Dust of Eden (42 page)

"Oh. How stupid. I can just paint them back again." A door slammed in the distance. "At least you didn't go with them, Kraft."

"I couldn't."

"Couldn't?"

"I stayed because of you."

"Me?" She made a girlish sound—half laugh, half disbelief. "Then you're over being angry with me? You know, I didn't really make things worse for you, Kraft. What I did to Danielle was stupid and desperate, but I wanted you to see—you most of all—I wanted you to appreciate what I gave back to you."

"I know."

"I can't believe this, especially now. You talking to me like this. What a difference it makes. You have no idea—do you hear that sound? What is going on up there?"

"It's just Amber."

"It sounds like she's running water or something. Oh, Kraft, I can start over. I can make New Eden again. We can all start over. Get it right this time. Would you mind turning on the light?"

". . . Yes."

"Yes?"

"I'd mind."

"Why?"

"Because I want to kiss you."

Stung silence. A terrible joy. Her arms groped as his circled smoothly around her withered body and drew her onto his withered lips. Soft at first, then firm, then hard. Hard. HARD!

She snapped her head back. "Kraft!"

There was a distant sound of something collapsing.

Air sieved out of the cellar, leaving parched, vapid breaths.

"Do you hear it coming?" he whispered excitedly.

"I smell smoke. . . . Let me go!"

"Not the fire. Listen."

She listened. Heard the scrapings and
draggings
coming from beyond the laundry room. Not a singular thing, but a procession—twin processions—coming toward them. And for just an instant she had a connection with the insanity, the outer chaos from which she had summoned back the gallery of her life. It was the answer to the question she had incessantly asked:
What is death like?
And now she could feel it—feel it, because she couldn't know it. How could you know total aberrance? How could you order disorder? No rules, no form, no stability—a total shattering of bonds. Except for the hell of consciousness. That was the one glimpse she got, the one foretaste of her imminent fate. But she was still a part of the rational world and she couldn't let go of that, even for the handful of remaining seconds. Not here in this century-and-a-half-old farmhouse that remained on its foundation. So she told herself that her little family had found another way into the cellar. They hadn't painted themselves into extinction at all, but were coming in some ridiculous mummers' parade to frighten her, punish her, show her that they had her precious paints (which they would never be able to use) and—

Something even more insidious reached her now. Something similar but distinct from the spank and hiss of flames overhead. A sinuous rush like the undulation of a wave along a breakwater. And then a long, subtle sigh, as of an ancient ache about to be satisfied.
Something just around the corner
.

"You didn't think it would stay up in the studio, did you?" Kraft whispered, cinching her to him, heart pounding against heart, triumphant with betrayal. "It's down here. This is where it lives. Shall I turn on the light now?"

A
mber didn't count on seeing her father's body on the stairs. When they said he had died there it didn't occur to her to white out his picture, and here he was, twisted and slumped over one wheel of his chair. His shaggy head felt like a cold marble bust beneath her fingers. But he had died before, she assured herself, so this didn't really count. It was like Miss
Hoverstein
had said. Being alive for the second time in her mother's world was all wrong for them.

Chest heaving, Amber stood. "Good-bye, Daddy," she mouthed in the searing air, and with the old dried frame of the farmhouse sending out tentacles of fire along its interior seams, she resumed her awkward descent, clinging to the shoulder strap of the portfolio bag.

The first floor had an eerie stillness to it, as if the air in the middle of the rooms couldn't figure out where to go. She passed through the dining room, and there, leaning against the jamb to the kitchen, was Mr. Olson's portrait.
He must have left it there to go to the cellar
, she thought. And if she took it outside with her, he might go looking for it when he came up with her mother. So she left it and hurried on to the residents' corridor, where the old school had been, and where all the doors now stood ajar the way they once had at the end of each class day. All the doors ajar, that is, except one. Without pausing to knock, she grabbed the handle and flung it open.

She could see right away that Mr. Bryce didn't know there was a fire. He was sitting in his chair by the windows with his flannel shirt buttoned up to the neck, even though his forehead was starting to glisten and even though two floors above them there was an inferno eating its way to the ground. The heat was building and smoke crawled out of the radiator grid in little puffs that backed into one another.

"Mr. Bryce, we've got to get out of the house right away," she said, plucking urgently at his sleeve.

He turned so slowly that she realized he had been nodding off. "Tiffany. . ."

"We've got to get out of here, Mr. Bryce. It's a matter of life or death."

He looked around. "I don't care about dying. You go."

"Stop talking like that, you've got to come now!"

She let go of the portfolio bag strap and tugged his wrist, but he simply let the arm extend until the dead weight of his body anchored her.

"What is this place?"

"Your room, and you've got to leave it. Please, Mr. Bryce." And then she remembered how he had warned her—warned Tiffany—on so many nights in his wanderings that she had to get out of the house because there was a fire. She thought of how she had burned down the barn, and of how he had been out there calling her name and trying to go into the flames while the others held him back. And when the barn had collapsed, he had collapsed in the dirt like a little kid not caring anymore what happened to him. So now she played on that, telling him she was Tiffany and that there was a fire, and he had to save her.

Tiffany.

What made no sense at all to Amber
Leppa
living in the present made perfect sense to Martin Bryce living in the past. Color sprang into his cheeks and he tried twice unsuccessfully to push himself out of the chair, coming up unsteadily on the third try. And then he got his "land legs" and took her hand while she lugged the portfolio bag, slung by its strap over her shoulder. She had to cue him in which direction to go in the corridor, but by the time they reached the end of it, he was actually leading her instead of the other way around.

Decades after the fact, Martin Bryce was saving Tiffany at last.

Out of the house and off the porch they went, the old man's grip on her fingers hurting in its ferocity. Thirty feet from the steps he came around in a wide circle, still holding her hand as if leading a grand cotillion. His gaze came down slowly from the blazing upper story of the farmhouse.

"What's that?" he asked.

"What?"

With his free hand he gestured to the picture frame sticking out of the portfolio bag. "That."

She unlimbered the bag and pulled the portrait up so he could see it. "That's me."

"Like the one I've got in my wardrobe."

"You mean like the one you used to have. You gave me that one already."

"I did? Yeah, that's right. I gave you one of them. There were two."

She heard this without impact, his little confusion, the
nonhappenings
that popped up as facts in old Mr. Bryce's failing memory. But the insidious truth began to drip like ice into her consciousness. Because even though Mr. Bryce could get lost easy as pie, he was very good with numbers. He might not remember his age, but whenever Mrs.
Armitage
told him what year it was and what year he was born, he would tell her how old he was without missing a beat. And now he was sure he had had two portraits, and he had given her one—the one she had destroyed to annihilate her twin.

Amber looked hard at the painting she had been carrying precisely as if her life depended on it. The reason it looked different was because it was different. She was older in this picture. Her mother must have painted a
third
picture of her, only this one hadn't been finished with the magic paints yet, and that was why there wasn't another Amber around. And the real portrait of her—the one Mr. Bryce was talking about—that one was still in his room about to burst into flames.

She squealed with fear, tried to pull away. "Let me go, let me go! My picture is in your closet and it's gonna burn up!"

He peered hard at her, and he had her hand in a literal death grip while he tried to fathom, tried to understand why she wasn't saved now that he had led her out of the burning house.

"I'll die if I don't get that picture. I'll die!"

And then she yanked away and ran for the porch and danced up the steps and down again, because the heat was blasting out the door and the parlor was already an unearthly orange. Mr. Bryce was coming after her and she thought:
his bedroom windows in back!
So she ran around the house, which was billowing smoke and popping with small explosions of glass, and she couldn't tell which windows were his. So she broke two of them with bricks from the edging Dana had put around her garden, but all that happened was that yellow smoke came pouring out. With a cry she ran back around the basswood to the front, and there was Mr. Bryce. Only it wasn't old Mr. Bryce. It was young Mr. Bryce.

"Is everyone safe?" Denny hollered at her. But she was too terrified to make sense of anything, and he had to grab her by the shoulders and brace her. "Is everyone safe?"

She cried and shook her head and tried to lunge for the porch.

"Where's my father? Listen to me. Where's—"

"He must have gone inside. He was here, but he went back for something."

The words were barely out of her mouth before Denny Bryce was vaulting up the steps.

She tried to follow. Making it as far as the parlor, in fact, where the wallpaper high in the corners was starting to curl and turn brown while fire raced down the seams. The last thing she saw was the yellowed sweatshirt the younger Mr. Bryce was wearing, throbbing white against the archway as it collapsed on top of him.

S
he didn't remember coming back outside, but she knew she was waiting to die. Only it was taking forever for the flames to reach the painting in Mr. Bryce's wardrobe.

He must be dead now, old Mr. Bryce. His son too. And where was her mother and Mr. Olson? Half in shock, her emotions hardening into the armor of aftermath, she walked slowly to Mr. Bryce's car and got in the passenger's side.

A pack of cigarettes sat unopened next to her and she focused on it as if it had profound implications. Did Mr. Bryce smoke? The question hung sealed up in her wounded mind like the cigarettes sealed in the pack and the people sealed in the house and her portrait sealed in the wardrobe, and it suddenly slipped into her mind without a breath of emotion that the metal wardrobe might somehow be protecting her picture, even though the house must be hot enough to melt it.

Casually she got out of the car and casually she walked toward the back of the house again, pausing for a moment in the relatively cool shade that the basswood provided where it eclipsed the conflagration of the house. But the top of the tree was already on fire, and burnt leaves and flaming twigs were drifting down. She moved away. She continued toward the back of the house, and when she reached the windows she had broken, she saw it.

At first she thought it was a piece of
uncharred
debris from the roof, but no, it was a picture frame. And as she sprang forward, she knew already that it was hers—her image, her salvation, her life—lying
facedown
where old Mr. Bryce must have thrown it out the broken window. He had saved her, saved her for real this time – his “Tiffany.” But why hadn't he saved himself? The house was collapsing in showers of cinders that drove her back, and there was no way he could be alive now. Why hadn't he just fallen out the window or something? He had wanted to die, but to just give up like that, like he was too tired to care . . .

She was standing far enough away from the house so that the heat no longer blistered against her skin, and she turned the picture frame over and gazed at the likeness her mother had painted. She didn't understand how people could not want to live. The
Taron
pygmies or the other residents or Mr. Bryce. She was going to live, and not just an ordinary life either. Because she was the daughter of a painter, and she was going to become a painter. Then she would paint a world around her to her liking. Maybe she would bring back Sir
Aarfie
, and maybe the
Taron
pygmies, and certainly she would bring back her mother. Give her another chance. But she would have to do it in a way that her mother couldn't be in control. Amber
Leppa
was going to be in control.

The firemen found her like that, standing in a rain of white ashes drifting down like lost souls or feathers from the moon. A portfolio bag hung from her shoulder, which she would not relinquish to anyone. The only other thing standing was a blackened lightning rod sprouting from the earth, as if it were trying to touch the finger of God.