San Fernando had still been a small farming town in the California valley of the same name. Built entirely of wood, the house had baked in the sun for half a century, its wood slowly turning into tinder, and tonight, when the fire started, it had raced through the rooms with a speed that stunned Teri. It was as if one moment the house had been whole, and the next it had been swallowed by flames.
Teri was only vaguely aware of what was going on around her. In the distance a siren wailed, growing steadily louder, but she barely heard it. Her mind was filled with the roar of the fire and the crackling of the siding as it curled back upon itself and began to fall away from the framework of the house, venting the interior to the fresh air that fed the raging flames.
Her parents …
Where were they? Had they gotten out? Forcing her eyes away from the oddly hypnotic inferno, she glanced around. Down the block, someone was running toward her, but the figure was no more than a shadow in the breaking dawn.
Voices began to penetrate her consciousness then, people shouting to each other, asking what had happened.
Then, over the roar of the fire and the babble of voices, she heard a scream. It came from the house, seemingly unmuffled by the already crumbling walls. The sharp sound released Teri from her paralysis, and she ran around to the driveway, her eyes wide as she stared up to the second floor and her parents’ bedroom.
She saw her mother, a dark silhouette against the glow of the fire. She was wrapped in something—a blanket, perhaps, or the bedspread. Teri watched as her mother’s legs came over the windowsill, and a second later she saw her jump … then turn in the air as the bedspread tightened around her legs.
Her mother seemed to hang for a moment, suspended in midair. A scream built in Teri’s throat, only to be cut off a second later as her mother slid free from the swaddles and plunged headfirst to the driveway below.
Had she heard the sound as her mother’s head struck the concrete, or did she imagine it?
Teri began running then, but as if her feet were mired in mud, it seemed to take forever before she reached the spot where her mother lay crumpled and still on the driveway, one arm flung out as if reaching out to her daughter, as if even in death she were grasping for life.
“M-Mom?” Teri stammered, her hand falling away from her robe to tentatively touch her mother. Then her voice rose to an anguished wail. “M-o-m!”
There was no response, and as Teri became aware of someone running up the sidewalk, she threw herself on Polly’s body, cradling her mother’s head in her lap, stroking the blistered cheek of the woman who only a few hours ago had stroked her own before kissing her good night. “No,” she whimpered, her eyes flooding with tears. “Oh, no. Please, God, don’t let Mommy die.” But even as she uttered the words, Teri already knew somewhere deep inside her that it was too late, that her mother was already gone.
She felt gentle hands on her shoulders and slowly looked up to see Lucy Barrow, from across the street. “She’s dead.” Teri’s voice broke as she spoke the words. The admission seemed to release a tide of emotion that had been locked inside her. Covering her face with her hands, she began to sob, her body shaking.
Lucy, her own mind all but numbed by the sight of Polly MacIver’s seared and broken body, pulled Teri to her feet and began leading her back down the driveway. “Your father …” she said. “Where’s your father? Did he get out?”
Teri’s hands dropped away from her face. For a moment her shocked eyes flickered with puzzlement. She started to speak, but before the words emerged from her mouth there was a sharp crack, followed instantly by a crash.
Lucy Barrow grasped Teri’s arm tightly, pulling her down the driveway as the roof of the house collapsed into the fire and the flames shot up into the brightening sky.
Three fire trucks clogged the street in front of the MacIvers’ house, and a tangle of hoses snaked along the sidewalk to the hydrant on the corner. An ambulance had taken Polly’s body away more than an hour before, but as more and more neighbors arrived to gape in dazed horror at the smoldering ruins