Smoke (12 page)

“Why are you telling me that?”

“I thought you’d like to know.”

“I saw him yesterday. Here, in fact.”

“Did you now?”

“Which you obviously know. Don’t you have a fire to manage?”

She smirks again, this time at herself. “I do.”

“Ben says hi.”

Her smirk drops. “I
am
sorry about you two.”

Does she mean the divorce? The lack of a baby? Better not to ask.

“Me too.”

“I assume you have some purpose in coming out here? Besides checking up on me, of course.”

“You’re all about button-pushing today, I see.”

She pulls me into a hug. “Oh, my darling, I’m sorry. I have a bad feeling about this fire, and I’m taking it out on those around me.”

I pull away and look her in the eye. The usual twinkle is missing. “How bad?”

“Quite bad.”

“The town?”

My house?

“Not that bad, I hope, but . . . it’s going to be a close one. Too close to call right now.”

I look out the smudged window of her camper and wonder, not for the first time, how the life and death of a town can be in the hands of a few hundred men and women no one will ever know. Strangers who are putting their own lives on the line while the town they’re trying to save is probably just complaining about the smoke, and how they’re never going to get the smell out of their drapes. Most of me wants these people to stay ignorant, of course. But a small part of me would like reality to hit them, just for long enough to wake them up, see the world outside them for the place it really is.

“It might be kids that did this,” I say to Kara.

“Young children?”

“Teenagers. They’d been harassing Mr. Phillips. Drunken stupidity, probably.”

“Do you think they know?”

“Perhaps. Think they care?”

“Cynical, cynical.”

I wrap my arms around myself. “Sorry, I’m kind of irritable lately.”

“That is understandable.”

We say good-bye, and I walk out into the camp, wandering through the trailers, listening to the banter. I’m delaying, I know, but when I see Andy emerge from the showers with a towel wrapped around his waist, I realize I was also looking for something.

Him.

Ben’s request from this morning comes back to me, but it’s already too late.

“Beth,” he says. “You’re back.”

“Just visiting. You got a minute?”

“Let me get changed, and I’ll be right out.”

I sit at the picnic table outside his tent, wondering at myself. If Ben knew I was waiting to talk to Andy, that might really be the last straw. And yet, part of me feels like knowing I’m not at fault entitles me to this. To this person who understands what I’ve been through, am going through, and with whom I’ve never had an awkward silence or a misunderstanding. I need the kind of comfort he provides, and maybe I’m being selfish for looking for it, but here I am.

Andy emerges from his tent in an old pair of jeans I recognize and a sweatshirt I don’t. His feet are bare except for a pair of flimsy flip-flops. He prefers to go barefoot when he can; he likes his feet to be “free” when they aren’t encased in the heavy boots that are a necessity for our work. I admire, as I always do, the compact power he exudes.

“What’s up?” he asks, sitting next to me on the bench. Another thing I’ve always liked about Andy—he’s never too self-conscious to sit next to what he wants, instead of across from it.

“It feels like it’s happening again,” I say. “Like four years ago.”

“The Miller case? A kid started this fire?”

“Kids. Teenagers. I think so, anyway.”

“I’m sorry, Beth.”

I lace my hands together like I would if I was seated in front of a priest. And perhaps that’s what this is, a confession of sorts.

“I’m not sure I can do it.”

“You’re not doing anything.”

I take a ragged breath, but all I get is smoke for my troubles.

“Aren’t I, though? Everyone wants to blame the homeowner. I could leave it at that. I
should
leave it at that.”

“But you don’t think it’s him?”

“It might be, but maybe not.”

“You have to do what’s right.”

“Do I?”

He looks at me, and for the first time since we met, I’m not exactly sure what he’s thinking.

“You always do what’s right. That’s who you are.”

“What if I don’t want to be that person anymore?”

“You can’t run away from yourself. I’d have thought you knew that by now.”

CHAPTER 13

There’s Going to Be a Change of Plans

Mindy

Before Mindy could face the Coffee Boosters
and the rest of the Fall Fling organizing committee, she needed reinforcements. Caffeine and calories, not the empty substitutes found at the
Perk
, but the real thing.

So she went to Joanie’s. She hadn’t been there since that last, terrible day with Elizabeth, and the caffeine and grease that coated her senses before she’d even walked in the door smelled like memories.

This used to be their place, hers and Elizabeth’s. They’d come here and spend hours together after whatever mutual activity they’d signed up for that month. Particularly in the winter months, when Elizabeth wasn’t working and after Mindy got laid off, they’d drink bottomless cups of coffee and eat half of whatever treat the other ordered. Mindy hadn’t had a friend like that since college. She’d moved to San Diego for her master’s degree, where she didn’t know anyone, and the women—and men, for that matter—in the lab where she worked were an insular, prickly bunch. It got easier when she met Peter at a party she’d forced herself to go to, but then they moved and had the kids, and then Carrie got sick and they moved again. And while she had acquaintances in Nelson, mostly the other moms she met on her endless circuit of child-related chores, Elizabeth had been the only close connection she’d made outside her family.

Elizabeth was the one who suggested that she take an EMT class. Elizabeth needed to re-up her qualifications, and having heard all about Carrie and the years of restless concern that followed, she thought it would be good for Mindy. Peter had been surprised at her interest, but that twelve-week course had been some of the best time Mindy had spent in years. Learning how to assess and treat basic medical emergencies. Staying in the barracks outside of town with the much younger participants for the last intensive weekend. The thrilling stress of taking the final exam and passing it with flying colors. She’d felt almost high with the exhilaration of it for weeks.

Then Carrie had come down with a bad flu, and Angus had failed two math tests in a row, and Elizabeth had left for the summer, and Mindy settled back into her life with a thud.

Now, as she made her way through the 1950s-style diner, she found herself hoping Elizabeth would be there, sitting at the chipped Formica counter, maybe, or getting a nondescript to-go cup. Instead, the closest thing to Elizabeth was her boss, Rich, holding court in his usual Naugahyde booth with the triumvirate of men who ran Nelson: the sheriff, the mayor, and the head of the tourism board.

Mindy sighed and took a seat in the booth behind Rich and the others. She gave her order for a coffee, black, to the pleasant waitress who still knew her name. And wasn’t it nice that she could just say, “Coffee, black,” that she didn’t have to remember some complicated set of words to get what she wanted. She felt so lighthearted she added an order for one of the cinnamon Danishes she fantasized about when she was in spin class.

Spin class
. Mindy had forgotten all about it. Guilt and dread descended in equal measure. Kate would be disappointed. Heck, she was disappointed with herself, but what could she do to fix that now, or erase the bites of Danish that had already slipped so easily down her throat? She felt at sea, and this place was an anchor. Her panicked awakening still clung to her, and she was worried about Peter, and oh, she didn’t know. If only she could pick a direction and stick to it. If only she wasn’t so apt to be carried along in the trail of whomever it was she was closest to at the moment, like they had a bigger gravitational pull than she did, and she was only a satellite in their orbit.

It was a hard place to be, up there in her head, so she tuned in to the conversation behind her. They were talking about the fire, and she was glad that at least some people in the town seemed as consumed by it as she was. They weren’t saying anything unusual at first, but then Rich was talking about Elizabeth, about how she had this ridiculous theory, that she didn’t want to accept the obvious. But he didn’t say what the obvious was, and Mindy couldn’t follow his intimation.

“And of course, old lady Fletcher’s got her bun in a knot,” Rich said in his usual pontificating style. Oh, the fun she and Elizabeth used to have imitating how he talked. “You’d think she was running a hotel out there.”

“Not that surprising she’s unhappy about having the shelter in her school. Kids need education and all,” the mayor said. He was a tall, wiry man in his sixties who’d had a lock on the position for at least twenty years. “My office is fielding thirty calls a day from irate parents.”

“Unhappy was yesterday,” Rich said. “Today it’s all, ‘I’ve got this whole room of beds and food and only three guests.’”

“Guests? That’s a good one.”

“What’s she calling you for?” the head of tourism asked Rich. “Housing’s my department.”

“That’s what I told her. But she thinks that because my girl is investigating the fire, I somehow have control over the rest of it.”

Mindy cringed. If Elizabeth knew Rich was referring to her as “my girl,” she’d be livid.

“Phillips been brought in for questioning yet?” the mayor asked.

“Nah, not yet,” Sheriff Thompson said. “Thought I’d let him stew for a couple days. Get him in the right frame of mind before we tackle him.”

“You’re a sadistic bastard, aren’t you?” the mayor said.

“How else you gonna keep this town in order?”

Rich pulled out his ringing phone and made a face. “Just make sure you’re not digging your own grave come election time.”

Sheriff Thompson laughed. “I wouldn’t start planning any funerals just yet.”

“She didn’t want no funeral,” John told Mindy an hour later.

They were sitting at a folding table in the gym at Nelson Elementary, where they’d been for the last twenty minutes. The cup of coffee one of the volunteers had brought him was sitting untouched on the table. He wore a camp blanket around his shoulders like a cape, tied at the neck above the V of his hospital scrubs.

“Your wife?” Mindy asked, feeling slightly disoriented.

After she’d finished her coffee and Danish, she had another two hours to kill before the Fall Fling meeting, and she found herself driving to the elementary school. She wanted to meet John Phillips, she decided. Newspaper articles and overheard conversations weren’t enough to propel her through the fight she knew was coming. Besides, it seemed kind of odd to be advocating for someone when you weren’t even on a first-name basis.

After a brief hesitation on his part, now they were. It hadn’t taken long for Mindy to get an introduction to John’s peculiar, circular way of talking. He seemed to have no filter, and there were moments when she wasn’t sure if he was talking to her or to his dead wife, Kristy. As far as Mindy could tell, John hadn’t had anyone to talk to in a long while, and now that he’d gotten started, he didn’t quite know how to stop.

For instance, when she asked him how he was doing, he told her that he’d woken up that morning feeling confused and lost. It wasn’t that he didn’t know where he was, he said. He felt like he didn’t know
who
he was. It was likely something he’d never known. But to the extent that he had, well, all that knowledge, that accumulated life, had been burned to dust, to earth, broken back into its original elements, like Kristy was at her insistence.

And that’s how they’d gotten to talking about funerals.

“‘Don’t you be wasting our money on funerals and caskets and nonsense,’ Kristy had said when the doctors made it clear that the cancer was going to take her,” John said, delivering his wife’s words in a high-pitched wheezy voice that made Kristy come to life. “‘You need to act sensible and take the cheapest option. Don’t let those funeral people push you around neither. They’s worse than used-car salesmen, I tell you. You listening to me?’

“She never thought I was listening to her. But I always was. Course I used to talk more, when we were first together. But she didn’t really like what I had to say, and it got so it was easier to keep myself to myself, if you know what I mean.”

Mindy did know. She’d often felt that it was easier to stay silent, to agree, to express herself only when she absolutely had to. Mindy told him it was a natural way to feel.

John gave a deep grunt and continued.

He’d been sitting by Kristy’s bedside at the hospital, wondering how they were ever going to pay for the treatments he was sure the doctor was going to say were necessary. When they’d talked about it earlier, Kristy thought the army would pay for everything. She said it was “his due,” but that was because she thought, since he never corrected her, that he’d done something in the army worth a damn. He hadn’t known how to tell her, all those years later, that what had really happened was that, just shy of his second year in, when he heard he was being sent
back
to Vietnam, he’d tried to escape (“desertion” it was called), and it was only because he’d tripped and fallen down a hole some sadistic CO had made one of the other privates dig that he’d been allowed to leave for “medical reasons,” rather than be thrown in the stockade.

Mindy thought about intervening then, telling him he didn’t have to confess these things to her. But she stopped herself. She was supposed to be making him feel better, after all. And if this helped, well, who was she to judge or censure?

She made a sympathetic noise, which was all the encouragement he needed to continue.

After Kristy died a few pain-filled weeks later, John said he’d done what she wanted. He hadn’t listened to that slick man in a suit who talked about payment plans and how to give Kristy an “appropriate” send-off. He’d used their small savings to pay for her to be cremated and poured her remains from the plastic bag they’d given him into an old ceramic pot she liked.