take care of until Brandi got home from work. He had to drive over the river to Brick Chapel to see a man about a job. “We have to go,” Hannah said, and she took Angel by the sleeve of her coat. “We have to go right now.”

“You can babysit.” Angel jerked her arm free from Hannah’s grasp. “You’re the one Dad really trusts anyway. Not me.”

In the days since the fire, Hannah had delighted in the fact that she and Angel were growing closer. They’d put away their argument about who’d been supposed to feed the goats the night the trailer burned and who’d neglected that chore and who’d failed to carry out the ashes from the Franklin stove. That had just been sniping between two sisters who didn’t know what else to do in the aftershock of their disaster. It didn’t take long for them to find comfort in each other’s company. Nights, Angel often whispered to Hannah, who was in the bed across from her in the room they shared, and said, “You okay?” Sometimes Hannah nodded her head and said, yes, she was, and sometimes she said she didn’t think she’d be able to go to sleep because every time she closed her eyes, she saw the flames and smoke of that night. Angel got into bed with her then. She crawled in under the covers, and she let Hannah lie close to her and they held hands and finally drifted off to sleep.

Now Angel was turning her away.

“I’ll go with you,” Hannah said even though she knew she had to go to Brandi’s. “Are you going to Missy’s?”

“I’m just going,” Angel said. “Never you mind where.”

The sidewalk was almost empty now. Some of the buses had already pulled out. The last of the stragglers were getting onto Lucy Tutor’s bus.

And with that, Angel was gone. Hannah took a few steps after her, but she knew it was all for show. She knew she’d go to Brandi’s like she was supposed to and she’d take care of Sarah and Emma. The only thing she didn’t know was what she’d tell her dad when he’d ask her, as she knew he would, Where is she? Where’s your sister?

The only seat left on the bus was the one behind Lucy Tutor — the loser seat, the one for dweebs and ’tards. Angel didn’t care. She let her book bag slide off her shoulder as she dropped down onto the seat.

“That you, Angel?” Lucy wore a pair of glasses she kept on a chain around her neck. She lifted the glasses to her face. She tipped back her head and crinkled up her nose. “Honey, you know you don’t ride this bus anymore.”

“Are you saying I can’t?”

“You live in town now.”

“I know where I live.” Angel let her voice get all sweetie-sweet. She leaned forward and whispered to Lucy, “I’ve been invited.”

“Invited,” said Lucy. “Invited to what?”

“It’s very important that I be there.”

“Oh, I’m sure it is.” Lucy let the glasses drop onto her chest. “Is it Missy Wade? Is that who you’re going to see?”

Angel smiled, and there was something in that smile that was enough for Lucy. She said, “Missy sure does love on you girls.”

Then she put the bus into gear and slowly pulled away from the curb.

What was left of the trailer after the fire was still there. The furnace and the hot water heater rose up from the ruin. Angel turned her head as the bus went by. She saw the head of a wire coat hanger poking up along the trailer’s underskirting, a litter of baking pans rusting in the weather, scraps of this and that turned black with char. She remembered in flashes of light and sound the bits and pieces of that night once she understood that the trailer was on fire. Her mother shook her awake. She could smell smoke, could hear the crackle of flames. Her mother said that word, Fire . She told her to help get the others out. She was coughing, and she made sure Hannah was awake. Then she turned and went on down the hall. Something exploded, and Angel heard a whoosh of fire the way she did each time the furnace kicked on. That’s when she got more scared than she’d ever been in her life. She grabbed Hannah’s hand. “C’mon,” she said. “Run!”

That was the moment that Angel thought about some nights now as she lay in bed with Hannah. Angel wanted to tell her what her mother had told her to do — save the others — but Angel couldn’t bear the thought of confessing that. She couldn’t bring herself to say that she’d been too scared to try to save the others. She couldn’t say that. Hannah, she was sure, would have been braver.

Just maybe, Angel wished it true — what Tommy claimed Shooter Rowe said. If her father had something to do with the fire, she’d have reason enough to put aside how much she hated herself for running out of the trailer that night and leaving her sisters and brother and mother behind, how much she regretted not taking the ash box to the compost as she was told to do. If her father was guilty, then how could she be too?

She realized how quiet the bus had become. The kids who’d been chattering had fallen silent. They were all looking back at the trailer’s heap of ruin. Angel thought of all the people who’d given her hugs once she returned to school after the funeral. Kids and teachers crying with her, telling her to know that they were there to help her through, encouraging her to be strong. They’d given her cards — some of them were about their prayers being with her; others featured doves, roses, oceans, sunsets. Someone stretched a banner above the stairwell leading to the second-floor classrooms: We ♥ You, Angel! Every time she went up the stairs, she saw it. For a while, people left things at her locker — teddy bears, flowers, and, of course, angel figurines — but after a while that stopped, and she was secretly glad because deep down she didn’t believe she deserved any of this kindness.

She was embarrassed that the burnt debris was still there for all the kids on the bus to look at. It was a sign of everything that had gone wrong for her family.

The bus was slowing in front of Missy’s house, and for a few seconds Angel didn’t understand that Lucy was stopping on account of her.

“Here you are, honey,” Lucy said. The doors of the bus opened with a hiss. “You have a good visit.”

Tommy’s voice rang out from the back of the bus. “Why we stopping here, Lucy? Missy doesn’t have any kids.”

Angel gathered up her book bag and hurried down the steps of the bus before Tommy could spot her. She stood off the side of the blacktop and watched the bus go on. She stood there until she could no longer see it. Then she turned back to the south, back toward where she and her sisters and brother and mother and father had once had a home.