Tinderbox (35 page)

“Do you?” Adam repeats.

“What good would it do?”

“They’d understand how fucked-up I am.” Adam clenches his hands, the spiders disappearing
into his fists. “I haven’t looked at any of that stuff since the fire, but I’d be
a liar if I said I don’t still think about the pictures.”

Talis’s mother had taught him how to live with a secret. He can’t recall her ever
having actually instructed him not to tell anyone that she didn’t believe his father
was dead, but he’d always known that this was more forbidden than anything else he
might do. For a long while, he resented the burden of something that could not be
said, but as he grew older, he’d been able to see the situation through his mother’s
eyes: the secret, a small price for not living hand to mouth as they would have on
her supermarket cashier’s salary alone, for not worrying about buying her kid shoes
or having the electric turned off, for not asking for handouts from her sisters, who
looked down on her, or her parents, who kept accounts of every penny given.

“So you want to tell them so they can then forgive you?”

And the kids were right. His mother had been Red Hot Dot, screwing married men on
their late-night trips for milk and diapers in the manager’s office, where she was
the one who closed out the registers each night.

Adam digs his nails into his arm. He looks like someone who could gouge out his own
eyes.

Parachuting from a plane was easy next to what Talis wills himself to do now: to pull
it out of himself, the goodness to respond, to grant the healing of one soul revealing
itself to another. “Let it go, man. Let it go.”

33

At first, there are only hang ups. Three on Caro’s cell phone in January, two in February.
When Caro calls back, there is no answer. Trying the numbers again, a few hours later,
she discovers pay phones at a gas station, a laundromat, a convenience store. No girl
from Peru anywhere near.

From the area codes, it seems that Eva is moving west: Pennsylvania, Ohio, then a
leap to Colorado. Six calls. Six hang ups.

In April, there is a call without a click. Caro can hear breathing.
Eva? Eva, is that you?
Caro asks over and over again. On the second of these calls, Caro just talks into
the receiver. The monologue comes surprisingly easily. Omar is doing well, she says.
His skin graft has taken, and he doesn’t seem too self-conscious about the bald patch
he will have until he is old enough for the tissue expansion. Her mother, Dr. M.,
has healed well, too. The house has been repaired.

The calls stop. Caro wonders if Eva is satisfied, having heard that everyone has survived,
or if she is afraid of her whereabouts being traced.

34

When Caro gets home, Adam is in the kitchen making dinner.

“Where’s Talis?” she asks.

“He left about an hour ago. He was called in for an emergency. A fire in Queens, I
think. One of the burn-unit nurses has a stomach flu. Something like that. He said
he’d call you later.”

Caro turns on the television, which they keep now in the parlor. She flips to the
local news, watches reports of the mayor’s press conference, beach closings due to
sewage. Then, the report of the fire. It was in the basement apartment of a semiattached
house. An Iranian family lived in the apartment. Only the baby survived. Someone broke
a window and threw burning paper inside. A neighbor, a man whose son died in Iraq,
is the prime suspect. Another neighbor, an old man wheezing beneath a checked shirt
with buttons strained against his girth, is interviewed. “Twice, I seen him go after
those people. Once, he threw garbage at them, rotten eggs. Screamed something about
go back to your caves. Another time he chased them into their house with a crowbar.
I tried to tell him these people are from Iran, not Iraq, they don’t live in caves
in Iran, but all he’d say was all of them’s out to destroy us.”

The reporter wears a sleeveless turtleneck and gold hoop earrings. Her arms are lightly
tanned. “And no one ever called the police?”

“Me? Call the cops? On my own neighbor? I don’t think so, ma’am.”

She speaks directly into the camera. “A case of racial prejudice. An Iranian family
mistaken for Iraqis.”

Caro turns off the television. After dinner, she calls the hospital. Talis is with
the baby in the pediatric intensive care. “Don’t bother him,” Caro says. “Just tell
him I called.”

She wakes early, having forgotten to pull the blackout shades, the northern light
filtering through the glistening leaves of the neighbors’ maple tree, the warmth of
the coming day hinted at in the sheen of the still air. Talis is lying on her bed
in his nursing uniform. His hands are behind his head and his eyes are open.

She turns toward him.

“Bad?”

“Bad.” Talis blows air out of his mouth. “Three kids. No one knows how old exactly.
Maybe five, three, and an infant. The father, best we can figure, grabbed the baby,
put her under his shirt, and got her out. Dumped her on the sidewalk, then went back
to try and get the mother and the two other kids. The kids and the mother were dead
by the time the ambulance arrived. The father died in the ambulance.”

Caro touches the V of skin over the blue of Talis’s uniform. She lays her hand over
the fine hairs, mostly blond but a few grays too, her fingers curling around his exposed
neck.

“The baby has a third-degree burn on one foot and an arm. Which is serious at her
age, especially on the foot and the inside of the arm. The skin is like paper. We
don’t know how old she is, but little. Maybe eight weeks.”

Talis unfolds his arms. His hands move into fists. “Assholes,” he cries, pounding
the mattress.

35

No relatives appear to claim the baby, either because there are none here or they
are too frightened to identify themselves. Her foot and arm are kept in traction so
she doesn’t knock off the dressings or disturb the compression bandages. It is hard
to know if her screams are because of pain at the burn site or a protest about the
traction. On her chart, she is identified as Baby3, the three because she was the
youngest of the three children in the house. Talis names her Chicky on account of
the dark curl on the top of her head.

At the end of her first week in the hospital, Chicky develops an infection in her
foot. For four days, Talis fears she will lose the foot. Her fever cannot be brought
under control. He refuses his two days off, not trusting anyone else to stay with
her overnight. During the hours when he isn’t on the unit with her, he is on the computer
reading about other cases of severe infant burns. When her fever finally breaks, she
is sedated so that the dead and infected tissue can be surgically removed. A week
later, the surgeon sees between Chicky’s toes the hoped-for beginning signs of epithelialization.

Once Chicky is removed from traction, the nurses hold her constantly, singing to her,
cooing, kissing her miraculously unscathed forehead. Over the Fourth of July weekend,
Talis agrees to switch to the short-staffed day shift. Caro does not object. She hates
traveling on holidays, likes the city on summer weekends, when there are no lines
for anything and the streets are empty. She meets her mother for brunch, then walks
across the park with a sandwich for Talis.

Caro knows most of the pediatric burn unit day staff from Omar’s stay. She waves to
the nursing supervisor, who is writing charts in the center station, says hello to
one of the attending doctors. In the dayroom, Irene, a Scottish woman with five children
and nine grandchildren, is rocking a baby.

Caro leans over to look. The baby is tiny, with a little tuft of black hair. She has
a bandage on one arm and her foot. “Is this Chicky?”

“That’s our ducky.”

“How is she?”

“Drowsy, as always. She opens her eyes for a few seconds, and then it’s back to sleep.
Once we get her out of these dressings, we’re going to have to lower her morphine,
because she’s got to start exercising those arms and legs of hers.”

“Can I hold her?”

“That would be nice, dearie. I could use my afternoon tea. There’s hand sanitizer
on the table.”

Caro holds the baby while Irene hoists herself up. Carefully, afraid of jostling Chicky’s
bandages, Caro sits down in the rocker. The baby nuzzles against her shoulder. She
tucks her knees under her so her shins are resting on Caro’s breastbone and her tush
is sticking out, the curl of a baby in the womb.

Gently, still worrying about disturbing the dressings, Caro rocks back and forth.
She sings “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” She sings “London Bridge.” She sings “Rockabye
Baby.”

The light filters through the half-closed venetian blinds of the children’s dayroom,
sketching golden trellises on the linoleum floor. On the low shelves, Caro can see
Monopoly, Connect 4, Clue, Uno. She played all these games with Omar during the weeks
he was here. Across the room are bookshelves with
Olivia, Where the Wild Things Are, Pippi Longstocking
, a collection of the Harry Potter books.

She cuddles Chicky, no longer worrying that the rocking will hurt her. She sings “Hush,
Little Baby,” all ten verses, the way her mother sang it.

When Caro gets to “If that cart and bull turn over, Mama’s gonna buy you a dog named
Rover,” Chicky twists her head to locate the voice.

For the rest of her life, Caro will never forget the moment when Chicky’s eyes—two
brown pools, not of pain, but of curiosity—first find her own. Chicky’s tiny perfect
lips part and a smile breaks over her face, revealing her pink toothless gums and
the crimson tip of her tiny tongue.

Caro is so stunned, her own mouth drops open. She bursts into tears, flooded with
the feeling that this injured bird is hers.

36

For Talis to bring Chicky home as a foster baby would be simple. The complications
would arise if they were to make an appeal for permanent placement. Translated into
legal language, Caro feels the impulse of the afternoon fracturing into doubts.

“I don’t want to take her home if she won’t be able to stay with us,” she tells Talis.

“There are no guarantees. No one’s showed up now for six weeks, but anything could
happen. A relative from anywhere might appear. But we’d have priority over any nonrelative.”

Talis narrows his eyes. Has he taken a baby home so many times, Caro wonders, that
he can’t understand that it would be better not to take Chicky home than to have to
give her back—that Caro can already imagine fleeing the country with Chicky and abandoning
everyone else in her life, including him, rather than losing her?

At work, the numbers on the school’s budget spreadsheet lie inert, incomprehensible
on the page. Her thoughts are caught in a spiral. If they were able to adopt Chicky,
what would they tell her when she is old enough to understand? Should they try now
to find her relatives in Iran? What would happen if relatives appear five years from
now?

It is a relief when her father calls and asks the same questions. “You have to consult
with a lawyer.” He clears his throat, unaccustomed, she knows, to giving her, his
practical child, advice. “And how about getting married? Wouldn’t an adoption be easier
if you were married?”

“What if,” she asks her mother the following day, “what I’ve always thought about
myself, that I don’t have it in me to raise a child, is true?”

Caro can see her mother studying her anguished face. She wants her mother to tell
her what to do: wear the brown or the navy shoes, choose the grilled cheese or the
tuna, invite Allie or Helen for a sleepover.

“No one has it in them ahead of time. We grow into the task, grow with our child.
You’re strong, darling. Stronger than you think.”

Adam takes off his glasses when she asks what he thinks. It is late, Omar asleep,
Talis at work. They are in the parlor, both in pajamas. He rubs his eyes. “You’d be
a fantastic mother,” he says.

Her eyes are pathetically watering. She hadn’t realized how desperate she is to be
reassured. “You think so? I love Omar, but I know it’s a hell of a lot different.”

“You half-raised me. I know so. And it would be great for Omar to have a little cousin.
I already asked him how he’d feel. He said he’d share his room and teach her how to
build Legos.”

Caro hugs her brother. Chicky and Omar look like cousins, she thinks. Both with brown
skin, skin seared by fire, skin that for the rest of their lives will elicit questions
about where they are from and what happened to them.

37

Rachida calls after midnight. “A few days ago I remembered that Layla has a friend
who works at the Iranian embassy. I called her and asked her to see if her friend
could make some inquiries.”

Caro flips on the bedside light. Her thoughts are racing too fast for her to focus
on how difficult it must have been for Rachida—who, Adam has told her, has an endless
loop in her head of Layla fucking the blond neurosurgeon, a sapphire ring gleaming
on his pinky finger—to call Layla.

“Layla’s friend found out that the baby’s father came to Queens eight years ago. He
drove a cab. He brought his wife and the two older children over sixteen months ago.
That’s when they moved into the basement apartment of the house. The baby was the
only one born here.”

“Are there any relatives that anyone at the embassy knows about?”

“Not here.”

“But there are in Iran?” Caro asks.

“I’m sure there are.” Rachida pauses. “Layla says you can’t send the baby back. They’d
never accept a scarred girl in a rural village. It would be cruel.”

Layla is not to be trusted. She told Caro her brothers had stoned her and left her
for dead in the sand. She told Rachida her panties were wet when she thought about
her, and now she is sleeping with the blond neurosurgeon.

About this, though, Caro knows Layla is right. Chicky has to stay.