by Anna Bailey
But when he opens them now, there is Abigail, stretched out on the boulder, her slender, freckled arms tucked under her head, her red hair shining like a beacon. That is what she is to him. When he gets himself lost in those low, dark memories, he can always find his way back to her, his guiding light. She is easier to find than God sometimes, although he would never admit that to anyone.
The water froths and jumps like it’s alive. Samuel thinks, In the fall, I will take her downstream to fish the kokanee salmon as they make their run. I’ll show her how to twist her own lures, and we’ll catch us some dinner, cook it up right there under the stars. He cannot imagine, sitting here among the quiet trees with his daughter, listening to the river, that this will be their last visit to the woods together. Two weeks from now he will beat her brother bloody because of some pictures on his computer, and then Abigail, his Abigail, won’t like to be alone with him anymore.
For now, he just smiles at her and says, “Hey, baby girl, take off your shoes. I’m going to teach you something new today.”
Abigail does as she’s told, frowning as she peels off the sticky fabric around her ankle. “I think it’s stopped bleeding.”
“Told you it would. Now come over here. You remember me telling you about how sometimes we had to hide from Charlie by getting under the water?”
She squints at him in the sunlight. “What are we doing?”
Samuel looks at the river roiling under the relentless pummel of the falls. “You’re going to learn how to hold your breath.”
NOW
“Where’s your mother?”
Samuel stands in the hallway, staring at the space on the wall where the gemstone cross used to be. The outline is still there, where the paint has faded around it, but now the hole is covered with a piece of Christmas wrapping paper, which Jude is eyeing regretfully. The way the glued-on glitter winks as it catches the lamplight seems to be taunting them both.
“I said, where’s your mother?”
“She just went out earlier, didn’t say where. Dad, she’s been weird all day. I tried to call you, but—”
“I was at the mill, wasn’t I? Was out last night and then I’ve been working all day, which is more than I can say for you, boy. Why did I get a call saying you weren’t at school today?”
“I had to stay with Mom.”
“Your brother should have seen to that. Where is he?”
“He said he was going to get some gas.” His son glances at the clock, tapping his finger on his cane.
Samuel nods at the Christmas paper. “When did this happen?”
“I don’t know, sir. I mean, I put the paper up, but the cross was already gone when I got back last night.”
“And your mom didn’t say anything about it?”
“No, sir. She had a Valium, then just slept all day.”
Samuel nods again and eases some of the tension in his back. “Your mother, she gets sort of crazy sometimes. You know that, don’t you? Not quite right in the head.”
Jude looks at the patch on the wall again and folds his lips together.
“I should go look for her,” says Samuel. “Not good for a woman to be out running around at night when she’s not in her right mind.”
“Yes, sir.”
Samuel rubs his eyes, and as he shoulders past his son, he surprises himself by thinking: He’s a good boy, Jude.
In the kitchen, he pours himself a glass of water and leans against the sink, listening to the tap of his son’s cane on the floorboards as the boy approaches the kitchen door. If it weren’t for the stick, he thinks, perhaps he might have been able to make something out of this one. Jude lacks Abi’s fire, but he takes orders well enough, like a little soldier. It’s a shame, really. There are too many years between them now—fifty, if he’s counting—and that’s more of a lifetime than most of his friends got. It occurs to him that maybe he should tell his son this, or something to that tune, or at least say: You’re all right, kid. But what would be the point in that now?
Samuel raises his arms over his head and pulls on his elbow to crack his shoulder, groaning loudly as he does so. From the doorway, Jude is looking at him very strangely, as if he is only just recognizing him.
* * *
Emma’s phone goes just as she is sitting down to dinner with her mother.
“Aren’t you going to answer that?”
“Mom, we never get to eat together. They’ll call again or text me if it’s important.”
“Well, who is it?”
Emma glances at the screen. “Oh, that’s weird, it’s Jude.”
“Jude Blake? You should probably answer it, then. It could be about his mom.”
“Emma?” Jude’s voice sounds very close but slightly echoey, as if he is cupping his hands around the receiver while he speaks. “Hey, Emma, can you talk? I need to tell you something.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I can’t get through to my mom or Noah, but you have to… It’s just, if you really are trying to find out what happened to Abi, there’s something you need to know. It was right back at the end of March, I think I saw—”
There is a clunk, and then the line goes dead.
43
By the time Noah arrives, the RV is already on fire. He feels the heat on his face as he climbs out of his truck, sees the smoke rising above the trees before he sees the actual flames, but, somehow, he already knows what they’re burning.
It was half past six when Noah left the house. He said, “The truck was looking a little low earlier. I’m going to the gas station. Tell Mom when she gets back.”
Jude said, “Can you pick up a new thing of toothpaste? I forgot to get some earlier,” and Noah said that he would, and then he put his suitcase in the back of the truck and left his father’s house. I’ll wait for you, Rat had said. An hour. Noah thought about the way Rat had looked at him that afternoon in the woods so many months ago, and he thought about the way Rat looked when he told him to get out, only that morning, and in his truck Noah put his foot on the gas.
Now he runs across the trailer park, past the residents standing on their roofs to watch, over the deep, muddy scores in the grass where a chaos of cars and pickups have parked, through the throng of folks, all eerily smart in their church clothes, as they holler like a pack of coyotes.
A fire of this scale has no real shape. It is just one great mass of flame and smoke, bulging out of the broken windows, vividly orange against the night sky. The door peels away, black and burning, as the whole vehicle begins to sag in the middle. Any view of the inside is blocked by a wall of thick smoke that stinks of burning metal, leaving a strange, sweet taste in the back of the mouth.
The heat is like something solid that he has to pry apart with his bare hands, and somebody grabs him from behind and tries to hold him back. In his periphery, he catches sight of Pastor Lewis, ghostly pale in the dark, flickering around the edges as the heat distorts Noah’s vision.
“Fire is the Lord’s cleansing instrument,” the pastor cries, arms raised. “Harm shall be repaid, burn for burn!”
Noah won’t remember what he says then, if he says anything at all, because that is when the screaming starts. There are boys in the crowd—boys he has known all his life—who start to cheer, waving blazing garden torches above their streaky faces. People, it turns out, don’t burn in any special way. Burning people scream like animals, and neither the cheering boys, nor the ranting preacher man, nor the fire itself, thundering like the engine of an eighteen-wheeler, can drown out the sound completely.
Noah kicks back hard against the sweating body holding him and feels it buckle, then breaks free, elbowing another man in the teeth as he tries to grab hold of him from the side. Somebody hits him with something solid across the shoulders, and Noah staggers but he doesn’t go down. He doesn’t go down because his father taught him that, at least.
He thinks, at the last minute, above the howls of the men and women, above the blaze, that he can hear his mot
her calling his name. But Rat cries out again, and then there is only the fire.
* * *
Dolly, arriving in time to see Noah disappear into the blazing RV, remembers that morning, eighteen years ago, when she came home and found her son in the bedroom closet. You smell disgusting, she had said to a little boy who’d only stood there wanting someone to hold him, and she thinks now, Is this what I have pushed him to?
Dolly screams his name until her vocal cords are raw, and the pastor’s wife has to hold her back from running into the fire after him.
* * *
“Is he dead?” someone asks.
Dolly watches her son stagger out of the RV and drop that poor boy’s body in the grass, before he collapses to his knees beside him, retching up lungfuls of smoke.
She stumbles toward them. “Noah!”
There is movement in the crowd, some people running away to their cars, others pushing forward to get a closer look.
“What’s going on?”
“What happened to the Blake boy?”
Then somebody shouts, “Get the fire department before the whole forest burns down!”
Noah’s blackened face twists as he looks down at the figure slumped in his arms. “Wake up. Rat, please wake up…”
He sounds so small and young again. Dolly says, “Don’t worry, I’m here.”
She crouches in the dirt beside him and presses her fingers to the base of Rat’s neck. The texture of the skin feels wrong. His head rolls to the side, but he doesn’t move.
“Hell, Ed, I think he’s actually dead,” someone says.
“Jesus Christ.”
Ann Traxler is close enough that Dolly can hear her familiar voice directed at the pastor: “You let this get way out of hand.”
“An ambulance!” Dolly cries. “Somebody call an ambulance, he’s got a pulse.”
It is Ann who eventually phones the emergency services, although Dolly will not find this out until later, and they will look at each other differently then.
Noah, his cheeks streaked with tear tracks, is trying to wipe the grime off Rat’s face, his fingers rubbing frantically as he murmurs, “Please, please…” Dolly closes her hands over her son’s. She can tell from the way Rat’s skin feels, all gnarled, like a tangle of ropes, that Noah won’t want to see what’s underneath.
Behind her, she hears Pastor Lewis say, “Let him be. This is God’s will.” He extends a hand, which seems to shine so clean in the firelight. “Come back to town with us, Noah, and we’ll get you cleaned up. Come back to God’s path.”
Dolly pushes his hand away as she gets to her feet. All these years of looking at the bruises on my son’s face and now you care about cleaning him up?
“You stay the hell away from Noah.”
“Come on now.” The flames snap, engines rev into the distance, and the RV groans as it melts, yet the pastor still sounds so very calm. “The Lord makes it clear to us in the Book of Exodus, Dolly. If there is harm then you shall pay, life for life, eye for eye, and this boy intended harm upon our church.”
“But,” Dolly settles into her stance, and some faraway part of her mind laughs bitterly because at least she knows she can take a punch if someone starts swinging, “what about the Sermon on the Mount? What about that? You have heard an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but I say to you—if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. What about that? You step back right now, or so help me, Ed Lewis, I will slap you anyway, and I will make it hurt.”
See how you like praying on that.
By the time the emergency services arrive, the heat of the fire has dimmed, and Rat’s skin feels cold as Dolly holds one of his blistered hands. She takes Noah’s, too, and the three of them hold on to one another in some semblance of prayer, until the paramedics load Rat into the back of the ambulance. Then Dolly feels the weight of her son as he sinks against her, almost chokes on the smell of gasoline and burned fabric that clings to his clothes and his skin, but finally, as he sobs into her hair, she puts her arms around him.
“Oh,” she says, rubbing the back of his head. “Oh, my boy.”
44
They won’t let me see my face.”
Rat lies slumped on his side, staring blankly at Noah with his one visible eye. The whole right side of his face is covered with two large squares of gauze, and Noah hadn’t wanted to hear the words the doctors said last night, had pushed them to the back of his mind, quietly certain that they must be making some mistake. Words like serious upper body burns, temporary blindness, permanent scarring—those couldn’t apply to someone you actually knew. They just couldn’t.
Noah rolls his neck, trying to ease some of the stiffness from having slept upright in a chair. “It’s probably just until you get the vision back in that eye.”
Rat’s doctor had said he had something called an acute angle-closure glaucoma, caused by too much sudden pressure, and had told him to quit smoking.
Soon after they’d arrived at the medical center over the mountain in Estes Park, Noah was taken into a small room by a different doctor. She’d made him take off his shirt so that she could listen to his lungs with a cold stethoscope. She bandaged the minor burns on his forearms, then gave him a washcloth and told him he could use her sink to clean up his face. The simple kindness of this stranger in the middle of the night had made his eyes water.
His mother had been waiting for him when he emerged. She put a cool hand against his forehead, the way she used to when he was a child and would play sick so he could stay home from school. “They think he’s going to make it,” she told him, and he wondered if she was playing with him then.
She’s gone now: she had a bunch of missed calls from Jude. Noah is glad, in a sense, because he’s worried that if she stayed much longer then the sudden affection she’d found for him would start to wear off. He still doesn’t really know what to make of that, but he has decided he’ll deal with it later. Rat needs him to be present, even if he won’t say so.
Noah looks at him lying in the hospital bed, and the word hanging comes to mind. Something about Rat reminds him of the wind chimes that his father makes out of animal bones, just dangling there on a day with no breeze, uncertain of their purpose.
Rat’s hands are heavily bandaged, with only the tips of his fingers visible. They took the worst of the damage, the doctor said. He was probably trying to put out the flames. Noah wants to press his mouth to them and say: They will heal and toughen, and I will buy you a new guitar to help you grow new calluses, and new books whose pages you can learn to feel again. He wants to lean forward right now and tell Rat this, and kiss him and kiss him, but when he looks again, his stomach turns. He can’t help it: Rat has no fingernails.
“I’m sorry,” Noah whispers, and Rat looks away.
“I’m ugly.”
“You’re not.”
“I wish you hadn’t…” His voice is faint, gravelly. He raises one of his hands, turns it one way and then the other, and they both stare at his gummy fingertips. The hand, too, just seems to hang there, before Rat lets it fall heavily to his side again.
Around midmorning, a nurse comes in to check his face. She lifts up the gauze with a pair of tweezers, and Noah catches a glimpse of the skin underneath, all red and peeling.
“Try and think positive,” the nurse says before she goes, and Noah isn’t sure which one of them she’s talking to. He puts his hands into his pockets—it feels wrong to have them on display.
“Hey.” He speaks softly, afraid that somehow his voice might take up too much space and push Rat away. “Is there anyone I should call for you? I mean, do your parents know where you are?”
“My parents?”
“Yeah, or a relative or something. I don’t know. Don’t you have anyone?”
Rat stares straight at the floor. “No.”
Noah doesn’t know what to say then, so he just sinks his teeth into his bottom lip and tries to think of some way he could be useful. Just s
itting here makes him want to rip out his fingernails too. There has to be someone else in town who cares about Rat, someone else who’d give a damn that half his face has been burned off. Noah looks at him, one bandaged hand over his mouth, his eyes screwed up, like he doesn’t want anyone to know he’s crying. He thinks, I cannot be the only one who loves the way your lips turn up at one side more than the other when you smile, or the routes of the veins in your wrists, or the sight of your wet footprints on the floor after a shower. He doubts the kids at the trailer park are that cut up about it: some of those friends were there last night, waving their firebrands around. But Emma Alvarez—she cared about him once, not so long ago. Didn’t she?
“I’m just going to run down to the lobby to make a call,” Noah says. “I’ll be right back, okay?”
He pulls the big blue curtain around the bed as he leaves, so that Rat can cry without anyone looking at him.
Grief is tidal. This occurs to Noah as he strides down to the lobby. One minute he can sit there and say that everything is going to be all right and believe it, and the fact that Rat needs him to say it gives him the confidence to do so, but then all of a sudden he’s drenched in the awfulness of it all. What the hell? What a thing for a group of people to do to another human being. These people he has known his whole life, they just set fire to somebody, like they were getting together for a potluck dinner.
“Don’t expect the police to do anything about this,” his mother had said last night. “Some of the deputies were there and they didn’t lift a finger. We can’t trust them, Noah. We can’t trust anybody but each other now, you understand?”
But Noah could tell from the way she had looked at him, with her big wild eyes, that this was about more than just the fire.