Breathless Read Free Page B

Papa used to say that I was older than I looked. Mama didn’t agree at all. I was just quite small. “How old?” the boy said again, measuring me as he looked. Not much to measure, I hadn’t even reached the age of seven. Instead of answering I asked him where he lived—truly. Then suddenly I felt his hard hands take hold of me. I lost contact with the ground without warning, rising right up until I was taller than him, and there . . . far down the slope, sheltered from the wind and people’s view by high trees, was the house. Beyond my horizon, far beyond the limit Mama had set for me to roam around on my own, almost down by the water’s edge, the widening of the river, round like a lake, silver blue, with two narrow streams that meandered farther north and south.
    He set me back down on the grass. I straightened my sleeveless dress that had ridden up and gotten creased and had the marks left by his black hands. Felt my face tighten with soot and heat.
    â€”
    As soon as the worst of the disaster had been averted, speculation over what had caused the conflagration began. Or who. Arson, Mama believed. Sparks from the train line, Papa said. Dry grass that spontaneously ignited, Mama’s sisters thought. Arson, Papa’s father agreed—it had begun to burn in several places at once; natural fires seldom follow such a rapid pattern. Mama’s father thought it might be a bit of everything: it was a fire summer, a snake summer, a summer of parched and overheated emotions. I said nothing and no one asked me what I thought.
    The danger wasn’t over. The ground glowed with sealed-in heat, for the fire could creep along the roots and stay alive for days and restart at any time. Watch had to be kept on the field all through the night. The thirteen adults who under normal circumstances looked after me would have been too preoccupied or exhausted to bother whether I was in my bed or not. The rest of the night I sat with the unknown boy near his house wrapped in a heavy saddle blanket that smelled of propane and old stallion, filled with new, unfamiliar feelings.
    The fear that the underground embers would suddenly flare up again kept me awake. His presence as well. Was he one of those you had to be wary of? I wasn’t sure. The fire, the dark, the tiredness, the stinging in my eyes, the sense that I had to look after myself now, that no one would protect me so far away from my usual territory. Independent overnight. No one would recognize me when I came home,
if
I ever came home. It seemed unreal that I had had a family at all. I felt so grown-up, so far from home, that I lost sight of my old life, the house, the arboretum, the cars in the yard, the tall white birch, my hiding place. Where this endless night would lead I had no idea. For the first time in my life I was alone with someone I didn’t know, nestled beside the forbidden lake where, it was said—I knew this even though I wasn’t yet seven—people from the village had deliberately gone under. One or two from the neighboring village too.
    â€”
    Where he lived was still the only thing I knew about him, in the house where no light was turned on the whole night. He went into the garage and found a blanket for me when he heard my teeth chattering in the darkness, but he didn’t go into the house, despite hunger, despite thirst. I didn’t know what his name was, only how his hands felt when he lifted me up off the ground, the smarting of the tender skin of my armpits, a cold tingling in my stomach. He didn’t fetch a jacket for himself, never felt the cold, he said, sat on his heels, huddled up, and smoked as if he didn’t have enough smoke inside him already.
    The only things I had smoked before were chocolate cigarettes, and even that I had done in secret. But when he offered me a cigarette, I couldn’t say no. What would he think, that I was a child? I didn’t want him to light it for