Burning Down the House (29 page)

Later, when there were more of us, I remember doing the ceiling in the playroom, the beams, and the tape player singing softly, getting spattered with paint. The way the roller never covers as evenly as it is supposed to, the way you always have to do one more coat than expected—the way that, when I finished, the house was asleep and it didn't matter.

Well, mostly it didn't matter.

Years don't walk, they run.

Painting the outside of my old house, high up on the aluminum ladder, grey paint on clapboard, watching the boys run around as I might imagine watching them running around in a movie, shot from high above, everyone oblivious to my presence. It was disturbingly just like that—as if, almost imperceptibly at first, I was painting myself into the background, walling myself off. If you're unlucky, everything begins to change: you become handy but not needed. Comfortably, constantly there, but never more than that. Never desired. Never necessary. Never recognized, not even when you yourself are the one in need. You're there, but you're fundamentally ignored.

The couple in the blue house hadn't reached that point, but it's hard to escape the thought that maybe they would. It is a small thing at first, but it grows.

Walking by the same blue house late at night, before the fire, it was obvious. Subtle and small—but as decisive as a circuit breaker throwing itself off in the box. Light, then dark. Done, then never, ever undone.

I can imagine them in there, sleeping like spoons in a drawer. Cheap brown butcher's paper blocking out the bottom halves of the front windows instead of curtains, the feeling that they were wrapped up inside the walls, the steely, bright belief that everything is possible.

It was a house I almost bought, a house I briefly imagined myself living in, as unlikely as that seems. Not the kind of house that suits the weekly visit of two rambunctious boys: too small, and facing right on the busy street with no yard at all, too dangerous for bicycling or playing. But somehow the house sang in a way that suggested it was possible to go out and simply buy the song.

When the workmen were still there, renovating, I would walk by and look in the door, up the stairs past the row of balusters. I would get a glimpse of the kitchen, just passing, see the regiment of the tile and the parade of the stairs. I watched the walls evolve from studs to Gyproc to primer.

The front door is black lacquered steel, and underneath the doorknob, sometime in the last month or so, a pattern of small, fingernail-shaped white dents had appeared, as if someone had been pounding urgently on the metal, but pounding with an underhanded swing so as not to raise any alarm. It was the first disquieting hint that things might be less than they seemed.

Upstairs, on the side, for weeks I could see through one thin window—the only window on that side of the house, the side next to the service station parking lot—and I could stand there, putting gas in the truck, and see high shelves with glass objects, just shapes, really, in the deep green of bottle glass. From above, the angled light from a fixture I couldn't see. Passing by the front of the house, I sometimes glimpsed silhouettes against the butcher's paper, and, even more occasionally, the sight of a far-off hand and arm reaching for something in the bright of the kitchen. Life captured for one small instant in the frame of a window.

There is no guide to living, no simple chart to tell the temperature of someone else. One moment your thermostat is true, the next the fish sticks are in flames. One moment an explosion in a marriage seems impossible; the next it is already past, leaving you marred, annealed and changed. You're unable to bend the way you once could—white waxy skin pulled tight over scores of old injuries.

Even a small fire leaves an indelible mark, a permanent stain on the fabric you might think of as trust. It's like a loss of confidence in your surroundings. Like the way it's hard to get over a break-in when you can't help but wonder if the burglar has gone through all the drawers in your dresser, laughing. Waking up at night, not knowing what to trust. Did you hear the door? A footstep? Are they back?

Smoke does that too, late at night. I wake from a sound sleep, sure that I can smell it. Sometimes I actually do—in a former apartment, an unexpected cigarette from somewhere in the apartment downstairs—or else it's the stale charcoal that the damp can always seem to bring out in a building that's had a fire.

Sometimes there is nothing at all, and I make my way from room to room, smelling at the still, dark air, constantly doubting my senses. Frantic to find the room where the smoke begins, before it's suddenly everywhere and there's nothing left to do except run away.

The stain a fire leaves is almost insurmountable. It's inside every single cupboard, under each glass, a soot ring where the glasses stand on the shelf. The glasses turn tobacco yellow with heavy, sticky gunk that doesn't come off easily. Fire completely permeates a house.

It turns up months later in places you would never expect— inside zipped, hanging suit bags, on the undersides of drawers. Turn a corner and find yourself face to face again in the mirror, with the tissue still raw and not even close to healing.

Burns heal slow.

And that's not all. Smoke has a way of touching and fingering every single thing you own. It is startlingly intrusive, rude almost, pushing into drawers and digging down deep to the raciest of the underwear, the ones that are never actually worn but talk loud about futile carnal last-chance daring. It knows all about dreams and hope and fear, and most of all it knows exactly where you live.

Fires start small but they scar. Sometimes the damage they do is more long-lasting than you've ever been led to expect, and even the smallest of fires will leave a permanent mark.

And that's one fire. Just imagine hundreds.

I know the training will click in—it always does, even when I'm doing CPR in my sleep. Awake, I'm always doing scene surveys, always watching for downed power lines, always getting ready to run towards the accident that could happen at any time. And I know that when I'm thinking like that, any evening can turn two ways: I can be myself or I can get distant, my eyes focusing on spots no one else can see.

I look up at the spinning, rushing night and wonder if I'm the only father who plays count-the-cars-in-the-ditch with his kids on snowy days, the only one who stops for every car off the road—even the ones that have been completely buried by passing snowplows— the only person to abandon ship when I see an accident, leaving a whole family behind, the truck with the four-way flashers on the side of the road by a fish and chips store, me supporting an old woman's head with my hands in her wrecked car, while my own boys need some support of their own.

I'll sit in someone else's car, behind a lady so short she's built a pile of pillows on the driver's seat to let her see over the dashboard, just a bystander lending a hand until the fire trucks arrive. And I'll wonder whom I'm betraying this time—myself or my boys, sitting crying in the truck because they're afraid. Yet still I can't let go of the woman's neck and go comfort them. And when the firefighters finally get there and look in the window, they know me by name and say, “How are you doing, Russell? Can't stay out of it, can you?”

And I don't tell them how shaky I feel inside when I finally get out of the car and stretch. There's perfume on my hands, dusty, pale purple lavender in my nose, and it seems like I can't get rid of it for days.

THIRTY

January, on the phone in my bedroom upstairs, and I was talking to my mother because my dad was sleeping, and I asked her if it was time for me to jump on a plane and fly across the country.

Dad had a mass in his liver, had been losing weight fast for several months, and he was spending most of the time asleep in a big armchair they'd gotten, an armchair that helped him stand so he could get to the bathroom.

“I don't know, Russ,” Mom said, careful not to force me into anything while I fished around desperately for any scrap of definitive information. “There's not really that much you can do out here anyway.”

But there was enough concern in her voice for a fight with the airlines, a scramble to find tickets even if it meant flying part of the way on a Dash 8 through Labrador.

They met me at the airport in Victoria, my mom and both my brothers, my parents' small white dog tugging eagerly at the end of its leash, right exactly where I'd met my parents only a couple of years earlier. And I was already too late.

My father was lying in a Victoria palliative care wing by then, only occasionally close to consciousness, looking like my dad and somehow like someone else too.

Sometimes you look at someone you love as they lie there fading away, and it's as though an evil trick has been played on you, as if someone has come in and magically and maliciously swapped people around. While the person in front of me resembled my father, I can't get past the stubborn part of me that occasionally insists that it wasn't him at all, that I might pick up the telephone someday and hear the gentle declination of his voice, falling through my name the way it always did. “Hi Russ,” he'd exhale almost like a sigh.

As he lay there, his hands out of sight beneath the covers, he was obviously in hospital even though they had dressed him in a plaid shirt from home. The tube from a catheter snaked out from the waffle-weave blanket, draining into a bag low down on the side of the bed. The bag told its own story, the urine Coca-Cola-coloured, his liver function obviously failing. Put your faith in doctors who don't want to give you sharp, definitive bad news and you can ignore plenty of things—but if you know just enough, you can't ignore anything.

We stood around, awkward, the room still and warm, the nurses padding up and down the hall in quiet shoes that sometimes squeaked slightly, and we'd put our hands into our pockets and take them out again. We wound up sitting in the chairs along one side of the room, telling stories and laughing, until my mother stopped, suddenly serious, and said, “Do you suppose anyone will be upset that we're laughing in here?”

It's hard to believe that anyone would be upset, a great big building full of patients in their own holding patterns, the whole hospital filled with under-your-breath and heater-ticking quiet, like a seashell that's still the right shape but has forgotten the sound of the ocean. You'd think they'd want to broadcast any laughter there was through a speaker system, just to leaven the airless weight of the place.

Even the cookies at the coffee machine had a kind of severity to them. Other families had brought them in, carefully decorated, as if home could be caught in curves of familiar frosting, in the careful placement of toothpicks to keep the plastic wrap from touching down and marring the whorls and pastry-sleeve points and dots.

The coffee was always kept too long, and it smelled burnt and harsh as the elevator doors opened on the floor, the smell of coffee fighting with disinfectant and the squeak of the nurses' sneakers on the polished linoleum.

It all happened fast. At least it was fast.

The next day when we visited, there was froth in his lungs. Patients with edema, the book says you keep them any way but flat. First, elevate the head of their bed, and if that doesn't help, tilt them on their side. He was percolating like a coffee pot, bad enough that I could hear the wet snap of the bubbles popping at the back of his throat. They had drugs to dry him out, and suction too, and even though that was done before we came in, I knew it must have been particularly unpleasant.

He was tipped up on his side in a big hospital bed, his breath rattling, tipped up so one lung stayed above the rising fluid that was building in his chest. His face was moving sometimes, as if he was working through some complex and changing equation in his head, maybe working on the mechanics of yet another complicated pun, eyebrows rising and falling. But there was no clear indication he could hear the world outside at all.

It was like that until Sunday around one o'clock in the afternoon, when my mother and I and my brothers and even the dog went straight to the room without stopping at the nurses' station. We'd been there enough times to know to just head down to his room, third floor, and then the third door down on the left side of the hallway.

When we came in the room, I knew, and I was right back checking for signs, looking for gloves in my pockets. I remember saying, “He's not breathing, Mom,” and looking at his neck, where just the day before there had been a strong if somewhat urgently ragged pulse, a not-quite-even slapping kind of throb.

I also remember that his ears were waxy and yellow instead of the ruddy red they had been, and even though his forehead was still warm to the touch, he had clearly died.

I moved close enough to his face to be absolutely sure he wasn't breathing, that he wouldn't breathe again.

“But he's warm,” Mom said. A pause. “But he's warm.”

I was counting the signs, one by one, knowing exactly what they added up to.

Standing there, standing still, and already I was wondering just what came next—because this was always where I got to leave.

My older brother's cellphone rang, and it was the nurses' station looking for us, calling us to tell us what we already knew, that Dad had died, not long before we got there.

For once I didn't have to do anything. I had asked my mother directly about it the day before, and she said that they'd both agreed on “do not resuscitate,” the blessed DNR, when he came into the hospital.

Thank God, I didn't have to do anything. No heroics, no attempted CPR, no frantic effort to force someone to have a pulse again after his body had decided to stop. The ability to let go of rote, to finally surrender the training that's always inside you the way ticking is inside a clock. I was only expected to feel—and I was remarkably unprepared for that.

Just grief—something new. Grief, and sudden tears that come at me now when I hardly expect them, and relief too. Knowing that, dying, he may just have managed to release me from the responsibility of having to do something every single time.