I watch my boys on their bikes outside my new city house, and I can feel my insides clenching up while I wait for the inevitable. In my imagination they are always inches away from falling and sliding along the pavement on their faces, moments from being hit by a car. Away from their bicycles they’re just waiting to fall from trees and strike that last fateful limb on the way down.
Other parents simply ask their kids if their injuries hurt. I find myself asking peculiar, probing, offhand questions, trying to find out if there are symptoms of serious back injuries or ruptured spleens or intracranial bleeding. My boys fall off something and have to spend the next few hours following my fingers with their eyes on command, have to put up with being asked hours later if they feel dizzy or nauseous while I hunt down the signs of the delicate tissue rips that are at the root of concussions.
If I hear a screech of tires outside, I imagine that one of them has been hit—and the problem is that I know exactly what kind of injuries to expect, and I know what those injuries will look like. And I start planning: what to do, how to start. If they have a tooth knocked out, drop it in a glass of cold milk and head for the hospital. If they lose a finger, find it and pack it on ice and hope the vascular surgeon’s on call.
And you die a little bit more every single time you plan for something to happen to one of your children. I don’t know how doctors and nurses do it, especially if they work in children’s hospitals.
Leaving the fire department was supposed to be a relief. I planned every word I would say, planned to tell them at the monthly meeting in the same way I’d joined up, except I’d say that with a new job as a daily newspaper’s managing editor I just had to have more time for work. Instead, I dropped my gear in its red hockey bag on the floor of the upstairs meeting room and managed a handful of words from the speech I’d prepared in my head—“I’ve got a new job and a new truck and . . .”—before rushing out the door, crying and furious.
I was angry, because I felt as though I was letting the other firefighters down. Part of me knew I had to leave, but a lot of me wanted to stay. I couldn’t imagine the idea of not having a pager with me, couldn’t imagine not being on the balls of my feet all the time, waiting for a call. Angry because I still felt I was the best person to answer the calls, because I was trained and ready and alert and sharp.
Now I’m not so sure I was any of those things, except trained.
The simple, easy thing would be to blame everything on firefighting— to claim that it dynamited my life, that it wrecked my marriage, that it split my family, that I gave myself to firefighting and to the idea of helping other people and that I lost myself in the process. But it’s nowhere near that simple. In its own way, that would be the same as saying I went into burning basements because I was brave and big and strong, when I was none of those. Firefighting was a part of it, a piece of the whole, but the fractures were just me—broken, busted, and stuck living with nightmares and ghosts.
Months later, I heard that my crew had responded to a fire call and found one of our own firefighters in his living room with a steak knife stuck in his chest. The responding firefighters couldn’t convince the paramedics that the man had a serious injury, and he slipped into unconsciousness before the ambulance crew would put the siren on and head for the hospital. When he was finally conscious again, he told the police he did it himself. He didn’t explain why—what was going on or what he was trying to do—to anyone.
When I heard about it, it stopped me cold. I knew the guy well. I can picture his squat little house, his pickup truck and his facial expressions, and I could imagine both the knife and him sitting there in the chair, shirt soaked with blood.
The firefighter who told me about it said that, when they looked, the knife was buried right up to the handle.
When I got home after resigning, I turned off the fire department radio for the first time in six non-stop years on call. But I didn’t feel any relief. I just felt alone.
My hair is on fire.
Again.
I have no doubt that I have thousands of individual hairs on my head, because it seems like each one is burning down separately, each one a painful little wick ending at a nerve. My hands look like soft wax, penumbraed in blue flame. When I hold them up in front of my face, there isn’t any reason to look for blisters, because any blisters would be bursting as quickly as they formed.
I’m crawling slowly forward, and I’m exhausted. It seems to take every scrap of energy I have to move, and there’s someone moaning out in front of me, someone I can’t see and maybe, I think, maybe it’s me. I’m just going to put my head down now, because there’s nothing left to do. The wallpaper is all down, the wallboard is falling apart, and the studs are burning in a geometric pattern no one has seen since the carpenters left and the Gyproc guys came through. It’s like a big burning crossword, where none of the clues spell anything good. I’m supposed to keep moving, but I can’t.
I wake up from the dream covered in sweat, moaning, and the first thing I do is to put my hands up in front of my face in the dark of the room to see if they are intact, because I can still feel them burning.
TWENTY-NINE
If I really thought I was getting away from anything, I was mistaken. I kept putting one foot in front of the other, with every step watching the ground crumble away.
One day I walked down a street in St. John’s and saw the aftereffects of a fire I’d had nothing to do with fighting, a fire in a small blue row house, and the image conjured up ghosts from my own life.
Just passing the house, I knew it had been a small fire. I’ve got enough experience to tell that easily from the outside. Maybe electrical, maybe not. The porch light was still on, bright over the front door, so maybe the electrical panel was intact. Maybe it was a fire in the basement. It didn’t look like something that started on the stove.
The people who lived there were gone, parts of their lives stuffed in the row of garbage bags that stood outside the front door, fat, dark-green soldiers oblivious to their assignments.
The snow on the steps was untouched. There was a shred of a moon, a thin pale curve, up behind the battered clouds. The air hung still; a small winter storm had blown through, but the night was lying exhausted, too tired even to breathe. The snow covered everything like stucco, hard, cold and deliberate.
There was one shirt hanging on the clothesline behind the house, and it was crusted with wet snow that had frozen. A plaid shirt, maybe felt, stiff in the breeze so that it waved all at once, one single swinging panel.
Two days earlier, there had been firefighters on the sidewalk and a police car, lights flashing, next to the curb. The firefighters were businesslike and offhand as they rolled up wet yellow hose, as if they had done it all a million times before. I could see that they hadn’t had to cut through the roof to vent, that they hadn’t even had to break the upstairs windows to let the heat out.
A day before that and there would have been nothing at all, not even the merest of hints of what was to come, no foreshadowing whatsoever.
It was a small blue semi-detached house in downtown St. John’s, renovated a handful of months before the fire, and I had imagined that a couple had moved in there. There was something about the size of it, about the way things were inside: glass and plants, and none of the defensive decoration that comes when you have to deal with small, eager hands that batter around and break things.
Afterwards, the windows were matte black, sealed from the inside with the smoke. There was a spider fern in a downstairs window, choking with soot, a few stray fronds up against the glass.
I know about couples. I know how hopeful they can be. I know about secret, knowing smiles when they run into each other coming around corners. I can imagine them in there, painting the rooms before they moved in, talking about where everything would go. Picking the colours, buying the paint, sharing the heat of the tub while picking off the freckles of paint. They hadn’t been there that long, but it was a house that just
screamed out that the two people who lived there were painfully in love—it was stuffed with that, so full you could almost smell it, walking by on the street.
I remember fixing up a house when there were just two of us. Wallpapering first. One cutting and soaking the paper, the other hanging the sticky sheets and rubbing the bubbles out from underneath with the squeegee and then the sponge. Painting the thin trim around the windows, getting paint on my hands and on the glass. Empty rooms, without furniture, but full of the easy comfort of belonging.
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.
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