Karen Memory (24 page)

“Hi,” I said, and sat down on the bed, too. Closer to the head, though. Just close enough that our shoulders brushed together. I had made up my mind early that as long as she knowed I was willing, it was going to be Priya made all the moves between us. I was giving her time, and you know it weren’t easy. But like gentling a badly broke horse, I knowed I had to let Priya do most of the traveling if I didn’t want to spook her away for good.

I handed her a pillow. She smiled and leaned back against it. I stuck my legs back under the covers.

“Hi,” she said. She looked down at her hands, picked at her cuticle, and tucked her fingers into her armpits under the shawls while I tried not to stare at her.

A minute or two later, I said, “Did you want something?”

“Um,” she said.

She looked at me and glanced away again. In the lamplight, her dark eyes seemed opaque. She dropped her head as if she meant to hide behind her hair, but the braid thwarted her.

Then she said, “Company.”

I wanted to reach out and take her hand so bad I could taste it. But her hands were tucked up warm under her arms, and anyway the foot and a half between us seemed unbridgeable. I wanted to kiss her, too, but she didn’t look too kissable just then. More remote, and worrited.

I wished I could offer her tea. You don’t think about it, but all those little fusses we make over company have their purposes. They give us something to do with our hands and our anxiousness until everybody settles in and starts having fun. It’s probably why the men who come into Madame’s spend so much money at the bar. Even though they gotta know—the savvy ones, anyway—that we girls is drinking soda water or cold tea. But it gives everybody something to do with their hands.

“I want company, too,” I admitted. It was on my lips to say,
In kind of particular, I want your company,
but all I could see was her jumping up and scooting for the door. When people have only lured you close to hit you or throw a rope over your head before, it’s hard to learn to trust the ones who aren’t going to. Hell, it’s hard to learn to even know which is which.

So I just sat there like an idiot, watching the most beautiful person I’d ever seen huddled up on my bed, and I didn’t put an arm around her.

She pulled her hands out of her armpits and twisted them together, all pale with the chill. She had the most elegant fingers—tapered, like a lady’s, even with her nails kept cropped for the domestic work she was doing. Mine were blunt and plump, though I grew my nails out to make them look more genteel.

Looking at them, not at me, Priya said, “Karen, have you ever thought about leaving here? About what you might want to do after?”

“Are…” 
… you asking me to come with you?
It died on my lips. It was too much to hope, and it would give too much away.

She waited patiently, still not raising her head.

“I have,” she said when I was quiet too long.

“Me too,” I answered. “I’m saving. I want a stable someday, a horse ranch. A breeding operation. Sell good cow ponies, and maybe break ’em for folks.”

“Oh,” she said.

She didn’t sound disappointed so much as concerned, so I hurried to say, “You would always be welcome. I … I’d build you a machine shop, and you could fixit while I wrangled, and you could cook and I could sew. And, and we could each read to the other while we did it.”

It was about the prettiest dream I’d ever put to words, and no mistaking. I held my breath while I waited to see if she was going to shoot it down.

She said, “I don’t know anything about horses. My family had cattle and sheep … but the cattle weren’t for eating. We don’t eat cows at home. They’re for milk and cheese and ghee.”

I didn’t know what ghee was and made a note to ask her. But it seemed more important to say, “I know all about horses. I practically grew up on one. I could teach you, especially if you know cattle. If you’re not afraid.”

“I’m afraid of all sorts of things,” Priya said. “But not farm animals.”

“I wish you could have known my Molly.”

“Molly? This is a … what’s the word? Mare?”

“Is, yes. As far as I know, she’s still alive. I had to give her away after my da died.” Horses live a long time.

“Not sell?”

I shrugged. “I sold the rest. Her … the person I wanted to have her couldn’t pay for a horse, so I gave her to him. A neighbor’s lad. My age.” I knowed Lutz would give her back to me if I ever came looking. That was part of it. I didn’t say that, though, because I didn’t know if it would be fair to him—or to Molly—and frankly, I didn’t know if I would. You grieve, it’s one thing. You grieve and go back, it’s another.

She gave me a sly look. “Did you love him?”

“Hah! No, of course not. I loved that mare. Though some folk would say you can’t love an animal, on account of they have no souls.”

“I don’t believe that,” Priya said.

“That you can’t love an animal?”

“You can love an animal,” she said. She was uncoiling a little, straightening up. Though it hadn’t gotten any warmer in the room. “And animals have souls. Your religion is very strange to me, Karen. I believe that when we die, we come back on a wheel of rebirth. And depending on whether we have acquitted ourselves well—depending on our
karma
—we may be reincarnated to a good life. Or we may be reincarnated to a life where we must earn our way out of misdeeds—pain we have caused, injustice we have benefited from.”

I’d been blinking at her confusedly, I’m afraid. But when she said that last, I bounced on my seat bones, ridiculously pleased to find some common ground in her blasphemy. Or was it just heathenish? Can a heathen blaspheme?

I’m a fallen woman; who am I to judge?

I said excitedly, “That’s like Purgatory!”

Her lips curved so gently I’d be afraid to call it a smile, lest it fly away. “We would say it is
dharma
. It supports the natural and proper order of things.” She got quiet again, and I knowed from her frown that she was wondering what her past self had done to deserve a life in Peter Bantle’s cribs. But she pulled herself back together and said, “Tell me about your mare. Your Molly.”

“She’s a strawberry Appaloosa,” I said.

Priya looked at me like I was speaking one of the maybe five or six languages on earth that she wasn’t already fluent in.

I guess it was what you’d call technical vocabulary. “That means she’s a roan, a kind of speckled red and gray. With a white blanket across her shoulders and … sort of silver-dollar-sized spots of red on top of that. And she’s smart, Molly is. Smart for a horse, anyway.”

Smart enough to get herself into plenty of trouble. Learning to unlatch gates and suchlike. Nearly colicked herself once, getting into the grain. I told Priya about some of that but wound down halfway through what was supposed to have been a funny story about a barn cat when the wave of longing hit me. Loneliness and missing … Molly, and Da. Molly almost worse than Da. Because Da was gone, and he weren’t coming back, and I hadn’t had no choice about it.

I hadn’t had no choice about Molly, neither. Not really. But I’d had to make one anyway.

Priya waited a few seconds, as if to see if I was going to carry on. Then, as if I’d asked a question, she started to tell me about her baby brother, and her parents, and the crop failures. And how she and her sister had signed indenture papers to come to America so their family could afford to eat, not realizing that they was going to wind up in a barred crib or paraded on leashes through Chinatown weekly for their only exercise. “It was supposed to be domestic work,” she said. “We were supposed to send money home.”

She was picking at that cuticle again. She was going to draw blood in a minute.

“Well,” I said. “That’s what you’re doing now, ain’t it? You just got a bit delayed.”

I couldn’t stand it anymore. I reached out and pulled her nails away from her skin. She looked up in surprise, like she hadn’t noticed what she was doing to herself, despite having been so studious over it. Her fingers was strong for being so slender, and she gave my hand a short, quick squeeze. I was half-stunned by how warm it was, and I thought—for a second—she was leaning in toward me and I thought I might get my kissing in after all.

I wondered if someday she might trust me enough to fall asleep with her head on my shoulder. Or even lie there a little while without having to get up and pace circles to burn off the anxiousness of getting too close.

All I saw was her lips as she hesitated. Then her head twisted around and her expression froze. “What’s that smell?”

A second later and I caught it also. Burning—and not the clean smell of wood or coal. This was a dirty kind of stink, like a trash fire.

“I smell smoke!” Priya cried.

“Shit,” I said. “I do, too.”

*   *   *

Some good grace of God made me pry open my hiding place—right there in front of Priya—and grab out my journal and my savings. I left Da’s wooden horse, though it about killed me. We pulled sheets from the bed, wet them in the basin, and wrapped them around our heads. I opened the door—Priya made me touch it first and check to see if the wood or the handle was hot, which I had never heard about before then—and we stumbled hand in hand into the corridor, me holding up the lamp.

The door at the top of the stairs was open, and ordinarily Connie would of had the head of whoever left it so—letting all the heat run out of the downstairs like that. And the heat was sure running out now: streamers of smoke crept along the stair ceiling like foul black fingers. Hot air rushed up the steps, like holding my hand over a lamp chimney except on an industrial scale. The smoke had already left oily smears on the corridor ceiling, like the ripples on water. I stared at it, trying to think—could we get down the stairs? Could we go out the window? It was only a short drop down to the street, but it was farther to the sidewalk—much farther—and I wasn’t sure I could jump the gap. And even if the fire companies were en route, which they probably weren’t because I hadn’t heard nobody raise the alarm of
Fire!,
it might be twenty minutes before they arrived. And then if two or more showed up, they might just have a fistfight over who got to hook up to the hydrant rather than getting to the business of dousing fires.

In twenty minutes, we might all be dead.

“Fire!” Priya shouted, thumping on the nearest door. “Fire!”

Now, that was what you call direct and functional action. Since I couldn’t make up my own mind what to do, I figured I might as well follow Priya’s lead.

She was pounding on Effie’s door, because Effie was next door to me. I whirled around and ran down to Miss Francina’s room, shouting.

Other doors were starting to open—Crispin, and Bea, and Pollywog all pouring out in their nightclothes. Crispin had grabbed boots and was stamping them on over his pajamas. That seemed like a fine sensible idea, but all my boots required a buttonhook and if I was going to die in a fire I didn’t want it to be because I stopped to make sure my shoes was fastened. Or because I broke my neck trying to run in ones as weren’t.

Madame’s bedroom was on the floor below, behind her office. I looked up and saw Miss Lizzie and Miss Bethel coming out of the room they share, and from the way they headed to the stairs they had realized that, too. But just as they got there, I heard a door below slam open and Madame shouting up the stair, “Girls, it’s a fire in the kitchen! Go out the windows at the front! Get out! Get out!”

Priya grabbed my arm. She pulled me toward Pollywog’s room, which was at the front of the house. But just then, Bea darted toward the stairs. “Signor!” she yelled.

She probably would of gotten past Miss Lizzie and Miss Bethel, too, because by then they each had Madame by a wrist and was hauling her, limping, up the stairs. But when she darted past Priya, Priya let go of me and grabbed at Bea.

The air was getting thick. My head spun, even with the wet cloth over my face. I grabbed Bea’s other arm and helped Priya hold her. “I’ll look for him,” I said. “You go with Priya.”

“Karen!” Priya snapped.

I shoved my journal and my little purse at her. “Keep these safe. They’re yours if—”

“Karen.”

“Connie’s down there, too, unless she made it out the back,” I said. “And didn’t you just tell me animals have souls?”

She threw up her free hand in despair. “All right,” she said. “All right.”

And then she leaned forward, and in front of God and Madame and Effie and everybody she kissed me square on the mouth, wet rags and all.

“For luck,” she said, and dragged Bea toward the windows.

“Wait!” Crispin yelled. He had a big voice. It carried through the room. I thought he was going to try to stop me, and I’m sure he thought about it—but Miss Lizzie and Miss Bethel was struggling with Madame, who was coughing like a consumptive as she came to the top of the stairs. I saw him look around, and think about the odds.

“You can catch the girls when they jump,” I said. “I can’t do that.”

One thing about Crispin. He don’t waste time making up his mind. He yanked his boots off and shoved them at me, then threw the overcoat he’d been struggling into over my shoulders. “It might help,” he said. “Get Connie. I won’t let them open the window for two minutes, so’s you can get down the stairs.”

Because once that window was open, the stairs would be a chimney. Right.

Hopping on one foot to get the other boot on, I looked him in the eye and nodded. “I’ll see you outside,” I said. “Shut the stair door behind me, too.”

I wouldn’t of gotten past Miss Francina that easy. But she was corralling Pollywog and Effie after Priya, so in the thickening haze I figure she didn’t see what I was fixing to do.

It’s damn hard to crawl down stairs, I don’t mind telling you. I skidded down backward on my hands and knees as fast as I could, mindful of my time limit. Whenever I lifted my head, it felt like dunking it into a warm bathtub, except for upside down and strangely dry. But there was a ribbon of cooler air down by the steps, and through the wet cloth I could breathe it.

I was counting under my breath—that one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi—and I had gotten to sixty-seven when my feet thumped against the wall at the landing. I couldn’t see much anymore—my eyes was streaming and the smoke was damn near chewable—and I hoped Crispin didn’t count much faster than me. So I turned around and scurried faster. Eighty-Mississippi. Eighty-one. My knees were going to look like somebody’d taken a hoof file to ’em. I weren’t going fast enough, and I knowed it. I think I peeled off half my senses, reaching ’em out like whiskers, trying to feel the draft that would be followed by the flood of hot air and maybe fire up those stairs.