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She’s also noticed that when Smith is in the room, her mother always manages to be elsewhere.
It could be that she doesn’t like the reminder of whatever he and Papa used to do, the winking way he saysthe old daysthat makes it clear they were up to no good. Maybe she worries that they still are. Or maybe it’s simpler than that: pure jealousy, that Papa seems to have a rapport with Smith, who is coarse and badly dressed with fetid breath and brown teeth, that he doesn’t share with anyone else.
But if Mother is lonely, she doesn’t say so. Instead, she fills her time, and Miriam’s, too, with luncheons and teas and card parties, dinners and dances. It’s unsaid yet understood that there’s no saying no to these engagements. Evelyn Day has worked hard to keep her society connections, not for herself but for her daughter; it’s just as unsaid, and just as understood, that Miriam is being paraded through all these parties just so that all the biddies in attendance can tell their eligible sons how lovely she looks, which of course they do. A few of the sons have even come calling. They doff their hats as they come inside, and smile like sharks that have caught the scent of blood.
Miriam has enjoyed exactly one of these visits, and then only because Patches had come into the room, sniffed once at the interloper, and then lifted his leg and urinated extravagantly all over the suitor’s shoes.
Harold Chandler, on the other hand, has not come calling. He and his Cadillac are elsewhere this year, and Mother keeps asking after him—but always in a sidelong way that suggests she’s already heard something, maybe from Harold’s mother. The summer is gone, and the Chandlers with it, before she finally asks outright.
“Did something happen?” she says, but Miriam doesn’t know how to answer that, except to shrug and say, “No.” It wasn’t that something had happened. It was that something could have but didn’t. If not for Edward’s accident, if she hadn’t left that very day—but there was nochanging what was already past, the chance she had already missed. When she went back to the pond this summer, she found it empty, the lily pads growing thick and undisturbed. There was a forest of bobbing flowers now beneath the ledge she’d jumped from, which looked so impossibly high that the memory made her stomach do a somersault. She wonders if the boys stopped coming here, and if it’s because of her. She wonders if she spoiled this place. She has looked for Theodore Caravasios, waiting on the pier at sunset, but none of the boats that pass by seem to be his. Maybe he no longer cares for her . . . or maybe he doesn’t live here anymore. She had thought of writing him, and just as quickly thought better of it: what would she say? And now whatever they might have sparked is gone, and it’s too late.
It’s too late, and she burns with it.
Come the third week of October, the island begins burning with her.
A summer without rain has turned acres of wilderness into kindling. Some people swear they’ve seen the sky glowing red in its southern reaches at night, that they can smell the smoke as it wafts up the coast from Portland. Most of the town’s seasonal visitors have already left, but those who stayed to see the autumn can talk of nothing else. At the next luncheon, Miriam picks at her crabmeat salad and listens as the women trade snippets of news overheard at the post office or market: towns reduced to ashes overnight, people stumbling out of the haze with soot on their faces, all of them clutching suitcases stuffed with every precious thing that was small enough to carry. Their hostess, a petite blonde named Mrs. Procter, shoots a glance at Miriam and mistakes her fascination for fear.
“Oh, but there’s no need to worry, dear. My William spoke to a ranger just yesterday, and he assured me we needn’t concern ourselves,” she says, patting Miriam’s hand. She’s still patting, still smiling, when the fire whistle blows. It’s loud enough to rattle the windows, loud enough to bounce off the top of the mountains and echo back from every cove. The first peal silences the chatter. By the third, every womanat the table is on her feet. They stare at one another, wide-eyed, in the silence that follows, waiting for the next whistle that never comes.
Only Miriam stays seated, biting her lip, staring straight ahead. Three blasts on the fire whistle isn’t just a warning. It’s a call to arms, a summons to every able-bodied man. In homes all over the island, they’ll be standing up and making for the door, ready to beat back the flames.
And Theodore Caravasios, if he’s still here, will be among them.
“Miriam,” Mother says, and she snaps to attention. She’s alone at the table, her fork still in her hand, surrounded by abandoned plates and half-drunk glasses of punch; from the hallway beyond Mrs. Procter’s dining room comes the frantic rustling and murmured apologies of five women struggling into their coats.
As Miriam looks toward the open door, their hostess suddenly reappears, gazing back and forth across the room with her hands fluttering and twisting at her heart. “Oh dear,” she says to no one in particular. “The house may go, I suppose there’s nothing to be done about that... but I simply must save my best pink hat.”
Mother is too nervous to drive, and Miriam takes the wheel, carefully following the curves of the road that runs out of town and across the ridge back to the cove and the Whispers. Despite the shattering blast of the fire whistle, everyone outside and on the streets is oddly calm, continuing about their business even as blazing destruction creeps closer and closer. When Miriam sees men and trucks gathered in the road ahead, she slows the car to a stop and rolls the window down. The air is already hazy and tinged with the scent of smoke, but it’s light, almost pleasant, as if a few men working to clear someone’s yard had set a pile of leaves to burn. Even the men guarding the road seem cheerful and unafraid.
“Hello there,” one calls, jogging up to the car.
Mother leans across Miriam’s lap. “Where is the fire? Can we cross over?”
“Half a mile along Eagle Lake Road. That’ll be closed off now, but you can make your way over the mountain road.”
“Is there any hope of stopping it?”
The man chuckles darkly. “This fire? No, ma’am. We may be able to push it to Eagle Lake and contain it there, where there’s water. Otherwise it’ll continue on, all t’way to the sea.”
Mother seems on the verge of saying something else, another foolish question, but coughs instead. The smoke has grown thicker in the minute since they first stopped, and another man points and shouts: in the distance, a spike of flame has appeared over the top of a hill. It hovers there like a cresting wave—and then the wave breaks, a cascade of fire rippling down, devouring the hillside.
“Best go now, young lady,” the man says, and Miriam does, peering into the side mirror for one last glance at the men in the road as she drives away from them. Theo is not among them, but the hope of seeing him must show on her face, because Mother twists in her seat to look back, too. The fear in her eyes is briefly replaced with something more familiar: suspicion. “Do you know those men?”
“No,” Miriam says, although it’s not entirely true. There was one man, small and lean with ears that stuck out beneath his hat. She doesn’t know his name, but he was there that day, one of the curious bystanders on the ledge who stepped aside so that she could leap. A witness. But that moment has been her secret for more than a year, and she isn’t about to tell it now.
Evelyn Day narrows her eyes but doesn’t say anything else. Instead, she gazes out the window, her lips moving, muttering to herself—praying, Miriam thinks, until she catches the tail end of a whisper and hears not an Our Father or a Hail Mary, but the wordsgreen glass bowl.Her mother isn’t asking God to save them. She’s making a list of the things she herself wants to save. Miriam is about to make a joke about Mrs. Procter and her hats, but then the car reaches the top of its uphill climb and the trees fall away, and she can’t joke at all, onlygasp. Over their heads whirls a mass of smoke that writhes and shudders like a living thing. Furious eddies of bright pink and dusky purple ripple through its blackened body. Dark furrows open and close in its billowing surface like hungry mouths. It spirals funnel-shaped into the heavens, so huge and endless that it is impossible to imagine there’s a place in the world that isn’t burning, where the sky isn’t choked with black.
Mother’s face is very pale. “Have you ever seen anything so terrible,” she whispers, as the ash begins to fall.
By two o’clock, an evacuation order has come over the radio and the smoke is so soup-thick around the house that the view from every window is nothing but a blank wall, broken by the dark trunks of trees rising up here and there like girders. Miriam and her mother run back and forth through the hazy air, filling the larger of their two cars with boxes and suitcases that hold clothes, books, a handful of framed photographs.
Papa watches their packing with amusement until it tips over into scorn. “My dear,” he finally says as his wife rifles furiously through drawers and cabinets, “is there truly any object in this house that I couldn’t just buy you a second time?”
That’s when Smith starts chuckling from the corner, and both women jump; they hadn’t even seen him sitting there. Mother’s face is as angry and wounded as if she’d been slapped. She looks out the window, out at the copse of trees that used to make the house feel beautifully secluded but which now makes it feel like a tinderbox surrounded by kindling wood.
“Perhaps it may miss us yet. Perhaps the wind will change,” she says, but her voice is so strange and flat that Miriam will always remember it: this is the moment she understands that there is no hope, that the Whispers will burn.
Smith knows it, too. He shakes his head. “You know better than that.” He turns to Papa. “And if there’s anything in this house you feelkeenly attached to, old man, I suggest you put it in that car . . . if the ladies left any room.”
