Page 105

Wrong. Wrong.

Quiet.

Her chin comes up. She lifts one hand, barely, like a woman reaching for a doorknob in a dark room she knows well.

Nine pairs of yellow eyes come up at the same time.

"I can feel it," she says. "It's just hanging open."

"Slowly."

"I don't know how to be slow at this."

Her fingers curl.

The seam pulls shut.

It doesn't stop at the yard. My front door slams behind us hard enough to jump the frame. Every window drops in its sash at once, a sound like a train going through a station. The wood stove dies. My ears pop the way they do coming down off the ridge road too fast.

For four seconds nothing in my house opens.

Nothing breathes, either. Not the pipes, not the fog, not the pines behind the property line.

Then the yard is empty.

No smoke. No dissolving. Nine of them gone between one blink and the next, like they were never given permission to have been there.

Maren's hand is still up.

"Put it down," I say.

She doesn't. She stands there with her arm out and her jaw set, and I watch her try twice before her hand comes down on its own.

Then her knees go.

I catch her before she hits the ground.

I carry her into the kitchen and the bulb is still dead, so we light her shop candles, three of them stuck to a saucer.

She won't sit until my forearm is dealt with. I tell her it closes on its own. She tells me to shut up and hands me the salt.

"You're shaking," I say.

"You're smoking."

That’s fair.

She works the salt into the burn with her thumb, hard, exactly the way I did to her ankle Wednesday, but neither of us mentions that.

Two hours ago she kissed me against the siding of this house and stopped a fire mid-flame without knowing she'd done it.

Now she's cleaning my arm with her hair still full of woodsmoke, and she's close enough that I can hear her pulse, and I don't move.

You could.

I'm aware.

She'd let you.