James Hynes: Next

“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.