House on Fire

by Bonnie Kistler

  Kip had given up trying to stare his phone back to life. Now he was staring at the braided rag rug on the floor, elbows on his knees and his chin on his chest. Pete sat down beside him on the nubby plaid sofa. “Tell me again what happened.”

  Kip told it in a halting whisper. How Chrissy shuffled into the kitchen that morning and slumped down at the table. She moaned she didn’t feel good. There was something off about her eyes. Like they didn’t match. One was the usual blue, but the other was black—the pupil was completely dilated. And then—then it was like one side of her face melted off her skull, and her mouth opened up and she vomited all over the table. Kip ran for some paper towels, and by the time he got back—seconds, it was only seconds—she was on the floor, convulsing. “I—I turned her on her side so she wouldn’t choke, you know? But I couldn’t get her to come to, even after the seizures stopped. I tried calling you, and Leigh, then I called nine-one-one.”

  Pete scrubbed a hand over his face. “Did she ever wake up?”

  Kip shook his head. “They took her for some kind of scan, and one of the ER doctors came out and said it showed a subarachnoid hemorrhage and asked if she’d ever been diagnosed with a cerebral aneurysm.”

  “Never.” Leigh would have wrapped her in lamb’s wool for the rest of her life if she had.

  “Or if she ever had a head injury.”

  What child hadn’t? They’d had each of the boys to the ER one time or another with a suspected concussion, and Chrissy played sports as hard as they did. She rode horses, too, which meant she’d had her share of hard falls, not to mention crashes into stable walls every time a horse took a sudden sidestep.

  “It could be congenital.” Kip’s halting whisper picked up speed, and his next words came out in a rapid-fire stutter. “Google said these things—these aneurysms, whatever—are also caused by old age or drugs or infections. But she’s not old and she doesn’t do drugs and what kind of infection do they mean? It’s gotta be something more than bronchitis, right? So it’s either congenital or a head injury.”

  “She never showed any symptoms.”

  “He said they go undiagnosed until they rupture and bleed. Then he said they couldn’t wait for a parent and they had to go in now and clip it. Dad—” His voice broke on the word. “—I think he meant into her brain.”

  “Yeah, buddy, I think so.” Absently Pete patted him on the knee.

  “They’ll have to shave her head.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Man, she’s gonna hate that so much.”

  The elevator chimed again out in the corridor, and this time it was followed by the sound of footsteps that Pete instantly recognized as Leigh’s. It was the sharp strike of her high heels in a building full of soft soles, and the brisk rhythm of those heels on the hard floor, like the pace of a horse running at a controlled trot. Control was what he heard in her footsteps, and it was a relief to hear it in her voice, too, when she addressed someone down the hall in her clear, strong, lawyerly tone.

  He jumped up and ran down the hall to join her, but she was already out of sight. He turned a slow revolution in the empty corridor. “Leigh?” he called.

  She didn’t answer. She must have been out of earshot, too. Someone must have escorted her to the doctor. He trotted back to the glass cube and picked up the phone again. It felt like the intercom in a prison visiting room. “Hey,” he said to the faceless voice that answered. “My wife just arrived. Did you take her back to see Dr. Rowan?”

  “Dr. Rowan’s in surgery.”

  “Okay, where did you take her? My wife. I want to join her.”

  “Your name, please?”

  He went through them all again. Pete Conley. Leigh Huyett. Christine Porter. One family with three different surnames. There was a reason why couples used to pick one and stick it on all their kids, and at that moment he was willing to become Pete Huyett Porter if it would get him past that glass partition to wherever Leigh and Chrissy were.

  “Have a seat in the waiting room. Someone will be with you.”

  Shortly. She forgot to tack on shortly at the end of that sentence.

  He returned to the lounge. The TV was on now, and Kip was dispiritedly clicking through the channels with the volume turned low. He passed through the cable news stations and some Saturday morning cartoons and a couple infomercials until he finally stopped on the History Channel and turned up the volume.

  “What’s this?” Pete said.

  “I saw it already. It’s about the Crusades.”

  Kip was writing his final AP History paper on the Christian Crusades, about some pope back in the Dark Ages who basically incited all of Europe to march to Jerusalem and conquer the infidels.

  “Hey, what was that phrase?” Pete asked as the narrator droned on. “That Latin war cry you wrote about?”

  “Deus Vult?”

  “Right. What’s that mean again?”

  “It is the will of God.”

  Right. The will of God. Pete had a sort of reflexive belief in God, much like his belief in, say, Neptune. He had no reason to doubt the planet’s existence, not when other people seemed so sure, but he couldn’t personally verify it, and it didn’t have much to do with his actual life. The same was true of God. He never thought of God as watching him or listening to him and certainly not exerting his will over him. So what did it mean to say something was the will of God? In the Dark Ages it meant a command that had to be actively obeyed. Take up arms and march east. But today it meant only a passive resignation. It’s out of our hands There’s nothing we can do It’s the will of God.

  There was no way it could be God’s will that Chrissy sustain any kind of brain damage, but Pete had to accept it was out of his hands. There was nothing he could do for her now.

  It was afternoon before the crisp rat-a-tat of Leigh’s heels sounded from the far end of the corridor. Pete looked at his watch as he got to his feet. It was more than three hours since they took Chrissy to surgery. They must be done now, the artery was clipped, and Leigh was coming to tell them that everything was going to be okay.

  The brisk rhythm of her footsteps faltered. There was the clatter of a stumble, then a machine-gun burst of quick running steps. Then a sound that came not from her feet but from the bottom of her throat. A sound that in five years he never once heard her make.

  Chapter Six

  Afterward there was a luncheon at the house. Pete made all the arrangements, for that and everything else over the past three days, but now he had nothing to do. He wandered through each crowded room, looking for a forgotten detail or one more fire to put out. The caterers had the bar and buffet covered, and Leigh’s longtime assistant Polly was answering the door. A cop was directing traffic at the corner, and two young guys from Pete’s crew were valet-parking the visitors’ cars in the meadow. Pete had nothing left to do but find a place to position himself. Suddenly that seemed the hardest task of all.

  More than three hundred people came through the door that afternoon. Family, friends, neighbors, business associates. Leigh’s parents, up from Florida and sitting silent and pale beneath their leathery tans. Leigh’s friends came in three sets: her lawyer friends, her horse friends, and her mom friends. Her law partners made a big showing, along with a couple of judges and some of her clients. A few of Ted’s friends were there, and his colleagues from his stockbroker days, before he chucked it all to sail the seven seas. Most of the neighbors dropped by to pay their respects, and some of them stayed all afternoon—the Markhams from next door, the Dietrichs with their pregnant daughter. And the house was full of middle schoolers: Chrissy’s school had declared a half day and sent two activity-busloads of her classmates.

  Polly was supposed to be there as a guest, but she didn’t know how to stop working, and she spent all afternoon on her feet, opening the door for each new arrival and steering the guests like an usher at a wedding. Friends of the father? Ted was at the bar in the dining room, and she showed them the way. Friends of the mother? She waved
at Leigh in the wing chair by the fireplace in the living room. Friends of the brothers? She pointed to Zack and Dylan standing like statues behind their mother, each with a hand on one of her shoulders. They were big hulking boys, and standing together like that, they looked like the defensive line they used to be part of back in high school football. But they were red-eyed and shell-shocked and drowning too deep in their own grief to be of any help to Leigh.

  That role fell to Shelby Randolph, who sat perched on the ottoman at Leigh’s feet. She was the real defensive line today, sheltering Leigh from hysterical teenaged girls and maladroit well-wishers, fending off anyone who tried to do more than offer a brief word of condolence. If any guest dared even to sniffle in front of Leigh, Shelby hustled them away like the Secret Service frog-marching a protester out of a presidential town meeting. She ran interference with Ted, and with Pete, too, for that matter. Twenty-five years of friendship trumped five years of marriage.

  Pete couldn’t have taken care of Leigh these last three days anyway. He had airport runs to make and trains to meet. Hotel rooms to reserve for anyone who didn’t insist on staying at the house. Beds to strip and sheets and towels to change. A casket to choose, the cemetery plot to buy, and a headstone to order. The menu to approve. The music for the organist to play. The photos to select for the slide show that was playing in a loop on the big TV in the family room. Chrissy through the years, growing from just-born all the way up to last week. Where she would remain forever, frozen in time.

  Now all the chores and errands were done, and there was nothing left for him to do, and no role for him to play either. Ted was the bereaved father here today, not Pete. No matter that Pete was the one who ate breakfast and dinner with Chrissy every day for the past five years. Who picked her up from her after-school activities and coached her softball team and coaxed a smile from her after her first middle school breakup. Still, he understood his lack of standing. If anything ever happened to Kip or Mia, the last thing he’d want would be Gary sitting front and center in the mourner’s bench. That would be Pete’s place, just as it was Ted’s place today.

  Ted’s mourner’s bench was a chair next to the bar, where he sat slopping whiskey from a tumbler while he wept out loud with maudlin memories of his sweet little girl. She was little by default in his memories, considering he moved out when she was seven. And not only out of the house—he left the whole goddam country. It took Pete two days to locate him at a marina in Bermuda, and he barely managed to book him a flight that would get him here in time for the funeral. But he made it. Chrissy would have wanted her whole family there, and Pete made sure she got it.

  Pete had no family there. When he phoned his mother with the news, she said, “Oh, what a shame. Kristen, was it?” She didn’t think of Chrissy as her grandchild; she made her excuses and sent a card. He asked Karen to bring Mia—she adored her big stepsister; Where’s Chrissy? was the first thing she said when she arrived every other weekend—but Gary decreed that ten was too young for funerals, and he and Karen came without her. Kip was around somewhere, but he’d been doing his disappearing act ever since they got home from the hospital on Saturday. Even Shepherd was gone, penned up in the barn with the horses.

  Pete threaded his way through the crowd into the living room and squatted beside Leigh’s chair. “Anything I can get you, sweetheart?”

  Her clouded eyes wandered his way. The sedatives her doctor prescribed were supposed to be low-dose, but they dulled her into a high haze. It was like somebody had dropped a veil over her head, and she looked out through layers of filmy gauze. “I’m fine,” she whispered.

  “Okay,” he said. She didn’t react as he kissed her. He got to his feet and circled behind the twins and clapped them each on the shoulder. “You doing okay, guys?”

  They looked like their father, big and blond. Two years of college pizza and beer had softened them around the middle, too, like Ted. Zack started to answer before he choked up and ducked his head. With a loud sniff, Dylan nodded in the direction of the bar. “Pete, somebody’s gotta cut Dad off.”

  Zack found his voice to chime in. “Yeah. Before he starts singing or something.”

  By somebody, they meant Pete, but it wasn’t his place to close the bar to their father. “It’ll be over soon,” he told them.

  He spotted Karen and Gary standing alone on the far side of the living room. They didn’t know anyone there, and Karen was getting that fearful look she often wore in a room full of strangers. He ought to go rescue her, even if it meant talking to Gary. He started to head that way when Gary buttonholed another passing guest and introduced himself as Dr. March. “It’s like a balloon bulging out of an artery,” Pete heard him say. “These things can go undetected for years until, bam, they rupture. Then they bleed out into the brain and it’s all over.” Gary was a dentist. He knew more about abscesses than aneurysms.

  Pete did an abrupt about-face. He looked around for Kip but he was still AWOL. Probably hiding out in his room. Pete headed for the stairs. Time to flush him out.

  Polly was still in the front hall. She’d been cornered by the Dietrich girl, who was speaking in a strained, too-loud voice. “I’m just going to disappear, that’s what. He can’t stalk me if he can’t find me.”

  “Now let’s think about that, dear.” Polly was the secret weapon in the arsenal of Leigh’s practice. She was like everyone’s favorite grandmother, wise and soothing. “You don’t want to be on your own with a baby coming. You’ll want your mother and father on hand.”

  “They’re no help to me. Not where Hunter’s concerned.”

  “Excuse me,” Pete said and cut around them to the stairs.

  The buzz of the crowd faded as he reached the second floor. He turned right, past the old master bedroom, now fitted out for Mia, then climbed another half-flight of stairs. Three doors opened off the landing, and two of them stood open, to Kip’s room and the twins’, but he wasn’t in either one.

  The third door was closed. Pete hesitated before he swung it open, but that room was empty, too. The bed was made and the books and homework put away and the clothes picked up off the floor, but signs of life were still everywhere. The life of a girl teetering between childhood and young womanhood. Her Breyer horse collection arrayed on a shelf above the complete works of William Shakespeare and a year’s back issues of Seventeen. The One Direction posters on the wall and the blue ribbons tacked to the bulletin board beside flyers for Habitat for Humanity and Doctors Without Borders. A rainbow of nail polish bottles lined up on her dresser next to a framed photo of the family, the one taken in front of the tree last Christmas. Pete picked up the photo and gazed at the grouping. He and Leigh stood smiling with their arms around each other’s waists, the twins were taking a knee on either side, and Chrissy sat front and center with her arms flung around Kip and Mia and a thousand-watt smile spread over her face.

  He clasped the frame to his chest and sank down on her pink-ribboned bedspread. The door to the closet stood open and he could see the heaps of sneakers and loafers on the floor and the jumble of dresses and shirts crammed on the rod. Leigh loved to buy Chrissy new clothes, loved it far more than buying clothes for herself. She delighted in her daughter’s burgeoning beauty, and every time they got home from the mall, she had Chrissy give them a fashion show of each new ensemble. She’d sit down with Pete at the kitchen table and Chrissy would duck into the pantry with her shopping bags and come out giggling to prance and twirl with the tags still attached and fluttering like tails on a kite. Then the two of them would gallop upstairs and rummage through her closet to see what else might go with what. They’d be up there laughing for an hour after every shopping spree while Pete sat in the kitchen, grinning at all the ruckus.

  He put his face in his hands as the echo of their laughter rippled away. It struck him for the first time: he’d never hear that sound again. Chrissy’s laughter, gone forever, and he couldn’t imagine life in this house without it. Or her. He might never hear the sound of
Leigh’s laughter again either. Not that laugh anyway, the one that bubbled out of her, a spring of pure delight. Chrissy was the heart and soul of Leigh’s life, and Pete didn’t know how she’d ever be the same again. His wonderful, lighthearted, wisecracking wife might be gone for good.

  The voices of the crowd droned on downstairs as he got up and closed the door to Chrissy’s closet. The clouds had been hanging heavy in the sky all day, and now the windowpanes were streaked with rain. He looked out through the glass. A drizzle was falling on the bluestone patio down below, and there was Kip, outside, hunkered on a chaise. Hiding out, as he’d suspected. No better than Pete, but he shouldn’t be doing it in the rain. He headed downstairs to drag him inside.

  Polly was talking to someone in a rain-splattered hat at the front door. It was the traffic cop, which meant another fire to put out. “I got this, Polly,” Pete said. Until he saw that there were two officers at the door, and neither one was the traffic cop. He stopped short. “Is there a problem?”

  Polly turned to him, eyes wide, and it was then that he registered who the officers were. They were the two cops from the police station Friday night.

  “Mr. Conley,” the man said. Softball Coach, Leigh had called him, though Pete learned that night his name was Hooper. “Is your son at home?”

  “Sure. What’s this about?”

  The woman stepped up. Ballerina Bun, Leigh had named her, though she was actually Officer Mateo. “We have a warrant for the arrest of Christopher Conley.”

  “What?” Pete said, a little too loudly as Polly backed away. “What do you mean? He was already arrested. You released him.”

  Mateo held up a crisp sheaf of papers. “These are new charges.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Conley.” Hooper glanced uneasily at the throng of guests spilling into the foyer. “I know the timing is—unfortunate.”

  Shelby charged into the hall with a glass of wine in her hand. “Let me see that,” she snapped and thrust her glass at Officer Mateo as she snatched the warrant from her.