James Hynes - Next

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.”