Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down

by Anne Valente

  The Wilcoxes were their neighbors directly across the street: the neighbors who gathered their mail when they were out of town, the people her father discussed rogue thunderstorms and long winters with. Christina had written them thank-you notes every year for the candy apples and king-size chocolate bars they set aside for her and Simon on Halloween. She knew the Wilcoxes still spoke of this to her father, even now, how Christina’s notes had always been thorough even in the wide penmanship of first grade and how proud the Wilcoxes were that she’d joined the yearbook staff, how they’d always known she’d be a writer. Christina glanced out the window as Mr. Wilcox walked across his front porch and stepped onto his lawn, his wife visible in the window behind him.

  Stay here, her father said. I’ll be right back.

  Christina and Simon watched out the window as their father walked across the lawn and met Mr. Wilcox at the sidewalk.

  Whose house do you think it is? Simon asked, and something ached in Christina’s chest. That in only a week they’d come to expect this. That somewhere close, someone was burning.

  I don’t know, she said. She scanned her memory for who lived closest and within seconds she zeroed in on Jacob Jensen. A boy she barely knew beyond sharing elementary school classrooms, beyond Matt having once admitted to a crush. A boy whose mother she recalled seeing at Principal Jeffries’s funeral, a mother only two streets away.

  Jacob, Christina said. Jacob Jensen. He lived on Walnut.

  Echoing already in her brain: lived. Everywhere the past tense.

  The soccer forward? Simon said.

  The sirens grew louder. Through the window Christina could see Mr. Wilcox gesturing down the street. Christina watched her father nod and turn back to the house.

  Richard thinks it’s two streets over, he said when he returned.

  Jacob Jensen’s house. Christina glanced up. On Walnut. It has to be.

  Her father grabbed his coat from behind the front door.

  Stay here, he said. Richard and I are going to walk up the street to see what’s happening. Lock the door behind me. And don’t go anywhere.

  Can we come? Simon asked.

  I don’t think that’s a good idea.

  Christina sat forward. Dad. Can we come? I need to see.

  She didn’t know why she’d said it, didn’t know what it was she needed to witness. She’d already seen Benji Ndolo’s house. She knew what a home looked like in flames.

  Her father hesitated. I don’t want you to see anything.

  What haven’t we already seen? Christina asked.

  Isn’t it better for all of us to be together anyway? Simon said.

  Her father sighed. Fine. Follow me closely, but if there’s any danger, we’re coming home immediately.

  Christina pulled on her coat and they stepped out the front door, the air nipping her skin. The moon shone bright, a hole shot through the sky. Wind gathered leaves at their feet as they met Mr. Wilcox at the sidewalk.

  Family outing? His voice gruff. He’d been a smoker as far back as Christina could remember. She recalled so many afternoons playing in the yard while he stood on his porch with a cigarette, a fixture of her childhood.

  We figured it’d be best to stay together, her father said.

  They walked down the sidewalk, Christina next to Simon, Mr. Wilcox and her father side by side in front of them. Christina pulled her coat tighter, hands stuffed into her pockets, and Simon kept his gaze down as they walked, hair falling across his eyes. No more police cars rushed past, the street empty though people gathered on porches. Some of her neighbors spilled into the street. Mrs. Skinner, a retired postal worker who lived alone three houses down, moved beneath a streetlamp toward the noise. Mr. and Mrs. Rosenstein, an elderly couple five houses down, stood near their mailbox and leaned into one another. And Mr. Edwards, a young father whose wife and two toddlers were surely somewhere inside their house, stepped onto the sidewalk ahead of Mr. Wilcox, his flannel pajama pants poking down like stalks beneath his coat. Mr. Wilcox lit a cigarette and Christina watched the smoke escape into the air, the scent of tobacco mixing with the faint scent of ash. At the end of their street, Christina saw the reason for the lack of traffic. A flashing police car sat parked at the intersection, blocking cars from entering or exiting the neighborhood. Christina’s father glanced at Mr. Wilcox, his face filled with uncertainty. They turned anyway down Cumberland, on toward Walnut, an immediate right up ahead.

  As soon as they rounded the corner, Christina saw it: six fire trucks, two ambulances, more police cars than she could count, and Jacob’s house in the middle of all of them. On fire. The flames rose high above the row of houses lining the right side of Cumberland. As they moved closer Christina’s father stood in front of her and Simon, his body their shield. They stopped well before the intersection of Walnut and Cumberland, the street blocked off and filled with emergency vehicles. Mr. Wilcox ground his cigarette into the sidewalk. People crowded around on porches and on their lawns, some of whom Christina recognized in passing and others she was sure she’d never seen. A skinny woman in foam curlers, the kind Christina remembered her mother sleeping in when she was a little girl and her parents were still married. A teenager in street clothes, about her age, someone she’d never noticed who surely attended one of St. Louis’s many private schools. A young couple who looked to be in their early twenties, not much older than Christina, the woman in a thick bathrobe and the man in a tracksuit. How was it that these people lived one street over, that she’d shared a neighborhood with them for years and never noticed them? What was it that made them a community? What drew them from their homes to the sound of sirens, to watch the flames reach the full moon, to watch a life burn?

  Did Jacob have siblings? Simon asked.

  I don’t think so, Christina said. His mother lived alone.

  A team of police officers passed them on foot, carrying barricades to block off the street. Christina’s family and Mr. Wilcox were pushed back behind barriers along with everyone else in the street, onto the sidewalk and the lawns of homes along Cumberland, but Christina could still see firefighters. Their suits iridescent, caught by moonlight. She saw a hydrant ripped open, water bursting down the street’s gutters. Fire trucks parked at angles, a maze of flashing lights and sirens. Firemen spilling between them, hoisting ladders, dragging hoses ballooning with pressure. And people pushed to the sidelines beside her, some of them with cameras, some shouting questions at the police. She watched the flames serrate the sky. So much dark around them. The moon glaring back down, a puncture wound above them.

  How the hell are they going to put something like that out? shouted Mr. Wilcox, his voice lost to the crackle of fire and the growing surge of water. No one answered him. Christina couldn’t believe the heat, even from another street over. She took in the scent of burning, a campfire smell but also something else: something chemical beyond wood and paper, the burning of plastics and wire and human hair.

  Dad?

  What is it, Chris?

  She couldn’t look at him. Do you think she made it? Jacob’s mother. Do you think she made it out?

  Her father met her eyes and looked away. Another police car edged past them, lights flashing, siren howling through the barricades.

  Christina felt the fabric of her brother’s shirt beside her, the rise of his shoulders as he breathed. She watched the water rush down the street and pool in the gutters, so much water it began to foam. She glanced around at the faces beside her, so many people, neighbors she’d never noticed. She wondered who lived here and who’d been driving past and stopped to see what was happening. She wondered who didn’t belong. She remembered a police procedural she’d once seen, a bad television drama where a witness investigator alerted a courtroom that arson suspects stayed in the crowd. Christina looked around. Blank faces standing in the grass, upon porches. She had no lens of detection, nothing within her that knew the face of arson.

  She heard glass shattering and watched a firefighter on a la
dder smash a second-story window. Smoke funneled out, trapped air escaping from the home. Christina closed her eyes and imagined a bedroom, the second floor of any two-story residential home. Jacob’s mother settled into flannel sheets, a thermal blanket. Asleep as a flame stalked across the bedding, or else awake and waiting. Parents for Home Protection. If she’d joined, if she’d already known for days she was in danger. If they all were. Christina opened her eyes and glanced at her father. At Mr. Wilcox, lighting another cigarette.

  Would they know it, if it came for them?

  The flames climbed higher above the treetops and Christina watched the fire crack against the sky and wondered if it was only a matter of time, not just the families of those who had lost someone but every single one of them. A thought. A wave of guilt. Her face reddening in the dark. A high school killer. An arsonist. An entire marked community. Christina watched the firefighters aim every hose at Jacob’s house, a futility she already knew, and wondered how long it would take for all of Midvale to burn.

  WE HEARD THE news Tuesday morning: another headline, breaking news. A constant scroll on CNN. We heard from newspapers and from television well before we heard from Christina. Blared in headline: FIRES RESUME. Thick letters stamped across the front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The word resume, its implications: that this was expected. That fire had a life of its own. We barely wanted to read the article but couldn’t look away. We learned that Jacob’s mother perished in the fire before medics could save her. A woman we’d just seen at a funeral, wind displacing her hair, cigarette crushed beneath the heel of her pump. We learned that the fire erupted just past midnight, that firefighters fought the blaze for over an hour and that nothing had been saved. That Jacob had no siblings, no pets. That the second floor of the house undertook the greatest damage, that nothing of the upstairs bedrooms remained. That Parents for Home Protection would meet immediately to consider their options, a homegrown vigilantism. We thought of Matt’s father and imagined a blank autopsy, nothing left.

  We cast the thought away for other headlines, other news stories more and less imaginable. The mundane: that a man survived falling over Niagara Falls without any protective capsule. The less mundane: that a member of Al Qaeda had killed Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter. The War on Terror escalating. Human Rights Watch accusing U.S. troops in Iraq of excessive force against civilians. We turned away from the world, too tangible, too real and too sharp. We opened the sports section: the St. Louis Rams soaring on a 6-2 winning record. The World Series tied, a third game on the horizon in Miami. We gleaned only one last piece of information before we turned away from the newspaper: that Midvale’s evening curfew had been canceled overnight.

  A futile restriction. Everyone inside and a house still ignited. We sat in the mess of our beds and our living rooms and our kitchens and our basements, air that had long grown stale, a curfew that in the end accomplished nothing but trapping everything inside except a match and a flame. We turned off the news. We sat in the dark, the light of a clear morning pushing through the slats of our blinds, illuminating specks of dust. We pulled on our clothes, jeans and sweatshirts, pullovers and fleece sweaters. We said goodbye to our parents, embraces they held for a moment too long. A mass phone message each of them had received from the administration that school would continue, that we would stay strong. We didn’t look back to see the faces of our mothers and fathers watching us from the window as we walked away. We traveled the streets of our neighborhoods, our community, our radios and car stereos and portable headsets blocking out the lingering sound of sirens, the streets a chaos of police cars and FBI vans, the presence of reporters a constant for nearly two weeks.

  At school, Christina watched Simon meander up the stairwell toward his physical science class and felt her chest constrict, to turn away from him and lose sight of where he was. His breathing so close in his bedroom through the night, a sound she couldn’t hear through their shared wall but knew he was within a body’s length if she had to protect him. She thought of her profile. Elise. Her entire family cheering on their swim team from natatorium’s metal risers. Jacob’s mother gone in the night. Christina wondered if Elise’s family was in danger, along with everyone in the entire school. No one spoke in the hallway. No one made eye contact. Everyone moved as if through a dream. She stepped into her algebra class as the passing bell rang and took her seat and opened her mathematics textbook and found nothing in its pages that could make her focus.

  Matt moved down the hallway and imagined his father, already gone again before he awoke, already at the station reading analysis or else somewhere in the streets near Christina’s house bagging evidence. Matt felt his lungs tighten. He’d barely slept. He’d stayed awake with the images of a computer echoing through his brain. What was so often only Nick’s task, what he’d taken upon himself after returning from Zola’s house. What he’d done to fill time before his father came home and leaned into the office and Matt made up a quick excuse that he was only checking email and would be to bed soon, and his father said there was nothing new on the investigation but confirmation that no chemical accelerants were found in the debris, that only organic materials were present.

  Matt had leaned back in his father’s desk chair. Organic?

  His father sighed. Organic materials were all we found in the reports.

  Matt blinked. As opposed to what? What the hell does that even mean?

  As opposed to telltale accelerants, his father said. No fire starters. No gasoline, no chemicals. All it means is that no one tried to burn down these homes with rags and solvents. Look, Matt, I’m tired. I just wanted you to know what we found.

  His father had left the room and walked down the hallway and closed his bedroom door and Matt had stared at his own reflection in the computer screen. Organic materials. No ready-made search terms. No key words. Nothing to plug into a keyboard and easily find. Proteins. Lipids. Oxygen and carbon. Words that could have pulled up anything on a browser from diet management to science reports, each of them vague and wide-open and unrefined and meaningless. Matt had shut down the computer and retreated to the basement and had slept a dreamless sleep until he awoke to the news.

  Matt made his way down the hallways of Timber Creek. He’d seen the newspaper. Jacob’s mother. How he’d just spoken to her at the funeral, the stupid mumblings of saying nothing to a parent in grief. The mother of a boy he’d tracked since junior high, every class and every extracurricular. All at once he felt the blank walls of Timber Creek’s hallways press in, the school’s air leached of oxygen, too many students and teachers crowded into a small space. He couldn’t make sense of himself, this nausea, only now after two weeks of staying numb and finally falling to sleep. He turned toward his English classroom, the last door down a hallway that stretched too wide and long. He pushed himself instead into the nearest men’s bathroom and dropped his textbook to the floor, his lungs seizing and his head between his knees.

  Hey man, it’s okay.

  A voice beyond him: someone unlocking a stall door, stepping toward him. A hand on his back. Matt glanced up long enough to see the face of Samuel Winters, a running back on Lewis and Clark’s varsity football team who Matt once knew to avoid. A player with a known temper, a boy who in other versions of their lives might have slammed him into a locker for nothing more than knowing he didn’t prefer girls.

  It’s all right. I’m fine.

  You don’t look fine. You need the school nurse?

  Matt listened and heard nothing, no one else in the bathroom stalls or at the sink. He was alone with Samuel. A quick fuse. He felt his body tense, his heart tighten.

  I can call the school nurse. Samuel kneeled beside him. Not a problem.

  I’ll be fine, Matt said. You’ll be late to class.

  Panic attack? Man, sit down.

  Matt glanced up at him. His chest hurt to speak. He sat on the bathroom floor.

  I used to have those, Samuel said. Sometimes before games. Sometimes
at home. Feels like you’re seeing stars or dying.

  Matt closed his eyes. Pinwheels of light.

  You just need to breathe, Samuel said, and Matt felt a hand on his back again. In and out, Samuel said. Big breath in. Good. Breathe out. I’ll stay here until you stand.

  Matt focused on the sensation of Samuel’s hand. The weight of it. What it was for another human being to touch him. Someone beyond his mother, his father, the heat of Tyler pressing him to a wall.

  Good, Samuel said. Everything’s all right. See, just breathe. Everything’s all right.

  You’ll be late to class, Matt whispered.

  No problem. I don’t think I’ll be the only one today.

  Matt felt his lungs relax. He took two large breaths and sensed himself strong enough to look up. He met Samuel’s gaze. Thanks, he said. You didn’t have to do that.

  Samuel slapped his back lightly. Hey, it’s nothing. What was I going to do, just walk away?

  Matt smiled and Samuel got to his feet. He pulled Matt up.

  You all right? Okay to stand?

  I’ll be fine.

  You take it easy, man. You’ll be okay.

  Thanks, Matt said, but Samuel was already out the door.

  WHEN ZOLA WALKED into chemistry class, Nick was already seated near the far wall, with nothing open on his desk, his hands folded in his lap. There were no windows to stare through. No pictures on the wall. She took her seat beside Sejal Chaudry and wondered what Nick was thinking, whether he was replaying a house fire in his brain and calculating causes, things he’d surely spent all night looking up on his computer. Zola glanced at Sejal, who sat drawing the same lines over and over in her open notebook.

  Hey, Zola said. Sejal nodded in return.