The walls of the parlor were stripped to their lath. At the center, the top of one iron bedpost and a pyramid of brick.
I knew she was dead, but the strands of gray hair poking out of the brick, hair like yarn at the end of a blanket, made it certain. If Morie had stepped from the shadows and yelled, I couldn’t have been any more shocked. But she wasn’t there. She was nowhere and everywhere under all those bricks.
Pie looked to me as if I had the power to change what we were seeing.
But, oh, I didn’t.
The house shuddered as another temblor came on, and more parts of the house crashed. Next, we’d be buried too.
My only thought was to get us out. The front door was blocked by a fallen beam and more brick. With Pie on my back, we worked our way to the kitchen, where the busted gas pipe sputtered and hissed.
Morie’s shawl was on the chair; I passed it to Pie, along with a dish towel for the cut on her forehead.
At the back door, Rogue was whimpering, holding up first one, then another shredded paw. I set Pie on a chair and opened the back door and let him go first.
“I can stand,” Pie said, wobbling.
We locked arms and stepped outside into a grave silence, weightier than the roar. Our neighbors were just coming out of their houses. Like moths hatched from a chrysalis, we emerged into a shattered world.
“Hold on tight, Pie,” I said, her tethering weight a comfort.
“You too,” she whispered.
We crossed the road with Rogue at our heels, and I set Pie gently on the curb. She tucked her legs under her, as we looked back to see what remained of the house. Rogue lifted his snout and followed my gaze.
Most of the front and one side wall were gone; where the chimney gave way, there was a massive hole. The furniture, the tables and chairs and sewing machine and grandfather clock, were shattered or tossed. Yet the upstairs bathtub still stood on its four feet, and a towel hung from the bar. Morie’s lace curtains—she’d insisted on Belgian lace, had campaigned a year for Rose to buy them—flapped in the morning breeze, their hems shredding on the broken windowpanes.
A dollhouse, with its back open to the street.
Our neighbor Mr. Heffernan approached in his nightshirt, his pearly, sockless calves peeking out of his wife’s boots.
“Vera, Pie,” he said. “And your mother?”
Seeing our faces, he looked back at our house, where only a single white bedpost stuck out from the tomb of brick.
“Oh, my dears,” he said.
Mrs. Heffernan, her hair curled in strips of rags, then said, “Your mother, bless her, has gone to heaven, girls. While I fear we may be lost in hell.”
Pie flinched and bit her fist.
Anything could happen and no one could ever be shocked again.
More folks were emerging from the wrecks of their houses. Not a single house on the block had been spared: columns split, chimneys caved, roofs folded like paper. The house next door to the Heffernans’, having slipped from its foundation, faltered on bended knee, genuflecting. Mrs. Fielder, at the far end of the block, had been crushed by a beam. The falling joist had spared her husband, who was asleep beside her. Mr. Fielder carried his wife’s body into the road as if she were a bride, and there he stood, looking back at his life.
And the aftershocks kept coming, with everything perched on the earth’s top, every brick and board, glass and book, every man and beast, trembling—forced to recommit or bust.
The roar as another chimney came down.
“Flynn’s,” Mr. Heffernan said to his wife.
Followed by the neighbors on either side scrambling to dig out the widower Flynn, who, in his youth, had been a miner.
Rogue sat on his haunches next to me, and with Pie on my right, the two of them leaned against my legs. They were leaning so hard, I had to lock my knees to keep from falling.
“Who else?” Mr. Heffernan asked the group of survivors, our neighbors, all standing in their bedclothes.
“Any sign of the de Brettevilles?”
We turned to ask their house. The chair where Mr. de Bretteville loitered was tipped on its side, but the house stood.
“Saw them last night. They were all turned out for Caruso.”
“Maybe they spent the night downtown with the swells?”
A collective shrug. Unspoken agreement that the de Brettevilles would be the ones to make a fancy escape.
Pie held the rag against her head and rocked with her eyes closed. “V,” she whispered hoarsely, “ask the men… to help Morie—”
I shook my head. “Shh. Not now.”
“But… we have to—”
“Sorry, girls,” said Mr. Heffernan, catching Pie’s meaning, “it’s the living we need to tend to. There’s no telling when the rest of these houses are coming down.”
“But, V,” Pie pleaded, and for good measure she tugged on my skirt. All at once, I felt light-headed, queasy. I dropped to the curb beside her and rested my head against my knees.
“V, we have to do something,” Pie begged. “It’s Morie. She’s… don’t you feel her—”
“ ’Course I do.”
I felt the last shake and the one before that and the one before that too rumbling inside me, knocking loose the marrow of my bones. I heard the roar and slide of the chimney as it brought the house down over and over and over.
Rogue whimpered and licked his hurt feet. I shifted him over, so his rump was between my knees, and set to work picking the tiny
