I sit up.
The smell sharpens the moment I sit up. Not the sheets. The air. Something heavy under the door.
I get out of bed.
The hardwood is warm under my feet. Not hot. Warm enough that I feel it. I walk to the door in my nightgown, white silk, calf-length, the one Daniel bought me in Milan five anniversaries ago and that I still wear because he notices when I don't. I put my palm flat against the door.
The wood is hot.
I take my hand back and the first bad thing happens inside my chest, a small fast animal trying to get out. I don't let it. I've been married eleven years to a man who watches me the way men watch horses at auction, and I have learned to keep what moves in my chest off of my face. I step away from the door. I cross back to the bed. I pick up my phone from the nightstand.
The screen lights under my thumb. Five percent battery. No bars.
No bars.
I hold the phone closer to the window as if the window is the reason. I walk it around the room. Corner, corner, corner, nothing. Daniel has a cell booster installed in every room of this house because Daniel takes calls from people who live in time zones I will never see. The booster is in the ceiling. I can see the little LED behind the vent if I look up at the right angle.
The LED is off.
I put the phone down. There is an intercom on the wall by the light switch, a little flat panel with buttons for every room. I cross to it. The primary suite button. I press it and hold. Daniel. I press it again. Daniel. The panel doesn't light. I press master kitchen, I press staff quarters, I press garage, I press every button on the panel in order and nothing lights and no voice answers. The intercom runs off the house electrical, not the cell booster, not the landline, and the intercom is dead.
I pick up the landline on the desk. I lift the handset to my ear and listen for the tone and there isn't one. The line is dead. Thetwo things I have for contacting anyone outside this house are both dead at the same time and at two in the morning. I have never been a stupid woman, and I am not one now. I know what it means when both phones go at the same time.
Someone has done this.
I cross back to the door and I pull my hand away before I touch it the second time because the wood is hotter now than it was a minute ago. Smoke is coming under the door in a low grey line, moving fast, confident, the way water moves when a pipe bursts under a sink. I watch it and my eyes sting. I turn the brass knob and push.
Heat pushes back.
The hallway beyond my door is a moving orange, the runner along the floor already glowing at its edges, and a wave of black rolling across the ceiling like weather. The stairwell at the far end is gone. Just gone. I can see through to the stones of the landing wall and the stones are wet-looking and red.
Daniel is down that hallway. Daniel is on the east wing, two doors past the stairwell. I don't think about him. This is the first thing I notice about myself in the three seconds I stand with the door open: that my husband is in the burning east wing and my mind does not turn toward him. My mind turns toward the window.
I close the door.
I close the door and I put my back to it and I slide down to the floor because my legs are not doing what I'm telling them to. The silk of my nightgown catches on a splinter in the baseboard. The smoke is still coming under the door and I can feel the warmth of it on my ankles like bathwater that has sat too long. There is a towel rail in the ensuite. There is a bath across from it. I get up.
I soak the towel in the tub. I roll it and press it to the base of the door. I do this the way a person does a thing they have read in a magazine once and never expected to need. The rolled towelgoes dark at the edges almost instantly. I take a second towel. I drag it through the water and wrap it around my mouth and nose and tie it behind my neck the way a girl ties a scarf. My hands are shaking. I watch them shake the way I watch a horse shy at a fence. I tell them to stop and they don't.
I go to the window.
The guest room faces the front lawn, the long pale stretch of grass that runs down to the fountain and the iron gate. Beyond the gate is the service road and beyond the service road is the treeline and beyond the treeline is forty miles of hill country between this house and another living person who knows my name. I put my hand on the window latch.
The latch doesn't move.
I try it again. It doesn't move. I look at it and I see the small brass key lock sunk into the frame and I remember. The windows all have keys. Daniel had them installed after the break-in at the Petersens' house three summers ago. The keys live in a drawer in Daniel's study. Every window in this house locks from the inside and opens with a key I do not have.
I pull the window sash up with all of my weight against it.
Nothing.
I stand there in my nightgown with the wet towel across my face and I look through the leaded glass at the long pale lawn, and I understand it then, the way a cold room is clear after a bath. I am going to die in this house. Not because of the fire, not entirely. Because of the keys. Because of the cell booster. Because of the phone line. Because someone has turned this house into a closed shape and I am inside it.
I scream.
I am not a woman who screams. I have not raised my voice at anyone in this house in a decade. I scream at the window and I beat the glass with the heel of my palm and I put my face close to the pane and shouthelpat a lawn that has no one on it, at agate that has no one behind it, at a driveway that hasn't seen a car pass since eleven.
And then I see him.
