After the Fire

by Daniel Robinson

  Ruth met him at the front door. Taking him into her arms as though pulling in a lifeline, she held him tight to her. Barnes returned the embrace.

  “Have you called the police?” he asked as he stepped back from her.

  “They’re on their way.” She turned and walked into the kitchen.

  “And Call?” Barnes asked as he followed.

  “He’s already started looking for her, going to the neighbors’ houses to get some help.”

  “Good. Tell me what happened.” In the light of the kitchen, Barnes could see how purple and swollen her eyes had become from crying. He wanted to hold her again, rock her inside the embrace of his arms, but he also knew that could wait until a balance was restored.

  Ruth swallowed hard and inhaled her tears. “I went to say good-night before going to bed and she was gone. And so was Harp.”

  “No idea where?”

  “None.”

  “She didn’t say anything earlier about anything?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “Did you call Robert?”

  “He’s in Denver and said to call him back as soon as we hear anything.”

  “He’s not driving up?”

  She did not say anything.

  “Okay, tell me which way Call went and I’ll go another.”

  “Down Mountain toward downtown,” she said, lifting a trembling finger to point through a window into the darkness.

  “I’ll go up Loomis and wake people to help us look. Stay here in case she returns.”

  Ruth nodded her head quickly, her clenched eyes tight as her body. She leaned her weight back against the counter. “Oh, God,” she said, covering her eyes. “Dad told me tonight that he’s dying. I can’t lose them both. He’s my past and she’s my future. I can’t lose them both. Please.” She reached out for him.

  Barnes took hold of her shoulders but did not embrace her. He bent to see her fallen eyes and said, “We’ll find her. I promise we’ll find her.”

  He left quickly, wishing he could hug her into him but not wanting to spend another moment not searching for Grace.

  From around the corner came the sound of cars stopping on hard pavement, the soft tramping of shoes jogging to Ruth’s front door, a knocking followed by the retreating voices of the police as they entered Ruth’s home.

  He ran from house to house, knocking on each loud enough for someone to come to the door, a woman in her robe and a man holding a pistol in his hand. He asked each person he woke to dress and go to Ruth’s house to help the police in their search. He looked down the alleys caught inside barriers of darkness and cursed the limits of his vision. All he could see was darkness and nothing, and even the street lights and porch lights offered only shadows.

  After he had stopped at a dozen houses, he began jogging, too fast at first and then slower, keeping to a pace he could sustain for some time. His jeans rubbed against his knees, but he forced himself into an acceptance of them. He yelled her name into the night. Dogs barked in response. He circled through the playground of her elementary school, hoping that maybe she had walked there.

  The walls of the school, like the houses surrounding it, leaned up against the night, turning charcoal in the lakes of light cast from a hidden moon. That little bit of light had no power to show where the little girl had gone.

  He shook off the arresting thoughts of a terrible violence, a paralysis in time latent with impotence, and held tight to a thought that something wanted him to find her.

  He ran through alleys and down the middle of empty streets, calling her name. The town hushed around him, porch lights flashed, a figure peered from a bedroom window, more dogs answered his calls. He ran in increasing circles, clockwise around the neighborhood. Each circle he expanded by two blocks as though gridding a fire, making certain that every square foot was covered before searching a new area.

  He thought of little other than Grace huddled in some corner of the night holding tight to her Gi-Gi. His mind worked without randomness, however, having involuntarily shifted into the automatic.

  Someone walking her dog down the street crossed when she saw Barnes running in her direction. Barnes slowed and asked if she had seen a little girl alone with a dog. The woman uttered a “No,” and quickly went on her way.

  He continued to run. Up the street. Past closed houses. Plastic trash cans, parked cars, blind garage doors, wooden picket fences like columns of dead flowers. Rows of frame and brick houses descended into the night. The voices of others calling her name. But not her voice answering. The houses, small fortresses broken by alleys connecting block to block. Street sign sentinels like bare trees. Lit and unlit doorways, potted plants, ceramic and cement animals. An abandoned lawn mower halfway through its job.

  Running. The shifting qualities of dark and light deceived him, and more than once he thought he saw Grace move within the shadows. Only to find a plastic bag grasped within the limbs of a bush or a stray dog checking trash cans. Scaring a scavenging raccoon once as it robbed from a compost pile.

  Running. He felt her receding from him, disappearing in magnitude. He stretched his vision into the gloom of the night and saw shadows.

  A police car passed him driving the other way. It slowed and turned and pulled in ahead of him. The driver stepped from the cruiser and held out his hand for Barnes to slow.

  “You out looking for the little girl?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Barnes answered, hopeful and out of breath. “Yes. She found?”

  “No. I had to be certain—you’re not dressed for jogging.”

  Barnes rested his hands on his knees and lowered his head. He breathed deeply to catch his breath before continuing.

  “Cases like this,” the officer said, “the kid usually is found hiding someplace.”

  The police officer said “Good luck” as he drove away. Barnes lifted a hand and returned a noncommittal wave, then set his pace again.

  Barnes ran, increasing the crescent of his circle. His legs worked against the pull of the denim jeans he wore, and his lungs ached. A sudden shift of wind swirled around him. He looked into the darkened yards.

  When the thought entered his mind, its whisper echoed gently. He slowed, thinking his mind was playing games with him, that his body had tired of the chase and had sent a signal to his mind to find a way out. Then, after he conceded the possibility, he wondered if he could take the chance of turning back to the house, that maybe she was just a block away or around the corner up ahead.

  He turned and started back, his legs renewed and working with the possibility of youth. Up ahead in the night and coming toward him, Barnes could see the bouncing spots of light from the flashlights of other searchers. They momentarily reminded him of a night shift on a fire with firefighters wearing head lamps to spot the ground they worked.

  The centuried bells in the tower at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church rang in Sunday morning. Their sound ring formed a paean to the new night. Barnes heard their sound, but registered only the strike of each ring and not the time they measured.

  He ran past a pair of searchers without offering any explanation and could feel their gaze follow him back toward the house. Taking the stairs to the front porch in two strides, his feet nearly slid from beneath him as he reached the closed front door.

  “Ruth?” he called as he entered.

  A lack of breath left him unable to say anything else. Stopping for just a moment in the home’s entry, he stood with hands on hips and knees slightly bent. He could feel that last inch of lung fight against his breathing.

  No answer. A single table lamp was on in the front room, but nobody sat near it. A car passed on the road outside, the beam from its headlights rolling across the room.

  He walked down the hallway and through the kitchen to the basement staircase. Another darkness greeted him when he opened the door, and he felt certain that he had been wrong, that his instinct to return was not right.

  He flipped on the light and walked down the dozen steps. The
half-basement was unfinished, wooden beams, exposed pipe, and a cold cement floor. Boxes piled three and four deep lined one wall, two file cabinets stood alone against another wall like discarded ideas. An ancient Ideal water heater nearly as large as a Volkswagen car and the assembly of pipes converting it from coal to gas. A couple of chairs with torn upholstery, a folding card table, the frame to an oak acorn bed, retired radios and clocks, a life-size plastic Santa.

  Nothing but the sediment and shadows from the many lives of the house.

  Barnes searched quickly through the assortment and accumulation of castoffs for something that would signal a door, another room, the stile into Grace’s secret place. Nothing. Nothing that made a door. Nothing other than concrete walls.

  Except down near the floor, almost hidden in the shadow of the water heater, was the cast door to the old coal room.

  Barnes bent down to open the door. It pulled easier than he thought it would. The flicker of a light threw a soft rectangle through the opening.

  Barnes lay down and crawled into the ambry, having to angle his shoulders to fit through the opening. Lit only by an upturned flashlight, the room looked sheathed in a charcoal haze. Wandering shadows danced across the low ceiling. Even prone on the floor, Barnes could see that the room stood no taller than he and was narrow enough for him to touch opposite walls with his arms outstretched. This was Grace’s secret place.

  This was where she came to control the world outside. In her one small place of freedom from the paralyzing possibilities of life, she sat rocking back and forth in her small chair, searching through what must have been the inexplicable losses of her world.

  She sat on a small chair, rocking her little body into and out of the circle of light from her flashlight. In her arms, she cradled a tiny pink doll within the folds of her blanket, her Gi-Gi. Harp lay next to her, his head on his paws and his eyes watching Barnes. His tail flopped lazily when he recognized Barnes.

  “Grace?” Barnes asked because he had lost every other word.

  She did not answer. Instead, she continued to rock, and she looked into the flashlight. Her eyes remained steady and intent on that single light as though to look away might bring a darkness.

  Barnes pulled himself completely into her room and kneeled facing her with the light between them.

  “Grace?” Barnes asked again.

  She blinked and still did not swerve her eyes. She said, though, almost so low that Barnes would not hear, “Daddy’s gone forever. Grandpa is dying.”

  Her voice wedged its way into the retreating silence.

  She looked at Barnes then, and Barnes could see that she had been crying and that she was about to cry again.

  “Your grandfather is out looking for you,” Barnes said.

  “But he’s dying.”

  “Yes, he is. But he’ll be with us for a long time before then, and he wants to spend as much of that time with you as he can.”

  “And Daddy. Will he come home?”

  “I don’t know, sweetheart. All I know is that your mother is worried and scared, and she wants you.”

  The softness of a silence interrupted them again.

  And Barnes said, “We all love you, sweetheart, and your mother and Call—we all need you.”

  Not quite a smile but a recognition of a smile formed on her face, and with watery eyes she stood and walked the few steps to Barnes. Still on his knees, Barnes lifted Grace in his arms, lifted her above him toward the ceiling and their mutual smiles brought her safely back down into his arms.

  Barnes closed his eyes, losing himself in Grace’s laughter. When he opened his eyes again, he watched the slow-motion movements of Grace and Call dancing in the silence of the front room.

  The police had left nearly an hour earlier, and the neighbors had been thanked and were back in their beds.

  Ruth had been upstairs when Barnes entered the house, and by the time she came down the stairs, Barnes had already left for the basement. She had stood alone in the imminence of her destroyed hope until she heard Grace’s voice and then saw Grace being carried on Barnes’s hip.

  She cried and knocked Barnes back a step when she embraced both him and Grace. The police were called, the search ended, and Call rushed into the house. Deep lines like the furrows across a ranch road crossed the umber skin of his forehead, but his smile broadened noticeably when he saw Grace.

  Call paused in the half-light of the entryway to look down on Grace. He had stood there once without any words to say after the fire that had killed half of Barnes’s crew and Barnes sat in the same chair telling them what had happened. And maybe he had stood in that very spot with Ruth sleeping in the curl of his arm or thirty years later with Grace doing the same. And he may have stood there with tears in his eyes as he looked down on Ruth and thought how hard it would be to tell your daughter that her mother had died. And he stood there, exhausted and with his hands limp at his sides and his mouth open as though beginning a short prayer, before he kneeled and took Grace in his arms.

  Grace was hugged, and chastised, and hugged, and hugged again.

  Not more than fifteen minutes past two o’clock by the bells at St. Joe’s Church, Barnes rolled out his sleeping bag on the grass of his backyard. He had already laid out a survival blanket for protection against the moisture and cold of the ground, and he placed his bag on top of that. He stripped off his shirt and boots and lay on top of the bag with his head resting on his hands.

  He saw Maria Lopez walk past him to join the semicircle of ghosts stretching out on the grass with him. He saw Maria Lopez from a different angle, saw her eyes open, and could remember how vivid they were in life, black as Apache tears.

  And he saw Warner bent as in prayer, Doobie and Stress together as though dying were something communal, and Horndyke, and after Lopez alone was Freeze with the jumper Fleming, then Earl and Hassler, Budd, Sully, Dago, Max Downey, and finally Chandler.

  And he saw Ruth sitting in the dark in Grace’s bedroom, just sitting and watching her daughter sleep curled on her side with her hands together under her cheek and her golden hair spiderwebbed across her forehead.

  His ghosts slept on the ground around him, as they had slept near him in fire camps when they were alive and ready for his wake-up call. He knew he would dream of them again. Maybe every night for a long time he would dream of them. And sometimes his dreams would still wake him. And that was no longer a bad thing.

  He watched the light from the moon shine through the nearby elm trees to toss shadows on the side of his house. He looked up into the night sky. In the hazy edge of the Milky Way that stretched out like the hair of a mare’s tail, he recognized an empyrean presence. He breathed lightly and rolled on his side to sleep.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Daniel Robinson’s first career was fighting wildfires. Twelve of his fourteen years fighting wildfires were spent on hot shot crews in Washington, Alaska, and Colorado, and for two years he was crew supervisor of the Pike Hot Shots. During his career, he fought over one hundred fires in eleven Western states and two Canadian provinces, and the experiences from those fourteen years serve as the basis for After the Fire. He won the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize for his Depression-era noir, The Shadow of Violence. His third novel, Death of a Century, was published by Arcade Publishing in June 2015. He has a PhD from the writing program at the University of Denver and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.