by Anne Valente
He pulled over to the curb. The engine idled. He watched two police officers in plastic gloves duck beneath yellow crime tape and enter the school. Nick closed his eyes: a hooded figure passing beyond a window carrying a gun. Animal instinct. How the body held on to fear. How humans weren’t alone, a unit he remembered on animal memory in sophomore year biology. How the octopus brain held half a billion neurons, more closely linked to humans than to the cuttlefish and snails that shared its DNA. How under pressure the octopus could transform its short-term memory to long-term recall, a response similar to human fear. How through an entire winter certain birds could recollect the specific location of up to thirty thousand buried nuts for survival. How chimpanzees memorized numbers. How captive elephants remembered one another after thirty years of separation. How wild elephants recalled water sources and knew where to dowse down into the earth. How elephants grieved as well, what hadn’t been in the classroom lesson, what Nick had looked up later on his own computer. How they shed real tears. How they buried their dead. Nick watched the high school beyond the car’s windows and tried to imagine so many bodies be carried away from inside its doors.
The newspaper’s list of funerals: Nick knew Principal Jeffries’s service would be tomorrow and that they all would go. He imagined Matt’s father somewhere inside the Trenway house or at the police station in his forensics lab, poring over what little remained. What Matt had told him: nothing left. No bodies. Only ash. He shifted the car into drive and knew he didn’t want to go home. Just blank ceilings and walls. No evidence. No outline of a body chalked upon a bed, outlines he knew filled the classrooms and hallways of the high school less than a hundred yards beyond his windshield.
MATT WAITED ON the front porch all morning for his father, unsure when it was that he’d return. Matt would work that afternoon, a short shift. Something to get him back in the theater and out of the house. He’d read the newspaper already, a curled tube that had been thrown to their lawn just moments after his father’s Impala pulled out of the driveway. He drank his coffee black. He read every article, every editorial on gun control and school security, and then a sports feature for diversion on the St. Louis Rams’ 36–0 win the night before against the Atlanta Falcons, a Monday Night Football game he wondered if anyone in the city had watched. He lingered over the front page. The expansive font. A question of arson he couldn’t answer. His mother had watched the news in the other room, a steady stream of commentary and vague reporting that billowed into the kitchen, on-scene coverage from the Trenways’ house.
He pulled on an old St. Louis Cardinals sweatshirt and sat on the front porch and watched the light shift, the sun crawling up the sky amid puffs of thick clouds. The television’s hum drifted through the front door’s screen, a white noise that diminished and eventually stopped. He heard footsteps approaching. The screen door banged open and his mother joined him, the sun leaving them cold when it dipped behind clouds.
When will he be back? Matt asked.
With something like this, I don’t know.
A crisp breeze scattered leaves from the trees to the front lawn, a sound like dry paper. Matt wondered what his mother’s daily life was, here at the house, what it had been for her to not work through the entirety of his childhood and to wait every day for his father to come home. Matt knew his father’s schedule, knew he so often went in early so he could be home by the time Matt returned from school. A family man. The kind of man Matt thought would embrace and support his son coming out. The kind of man who wouldn’t walk down a hallway and close a door. How his father had never apologized but had only softened his temper in the past two years. How his father wanted to be home, to be nearby. How Matt had let his actions speak for words.
What has he told you? Matt asked.
Everything he’s told you. I wish I had answers, honey. No one knows what the hell is going on.
Matt looked at his mother. She rarely swore. She let him spew as many fucks and Jesus Christs and goddamnits as he needed but she almost always kept her calm. The only other time she’d broken her poise and let her guard down: when he’d heard his parents arguing upstairs after he’d told them and he could hear nothing of their words except his mother’s voice ringing through the floorboards, What the hell kind of parent are you.
I can’t imagine it, she said. Their daughter, now this. Matt felt his mother’s hand on his shoulder. I hope you’re all right, Matt. I hope you’d tell us if you weren’t.
You shouldn’t worry.
We’d take you to see someone, if it would help.
Matt knew what was coming. As soon as he returned to whatever school wasn’t really their school, a horde of grief counselors would descend upon everyone he knew, every friend and classmate, a line of quickly hired psychologists who’d be available if anyone needed to talk. If anyone needed to chat. Discuss. Ruminate. Feel their feelings.
Thanks, he said. But I’m doing okay.
You say the word and we’ll help, his mother said.
The sun filtered through the tree line, spilling fractals of light across the porch, and Matt felt broken. That his parents loved him. That they would do whatever it took.
He pressed his fingers to his forehead. I could use some aspirin.
It’s on the grocery list. I haven’t had the chance to go this week.
He stood. I can go grab some. At the store. Anything else you need.
Matt’s mother watched him rise. Maybe you should stay here, she said. Just rest. I’ll go. Maybe what you need is to just sit awhile.
Matt didn’t want to stay. He didn’t want to sit on the front porch with nothing but the singing of chickadees and the passing of cars and an oppressive stream of cold early light. But her face was earnest. She wanted to do this for him if she could do nothing else.
I’ll pick you up some mellowcremes. The candy pumpkins. I won’t be gone long.
Matt watched her pull out of the driveway. He imagined his father at work and could only make assumptions: that his father was hunched over a desk in a lab that was too bright, fluorescent bulbs bearing down on so many photographs and reports scattered across a steel table’s surface. The Black report would be reexamined. It would have to be. To know what linked them: another incident, an identical house fire.
Matt didn’t have long. He grabbed his coffee mug and went inside. His mother would be back in a half hour, forty-five minutes at most. He dropped the mug in the dishwater and moved down the hallway to the bathroom, a medicine cabinet hiding a pouch of bobby pins. He pulled the mirror open before he could look at himself. He took a cosmetic bag from the middle shelf and drew a single bobby pin, the only one he would need. He made his way to his father’s office. To the single locked drawer inside his desk. Matt let his mind fall blank as he bent the bobby pin and broke it in half. He jiggled the two halves together until he felt the lock release. He closed his eyes. He let go of the pins. He pulled open the drawer.
Inside the drawer was every document he expected.
An incident report from October 12, 2003. 3:54 A.M. Police response, fire engines. Dozens of photographs of the Blacks’ house, of the carcasses of armchairs, tables, entire rooms. Photographs of what he assumed was the master bedroom, the bed frame and the mattress scorched. No remains. Nothing at all. Only the faintest outline of two figures. Two autopsy reports from the medical examiner’s office, filled out even though they’d found nothing. Both reports cleared, eradicated of foul play, indicating only where the bodies might have lain by imprints in the mattress. Both reports including a diagram of the human body regardless, figures Matt pored over like the drawings of a textbook.
He picked up accompanying photographs, his fingers gliding across everything in the house that had burned. All of them photocopies. So many scans. He knew his father never risked losing originals, that everything he brought home was a facsimile of something else. Matt held them as if they were the objects themselves, as if his hands would streak with ash when he pulled them away. He drew the
images close. Squinted his eyes. Made out the shapes of what were once countertops, a coffeemaker, so many broken windows. Matt sat in the desk’s swivel chair and leaned back. He didn’t know how to read them. How to glean from the documents an answer, something Nick would have been far better at deciphering. He saw only no foul play and clean, nothing his father hadn’t already told him. The only thing he gained was another afterimage, silhouettes in the padding of a mattress, two more bodies he wouldn’t forget.
Eric Greeley back in policy custody for questioning. Matt wondered if his father would see him at the station and what connection there could possibly be. Caleb’s plan inconceivable and another plot beyond it, past the realm of plausibility. Far more possible: suicide, what Zola had suggested only in a whisper. Alisha Trenway’s funeral just hours before her house burned, a home as quiet as any other when he’d passed down so many empty streets. Matt looked at the documents spread out before him. Wondered what he could possibly ask his father about them, files he was never meant to see. And his father, a man Matt felt he could ask anything though there was still a thin wall, a lack of apology, a storming down the hall.
Matt knew how to pick a lock but not how to refasten one. His father would come home and sit down at the desk and pull out his key, a key hidden in some place Matt had never found, a key that would open nothing, the lock already released. Matt scanned his brain. An excuse. He felt tired. There was no lie to tell. He leaned farther back in the chair, the leather creaking beneath his weight, and stayed until he heard his mother’s keys in the back door then the rustle of plastic grocery bags in the kitchen.
I’m home, she called. A loud thump. The bags on the counter.
He wanted to help her but the chair held him. He wanted to say he was sorry. He wanted to gather the documents from the desk and slide them into the drawer.
She found him still seated at the desk, a plastic carton of pumpkin spice creamer in her hands. She met his gaze. Her eyes moved down and she saw the photocopies on the desk and her smile faded.
What’s this?
Matt looked away.
I bought you some coffee creamer, she said. Her eyes on the desk. She lowered her hands. Turned away down the hall and he followed.
She busied herself with putting away groceries. Halloween cake mix. A jar of sprinkles he could see from the doorway of the kitchen. Mellowcremes and Sour Patch Kids. Coca-Cola. She pulled the aspirin from the last bag and slid it across the counter.
Mom, I’m sorry.
Don’t tell me. Tell it to your father. Tell him when he comes home.
I needed to know. I needed to know something.
And did you find it? Her eyes flashed at him. Did you find whatever the hell it was you were looking for?
Mom. He cupped the bottle of aspirin in his hands.
We are trying so hard, she said. The world like this. We are trying so hard to protect you.
A world like this: Matt looked past her to the kitchen window, light streaming through the panes. October sun. A world like this: pumpkin patches. Haunted hayrides. Ghost walks and apple cider and the scent of firewood, what autumn in Midvale had always been, what a world like this could have meant. Matt saw it in his mother’s face, in the grimace of her rage burned down to sorrow. That her anger was for him. For him, always. That the world wasn’t what she’d wanted to give him. That she could come home to photographs and reports inside her own home, that she couldn’t keep the world beyond its walls.
I’ll put them away, he said. I’ll put them back and you’ll never see them.
I already saw them, she said. I already saw them and so did you.
There was nothing left to say. He moved into the kitchen. He stood next to her and felt the tremble of her shoulders trying to shut it all in, to not break down, to hold away the world though he knew there was nothing either of them could do to keep it out.
MATT WORKED THE afternoon concessions at Midvale Cinemas, his mother silent on the couch when he left. The War on Terror book in her hands. He didn’t want to leave her but knew he had to leave the house. Some sense of normalcy, work an easy return, no films needing construction until Thursday night. People filed in, the crowd light. The scent of popcorn and burnt butter overwhelmed the theater lobby. Intolerable Cruelty. Kill Bill Vol. I. A Tarantino movie he’d wanted to see, a movie he should have built last Thursday night. He stood sipping a large Mountain Dew to keep himself awake when Nick entered the lobby doors and made his way toward the concession stand.
One student for School of Rock?
I’m not here for the movies, Nick said.
Matt glanced toward the back, his manager out of sight. He scooped ice into a paper cup and handed Nick a free Dr Pepper.
I can’t believe this news, Nick said.
I know. I’m trying not to think about it.
Is your dad there? Nick asked. At the Trenways’ house?
I don’t know. He left the house early this morning.
Has he told you anything else?
Not really. He was up when I got home last night. He only said they were looking at the electrical wiring of the Blacks’ house.
The paper said Eric Greeley is back in for questioning.
I saw that. My dad didn’t say anything about it this morning.
It seems weird. I know Eric knew him. But Eric never seemed like a bad guy.
A customer approached, a middle-aged man in glasses and a thin sweater, and Nick stepped to the side for Matt to take his order, a large soda and buttered popcorn. The man walked across the lobby and toward the ticket taker and Nick slid back to the glass counter, his soda cup already perspiring in his hands.
I was at Sarah’s this morning.
How’s she doing?
Not great. She didn’t see anything, but she’s not great.
Is anyone? I’m only here because I can’t stay at home anymore. It’s too much time. Too much news.
I know. I had to get out, too. I’ve just been driving around. I figured you’d be here.
I’ll be here on Thursday, too, Matt said. Two shifts this week.
He recalled all the times Nick had come to the theater late on Thursdays while he built the weekend’s new releases, Matt still in his work uniform and Nick sometimes in sweatpants, Matt offering him the day’s stale popcorn or a forgotten bag of Twizzlers as they watched the weekend’s films together inside the dark of the projection booth.
You want to see something? Matt said. Free ticket. On me.
Nick hesitated. I drove past the school.
Matt felt his face change. Just now?
It was filled with police.
I don’t know anything about that. I only know what my dad said. That they’re working to retrace Caleb’s path.
Do you know why? It seems irrelevant now.
Matt felt tired. A morning’s frenzy to seek and find, long gone. The need to know drained away amid the hum of soda machines and a popcorn maker. A return to normalcy. One broken up by Nick’s insistence on talking about the school and two fires.
I don’t know why, Matt said. Look, I should get back to work.
Matt, I’m sorry. But I couldn’t help it. I had to drive by the school.
Why?
Because I have questions. Don’t you?
Matt said nothing, his palms pressed flat on the counter.
Why those houses? Why those specific families? It just doesn’t make sense. And also that there’s nothing left. No bodies. That seems impossible.
My dad thought it was weird, too. But what do you want me to say?
I don’t want you to say anything. Really. I just hope you’re doing okay.
Matt made himself smile. Thanks for coming by.
I should get home. Thanks for the soda. Let me know if your dad tells you anything when he gets home.
Matt watched Nick leave the theater, through the double doors and into the afternoon light. It pained him to be rude but he felt exhausted, far beyond a lack of sleep. He watched people w
alk in, most of them alone. A few faces he thought he recognized from school, teenagers in other years, a few young parents taking their children to see Seabiscuit, a holdover from summer. Nick driving past the school: what Matt had deliberately avoided. He imagined the office at home. His father would be home soon.
A man entered the theater lobby that Matt recognized: Alexis Thurber’s dad.
He was relatively young, in his mid-thirties, a man Matt recalled from when fathers had visited their second-grade classroom at Des Peres Elementary for Take Your Dad to Class Day. Matt didn’t remember all of the fathers. He remembered that his own father hadn’t come, one of many investigations he couldn’t put on hold. But he remembered Mr. Thurber, a man who at the time must have been in his mid-twenties. Matt remembered that he worked as an independent electrician, that he set his own hours, that Alexis beamed from the desk beside Matt’s when her father stood before the room and explained what he did.
Matt watched him cross the lobby, move straight to the theaters. No soda, no popcorn. Matt tried not to notice the sunken circles that rimmed the undersides of his eyes. He handed his ticket to the taker and receded into a theater. Matt thought of him alone in the theater, a hollow cavern of sound and dark. Matt wondered where Alexis had been inside the school. If she’d been scared. If there’d been anyone beside her. A girl he barely knew beyond sharing an elementary school classroom and knowing who her boyfriend was, Russ Hendricks another junior Matt had seen at the vigil, but who felt more real to him here, her father at the cinema, her father walking into the shelter of a theater where he could silence himself to everything. He wondered where Mr. Thurber was when he received a phone call, when his life split in half. He thought of the fires. Two homes. Two sets of parents who’d lost a child. Two homes with potential commonalities that none of the other families shared though Matt couldn’t help imagining more fires for a split second, the possibility of an arsonist claiming more homes in flames. He watched the gaping dark of the theater doors where Mr. Thurber had disappeared and wondered if he was in danger.
