What her eyes could see. chapter 3

The pixie-girl stood on the corner of Maple and Sycamore, her usually bright, lively face resembling a day-old corpse. Her brows fell over her dark eyes as though they too had fainted dead away in horror. Faintly her cotton dress shifted, murmuring with a listless concern as the wind blew its own trepidations our way. My nose twitched as it caught the scent of smoke. Lifting my eyes from the girl I had awkwardly avoided for two days, I saw the object of her fright. The home of Ms. Hopkins, the kind, simple lady who taught piano, flute, and clarinet lessons at school (three dollars an hour on either Mondays or Wednesdays, whichever suited you) was engulfed in flame. It was entirely overcome; flames leapt and flickered from every side. My eyes watered just looking upon it, and my heart sunk as I realized that I could feel the heat on my face even though I was three houses away.

I reached out to touch her shoulder. A voice burbled in and out of my consciousness, familiar, but not. “Is she out?” The question was mine. Tears I hadn’t noticed before in her despairing eyes slid down her flushed cheeks.

“No.” The word was like the coroner had come and pronounced the final cause of death. I turned back to the house, my gaze concentrated upon it as though I could make her walk out unscathed by sheer willpower alone.

Sirens caterwauled and screeched, preceding the appearance of fire engines. Doors slammed, men shouted, hoses hissed, boots stomped, and dogs barked in a swirling whirlwind of raucous chaos. In the midst of it all, I nearly forgot where I was. But she took my hand--or rather, grabbed it--and jerked me from the haze, and, after looking both ways, dragged me across the street....toward the blazing inferno.

Her urgency alerted me to many possible intentions, but whatever she‘d had in mind, they were stilted by a tall, foreboding shadow. A man, whom I assumed to be the police chief, stepped rather authoritatively in our path, one hand on his hip, the other nervously toying with his mustache. His boots just missed decapitating the ends of my bare toes. “Stay here, kids,” he grunted, his whole face warped in a grimace.

To my utter relief, my companion nodded solemnly and let go of my hand. I Just as soon as she did, though, I gasped, mouth gaping open like a beached fish as a window on the first floor of Ms. Hopkins’ house shattered, flinging shards of glass and wood across her lawn and driveway. With a mortified shriek, she threw her arms around me and buried her face in my shoulder. I clung to her, just as terrified, my pointy chin no doubt poking her back through her light pink sweater. Oh, I wanted to say something, anything, but my throat had closed up and I could hardly breathe. Despite dismal scene, I could not turn away from the sight of smoke spewing from the chasm as though a hidden dragon had been rudely awakened from hibernation.

The chief presently forgot about us. More doors slammed, more fire hoses whizzed past us along the ground before being clinked into the closest hydrants, and frenzied commands seared the air above our heads. We watched as a fireman, wearing two oxygen tanks, charged through the front door, flanked by two other men in yellow and black. Those minutes seemed like hours: the flames climbed up and up, and the smoke spiraled dark and black, and extreme concern escalated into fear as more glass shattered audibly from somewhere inside. It seemed hopeless.

Then I couldn‘t believe my eyes. “Look!!” I managed to choke, flinging a pointed finger toward the house. Loosening her grip and spinning around, we witnessed, in seeming slow motion, the burly fireman rushing form the smoky blaze with what looked like a limp, green-dressed doll in his arms. As they emerged, a blue light, a blue more lovely and pure than my mother‘s blue eyes, seared my irises--I blinked, and there was a sequin-like glitter that shimmered once or twice on each side of the man and woman. Before it disappeared entirely, though, I saw a whisper of something downy soft, periwinkle, and wispy. Wondering if she had seen it too, I opened my mouth and looked at her.

And what a transformation! Her tears of woe had become tears of joy, and the smile she bore was as wide as the grand canyon is deep. She laughed, one of those laughs from the soul, and ran a bee line toward the pair, leaving me in a bewildered state of shock and disbelief. She gingerly cradled the shaking hand of Ms. Hopkins. I rushed over behind her after I gathered myself, bemused with her intimacy with the woman we’d never met.

“He saved you, Ms. Hopkins, ma’am!” she bubbled, stroking the traumatized woman's hand. Ms. Hopkins’ eyes shifted from us, to the medic who was listening to her lungs, and then to us again before a faint smile tilted her lips. “He did, didn’t he?” She smiled fully, a tenderness in her eyes touching us instead of her actual hand reaching up to brush our cheeks with trembling digits. “I didn’t think he would find me at first, dear, but...he knew somehow that I was trapped in the hallway.”

“They always know where to look, ma’am.” I nodded my head in agreement, just watching the pair. Ms. Hopkins seemed to have grown older the last time I saw her walking through the halls of our elementary school, but perhaps it was the ash and soot that had settled into every crease of her face, deepening them so that she appeared to have aged. Her hair also was tinted white with ash and whatever else, adding a charming older-lady quality to the quiet, middle-aged woman. With dark auburn hair and deep chocolate eyes that were wide in trauma, she reminded me of a momma doe. “Indeed they do, dear. They’re trained to know, I suppose.”

Again she smiled that tender, touching smile, then nodded to the medic, who had been waiting for the conversation to end so that he could lift her up and onto a stretcher. He had been standing quietly, ogling us impatiently, but politely obliging the curious girl to my left. However, the hair on the back of my neck stood up--something was off about their dialogue, not inherently wrong, just...odd. Like the weren’t talking about the same thing. My misgivings were affirmed as the medic strapped Ms. Hopkins in, for the girl shook her head with something akin to pity in her shining eyes and softly corrected, “No, ma’am...They don’t have to find us. They know where we’ve been the whole time. They stay in the shadow, watchin’, carin’ ’bout us, just waitin’ for when we need ‘em the most.”

We watched in silence as she was hoisted into the ambulance, and I noticed her brow crinkled as if she were pondering what the girl had said. The pixie’s eyes were still sedate and thoughtful as the emergency vehicle drove away; there was a way about her that I couldn’t grasp, an evasive, enchanting mystery.

She turned toward me and her face became draped in the hour’s shadow. But I knew she smiled. “Did you see him?”

I nodded in the dark. “Yeah. He wasn’t even afraid. He marched right in like he could save the world. It was like he knew he would be savin’ Ms. Hopkins, no question.”

There was a pause, then, as was custom, a probing query, but with it came a peculiar flicker of eyes as a fireman cleaning up shone his flashlight around the yard. “Did you see Alastair?”

I blinked. What? “He...he was there?”

I detected amusement in her soft voice. “Yes.” Crickets chirped, the only noise for an entire eternal minute. “The fireman would never have made it out without him.” Her head tilted as she studied me, or perhaps the look that gave me away. I heard the smirk on her lips, nearly saw in my mind‘s eye how the left side of her mouth twitched and then raised. Her pixie eyebrows followed suit. “You saw him.” She believed I had; there was no shame or lack of confidence in the way she spoke it...like it was concrete truth. And conveniently enough for her, that was all. But it wasn’t the end as far as I was concerned.

She stepped away from me, bare feet massaged by the grass of Ms. Hopkin’s lawn that was untouched by flame, ash, and soot. Feeling silly and suddenly indignant at her know-it-all demeanor, I rejoined, “Well--How do you know?!”

And she had the gall to laugh...though later I realized she wasn’t laughing at me as much as for me, on my behalf.

“Your face is a reflection of your soul. By not hiding what you feel, you give all of yourself to the world all the time. It‘s beautiful.” I shoved my hands in my pockets, feeling as though she’d given me the grandest of compliments. Like she appreciated me, like I was different. I wanted to take her words and tuck them in my pocket forever, to keep for a day when I might forget, to be reminded. For a moment I studied my shoes, half-covered by dewy grass, ash, and dirt, not knowing what to say.

She chuckled, surely seeing the shy appreciation written vividly across my expression. “You’re welcome.” She tugged my braid, then reached for my hand. Then she walked me home.