Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down

by Anne Valente

  He’d gone into the station a million times before, knew his father’s colleagues, had shadowed them at Take Your Child to Work Day at least a half-dozen times across his elementary school years. He waited in the parking lot. He couldn’t saunter through the station’s doors, just checking in on his father, the department managing FBI officials and arson investigators and more media attention than they’d ever known. He left his backpack in the passenger seat. Steeled himself. Made his way toward the sliding glass doors of the police station. The receptionist recognized him and led him past the secured doors, and he followed her through the buzzed-open entryway and past rooms where he could see officers and detectives bent over computers and scattered papers. His father’s office door lay open. He looked up from his desk.

  You shouldn’t be here, he said. Today’s been insane. Your mother will worry.

  Matt said nothing and sat down in the chair across from his father’s desk.

  I have work to do. Work I’m trying desperately to finish so I can get home.

  What kind of work?

  You know I can’t tell you that.

  Fine. Then let me tell you what I know instead. I know Russ Hendricks was brought here. We saw him being taken away from school today for questioning.

  His father got up and closed the door. No one knows that yet, he said. We’re keeping it confidential for now. No reason to raise unnecessary suspicion.

  Is he here? Did they give him a polygraph test just like Eric Greeley?

  That’s enough, Matt. Keep your voice down.

  Matt sat back in the chair. I want you to tell me. Please. Tell me what’s going on.

  Matt’s father looked past him toward the closed door, as if expecting another officer to push his way in. You remember what I told you yesterday, he said. About what we’re looking for. Russ Hendricks fits the bill.

  Matt wanted to believe him. He thought about what Zola and Nick had said at the lake. That Russ had violence in him but not enough to kill.

  He’s been in fights, he said. But that’s it. Did you find out anything else?

  He may not have an extensive criminal record, but he’s got some telltale issues. A history of anger, social problems. A low academic record, evidence of past criminality in property damage. I shouldn’t even be telling you that. Family problems. Looks like his father died when he was small. Single-parent household, possible lack of supervision.

  Christina lives in a single-parent household. So does Zola.

  It’s only one factor among many. Lots of kids grow up in great homes with one parent. We’re looking at the few who didn’t, statistically speaking, who’ve displayed evidence of criminality and social problems.

  But do you actually have any evidence? Anything concrete that places Russ anywhere near Alexis Thurber’s apartment, or at any other house?

  I can’t tell you that. I’d be breaching confidentiality.

  You said you’d tell me anything to keep me safe.

  I would. Don’t think for a second I wouldn’t. But trust me when I say that I won’t tell you anything unless I absolutely have to. Trust that I have your best interest at heart, and everyone else in that entire goddamn school.

  Matt felt nothing but a quiet shame. To have challenged his father, so much work spread across his desk like the pages of a disheveled manuscript.

  Fire’s not my area, his father said. But suffice it to say that we’ve found some evidence at the scene, evidence that links Russ through more than profiling.

  He was probably there hundreds of times, Matt said. Alexis was his girlfriend.

  We know that, which is why we’re not making anything public just yet. He’s really just a person of interest at this point. Not a suspect. They’ll probably question him through the evening and then let him go home. They can’t hold him longer than that.

  Matt looked at his father. Is Russ the accomplice?

  We still don’t know if Caleb had one. But it’s a possibility.

  Matt sat back in the chair and imagined returning to school in the morning.

  He’ll be let go if he wasn’t arrested, Matt said. He’ll be back at school tomorrow.

  I’m telling you, don’t worry about it until you need to worry. I promise I’ll tell you if you do. What I can tell you is that we’re still working on the scene at the school.

  What do you mean, working on?

  Matt’s father sighed. A situation like that calls for more cleanup and investigation than you can imagine. We’re working with the FBI on that. It will take time. But we’re still tracing the kid’s path through the school. Because it’s necessary. Because even though it seems so obvious what that boy did, it still needs to be retraced. Not just for investigation and evidence but for future prevention, so this never happens again.

  Matt thought of police sweeping through the darkened classrooms, a mess of overturned desks and discarded backpacks. A trail of chalk markings indicating where his classmates had been found. The echoing halls of Lewis and Clark. Long corridors lined with ghosts. A place he knew he’d never want to see again.

  How could anything have prevented this? What could we have done differently?

  Nothing, Matt’s father said. No one could have done anything differently to change what happened. This isn’t anyone’s fault. But the more we know about his path, the more we know how we could have stopped him sooner.

  Matt looked at his father. He wanted to believe him.

  We’re close, his father said. The force has dispatched a new team to keep an eye on the other homes. Just know that we’re getting there. That we’re on our way.

  ZOLA SAT BEHIND the counter of the Local Beanery, where she’d biked after Nick dropped them off back at Timber Creek’s parking lot, a notebook of graph paper resting on her lap. Trigonometry functions; x, y. Variables that swam across the gridded page. Her homework, a thin pretense: near the far window, Kelly Washington’s mother and two other women sat talking quietly. Zola recognized Kelly’s mother from homeroom activities at Des Peres Elementary. Handing out glue sticks. Collecting unused pipe cleaners. A woman who sat hunched now, a mug of coffee enfolded in her hands. Zola didn’t recognize the other two women though she knew they were mothers of her lost peers. Parents for Home Protection. Zola knew this. Knew without a doubt that this was their meeting. She thought of Alexis Thurber’s father, a parent she couldn’t imagine joining in, and recalled that Matt had seen him at the movie theater alone. How parents navigated the complications of grief, each in their own way. Zola looked to the women at the table, their faces hard but without the strain of tears, and for a moment she couldn’t believe that they were in the world without breaking something, without shattering the glass of the coffee shop windows, without burning down the entire city.

  Can I get a refill? a voice asked from the edge of the counter. A middle-aged man motioned his mug toward Zola and she held it beneath the coffee dispenser.

  Fifty cents, she said. The man pushed two quarters across the counter and returned to his armchair when she gave him his refilled mug. The sun slanted down the horizon beyond the Beanery windows, nearly sunk behind the trees. Zola thought of Nick, surely at home, sitting at the computer in his bedroom. Looking up juvenile arson. Culprit profiling. Or else combustion and gas excitation, what he’d clearly absorbed in chemistry class, seeking some explanation for how nothing remained. Zola wondered if the women in the coffee shop knew that no bodies were left, what still hadn’t been printed in the newspaper. She knew they had no idea Russ Hendricks was at the police station at this very moment while they met, that they could have celebrated the catching of a suspect though Zola still didn’t believe it. She imagined Jacob’s mother’s funeral, another lowering away she couldn’t believe had happened that afternoon. Russ had a temper. A given. Zola knew he couldn’t have possibly burned down so many homes. She also knew the fever for an answer. She thought of the pictures she’d taken of Alisha’s house, evidence no different than police photography, how they’d told her
absolutely nothing.

  The same as what Russ could tell police.

  She set down her notebook and looked at the women. She felt her stomach roll in a wave of nausea. She realized she hadn’t eaten lunch. She wasn’t hungry, muffins and scones waiting in the display case and even still she couldn’t imagine eating, these women only yards away planning how to keep their homes from burning. Their children gone. Zola felt her stomach lurch, the strange workings of her own body. That it could alert her to something wrong, a flood of queasiness. That it could turn on her, a system of pathways and networks she barely understood.

  MATT WATCHED FROM the bay window of the living room as the last of the sun slid down the glass in ghosted light. It was impossible to imagine such a sun bringing only devastation as it slipped away, that dusk meant only bracing. For darkness and a flame. For the inevitability of the newspaper. That he’d come to assume this, even with Russ Hendricks detained at the station.

  His mother came in from the kitchen and stood beside him, dinner near ready.

  Did you know her? The Thurber girl.

  Not well. I knew of her.

  With any hope, this will be the end of this.

  He knew his mother meant Russ, a name his father had mentioned when he’d walked through the front door a half hour ago. Police still working at the station. Russ still being questioned, Matt knew. His father had vowed he’d be home for dinner but had retreated down the hallway and closed his office door despite his mother’s meat loaf warming in the kitchen’s oven, the aroma of roasted beef and browned ketchup filling the house until his father finished working.

  Have you been writing? his mother asked. I’m not trying to snoop, but I vacuumed your room today. I saw the profile of Jacob Jensen on your desk.

  It isn’t worth reading, Matt said. Christina’s been trying to write them, too.

  They’ll be valuable. You can’t know it now. But your classmates will be grateful for them, for the memories you captured. When they go back and read those books.

  When they go back. Matt couldn’t imagine his classmates as fully fledged adults, Nick or Christina at thirty, Zola at forty. If anything from here could be imagined, a future as impossible as so many blistering fires. Maybe that was why Nick had been so subdued. That he’d hit a wall. That the only thing left for them to do was look back. To put together a book. As if anything of this could be kept.

  I don’t even know what I’m trying to capture, Matt said. There are barely words.

  But the words you find will be the right ones. I’m sure of it.

  She touched his shoulder and they watched the roof of their neighbor’s house absorb the last light of the sun and though he wanted to believe her, as readily as he wanted to believe that his father and the police team had control of an investigation at last, he knew there were no words, his task an illusion. The illusion of statement, of setting this down. Of creating a comfortable history. Of stabilizing the past. Of saying this was, in words that fixed meaning for anyone who would ever read them.

  Will you write a profile of the Thurber girl?

  Christina and I haven’t talked about it. But I can try. Chris has done enough for now. She’s seen enough in the past few days.

  Your father told me she saw the Jensen house. On top of seeing Benji’s mother.

  This isn’t easy for anyone, Matt said. Just waiting around for news to come.

  I finished my book. The one on President Bush and the War on Terror.

  What did you think?

  His mother looked at him. He’s an interesting man.

  And?

  She hesitated. It’s easy to be certain. It’s harder to admit what we don’t know.

  Matt followed her back to the couch, where she turned on the television, his father still behind the closed door. Matt sat on the armchair near the window, leaving the couch to his mother and soon his father once he emerged from the office. He thought to work on his history homework but gave up quickly, a notepad in his hand, the television whirring. A game show instead of news. He glanced out the window at the dark treetops, the sky heavy with new clouds that blocked out the moon. A storm was moving in. He could see it in the bend of every tree branch. He glanced at his mother, her attention divided between the television and a new book she’d started, a brief history of the world from the dawn of the Big Bang to the modern age. His blood oscillated beneath his skin, the same restlessness he’d felt in his car. There was nothing he could do. Nothing but continuing to write profiles, the best he could do, a notepad in his hands.

  Alexis Thurber. His pen stayed poised above the notebook.

  There was so little to write. So little he knew of her and her life. But he knew his task, the simplest of actions, something to draw his focus: a profile to set down. He pushed down his pen. Alexis Thurber was loved. He didn’t know if it was true. He didn’t know what else to write, what information he could conjure up about a girl he’d barely known. The telephone rang and his mother set down her book, reached for the side table where the receiver sat but only tolled once. She withdrew her hand but Matt could hear his father talking to someone in the office, his voice audible above the television.

  Then the door opening. Quick footsteps. His father in the living room.

  Jim, what is it? his mother said. Her book dropping to the couch cushions.

  Fire. His father already pulling on his shoes. Another fire. God fucking damn it.

  Matt steeled himself against a wave of shouting, his father’s anger as terrifying as his hardened quiet, the rage of walking from a room and down the hallway and closing the door behind him, his silence a stone. But his father only grabbed his coat. He opened the front door wide, the wind gusting in. I’ll be home when I can, he said. I’ll call when I can. The door whipped shut behind him and Matt watched through the front window as his father threw himself into the car and pulled away from the house and disappeared fast down the street. He watched until long after the car was gone, a heat rising in his chest.

  That Russ Hendricks was still at the station.

  That unless there was another suspected accomplice, Russ wasn’t a killer.

  That Russ meant nothing.

  That he also meant everything: that there were officially no answers.

  It’s too soon! his mother shouted. This just happened. Are we going to go through this every night? The same thing every goddamn night?

  Matt didn’t answer her, his mother a rock, always the rock and breaking down into rubble. He knew it as well as his mother did: too soon. A pattern broken. Not the dead of night but just after sunset, a community awake, the streets still screaming with police cars and reporters. Not a juvenile, not someone who shared the walls of his high school, not someone whose parents were home having dinner just like his were. His mother stared out the window. Weight-born sky, thickening clouds. Wind beating against the windowpanes. He closed his eyes. He saw no culprit. He saw no accomplice. The only possibility left, a trail of smoke. He saw nothing but a flame and his father racing toward it.

  ALEXIS THURBER

  Lewis and Clark High School Class of 2005

  March 3, 1988—October 8, 2003

  A junior at Lewis and Clark, Alexis Thurber was loved. We know this now: her boyfriend Russ Hendricks was not a killer.

  Alexis was active in theater, serving as a technical assistant for Godspell as a freshman and The Man of La Mancha as a sophomore. She was slated to work on lighting for the 2004 spring production of Pippin. Active in community service, Alexis also worked in horse stables and volunteered with the Equine Therapy Center.

  Alexis was a kind soul, one who was loved by her friends, partner, and family. She will be greatly missed by the community at Lewis and Clark High School.

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE HUMAN BODY

  THE AVERAGE HUMAN speaks 16,000 words a day, approximately one-sixth the word count of a standard novel.

  The human body takes between 17,280 and 23,040 breaths, a range dependent upon level of daily act
ivity. The rate of respiration a sine wave, in and out, the rhythm of mathematics so much like a sea.

  The human body’s blood travels 12,000 miles through more than 60,000 miles of blood vessels every cycle of 24 hours. 60,000 miles: more than twice the distance around the earth. Human blood, a liquid organ. A conduit that flows between lengths of entire continents, from Los Angeles to Moscow and back in the span of one day.

  Each cell in the body: six to eight feet of DNA, a coiled helix sprung tight.

  The body’s electricity: impulses traveling between synapses at a rate of 248 miles per hour. Saliva: one liter produced every day. Human hair: 100 strands lost. The human eye: 23,000 blinks, the retina’s cone cells capable of discerning up to 100 million color surfaces, more information taken in than the largest telescope on earth.

  The human heart: 2,000 gallons of blood. Approximately 100,000 heartbeats every day, enough energy produced in one hour to raise one ton of weight three feet from the ground. Under stress: rising heart rate, 120,000 to 140,000 beats per day. Increased blood pressure, liquid pushing against the walls of each vessel. Palpitation. Irregular heartbeat. The strain of fight or flight. Enough energy to slacken cells from routine. Enough to break the body of order, to throw a locomotive from its track.

  AS MUCH TO KEEP US SAFE

  MATT WAITED UP for what felt like hours for his father, his mother’s shape a fortress beside him on the couch. He closed his eyes and willed his father home. He let the sound of the television fill his ears. American Idol. The nine o’clock news. Then the ten o’clock news, the fire breaking at the top of the hour, camera crews at last on the scene and a reporter standing before a swirl of flashing lights. The camera panning behind her once she mentioned the address and the camera tracked toward the fire. The 1400 block of Fox Run Road. Not far from Nick, Matt realized. Only a few streets over. Fire trucks everywhere. Hoses. Water. Flames filling the perimeter of the screen. Matt imagined Nick’s neighborhood and its houses and who among them lost a child and zeroed in on Darren Beechwold, a sophomore he remembered sometimes seeing at the school bus stop at the end of Nick’s street. Matt hastened downstairs, telling his mother he’d be back up in a minute. He picked up the telephone in his room. Nick answered on the first ring.