by Anne Valente
NICK SAT PERCHED in the nook between his bedroom window and computer, the desk chair hard against his back. He kept an eye on the street outside, neighbors emerging from their homes to see what was happening though he knew the fire was streets away. He knew already whose home it was. Darren Beechwold. A sophomore he knew had been lost inside Lewis and Clark, someone he’d often seen riding his bike through the neighborhood though they’d only nodded hellos and had never spoken to one another. Police cars passed. Nick knew they were blocking off streets. A parade of fire trucks swarmed through, lights flashing. Heavy wind pulsed against the house and pushed the trees against Nick’s window. His family was congregated in the living room. Nick had sat with them until he couldn’t stand it any longer.
He knew already: a fire in the early evening. A broken pattern.
What he’d known at the lake: there was no juvenile arsonist.
Russ Hendricks easy. So much easier than the complications of the human body.
Nick sat in front of his computer. Every fact he could find on what the body was capable of doing. Every brain wave. Every heartbeat. Every electrical impulse. Everything he wasn’t sure he believed but had nothing else, everything he couldn’t say out loud for how reckless and stupid the words would sound spilling from his mouth.
When the phone rang late beside his computer, he knew already who it was.
I don’t know anything, Nick said. The entire neighborhood’s on lockdown.
Can’t you go outside? Matt asked. Even just to your yard?
My parents are keeping us inside, Nick said. I would if I could.
So where are you? At your computer?
I can see out my bedroom window, but that’s it.
What can you see?
Nick pivoted his desk chair. There are police everywhere, he said. There are a few people in their yards, just like what Christina described from the other night. But this isn’t like that. It’s so much earlier. People are scared. The police are keeping everyone inside.
There’s no curfew.
I know, but it’s beyond pattern. People are still out. I’m guessing they don’t want to take chances in case someone’s out there on the loose.
Darren Beechwold’s house, Matt said.
It can’t be anyone else, Nick said. He’s the only person on the list of names who lives in my neighborhood. Is your dad out there?
He got a phone call a little while ago. He’s probably waiting until the fire’s extinguished before entering the scene for evidence.
Nick winced at the word: scene. This was not a scene. It was someone’s house, an entire life he hadn’t bothered to know beyond waving hello on the sidewalk.
Did you see any police earlier near your street? Matt asked. My dad said they’d start patrolling the families’ homes.
I didn’t see anything. But I’ve been inside. I’ve been inside all night.
It’s probably going to rain any minute.
Nick glanced out the window, every tree pulsing with the first wall of a storm’s wind. That won’t stop the police, he said. And it won’t stop a fire, either. I counted at least six fire trucks. They all raced down the street, one after the other.
I’ll wait up for my dad if I can. I don’t know when he’ll be back.
Nick sighed. We both know what this means.
Russ Hendricks, Matt said. My dad told me earlier that he’s still at the station.
Which means he didn’t do this. We knew that. Come on, Matt. We both knew.
I didn’t, Matt said. I thought my dad finally had an answer.
Nick said nothing. An answer. What he’d begun to trickle into believing but couldn’t say. The science of fire: the same principles of the investigation Matt’s father led. Nick couldn’t speak. Couldn’t let the words travel across a line, nothing more than a fledgling theory in the face of another fire upon so many other fires.
Are you okay? Matt asked. You seemed off at the lake.
Nick hesitated. I’m fine. I just don’t think this is someone at our high school. The pattern’s broken. It doesn’t add up to someone we know setting fires.
But you were quiet this afternoon. Long before anything broke a pattern.
I’m just trying to find answers. Same as you. Same as Christina and Zola.
What are you looking at? Your computer. I know you’re looking at something.
Nothing that isn’t on television. My family has the local news on in the living room. The stations finally picked it up just this hour.
My mom’s watching it, too. There was nothing on the nine o’clock hour.
The ten o’clock wasn’t much better. I figured I’d have better luck online.
So what did you find?
Nick was careful with his words. I haven’t found much.
Come on, man, just tell me.
Well, I’m looking at the chemistry of fire. Gas excitation.
Like chemistry class. I thought you’d been looking at that for a while.
I have. But when you said organic material, I thought of the human body.
What about it?
What it can do. What the body does every day to keep us moving.
Like all the amazing things we learned about in biology in junior high? Like how an unfurled intestine can stretch to the moon and back?
Nick smiled despite himself. I’m just saying that under pressure, the body responds. Just like flashbulb memories. What the brain recalls when pushed to its limits. Look, I know people experience grief all the time. They experience it without a shooting and without houses burning down. But there’s been so much, Matt. There’s just been too much here to even begin to comprehend.
Nick heard Matt sigh. I know.
Beyond the window, Nick watched the first raindrops begin to fall and knew he’d said too much. That he’d done nothing but make Matt recall Caroline Black, an image he knew Matt wanted to forget.
It’s too much, Matt said. All of this. It’s just too much.
I know, Nick said. Believe me, I know.
There’s still the chance of a different accomplice, Matt said. Beyond Russ. What my father told me they were looking for.
Nick watched rain slide down the windowpanes, small bubbles that joined other droplets. Russ Hendricks still at the station being questioned. The possibility of someone else out there, another suspect, someone who could be occupying the desk beside him in history class or academic lab. Nick wanted to believe it, wanted to shut his computer down and sit with his family in the living room and forget any need to know. The rain began to cascade in curtains. Nick wished Russ an arsonist. He wished an answer, an end.
WHEN MATT AT last heard his father’s voice inside the house it was late, the rain long gone, the sky thick beyond the pulled-open curtains of the living room window. He’d fallen asleep on the couch, the notepad still sitting on the chair, Alexis’s profile short and inadequate but complete. He knew nothing about her life. He would never print the sentence about Russ Hendricks. He heard his parents’ voices in the kitchen, the percolating sound of the coffeemaker dripping. He heard his father’s voice: Nothing left. Words hovering above the sound of the machine. He wanted to listen to the confidence between his parents, what they discussed when they thought he was asleep, but he couldn’t make out any other words beyond murmurs. He pulled himself from the couch and entered the kitchen. They sat at the table across from one another, his father still in street clothes, his mother in her bathrobe.
What happened? Matt asked. What did you find?
Have a seat, Matt’s mother said.
Want some coffee? Matt’s father asked and his mother protested, said it was too late. At this point, Matt’s father said, I don’t think anyone’s getting any sleep anyway.
What time is it? Matt asked.
Past two, his mother said.
Did you just get home? he asked his father.
Not long ago.
I’m an adult, Matt said. Please, Dad, just tell me what happened. His father glan
ced at his mother across the table. It was the Beechwold kid’s house, he said. Sue and Grant. You know the rest by now. There was nothing left. Surely the same: organic cause. We know it already, without need of lab reports.
Matt said nothing. Everything accelerating. So many houses multiplied like a rapid-spread virus. It had taken his father two days to tell him what they’d found at Jacob Jensen’s house and now here, in the kitchen, his father could guess everything only two hours beyond Darren Beechwold’s house burning.
Matt’s mother reached for his hand across the table. Did you know him?
No, Matt said. We only saw him sometimes in Nick’s neighborhood.
Poor Nick, his mother said. He and his family must be so frightened.
Matt looked at his father. What about Russ Hendricks?
They released him. Unless he’s part of some wide network of arsonists that snuck through a neighborhood while he was in custody, he’s no longer a suspect.
I could’ve told you that, Matt said, and regretted it. It was late. His father had done what he could.
The police are working, his mother said. They’re doing the best they can.
What about an accomplice? Matt asked his father. What you mentioned before.
It’s on the table. Frankly, it’s the only thing on the table we’ve got.
But tonight breaks the pattern, Matt said. Everyone was still out in the streets. It couldn’t be a juvenile arsonist. Which is what an accomplice would have to be.
Matt’s father looked at him. After what happened tonight, the pattern’s been broken. It might not be a teenager at all. Still a time when parents would be home, when supervision would be at its height. It could be an adult, but it could still be someone at the school. Time of day is just one of many possible factors.
The coffeemaker dripped. Matt felt exhausted beneath the harsh bulbs of the kitchen’s fluorescent light, the sky a black hole beyond the small square of window above the dishwasher and sink. He thought of what Nick had said: the human body. He felt his own breaking beneath the burden of this night.
What’s the next step? Matt asked his father. Cancel school? Lockdown? What?
They can’t cancel school, his father said. Not any more than they already have. We’ll all just keep doing what we’re doing. High security. And at this point, maximum security around every house of the remaining families.
I thought the police were already doing that, his mother said. And I thought there was concern over too much scrutiny. A lack of privacy.
Matt’s father sipped his coffee. By now, any question of privacy has gone out the window. Those families have as much privacy as the rest of Midvale County. None. What’s more police security? They’ll need it. We’re the eye of the country right now.
WE AWOKE TO more news. More headlines.
We awoke to the surety that Matt’s father was right.
We were the eye of the country, the center of a media storm of television and newspapers and websites. We had been for weeks. And now, a tenor reaching a fever pitch, a fire broken out every single night since we’d returned to school. We awoke to blaring headlines, to the angry shouts of reporters on television. What about the children? Our names invoked. What about these poor children and their safety? We awoke to public outrage leveled hard at the Midvale County School District for letting us travel unprotected to Timber Creek’s doors.
The administration sent no cancellations, no postponements. No indication that plans for our continued education had changed. We awoke only to another terse email from the school that their thoughts were with the Beechwold family and those who knew them. That counselors were on hand. That sessions remained mandatory. That to maintain routine, classes would resume as scheduled.
The A1 front page that morning: a full-scale photo of the Beechwolds’ home surrounded by flames and firefighters, the headline above challenging police officers, WHAT NOW? No mention of Russ Hendricks anywhere in the article. Only brief indication that police surveillance would increase and that Parents for Home Protection had gathered in force. That Alexis Thurber’s father would be buried in a private ceremony that afternoon. The entire front page a demand that the police do something, that they solve everything, all of this, now.
We took in the pages. We read every word. We lost our will and turned to other pages, the back sections that let in the rest of the world: that Al Qaeda was operating in Iraq and also in Afghanistan, planning attacks on U.S. troops. That leaders of the European Union were working to release twenty-six Europeans detained in Guantanamo Bay, prisoners held indefinitely by the United States without charge or legal representation. That the outgoing prime minister of Malaysia called the United States the terrorists of the world. In sports, other pages we turned to for reprieve: that the Marlins had taken the fourth game of the World Series in twelve innings. The series tied. That the next game would include a brief memorial at the start of the game, a moment of silence for Major League Baseball’s friends in St. Louis.
Our teachers couldn’t ignore us or the news. They couldn’t start our first-period classes without mention of Alexis Thurber or Darren Beechwold or so many fires, so close to our own basements and bedrooms within the gridded streets of Midvale County. Mrs. Menda held a moment of silence in Matt’s English class. In algebra, Mrs. Gornick asked Christina and her classmates if there was anything they’d like to talk about beyond equations and formulas. And in chemistry Mr. Albertson did the best he could, a man with so little sense for the connective element of empathy but enough to set down his beakers, to look beyond colored fluids and test tubes and ask the entire class without eyeing anyone in particular, Is everyone okay?
We attended our counseling sessions. Academic lab. We watched the small clocks in the therapy rooms tick toward their mandated end. Christina found herself seated on a hard couch midmorning beneath the pressure of finding words that meant something, of saying anything of substance to the counselor sitting before her with a notepad. I’m feeling okay, she said. I just don’t know what’s happening. The woman nodded, her gaze sympathetic, her head tilted to the side, a woman who seemed too young to be a therapist. She asked Christina about the Ndolo fire and about the Jensen fire and a surge of guilt pushed through Christina that she’d have rather talked about Ryan than the homes she’d seen burning. That she’d broken a picture frame and a window and brought on her first orgasm in a single week that everyone else would remember for fire and nothing else.
Zola sat on a similar couch across from her counselor through the second period of the morning, a reprieve from chemistry and the hard data of science. How are you feeling? Natalie asked, a question as wide as the fields of the back roads. Zola wanted to say she was on fire, that at night she felt as combustible as the homes that surrounded her. That she’d lain awake well past three knowing a house was burning again in a two-mile radius, that the house was only blocks from Nick’s house and that they shared this now, the scorched scent blanketing everything from their porches to the blades of browning grass in their backyards. That she and her mother had watched the news until her mother said that nothing about it was news but only the catharsis of watching. That her mother had gone up to bed, had asked if Zola wanted to sleep in her bedroom for the night. That Zola had shaken her head but regretted it as soon as her mother closed the door. That she’d gone into her own room and lain on her bed and felt the photographs of Alisha Trenway’s house alive and pulsing on the carpet, still trapped in her camera, undeveloped and unprinted and unable to tell her anything at all but that something awful had happened here. That she’d pulled Penelope from her cage and held her close against her chest, velvet ears soft as a hymn against her cheeks.
I’m fine, Zola said to Natalie. She said it loud enough that she believed it.
And your friend Nick? What about him? Did you get the chance to talk, to resolve your fight?
I said what I could. I apologized.
Did you say everything you wanted to say?
Does any
one ever say everything they want to say?
What else would you say, if you could?
Zola looked at Natalie. Wondered what was acceptable. Wondered what was appropriate in the space of a mandatory counseling session, what she could ask of this woman licensed only to speak of grief and reveal nothing of herself.
What do you think is happening? Zola asked.
What do you mean?
I mean, tell me what you think is happening. You live here, too. You go home to your house, every day. You have your own fears, your own thoughts. Your own sense of why this is happening.
Why do you think it’s happening?
I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.
Natalie set down her notepad. I really don’t know.
Please. For a minute. Just pretend I’m not your patient.
It’s my job. I’m here to support you.
But if you weren’t. If we were just having coffee. What do you think is happening?
Natalie glanced toward the door. It’s not for me to say. But since you asked, I’ll admit it. I’m scared, too. I don’t know what’s going on.
Do you think anyone knows what’s going on?
I really don’t know. I’m sure the police are working on it. Does that answer your question? What else do you want to talk about? How about your family? How is everything at home?
Zola sat back on the couch. An opening sealed. The closest Natalie could come before locking herself back into the role of adult, of therapist. Zola settled back into hers. She let herself speak. She let herself talk knowing authority was nothing but illusion. That everyone she once believed knew everything was scared, even the police, that those in charge knew nothing of what was happening or what to do.
