Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down

by Anne Valente

  IT WASN’T UNTIL early evening, long after Matt returned home, that his father’s car at last pulled into the driveway. Matt peered at his mother across the living room in an armchair where she continued her book on President Bush. She’d said little when he returned home. Waiting for his father to come home, he knew. She glanced up but continued reading as Matt’s father entered the kitchen and set his keys on the counter.

  His father didn’t call to them. Matt had left the documents splayed across his father’s desk. He heard his father open the fridge and then nothing, no clinking of bottles or the hiss of a cracked beer. No clatter of pickle jars. No sizzle of poured soda. Matt imagined his father staring into the fridge, an abyss of choice. And then he was in the living room, boots removed, his police uniform creased. He looked at both of them, then moved down the hallway and Matt heard the carpeted weight of his father’s footsteps stop in front of the office. There was no sound in the house but the rattle of the refrigerator’s ice machine echoing from the kitchen. Matt’s mother refused to look up from her book, even as they both heard the footsteps turn and head back toward them, even as Matt’s father was in the living room standing between them.

  Who opened it? he said.

  Matt’s mother didn’t answer. She set down her book.

  I did it, Matt said. I picked the lock. I needed to know.

  Matt waited for the blow, the hurricane of his father’s temper.

  Come with me, his father said. He looked only at Matt, not his mother. Matt rose from the couch but his father was already gone, already hastening down the hallway to the office.

  When Matt entered the room, his father was already seated at the desk.

  Pull up a chair, he said. His voice all at once calm, though he would not look at his son. Matt wheeled a chair to the edge of the desk. He sat down next to his father.

  What do you want to know, his father said. A statement instead of a question.

  Dad.

  If there’s something you want to know, you should know it.

  Matt couldn’t read his father’s voice. A broken barometer. He couldn’t tell if within it lay a challenge or a pleading. Matt pointed toward Jean Black’s autopsy report.

  This diagram, he said. His index finger traced the anatomy of the drawing. I want to know what you see here. I want to know how you know this isn’t foul play, especially when there’s nothing left.

  You can’t see it here. Matt’s father shuffled the papers. He pulled out an image of burned remains, what had once been a breathing body. Matt regarded the speckled shape lying on what looked like concrete, a surface he’d never seen inside a home.

  Is this from the Blacks’ house?

  No. Stock footage from arson investigation protocol. Even without a complete body, we have their outlines. The shape of their bodies in the mattress, how they died.

  Matt looked at the photograph his father held before him. He didn’t know what he’d expected of burnt skin: blackened ash, the residue of cinder, the same cinders of his family’s fireplace when they’d burned logs down to dust. He didn’t expect the clear shape of a body. He didn’t expect the lucid contours of limbs and a torso, the familiar outline of a nose and a mouth. He didn’t expect the patches of pink and red, the outline of muscles and tendons beneath the char. Human tissue like gold leaf. Fine and thin. Flashes of color amid the ash, the tips of icebergs, so much more muscle and mass beneath the black that Matt did not want to imagine.

  You can’t see it as readily on an autopsy diagram, his father said. But look at this photo compared to the outlines on the Blacks’ mattress. Compare it to what we found.

  Matt wanted to close his eyes but felt himself fixed. His father held the photograph of the Blacks’ mattress against the stock picture and pointed to the arms on the stock photograph. If you look here, he said, the arms are contracted. Pulled into the torso. He pointed to the photograph of the Blacks’ mattress, the outlines of two figures curled into themselves beside one another. The outlines, even without physical evidence, resembled the shape of the body in the stock photograph. Matt could see the match.

  Jean and Arthur Black, they died by fire, his father said. There was no foul play involved. No one tried to keep them in the house while it burned.

  How do you know? Matt asked.

  His father’s finger traced the outlines. Unless someone rendered them unconscious, which is unlikely given the way they were found, no one tried to keep them in the house while it burned. Pugilistic stance, he said. Over time, the body curls into the fetal position when exposed to high heat. The fingers are drawn into the palms, the legs to the torso. These two died by fire. Not by something else. Nothing tied them down. They never tried to escape.

  Matt leaned close to the photos. He looked between them. The curvature of the body a mirror image for the ghosted coils outlined in the mattress.

  How do you know someone didn’t just catch them by surprise? Matt said. Burned down the whole house before the Blacks could react?

  We’re still working on that. It’s a possibility.

  How would you know?

  The origin of fire, his father said. Burn patterns. Where it started, and how it burned. He pointed to the mattress. If you look here, given the level of damage, this is the worst room in the house. The fire started here. We just need to know what started it.

  What could have started it? Matt asked. And what difference does it make?

  Faulty wiring, his father said. An unattended candle. Those things are blameless. We’re looking for evidence of accelerants, igniters, flammable fluids in the burn pattern of the fire. We’re looking for multiple points of origin, which would indicate that a fire was lit in many places. But here. His father pointed to the mattress. Here, there was just one origin. This bedroom. This bed.

  Matt looked at the mattress, the outline of Caroline’s parents a fairy ring upon it.

  How do you know someone didn’t just douse the bed with lighter fluid? Just once? Then flick a match and walk away?

  We don’t know that. It’s unlikely. But now, with all of this, we just don’t know.

  All of this. Matt wanted to ask. He wanted to ask what they’d found at the Trenways’ house, what was similar and different, whether there’d been anything left of the bodies and where they could lay blame. Those things are blameless. His father had said it. Outlets and wiring, the neglect of a candle. Matt imagined Arthur Black lighting a pillar on the bedside table for his daughter after the funeral. Matt imagined him falling asleep, the flame still held in his gaze, the last light he saw.

  Anything else? his father said.

  Matt hesitated to ask. Why Eric Greeley? Why did the police bring him back in?

  That’s not my investigation, son. I don’t know. Probably just brought him in for further questioning, all of this right on the tail of what happened at the high school.

  What about suicide? Is that even on the table?

  Double suicides? At both homes? We looked into it initially, but it’s unlikely.

  Matt looked at his father. He’d been gone all day. He heard it in his voice: that this was his job, but it was not without grief. So many photographs and reports, thousands of images without answer. Documents his father would take back to work, the lock broken. Documents Matt knew he would never see again.

  Anything else?

  Matt shook his head.

  We want you to use this time, his father said. We want you to take care of yourself. We want you to heal.

  His father gathered the photocopies, images Matt knew would stay in his brain regardless of being taken away.

  I’ll fix the lock, his father said and Matt heard quiet footsteps in the hallway heading back to the living room. His mother had heard everything. She’d seen the photos when she came home from the store, and now she knew what they meant.

  Matt wanted to ask about the Trenways’ house. He wanted to keep the photographs, the documents, to take them with him and show them to Nick. He wanted to know what
his father had seen. His father said nothing. Matt pulled the chair away from the desk and set it back in the corner. He left his father in the office, the photos still scattered like tornadoed remnants across the desk.

  PAST DARK MATT lay in his bed, the television upstairs pulsing through the ceiling above him. He pulled a small pipe to his mouth and inhaled. He knew his parents were watching the news, a constant stream, cycles on CNN and MSNBC that would keep everyone updated and tell them nothing. He couldn’t hear from the basement whether his parents spoke to one another amid the television’s drone, if his mother asked about the photographs. He remembered the last time they glued themselves to the news cycle, two years ago when he was fourteen and the planes hit the towers. He’d been let home early from school. His parents had come home and turned on the television. They didn’t speak. They’d watched smoke billow from the buildings, over and over.

  A scratching grated at the basement window, a noise Matt barely heard above the television’s indecipherable whir. A sound like a branch pulled across the panes though Matt knew there were no trees at the basement’s level. The scratching stopped. The sound of knuckle against glass. Matt sat up in his sheets and hid his pipe. He moved across the room to the bedroom’s small window and pulled back the curtain and saw Tyler’s face.

  Matt felt the seawall of his anger rise up and cage him from the window. He wanted to close the curtain. Or open the window, tell Tyler to go fuck himself. But he unlatched the window as he had so many nights across the summer: humidity pressed against the glass. A damp so thick Matt thought he could hold it. He’d pulled Tyler into his bedroom so many times and held him huddled in the night sweat of July heat before Tyler slipped back through the window once light tinged the horizon. Matt opened the window. The air was stark. Not the fluid lush of summer but a cool knife that sliced the room. Hey, Tyler said. Crouched in a sweatshirt, hood hiding his hair.

  Tyler crawled inside and Matt let him and they stood unmoving in the dark of the bedroom, Tyler’s face slashed by moonlight leaking through the open curtain. Matt looked at him and saw Caroline. Her heat on the carpet. Tyler fleeing down the hallway. Matt looked at Tyler and felt the impossible cage of his own skin. How he could not escape it. How he wanted to shed himself. How he ached to be new again. How he felt himself trapped in the bindings of his bones, his brain waves, the barrier of his cells. How despite his anger he felt his body preordained to forgive. To absolve, to take Tyler back, to feel nothing but desire, to be taken in. To know Tyler. To know what it was he saw, to dissolve into him entirely.

  It took you long enough, Matt said.

  Tyler moved toward him and Matt wanted to hit him, wanted to throw him to the ground. But Tyler touched his face and Matt let him. A nearness, unbearable. Tyler’s skin. He let himself be calmed. He let a hallway disappear. He let himself be held.

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF FIRE SCENE INVESTIGATION

  FIND A FIRE’S point of origin: trace the route from the least amount of damage to the most.

  Windows, doors, beam structures: checked. How glass breaks, the angle of sharding, an indication of speed and intensity of fire. Glass broken in the pattern of a half-moon: signification of rapid cooling.

  Smoke: a pattern documented by trace in material, a point of origin otherwise lost to dissipation. Film boiling: when vapor sifts between paint and wood and lifts one away from the other. Metal surfaces: color patterns an indication of fire temperature.

  An investigator must ask: Are the walls destroyed? What is their condition? Has the paint separated away? Are there burn patterns? Are the walls pushed in or out? Are there char patterns where the wall meets the floor or ceiling?

  Burn patterns on the floor: are they seamless? Do they indicate liquid accelerant, the flow of flammable fluid? Are there points of pooling? Are the floors nonporous? Is there a chance that liquid has evaporated? How deep is the grain of charring? How far down has flammability seeped? Is the flooring hardwood? Linoleum? Tile? Carpet?

  Detonation: an explosion. Search for indication of broken gas lines, sewer lines, hazardous storage of flammable items or medical oxygen.

  The area of heaviest burning: sweep the floors, the ceiling, every corner and every molding. Sweep the entirety for a cause, for the shifting trace of a spark.

  TO BE ALONE

  WEDNESDAY MORNING. OVERCAST. Slate sky, temperatures hovering in the low fifties. We awoke to nothing but the sound of cardinals and robins. The distant honking of Canadian geese flying south. No television hum, no sirens or reporters. Only the weak light of a clouded sky filtering through window blinds. We awoke to more memorials. We awoke to Principal Jeffries’s funeral, every last person at school invited.

  We anticipated community, a shared grieving. For our principal and for our entire school, so much like the vigil beneath starlight. So many people we hadn’t seen since Saturday night, an entire county, our peers and their parents and the one time we’d all been together before fracturing across a week to separate funerals and gatherings that centrifuged us away from a center.

  We knew from the paper which funerals had already occurred. Missy Hoffman, Monday afternoon. Nafisa Fields, late Tuesday. Mr. Rourke, our second-floor custodian, a quiet ceremony we heard little about for the media swarm around our peers. Deborah Smalls, the administrative assistant: her funeral equally hushed and also elsewhere, some other town, her family from a small community in southern Illinois. And today: Josh Zimmerman. Darren Beechwold. Alisha Trenway’s parents, a service listed quickly. Ceremonies we had no heart to attend. A spectacle for reporters and newscasters. Most of us hadn’t spoken since Caroline Black’s funeral and the cornfields beyond it. We still tasted whiskey. Slow wash of bourbon. A burn in the backs of our throats that across college campuses and after-work happy hours and so many years ahead at darkened kitchen tables would remind us always of a star-washed field and the hushed scratch of wind through corn silk.

  Principal Jeffries’s funeral: 11 A.M. A memorial service our parents would attend to pay their respects. Not only for how Principal Jeffries rushed from her office, how she tried to stop Caleb before he moved through the hallways and into our classrooms, but how she’d guided our school for the past twelve years well before any of us ever dreamed of high school, how she’d always said hello in the hallways, how she always knew our names. How we would speak hers a last time.

  Nick shuttled downtown early in the passenger seat of his father’s Dodge Caravan, a fogged sun crowning due east in front of them as they traveled down Highway 40, the central artery of the city. His father had several patients through the morning but would take him to the funeral after, his mother off from the law office for the day and at home with his brother. The funeral would be held in a downtown church, not far from the Barnes-Jewish Hospital obstetrics wing where Nick’s father worked. Nick said he would wait in the wing’s lobby. What he didn’t say: that he would try not to think of his computer at home, the information on fire scene investigation he’d found the night before. How even through a full night of searching there was still no explanation for a lack of remains. How he wondered about Matt’s father and what he’d seen, what Matt wouldn’t say at the movie theater. Nick found a chair apart from the waiting mothers and their partners and several lone patients, visibly pregnant. He opened a paperback copy of Crime and Punishment, the one book he was assigned to still read across Lewis and Clark’s weeklong hiatus. To keep him busy. To have something to speak of when everyone returned to class. They’d left Moby-Dick behind, too long to leave across a week. Nick bowed his head over the pages and found himself distracted.

  He rested his head against a window and through the glass heard the hum of the traffic below, a constant whoosh punctured by the din of car horns. The Gateway Arch distant beyond the buildings, a pillared portico curving above downtown, the only marker anyone who wasn’t from St. Louis associated with the city. He recalled ascending the monument with his family when he was in elementary school, the one requisite trip every c
hild who grew up in St. Louis made during their childhood. They traveled in an egg-shaped elevator that moved at right angles, an invisible staircase up the entire length of the curve. Nick’s brother had cried, the egg claustrophobic, the Arch swaying in the wind when they reached the top. Nick had gazed through the monument’s small windows shaped like Pez and barely visible from the street below and had listened to his brother crying. He’d looked down at the pencil-point people moving along the riverfront and was shocked with fear, as terrified as his brother. He watched a riverboat chug along the Mississippi, a toy in a bathtub, and thought we could all disappear.

  Nick looked down at his book. The eastern sun broke through clouds and cast shards of light directly into the waiting room. He read the same lines of the same chapter over and over again and finally closed the book. In the waiting room: new families. A mother with her baby, a child Nick guessed wasn’t more than six months old. The drone of a wall-mounted television running The Today Show, Matt Lauer reporting on a foul ball disruption in last night’s National League Championship Series game at Wrigley Field. Nick watched the footage of a man in glasses and a green turtleneck reach down for the ball, a Cubs fan reporters said had cost the Cubs the game. Nick’s attention moved to a woman sitting beneath the television, a worn copy of Parenting in her lap, a magazine she could practically balance on her belly. Nick imagined her life. Whether she had a partner, whether this was her first child, what she did for a living. Lawyer, like his mother. Social worker. Small-business owner. Whether she’d been watching the news every night thinking of the schools and its students and what would become of her newborn.