Dead and Gone

by Norah McClintock

  In that case, either it wasn’t a skull or a pelvis, or someone didn’t know what he was doing, because it had taken them almost a whole week to figure it out. Or, maybe, to get around to figuring it out.

  “You think you can handle things around here after school?” Riel said. “Get yourself something to eat, then get to the community center on time?”

  Thanks for the vote of confidence. “I have a perfect record so far,” I said. “You can ask Mr. Henderson. I’ve never been late. Why?”

  “Susan has this thing she wants me to go to.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “A fundraising thing.”

  “Yeah? What for?”

  What was that I saw in his eyes? Embarrassment? Must have been, because his cheeks turned a little pink.

  “Come on, what for?” I said.

  “The ballet.” His voice was gruff, like he was daring me to call him on it.

  “You’re going to the ballet?” I tried to imagine it. Riel was a guy who mostly dressed casual, mostly black jeans or a pair of charcoal pants he liked, although I had seen him put on a suit from time to time when he was going somewhere with Susan. He was a sports-outdoors kind of guy. It was hard to picture him watching girls in tutus and guys in tights prancing across a stage.

  “Susan likes the ballet,” he said, as if that explained everything.

  I thought about the girls I had known—all two of them, Jen and now Rebecca—and what I would have done for them if I cared enough.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said.

  Sal came by while I was microwaving the chicken quesadilla Riel had left for me.

  “What’s up?” I said.

  “Nothing.”

  He looked tired. It was his natural state these days. Sal’s dad was sick. He’d been in the hospital—psych ward—for over a month, and now he was home and on serious medication. He sat in the living room when he wasn’t in bed. Half the time, Sal said, he just stared out the window. The rest of the time he read poetry in Spanish. Back in Guatemala, where Sal is from, his father had been a professor at a university. He taught poetry. When they came here, though, the only job he could get was as a cleaner in a downtown office building. And now he couldn’t even do that. Sal’s mom worked, but she didn’t have the world’s greatest job. So Sal had had to get a job to help pay the bills. He put in thirty hours a week at the McDonald’s on Danforth, and that was on top of school.

  “You working tonight?” I said.

  “Eight o’clock.”

  The microwave buzzer went off. “You hungry?” I said. “You want some of this?”

  He shook his head. I felt bad eating in front of him, though, so I gave him a Coke. He drank it. While I ate, I told him about Emily and how she thought the swim team at our school was pretty good.

  “She’s pretty, too,” I said. “And I told her about how you won the city championships last year.” He winced. Sal had really liked being on the team. He’d hated it when he had to quit. “Hey, you want to meet her? I think they’re practicing at the community center tonight.”

  He shook his head.

  “Come on,” I said. “She’s rich.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. Not only did Sal have to work to help out his family, but his family also rented out half of their tiny house. They had to, to afford the rent. Sal’s shoulders slumped.

  “Why would a rich girl be interested in me?” he said.

  “Jen was interested in me,” I said.

  He looked at me, and I knew which word he had zeroed in on. Was. And, anyway, Sal had never had a high opinion of Jen. Rich girls, he said, they think the whole world revolves around them. He said Jen was walking proof of that.

  “This one’s different,” I said. I told him how I’d met her. “Anyone else would have screamed for the cops, but she didn’t. She turned out to be okay.”

  “Yeah?” Sal said. He still wasn’t impressed. “Maybe you should ask her out.”

  “It’s not like that,” I said. I was going with Rebecca, and that suited me just fine. Rebecca wasn’t rich, but she was cool. Maybe the coolest girl I had ever met. “I thought you might be interested, that’s all. You two have something in common. You could talk about swimming, see where it goes from there.”

  He said no, he didn’t have time for a social life these days, not with school full time and working full time. “But I’ll walk over there with you,” he said.

  I cleaned up the kitchen, and we headed for the community center. We were half a block away when we heard them. Girls. Talking, giggling, shrieking, making that high-pitched jumble of girl noises.

  Then we saw them, a whole crowd of them, coming out the front door of the community center, heading for the sidewalk. They stopped when they got there and talked back and forth for a few minutes before fanning out, some heading east, some heading west, some heading north to the subway.

  “That’s her,” I said. “The girl I was telling you about. See, the blond in the light blue jacket.”

  Sal turned his head to look, but I think he only did it for me—not because he was interested, but because I was working so hard to cheer him up. But, boy, he didn’t keep on looking because of me. When he focused in on Emily, his eyes almost came out of his head. For what seemed like the first time since his dad had got sick, he smiled.

  “See what I mean?” I said.

  He didn’t answer. He just kept staring at her.

  “Come on,” I said. I grabbed him by the arm. He jerked free of me.

  “Uh-uh,” he said.

  “You’d like her,” I said. I was sure of it, now that I saw the look on his face. “I told you, she’s a swimmer. She thinks our school’s team is pretty good. And when I told her about you, she looked interested.”

  “No,” he said.

  Jeez, if I had something in common with someone like Emily and someone was offering to introduce me—and if I didn’t already have a girlfriend—I’d be sprinting across the street. “Why not?”

  “I just don’t want to, okay?” Sal said. He sounded angry now.

  “Yeah, but —”

  “No,” he said. “Look, I gotta go.”

  He spun around and took off in the opposite direction from the community center. I was going to go after him. I had a couple more minutes before I had to be at work, and I didn’t want him to walk away angry. Besides, Emily and another girl were on the other side of the street now, heading north. So I turned to chase Sal. That’s when I saw Mr. Henderson. He was crossing the street Emily and her friend had just crossed. Maybe he was going up to the store on the corner to get something. That’s probably what I would have assumed if I hadn’t seen him checking out Emily at the swim meet, if I hadn’t seen him reading the list of participants, his finger resting where Emily’s name was.

  I glanced at my watch. Another two minutes and I’d be late. But the person I was supposed to check in with was Mr. Henderson. And he wasn’t at the community center. He was walking up the street behind Emily. Maybe following Emily.

  I joined the parade.

  I was careful to hang back almost a full block. It’s a good thing it was dark. I could keep an eye on Mr. Henderson and, up ahead, on Emily, and if either of them turned around, I could duck behind one of the big trees that lined the street or I could turn up a walkway to one of the houses and they probably wouldn’t recognize me.

  Neither of them turned. Emily was telling her friend something. At least, that’s what it looked like. I couldn’t hear what either of them was saying, but Emily was a hand-talker. She kept throwing up her arms and flinging out her hands. Maybe she was making a point, or maybe she was demonstrating some swim move to her friend, I wasn’t sure which. They passed a corner store a couple of blocks north of the community center and a couple of blocks south of Danforth Avenue, where the subway station was. Then Mr. Henderson passed it. I kept on his tail.

  Emily and her friend reached Danforth and crossed at the light. The light had changed from green to yell
ow to red by the time Mr. Henderson got there. I watched him stand on the sidewalk for a moment. Emily and her friend must have turned off somewhere, because I couldn’t see them anymore. Then Mr. Henderson darted across the street against the light. For a guy with a limp, he could move pretty fast when he wanted to. I jogged up to the corner.

  Emily and her friend must have gone into the subway, because that’s where I saw Mr. Henderson go. From where I was standing on the corner, I could see him in the bright light. He was right between the ticket taker and the turnstiles, looking toward the escalator. Then, just like that, he turned and came back out, limping heavily on his right side and then kicking out his left foot, moving fast toward the corner and the streetlight. I turned and jogged down the way I’d come. I didn’t look back. I just kept moving until I pushed my way through the door to the community center. I raced up to the third floor and found the utility closet door propped open, which surprised me. Mr. Henderson took his responsibilities seriously, which meant that he kept everything locked and kept a close hold on the keys. Usually I had to get him to open the door for me, using a key on the chain that was attached to his belt. When I was on a floor, I kept the door propped open—you had to, just in case it accidentally closed and locked.

  I was filling my bucket when I heard Mr. Henderson coming down the hall. You couldn’t miss him, not with that shuffle-thump way of walking he had. Then I could feel him behind me. When I turned around, I made myself think about Sal, about Rebecca, about anyone except Emily, because if I thought about her, I’d probably end up looking guilty.

  “You sure you know what you’re doing?” Mr. Henderson said.

  The question threw me. Had he seen me following him? Is that why he was asking?

  “Yeah,” I said. “Third floor, then second floor, then first, right?” Like I did every night. “Unless there’s something else you want me to do.”

  He shook his head.

  “I’ll check on you,” he said. Check on my work, he meant.

  While I mopped, I wondered why he had been following Emily. He had gone into her wallet. So had I. Apart from some money and a couple of student IDs, there was nothing there. Nothing except her name and the name of her school.

  Not even an address, I thought.

  Was that what he was looking for, her address? No, that couldn’t be it. He knew her name. If he wanted to know where she lived, all he had to do was look in the phone book—didn’t he?

  I mopped the third floor.

  I mopped the second floor.

  I mopped half of the first floor and stopped when I reached the pay phone in the main corridor. There was a telephone directory chained to the wall under it. I left my mop in the bucket, pulled out the directory and flipped through it. C…. Co … Cor … Cornwall … Corsetti … Corvo … Cory … Wait a minute. W comes after V and before Y. I looked again. There were no Corwins in the phone book. Emily was unlisted.

  Earthquakes, avalanches, tornadoes, floods—those are all things that happen somewhere else, to someone else. They’re things I’ve never paid much attention to, other than seeing them on the news. Same with fires.

  Sure, we had fire drills at school a couple of times a year. And a couple of times a year someone set off the alarm—it was always supposed to be a joke, but Mr. Gianneris never thought it was funny. If he caught who did it, the kid(s) got a three-day suspension. And one of the first things Riel had showed me when I moved in with him was where he kept the fire extinguisher. Riel is that kind of guy—like a Boy Scout. Always prepared. But I’d managed to get through life without ever actually having to deal with a fire. I thought the chances I would ever have to deal with one were about zero.

  I smelled it first. I was sweeping the halls on the third floor of the old, original wing of the community center. My first thought: someone is smoking. That’s a big no-no. The community center is a smoke-free zone. The smell seemed to be coming from the end of the hall, in or near the big room that everyone called the studio because it was where art classes were held. And, boy, was that going to get someone in trouble, because there was a lot of stuff in there—solvents and rags and paper—that could really go up if there was a fire.

  Then I heard a bell. A fire alarm. When the fire alarm sounded at school, the teachers made sure everyone got up and left the school. This was supposed to be done in what Mr. Gianneris called “an orderly fashion.” It was also supposed to be done immediately. The school checked later to see if it was a real fire or not. Better safe than sorry, Mr. Gianneris always said.

  At the community center it was different. The alarm went off. Doors opened and people stuck their heads out into the corridor where I was sweeping. You could see they were all wondering—Is it real? Do I have to leave the building? You could also see that nobody really wanted to. It was cold outside. If it was a false alarm, they’d have to stand out there, shivering, until the fire department sounded the all clear. A lot of heads looked at me, I guess because I was out in the hall already.

  I went down the hall to the studio. The smoke was definitely coming from there. I looked around. And then I did something stupid.

  It turns out that pretty much the last thing you want to do when you follow the smell of smoke to a closed door is to fling that door open. You’re supposed to be really careful because (it turns out) you have no way of knowing whether the fire behind the door is big or small. Also, when you open the door, it can cause a draft, which can make the fire worse. Fast. An open door (it turns out) also allows fire and smoke to spread.

  But I didn’t know that, so I opened the door—and immediately jumped back. Jeez, even if it had started out that way, what I had smelled wasn’t a cigarette left in an ashtray. It wasn’t even a match tossed into a wastepaper basket. What I had smelled was a major big-deal fire that all of a sudden got bigger. I felt the heat—it came at me in a wave, blasting my face, pushing me back and farther away from the door. Suddenly there was smoke everywhere, swirling around me and then spreading out into the hall. I heard people behind me now, all of them hurrying away from me and toward the stairs. The alarm was still ringing. I looked up at the ceiling. There were sprinklers up there, but they looked old and they hadn’t come on yet.

  “Hey!” someone called from the end of the hall. “Hey, get out of there!” It was Mr. Henderson. He was standing near the stairs. As far as I could tell, everyone else had left. “Come on,” he shouted at me. “The fire department is on its way.”

  Nobody needed to tell me twice. I turned. Then, as fire engine sirens whoop-whooped outside, I heard something. A cry. I turned back to the studio, shaking my head—and I heard it again.

  “You, Mike!” Mr. Henderson shouted from the end of the hall. “Come on! Out of the building.” He sounded angry now.

  “There’s someone in there,” I said. I couldn’t see whoever it was. The fire was too big. The smoke was too thick.

  Mr. Henderson thumped down the hall toward me. When he got to the studio door, he shoved me aside. “Hey!” he called. “Hey, is someone in there?”

  “Help!” a panicked voice came from inside. “I can’t get out.”

  Mr. Henderson slipped the straps of his overalls off his shoulders and peeled off his shirt. He tossed it to me. “The water fountain,” he said. “Drench this. Now.”

  I raced down the hall, put the shirt in the fountain and pressed the button.

  “Come on, come on,” Mr. Henderson said.

  I raced back and thrust the soaking shirt at him. “Go find the firemen,” he said. “Now!” Then he plunged into the room, right through the fire and the smoke. I hung in the hallway for a moment, stunned, wondering if I’d ever see him again.

  Then I turned and ran.

  Firefighters were swarming into the building by the time I reached the ground floor. I grabbed the closest one and told him where the fire was, where Mr. Henderson was, and what he was doing. He told me to go outside. I watched the firefighters head for the stairs. And then I saw Mr. Henderson. He wa
s coming down the stairs. Staggering down them, actually. His face was dark and smoky looking, and he was carrying a kid. A boy, maybe nine or ten years old. The kid was clinging to him. One of the firefighters took the kid from Mr. Henderson. The rest of them pushed by him and hurried up the stairs. The kid was coughing and blubbering when the firefighter carried him past me.

  Mr. Henderson limped down the hall toward me, coughing. “The kid,” he said. “He sneaked some cigarettes from his big sister’s purse. Thought he’d give smoking a try. In the art room.” He shook his head like he couldn’t believe it. “One more way cigarettes can kill, huh?”

  I stared at Mr. Henderson.

  “You okay?” he said. “You’re not hurt or anything, are you?”

  Hurt? I shook my head. No, I wasn’t hurt. But I was distracted—by the fact that brown-eyed Mr. Henderson now had one brown eye and one very blue one.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It turned out the kid who had accidentally started the fire stuck around after it had started because he thought he could put it out and then slip out of the building before anyone noticed anything. It was a plan. It just wasn’t a good one.

  One of the firefighters questioned me about what I had seen and what I had done. I told him. That’s when I found out that opening the door the way I did had been the wrong thing to do. “Next time,” he said, “just clear the building. Let us worry about the rest.”

  Next time? Once in a lifetime was enough, thanks anyway.

  Riel wasn’t home when I got there. He’d left a note: Back by suppertime. I called his cell phone and reminded him that I had plans. Rebecca had invited me over. Her parents were going to a dinner party. She was going to make supper for me, and then we were going to watch videos.

  “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” Riel said. Then, “You know about the birds and the bees, right, Mike?”