What Burns Away (19 page)

Beside a hallway fireplace with a propane insert, I dropped another propellant and then entered the master bedroom, scattering the aerosol cans along the perimeter. I set the last one where the telescope once stood.

I caught the view. Out the window, haze edged off Long Island Sound and onto shore.

The last time I stood there, I was home to visit Kara, who had just graduated from college. She was twenty-two to my twenty-four, and while we polished off the last of my mother's white wine, we stood there looking out that bay window. Kara had adopted Craig as her new father long ago, making me cringe and feel more separated from my sister every time she called him Daddy.

We had snuck into the forbidden master suite while Mom and Craig were away, each of us taking a turn to peer through the giant, white telescope after TWA Flight 800, a Boeing 747, exploded and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Long Island, killing all 230 people on board. Through the scope we searched for the burning wreckage plummeting like meteors across the night, as Channel 3's Gayle King broadcasted images of debris burning on the water in a ring of jet fuel. During the few weeks I was home from graduate school, before my research started and before Kara started her first advertising job out of college, we hunted for charred bits of plastic, which took precedence over our usual hunt for blue and green sea glass. We filled special receptacles left on the beach by the National Transportation Safety Board until their investigation was completed and authorities took them away.

I pushed the final tab on the last fogger and wondered about my sister now, still living in Connecticut with her family, hoping that maybe I could reach for her again once the haunts of that house were gone. I peered out the window again, noting my car in the parking lot across the street, and readied to race back to Jonah, wanting to be done with all that was wrong with my being there.

Downstairs in the kitchen, fumes emitted a noxious veil of combustibles, already the perfect atmospheric condition for flames. A broom-handle torch—made by Dean, tipped with crumpled newsprint and bound together with packing tape—waited on the island.

Remembering my chemistry, how the radiation and the convection of a fire are more important than the conduction, how fine fuels combust more rapidly than coarse, I knew that the walls and ceiling would burn more eagerly than the floors, the flames moving up rather than down.

Carrying the torch past the bathroom, the place where I once bathed with Dean, I moved into the breezeway, the point from which I would ignite that final expedient—the torch.

The clock chimed: 8:15 a.m.

I pictured Jonah out there crying in the cold and the patrons of the White Sands Country Club cutting into their frittatas. I calculated the handful of seconds it would take me to get back.

Unfastening my coat pocket, I pulled out the lighter and gave it a shake.

Terrified and eager, my breath became some dog's summer day pant. I thought about respiration and its “carbonic acid,” the midcentury's archaic term for CO
2
. How in Michael Faraday's
Lecture V: Oxygen Present in the Air—Nature of the Atmosphere
, he investigated the taper giving rise to soot, water, and a noncondensable gas with singular properties capable of snuffing out the very fire that produces it. Carbon dioxide was foe to the flame, he proved. So I held my breath and flicked the lighter again with my thumb, and my whole body quivered.

Small glints jumped from the wheel, but with the first few strikes there was no flame.

I took a deep breath, held the yellow lighter to my ear, and shook it again, noting the slosh of fluid inside. I struck the wheel once, twice…ten…twenty times more, turning over the switch until my thumb felt raw.

The clock chimed again, twenty-five past eight, my window of time to ignite the thing becoming slim.

I raced frenzied into the kitchen and slipped on the grease coating the floor. Rummaging through drawers, I sifted through silverware and sandwich bags, pushed back spatulas and Tupperware, envelopes and elastic bands, searching for matches.

I threw open the cupboards, rifled past foodstuffs and paper plates, dishes and cups. Empty-handed, I turned the corner into the dining room and patted above the mantel, claiming a single, silver matchbook, the logo of Patty's Irish Pub lettered across it.

Panicky, aware of the time and potential witnesses, the patrons at the White Sands Country Club finishing their brunches, I grabbed Dean's handmade torch and steadied its handle between my knees. Opening the fold of the matchbook, I scraped the last remaining matchstick across the flint to kindle the newsprint bound with tape. The flame fizzled out with the incoming draft of the door. I choked back a sob.

Taking a deep, quivering breath, I tried the yellow Zippo again, one last time, flicking it to initiate a single, glorious flame. Igniting the torch, I dipped an arm of blooming fire through the cracked breezeway door.

Light poured from the wand like liquid and doused the kitchen in brilliance.

My heart vaulted.

Above the island was a flash, a glare that temporarily blinded me.

I covered my eyes, opened the exit door, and ran.

Outside, the melted plastic trailed behind me. At my back, there was a wall of heat, followed by the sound of gunshots—one pop after another, a series of rapid-fire explosions.

Against the wind, I raced past the spot of my father's suicide and to my son. I whispered, “I love you, Daddy. Forgive me.”

Cold froze my nostrils.

Behind me I heard another boom, then the hiss of a thousand snakes.

Rounding the shoveled lane into the parking lot, I reached my rental car. Swinging the driver's side door open, I jumped in, buckled my belt, and looked in the rearview to comfort my son.

“You okay, baby?” I said.

But when I turned to greet him, Jonah was gone.

A moment of sheer terror held me motionless.

“Jonah?” I called out, paralyzed, my pulse throbbing in my neck.

I crawled over the console into the backseat. His half-eaten muffin and Elmo book were tossed onto the floor. I rubbed my hand across the empty car seat where his blanket was draped over the side. I popped the trunk and peeked foolishly inside, slamming it and circling the car, then the parking lot. Again, I yelled my son's name in a voice that did not sound like my own, but more like the cry of an injured bird.

In the distance there were sirens.

“Where are you?” I screamed, retracing my steps to be sure he was not hiding, reminding myself that Jonah was not big enough to have unbuckled himself and walked away, or
was
he?

Panic rose in my throat. Across the street, flames of blue and beetle-green waved from the house's second floor and the black smoke roiled into a dark cloud.

God
is
punishing
me
, I thought, my dread welling faster than smoke.

Inside the White Sands Country Club, I was consumed with panic, standing at the hostess station where I frantically tapped my fingers on the desk. “I need your help,” I told the teenage girl dressed in a skintight sweater dress.

She chewed the end of a pencil and held a telephone between her shoulder and ear. “One minute, please.” She smiled.

“It's an emergency,”
I almost screamed.

“We've already called,” she said, holding a finger to her lips. “The people at table five saw smoke.”

“No,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Not that. I'm looking for a little blond boy. My son. Did you see him?”

She covered the receiver with her hand and calmly mouthed, “Nope.” She jotted down a reservation, covered the receiver again, and whispered, “Have you checked the powder room?”

I ran to the ladies' room and threw open every door. “Jonah!” I hollered.

At the men's room door, I said, “Hello?” No one answered. I flew past the urinals and checked the stalls. I ran out and around the dining room and scanned the aisles of tables. I even dropped to my knees to peer under the booths. Nothing.

Peek-a-boo
, I imagined him saying.

“Jonah!” I said aloud, half sobbing. “Where
are
you?”

I hurried back outside. All I could think of was the cold and the fire trucks pulling into the lot, soaring around the corner, not seeing my small son, and me, his own mother, responsible for his death. Or worse, him having grown impatient, pushing through the front door, searching for me inside the burning house…

“Jonah,” I screamed.

My breath collapsed. I jumped into the car and circled the lot one last time. Then I pulled over and folded my hands in my lap for a prayer that I suspected, given my deeds, would go unanswered.

Across the street, the fire revived and quickened. Cruisers pulled up along the curb.

From my jeans, I took my phone and dialed Miles's number.

“Hello,” he answered on the first ring.

I couldn't catch my breath. It was hard to speak, and my face was soaked with tears. “I can't find him!” I shrieked. “He's
gone
.”

“Slow down,” Miles said. “Who's gone?”

“Jonah, it's Jonah. Oh God…I left him in the car. For a minute.” I turned on the wipers to clear the slush from the windshield. “Now he's missing.”

Across from me, 101 Quayside Lane burned like the firing chamber of a spaceship.

“What do you mean?” My husband's voice did not waver. “Is your sister there? Could she have run inside with him somewhere? I'm certain he isn't strong enough to unhook his own seat belt, Claire.”

An unfettered darkness billowed from the second-floor windows, their glass already blown. EMTs lined the snowbanks. I turned onto the street and passed, while firefighters broke down the front door.

I looked behind at the empty backseat. “I'll call you back,” I told my husband.

Driving too fast down windy roads, I watched as fleets of oncoming squad cars soared by. Farther from the main drag the traffic slowed, and I sped down a lane behind the Bee and Thistle Inn, where I found Dean's car.

“Please God,” I said, leaving the keys in the ignition, my heart thumping away. I rounded the front desk and raced upstairs to our rooms.

Throwing the door open, I found Jonah jumping on the bed, a green balloon in one hand, a cookie in the other.

“Mama,” he cheered gleefully. “Mama. Up!” He leaned against Dean to steady his landing and let go of his balloon. He reached for me.

I tossed my phone on the bedside table and scooped Jonah into my arms, holding my son so tightly he yelled, “Ouch!”

My terror withered into tearful gratitude as I inhaled his sweet, syrupy smell.

Glaring at Dean, I whispered: “You
took
my son?”

Dean pushed his sunglasses up onto his head. “Didn't you get my note?”

“Note?” I said.

I kissed Jonah's neck, his face, his ears, his eyes, his hair.

Dean voice's deepened with concern. “I left you a note in the car telling you to meet us here. You were scared about his safety. Figured I'd take some worry off your plate.”

“Didn't find a note,” I said, backing away from Dean, clenching Jonah tight. “You terrified me. I thought he was gone. I called my husband.”

“Oh man, Claire. I'm so sorry. Last-minute decision. I'd gotten nervous that you were right, that it wasn't safe, you know, so close to things. Went and grabbed him, popped the lock. He seemed happy to see me.” Dean turned to Jonah. “Right, buddy?”

On the bed between us, next to the set of blueprints, a Slim Jim similar to the lock pick Dean used to break into cars and steal pullout radios when we were kids jutted out from his duffel bag.

“Don't be upset. Good intentions,” he reminded me. “Too cold to leave him out there.”

Dean paused and walked around the bed, holding the balloon in his hand. He offered it back to my son. Jonah declined.

Dean told me then, “I'm glad to see motherhood hasn't changed you. You're still so daring.”

“You're dead wrong,” I said, knowing in that moment that Dean wanted me to be the girl he remembered, the one who would set her son down in the next room and give herself to him again right there. But that girl—like the years that had passed, like the house—was history. And as much as I had gone back East anticipating his desire and how I might let it fill me, setting my loneliness free, becoming that old version of myself for Dean, his jimmying the lock and taking Jonah from that car had clarified how terrifying his unpredictability could be.

Dean rubbed my shoulder. “It's over, babe. You did a fucking amazing job. There'll be nothing left. Have a drink with me? To celebrate.”

“You should go,” I said, scanning the room to take inventory of our things.

Dean tugged a bottle of champagne from his bag. “It's not cold enough,” he said. “But it'll do.” He popped the cork and sipped the foam from the bottle.

“Really,” I said, “I need to leave here, forget this place and go home.”

Dean told me, “You are home, babe.”

He poured two glasses and held one out to me. I shook my head no.

On the bedside table, my phone vibrated.

Dean gulped down both glasses of champagne, picked up my mobile, and looked at the face of it before he handed it to me. “Your husband.”

Across the screen was a text:
I just talked to your sister and your mother. Where are you? Where is our son?

Something inside of me went undone. Dean walked to the door and jingled his keys.

I texted my husband:
Will explain later. Jonah in my arms. All is well. Still in CT. Home late tomorrow night.

When I looked up, Dean was watching me. “I'm staying with my mother. If you need me—”

“I won't,” I said.

Jonah rested his head on my shoulder.