by R. J. Jacobs
Then came a flash. I saw and heard it at the same time, like the tail of a giant wasp stinging the earth. We stood, as if commanded, the swing knocking against the backs of our tanned legs. I gripped his hand. Near the road, fire rose immediately from an elm. The flames reached toward the clouds, their desperate smoke like a prayer to be retaken by the sky.
I watched, transfixed. This is happening.
The screen door slammed behind Paolo as he ran inside. He was yelling over his shoulder. “It’s been too dry. It’ll all burn if we leave it.” He was right. The grass was long and the leaves were the color of wheat.
He cursed his phone, which had no signal, dropped it, and found mine.
“You literally have to lean against the windows,” I told him, some small part of me finding the whole thing darkly funny. Mom talked sometimes about getting a landline. Never happened.
Eventually, the signal hit his phone and his voice was loud into it. “Lightning hit a tree and there’s a fire spreading fast. Baby”—he hollered at me—“Baby, what’s the address out here?”
I didn’t even know. “Highway 96, south from the Concord exit, about three miles down.”
Embers floated above the pond, then disappeared into its dark mirror. I rubbed my sweaty hands together as another tree caught, bursting into flames like it had been waiting to. Fire the color of sunset silhouetted the low, determined edge of the storm as the smell of charred pine reached us. Along the road, the rows of headlights stopped. A thousand motes filled their beams—the embers raining sideways, making it seem like everything was under water.
“I wait until the fifth date to let things get exciting,” I said.
Ash landed on the rail. He brushed his hand over it, blowing urgently. Between the two of us and the trees, the wind carried hundreds more.
His accent sharpened. “They’ll be here any minute.”
I looked over the living room. Everything was wood; it would be gone in minutes if the fire touched it.
Over the hill that rolled west toward town came the first hints of a siren.
* * *
Wednesday morning, Halloween. Another Lamictal, water.
Breathe.
How do you act normal, as if nothing out of the ordinary is happening? I’m terrible at it. I had a thousand questions. I needed to meet with Sandy again, if only to cure the unreality that had set in.
I tried calling her the following day but hung up when it went to voicemail, thinking back to the suspicion in her eyes and her skittish, birdlike way. As much as I needed confirmation, a bigger part of me was afraid of scaring her off.
My thoughts ran rampant—a mind full of echoes, I caught myself staring at nothing.
Making a sandwich, I cut halfway through my index finger while slicing a tomato. I didn’t realize what I’d done until I felt a warm drop of blood on the top of my bare foot. The tomato-blood mixture was a Rorschach print over the white cutting board. I ran the faucet cold over my hand until the bleeding slowed.
Shadows shifted across the old hardwood floors all that afternoon from bare branches in the wind. Mom’s windows were gentle waves of glass. Even under the circumstances, I wasn’t used to her being away. Her house felt enormous compared to my apartment, and it would have seemed empty if it hadn’t been for Andy, who slept in bed beside me at night and tolerated the glacial pace of our morning walks. I couldn’t help but wonder who was living in my apartment by then, if anyone. Who slept in my old bedroom and prepared food in my old kitchen? Someone. A presence like a silhouette had taken over that part of my life. I ran my fingers through Andy’s soft black coat, the Band-Aid around my index finger collecting fragments of his fur. His hair, I thought, smiling, was longer than mine.
I was grateful for Halloween—it gave me something to focus on, something to do. As it turned out, like it has again and again, I was no good at waiting.
Daylight savings didn’t end until the following week, but it was already nearly dark by five thirty. Down the street in both directions was a flowing network of costumes and iPhone screens. I filled a wooden salad bowl with bite-sized Hershey bars and leashed Andy beside me on the porch. It happened to be a warmer evening, and my hooded sweatshirt brushed heavily against the sides of my neck. Mom’s neighborhood had sidewalks on both sides of the street and was understandably popular for trick-or-treating. In her neighbor’s yard, plastic tombstones poked up from the evergreen lawn. A skeleton clawed its way out of the ground.
My phone chirped; Allie was calling back. “You left a message the other night, after we talked,” she reminded me, sounding reluctant.
I was rethinking everything. Telling her too much seemed like a mistake. I needed to be sure. Credibility, in this case, was not my strongest asset.
“It’s just going to be easier to explain everything on Saturday. It’s kind of a crazy story. I want to make sure it’s right before I get you involved.”
In the background of her call, I could hear the murmur of voices, a telephone ringing, someone yelling, displeased. “Are you at work?” I asked, incredulous, but with a tug of professional envy. “Are you really this productive of a human being?”
She laughed, or sort of laughed. “I’m leaving now, really. Halloween party with the Mr.”
Married life, I thought.
“Are you going out?” Her voice was encouraging.
I rolled my boot back and forth on the concrete porch. When I heard the phrase going out, I could still feel the faint traces of excitement that remained from when I’d been wild. I could almost taste the sweet sting of vodka and feel the sticky, dark smoke in my throat that had signified being out of control, burning bright. Most people, I knew, could celebrate without climbing rooftops or taking boys whose names they didn’t want to know into the shadows of backyard elms. They hated, and then loved, to see someone else lose control. They watched from a distance. That was what going out had meant before.
People want to see what will happen when they sense anything could.
“Nah,” I said. “Staying put tonight.”
When I ended the call, I spun the phone around in my fingers. What I really wanted was to pace the kitchen and bite my cuticles, alone with my thoughts. I petted Andy’s back and extended the salad bowl filled with candy as the first group ascended Mom’s stairs. Two vampires and an indecipherable.
Up and down the street, shadows followed by larger shadows bent toward rectangles of steady light. They moved in packs. Most wore costumes and masks. Playing pretend, not who they really were. Occasionally, groups would halt, then seemed to be released by the eruption of a flash. Having not lived in the neighborhood for years, I knew none of the kids, of course. Some of the parents wore puzzled expressions when they approached the porch—the disrupted expectation of seeing my mom. The role of mom, I thought, will be played tonight by her twitching, preoccupied daughter. In other faces, I saw a sort of muted politeness, even a wariness. Those were the parents who’d driven in.
Later, I called Mom for some company and could practically hear Destin in the background—the plink of wine glasses and silverware above the lazy, rolling tide. Seventy-five degrees, she told me.
“Why don’t you bring Andy down?” she asked, as if I could. Retirement had wiped the conventions of a workweek from her mind.
It took everything not to spill the meeting with Sandy to her. I knew opening up, telling her would only make her worry, maybe enough to cause her to drive back. So, lying by omission, I told her I had to keep focused on building my practice and that Marty had asked about her, the guilt of doing so feeling like a dull pain in the back of my throat. I was listening to her laugh when I saw a familiar face approach, tugging a smaller, also familiar face like a shadow beside him.
This, I could hardly believe.
Had he come looking for me?
“I’ll call you back,” I told Mom.
FOURTEEN
Cal moved with the same half-beat-slow caution of the other parents who had sought ou
t my neighborhood’s long sidewalks. One night a year. But Nashville wasn’t exactly a metropolis. Some part of me was surprised I hadn’t run into him before now.
The timing—my God.
A few of Paolo’s friends had called me after he’d vanished, but not Cal, with whom he’d been closest. Without realizing it, I’d decided I’d never see him again.
He looked the same: his cropped brown hair combed neatly to the side and his green, sun-strained eyes striking against his tea-colored skin. I could smell the Irish Spring soap as he stepped onto the porch.
He stopped when he recognized me, and his face tightened. His hand fell onto his daughter’s shoulder.
Olivia pulled free and planted herself beside me, wondering aloud what I’d done to my hair. “You cut your hair!” she observed.
“Yeah, I did,” I said as she began reaching into the bowl. I stopped myself from informing her that she had gotten taller and instead touched the joyful tangle of her curls. The spray of freckles across her nose had darkened, with green eyes that matched her father’s.
“Olivia …” Cal began a vague sort of warning. “Just one.”
He’d never been jolly, but his standoffishness now seemed more pronounced. It made me want to tell her to never mind, to take as much as she liked. Or dump the bowl into her flannel pumpkin bag until it overflowed. I smiled up at him and lavished her bag with chocolate.
“I didn’t realize you lived here,” Cal noted briskly. It was all he seemed prepared to say on the subject.
“It’s my mom’s house. I’m just staying here for a while. You’re nearby?”
He shook his head.
Olivia interjected. “Dad’s house is waaaaay out. Mom stayed in town when they split up, but Dad likes peace and quiet.” She made finger quotations for this phrase. “So we have to come into town to trick-or-treat.”
“Oh.”
Cal looked over his shoulder toward the street. “Olivia.”
Andy stood and circled her, nudging her hands as she squealed with joy.
“That’s Andy,” I informed her. “I think he likes you.”
“I like him! Hey, do you still like to go watch softball?”
“No, that was just for last year.”
“Why just last year?”
I looked at Cal, who seemed resigned to hold his breath until our encounter ended. He looked at my cane, my boot, saying nothing.
My thoughts flashed to watching Olivia climb on the warm metal bleachers the summer before, when I’d explained to her that the “birds” circling the field lights were actually bats. “Like Stellaluna,” I’d told her after she’d made a face. The next time I saw her, I’d brought the famous book from my office for her to look through. We’d bonded over how playing softball was less boring than watching it.
After attending my fifth game, I’d put my hand on Paolo’s arm on the drive home and asked what he thought about having kids. He’d shaken his head, picked at the baseball clay under his fingernails. His smile had been sly. “Of course. Don’t you think we should get married first?”
“There’s the old charm,” I’d teased. He had taken the doors off his Jeep for the summer, and when he stepped on the gas, it was like being inside a tornado. I’d kissed his neck as he shifted gears.
It seemed like a different life.
“I had a friend who played on your dad’s team,” I explained to Olivia.
She smiled, satisfied. Her eyes illuminated with an idea. “May I have a drink?”
“No, baby,” Cal mumbled.
“Of course,” I said at the same time.
When I turned, she was crouched beside the door as Andy barked, nose pressed against the glass pane.
But Cal took another step toward the sidewalk, avoiding looking at me directly. “We really should keep moving.” He had the permissive tone of a parent rapidly losing ground.
“Dad, I’m thirsty. She said I could have a drink.”
“Cal, I’m happy to bring something out.”
He was basically pinned—there was no way to deny his daughter a glass of water, and he knew it. Cal shook his head, and Olivia pushed into the living room, laughing as Andy began licking her hands. I gently took Andy’s collar and Olivia skipped past me into the kitchen.
“She’s had some candy,” Cal explained.
“Two Butterfingers, one Kit Kat, one Hershey’s Kiss,” she sang, “and one bag of Sour Patch Kids.”
“Kit Kat is my favorite,” I confessed.
“I’m in dance now. I can pirouette!” Olivia exclaimed. “Watch.”
I poured water from Mom’s glass pitcher as she twirled. She spun once, twice, then stopped to clear her dizziness before spinning a third time.
“Excellent. How long have you been taking lessons?”
She looked at Cal, whose arms were folded over his chest. “A few months.”
“I usually live with Mom, too, but she’s been on the road, so I stayed with Dad aaaaall month.”
I placed the glass in her hands, then looked at Cal. “Can I get you anything?”
“No, I’m good.”
Olivia returned to Andy. There was no separating them. Cal’s silence was so awkward I couldn’t take it, needed him to speak more than three words to me. “Playing softball this fall?” I asked.
“Just ended.” He refolded his arms, regaining his Marine Corps posture, and scanned Mom’s living room as if searching for an object worthy of investing his interest for the next few minutes.
I stepped in front of his face. “How’ve you been, Cal? I didn’t get to see you after everything happened.”
“I need to go to the bathroom!” Olivia said, standing. She had been kneeling down, petting Andy, letting him lick her some more.
I directed her down the hall, and when I returned to him, Cal’s lips were pulled tight, as though he was summoning patience from some deep inner well. He wasn’t going to talk.
I was long past being able to wait something like this out. “So … what’s your … problem?” I lowered my voice so that Olivia couldn’t hear. “You’re acting like a dickhead.”
His head tilted slightly, as if mechanized by stoicism.
“Yes,” I said, “a dick … head. You’re acting like a dickhead. I never did anything to you, Cal.”
“I never said you did.” His eyes were gentle. They flicked back toward the door. Calmness can be infuriating.
I kept talking in a kind of stage whisper, part of me horrified at the sense of my own guilt I was revealing—fears I’d never put into words. “You think I’m the bad guy? That I’m responsible for what happened? Take a number. But I didn’t kill your best friend.”
He shook his head.
The encounters with Detective Mason and Sandy had left me raw. It was all bleeding out of me. I couldn’t stop.
“Look, you didn’t like me from the first time you saw me. But really, I was never anything but good to Paolo. And you.”
“You really want to have this conversation?”
“Yep. I do.”
He raised his eyebrows.
I wasn’t going anywhere. Olivia was well out of earshot. “Ab-so-lutely,” I said.
Cal shrugged. “Okay. I’m sorry to say it, but I think you’re bad news, Emily. And I actually did think that the first night he met you. Just my opinion.” He looked relieved to have finally said it out loud.
“What makes me bad news, Cal? In your opinion.”
“You’re a nut.”
The word bounced off of me. A nut was the best he had? I shot right back. “Well, as long as we’re getting clear on things, I think you were just jealous because I stole your friend away. He spent more time with me than you.”
He made a face like this was preposterous. “Please,” he groaned.
“No, I think that was exactly the problem. Right during your divorce, I stole your best friend away, and you started sulking.”
Cal nodded as if he was actually considering the notion, then he countered
by saying, “It wasn’t the timing. It was that during that time, you got him addicted to the pills that killed him.”
This I had not expected. Down the hall behind me, I could hear the water running and Olivia singing, her voice muffled by the closed bathroom door.
I leaned in. “What did you say?”
“I’m not trying to start a fight with you in your house.”
“It’s not my house,” I insisted, as if it mattered. “But too late.”
“Thank you for letting Olivia use your bathroom and for giving her a glass of water.”
“Um, no. No way.”
“Never mind.” He straightened. “It really doesn’t matter, Emily.”
“Fuck you it doesn’t matter.” We were going to have this out.
He raised his eyebrows again, drew in a deep breath, set his jaw. “You heard what I said. I don’t need to say it again.”
My hands moved to my hips. “I heard something you said that made no sense. Maybe you could explain.” I took a step into his personal space. Cal was still as a tree trunk.
He took another breath, and for an instant, I glimpsed the extent of what he’d gone through, a wave of empathy for his loss washing over me. Being consumed by Paolo’s disappearance put me at risk for being self-centered about my grief.
Cal continued, “You’re saying that the night he … that the pills—or whatever—came from somewhere that wasn’t you?”
I felt like screaming. I wanted to break my cane over my knee. I wanted to tell him about Sandy. “Yes, you’re dead wrong. If he took anything, it damn sure wasn’t mine.”
His voice hardened again. “He made bad decisions after he met you. Period. I knew him for a year before. I met him right when he came to this country. Before everything changed.”
It was taking everything I had not to cry. “Bad decisions? Like?”
“Everything about him changed. Drugs? Late nights? You tell me.”
