Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down

by Anne Valente

  Zola’s mother smiled thinly, but Zola saw them anyway: hard lines of worry. The sea of anxiety her mother hid with movies and takeout. Zola saw in her face the flashed creases that vanished in her daughter’s presence but would sink back past dark, when she retreated to her bed and lay awake imagining the school, the teenagers, the homes. How there was nothing in this world, no movie, no amount of love that could keep her daughter safe. How Zola threatened her mother with every breath she took by being alive, being here. By being something to take away.

  It’s okay, Mom. Do what you need to do. Go to work, get things done.

  I will. We both will. But tonight, let’s just watch movies.

  Zola chose Back to the Future and they settled into the couch with their takeout containers. A movie Zola hadn’t seen since childhood: a DeLorean. A time machine. She pulled a plastic fork to her mouth and heard a soft rustling in the kitchen. A sound like paper, then a metallic clang. She sat up, alert.

  Mom, what is that?

  It’s nothing. Go on, eat your food.

  The clanging sounded again, then a tapping.

  Mom, there’s something in the kitchen.

  Her mother sighed, set down her container. I wanted to wait until later.

  Wait for what?

  Well, I guess the cat’s out of the bag.

  Her mother disappeared into the kitchen. Zola followed her in and saw nothing, the counter and the kitchen table as they always were. Then she noticed her mother bent to the floor beside a small metal cage.

  Zola crept to the edge of the cage and peered in. A rabbit, a white baby lop. Pulling water from a dispenser, tugs that rang out a rapid-fire banging.

  Who’s this?

  I got her for you. I wanted her to be a surprise.

  Zola rested a finger against the bars. The rabbit edged toward her and sniffed.

  She’s only eight weeks old. I got her at that shelter where Matt’s mom volunteers.

  Did you see Matt’s mom?

  She wasn’t in. But I told them to send her our regards.

  Zola peeked in at the rabbit. What’s her name?

  You can name her yourself. I thought you could use a little friend.

  How long have you been planning this?

  It was an impulse. I picked her up after work, with everything she’ll need.

  Zola glanced beyond her mother and saw a bag of straw, cage bedding, an extra water bottle. You didn’t have to do this, she said.

  I know. I wanted to.

  The rabbit circled the cage. Can I hold her? Zola asked.

  Sure. The shelter said the more you hold her, the sooner she’ll get used to you.

  Zola reached for the cage door. Hesitated.

  Go ahead, her mother said. It’s okay.

  Zola unfastened the latch and pulled down the door, a series of bars that became a small ladder. Zola didn’t want to reach in. She waited for the rabbit to inspect the open door and climb out. She held her palms open. The rabbit nosed them. She waited for the rabbit to hop into her hands. When she felt the rabbit’s feet on her palms, she raised its body from the cage.

  See, she’s not afraid. The shelter said she was friendly.

  Zola secured her hands around the small body. She held the rabbit close, its nose trembling. She felt something inside herself open. She leaned her cheek soft against the fur and felt the rabbit’s pulse quicken. She pulled the rabbit to her chest, its heart shuddering against her hands.

  MATT CLEANED UP the projection booth alone, the only Midvale Cinemas employee left in the entire theater. It was late: past eleven. He’d waited past the final nine o’clock screening of the night to build the following day’s wide release. He’d taken in the buckets of new reel, unpacked them, spliced them together with the following week’s trailers, threaded them on the film platter. A 35mm print of Mystic River, a movie he’d watched from the booth as it blinked blue through the empty theater below. The filmstrips hummed through the platter’s tiers. Everything seamless. Everything ready for the first morning screenings, a movie he wished he hadn’t seen. A group of friends solving the murder of one of their daughters, all of them linked by something terrible in their own past. Matt had turned away halfway through and looked out the projection booth’s lone exterior window toward a dark sky full of stars he couldn’t see. Nick had accompanied him here so many times, and so had Tyler, crawling up into the booth and watching him work as he built the films, sometimes letting his hands slide beneath Matt’s work shirt, sometimes sitting with patience on the floor until Matt threaded the strips and the movie began. The booth was empty, always. Space only for one folding chair at most. Space only for a projectionist and not his partner, never intended for the beginnings of love.

  Matt locked up the projection booth and moved down to the theater lobby, wide-open and vacant. He wondered what he’d ignored. If he’d failed Tyler somehow. Despite his anger, if there was any space for imagining what he’d done and not what had been done to him. The same as his father, how he’d thought his father couldn’t talk to him. Given the chance, how it was Matt himself who couldn’t speak. Moonlight flooded the panorama of the lobby’s glass windows, a half-moon expanding toward full. Matt heard the echo of his own footsteps as he secured the concession stand and made his way toward the front doors. He locked them behind him, the night biting as he stepped into its stark wind. His Fiesta, the only car left. Somewhere in the police station while he’d scooped ice and poured sodas and threaded a filmstrip Eric Greeley was being questioned. Nodes strapped to a polygraph. Matt huddled into the hatchback, the air cold inside its doors. He could see his breath. Winter on its way in only weeks. He started the car and imagined an arsonist beyond the car’s doors. A book of matches. A can of gasoline. No evidence at the Blacks’ house. No foul play. Everything his father had told him. No answers, not anywhere, the moon above the shape of a question.

  He turned his car toward home but found himself driving aimlessly through the streets. Suburban roads he knew like the cadence of his own heart, roads deserted of other vehicles at this hour except the occasional police car passing by. Keeping watch. Patrolling each neighborhood. Looking for any telltale sign of what didn’t belong. Matt passed Paul’s Books and the Dierbergs where his family always shopped for groceries and the turn toward Zola’s neighborhood, her quiet street. He let himself make a left. He passed by her house, the downstairs windows still illumined with light. She was inside somewhere with her mother. He thought to stop in but knew it was far too late. He continued driving toward the corner and saw the police tape before he reached the stop sign. He pulled over to the curb beside the darkened shell of Alisha Trenway’s house and kept his foot on the brake. He couldn’t drive past the high school or Caroline Black’s house but he could let himself see this. The house was deserted, no police cars or FBI vans at this hour, the perimeter roped off against onlookers until morning. Windows broken out, the roof splintered. Everything warped by a thick layer of charring. He glanced at the backyard, visible from the home’s angle on the street corner. A few trees. The moon spilling down between their branches, too sparse to obscure an arsonist. Someone would have seen something. A corner lot. Eyewitness visibility from all angles. Matt thought to tell his father but knew this was nothing the police hadn’t already considered. He lifted his foot off the brake and steered the car toward home.

  AFTER SIMON RETURNED on his bike before dusk and long after she’d moved her car from the garage so her father could park, Christina lay in her bed and listened to the cicadas’ drone beyond her closed window. They would be gone soon. Only days. With the weather cooling and the leaves throwing themselves from the trees, autumn would send every cicada underground until the first crocuses of spring. They whined through the window. White noise. A crescendo that had heightened at dusk before tapering off to a hum once the sun fell. Christina lay on top of the comforter, her body splayed, waiting for the sound to diminish once the stars appeared.

  She’d made dinner for her fa
ther and brother, fajitas from the scattered assemblage of vegetables she could find in the fridge. Two peppers. One sweet potato. A zucchini shriveled toward expiration. She’d told them nothing. She’d kept herself busy. She’d listened to her brother talk at the dinner table above the sizzle of cooking. He told her father about his afternoon with Brian, video games and cans of Pepsi, and how the streets were flooded with police and news vans on his way home. Christina’s father kept the television off, a background buzz they so often ate with. He glanced at her across the table and she avoided his eyes, asked instead about work, his schedule, when third-quarter sales would be finished.

  The phone had stayed quiet all night. Christina rolled over, looked away from the window to the notebook on her nightstand. She’d taken notes at Paul’s Books, gleaned ideas from the articles and photographs Nick had brought. She’d considered profiles, a series. Who she’d write about, who Matt would. How they’d divide and conquer their assignments, a task more than an elegy. She rolled away from the notebook and toward her wall, her bed pushed into the corner. She pressed her hands to the wall, the plaster cool against her skin, and thought of Ryan’s body above her in his bed, the sheets soft and the pain sharp. How stupid. How fucking stupid. She closed her eyes and lay still.

  She drifted off and when she woke, the streets were as silent as the house. She strained her ear to the hallway for the sound of television but there was nothing, not the regularity of her father’s police shows or her brother’s video games. She glanced out the window. No cars. One streetlamp carving a circle of light on the pavement. She sat up and checked the bedside clock: well past midnight. A wash of stars spread across the clear sky beyond her window. The walls of her bedroom pushed in. Only silence. A lack of anything at all. She pulled on her sneakers. She crept down the hallway and grabbed her keys on the kitchen counter before slipping into the garage.

  The garage door was closed, her father mindful of safety. She was glad she’d moved her car back to the driveway, the first spark of hope she felt all night. Without the garage door opening her father would never hear her, would never know she was gone. She moved to sneak around the side of the garage, to climb into her car and drive away, but her hand stopped on the doorknob when she caught sight of Simon’s bike tucked away behind her father’s Taurus. She imagined the streets. Empty past her house but surely full of police staking out every neighborhood. She wanted to stay unfound. She grabbed her brother’s bike. She pulled up the hood of her sweatshirt and hopped onto the bike and rode it through her neighborhood’s backyard, through other backyards, connected land without fencing that kept her hidden. She rode until she reached a trail, a biking path from her neighborhood to other neighborhoods and eventually to the high school. A path she’d taken certain mornings to first period. Certain nights when she’d snuck out. A path that led to Ryan’s neighborhood and on to the high school eventually though she wouldn’t go far, wouldn’t go anywhere near Lewis and Clark. She wanted only to be outside, limbs stretched, her body pushing and pedaling and moving. The brisk October air pressed against her face as she rode, the mountain bike’s velocity pushing it down her sweatshirt and against her skin, a spike of cold that left her breathless, that made her feel alive again.

  Rows of homes lay visible through barren trees, leaves lost to the wind. Porches spilled over with scarecrows and sheet ghosts, a fall holiday Christina had forgotten. The sky opened above her as she rode, wide and stark beyond the afternoon’s clouds. She recognized the Big Dipper through the trees, the only constellation she knew. Nothing but a little bitch. She rode faster. Let the brisk wind rip the down of her face, let her eyes water raw. Poor little rich girl. Her legs pushed harder to feel the wind whip across the trail and shard her skin through her clothes, to feel only exertion and adrenaline and the shell of her own body belonging to no one. She navigated the path through the woods and felt the tires of her brother’s bike roll across grass and dirt and toward Ryan’s house, a circle of gravity, felt her legs humming their way toward his home.

  When she breached the woods for the streets of his neighborhood, she slowed the bike and checked the road. Everything desolate. The streets abandoned. No cars, no patrols creeping along the pavement. She pulled her sweatshirt’s hood tighter across her hair and set to riding along the sidewalk, in the shadows of trees in case a police car passed and regarded her with suspicion. She pedaled toward Ryan’s street, her legs pushing faster. Her hair windblown, spilling from beneath her hood, legs pumping her forward until she saw Ryan’s house in the distance.

  She also saw Benji Ndolo’s house. Three houses down.

  The silhouette of a figure standing in the yard.

  Christina slowed the bike. Fear carving out the pit of her gut. The possibility of an arsonist. Someone standing outside this house in the dark of night. She slid the bike from the sidewalk and pulled behind an oak tree and peered at Benji’s yard across the street.

  In the road’s streetlamp, she recognized the figure’s face from the vigil. Benji Ndolo’s mother. Christina knew from the papers: Benji had been buried Wednesday afternoon. Just a freshman, a boy she only saw when she’d been at Ryan’s house, in the yard sometimes with his younger brother. She watched Benji’s mother across the street, standing still in her front yard. She appeared to be watching the sky, counting stars or constellations though her mouth never moved. Her expression lay indistinguishable in the dark until a lone car crept past, its headlights illuminating her grief.

  The car rolled through a stop sign, its taillights flashing. Christina looked at Benji’s mother, her body inert, her face passed back to darkness when the car moved on. But the headlights had betrayed her. Her eyes broken. Her face disfigured by sorrow. Christina climbed back onto the bike, a moment too private for her to witness.

  When she reached Ryan’s house, she stashed Simon’s bike in a row of bushes along the side of the house. She stole away from the street to the backyard, where she could see Ryan’s second-floor window, dark and unlit. Her anger escaped her. Benji’s mother, only homes away. A quiet agony Christina shouldn’t have seen, a naked moment unfolded across the yard. She stood by the family garden in Ryan’s backyard and watched his window and felt the air sting her skin.

  The cicadas had long stopped humming, the grass silent. Christina noticed the hammock strung between two trees, a fixture she knew Ryan’s parents would take down soon and store for winter. She remembered the summer: lying against Ryan between those two trees as their weight swung the rope. His chest beating a rhythm beneath her, his arms around her, his parents inside and unaware as his hands moved from her stomach to her waistband. How he unbuttoned her shorts slow, every tooth of the zipper a lifetime. How his fingers pushed beneath her underwear, his breath on her throat. The creak of their weight. The trees. His hands calloused and rough and welcome.

  What she brought on. Fucking crybaby. What she’d let happen, how she said nothing, how she’d taken it. A year older, the sheen of his calves and his abs, a better athlete than her. His attention a heat lamp she unfurled toward like a seedling. The weight of his body upon her. His mouth a knife. His tongue and a picture frame and a slammed car door, a silent telephone and a backseat and get in the car, you fucking bitch.

  Christina grabbed a rock and pulled back her arm and hurled it at Ryan’s window. A rock the size of a plum. A tangerine, an apple. A rock big enough to smash the outer pane of Ryan’s window and bring on a flood of lights inside the house.

  Christina ran. Grabbed the bike from the bushes, pulled it from the yard, ran it along the sidewalk to the opposite side of the street. She hopped onto the seat and pedaled, her legs already burning. She pushed hard and fast and away and made herself gone. She rode despite the smoldering in her calves, the twinged ache in her outer thighs, she rode until she reached Benji’s house, his mother gone, the yard vacant and desolate beneath the cold stillness of stars.

  She stopped when she saw smoke escaping in clouds from behind the front door.


  Christina set a foot to the pavement. The rock forgotten. She felt her blood constrict. Her limbs immobile. Her other foot still on the bike’s pedals, from the other side of the street she watched the cloud of smoke build until it billowed in sheets through the closed front door and flames appeared through the living room window and their glass at last broke apart in a rain shower of smoldered shards.

  PANDEMONIUM

  Third House Fire Kills Lewis and Clark Parent, Places City on Lockdown

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2003

  ST. LOUIS, MO—Another life has been taken in the third house fire in five days, following last week’s shooting at Lewis and Clark High School that police are now linking to the fires. Thursday evening, a day after Lewis and Clark freshman Benji Ndolo, 14, was laid to rest, a house fire at his residence in the 600 block of Conway Terrace in Midvale County took the life of his mother, Andricia Ndolo, 41. Police are still investigating whether there were other casualties in the home. Firefighters responded at 1:49 a.m. Friday morning to an extensive fire that burned the majority of the home, extinguishing the fire just after 2:30 a.m. Because of the recent house fires that claimed the lives of Jean and Arthur Black late Saturday night and those of Jonathan and Robin Trenway late Monday, all parents of slain teenagers at Lewis and Clark High School, police officials have brought in federal investigators to examine the cases’ connections not only to one another under the suspicion of arson, but to last week’s fatal shooting at the high school that resulted in the deaths of 35 teachers and students.

  “I just spoke with Andricia earlier this afternoon,” said Karen Nussenbaum, a neighbor who watched from her lawn as officials fought the flames. “They just buried their son yesterday. She was doing okay, given the circumstances. I saw her as she checked her mailbox at the end of the driveway.”

  Investigators are still searching for leads after the release of Eric Greeley, 16, brought in for questioning on Tuesday due to his connections to Lewis and Clark gunman Caleb Raynor. Firefighters and police officials will continue to search the debris from all three fires in search of clues and possible suspects. Residents of Midvale County and St. Louis city at large are asked to remain alert and report suspicious activity. A curfew of 6 p.m. will also go into effect until further notice due to the recent prevalence of suspicious activity past dusk. Residents of Midvale County are asked to venture from their homes during daytime hours only for necessary activities while police investigate these crimes.