After the Fire (4 page)

“Well, I guess he doesn't anymore.” Sharlene sounded worn out.

Melissa gave up. “So now what?” she said.

“What do you mean, now what?”

“What are we going to do now? It's going to be pitch-dark in here soon.”

“Well,” said Sharlene, “we could figure out how to light the oil lamps. Then we could heat up some water on the campstove and wash these dishes. Or we could just go to bed and do it all tomorrow.”

“Bed,” said Melissa quickly. She couldn't wait to sleep in her room without Cody. “Where is this outhouse anyway?”

“There's a little path between the trees behind the woodshed. Wait till you see the stars. They're amazing.”

Melissa got her flashlight and went outside. She stood by the door, stunned. The sky was like a giant black bowl filled to the brim with dazzling stars. There must be
millions
, she thought. Her mother was right. They
were
amazing. They were much more brilliant than the stars she saw in town. She tilted her head back until she was dizzy.

Her trip to the outhouse turned out to be definitely gross and full of mosquitoes but not as bad as she had imagined.

Before she went back to the cabin, Melissa walked down to the lake. She beamed the flashlight ahead of her onto the dock. Something stuck in between the boards glinted in the light. Melissa bent down and picked up a silver chain. It was a bracelet with a silver letter, a capital
A
, in the middle. Melissa studied it for a moment and then slipped it in her pocket.

Suddenly a long eerie cry quavered across the water, making the back of her neck tingle.

Wait until you hear the loons, Jill had said. There's a pair that nests on the lake. They make the most incredible wailing sound. It'll give you goose bumps.

Melissa was pretty sure she had just heard her first loon. She held her breath, hoping to hear it again, but there was only a deep still silence. It made Melissa feel tiny, as if she were the only person on the whole planet. She waited a few more minutes and then swatted at a mosquito and headed up the dry grassy slope to the dark cabin.

Four

F
lames crawled across the carpet and swept up the curtains in a torrent of orange and red. Melissa tried to scream but she couldn't make a sound. She heard Darren shout, “What the
hell
is happening?” and then there was a roaring noise. She couldn't tell if Darren was inside or outside the trailer, and she had no idea where Sharlene and Cody were. There was too much smoke. It was billowing around her, making her choke. She needed to get up and look for Cody but there was something wrong with her legs.

Her eyes snapped open. Her heart was hammering in her chest, and her back was soaked with sweat. It took her a few seconds to realize that she had been dreaming. Relief flooded through her like water.

The counselor, a woman at the Family Help Center in Huntley, had told Melissa to take deep slow breaths when she had the fire dream.
One, two, three, breathe
. She had also said that the dreams would stop if Melissa talked about things instead of keeping everything bottled up inside her. She ended up making Melissa cry every time they went to see her, until Sharlene said with tight lips that they weren't going to come anymore. Besides, wasn't it better to talk to your own mother instead of a stranger?

The problem was, Melissa couldn't talk to Sharlene about the fire. She had tried but it just didn't work.

Now her breathing was back to normal and her heart had slowed down. She reached for her flashlight on the floor and switched it on. She shone it on the log walls. She remembered a building set someone had given her when she was a little kid. You could stack the tiny logs together and make cabins just like this one. Cody would have loved it, but like everything else it had been destroyed in the fire.

It was weird not to hear Cody breathing beside her or music blaring from another apartment or a car door slamming outside. The apartment was never absolutely quiet, like it was here.

The air wafting through the window was cool. Melissa pulled the quilt, which she had shoved to the bottom of the bed, up around her shoulders and drifted back to sleep.

The next time Melissa woke up, her room was full of light, and breakfast noises were coming through the door: a cupboard door shutting, Cody's high-pitched voice demanding something, the lid on a pot rattling. She smelled coffee and bacon.

She made a trip to the outhouse and then sat at the table and devoured pancakes and maple syrup with strips of crispy bacon. Sharlene had left the windows open all night and the cabin was chilly. “Jill said it would cool off a lot at night,” she said. “It's glorious after our apartment. But it looks like it's going to be a scorcher again today. There's not a cloud in the sky.”

She heated water in a pot on the campstove and poured it into a plastic basin. Melissa washed the dishes, glancing out the window at the same time at the glassy lake. Sharlene got out toothbrushes and toothpaste and they brushed their teeth and spat into the basin, and then Melissa took it outside and dumped the dirty water into a pit behind the cabin.

The morning stretched ahead. Cody had spread his Duplo building blocks all over the floor, and Sharlene was scrubbing the insides of cupboards with a rag and putting away their cans of food.

“It's strange,” Sharlene said. “Jill told me that it was a firm cabin rule to always leave some food behind for the next person to use when they come up— canned stuff that mice can't get into. But I don't see anything here. I feel like Mother Hubbard with her bare cupboards.”

Melissa shrugged. She didn't see why they would want to eat someone else's food anyway.

“I'm wondering,” said Sharlene slowly, “if someone has been in this cabin. The broken window, the missing food, no can opener. And I think there might be a sleeping bag missing too.”

Melissa's heart gave a jump. There was no one around for miles if they needed help. “Do you think it could have been some kind of criminal?” she said nervously.

Sharlene glanced at her face and said quickly, “It's nothing to worry about, honey. If someone was here, they'll be long gone by now. Why don't you go outside and explore?”

Melissa wandered outside, but in a few minutes she had seen everything. What was she going to do all month? She went back inside the cabin to her room. She emptied out her duffel bag, filling the dresser drawers with her clothes, and then she opened up the box that said
Melissa.
She took out a sketchbook and a box of sketching pencils, then sat on the bed, propping herself against the pillow, and started to work on a picture of the cabin.

There was something relaxing about drawing logs. Melissa lost all track of time, which was what always happened when she was drawing. She worked all morning, paying special attention to the shading, and was pleased with the way the logs looked round. She drew the tall pine trees and put a squirrel on one of the branches. When she was finished, she hung the drawing on the nail where the calendar had been, poking a tiny hole in the paper.

She took out a new piece of paper and was trying to create in her mind a picture of the deer in the meadow when Sharlene called, “Hey, Mel, come and see this!”

Cody and Sharlene were crouched on the floor in front of an open cupboard. Melissa looked over their shoulders. They were staring at a glass jar. Something was moving in the bottom.

“It's a mouse,” said Sharlene. “I don't know how long it's been in there. It must have been crawling along inside the cupboard and fallen in. The jar was at the back of this cupboard.”

Melissa peered more closely at the jar. A tiny gray mouse was scrabbling around the sides.

“Let it out!” shrieked Cody.

“Not in here,” said Sharlene. “We'll take it outside.”

They trooped outdoors to a spot under a pine tree. Sharlene tipped the jar on its side and the mouse slid onto the ground. It lay there, a scruffy ball of matted fur.

“It's dead,” said Cody.

“No, it's still alive. Its whiskers are quivering,” said Sharlene.

The sun must be blinding, thought Melissa, after being in that dark cupboard for…how long? Days?

Suddenly the mouse stirred. It ran in tight little circles, like one of Cody's windup toys.

“What's it doing?” shouted Cody.

“It still thinks it's in the jar,” said Sharlene. “How horrible. It must have been running around in there for ages.”

Cody wanted to touch the mouse with a stick, but Sharlene pulled him back. Melissa held her breath, horrified, as the tiny mouse raced madly around. Gradually it spiraled out into bigger and bigger circles. Then it veered sideways into a clump of long grass and disappeared.

“Well,” said Sharlene. She sounded shaken. “That was something.”

Cody was rooting around in the grass, but the mouse had vanished. Melissa stored the picture of the mouse in her brain. She would try to draw it later and see if she could capture the desperation she had glimpsed in its tiny bright eyes.

Sharlene stood up. The sun was high over their heads, blazing down on them from a dark blue sky. “How about some lunch, guys?”

After a lunch of peanut-butter-and-jam sandwiches and lemonade, Melissa helped Sharlene unstack the lawn chairs at the end of the porch and drag them into a shady spot under some trees. Sharlene brought out a bin of toy cars with pieces of road and miniature bridges and tunnels for Cody and a book for herself. She stuck a cap on Cody's head and settled herself on a wooden recliner.

Melissa didn't feel like reading or drawing. She walked down to the end of the dock. She had never seen so much forest. You wouldn't even know there were any other cabins on the lake when you stood here. Jill was right when she called it wilderness.

She sat on the edge of the dock beside the canoe and dangled her bare feet in the lake. The water felt cold and silky. A school of tiny fish swam by, almost close enough to tickle her toes. She swished them away with her foot and then gazed across at the island. All around the edge, the dark forest was reflected in the smooth water, making a perfect mirror image. I could draw that, thought Melissa lazily. She had a vision of covering the bare walls of her little room with her pictures, like a mini gallery. It would be something to do for the rest of this long boring summer.

“Why don't you take the canoe out?” Sharlene called.

Melissa turned around. “What?”

“The canoe. I saw a paddle and life jackets up by the woodshed. Take it for a spin.”

“I don't know how,” said Melissa.

For a second, Melissa saw that look in her mother's eyes that meant she was frustrated with her. She hunched her shoulders. Sharlene always said Melissa didn't try, but it wasn't true. Melissa liked to take the time to think about something new instead of just plunging in.

“Come on,” said Sharlene. She put her book down and stood up. “It's not rocket science. I paddled a canoe everywhere when I was at Grandpa's cabin.”

“I want to,” said Cody.

“Not this time,” said Sharlene firmly. “Melissa gets the first turn.”

It was settled then, thought Melissa resentfully. Whether she wanted to or not. She wished her mother would back off sometimes. But, she had to admit, a little part of her was excited to try the canoe.

Melissa protested that she would be too hot if she had to wear the life jacket. After a brief argument, Sharlene gave in as long as Melissa promised to keep it right beside her feet. All those swimming lessons she forced me to take have paid off, thought Melissa. Cody watched, his thumb in his mouth, while they each took an end of the canoe and flipped it over. They slid it off the dock into the water. Melissa grabbed the rope tied to the bow.

“This is great!” said Sharlene. “I feel like a kid again! Now, put a hand on either side and kind of hoist yourself in!”

The canoe wobbled back and forth wildly, and Melissa's heart gave a little jump. But she was in. She perched on the edge of a wooden seat. In front of her, the bow tipped up out of the water. Sharlene passed her the paddle.

“Take deep steady strokes,” she said.

Melissa dragged the paddle through the water and the canoe shot forward. She dragged it again and started to veer in a circle.

“You're going to have to keep switching sides to go straight or…heck, I forgot all about the J stroke. You can paddle on one side if you use the J stroke,” said Sharlene. “Come on back and I'll show you.”

Melissa spun in a couple of circles until she got back to the dock. She handed the paddle to Sharlene and then held on to the edge of the dock so she wouldn't float away.

Sharlene gave a quick demonstration. She pulled the paddle back in the air and angled it away from her at the end of the stroke. “Pretend that you're making a letter
J
,” she said. She gave the paddle back to Melissa.

Melissa had no idea her mother knew stuff like this. The J stroke was way harder than it looked, and the canoe zigzagged back and forth, but at least it didn't go in circles. She loved the way the canoe scooted across the water, and she loved the drippy line the paddle made when she carried it back to the start of each stroke.

Sharlene was grinning at her from the dock. Melissa turned and studied the island. It wasn't very far away. She bet she could be there in five minutes. “I'm going to the island,” she shouted, feeling suddenly ready for anything.

Sharlene gave her a thumbs-up.

Five

T
he island was farther away than it looked. Melissa's arms started to ache, and the canoe had a mind of its own. She abandoned the J stroke and paddled on both sides, switching back and forth every ten strokes as she drew closer.

The forest grew right to the shore. There was no beach, just a jumble of boulders and overhanging bushes and logs. She headed toward a grassy bank that was partly cut away. A dead tree lay half on the ground and half submerged, its silver gray limbs sticking up like the ribs of a sea creature.