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Let go and reach.
Mary closed her eyes, remembering that feeling the first time she was upside down with the pole trapped between her thigh and calf when she was able to force her hands open so she would hang. And she had been fine.
Remember that. You were fine, Mary cajoled herself.
Her nerves ablaze with terror, she forced her joints to extend. The weight slipped from her fingers.
Squeezing her eyes tightly, she kept herself from looking. The child survived, or the child didn’t. She no longer had any control over his outcome.
There was still a little boy above her at risk of burning. Mary thought that falling to one’s death was a far preferred way of dying than broiling in a flame.
The tool guy on the windowsill below hollered. “Good job. Perfect! You’re doing perfect. Get the other baby.”
The blood rushing to Mary’s head made it feel like it had swollen in size. The heat burned the pads of her feet.
Get the other baby.
She folded up again.
This time, the child wasn’t fighting. He lay in his mother’s arms, oxygen-deprived and shocky. This was cutting things much too close. His little head lolled back, and Mary saw Kaleb’s face. “I’m here. I won’t let anything bad happen to you. I’m here, baby.”
Any fatigue, any fear, any hesitancy left her.
She reached for the boy. As she wound the hasty into place, Mary’s gaze slid over to assess the mom. The woman was slight, small for an adult. Lightweight didn’t mean easy. Even the weight and size of the first little boy had been hard.
The mom smoothed a hand down her child’s face and kissed him.
Mary had seen that in the hospital, too. This woman thought she was saying good-bye. She didn’t think she was going to survive. As Mary positioned the boy against her chest, the mom came up on all fours, hacking and gasping.
There was the billowing, noxious smoke stinging and clouding Mary’s eyes. There was the heat of the flame torching her skin. The metal posts grew ever hotter. Even through her hazy, watery sight, Mary could see the child’s face was black with soot, and his lips were turning blue.
“In coming.” This time, there was no ready, set, go. This child needed fresh air. Now.
Mary grabbed his ankles, thinking absurdly, I have the talons of an eagle. I can hold a flailing fish tight in my grasp and get it back to my nest. She flipped over backward, draping the child along her body until gravity dropped his hands within reach of the guy below.
No one grabbed at her ankles, and Mary slid until her feet caught on the bars. This, too, she’d done on the pole, holding her feet rigidly back to support her weight. It was familiar enough that she had done it automatically. But still, the tug of the rope around Mary’s waist was a welcomed reminder that she wasn’t going to plunge to her death. Not unless she chose to. Not unless there were no other options for escaping the flames.
“Got him! Release.”
Releasing was easier the second time.
The screams and gasps from below were less of an upswell.
But now, mucus flowed into her mouth and clogged her nose. Her system was trying to clean its airways, and instead, it was suffocating her. Her stomach muscles clenched as she coughed and sputtered and choked.
There was no counterbalance sitting on her feet and holding her legs this time. Mary was on her own to tighten her abdominal muscles and curl herself up. She writhed this way and that as she clasped her legs, trying to use her arm strength to hand over hand walk herself up her thighs, grab the heated bar, and drag herself up.
Up there was less air, more smoke, and her system worked overtime, dragging in the needed oxygen only to cough it back out.
Mary scooped her arm toward where the mother had been.
Where was the mother?
With her head down, through squinty eyes, Mary could make out the curl of the woman’s hand, and she reached for it to no avail. The cutters lay to her right. Mary cut the third rail and then a fourth bar as if it were butter—the effects of the adrenaline pumping through her system like a geyser that made her lips buzz, and possibly the help of the fire’s heat.
The opening was now adult-sized. Leaning through, the woman lay just out of Mary’s reach.
Using the handle on the tool, Mary scraped at the woman’s skirt. She was able to drag the fabric close enough that she could pull the weight of the mother.
