Tinderbox (31 page)

After her father leaves, Caro drinks some water from the tap. Is Eva being here evidence
that she set the fire? Isn’t it equally plausible that Eva was out at the time of
the fire? That she returned to see the house roped off and everyone gone? Scared,
she came here, the only other place she knew?

Either way, Eva’s job is over. There is no house now to keep.

14

Caro sits on the floor watching Eva sleep. Eva has rolled onto her side, facing Caro,
her thumb no longer in her mouth. The scarf has slipped out of her hands onto the
floor. There is something hanging around her neck, an antique-looking charm shaped
like a hand. Is this what Adam lost or what Uri made to replace it?

Eva cracks her eyes, then closes them again.

“Eva. Wake up.”

Eva curls into herself. She clutches the charm. Then she opens her eyes. She sits
up, covering her face as though expecting blows.

“It is not true,” she whimpers.

“What is not true?”

“She was not in the house. She was at the neighbors’ house playing a tile game. It
is a lie. The wicked lady, the one who said my mother went back to our house, she
is a witch.”

Caro gets to her feet. Looking down, she can see the albumen color of Eva’s scalp.

“Only my father was in the house. Looking at his dirty pictures. Drinking his nasty
stuff.”

Caro takes Eva’s hand. “Come,” she says, pulling Eva to her feet. “You’re still half-asleep.”
She leads Eva to the bathroom, where someone has left a roll of paper towels on the
counter. “Use the toilet. Wash your face.”

15

Caro waits in the kitchen for Eva to come out from the bathroom. She can hear the
water running. It sounds like the tub. Perhaps Eva is giving herself a sponge bath
with the paper towels.

What was Eva talking about? Her mother and someone she thought was a wicked lady.

Caro wishes she could talk with her own mother about what to do. Should she ask Eva
if she set the fire? Should she tell Eva what happened to her mother and Omar? Do
they need to turn Eva over to the police? Or should they take her to a hospital?

She hears the car coming up the driveway.

She goes back to the bathroom. The water is still running. “Eva,” she calls through
the door, “we have some food for you when you’re ready.”

The water continues to run. Caro’s heart starts to pound. She knocks on the door.
“Eva. Answer me, please.”

She hears the car engine turning off, the car door opening and closing, and then the
crunching sound her father’s shoes make on the gravel path.

Caro knocks again on the bathroom door. There are no sounds other than the running
water. She turns the handle. The bathroom is empty, the water running into the empty
tub.

The door to the children’s room is closed. Caro can hear her father unpacking the
bags in the kitchen. She knocks on this door. “Eva?”

She knocks again, then opens the door. The casement window is open wide, the screen
propped against the wall.

On the floor is Eva’s scarf, on the bed the key to the house.

16

Caro knows her father does not believe they will find her. She knows Eva is like one
of those nocturnal animals who sense where the shadows fall and how to find caves
and hidden burrows, an instinct for where a bat will swoop or an owl pounce. But Caro
needs to try. Needs to give Eva a chance to explain herself. For two hours, her father
circles the roads near the house with an increasingly larger radius while Caro peers
out the car window.

Before they return to the city, Caro writes Eva a note with her phone numbers.
Call me as soon as you get this
, she writes. She underlines her phone number.
Look in the mailbox at the end of the driveway. I left your scarf and a sandwich and
candy for you inside where the animals can’t get at them
. She tapes the note to the front door.

Her father lifts the screen back into the casement window and closes the window. She
puts the key back under the clay pot.

“I’ll call Henry,” he says, “and ask him to remove the key and the things from the
mailbox when he’s here next week for the closing.”

Her father registers her unhappiness that he does not think Eva will come back. Caro
refuses to tell him that she thinks the same, that she has already decided that if
she doesn’t hear from Eva by the morning, she will call the Willow police and go to
her mother’s precinct to file a report.

At the end of the driveway, her father stops the car so she can put the scarf and
the food inside the mailbox. She pushes the door to the mailbox tightly shut and climbs
back into the car.

Her father takes her hands and holds them between his own. “She’s a survivor,” he
says. “She did what she could to make herself safe.”

17

On the week anniversary of the fire, the day Myra is discharged from the hospital,
she realizes that they have already begun to acclimate: the crisis, ceased as a crisis,
having shifted to their new circumstances with its own order and logic.

Rachida, who has been staying in the residents’ dormitory, will remain there until
the end of June, when her fellowship will be over, after which she and Adam and Omar
will return to Detroit. Adam will stay at Caro’s. When Omar is discharged, he will
move into Caro’s as well. Larry, who has rescued and had cleaned what of their clothes
could be salvaged, will go back to Tucson at the end of the week.

On her end, she has made decisions with a certitude that has rendered them simple
despite their magnitude. Most significantly, she has decided not to return to living
in the house. The insurance adjuster, a surprisingly gentle and patient man, visited
her on her second day in the hospital. Her policy will cover six months of temporary
housing. He has given her the names of two contractors who specialize in fire renovations.
Her office suite is luckily undamaged. Once she is ready to resume seeing patients,
she will be able to do so there. After the house is presentable again, she will sell
it and buy an apartment where she can also keep an office.

Caro has found her a furnished apartment to which she goes straight from the hospital:
the home of a soap-opera star who has been written out of her part so that she is
subletting her Trump Tower thirty-sixth-floor one-bedroom to go live uptown herself.
“A seesaw,” Myra says to Caro. “One person’s misfortune, another’s opportunity.”

The apartment is extravagantly comfortable, with towel warmers and a heated floor
in the bathroom and a remote control that operates the sunshades, but impersonal and
bland, so that Myra feels as though she has been airlifted into an advertisement in
a glossy design magazine. On her first day out of the hospital, she lies on the couch
looking down at the city so far below it is sanitized of garbage and rat droppings
and sound, save for a whooshing that, were she not able to see the horse-drawn carriages
lined along Central Park South and the cars, tiny as toys, rounding Columbus Circle,
she would have mistaken for wind.

In the evening, Adam comes to visit. His fingernails are untrimmed and he needs a
haircut.

Myra waits for him to settle into the white leather slipper chair before telling him
that she will be selling the house.

“Are you sure?” Adam blurts, as though she might have jotted down a piece of information
incorrectly.

“I am, darling. The fire was just the kick in the pants. I love the house. It’s where
I raised you and Caro. But the two of you have been gone for a long time now. It’s
time for me to live a different way.” She doesn’t say what she has thought countless
times since the fire: that if she hadn’t delayed for so long selling the house, an
avoidance, really, of acknowledging that the era of raising her children is long past,
she would not have taken in Adam and Rachida and Omar. Would have left Adam to figure
out how to manage here in the city without her. Would not have hired Eva.

18

The day after Caro settles her mother into the temporary apartment, she returns to
work. It is a relief to find everything the same: Simon, still wearing her old Harvard
sweatshirt, still lingering by the bakery stoop, the Christmas lights strewn over
the door even though it is late March, the yeasty smell of the soft Spanish rolls
ready for the slabs of orange cheese.

“Hey, gorgeous,” Simon says, “long time no see. You been in Tahiti with your boyfriend?”

“I wish. My mother had a fire in her house.”

“Bummer. Real bummer.”

“It is. How’ve you been?”

“You can keep a secret, right?”

Caro raises an eyebrow.

“This kid in the neighborhood spliced some wires and got me cable in my squat.” Simon
grins. “I got HBO now!”

Caro smiles. It is the first time she has smiled since the fire. For a moment, everything
feels okay. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s get us something to eat.”

19

It is late afternoon, Myra’s first excursion out of the soap-opera star’s apartment
since she left the hospital four days ago—a doctor’s appointment and a visit with
Omar. Her porcine dressings have been removed and the burn doctors have declared what
they describe as good epithelialization on the wound site, but she still feels a deep
fatigue, a heaviness in her limbs, a constant awareness of her sapped energy.

She and Larry are seated on opposite sides of Omar’s hospital bed, watching him sleep.
Adam has gone back to Caro’s. Rachida will be arriving soon. Mumbling so that at first
she’s not even sure what he’s saying, Larry asks if she will have dinner with him
tonight, his last night in New York.

“Okay.”

“Really?” Larry grins like a fifteen-year-old. “The concierge at the Stanhope is usually
able to get early reservations at Daniel.”

“It would be wasted on me. Especially now. And I don’t feel like dressing up with
bandages still covering half my stomach. Let’s just go someplace simple.”

Myra suggests a small French restaurant on upper Broadway, a place where she’s been
with Caro. Seven o’clock, so she can rest first but still not be out too late. When
she arrives, Larry is already seated at a table in the window alcove in the front.
He stands to kiss her cheek. His skin is smooth, just shaven. In his cashmere sports
coat and Cartier watch, he looks overdressed and too prosperous for the place.

She recommends a few dishes that she’s had before—the fluke, the ocean trout, the
vegetable terrine—and leaves Larry to select the wine. They chat for a few moments
about how well Omar is doing. Then Larry leans forward in his chair. “Henry called
me this afternoon from Willow. The walk-through before the closing was today. He went
to check the house first, and it seems that Eva did come back. The note Caro wrote
was gone and the mailbox was empty.”

Myra nods. When Caro told her that Eva had left the scarf Myra had given her at Christmas,
Myra had thought she would come back.

“I haven’t told Caro yet. Do you think I should?”

“Why not?”

“She felt terrible about making the police report. I think she imagined Eva in one
of those nightmare scenes from the movies when dogs and men with nightsticks surround
some poor, vulnerable person. Then, afterward, she said she had the impression that
the report would go in a filing cabinet and nothing would be done. She didn’t like
that either.”

“She was filling in for me. Eva was my responsibility.”

“So you wouldn’t tell her?”

“I would tell her. She has a right to know. And we don’t need the burden of another
secret.”

Larry looks at her quizzically.

“Eva had a lot of secrets.”

The waiter arrives with the bottle of wine. Myra stares out the window while Larry
goes through the silly tasting ritual. She waits until they are alone again to continue.
“I think there are only two people whom I’ve failed with a capital
F
. Eva was one of them.”

“She was crazy long before she came to New York. If anyone is to blame, it’s your
cousin. She should have warned you.”

“Ursula really didn’t know her. She just wanted Eva out of Alicia’s and her hair.
Eva’s troubles go way back. But we, I, made her come entirely unglued.”

It surprises Myra that she does not feel with Larry a sanction against talking about
Eva. Perhaps it is because he is a physician, so it seems in some way almost collegial,
within the confines allowed by professional ethics. Or has what Eva’s done—or, to
be fair, what Myra suspects Eva did—released Myra from any covenants?

“I only understand a part of it. She wanted me to be the protective mother she lost
too early or probably never had. I think seeing so many of us—Rachida, Caro, me—taking
care of Omar made that longing overwhelming for her. But there was something more,
something that had to do with Adam. After the kids got back from Uri’s funeral, she
stopped talking to him. She set the fire in the music room, the room Adam was using
as his office.”

The waiter arrives with their first courses: the terrine for Larry, a green salad
for herself. She feels so tired, she hopes she will be able to make a respectable
attempt at eating.

“But why a fire?”

“Her mother was killed in a fire. Her father set the house where they lived on fire
and her mother was burned to death.”

“How do you know that?”

“She told me.”

“And she never told the police?”

“I suppose not.”

Larry puts down his fork. He has finished the terrine before Myra has even begun her
salad.

Without thinking, Myra switches their plates, then flushes as she recognizes the gesture
from the years they were married, when Larry’s hunger always outstripped hers. “I’m
still getting my appetite back,” she murmurs.

It is true about her appetite, but she switched the plates, she sees now, as distraction—because
she feels unnerved by the skeptical way Larry is looking at her. It reminds her of
Dreis, of the doubt she, too, seemed to have about Eva’s story.