A bearded guy with a bullhorn walked me off the porch as burning shingles started to drop onto the lawn. The firefighters hooked the pumper truck up to the hydrant across the street. I stood beside Deb on the sidewalk, feeling weak as foolscap from my teeth to my tailbone, while the column of black smoke rose so high that Cam and Kirsten and Mrs. Abel might've been watching it out the staff room window and shaking their heads at the horror of it all.
“Anybody inside?” one of the men asked Deb.
“I told them, the kids are at school. IâI only just stepped out five minutes ago.”
“Any pets?” he asked.
The kids had plenty of things they would have wanted savedâRoald Dahl, a cardboard box full of Josie's flying horses, a Hot Wheels carrying case shaped like a wheel, the still-boxed pictures of their momâall kept in rooms where flames had already consumed every molecule of oxygen. Credit cards melted down to bingo chips. At least Deb had pictures of Lydia on her mantel back in MacArthur.
But there was
one
thing I figured I could save! I ran through the next-door neighbors' yard all the way back into the alley, then in through our back gate and across our backyard. The siding bubbled beside my head but I reached underneath the stairs and pulled out that shovel my dad and I had used to bury Keister.
A dimpled cop with a notepad was talking to Deb when I got back to the car. I stood beside them and watched the fire. Load-bearing beams collapsed on themselves in explosions of smouldering ash, but everything felt more
right
with that shovel in my hands. I choked back my compulsion to smash every windshield.
“And this is Peter,” she said, nodding at me. “We only just got back to the house. He was at the high school before that.”
The cop eyeballed my shirt. Besides dimples he had surprisingly bushy sideburns.
“You need medical treatment, Mr. Giller?”
“I'm all right,” I said.
“Any connection between your, uh, injuries and this situation at the house, sir?”
I shook my head. The cop frowned and scribbled in his notebook. The fire chief climbed out of his red station wagon and muttered to one of the firefighters, then he came over and muttered with the cop. I felt like biting their faces, but not in front of Deb.
The roof crumbled into what had been our living room. The muscles down my arms flexed involuntarily. Man, the stuff a guy could rip apart if he were a house fire!
“After school today I'm taking the kids back to MacArthur,” Deb said. “With their mom gone too, I'm sorry, butâyou want to come buy them a change of clothes?”
“Jesus! You don't have to take them all the way toâ”
“You come pick them up whenever you're ready.” She folded her arms and leaned her hip against the car. “You sure as hell aren't ready now.”
“Youâyou think this
my
fault?”
“I don't know. That's just the thing, I don't know. And if those sweet kids are going to be in your care I have to be able to say, âNo, Peter
definitely
had nothing to do with it.' The extent of your parenting right now isâyou need a little time, Peter, and I can give them a safe place for as long as that's necessary.”
Behind my shoulder, someone said, “Arson?”
I twisted around.
“Again?” the cop said.
He and the fire chief glanced at me then went on talking in lower voices, but from the way his lips moved below his moustache, the chief was still saying
arson
.
“Take me back to get my car,” I told Deb. “At least leave me with that.”
I gave the cop my landlord's contact information, said I'd be staying down at the Brennan Motel, then Deb and I went shopping for underpants and pyjamas and six new
Choose Your Own Adventure
books, like Josie and Ray would really feel those were a fair exchange as they were driven away from their friends and home.
Lost everything you own? Choose from 23 different endings!
Deb bought me a green-striped tennis shirt that I wore out of the store, then she dropped me and the shovel off beside my car. Purple blood had dried on the driver's seat and even after I'd scrubbed it with a wet wipe there was a stain that looked like a pig balanced on its front legs. I found paper and a pen in the glove compartment and wrote:
Mr. James JonesâWhat the fuck do you want from me?
Peter Giller
.
Saul at the board office had provided names and addresses, according to Cam, and the next day the fire chief was on my lawn saying, “Arson.” At least I had the business card of the guy who'd burned my life down.
I stopped at 7-Eleven and had the red-headed clerk fax my message to that number I'd been keeping in my wallet. As he rang up two dollars on the register I noticed the rotating rack of wieners behind his shoulder, its plastic case emblazoned with
Why Not Make it a Bacon Dog?
Josie and Ray
were surprised to see me, waiting between Deb and the jungle gym at 2:30. We led them over to her Corolla, away from other kids, and I squatted on the dead leaves. Ray stared at me with round gray eyesâhis mother's.
What the hell now, Dad?
“We don't know what's happened exactly,” I said, smoothing his hair across the top of his head, “but there's been an accident up at the house. Grandma and I think it'd be better if you stayed with her in MacArthur for a little while. You've got your rooms there already.”
Josie let her backpack slide to the ground.
“You're getting a job in MacArthur?” she asked.
“No, baby,” said Deb, squeezing a shoulder. “Your dad is going to stay here to sort things out.”
“What
things
?” asked Ray. His face turned red while his arms bunched up like chicken wings. He looked ready to throw a
tv
out a window.
I said, “Grandma and I just think it'd be better ifâ”
“No, no, no!” Josie said.
She dove for my arm and gripped my elbow like it was a rope dangled over a burning ship. Same thing she'd done on the morning I'd had to tell them that their mom had passed during the night: Josie had grabbed for my arm then pulled Ray against us. I'd thought at the time, through my own fog, that it meant
I can't bear to lose my mom and I have to hold onto something, anything
. But Lydia had been out of their day-to-day lives for a couple of weeks by then, and I realized, squatting in the elementary school parking lot, that her clutching meant
You are our whole lives
, and that it had meant the same thing six months before. I pulled Ray's face against my neck, felt his wet cheek there, and I leaned across to press my forehead against Josie's.
“I haven't been acting like myself,” I whispered. “I've been too angry.”
“Sorry,” said Ray.
“That's
okay
, Dad,” Josie said.
“I haven't been angry with you two. Even when you threw out the bacon, all right? You guys go to Grandma's and I'll come get you when I feel better.”
“How long before you come?” asked Josie.
Deb's chin had crumpled and she was blinking hard. Rock-solid Deb.
“A month,” I told them.
It was possible I'd wake up the next morning with all of the rage dissipated from behind my eyes, so that I could see my way to MacArthurâthe kids and I would only be apart one day in that caseâand equally possible that my car would explode or I'd feel compelled to throw myself into a blast furnace, in which case we'd never see each other again. A month seemed like a decent compromise. Telling yourself
anything is possible
might feel terrific when you're eighteen and hitchhiking across the country, but when you're an underemployed widower and father of two it is a fucking terrible feeling.
Deb nodded and shrugged her shoulders, wiping her nose.
“Just one month,” she muttered.
She picked up Ray and put him in the car. Luckily he'd left a stuffed rabbit on the back seat that she could jam into his arms. Deb got behind the wheel. I carried Josie around to the other side, and her dangling legs were so long that the toes of her sneakers whacked my shins. I buckled her in. She was breathing through her teeth, trying to hold herself together for the umpteenth time.
“Will you meet us at the house?” she asked. “To get our stuff?”
“No, baby,” I said. “Grandma has new stuff for you. Surprises.”
I kissed her forehead and shut the door before she could say anything else, then I dragged myself around the car and twisted into Ray's side to give him a hug. He squeezed back hard, then abruptly let go.
“See you before long, Bugface,” I said, and kissed his forehead too.
His fist hit me in the ear.
I slid back and shut the door. Once he'd done the same thing when I'd forgotten to order curly fries and after thirty seconds that had blown over too.
“Grandma doesn't like that kind of behavior,” I said through the window.
He thrashed against the seat and Josie put a freckled hand on his leg. Deb backed out of the parking spot and I barely got my toes out of the way, though even if she'd crushed them flat I probably could've reinflated them with a bicycle pump. A school bus pulled out behind the car as they drove away so then I couldn't even see the backs of their heads, just
this bus stops at r.r. xings
.
A life without Lydia, okay, I was starting to digest that. But not Josie and Ray.
I turned down
Clemons though it wasn't exactly on my way. A giant black Escalade was parked in Harv's driveway so I didn't slow down, much less go in. If the house had looked empty I would've broken in and eaten his dad's driver's license or crapped in his oven and set it on low, but Harv was probably in there and kids shouldn't pay for their parents' fuck-ups. Sins of the father and that, Ezekiel 18:20.
How'd I even remember that? Funny how the brain works.
At a red light at the bottom of our hill, I pulled up behind a little Acura. He wasn't signaling, so I stayed behind him in the left lane instead of sliding into the right. When the light turned green he didn't even inch forward until every last oncoming car had gone by us, and then he finally rolled ahead and turned left. Hadn't had the decency to turn his signal on.
Well, I signaled and went after him, and thirty seconds later I stopped behind him at another light. It'd started raining. I reached for my shovel in the back seat, climbed out, walked four steps and smashed in his tail lights. Drizzle on my face while I did it. I glanced up at the side mirror and saw the driver staring back at me, and just from his cheek and eye I could tell he was Chinese. And I admit that that freaked me out a little because I'd never seen a Chinese guy before, not in Hoover. I got back into my car, shut the door and waited for the signal to change. The modern world trains us to act like nothing's happened. The Acura guy never even opened his door. The light turned green, he rolled ahead, I crunched over the shards of his lights and after a couple of minutes I pulled up in front of our house again.
Only the foundation was left, the front steps, what might have been our blue couch, and a tangle of charred timbers like a campfire Boy Scouts had peed on. Two firemen in shirt sleeves and overalls were unrolling yellow
danger keep out
tape around the perimeter of the property. The facing wall of the houses on either side of us were toasted black. I peered up and down the block and didn't see a single Alice's Flowers
van, so until I heard back from Jones or drove clear across the state to Lancaster County, maybe that meant I was out of clues. But why not drive straight to Velouria and ask what was in that
soft-soled shoes
only
tank?
“Hey, aren't you the guyâare you Giller?” asked a bearded fireman.
“I lived here, yeah.”
“Your landlord was just here to poke around. Not a happy camper!”
The other fireman laughed and they went back to what they were doing. A tall balding man sauntered up the sidewalk, leading a black miniature poodle on a leash. Even before my bacon problem I'd wanted to smash poodles into the pavement, and this little rat's mucousy eyes kept glaring up at me.
“Aren't you Mr. Giller from the high school?” asked the bald guy.
“I've done some subbing.”
Didn't want to own up to too muchâmaybe he had a subpoena because my shirt had traumatized some kid in the cafeteria.
“I heard you had a fire up here, thought I'd better lend my condolences. I'm Doug Avery. Our daughter Megan went on that field trip to Velouria, you remember?”
If Avery was looking for trouble, I'd duck when he threw his first punch, even with the extra reach he had on me, though the poodle might be a problem. Unpredictable.
“Sure. Megan,” I said. “Whiz at the periodic table.”
“Yes, sir. Now, we had a fire at
our
place last night too. Gutted it. Haven't quite accepted it in my mind yet. We're staying at my brother's place now, just over the way.”
“Really, you too? Megan all right?”
“Well, that's the thing. That's the thing, we haven't seen her since Monday. She came in late on Monday, then Tuesday not at all. That's two days ago. Cereal bowl sitting there untouched.”
He blinked hard. His eyes looked rheumy as the dog's.
“That, uhâthat doesn't sound like Megan,” I said.
Too homely to have run off with a motorcycle gang.
“No, it doesn't. Colleen's still all smiles about it, says Megan's at a sleepover and she'll phone any minute, but⦔ Avery watched his dog sniff around the puddles left by the firehoses. “And we heard most of that Chemistry 11 class was acting strange even before. Some business in the cafeteria, with the boys threatening people!”