by Jon Cohen
After they went around Dartmouth Circle, Gracie said they’d better head back. Her knee really was bothering her. They stopped every so often to admire a stand of tulips in someone’s yard, or a particularly fine azalea. A block or two from home Gracie paused, started to ask something, then didn’t.
“What is it?” Arnie said.
“My son,” she said. “Louis. I’m curious.”
“What about?”
“You haven’t asked me why he wears a hat and scarf. Are you being polite, or do you already know about him?”
“No to both questions,” Arnie said. He lifted his hook. “And you haven’t asked me about this.”
She looked at it without expression. “It never occurred to me to, Arnie.”
“There you go. It never occurred to me to ask about your boy. You got a hook for a right hand, you don’t nose around in other folks’ business. I guess me and you are about equal in that respect. Having lived with something pretty private, we’ve lost a certain curiosity.” He tapped his hook. “Lost my hand fooling with a car.”
“Louis was burned in a fire.”
“There,” said Arnie. “Got that out of the way, and it wasn’t even in the way.” He smiled.
An immense white azalea caught their eyes as they turned onto Gracie’s block.
“That’s a hell of a bush,” said Arnie.
“White is my favorite. Double-blossoming white.”
They were about to start up again when Arnie reached out, so quickly Gracie wasn’t sure he’d moved at all. But then she saw the blossom in his hand, and tilted her head toward him as he reached up and placed it in her white hair.
CHAPTER FOUR
IT WAS the skin on his face, with its memory of pain, that alerted Louis to the nearness of flames. He had been asleep, and the memory obliterated his dreams; the knowledge of heat and light startled him to wakefulness. Fear contracted him, caused him to shrink and curl upon his bed, his eyes clamped shut. A thought flashed: When they find me—a blackened ball stuck to the stinking sheets of my smoldering bed—I will horrify them, my monstrosity complete. He buried his head in the crook of his arm because he was terrified that the fire, which surely surrounded him, would flare into his face and melt his eyes. He couldn’t move because he might create a wind that would fan the flames. And if he opened his mouth to cry out, the heat would enter him, burning him from within. In what he took to be his final vision, he saw his room transformed into a crematorium, and himself, at first whole and recognizable upon his bed, slowly consumed by fire, feet, thighs, chest, scarf, hat.
Seconds passed, a minute, and then a cool breeze eased across the length of his body. He remembered that when his face had been burned, the flash of fire felt at first like icy water thrown onto his skin. The cool breeze would be followed by an unforgiving heat, he knew. He clenched his teeth. But the breeze continued, and instead of smoke, or the odor of his own burning flesh, he smelled the damp green of a spring night. He thought: I’ve passed beyond pain, beyond heat and cold, all the way to death. Is this what Atlas smelled, this green which is a renewal, at the moment he slumped onto the grass beneath the horse chestnut tree? Louis opened his eyes then and sat up in bed. In death, have I been reborn? He touched his fingers to his mouth and cheeks and felt the familiar terrain of destruction that told him nothing had changed. I’m not dead—eyes open, he saw no flames, and the cool breeze he’d mistaken for the breath of fire came from the open window on the far side of his room.
The fire was not a dream. He knew those dreams, the ascent to terror followed by a slow return to sleep. Nor a premonition. He sensed again the nearness of heat, the proximity of orange light veiled in smoke. He swung his feet over the side of the bed and stood, tensing himself for a run to Gracie’s room. Where in the house would he find the flames, or would they find him? As he opened his door, would the hallway be ablaze? He weakened and struggled to breathe. Don’t stop, or you’ll burn where you stand, like Joan of Arc. Louis of Waverly, we condemn thee. No. On the back of his chair hung his hat and scarf. He reached for them instinctively—they had always shielded him, and would shield him now from the smoke and fire. He turned toward the door, and in turning scanned his windows, the two that faced the street, and the open one with its half-drawn shade, the one which faced the side yard, and through a pair of sycamore trees, Kitty Wilson’s house. In full summer her house would disappear behind a wall of thick green. But now Louis could just make it out through the tangle of branches and tiny new leaves. He moved away from his door and over to the window, lifting its shade, the ever-present barrier between him and Kitty. He found his fire. Across the dark, flames on a curtain flickered in the panes of Kitty’s second-floor bedroom window. It was not he, but Kitty, who would burn.
Louis did not even hesitate. He pulled his scarf tight and his hat low and held his cast close to his body to keep it from bouncing as he ran into the hallway. “Gracie!” he shouted as he rushed past her open door, “call the fire department, Kitty’s house is on fire!”
Gracie, jarred awake, saw her son in pajamas before her, and then didn’t see him, his footsteps loud on the stairs before fading to silence as he disappeared out the front door and into the night. She resisted the instant need to follow him and groped in the dark for the telephone.
When Louis went out the door, his dread left him for a moment, and he thought: Look, Iris, I’m outside again, I can do it. A rush of panic, then the orange glow of fear filled him again, and he wanted to run through the streets of Waverly to her. Save me, Iris. But she did not know his danger. He knew it, and knowing it headed straight for Kitty’s house. He didn’t try her front door, which would be locked against burglars and creatures of the night like himself. He pushed between two overgrown yews, and lifted his cast, smashing in her picture window. A light went on across the street, and another and another, but inside Kitty’s house all remained dark. Louis dragged his cast once across the windowsill to flatten the shards of sparkling glass, then stepped up on a yew branch, and pulled himself inside. He knocked a chair over, then a small table and vase, as he groped along the wall for a light switch. Blinking in the light, he oriented himself, living room, dining room, hallway. Stairs. He ran for them and tripped on a cast-iron doorstop in the shape of a dog as he veered out of the dining room. Sprawled at the bottom of the stairs, he looked up and saw the dim cloud of smoke waiting for him at the top. Kitty, I can’t.
“Kitty!” he shouted.
I can’t make it up those stairs, I’m sorry.
“Fire, Kitty!”
I can’t do it. But he was already on the first step, doing what he could not do, propelled by his knowledge of pain, because what he truly could not do was let Kitty burn.
And so Louis climbed the stairs, found another light switch within the gathering smoke, and moved toward the room. Lost in a surging panic, he saw himself approaching that other room of so many years ago, the back room at the end of the hardware store. He touched the door to Kitty’s bedroom, but didn’t really know which room he was about to enter. The door opened and there she was, asleep and uncomprehending, a bottle of wine spilled on her bedside table, and next to it an overturned ashtray, the cigarettes scattered across the table and onto the floor and in the wastebasket—because that’s where the fire had started, from the wastebasket to the curtains, the flaming curtains sparking onto the rug, igniting another fire in the closet. Louis saw it happen in his mind, traced the path of the lit cigarette as it fell from Kitty’s drunken fingers to the overturned ashtray, rolling across the table to the wastebasket, and in tracing that path he saw again the course of the spark more than sixteen years ago as it lifted off the oily rags he had attempted to extinguish, lifted, floated, and then fell into the paint thinner.…
Louis stopped the memory just short of the explosion. He had returned to the back room of the hardware store at the instant before the explosion released the flames that scorched his face. He knelt upon the smoke-enshrouded bed and saw not Kitty, b
ut himself, unharmed at sixteen. Kitty opened her eyes and closed them again.
“I’ve come to rescue you,” he whispered.
He lifted her with one arm, up and over his shoulder, but did not know it. It was Louis he carried across the smoldering rug and beyond the growing blaze, Louis he carried back down the clouded hallway to the top of the stairs, to safety.
Kitty began to emerge from her stupor as they moved down the stairs. Upside down, her face bounced against the purple scarf.
“You,” she murmured.
Louis didn’t hear her. Firemen ran through the downstairs rooms, pressing past him to get at the blaze, red lights flashed, men shouted back and forth. Someone tried to take hold of Kitty, but Louis couldn’t release her. He moved forward through the commotion toward the door, he had to get to the door and outside.
“Let go,” Kitty screeched, squirming on his shoulder.
At last, he stopped. In the middle of her front lawn, he fell to his knees and dropped her to the grass. He breathed the fresh spring air in great gasps, slowly returning to himself. A circle had formed around them: policemen and firemen, Gracie rushing to his side, and the neighbors who seemed always to be there whenever he appeared—Bev and Bert, Francine, Carl—and others he didn’t recognize. The world had descended upon him.
Two firemen attempted to strap an oxygen mask to Kitty’s face, but she was having none of it. She struggled against them, spitting words into her mask, crying out. She jerked free and lunged at Louis, her arms outstretched, her hands reaching for his face, and her voice spreading like an infection through the crowd.
Gracie swatted her before she touched Louis, and Kitty fell, ranting, confused and deranged, alcohol and fear pounding through her. “It was him, get him, don’t you see?” she screamed, her face monstrous, lit by the glow erupting from her bedroom window. “He started the fire. He tried to burn me in my sleep!”
Louis jumped to his feet and faced the stunned crowd. He was very still, and they were very still. He swayed. Then someone moved, and someone else. A fireman turned toward him, and a teenager, and Carl reached out with his hands. Louis made a frightened sound and stumbled forward, breaking into a run. He ran into the street, heading one way, then another—stopped and pivoted, and started again, running straight for his own house, across the lawn, up the steps, slamming the door behind him as he escaped to his room, his concealment, his sanctuary.
CHAPTER FIVE
IRIS AWOKE to a perfect May day. She couldn’t remember ever waking to one of those before. She was in such a tolerant mood that the usual morning sound of Arnie gargling and hawking in the bathroom didn’t set her teeth on edge. Her thoughts moved past him to Louis’s invitation for another visit. She stretched and lingered in bed, enjoying the prospect. When Arnie finished in the bathroom, she rushed in after him, and out again, beating him down to breakfast. She was at the stove when he walked into the kitchen.
“Morning,” he said.
“Morning,” she returned, her voice neutral.
He poured himself a glass of juice. Then he eyed her. “Fixing a little porridge, are we?”
“How’s that?” she said, pretending not to hear him.
“I said, having a little oatmeal? You know, so you can win that badge they give you for the most mornings in a row without ever changing what you eat for breakfast.”
Iris whipped around, a mixing bowl in her hands. “Hah!” she said. “You think you know everything. Pancakes!” She tilted the bowl for him to see. “Blueberry pancakes.”
Arnie grinned, and she grinned back at him. Duke wandered into the kitchen. “Hey Duke, check that woman out for me, will you? I believe they changed daughters on me in the night.”
“Nope, it’s me,” said Iris.
“I ain’t convinced of that,” said Arnie.
“Drink your juice,” she commanded, turning back to the stove.
“That’s more like it.”
Arnie ate two stacks of pancakes, and Iris ate three. Every so often, between bites, Arnie looked at her. He didn’t know it, but Iris was watching him, too. Both of them were having the same sorts of itchy thoughts, prompted by a reversal of their fortunes. She gonna be all right? Arnie worried. Let’s say Gracie and I join up in some fashion. Where’s that leave Iris? How are we going to work that one? And Iris was wondering, too. Against her better judgment, she had brought her fantasies to the ultimate conclusion (she’d never really had a fantasy before, so how did they expect her to control it?). Suppose I wind up with Louis, was the way hers went. Suppose, even, we get married. What about Arnie? I can’t just leave him, and I know he’d never move in with us.
Arnie swallowed his last pancake and announced that it had been the best breakfast he’d had in years. Iris agreed. They pushed their chairs back and nodded and smiled, because although each was worried about the other’s prospects, they were still very excited about their own. Iris got up to do the dishes, and Arnie jumped to his feet to help. She insisted he sit down to his paper, and he insisted he take a turn at the sink.
“Since when do you do dishes?”
“Since right now, girl. What the hell, you deserve a break.”
After a minute or two of spirited wrangling, they agreed that Arnie would do Iris’s breakfast dishes and she would do his. Just before ten o’clock, when their smiles began to poop out on them, Iris disappeared to her room, leaving Arnie to his newspaper. She hummed to herself as she put a little extra talcum under her armpits, changed her dress, and fussed with her hair. There wasn’t a whole lot she could do with her hair, which was thin and straight, except wear a colorful ribbon to divert attention. Or would that attract attention? She chewed her lip and stared at herself in the mirror. Then she took a deep breath and went downstairs to the living room.
“Look at you,” Arnie said, peering over his paper.
Iris shifted. “Thought I’d go for a stroll,” she said.
“Ain’t you working evening shift?” said Atlas.
“Took a vacation day.”
“A vaca—since when have you ever taken a vacation day? I thought you didn’t believe in vacation.”
“People change, Arnie,” Iris said softly.
Arnie’s mouth dropped open. Change? Miss Oatmeal 1992 change? But there she was, standing before him, blueberry pancakes in her belly, a purple ribbon in her hair, taking a vacation day and going for a stroll. Changed.
“Well,” he said. “Yeah, maybe. I guess they do.” He nodded at her and she nodded back. They did that for a minute. Arnie looked at the front door, then at Iris. “So, strolling any place in particular?”
Iris reddened. She fumbled with her pocketbook.
Arnie got up from his chair and moved past her to the door. He held it open for her, touching her arm lightly as she slowly went by him and out into the light of the spring day. He didn’t know where she was going, only that she was going, her journey begun. As he stood in the open doorway, he thought he could hear the birds chirping in the branches of the maples. He hadn’t heard a bird chirp in ten years. Christ, he could barely make out what Iris shouted at him half the time. He was changing too, getting younger, his parts were mending and knitting themselves, and in his excitement he looked down at his hook, almost expecting to see his hand again, the resurrected fingers pink and soft as babies.
Iris’s eyes were everywhere, taking in a world she’d barely seen before. It was his world, Louis’s, or at least something like it, rich and abundant, sharply focused. She stopped several times to touch a flower, a leaf, and even the brown earth, warm and redolent. She didn’t think she was going to be able to survive the azaleas. Where did those colors come from? She knew, of course: From the man in the window.
And so she walked the streets of Waverly, immersed in the endless possibilities of a May morning. She walked, the world filling her, completing her. When at last she turned onto his street, she knew she was ready for him.
What she was not ready for was the sight of Kitty’s hous
e, the charred roof and window frame jolting her from her reverie. Her eyes cut to Louis’s house next door. Then relief: Whatever had occurred in the night had caused no damage beyond itself. Iris touched a hand to her chest and involuntarily said his name. “Louis.” What must it have been like for him to have a fire so near? She hurried up the walk.
The front door began to open, and Iris said his name again. “Louis?”
It was Gracie who appeared, her face white, her eyes bleary and sad. She blinked in the sunlight. “I know you,” she said.
“Yes,” said Iris.
“His nurse.”
“I’ve come to see him. Is he all right?”
Gracie turned her eyes toward Kitty’s house, then away again. She clutched the porch railing. Iris moved up the steps to her. “Tell me,” she said, holding Gracie’s arm. “Tell me what happened.”
Gracie leaned against the comforting solidity of her, and told the nurse what had to be said.
Iris listened, her eyes moving from Kitty’s blackened window to the shaded window above her, where no one stood. A light breeze carried the fiery odor from Kitty’s house, and Iris understood that even though the flames had not touched him, Louis had been burned.
When Gracie finished, Iris said in her strongest nurse’s voice, the voice she used to infuse hope in a patient’s family, “I’m going in to see him now, Mrs. Malone.”
Gracie said nothing, but moved aside to let her pass. Iris stepped once again into the dark house, uncertain that she could rescue this man from the same disaster twice.
Louis lay perfectly still, stretched out on his bed, his hands folded across his stomach. His breathing was so shallow his chest didn’t rise, at least not discernibly; but he was moving air because his purple scarf puffed up from his mouth at rhythmic intervals. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t in the room. He was far away; he had placed himself on a green hillside at the farm, roaming the grass in search of strawberries. His scarf hung loosely around his neck, his hat shaded his exposed skin from the warm sun. The wind picked up, and it was cool on his face, and the strawberries were tart and sweet, and the tall dry grass brushed lightly against the sides of his legs as he walked along.