White Picket Fences (16 page)

There was a break in the memory, and then there was smoke. And the roar of a beast.

No air, no air.

Mommy! Daddy!

Hot.

Someone is crying.

No air.

The carpet is hot. His eyes are stinging. Someone is crying.

Mommy!

Daddy!

A knock at his door startled him, and the lighter fell from Chase’s hand. His eyes flew open.

“Chase?”

Tally.

“Can I use your computer? Delcey’s using the one downstairs.”

Her voice sounded tiny and airy from behind the closed door. A rush of pressure filled his ears.

He grabbed the lighter as the door opened, and a flood of amber light from the hallway spilled into the room. Tally stood framed in the doorway. Her mouth was open.

“I…I didn’t think you were in here,” she said, stumbling over her words. “You didn’t answer, and there was no light on.”

“I’m busy,” Chase said, but the words came out in a whisper. He wasn’t sure if she’d heard him.

“Why are you sitting in the dark?”

She was in the room now, staring at him. He was aware that his upper lip was prickled with sweat.

“Are you okay? Do you want me to get your mom?” she said quickly.

“No!” he croaked and started to scramble to his feet. He dropped the lighter, and it landed with a quiet thud on his carpet. For a second both of them just stared at it.

Then Tally knelt down and picked it up. “What are you doing with this?” Her voice was laced with suspicion.

“Nothing,” Chase said hastily.

She turned the lighter over in her hands. He could tell she was thinking. But what was she thinking? Of going to his parents?

“I thought holding it would help me remember. And I was right. The baby-sitter’s son did have a lighter like this one. He caught me looking at it before he kicked me out of his room.”

Tally looked from the lighter to him to the lighter again. She said nothing.

Chase sat heavily upon his bed. He had to convince her to let him have it back. The lighter was like a key to his past, a past that was lost to him and was finally being returned. He couldn’t let her have it back. Not yet.

“I remember the room I was in, the other little kid, what he wore,” Chase continued. “I remember the baby-sitter’s son lighting the cigarette that started the fire. I remember not being able to breathe. The heat. Someone grabbing me. It’s all coming back.”

Tally’s eyes were on the lighter. “I think you should tell your parents.”

The lighter shone in her hands. He would have to make a deal with her if he was going to get it back. He stood, closed his bedroom door, and came back to the bed and sat down. “I think I should wait on that. If I tell them now while everything is still sketchy, it will only make them worry. Worry won’t help me. And it won’t help them. But I promise I will tell them. When the time is right, I promise I’ll tell them.”

“But what if your parents could fill in the blanks for you? Then you wouldn’t have to guess and you wouldn’t have to use this.” She lifted the lighter.

“If filling in the blanks was something they wanted to do, they would’ve done it a long time ago. I think the fire haunts them like it haunts me, but in a different way. They want to forget.
I want to remember. If I can just go to them later and tell them, ‘Hey, I just want you to know that I’m cool with what happened when I was four; I remember it, but I’m cool with it,’ I’ll get my wish and they’ll get theirs.”

Tally walked over to the bed and sat down beside him. Moonlight splashed them both. “But what if you can’t remember it all? What if it just stops?”

“I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.”

Tally was silent beside him for a moment. “Why can’t you just be glad you didn’t die? Why do you need to remember?”

The specter of Ghost swirled about him. Chase could smell the ash, the cinders, the fragrance of power—even as he sat in the cool shadows of his moonlit room. “Because it’s like the fire remembers me.”

Several seconds of dead air hung suspended between them.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Tally finally said.

“I don’t expect it to make sense to anybody else but me.”

Tally appeared unconvinced.

“Every time I remember something new, I feel it lessening its hold on me,” Chase said.

“What parts don’t you remember?”

Chase envisioned the blue mats. Keith. The lighter. The blond-haired boy. Then smoke. Heat. The deafening blast of power. Fear. “Everything in the middle,” he said. “The fire itself.”

Tally was silent. When she opened her mouth, she extended the lighter toward him. “I can’t let you keep it forever,” she said. “When my dad comes, I’ll need it back.”

Chase felt a twinge of bliss race through him as he reached
for the lighter. “I don’t want to keep it.” His fingers closed around the smooth metal. “I actually can’t wait to give it back to you.”

Tally nodded and then stood.

“Still want to use my computer?” he asked.

She walked to the door. “I’ll see if Delcey is finished. You shouldn’t sit here in the dark. It’s creepy.”

“You can turn on the light.”

Tally flipped on the light switch as she opened the door. She turned back to him. “Don’t lose it. My dad would be ticked.”

“I won’t.”

She hesitated a moment longer and then left, shutting the door softly behind her.

He waited until her footfalls down the hall and stairway were no longer audible. Then he turned the lighter in his hands, opened it, and placed his thumb on the striking mechanism.

A tiny flare jumped to attention and began to flicker in a slow swaying motion.

Chase.

Chase.

Chase.

The flame appeared needy. Hungry for affirmation.

Chase frowned.

twenty

H
er aunt sat at the dining room table with a long-stemmed wine glass sparkling under the pewter chandelier. A small box of old photos lay open on the table, and a handful of the pictures were spread out over the polished wood. Amanda took a sip from the glass, set it down, and sighed quietly.

Tally had come to the dining room to speak to Amanda, but she didn’t know how to break the silence in the room. It seemed a holy moment somehow. She cleared her throat.

Amanda drew back. “Tally. I didn’t hear you come in. You startled me.”

“Sorry. I just wanted you to know we’re going back to the nursing home tomorrow. We’re going to drop Chase’s car off at home first. Matt’s taking us this time.”

“Oh. Of course. I’m glad that’s going well… At least it seems like it’s going well. Is it?”

Tally took a step forward and nodded. “I guess. They’re interesting guys. Eliasz is blind. He’s the Jewish one. Josef is Catholic. Did Chase tell you they smuggled babies out of the Warsaw Ghetto?”

“Actually, no. But I didn’t ask much about how your first day went. I try not to hover. I’ve heard teenagers hate that. So,
Chase is doing okay with it? The project, I mean. The filming is going okay?”

The strange conversation Tally had with Chase had occurred less than twenty-four hours earlier. She had no idea what to tell Amanda about Chase’s ability to handle school projects at the moment. “I guess so. It’s not like Matt and I can help him much with the filming or editing.”

“Oh. Right.”

Tally looked at the spread of old pictures on the table. The images were colorless. Men and women in dark wool. Stoic, unsmiling faces. Children in buttoned-up suits and loafers. Hair cut short. “Are these from Poland?” she said.

Amanda nodded. “I was hoping there would be information written on the backs of these pictures letting us know where in Warsaw Bart was headed. But my grandmother wasn’t a very good record keeper. Half of these don’t have anything written on them at all. I don’t even know who some of these people are. It’s like she didn’t want us to know.”

Tally studied the men in several sepia-toned photos. One was of a tall man with a handlebar mustache and trimmed beard, wearing a white doctor’s coat. He was staring off into space as if gazing into the future instead of posing for a photographer. “Is that my great-grandfather?” she said.

Amanda nodded. “That’s Aron Bachmann. It was taken six months before the Germans invaded. I suppose it was the last photo taken of him.”

“Are there any here of my great-grandmother?”

“There’s one of her standing outside the hospital where she
worked. It’s in here somewhere. I think it was taken before she was married. And there’s this one.” Amanda handed her an eight-by-ten photo of a woman in a tea-length creamy white dress, holding a nosegay of teacup roses. Brown curls framed her expressionless face. “I think that was taken the day she remarried here in the States,” Amanda said. “I wonder if the majority of the family photos were lost in the ghetto when she and my dad escaped. My grandmother wasn’t a very sentimental person, as I remember. I was always kind of afraid of her. I think the war did things to her. Like it does to all people.”

“What was her name?”

“Marta.”

“How did she and Grandpa get out of the ghetto?” Tally asked.

Amanda shook her head. “She never talked about it. And my dad must’ve remembered bits and pieces of what happened, but he never wanted to talk about it either. He was six when the Germans invaded and almost twelve when World War II ended. So he must’ve had a few memories of the ghetto. But he never wanted to talk about it. Ever. I had to respect that.”

“What was he like?”

Amanda patted the chair next to her. “So my brother never talked about him much?”

Tally sat down. “No. He never talked bad about him or anything. He told me once he and his dad saw everything differently. Like if my dad saw something blue, Grandpa would say it was red. Like that.”

Her aunt fingered a photo of a little boy in short pants and a jacket standing by a fainting couch. She handed it to Tally.
“That’s him. That’s my father, Edward. Looks like he was four or five then.”

Amanda took another sip from her wine glass and then set it down. “My dad was older than all my friends’ fathers; he’d been married before. He was like Neil in some ways, and not like him at all in others. But I don’t know that he and Bart had anything in common except determination.”

Tally waited.

“My dad—your grandfather—didn’t like surprises, and Bart, well, he was always full of them,” Amanda continued. “Our mother, who is kind of a fragile person, couldn’t really handle the two of them and their differences. They argued a lot about everything. Things at our house actually improved when Bart left. For a little while, anyway.” Amanda turned quickly to face Tally. “I don’t mean for that to sound unkind. It’s just the way it was.”

Tally nodded.

“But I missed Bart, very much,” her aunt continued. “Things got quiet, but they also got boring. My parents had kind of a funny marriage. My dad and his first wife were married seven years and never had any children. And I’m not sure what happened there because he never wanted to talk about that either, but I think he brought some baggage from his first marriage into his second. And then there was the war, of course. He had that lurking in his past at every step. I was actually as happy as Bart was to finally be on my own, but I didn’t make the same kind of break he did.

“After my parents divorced, my mother only waited ten months before marrying again. She’s living in Australia, you know.”

“My dad told me,” Tally said.

Amanda studied her for a moment. “Did…did your dad ever say anything about Grandpa not giving him any share in his estate?”

“His estate?”

“His will. Grandpa didn’t leave anything to Bart in the will. I actually tried to give part of my inheritance to your dad, but he said he didn’t want it.”

Tally had never heard her father mention a will or an estate.

“It wasn’t a whole lot, Tally. I want you to know that. After taxes and the cost of the funeral, there wasn’t a whole lot left.”

“Okay.” Tally didn’t understand what her aunt was getting at.

“And of course I don’t know what was in the box Dad had me send to Bart.”

“The box?”

“With the letter. You said there was a letter in the box that I sent after Dad died.” Amanda took a sip of her wine, peering at Tally over the rim of her glass.

Tally didn’t know how much her dad wanted kept secret. The contents of the letter, certainly. He asked her not to divulge that. But he’d never mentioned the rest of it. It didn’t seem to matter much now. The pocket watch and wedding ring were long gone.

Amanda put the glass down. “I’m not trying to get you to tell me what was in the letter, Tally. I swear it. But if there was anything else in that box that would let us know where Bart is, maybe we should talk about it.”

“There was just the letter, your grandmother’s wedding ring, a pocket watch, and a cigarette lighter.”

Amanda blinked at her. “That’s it?”

Tally nodded.

Amanda traced her finger on the stem of her wine glass. A long pause followed. Tally was about to stand up and walk away when her aunt spoke. “So many secrets,” Amanda murmured.