Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down

by Anne Valente

  Zola pushed herself from the bed. She pulled the piece of paper from her jacket pocket and curled against the wall by her window. Her Pentax camera lay nearby on the carpet, peeking out from beneath her bed. She had no desire to take photos. No desire to capture anything beyond cornfields, a night already lost to her camera. She unfurled the creased paper and began to read the words Matt had written. Caroline Black, a junior at Lewis and Clark, was a magnetic force in the hallways of our school. Zola looked away from Matt’s handwriting, a scrawl written in haste. His question one she couldn’t answer, one she couldn’t let herself think about at all. She huddled into the wall and closed her eyes and pulled her knees tight into her body.

  She awoke to a blanket draped over her, a fuzzed softness, and to her mother shaking her shoulders. She awoke to sirens. The growing whine of an emergency approaching. Zol, get up, her mother was saying. Come on, get up now.

  And then they were on the lawn. The blanket wrapped around her shoulders. Her feet still bare. Cold grass between her toes. Her mother standing at the edge of the yard while Zola stayed back by the front door. Her mother watching as a police car and an ambulance whistled past on the street, a street lined with neighbors emerging from their homes and staring bleary-eyed toward what Zola could see from where she stood, her mother looking back at her, her face immobile in panic: the corner of their street. Alisha Trenway’s home. Flames rising into the night and ribboning the darkness to shreds.

  ARSON?

  Second House Fire Kills Parents of Slain Teen

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2003

  ST. LOUIS, MO—Two more lives have been claimed in the second house fire following last week’s shooting at Lewis and Clark High School, an incident that police are now investigating for the possibility of arson linking the two homes. Late Monday night, after Lewis and Clark freshman Alisha Trenway, 14, was laid to rest at Stone Hill Cemetery in St. Louis County, a house fire at her residence in the 4500 block of Quail Run Court in Midvale County claimed the lives of her parents, Jonathan Trenway, 44, and Robin Trenway, 45. Firefighters responded at 4:57 a.m. Tuesday morning to the full heat of flames surrounding the ranch home. The fire was extinguished at 6:26 a.m. The deaths of Jonathan and Robin Trenway were confirmed in the wreckage, along with a miniature schnauzer that neighbors have verified was the family’s pet dog. Due to the close proximity of the house fire that claimed the lives of Jean and Arthur Black late Saturday night, police officials are investigating links between the cases and the suspicion of arson.

  “I just came from Alisha’s service,” said Donna Brown, a next-door neighbor who stood down the street as fire officials fought the flames. “They were such an amazing family. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to do them harm.”

  Firefighters and police officials will comb the debris over the coming days in search of clues and indication of suspects. The effects of Caleb Raynor, the gunman in last week’s Lewis and Clark High School shooting, remain under investigation despite Raynor’s death by self-inflicted wound. His home was searched early this morning for indication of an accomplice and another Lewis and Clark student, Eric Greeley, 16, has been brought into the Midvale County police department for questioning.

  “We can’t imagine who could possibly do something like this,” said Darrell Heddick, a neighbor of the Trenway family. “At any time, anywhere, but especially after what’s happened in our community.”

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF FIRE INVESTIGATION TERMS

  Q: What is a fire point?

  A: The temperature at which a substance will burn for at least five seconds beyond ignition by an open flame.

  Q: What is a flash point?

  A: The point a few degrees below the fire point, wherein ignitable vapors are present.

  Q: What is heat?

  A: The release of energy when a substance changes from a higher to a lower state.

  Q: What is combustion?

  A: A rapid oxidation accompanied by heat and light.

  Q: What is a catalyst?

  A: A substance that affects combustion but itself remains unchanged.

  Q: What is specific gravity?

  A: The weight of a material in reference to the weight of water.

  Q: What is vapor density?

  A: The weight of a material in reference to the weight of air.

  Q: What is sublime?

  A: When a substance has a flash point in a solid state and changes from a solid to a vapor, or gas, at an ordinary temperature.

  Q: What is a true emergency?

  A: A time in which a single person’s actions affect all involved.

  Q: What are the three stages of fire?

  A: Smoldering at first, then free burning, then smoldering again, much like grief.

  THE WORLD AS IT IS

  WE REMEMBER THE headlines that morning. Capitalized font. Every letter screaming arson. We remember the speculations that filled the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, pages that have yellowed in our basements and storage bins across the years, pages we still scan sometimes as if the past were a concrete object to transpose and set right. We remember how the igniting of the Trenways’ home eradicated every shred of coincidence, how the flames that stretched high into the speckled halo over Midvale County let us know at last that nothing was random, that there was fault in this, that we could point beyond ourselves and identify a reason. We remember a ratcheted frenzy of media, a shattering of numb grief: how with the taking away of so many students and teachers and now four parents of two lost children our town began to suspect an arsonist, someone carrying out a schematic we couldn’t understand or know, someone with potential ties to Caleb Raynor and a plan he was unable to enact alone.

  Caleb Raynor: a mystery. No trail of bread crumbs left behind him.

  Caleb Raynor’s family: his mother and father and younger brother pleading only privacy and solace. Their home searched floor to ceiling regardless, investigated for any hint of accelerants or explosives.

  And Eric Greeley: taken into custody. Brought in again for questioning, Caleb Raynor’s only known collaborator despite Eric’s protests that they’d grown apart, that they hadn’t spoken for months and that Eric only wanted to be left alone.

  The Blacks. The Trenways. Two incidents that in their succession and similarity signified a crime we could latch on to and solve. Two incidents: a pattern. A devastation with cause. A mystery to be seized upon and unraveled, a tangibility with reason and motive. This was an opportunist, the news channels blared: local newscasts of KSDK and KDNL up to national broadcasts of CNN and MSNBC that had been circling around St. Louis for almost a week, now-constant coverage spouting accusations that someone in Midvale County preyed upon tragedy and the shared burden of our sorrow. News anchors in St. Louis and across the country speculated an accomplice with links to Caleb Raynor, some culprit skulking unseen through the ravages of our town.

  And among the speculations, anger: erupted from the germ of sorrow. At the audacity of two blazes, linked by proximity and by pattern and target, and by the unashamed disregard for a period of tenuous mourning. How there were so many funerals. How they had just began. How there was nothing more we could muster in hollowing ourselves out. A rage broke out in the newspaper and on television: that someone could take away so many children and that someone else could take away again, targeting the same community and the same families in a disaster of flames.

  Zola saw it in her mother’s face at the edge of the front yard, where she stood as the fire stretched above the Trenways’ house. Her jaw taut, her teeth clenched. The realization of a lack of coincidence. That someone caused this. That whoever it was had been here. Someone sliding down the street with a match, with a can of gasoline, a torch, an explosive. Someone who’d passed so close to her own house, her daughter inside. Someone who’d stood before the Trenways’ home in the darkest tilt of a half-moon and had regarded it with purpose, had slipped inside, had lit everything on fire.

  Zola walked to the edge of the lawn. She stood wit
h her mother, their neighbors nearby in their own orbits of grass. She saw the fire trucks shuttle down the street, the ambulances and police cars and news vans, a Doppler effect bending out of tune. She heard the spray of hoses, the hiss of water. She watched the smoke rise in sheets above the tree line as the flames diminished and the sun slowly rose, a muted circle of light through an early haze of fog and smoke. Her mother sat beside her on the front porch, both of her arms around Zola’s shoulders. The flames slowly went out. Their neighbors moved between their lawns and their homes, stares fixed down the street, eyes shadowed with lack of sleep. The newspaper came regardless, a white van snaking as far as it could down the street before reaching a blockade of police tape, small tubes shooting from the van’s window and landing with soft weight on every square of grass. Zola grabbed the newspaper from the front yard, a plastic-wrapped cylinder wet with dew. On the living room couch she unfurled the paper and stared at the headline. ARSON. Zola still in her pajamas, the phantom burn of cinders still pulsing against her cheeks. Her mother sat in the armchair beside her and turned on the television, toggling between local newscasts and the national reports. A culprit. Some specter that had followed Zola and her classmates from the hallways of Lewis and Clark and spilled out the library windows, onto the streets, into their neighborhoods and their homes. Zola glanced out the window. She thought of what Matt had said only hours before about the Blacks. That nothing was left. She set the newspaper on the carpet and curled herself tightly into the cushions of the couch, the bolded headline blaring up at her.

  Christina didn’t see the headline until long after she woke, the sun already high and intermittent behind clouds. Her father was at work, her brother in the living room, where the sound of video games thundered. She heard only the occasional rumbling of weapons, a combat game centered on zombies. Ryan hadn’t called. She turned the dial of her stereo louder, the same album playing in Ryan’s parked car when she lost her virginity that summer. The mini-golf course closed down for the night where they’d played eighteen holes through rotating windmills and across small ponds. His car the only one left, hidden beside a row of trees far from the parking lot’s floodlights that drew curtains of fluttering moths and mosquitoes. The windows up, the stereo billowing softly through the car. The weight of his body as it pushed into her. A flash and a pain and a flood of sweat and salt, songs that scissored her to hear now in her bedroom but allowed her escape from the hallways, from the school and Henry Park’s gaze and the sound and scent of detonated gunpowder. Christina heard the sudden silence of the console down the hallway. The static drone of the television flipped on, followed by the murmuring of talking pundits. She heard the padding of her brother’s footsteps running over carpet toward her bedroom, the gasping of his breath telling her to come quickly, his face already lined with fear.

  Nick learned the news on Sarah’s doorstep. He hadn’t bothered to look at the Post-Dispatch that morning. A cup of orange juice instead. A Toaster Strudel. His brother had read a comic book beside him at the kitchen table, his parents at work, the telephone off the hook until after breakfast, when he knew his parents might call, when they might begin to worry and check in. He’d researched fire investigation upon returning from the funeral after what Matt had told him, that there was nothing left. He’d fallen into a heavy sleep and hadn’t woken until the sun pushed through his window blinds, a day already begun, a day he promised he would spend away from the computer. A day without research, though he yearned to dig deeper into what Matt had told him. A day to go to Sarah’s house rather than read the news, to take her from the murk of her bedroom. Sarah’s mother opened the door. She looked at Nick and before he could ask he saw the newscast behind her on the living room television, a headline and the burnt remains of a house. He stepped into Sarah’s bedroom. She lay on her side beneath the sheets, her back to the door. He pushed off his shoes. He climbed under the covers in his jeans and sweatshirt. He coiled his body against hers and wrapped his arms around her shoulders and did not think of Caroline’s funeral, that Sarah had let him go alone.

  Matt awoke in his basement to the howl of the telephone and a disorienting lack of light. In the dark he remembered Caroline’s profile, what he’d carried around in his pocket all night before giving it to Zola. He wondered if she’d read it after he’d walked home from her house, the heavy sky pressing its weight down upon him. He’d walked straight up the street’s spine, no one out but the faint blinking of lampposts. He’d let the sound of his shoes striking the pavement guide him home and had fallen immediately into bed. He slept heavily, a sleep without dreams, a waking that left him confused by the thick weight of the darkness around him. The phone blared on and he heard the tread of footsteps above him. He couldn’t believe he’d been able to sleep. The ringing stopped and then there was only the lack the ringing had left, and then Matt heard his father shout God fucking damn it, his voice permeating the floorboards.

  Matt was afraid to move. The quiet following his father’s voice: total and absolute. He pulled on a T-shirt and climbed the stairs and stood at the edge of the kitchen, where his father sat at the table in boxers, his head in his hands.

  Dad?

  His father only looked up and Matt knew. He knew his father was holding on to a moment, a silent beat in the kitchen before getting up, before pulling on his uniform and driving to the station, before facing something Matt already knew would be awful.

  Dad, what is it?

  His father rubbed a hand against the stubble of his chin. Matt heard his mother’s footsteps approaching from the hallway. She turned on the kitchen light and blinked through the harsh fluorescence at both of them.

  Jon and Robin Trenway, he told her. House fire.

  Matt and his mother knew the list of names. They knew Alisha’s funeral was the night before, a listing in the Post-Dispatch. They knew her father from the vigil, his voice soft and trembling across the crowd. They knew where the Trenways lived, down the street from Zola and her mother. Matt knew he’d walked past their house just hours before, on his way home through the moonlit fog of an empty night.

  I have to go. Matt’s father stood. He slipped down the hallway toward the bedroom closet where his uniform waited, leaving Matt and his mother standing in the stark light of the kitchen.

  We were not angry like our parents, our community, the news outlets of our city and nation. We lay in bed and on couches and sprawled upon the carpet before televisions. We read the entire newspaper. Ongoing coverage of our high school. Speculations of criminal intent. Things we knew and would never know, a drowning out of other news. Catholic Church allegations, sexual misconduct of priests. Continued coverage of the war. The Iraqi Governing Council. Debates of gun laws and foreign policy and military spending. We sat through an entire day of taking in or else blocking out the world, a day of silence and inertia and the intermittent racing of sirens beyond our living room windows. We peeled oranges. We drank coffee and black tea. We tried to read books. We read the same paragraphs over and over again. We looked back over our freshman and sophomore yearbooks. Photographs of everyone we’d lost. We couldn’t stop ourselves from wondering what connected Caroline Black’s home and Alisha Trenway’s house beyond the obvious, what made each fire an accident or arson. We waited for our parents. We waited for news, for any answer beyond speculation. But past dark, past the shouting matches on every news broadcast for gun control and heightened school security and increased police presence on our streets, we sank quietly into our sheets and watched the sky beyond our bedroom windows and thought only of Alisha Trenway, her parents, the charred skeleton of their house. We watched the empty ceiling above us and felt our chests cramp, the clenched fist of a muscle tightening.

  NICK LAY WITH Sarah in her bedroom until he felt her fall asleep by the rhythm of her breathing. The news nothing but further reason for her to stay inside. She’d barely spoken all morning but had run her hands over his face again and again until she fell asleep, as if reminding herself that h
e’d made it out of the high school safe. He’d said nothing of Caroline Black’s funeral. That he’d wished she were there. He slipped out of her bedroom toward lunchtime and out the front door with her mother’s wish to be safe and drive carefully. He navigated the car through Midvale’s streets, around the traffic of so many news vans. Above the whir of the car, the radio off, he heard the chopped sound of a helicopter circling above. An aerial view, he knew, of the damage to the Trenways’ house only miles away. He imagined the house swarmed by police. He wondered if Matt’s dad was among them. He assumed Zola was at home only houses away.

  Nick drove without aim and wondered what Matt and Zola stored in their brains. Flashbulb memories. Their response to fear. A means of preserving aversion to danger, an animal instinct to remember harm and recoil. Caleb passing beyond the classroom windows: all the memory Nick needed for a lifetime. He couldn’t quiet the image, couldn’t keep himself from staying awake and seeing it on his ceiling. He had nowhere to be. He felt himself turn the car toward Lewis and Clark High School.

  He hadn’t passed by it again throughout the past week. He’d averted his route, the high school only a half mile from Sarah’s house. He let himself drive toward it. He imagined a bird’s-eye view of Midvale County: three crime scenes. Police still puzzling through the debris of Caroline Black’s house. A new squad flooding the Trenway house at the corner of Zola’s street. And the school, surely crawling with cops despite the news turning toward two homes on fire. He was to research for yearbook, what he’d done in past years: inclusion of current events, world news. He was at a loss. They were the current event. Their entire town the world news. He rounded the bend and Lewis and Clark High came into view past Sarah’s neighborhood and Nick saw a congregation of vans parked in the lot. Midvale County Police Department crime units and police cars and vans branded by the telltale letters of FBI, an entire team of officials filing through the halls and retracing a path and cleaning up what Nick couldn’t imagine lay beyond the school’s brick walls.