Page 78 of Our Last Resort

His coat was charred, but the mothers had acted quickly. The flames had spared his body. Émile had caught fire, and he had escaped unharmed.

I braced myself for fury. Waited for Émile to blame whoever had built the fire—too large, too close to the crowd, too reckless.

But he was in a good mood. And he was embarrassed. So he played it cool. He laughed, like it had all been a big practical joke. Like the air wasn’t saturated with the smell of burnt fabric.

“Really,” he said, moving his camp chair away from the fire, “I’m fine.”

He ran a hand through his hair.

“Now, what was I saying? Before I started roasting myself?”

Just like that, he was back to fairy tales and girls who rescued boys. Nothing could keep Émile quiet. Not even flames. His verbosity defied the elements.

Gabriel nudged my foot with his. He searched for my gaze. I nodded.

For a minute, we had seen it.

The possibility of a world where Émile burned.

Gabriel and I talked about the fire under our tree. We talked about it during chores. We talked about it whenever we had a moment.

We talked about the fire, and we talked about leaving.

We had no idea whatleavingentailed. The idea felt too forbidden to share even with Joan.

But there were ways to begin forming a plan. One day, Joan mentioned a trip she had taken out of town. We asked her how she’d gotten there.

“I took the train,” she said, then caught herself. “Do you…know what a train is?”

“We’re not stupid,” Gabriel said.

“Of course not. Of course.” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “I just never know…But okay. Yes. I took the train. There’s a station in town.”

“Could we go see it?”

She gave us a look.

Maybe she guessed, then.

But that was the thing with Joan. She never pushed us. She played along.

“We’ve just never actually seen one,” I added. “A train.”

Maybe she knew there was so little she could actually do for us. But showing us a train station—that, she could do.

She took us. Suddenly, we knew where the trains were.

We didn’t know where they went, or how to get on one. Those parts, we’d figure out when we had to.

I pretended to be her—Émile’s little soldier—until the end.

Our last morning together—the only way to get through it was not to think. To allow my escape plans to exist in an entirely different part of my brain.

Two weeks had passed since the incident with Émile. (That’s all I knew to call it in my head at the time,the incident.) Every night, I’d waited for Edwina to materialize at my bedside.

She hadn’t. Every morning was a deferment, a suspended sentence.

Gabriel and I cleaned the cafeteria for the last time.

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