Wintertide: A Novel (21 page)

The drive home that night was slow
going in the Buick. During the day, the sun had melted the snow banks that
lined the streets. But when the sun went down, patches of black ice had formed
on the roads. I passed several spinouts once I exited the highway and turned into
my parents’ neighborhood. As I approached the house, I saw the street was
crowded with police cars. My stomach jumped into my throat, and I nearly hit
the break until I noticed there was also a fire truck directly in front of the
house. Now, my heart thudded wildly for a different reason.

I pulled the car as close as I
could, but the final few yards were blocked off. Getting out, I walked the rest
of the way hoping the emergency was not at my house. But there was no doubt, once
I arrived at the front lawn. Firemen in their heavy coats and boots were coming
out the front door dragging a hose and other equipment with them. The house
looked fine with no sign of a fire. I searched the people gathered on the lawn
for my parents’ faces, but I didn’t find them. Dad’s truck wasn’t in the
driveway either. Pushing past the neighbors who had come out to look, I stopped
one of the firemen. “Where are my parents? Are they okay?”

“You live here?” he asked.

I nodded.

He pointed to another fireman
standing in front of a red sedan. “Talk to him,” he told me before walking
away. That was when I finally noticed the acrid smell of smoke in the air. I
rushed over to the other fireman, pushing down the panic I could feel rising.

“This is my house,” I said,
interrupting his conversation with a police officer. “What’s going on? Are my
parents okay?”

He turned toward me. “You’re
Daniel?”

I nodded.

“Your father has been trying to
call you.”

“Are he and my mother alright?”

“Your father is fine. Your mother
was taken to the hospital for smoke inhalation but she’s going to be fine,
also.”

I blinked at him and felt myself
nodding as I processed what he’d told me. They were going to be fine. Thank
goodness. “What happened?” I asked, looking back at the house.

“It looks like the fire started in
the kitchen. A neighbor saw the smoke and called it in. Your mother was
sleeping upstairs. Since your fire alarms weren’t working, she didn’t wake up
before the smoke reached the bedroom area. But your neighbor called before the
fire could spread. Your mother was very lucky.”

I pictured my mother asleep while
dark smoke filled the bedroom. “I should go see her,” I said. When I took a
step back, I could feel my lunch coming up. I bent over and threw up in the
snow, emptying my stomach completely before I was done. There was some murmuring
around me as I stood and wiped a gloved hand across my mouth. The neighbors I
had known while growing up had mostly moved away over time, and I didn’t
recognize the people whose curiosity had brought them out tonight in the cold.

“I could get someone to drive you
to the hospital,” the fireman offered from behind me.

I shook my head at him. “No, thanks.
I’ll be fine.”

Feeling as though everyone’s eyes
were on me, I headed back to the car. There was only one hospital in the area,
and it was close by.

At first, I hadn’t been thinking
that Eddie had done this. It never occurred to me that he would try to hurt
anyone but me. But I knew that my mother replaced the batteries in those smoke
detectors every fall when it was time to turn the clocks back just like her
favorite news broadcast suggested people do each year at that time. She did it
religiously. There was no way those smoke detectors stopped working on their
own. If I’d had anything left in my stomach, I would have retched again at the
thought of Eddie being in my house while my mother slept.

Somehow I managed to locate the visitor
parking lot at the hospital, and I found my way to the front desk. A woman
there told me that my mother was still in the emergency area and directed me
there. Once I reached the emergency room, another woman at another desk pointed
to the closed double doors behind me. I pushed through the doors, and I immediately
saw them. The emergency area was a circular room with beds partitioned behind
beige pull curtains. My mother sat on one of those beds. She had on a hospital
gown, and there was oxygen running into her nostrils through a tube. My father
sat in a chair beside her.

“Daniel,” she called, spotting me
across the way. She reached her arms out when I approached, and I tried not to
hit her oxygen line while we embraced. I still had on my bulky winter coat
making the gesture doubly awkward.

“You’re okay?” I asked, pulling back
to get a better look.

She waved an arm at me. “I’m fine.
I want to get out of here and go home. Did you go by the house?”

I nodded.

“How did it look?”

“It looked okay from the outside. I
didn’t go in but the fireman I talked to said it never spread past the kitchen.”

“You weren’t home?” I asked my
father, already knowing the answer.

“I was pulling in just as they were
bringing your mother out.”

Mom shook her head. “I just can’t
believe it. I don’t understand why the smoke alarms didn’t go off.”

“When was the last time we checked
them?” Dad asked.

Mom was still shaking her head. “Just
last month. They were working fine.”

A nurse came over then to examine
my mother. I told them I would be in the waiting area. Pulling my phone from my
pocket, I powered it on and sat down. Immediately, it began signaling that I
had missed calls, missed texts, and voicemail messages. Scrolling through, I
saw several messages from Seth among others from Mom and Dad and a few from
friends at school. I deleted them all without listening to them. It was odd
that Eddie never called me directly himself. It would have been easy enough for
him to get my number. He probably got some perverse joy out of manipulating
Seth into doing it for him.

Running my hands through my hair, I
stared down at the floor, the sour taste of vomit still strong in my mouth. Did
Eddie really do this because he wanted me to back up his story? If I went to
the police with the truth now and Eddie found out, what would he do? The police
still couldn’t find him, and I didn’t know where he was staying. How long would
he have to try to hurt my family again before he was found?

They released my mother a few hours
later. I followed Dad’s truck home. My mother was anxious to see her house and
inspect the damage herself. My father had called the police from the hospital,
and they told him that their crews were gone, and we could stay at the house. They
also said that the damage had been contained to the kitchen, and it had likely
been an electrical fire that started behind the stove. If they thought the fire
was suspicious, they didn’t appear to be saying as much at this point.

Knowing my mother, I would have
thought that she would use this event to milk our worry and attention. But her
reaction was just the opposite. She was brave and stoic, never once indicating
that she didn’t feel well or that she’d had a very close call today. Even when
we all walked into the house, smelled the heavy odor of smoke, and saw the
black charred wall behind the now displaced oven, she only sighed and shook her
head.

It was my dad who did most of the
talking, letting my mom know that he would fix everything in the kitchen, and
that the insurance would cover the costs. He even joked that he would have to
take her out to dinner every night until the kitchen was back in working order.

When I went upstairs to check on
the bedrooms, making sure there were no unwanted guests in the house, I froze
when I spotted the mussed sheets on my parents’ bed and the indentation in the
pillow where my mother’s head had been. If a neighbor hadn’t been so quick to
see the smoke and make that call, the outcome could have been very different.

I reached above the bed and pushed
the test button on the smoke alarm. There was no beeping acknowledgement.
Twisting it off the ceiling, I turned it over and opened the back. Surprisingly,
there were batteries in it. I figured Eddie had simply removed them all. He
would had to have found dead batteries and replaced all the working ones with
those. Had he really done that?

When I went back downstairs, I saw
my mother pulling items out of the refrigerator. Despite our pleas that she
rest, she insisted on making us sandwiches since we’d missed dinner. We sat
silently in the living room and ate. After taking a few tasteless bites, I
kissed my mother on the cheek and said goodnight. She gave me a distracted
smile and continued chewing.

Back in my room, I called Seth.

The first ring had barely finished
when he answered. “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to call you
for days.”

“I think Eddie tried to burn down
my house today with my mother inside.”

Seth sputtered on the other end.
“What?”

“You know nothing about this?”

“What are you talking about? Is
your mother alright?”

I wasn’t sure why I had called
Seth. A part of me needed to ask him if he’d had any part in this. But even as
I did, I knew that whatever his response was, skepticism would be mine. “She’s
fine,” I responded tersely.

“Did you just say that you think
Eddie tried to burn your house down?”

“After you gave Eddie the address
of my job this morning, he came and threatened me. Then, this afternoon, there
was a fire in the kitchen. My mother was upstairs asleep at the time. The smoke
detectors whose batteries had been working fine a month ago, all failed.”

I heard silence from his end before
he finally whispered, “Jesus. So, you said your mom is okay. What about the
house?”

“The house will be fine, too.
Thanks for your concern.”

“Look, Dan. You don’t know that it
was him. Why would he do that?”

 “You really can’t guess?”

He sighed. “I just don’t think he
would.”

“How can you say that after
everything he’s already done?” I whispered now as I heard my parents coming up
the stairs.

“Well, even if it was him, I’m sure
he never meant to hurt your mother. He was probably just trying to scare you.”

“Well that just makes it so much
better. Thanks.”

“Calm down. Okay?”

I paced my room, ready to explode
at him with a tirade of expletives, but I couldn’t. Not without my parents
overhearing. Then I realized that I couldn’t leave my mother alone in the house
again. I couldn’t risk it. I couldn’t go to work tomorrow, and I couldn’t go
back to school next week. I had to do something to make Eddie back off. I knew
I had to agree to what he wanted. He was giving me no choice.

“Give me Eddie’s number,” I heard
myself saying into the phone. All along, I’d been just as happy not to have
direct contact with Eddie. Now, I needed to talk to him myself.

He didn’t reply.

“Seth? Give me Eddie’s number.”

“I have to check with him first,”
he finally said. “I’m not sure he’d be okay with that.”

“I don’t give a shit if he’s okay
with it.”

“I can’t, okay? He’s not using his
own number anymore. I think he’s calling from his girlfriend’s phone, and I
don’t think he’d want me to give that number out.”

“He has a girlfriend? Is that who
he’s staying with?”

Seth sighed. “I don’t know. I never
asked him. I could tell he didn’t want me to know. So, I just didn’t ask.”

I fisted my hand in my hair. This
was getting me nowhere. “Then tell Eddie I’ll do it,” I said.

“Do what?” Seth asked hesitantly.

“I’ll say what he wants me to.”

“You will?”

“Yeah, I will. But let him know
that it’s contingent on him never going near my house or my family again.”

“Sure, no problem,” he answered
quickly.

“I mean it, Seth. Tell him that.”

“I heard you, okay? You’re doing
the right thing. I just don’t know why the fuck you couldn’t have done it a
week ago.”

“Fuck you and call me back after
you talk to him.”

“Look, I didn’t mean…”

 “Call me back,” I repeated,
cutting him off. Then I ended the call, sinking down onto my bed with the phone
clutched in my hand. Was I really going to do this? Was I really going to let
him force me into doing this? I sat there motionless, my thoughts a desperate
mix of reluctance and panic. I don’t know how long I stayed that way before my
phone startled me, buzzing in my hand.

“Okay, we’re set,” Seth said. “He
doesn’t know anything about the fire but he’s glad you changed your mind.”

I laughed miserably. “And if he
knows nothing about the fire then there was no need to agree not to hurt my
family, right?”

“He said he didn’t do it. What’s
the difference? It’s a moot point now that you’ve agreed.”

“I can’t believe you just said
that.”

 “What do you want me to say?”

I closed my eyes and touched my
fingers to the bridge of my nose. “Nothing. There’s nothing you can say.”

“We’re going to meet at the sea
cliff tomorrow night to get our stories straight,” he told me.

My eyes popped open. “Why there?”

“That’s where we’re going to say we
were that night but none of us have been there in years. It makes sense to go
there to figure it out,” he told me calmly.

“It doesn’t make any sense at all.
Eddie’s flare for the dramatic is the only thing that makes sense about it. Why
can’t we just figure this out on the phone? How complicated does this story
have to be?”

“We’re going to go after the
Southside Tavern closes so no one sees us,” he continued disregarding my
questions. “My mom is still working nights and she has the car. So pick me up
around 2:30.”

“Eddie didn’t care about anyone
seeing him this afternoon,” I pointed out. “Look, if we have to meet, let’s
just go to the woods by my house again.”