Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down

by Anne Valente

  Zola turned the camera toward the tops of trees, what branches the moonlight was able to make visible. The viewfinder swept across the black tips of silhouetted maples, their limbs bare and swaying in the wind. Past the gnarled stems of hickories, chestnuts, the spirals of a magnolia that bloomed only in spring. She closed her eyes and felt the breeze against her face and through her hair. She wondered if wind was capable of being captured, visible only in how it rustled branches and bent the trees. She trained the lens on the rusted iron rooster of her neighbor’s weathervane. On the sag of the woodshed in their backyard, its siding splintered and frayed. On the maple leaves swirling softly in the grass, wind just strong enough to lift them. On the sound of a wind chime somewhere on their street, a tolling she couldn’t locate. On her own sockless shoes, bare skin visible beneath the tongues. On the waving tree limbs. The way the moon coated them like wet paint. On the squared halo of Pegasus above her, what she’d learned from her mother.

  She lowered the camera. Everything was happening.

  Everything still happening all around her, around all of them, always.

  She zipped her jacket and stepped from the porch and tested the edge of the yard. The grass tickled cold against her exposed ankles and she wondered for the first time if the nights had sunk yet below freezing. She moved through the grass and found herself at the edge of the backyard, the road visible around the side of the house, one streetlamp pooling on the sidewalk like a doubled moon.

  The street: an edge. A curfew. The bars of a cage she would breach. Zola walked across the grass to the street, the camera still gripped between her hands.

  She expected police patrols, the occasional car. Maybe a windowless van, parked and obvious, filled with FBI agents staking out the neighborhood. But there was nothing. Just the moon. She stood beneath an elm on the sidewalk and wondered what Christina had seen just nights before. A parallel sidewalk, a similarly abandoned night until it no longer was and a fire erupted. Zola made her way without thinking down the street. She made her way toward the charred shell of Alisha Trenway’s house.

  She’d avoided walking past the house since it burned. She’d sidestepped being outside altogether. She’d altered her route to Timber Creek so as not to bike past the blackened remains. But in the moonlight, the street deserted, her fear fell away. She quickened her pace, steps growing faster, the Pentax’s strap around her neck and the camera’s weight hard against her chest. She welcomed the ache, something heavy, a thudding that felt more real than her own heartbeat. She didn’t stop until the sidewalk led her to the corner of her own street and to the edge of the Trenways’ property line.

  The yellow police tape: close enough to touch.

  She reached out her hand and felt its thin plastic, a ribbon snapping in the wind. She ran her palm down its length and imagined the hands of an officer first unfurling it to stake off the property. Her eyes rose to the house. Windows blown out. The roof blackened. Brick exposed. Siding peeled to large piles of rubble. Zola glanced at the corner of the street, a busier road beyond it, but no one drove past. She looked back the way she came and saw only a line of dimly lit streetlamps. She held her breath and bent her knees and ducked beneath the police tape.

  She anticipated sirens. Flashing lights. The whooping of a police car. But no one came. The hard rhythm of her heart replaced the camera’s thudding against her chest. Before she could overthink it she found herself walking across the Trenways’ yard. She didn’t stop until her feet crunched against something other than frosted grass and she looked down where the toes of her shoes met ash. The house: so much taller and more terrible than what it had seemed from the street. Blasted windows. Jagged frames. Glass melted like a face turned down in sorrow. A broken door, collapsed ceilings, a moon she could see through the broken beams. She found no furniture in the rubble, no belongings. So much had been removed. So much to shield from a community, from cars and pedestrians passing along the street. Everywhere the smell of smoke, even still. She tasted it in the back of her throat, a thickness that crowded the air. What could have possibly happened here. She blinked. She opened her eyes and the house remained. Her fingers found the camera’s strap, slid down, troubled the Pentax’s lens. She removed its cap and pulled the viewfinder to her face.

  She pointed the lens and shot. Flipped off the flash. The camera whirred in her hands. She captured images. A house. A dream and a family lost. The light was barely adequate and it didn’t matter. She rotated her body around the house and captured burnt insulation and collapsed brick and crumbling wood. She turned the camera to the ground, to the piles of plaster and siding and tile, to wood and metal and indeterminable debris. She stayed low against the ground to remain unseen in the dark. She walked the line of police tape around the house. She trained the camera on every angle of devastation.

  When she made it all the way around the house she lowered the camera. She breathed in the scent of ash, almost unbearable. She could see exposed sections of the basement through the home’s crushed flooring and though it wasn’t the same house, Zola imagined the cool damp of Caroline Black’s basement. A playgroup of four. Sega Genesis. Sweating cans of Coke. Where was everyone now? Althea and Amy Robinson: did they remember? When they heard the news did they recall themselves at age five in a basement? Zola glanced to the second floor, a tatter of floorboards she could only imagine was once Alisha Trenway’s room. What ghosts lay there? What secrets were trapped in the smoke of the air? What crushes, what heartbreaks, what diary entries burned to dust?

  Zola turned away from the house. She slipped beneath the police tape and across the grass, her shoes shedding ash against the dew as she moved. The Trenways’ house out of sight and nothing but the full moon and a trail of streetlamps to light her way, Zola imagined Alisha’s parents lying side by side in their bed. Flames teasing the edges of curtains, licking baseboards, blackening every corner of the walls. She didn’t want to think about it, what Nick and Matt and Christina seemed so desperate to know, but out here beneath a gilded moon that soaked the street in light but revealed nothing she couldn’t help herself. What happened here? Her shoes pounding the frozen grass. What the hell happened here? A question beating inside her blood, a wave matching the pace of her footsteps, the camera slung around her neck and hammering against her chest.

  NICK SAT IN the blue light of his bedroom, the television buzzing softly in the corner. Everyone in the house asleep, the neighborhood beyond his window silent in the curfew’s wake. He’d come home from Zola’s house and had dinner and sat in the living room and tried to work on chemistry homework while his brother played video games. He’d turned on the computer in his bedroom after his parents wished him good night. He’d sat before a blank screen. Fire investigation. Crime scene investigation. Burn pattern, accelerant residue. Flame color. Flame temperature. He felt himself exhausted. He’d been researching too long, through an entire weekend and now again at his bedroom desk regardless of backlogged homework he hadn’t finished, a chemistry class where he’d be lost. He leaned back from the computer. He dimmed the screen and turned on his room’s small television, seeking the most mindless show he could find.

  It wasn’t hard. Mid-October. Every network teeming with late-night Halloween marathons, true crime marathons, Nightmare on Elm Street marathons, UFO conspiracy marathons. He flipped through the stations until he came across a special on ghost hunting, what had never interested him for its lack of evidence, but the paranormal squad on-screen drew him in. A team of four investigating a long history of hauntings at the Jerome Grand Hotel in Arizona, an imposing building wedged into the side of a desert mountain. The team stood outside the hotel, packs of ghost-hunting equipment at their feet. Night-vision cameras. EVP recorders. Dowsing rods. EMF meters. Equipment Nick knew would measure nothing, a sham investigation meant for the entertainment of television.

  He leaned back in his bed and watched the team enter the hotel regardless. He glanced out his bedroom window at every house on his street ill
uminated by the dim glow of streetlamps. The television whirred and he wondered which homes in his neighborhood had heard footsteps in the attic. Rattling chains. Which had seen doors creaking open by invisible hands. The unnecessary energy of believing. A paranormal team so needless, he knew, Midvale County filled with so many other kinds of ghosts. What Matt had said: the police preoccupied with retracing Caleb’s path through the high school. A scattered path of phantoms. Of chalked outlines, bagged evidence. A path of ballistics, of shapes where breathing bodies used to be. A heavy constellation through the hallways, police stringing lines between so many points of loss. The ghost of his classmates’ voices. The ghost of a parent’s body, nothing left. And fire: accelerants. Burned carpet and electrical wiring and spackled Sheetrock and wood paneling. There was nothing metaphysical about any of it. Nothing mystical. Only the hard fact of lost material and lost skin, the charring of so many homes that had held bodies that had held memories, a matryoshka of grief. Nick wondered how a path through a high school could matter now. A high school of ghosts, even Caleb’s, as if fire meant he still stalked the streets from beyond the silence of a self-inflicted wound.

  On television the team climbed the steps of the Jerome Hotel past dark, the screen grained in a green wash of night vision. Nick had sought distraction but he felt all at once crushed by the night’s resounding quiet. Every house on his street still, everyone asleep. His only company so many chiseled circles of streetlight. Nick held a hand to his chest. A dark figure passing by with a gun. The thrumming of his heart inside a classroom matched to its pulse in Sarah’s living room, her body folded down upon him. A weight of devastation crowded his bedroom, a sensation he couldn’t isolate but knew felt like suffocation. He wondered what it was about the night that made him feel so hopeless, as if sunlight was all that kept any of them from a brink. It was impossible to take so much in. Every parent, the hollow of their own dark night. His heart rioted beneath his hands. He was out of explanations. The police at a total loss. The ghost-hunting show’s end credits rolled and Nick pushed himself from his bed to close down his computer. It was late. He would find nothing. There was no evidence he hadn’t considered, nothing he’d find that the police hadn’t found.

  The computer’s mouse still hovered over the shut-down key when Nick heard the opening of a new show beginning on-screen behind him. Another late-night special. Another investigation. An unsolved mystery, what he heard the host say. Strange circumstances, unexplained evidence. Nick swiveled in his desk chair and glanced at the television. He listened for only moments before he turned back to the computer screen and let himself slacken from reason, everyone asleep. Let himself entertain for one night the possibility of a cause beyond empirical evidence, the television droning in the corner behind him. He opened his browser, a new search.

  He typed in a term. A term from television.

  An impossible term, a phrase he barely knew.

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF STARLIT HAUNTING

  THE INTERMINABLE STRETCH between twilight and dawn: a time for phantoms.

  A time for creaking doors, moving shadows. A time for poltergeists, demons, residual spirits, moon-damp haunting. A time when specters feel most welcome. A time for loops of trapped energy, manifest as movement. A time for energized currents winnowing through homes and hotels, through spaces where trauma occurred.

  Or else a time between dusk and daybreak when silence swallows the brain in darkness. When a body’s circadian rhythm grows faint, when the brain’s signals spin out of cycle. When insomnia alters cognitive chemistry and triggers depression. Sorrow sliding down the body in waves, a descending hollow. The length of a shadow across a wall. A speckled ceiling. A stilled fan. A compounded cycle, a lack of sleep. A waiting within sheets for the first streaks of light to crawl up the slats of blinds.

  A game of chicken with dawn.

  A dark impenetrable by light meters or digital cameras or dowsing rods.

  A condition beyond phantom investigation.

  A clarion call to nightfall. Come, all you ghosts.

  ELISE NGUYEN

  Lewis and Clark High School Class of 2005

  January 16, 1988—October 8, 2003

  Elise Nguyen, a junior at Lewis and Clark, was well-known for her academic achievements. She was a three-year member of the National Honor Society and served as an after-school peer tutor. A straight-A student, her favorite subjects included biology and literature. Elise was also highly skilled in playing piano and twice served as the theater’s musical accompaniment for two student productions: Godspell her freshman year, and The Man of La Mancha her sophomore year.

  Elise was also a proud member of Lewis and Clark High’s varsity swim team, charting school records in women’s freestyle, butterfly, and medley relay. She was a powerhouse in the water, her stroke controlled and muscled with grace. She loved Sleater-Kinney and Wu-Tang Clan, what she listened to for inspiration before meets.

  What else is there to say?

  Elise will be so missed.

  THE COLOR OF BURNING

  CHRISTINA WAS THE first of us to hear the news.

  She’d gone to bed just past ten, her family asleep and the house silent. But when she lay in bed, she kicked at her sheets and stared at the ceiling. Wind pushed against the double-paned windows of her bedroom and she sat up, crossed the room to her desk. She’d thought all night of what Matt had said, that there was nothing left in any home but smoke and ash. Had thought of it all evening through episodes of The Twilight Zone that she and her father had watched about the last man on earth, a talking doll, a gremlin on the wing of a commercial flight. Through her window a full moon rose above the roof of her neighbor’s house. Her limbs felt agitated. Her hands itched to pick up the phone. The receiver so close, just on her nightstand, close enough to dial Ryan’s number.

  She imagined him at home, leg propped up, his picture frame shattered and his window broken. She felt no remorse. I was here. She’d wanted to scream it at him instead of launching a rock. We were something. As if it mattered anymore. Her French homework lay on her desk: Timber Creek’s classrooms, the lack of light, the bare walls. French class. Algebra. She couldn’t imagine doing it all over again tomorrow and on Wednesday and every day from here. She envisioned her afternoon English class, the only class that contained an empty desk. Alexander Chen. His desk vacant. Christina knew Alexander had been in the library. She knew he’d been only feet from Zola hiding in the stacks.

  Christina pulled a pen from the desk drawer. First shapes. Triangles, hearts. She could have written a profile for Alexander. She knew she would have to eventually. She pressed her fists into her closed eyes and in the darkness saw the blue of a pool. Elise’s funeral. What she hadn’t had the endurance to attend. A profile she knew would be the worst, the hardest to write. She dragged her pen across the page and let herself spell nothing more than the letters of her own name. Elise’s wet hand tagging hers in the women’s medley relay. Elise on the way to meets, the stereo currenting through the car on the breeze of wide-open windows. The letters in Christina’s notebook began to take the form of a sentence, the first she could think to write: Elise Nguyen, a junior at Lewis and Clark, was well-known for her academic achievements. The start of a profile. The blandest of openings, the staid language of formality that the yearbook required. A tone she didn’t know if she could keep. A tone of decorum she and Elise had never used between them. Had. A verb tense strange on her tongue. A past tense that only two weeks ago had been the ever-present now, a girl keeping pace with her breathing through the water. The words came. She listened to nothing but the sound of pen pulled across paper. A gentle sound. A meditation. Nothing but the smooth ball of a pen and rough paper and the full moon and the quiet of her room.

  And then a siren: faint and far, the familiar sound of a car being pulled over for speeding. The background din of the suburbs, an everyday noise, as accustomed as the constant hum of the highway beyond her neighborhood shuttling toward the heart of the city.
But then one siren became two. Then three. Then a compounding of louder sirens: the approach of an ambulance, drawing nearer.

  Behind it, the unmistakable horn of a fire truck.

  Christina felt her body go numb. Felt every ounce of energy she’d summoned to write about Elise escape her. Felt her hand drop the pen, a thud against her desk. She looked out the window and saw nothing, just the dark of her street and the moon hanging high, oblivious. And then a single police car whizzed past, its lights dimmed, no indication of emergency but for its speed.

  Christina—

  Her father’s voice at the cracked-open door, his face pale and stricken in the hallway. She knew he’d been asleep only moments before and knew immediately in the wake of the past week: how thin the sleep of a parent.

  Something’s happening, he said.

  Simon? she could only think to ask.

  He’s already up, her father said, and motioned her from her room and down the hallway, where her brother was sleepy but awake on the living room couch, the bay window’s curtains wide-open on the illumined flash of another police car racing past.

  Dad, what’s happening? Simon said.

  Let’s just stay here, her father said. Let’s stay right here until we know.

  He sat on the couch beside Simon and waved Christina toward him, his arm curved into the shape of welcoming. She was sixteen. She was not a child. She crossed the living room and let his arm encircle her, one around her shoulders, the other around Simon. Another police car drove by, then an unmarked van moving too fast for a residential street. Christina leaned into the warmth of her father’s shoulder, his heartbeat palpable through the thin cotton of his shirt. The harsh trumpeting of a single fire truck multiplied to the dissonant chorus of two then three and they saw through the window the lights of their neighbor’s house turn on then those of the house to the left and to the right, and then Christina saw Mr. Wilcox emerge onto his porch.