Albany airport fire incident

The Albany airport fire incident transforms a small act of desperation into a public spectacle: while trying to obtain change for her father, Charlie McGee accidentally sets a serviceman’s shoes on fire. The episode makes her feared power visible to strangers and, through the airport police report, alerts the Shop to a striking clue about the fugitives’ whereabouts.

Causes and Setting

At ten past midnight, the terminal lobby is crowded with travelers who have nowhere else to be: servicemen returning from leave, tired families, businessmen, and young people with packs and tennis rackets. Amid the restless crowd, Andy McGee and Charlie sit at desks with televisions bolted to them. Andy spends his last two quarters to keep their seats. He is exhausted, in pain, and unable to offer Charlie the money or rest they need; when she asks whether they have to leave, he tells her they have no money and cannot stay.

Charlie understands that her father is hurt and that the men from the Shop may be coming after them. She knows that when Andy is in this condition, thinking is difficult and he needs quiet and sleep. She also understands that the Shop wants to examine them and find out how they work. Although she is grieving her mother and frightened by the danger, she decides to look for money herself.

The choice brings her up against the rule Andy has repeated throughout her childhood: she must not use the Bad Thing. Charlie remembers the earlier incident in which she hurt her mother, and the screams and bandages that followed. She fears that once her power is released it may spread beyond her control and hurt herself, one person, or many. The need to help her father presses against that warning; the airport’s ordinary objects become the means by which she tests a power she has been taught to fear.

Charlie Gets the Money

Charlie takes a paper shopping bag from a trash basket and finds a bank of pay phones. She is afraid to use her power, but enters an end booth and pretends to speak to her grandfather while watching through the glass for anyone paying attention. A woman nearby is occupied with a flight-insurance machine, and no one seems to be watching Charlie.

She shoves the phone. The first effort does not produce the result she wants, but the sensation of pushing objects feels good to her, which unsettles her: she wonders whether she might come to like doing something dangerous. She tries again, more lightly, and a flood of silver change spills from the coin return. Charlie hurries to hold the bag beneath it, but most of the quarters, nickels, and dimes scatter onto the floor. She gathers what she can, repeatedly checking the booth window as she works.

At the next booth, a serviceman is still talking on the phone. Charlie hears him speaking to a woman and senses that he is trying to deceive her. She closes the booth door while he is outside smoking, then turns her attention to the phone. This time she positions the bag first. The coins cascade into it, and she moves on with money for Andy. The sequence makes her ability seem briefly useful and almost manageable: a shove can produce the small, immediate resource she needs. But the phone is only the first object to respond to her power that night.

The Fire and Its Immediate Aftermath

The serviceman is Eddie Delgardo, whose thoughts have been occupied by resentment toward Sally Bradford and plans for his leave in New York City. His private fantasy of revenge is interrupted by heat at his feet and the smell of something singeing. When he looks down, his shoes are burning. He leaps up as people turn and security guards notice the commotion; soon the cuffs of his uniform are catching too.

Eddie runs across the concourse trailing smoke and rushes into the women’s room. There, a woman leaving a stall sees him and screams, her voice magnified by the tiled walls. Eddie catches the door of a pay toilet before it can latch, hauls himself into the toilet feet first, and the water produces a hiss and a billow of steam. The incident draws the airport security guards into the room. What began as Charlie’s attempt to gather coins has become an emergency visible across the terminal, with Eddie’s burning shoes and uniform making the danger unmistakable.

Charlie returns to Andy crying. She has obtained the money, but tells him that it got away from her again: there was a soldier, and she could not stop what happened. Andy, still struggling to think through intense pain, puts an arm around her and reassures her that the man is all right and has been taken to the security office. Charlie explains that she overheard him on the phone, formed a few thoughts about his attempt to trick the woman he was speaking to, and then saw him as the fire began. She is horrified that she might have hurt him badly. Andy’s response is unexpected: he tells her to keep her voice down and calls the incident the most encouraging thing that has happened in some time. His judgment places the accident in the context of their immediate danger, even as Charlie experiences it as a frightening loss of control.

Consequences and Significance

The fire gives airport authorities a memorable detail to report. When an airport cop tells the driver of a green car that two people matching the fugitives’ description were seen, he adds that a fool has also set his own shoes on fire. The driver, who had seemed bored, sits upright at the information. The report connects Charlie and Andy’s passage through the airport with an unusual event that the Shop can recognize as relevant to its pursuit.

Eddie’s ordeal continues beyond the blaze. Instead of spending his leave sightseeing in New York, he is taken into a drug-induced state of total recall and made to describe repeatedly what happened before and after his shoes caught fire. The incident therefore has consequences on two scales: Charlie’s unintended power injures and terrifies a stranger, while the Shop turns that stranger’s experience into intelligence. The coins in Charlie’s bag answer an immediate need, but the fire exposes the cost of using her ability in a crowded public place. Her wish to help Andy, her terror of repeating the harm done to her mother, and the Shop’s capacity to exploit whatever the airport witnesses combine to make this brief episode a turning point in their attempt to remain hidden.