Andrea Barrett - The Air We Breathe

Dr. Petrie shared his report with the fire department and the police, the commission from Albany and the other one from New York. More informally, he told us, so that we began to get a sense of what had happened. His partial information was better than what we got from the newspapers, which tried to link our fire to others of the recent past: at the Williamsburg tenements, the insurance building, the shirtwaist factory. Interspersed with their speculations were shots of our own faces, swollen and covered with soot, which eager local photographers had taken as we lay out on the lawns.

The investigators, after sorting through the evidence and taking statements from everyone able to speak, found nothing scandalous to feed those papers, though. No defects in the heating or the electrical systems, no mismanagement, nothing scanted in the building’s design or maintenance, no evidence of shortcuts during construction, no sign of arson. An accident, the investigators said. A spark, perhaps, or a shorted wire from a piece of apparatus in the X-ray facility. The cause of the “smoke-related incident”—that was how they referred to it — remained mysterious, but the destruction would have been far worse and the fire spread more rapidly if the building hadn’t been so well-designed and well-built. They particularly admired the central stairwell, recommending only that exterior fire stairs be added to the top floor of each dormitory wing.

DURING THE DAYS immediately after the fire, Eudora hardly left Tamarack State except to snatch a meal and a few hours of dreamless sleep. She knew, as the rest of us didn’t, then, how upset Naomi had been to find her with Leo, and she blamed herself for Naomi’s disappearance. Briefly she wondered if Miles might have helped her leave town, but when she saw him at Tamarack State, directing a line of volunteers carrying groceries, she didn’t dare ask him. Mrs. Martin was useless; Eudora had glimpsed her at the pharmacist’s, telling whoever would listen that her daughter had run away for no reason, taking the car that even now wasn’t fully paid off and leaving her shorthanded. Perhaps, Eudora thought, Naomi had left some clue in her room.

She sacrificed her first morning off since the fire, bicycled over to Mrs. Martin’s house, and went in through the service door. A young woman stringing beans greeted her as she walked past white walls fringed with Mrs. Martin’s notes. New ones, about conserving food for the war: reminders about observing wheatless Mondays and Wednesdays and meatless Tuesdays, about using less sugar, eating more fish, saving cooking fats for soap and fruit pits for carbon that would go into gas masks to save soldiers’ lives. Eat Potatoes! one card read. Eat Oatmeal! read another.

“What’s all this?” Eudora asked the girl, whom she hadn’t seen before.

“Mrs. Martin signed the food pledge,” the girl said, pointing with her knife toward a larger placard hanging from a pin.

Eudora paused and said, “Sooner or later, I suppose everyone will have to sign.”

“No doubt,” said the girl. “But they won’t all be so smug, will they? Or volunteer to head up the local women’s drive to save food. All the time bragging that she keeps the best table in the village, and making everyone who works here suffer for it.”

She chopped a pile of beans in half and added, in a high, mocking voice, “‘There is no reason why we can’t serve nutritious, delicious meals while still conserving to the utmost. We must be endlessly creative …’ She’s ten times worse now that she’s got Mr. Fairchild egging her on. He overheard me complaining about trying to cook with so little butter and he accused me of being disloyal.”

Taken aback by the girl’s vehemence, Eudora pushed through the swinging door to the dining room and nearly bumped into Mrs. Martin, standing just a few feet away. She’d had her hair done recently, Eudora saw, a new style involving a complicated mat of gray braids clamped to the back of her head. Her apron, ruffled along the bodice, looked new as well, or at least freshly starched.

“How nice to see you,” Mrs. Martin said, crossing her arms at her waist. “But why did you come to the kitchen door?”

“I didn’t want to bother you,” Eudora murmured, trying to look trustworthy.

Mrs. Martin proceeded to talk about the weather, the tragedy at Tamarack State, the difficulty of running a boardinghouse with the new wartime restrictions and how she’d nonetheless triumphantly adapted to them; about everything except Naomi. As if, by refusing to mention her daughter, she erased any grounds for worry. Five or six years ago, when Naomi had had a terrible case of bronchitis and a cough suggesting that she might have something worse, Eudora had seen Mrs. Martin wall off her fears in just this way, betrayed only by her rigid hands. As she rattled on now, the skin on her knuckles whitened.

“Was there something you wanted?” she finally asked.

“Just — to see how you were,” Eudora answered, knowing she’d lost any hope of ducking into Naomi’s room. “And to find out if there’d been any news.”

“Nothing,” Mrs. Martin said. “Too much trouble for her, I am sure. But as long as you’re here, I know Mr. Fairchild wants to speak with you.”

Before Eudora could protest Mrs. Martin had vanished up the stairs. A minute later Miles came down alone, his stiff collar buttoned and cinched by his tie.

Without any greeting, he asked the same question she wanted to ask him. “Have you heard from her?”

In this house, Eudora thought, “her” always meant Naomi. “No,” she said. “Have you?”

His face crumpled, and then his body, depositing him on the broad bottom step. “I thought she told you everything,” he said.

“If she had,” Eudora replied, “I might know where she was.” The top of his head, now at the level of her knees, had a bald spot she hadn’t noticed. She tried to step back but his hand clutched her right shin through a handful of her skirt.

“She didn’t mention leaving?”

“No,” Eudora said. She held her breath, waiting for the obvious question: when had she last seen Naomi?

Instead he said, in an anguished tone, “There’s money missing from my room. From her mother’s purse as well. It disappeared the day she did. How could she not know that if she asked, I’d give her anything?”

He was so upset that Eudora didn’t dare hint at Naomi’s real feelings, or at her own. At movie night, the pang she’d felt when she’d returned to find Naomi sitting at Leo’s side had shocked her.

“Really,” she said to the top of Miles’s head, “I have to go.”

She left him on that bottom step, knowing as she fled the house that she wouldn’t feel so guilty if Naomi’s suspicions hadn’t been true. In the weeks since the fire, she’d felt more and more strongly drawn to Leo each time she crept into the rough new infirmary and listened to him struggling to breathe.

IN OUR NEW infirmary, which was wedged into the second floor of the former women’s annex, Leo lay on a white bed resembling those in which Edith and Denis had been trapped during the fire. He didn’t know that they were dead, nor did he know about Morris’s fatal jump or how badly Irene had been injured. Although many of us had recovered from our exposure to the fumes, he’d developed pneumonia in both lungs, with a fever so high he felt like flames were licking at his sheets. Often he was unconscious when Eudora visited him, and even when he was awake he didn’t always recognize her behind the mask Dr. Petrie made her wear. Watching the muscles at the base of his neck tighten and hollow as he struggled for breath, sometimes she couldn’t recognize him either. For the ten minutes Dr. Petrie allowed, she sat next to him silently, now and then stroking the smooth web of skin between his index finger and his thumb.