The big red doors stood open on an empty bay. The lights were still on inside. Through the side door, standing in the light, small and lavender-coated, with her hat pinned to her white hair and her pocketbook over her arm, was Edith Pruitt. She had come down, Nora learned later, to bring the night shift a tin of oatmeal cookies, as she did every Saturday, and she had been in the kitchen when the alarm went.
The old woman looked at Nora across the snow. She did not say anything. She did not need to. She just held the side door open a little wider, and waited.
Nora crossed the street.
*
They sat in the green kitchen with the scanner on. Edith made tea. Nora set the pie on the table between them and did not cut it.
It was a chimney fire, the scanner said, at a farmhouse out on the Ridge Road, and then it was not just a chimney fire; it had gotten into the walls, into the old dry timber of a house built before the Civil War. Ladder One, going to the roof. Nora held her cup in both hands and drank her tea, because it was something to do with her hands. When the voices went quiet, she did not get up. When the static went on for a long time, she did not get up. She sat. She sat in the posture of waiting that her mother had sat in, and Edith Pruitt had sat in, and every woman and man who had ever loved somebody who ran toward things had sat in, back to the beginning of the world. And she found, to her astonishment, that it was not a wall. It was not a cell. It was a kind of prayer, the kind you say with your whole body, the kind that has no words except bring him home.
"How do you feel?" Edith asked her, near midnight.