Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [120]
“Miss,” he said. “Are you all right? Miss, we’ve got to get you home.”
She did not remember getting on the streetcar, or walking up the block to her parents’ house. But she found herself on the front porch, the stillness of the neighborhood impossible to comprehend after what she had just seen. Then she was turning the doorknob and stepping inside, removed from her body as if in a dream.
They were all sitting in the den. Their faces lit up when she walked through the door.
“You’re alive!” her mother said, excited to see Alice in a way she never had been before. “There’s a horrible fire at the Cocoanut Grove. We heard about it on the radio. Oh Lord, thank you.”
The boys jumped to their feet and held her close, and even her father hugged her. Alice felt so loved for an instant, before she remembered: “Mary was inside.”
“What do you mean?” Timmy said.
Alice thought of telling them the whole story, but she couldn’t do it.
“I saw her there and I don’t think she came out,” was all she could manage. “I was already outside when the fire started. I couldn’t get back in.”
“Maybe she left before you,” her mother said. “Maybe you just didn’t know.”
Alice sobbed. She could not tell them the truth. “I hope so.”
At the mortuary the next day, a freezing rain fell, and Mayor Tobin himself read the names of the dead. Their father didn’t come. It was only Alice, her brothers, and their mother. After almost every name, someone screamed, the most shrill and awful sound Alice had yet to hear in her life, or ever would. The rare name that was met with silence made her wonder whether that person’s loved ones had no idea yet. Maybe they were on the Cape, walking along a frigid beach with a thermos full of coffee, and they hadn’t switched on the radio all weekend long. She wished that for herself, for her mother.
The mayor finished the list off after an hour, but Mary’s name wasn’t mentioned.
“That means she might still be alive,” their mother said, hopeful. Alice wanted to believe it, but she saw the looks on her brothers’ faces and knew.
They drove from one hospital to the next, searching.
Those who had died on the way to help the night before had been piled in hospital lobbies while doctors and nurses scrambled to save the living. The bodies were still there. The stench made Alice ill as she passed through. She had to cover her nose with the sleeve of her coat.
Hundreds of people were lined up on gurneys in the halls of Boston City Hospital, some of them burned beyond recognition. Every medical examiner in the state was brought in to help identify the dead. It was hardest to figure out who the women were. Most of the men had their licenses in their wallets. But the women, dressed in gowns, had nothing that revealed them.
They walked in silence up and down those hallways for hours. Alice looked only at the gowns, telling herself that it was because she knew what Mary was wearing. In fact, she did it because she could not bear to look at the faces. She had always bossed her sister, but she had protected her too. Now Mary was probably dead, and it was Alice’s fault.
A nurse told them that there was the threat of a blood shortage, so the government had allowed access to the emergency blood banks that had been set up for air raids. And, she said, the police were using the method set in place for an air raid, of receiving calls from relatives and loved ones, of assigning cards to the victims: white for the missing, green for the injured, and pink for the identified dead. Everyone had been focused on the war for so long, expecting a catastrophe tied to it somehow. Now something else entirely had taken its place.
Alice tried to bargain with God: if they found Mary alive, she would never eavesdrop on Trudy again; she would never have one of her temper tantrums; she would learn to cook and to be quiet. She looked at the sky and told Him that she knew her sister had sinned in one of the very worst