Later, while we were waiting on the accessible premises, I was reading the same short notice on a wall for the third time. It concerned ordinary services and told me nothing I needed. Bram sat nearby with his newspaper open. I had begun to envy anyone capable of following one printed sentence into the next.
The sound came before I had any thought ready for it. It was a heavy, tearing report, larger than the noises inside the casino, and every conversation around me seemed to stop at a different point in the same instant. My hands closed on the purse in my lap.
A spoon struck a saucer. Someone said, "What was that?" A woman near the passage stood so quickly that her chair scraped backward. I saw a man reach for his companion's arm, not roughly, just needing to know she was there.
I cannot say what happened inside Harvey's at that moment. I could not see inside it. I heard the sound and saw the people around me react. For several breaths those were all the facts I possessed, though my mind offered pictures with the confidence of things witnessed.
Bram folded his newspaper without matching the edges. "That must be it," he said.
"We don't know yet." My voice sounded stern, the bus driver's voice returning at last. I wished I had used it on myself sooner.
People began moving toward a place where they thought they could see outside. Others stayed seated, looking offended by those who moved. A man near us repeated that something had happened at Harvey's. He offered no source beyond the noise we had all heard.
Bram stood. "There might be a better view over there." He indicated the direction people were taking, not the restricted area itself.
I rose too, then stopped with one hand on the chair. My room at Harvey's had become a suitcase, the suitcase had become an address book, and now the whole building threatened to become an image I would spend years trying to replace. A better view could not retrieve any of it.
"I'm staying here," I said.
"We wouldn't have to go near the closure."
"No. But we were told this is somewhere we can wait. Looking won't tell me whether I can go back. Somebody will have to tell us that."
Bram looked toward the moving crowd. For a moment I thought he would go without me, which he had every right to do if he stayed within guidance. Then he sat down. "You're right. I don't need a view."
I sat beside him, not triumphant. My legs felt unreliable, and there was no virtue in pretending that restraint had come easily. I wanted to know what had happened. I wanted to know whether the room where I had slept still existed. Mostly I wanted to make the noise stop having happened at all.
An employee asked people to keep the passage clear. I moved my chair inward. Bram gathered the newspaper from the floor where it had slipped. Those small actions gave our hands something lawful to do.
"My medicine isn't there," I said suddenly.
"In your bag?"
"I don't need anything from it tonight. I told Tessa that." I was reminding myself, not informing him. There was nothing inside that justified even asking for an exception before the people responsible could say what was possible.
He nodded. "My things can stay too."
Around us, accounts multiplied. A man who had not left his seat described what another man supposedly saw. Someone used a word that made the woman beside him cover her mouth. I turned toward the public news source rather than following the chain of voices.
Nothing useful came immediately. Waiting after a sound was different from waiting before it. Before, I could imagine that nothing would happen. Now something had happened, and there was no action of mine that could reduce it to a harmless possibility.
I took out the paper bearing Tessa's number. Our next planned call remained possible from where I was. That mattered. If I joined the movement toward a view, I could miss the very arrangement we had made to keep from losing each other again.
Bram asked whether I wanted water. I said yes, then stood to get it myself while he kept the chairs. When I returned, I could still hear the sound in memory. I set the water down without spilling it and waited for information that had a source.