House on Fire (ARC)

by Bonnie Kistler

  “Which are?”

  Leigh ticked them off. Desertion. Felony conviction. Cruelty. Adultery.

  Devra leaned forward at the last point. “Defined as?”

  “Sexual relations with someone other than his spouse.”

  “What does spouse mean?”

  “A husband or wife,” Leigh answered slowly, as if speaking to a child. Then she realized. “Oh! Are you asking about plural marriage? Only the first spouse qualifies as the spouse. Sexual relations with any subsequent partner would constitute adultery.”

  “Even if the subsequent marriages were lawful in our home country?”

  “Even so.”

  “Even if they were sanctified by Allah?”

  “In this country, divorce is a civil matter only. Religion is irrelevant.”

  Devra shook her head. “I confess, I cannot comprehend such a thing. In my country, law and faith are one and the same.” She paused. “And it presents a further difficulty. If your courts will not burden me with the requirements of sharia law in seeking a divorce, then I assume I must likewise forfeit the benefits I would have received under sharia law?”

  “You’re referring to the mahr?”

  “Yes. Specifically, the deferred part of the mahr, the mu’akhkar. This is the sum agreed upon at the time of our marriage to be paid to me in the event of divorce. How can I hope to receive that money if sharia law is not enforced?”

  This was the subject of Leigh’s article, so she could answer with some confidence. “Courts in this country have ordered payment of the mahr without treading into questions of religion, by treating it the same as any nonreligious prenuptial agreement. It simply has to meet the statutory requirements for an enforceable prenup. Namely, that the agreement be in writing and entered into voluntarily, after a full and fair disclosure of assets.”

  Devra seemed stunned. “So it is actually possible your court would grant me a divorce over my husband’s objection, and at the same time compel him to pay me the mu’akhkar?”

  “Certainly it’s possible.”

  “Well.” She sat back with a dazed look in her deep dark eyes. “My mother told me things were different in America, but I never . . .” Her voice trailed off. She was silent for a long moment before she forced a smile at Leigh. “You’ve given me a great deal to reflect upon. May I ask that we meet again in a few weeks to discuss these matters further?”

  “Yes, I’d be happy to.”

  She pressed a button on the end table beside her. “Someone will contact your office with the particulars.”

  A brisk knock sounded on the door, and it swung open to admit a rolling rack of clothes steered by the personal shopper.

  “And now if you will excuse me,” Devra whispered with a glance at the bodyguard standing at attention outside the salon. “I must spend enough money to convince my husband I’ve been shopping this morning.” She raised her voice. “So you recommend the Versace?”

  “Ye—es.” Leigh faltered only slightly. “Yes, I think that would suit you best.”

  “Very well. I thank you.”

  The bodyguard escorted Leigh to the elevator and glowered at her until the doors closed. On the ground floor, she hurried through the empty store, and as soon as she cleared the front door, she took out her phone and powered it up. She couldn’t wait to get home to tell the kids about this encounter. Chrissy was studying the Middle East in her World Cultures class this term and was fascinated by it. She’d be thrilled to hear about her mother’s meeting with a real live sheikha. While Kip would get on the internet and figure out in five minutes exactly who this woman was.

  She slid into the car as her phone glowed to life. Six calls had piled up since she turned it off. Three from Kip, two from Peter. And the last one from the hospital.

  Chapter Five

  Pete swerved into the parking lot and squealed to a stop at the ER entrance and tore inside to the reception kiosk. But he was already too late, and they sent him to Admissions, but Admissions wouldn’t tell him anything except how to fill out the paperwork. When that was done they sent him to the surgical floor, but the elevator wouldn’t come no matter how hard he punched the up button, and he finally gave up and ran to the stairwell and galloped up four flights and down a couple of halls until at last he burst panting into the room.

  Kip didn’t look up at Pete’s arrival. He was staring at his hands, cradling his phone like a bird with a broken wing. His mouth trembled when he spoke. “They made me turn it off. I never got through to Leigh.”

  “I reached her. She’s on her way.”

  “I was googling these words. Cerebral aneurysm. Subarachnoid hemorrhage. I don’t know what they mean. I’m not even sure I’m spelling them right. They made me turn off my phone before I could figure anything out.”

  Pete stared, too, not at the phone but at Kip’s fingers. The tips were still smudged black with the ink residue from last night’s fingerprinting. “Where’s the doctor?”

  “I don’t know. They won’t tell me anything.”

  Pete went back out in the hall and did another circuit of the floor until he came to a glass-walled room with a row of doors along the back wall. He thought it might be the nurses’ station but there was no reception desk and no one inside the cube was looking outward. They were all looking at screens and talking on phones.

  A phone was hooked on the wall next to Pete. He picked it up and it rang automatically. A woman answered, though no one in the glass cube looked his way.

  “I’m looking for Dr. Rowan, I think it is?”

  “He’s in surgery.”

  “With Christine Porter?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Pete Conley. I’m her stepfather.”

  There was a pause. “I have a note here that the mother is on route.”

  “My wife, yes.”

  “Have a seat in the waiting room until she arrives.”

  The phone went dead in his hand, and still he couldn’t tell which nurse he’d spoken to. He hung it back on the hook and returned to the lounge down the hall. It was decorated in prints and plaids in shades of red and yellow, homespun and cheery, the kind of room often adorned with uplifting proverbs in framed needlepoint. These walls were blank.

  Kip had given up trying to stare his phone back to life. Now he was staring at the braided rag rug on the floor, elbows on his knees and his chin on his chest. Pete sat down beside him on the nubby plaid sofa. “Tell me again what happened.”

  Kip told it in a halting whisper. How Chrissy shuffled into the kitchen that morning and slumped down at the table. She moaned she didn’t feel good. There was something off about her eyes. Like they didn’t match. One was the usual blue, but the other was black—the pupil was completely dilated. And then—then it was like one side of her face melted off her skull, and her mouth opened up and she vomited all over the table. Kip ran for some paper towels, and by the time he got back—seconds, it was only seconds—she was on the floor, convulsing. “I—I turned her on her side so she wouldn’t choke, you know? But I couldn’t get her to come to, even after the seizures stopped. I tried calling you, and Leigh, then I called nine-one-one.”

  Pete scrubbed a hand over his face. “Did she ever wake up?”

  Kip shook his head. “They took her for some kind of scan, and one of the ER doctors came out and said it showed a subarachnoid hemorrhage and asked if she’d ever been diagnosed with a cerebral aneurysm.”

  “Never.” Leigh would have wrapped her in lamb’s wool for the rest of her life if she had.

  “Or if she ever had a head injury.”

  What child hadn’t? They’d had each of the boys to the ER one time or another with a suspected concussion, and Chrissy played sports as hard as they did. She rode horses, too, which meant she’d had her share of hard falls, not to mention crashes into stable walls every time a hor
se took a sudden sidestep.

  “It could be congenital.” Kip’s halting whisper picked up speed, and his next words came out in a rapid-fire stutter. “Google said these things—these aneurysms, whatever—are also caused by old age or drugs or infections. But she’s not old and she doesn’t do drugs and what kind of infection do they mean? It’s gotta be something more than bronchitis, right? So it’s either congenital or a head injury.”

  “She never showed any symptoms.”

  “He said they go undiagnosed until they rupture and bleed. Then he said they couldn’t wait for a parent and they had to go in now and clip it. Dad—” His voice broke on the word. “—I think he meant into her brain.”

  “Yeah, buddy, I think so.” Absently Pete patted him on the knee.

  “They’ll have to shave her head.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Man, she’s gonna hate that so much.”

  The elevator chimed again out in the corridor, and this time it was followed by the sound of footsteps that Pete instantly recognized as Leigh’s. It was the sharp strike of her high heels in a building full of soft soles, and the brisk rhythm of those heels on the hard floor, like the pace of a horse running at a controlled trot. Control was what he heard in her footsteps, and it was a relief to hear it in her voice, too, when she addressed someone down the hall in her clear, strong, lawyerly tone.

  He jumped up and ran down the hall to join her, but she was already out of sight. He turned a slow revolution in the empty corridor. “Leigh?” he called.

  She didn’t answer. She must have been out of earshot, too. Someone must have escorted her to the doctor. He trotted back to the glass cube and picked up the phone again. It felt like the intercom in a prison visiting room. “Hey,” he said to the faceless voice that answered. “My wife just arrived. Did you take her back to see Dr. Rowan?”

  “Dr. Rowan’s in surgery.”

  “Okay, where did you take her? My wife. I want to join her.”

  “Your name, please?”

  He went through them all again. Pete Conley. Leigh Huyett. Christine Porter. One family with three different surnames. There was a reason why couples used to pick one and stick it on all their kids, and at that moment he was willing to become Pete Huyett Porter if it would get him past that glass partition to wherever Leigh and Chrissy were.

  “Have a seat in the waiting room. Someone will be with you.”

  Shortly. She forgot to tack on shortly at the end of that sentence.

  He returned to the lounge. The TV was on now, and Kip was dispiritedly clicking through the channels with the volume turned low. He passed through the cable news stations and some Saturday morning cartoons and a couple infomercials until he finally stopped on the History Channel and turned up the volume.

  “What’s this?” Pete said.

  “I saw it already. It’s about the Crusades.”

  Kip was writing his final AP History paper on the Christian Crusades, about some pope back in the Dark Ages who basically incited all of Europe to march to Jerusalem and conquer the infidels.

  “Hey, what was that phrase?” Pete asked as the narrator droned on. “That Latin war cry you wrote about?”

  “Deus Vult?”

  “Right. What’s that mean again?”

  “It is the will of God.”

  Right. The will of God. Pete had a sort of reflexive belief in God, much like his belief in, say, Neptune. He had no reason to doubt the planet’s existence, not when other people seemed so sure, but he couldn’t personally verify it, and it didn’t have much to do with his actual life. The same was true of God. He never thought of God as watching him or listening to him and certainly not exerting his will over him. So what did it mean to say something was the will of God? In the Dark Ages it meant a command that had to be actively obeyed. Take up arms and march east. But today it meant only a passive resignation. It’s out of our hands. There’s nothing we can do. It’s the will of God.

  There was no way it could be God’s will that Chrissy sustain any kind of brain damage, but Pete had to accept it was out of his hands. There was nothing he could do for her now.

  It was afternoon before the crisp rat-a-tat of Leigh’s heels sounded from the far end of the corridor. Pete looked at his watch as he got to his feet. It was more than three hours since they took Chrissy to surgery. They must be done now, the artery was clipped, and Leigh was coming to tell them that everything was going to be okay.

  The brisk rhythm of her footsteps faltered. There was the clatter of a stumble, then a machine-gun burst of quick running steps. Then a sound that came not from her feet but from the bottom of her throat. A sound that in five years he never once heard her make.

  Chapter Six

  Afterward there was a luncheon at the house. Pete made all the arrangements, for that and everything else over the past three days, but now he had nothing to do. He wandered through each crowded room, looking for a forgotten detail or one more fire to put out. The caterers had the bar and buffet covered, and Leigh’s longtime assistant Polly was answering the door. A cop was directing traffic at the corner, and two young guys from Pete’s crew were valet-parking the visitors’ cars in the meadow. Pete had nothing left to do but find a place to position himself. Suddenly that seemed the hardest task of all.

  More than three hundred people came through the door that afternoon. Family, friends, neighbors, business associates. Leigh’s parents, up from Florida and sitting silent and pale beneath their leathery tans. Leigh’s friends came in three sets: her lawyer friends, her horse friends, and her mom friends. Her law partners made a big showing, along with a couple of judges and some of her clients. A few of Ted’s friends were there, and his colleagues from his stockbroker days, before he chucked it all to sail the seven seas. Most of the neighbors dropped by to pay their respects, and some of them stayed all ­afternoon—the Markhams from next door, the Dietrichs with their pregnant daughter. And the house was full of middle schoolers: Chrissy’s school had declared a half day and sent two activity-busloads of her classmates.

  Polly was supposed to be there as a guest, but she didn’t know how to stop working, and she spent all afternoon on her feet, opening the door for each new arrival and steering the guests like an usher at a wedding. Friends of the father? Ted was at the bar in the dining room, and she showed them the way. Friends of the mother? She waved at Leigh in the wing chair by the fireplace in the living room. Friends of the brothers? She pointed to Zack and Dylan standing like statues behind their mother, each with a hand on one of her shoulders. They were big hulking boys, and standing together like that, they looked like the defensive line they used to be part of back in high school football. But they were red-eyed and shell-shocked and drowning too deep in their own grief to be of any help to Leigh.

  That role fell to Shelby Randolph, who sat perched on the ottoman at Leigh’s feet. She was the real defensive line today, sheltering Leigh from hysterical teenaged girls and maladroit well-wishers, fending off anyone who tried to do more than offer a brief word of condolence. If any guest dared even to sniffle in front of Leigh, Shelby hustled them away like the Secret Service frog-marching a protester out of a presidential town meeting. She ran interference with Ted, and with Pete, too, for that matter. Twenty-five years of friendship trumped five years of marriage.

  Pete couldn’t have taken care of Leigh these last three days anyway. He had airport runs to make and trains to meet. Hotel rooms to reserve for anyone who didn’t insist on staying at the house. Beds to strip and sheets and towels to change. A casket to choose, the cemetery plot to buy, and a headstone to order. The menu to approve. The music for the organist to play. The photos to select for the slide show that was playing in a loop on the big TV in the family room. Chrissy through the years, growing from just-born all the way up to last week. Where she would remain forever, frozen in time.

  Now all the chores and err
ands were done, and there was nothing left for him to do, and no role for him to play either. Ted was the bereaved father here today, not Pete. No matter that Pete was the one who ate breakfast and dinner with Chrissy every day for the past five years. Who picked her up from her after-school activities and coached her softball team and coaxed a smile from her after her first middle school breakup. Still, he understood his lack of standing. If anything ever happened to Kip or Mia, the last thing he’d want would be Gary sitting front and center in the mourner’s bench. That would be Pete’s place, just as it was Ted’s place today.

  Ted’s mourner’s bench was a chair next to the bar, where he sat slopping whiskey from a tumbler while he wept out loud with maudlin memories of his sweet little girl. She was little by default in his memories, considering he moved out when she was seven. And not only out of the house—he left the whole goddamn country. It took Pete two days to locate him at a marina in Bermuda, and he barely managed to book him a flight that would get him here in time for the funeral. But he made it. Chrissy would have wanted her whole family there, and Pete made sure she got it.

  Pete had no family there. When he phoned his mother with the news, she said, “Oh, what a shame. Kristen, was it?” She didn’t think of Chrissy as her grandchild; she made her excuses and sent a card. He asked Karen to bring Mia—she adored her big stepsister; Where’s Chrissy? was the first thing she said when she arrived every other weekend—but Gary decreed that ten was too young for funerals, and he and Karen came without her. Kip was around somewhere, but he’d been doing his disappearing act ever since they got home from the hospital on Saturday. Even Shepherd was gone, penned up in the barn with the horses.

  Pete threaded his way through the crowd into the living room and squatted beside Leigh’s chair. “Anything I can get you, sweetheart?”

  Her clouded eyes wandered his way. The sedatives her doctor prescribed were supposed to be low-dose, but they dulled her into a high haze. It was like somebody had dropped a veil over her head, and she looked out through layers of filmy gauze. “I’m fine,” she whispered.