Page 52 of The Intruder

BEFORE

ELLA

I am sitting in the back of an ambulance with the doors open, a blanket around my shoulders.

A female paramedic sits beside me, a concerned look on her face.

Every few minutes, I start coughing. At first, I was kind of faking it, but now I’m not.

There’s a lot of smoke in the air. It’s hard to breathe.

“Are you taking me to the hospital?” I ask the paramedic.

She takes my hand. “Yes. But you seem okay, so we’re waiting around to…”

She doesn’t complete her sentence. When the fire trucks arrived, I told them my mother was still inside.

And now I’m waiting to see if they save her.

I wasn’t the one who called the fire department—that was a neighbor.

By the time the trucks arrived, there were flames visible in the windows of every floor, and the stench of scorched wood filled my nostrils.

Although it smelled good compared to my mother’s cigarettes or those rotten pumpkins.

She couldn’t have gotten out. There’s no way.

Could she?

“The firemen are looking real hard for your mother,” she says tenderly. “If she is in there, they will do their best to save her.”

I close my eyes, squeezing out a few tears.

I imagine my mother waking with a jolt to the sound of the fire alarms. I imagine her running down the hallway and then seeing the mess of paper all over the stairs.

I imagine her brown eyes widening as she realizes the situation, then trying to get down the stairs the best she could.

Maybe she slips and falls, almost making it but then hitting the wall of mattresses.

I imagine her realizing that she was going to burn to death in a house with all her junk.

And that it’s all happening because of me.

A man in a police uniform approaches the back of the ambulance.

He glances at me, then crooks his finger at the paramedic.

She climbs out to talk to him, and the two of them speak softly together.

I try to make out what they’re saying, but it’s too loud.

My ears are still ringing from all the sirens.

But there’s a grim expression on his face.

The nice paramedic climbs back into the ambulance with me. She throws an arm around my shoulders and gives me a squeeze. “I’m so sorry, sweetie.”

I look up at her.

“It sounds like…” She winces. “Your mom didn’t make it.”

For a moment, I can hardly believe it. I knew what I was trying to do, but I didn’t believe it would work. I sit there, unsure how to react.

Cry. Cry, stupid.

At first, it’s tricky to get the tears started.

But once they do, they come fast and hard.

Big soggy droplets run down my face, and I wipe them away with the back of my hand.

My mother is gone. She took care of me my whole life and loved me in her own way, even though she wasn’t very good at showing it. And I killed her.

If only she hadn’t started caring about things more than she cared about me. She didn’t used to be that way. When I was little, she loved me best of all. This never would have happened if she hadn’t changed.

And now that she’s gone, I have nobody. Not Anton, who is locked away somewhere because he was trying to defend me. Everyone who cared about me in the whole world is gone.

The paramedic wraps her arms around me in a hug. I sob into her shoulder, soaking the material, as she strokes my hair. “Oh, honey. Oh, Ella, it’s okay. Cry as much as you need to.”

She hugs me for the next few minutes until the tears gradually subside. I finally pull away, wiping my eyes as I sniffle loudly. She produces a tissue from her pocket, which I use to wipe the snot from my nose.

The policeman is still standing there, patiently watching our interaction. All these people are so nice. Sometimes I forget there are good people in the world. “I’m so sorry,” the policeman says gently. “We’re going to take you to the hospital but will contact your family to come meet you there.”

Good luck with that. I have no family. Nobody who cares about me. Not anymore.

The paramedic squeezes my shoulders. “I’ll ride with you, Ella. I’ll stay with you until your family arrives.”

Yeah, doubt it.

“Can you tell me your full name, please?” the officer asks me.

I wipe more tears from my eyes with my dirty tissue, swallowing down a lump in my throat. The paramedic and the police officer are watching me, waiting for me to answer.

“I’m Ella,” I finally manage. Then I think better of it and give my full name: “Elizabeth Casey.”