by Marge Piercy
“Do you have your keys?”
“No! They’re upstairs!”
“I’ll take her. You go next door, wake Annette. Please! Call the fire department.” Daria slid in and started the car. “And call Torte again. If you keep calling him, he’ll come.” Daria started to back out.
“Wait! The garage doors.” Sandra María ran to open them and Daria gunned the Rabbit backwards, turned with a screech in the road and floored it downhill. As she roared off, she had an afterimage of Sandra María standing just inside the garage staring after the car with tears rolling down her face, still coughing, and then turning to trot in her flannel nightdress across the lawn toward Annette’s house.
The cats stayed crouched in the backseat. Ali was washing Sheba. But Mariela lay limp as a dummy. She could not tell in the rearview mirror if Mariela was still breathing. Oh, please, she begged, please, please don’t let her die. Please. “We’ll be there soon, I promise, soon!” She muttered in her raw scraped voice and ran a red light, gunning the car hard.
She carried Mariela into the emergency entrance at Symmes. The first thing they did, of course, was shove papers at her. She realized she had no idea what kind of health insurance Sandra María carried and standing there with the unconscious Mariela in her arms she made an instant decision. “Daria Walker, W, A, L, K, E, R. Blue Cross, Blue Shield. This is my daughter Teresa.”
They wheeled Mariela away, leaving Daria to complete the forms. She did and waited, waited, waited. She had not heard anything, pacing in the anteroom in her nightgown and coat, when Sandra María ran in. She was wearing a dress of Annette’s two sizes too big on her and surprisingly, her own maroon wool coat.
“She’s in there.” Daria pointed. As she did she felt the burn on her hand for the first time. She stared at her flesh and the pain began to register. “I wonder if there’s ice around. A soft drink machine?”
“What did they say?”
“Smoke inhalation. Carbon monoxide poisoning.”
Daria found a machine and put ice on her hand. Then they sat side by side in the waiting room. A man was asleep in a chair. A little boy was brought in with a bad asthma attack and a teenager was carried in unconscious. “Did the firemen come?” Daria asked. They held hands, her good right hand in Sandra María’s cold left.
“About ten minutes … Annette and her husband ran over to the house and unlocked the front door while we were waiting for the firemen to come. They took the small Oriental out of the front hall and that china umbrella stand and all the coats. So if we got nothing else, we have umbrellas and coats.”
Daria laughed, sharply. “I can’t believe it yet. I can’t!” She looked at the wall clock. It was just short of three A.M. “Sandra María, did you happen to get out of bed, maybe half an hour before the fire? Maybe an hour at the most?”
“Me? No.” Sandra María was still coughing. Her eyes were bloodshot and swollen, her face flushed. “Ángel left about ten. I studied maybe another forty-five minutes. Then I took a hot bath and went to bed. I’d heard you come in. I fell asleep right away and I slept straight through till you came in and woke me.… What woke you?”
“Ali! Bless him. He howled till I got up. I was going to hit him, Sandra María, I was so angry I was going to hit him.… Torte! Did you find Torte?”
Sandra María squeezed her hand. “We couldn’t get to him and he wouldn’t come. We told the firemen about him. Maybe they got him. Or maybe he even ran out the door and we didn’t see. Let’s hope so. Annette drove me over here as soon as the fire trucks came. Then she went back.”
The nurse swished into the waiting room. “Mrs. Walker? Your daughter Teresa’s conscious now. We’re keeping her on the respirator a while longer. But as soon as she’s off, you can come in and see her.”
Sandra María raised her eyebrows at the name, but catching Daria’s look, said nothing. The nurse stared hard at Sandra María till Daria thought her lie was blown, but what the nurse asked was, “Were you exposed to the smoke? I think you’d better come along. I want the doctor to see if he doesn’t think with that high color you’ve had a dose of carbon monoxide too.”
“But I didn’t pass out—”
“I want the doctor to take a look.”
“Sandra María, take this for cab fare. I’m going back, since she’s awake.… Do you have medical insurance?”
“Through the university.”
“Then you can disentangle my little fib. I thought it would expedite treatment.”
Sandra María squeezed her hand. “Go! I’ll straighten it out.”
As she approached her Rabbit, the cats stared at her through the side window, two sets of yellow eyes round and wary. They must think she had gone crazy. She lured them to the far side of the car so that she could then sprint back around, unlock the driver’s side and climb in. Fending them off, she drove slowly back, keeping them from sticking their little heads through the steering wheel or squeezing under her foot as she hit the brakes.
Her left hand was lit up now with pain. Her head ached. Her throat was scraped raw. Her eyes kept watering. She had a deep racking cough. Somewhere she had acquired a set of bruises along her right side. She had made it from the burning house to Symmes Hospital in less than ten minutes. Driving back took twenty-five minutes. She dreaded what she would find. The fire engines were still blocking her street. Great coils of hose fed from the fire hydrant up the block into the front door and through a broken living-room window. Lights were on in both her neighbors’ houses and across the street, scattered lights on the rest of the block at … she glanced at her watch and found she wasn’t wearing it. Of course. It was in the fire too. The clock in the Rabbit read ten to four.
She sat on in her car, staring at the wreckage of her home. She saw no flames, but in the glare from the streetlight she watched a fireman up on the roof hacking holes in it. She could still see smoke drifting out, casually, lazily. Obviously they had the fire under control. They sloshed about as if dog tired. However, she had little hope for her home. She had seen the flames in the stairwell, licking up the walls. Its heart must be gutted.
One hundred forty years it had stood, until tonight. Sandra María had not been walking around when Daria had heard someone in the hall. Ángel had long since gone home. Mariela was sound asleep. No, she had heard a substantial tread. Furthermore, Annette had had to unlock the front door. She herself had unlocked the door between kitchen and garage. Someone had entered the house without breaking in, and when they had left, they had tidily locked up.
She shut off the engine. The smoke in the hall had been pungent and black. Oily smoke. Whoever had set the fire had a key. It had not been Annette’s, certainly not Tracy’s, unlikely to be Peggy’s. The other keys to the house were in the hands of Robin and Ross. Ross had not mailed the keys to her or given them to Dorothy, as promised. She knew whose key had been used.
A few slow tears welled from her sore eyes, rolled down her cheeks and dried. She felt as if the core had been carved out of her, like the house. She felt light as ashes and as grey. Shaken. Broken perhaps. No. She could find by digging in the ashes of her fatigue some bone still of strength. That had certainly been one way of getting his money out of the house. Had he cared if she died? Had he hoped she would die? An added benefit? What the person—Lou?—had been doing in the upper hall when she had heard his tread was clear now: he had been disconnecting the smoke alarm there. Without Ali, she would never have wakened at all. She scooped him up to hold him against her face, his muscular springy warm flank. He purred for her loudly, nervously. Three die in Lexington fire. The animal lover had saved some of the best antiques but had not bothered to remove Torte.
It was not only that she felt betrayed. It was not only that she felt attacked in the heart of her new life. It was not only that he had taken from her the home she loved, not only that he wanted to annihilate her, to burn her alive like a witch. She felt all those pains, arrows stuck into the Saint Sebastian she remembered staring at as a
child on holy days in church. But the pike lodged in her chest between her scalded lungs was that in the person of Ross whom she had loved she had encountered evil.
Often enough in her life she had been angry, although for years she had learned to dampen that anger. On occasion she thought she had even hated. She had hated one teacher of Tracy’s who had picked on her daughter, held her up to ridicule for her naive enthusiasms. Daria had always been a better lover than a hater, but she was learning.
Evil had been something abstract; the threat of rape to Tracy when she came home alone in the evening, that long walk from the bus. The threat of total annihilation in nuclear war. That sense of outrage she could dimly recall against a war that had gone on and on, burning children and simple people in their own land; burning their livestock, their rice fields, their small homes, their sweet flesh and slim bodies honed by endless hard work and hunger. Evil was something that the powerful did someplace else—in Asia, in Central America—or acts that faceless rabid criminals rose from the depths to wreak randomly.
But to find evil in the man she had lived with half her life stunned her to a weariness she found paralyzing. She felt not so much numb as struck senseless, hunched, clenched around a hollow like a great cave of the winds inside that must be filled with a knowledge she could not yet endure.
23
Daria stood shivering in the dark street, waiting to speak to the fire captain. “Did you ever find my dog? A little terrier.”
“We didn’t see him. The other lady mentioned him too.”
“I believe this fire was set.”
He had a reaction she could not understand, till he took her firmly by the elbow and walked her a few steps away, out of earshot. “Lady, that kind of thing is hard to prove and you won’t collect on your insurance.”
“That has to be the least of my worries. It was aimed at me, and I’m scared. My estranged husband has a key to the house—”
“You have any family around here? You ought to go stay with them. When those old furnaces go in a frame house—”
“I heard someone in the hall upstairs about an hour before I woke to the fire. Could you look at the smoke detector there? I bet it’s disconnected or tampered with.”
“Lady, everything in that hall is long gone.… We got another call. If you really want, I’ll put in a report for you.”
“Who should I talk to?”
“Don’t worry about it. They’ll be in touch.”
Crazy he thought her, shivering in the street in her nightgown and coat. She watched the fire apparatus leave. Annette came out to meet her as she walked toward her ruined house. “Daria, oh, Daria, what a disaster! The flames were shooting out twenty feet. Are you all right?”
She nodded dumbly. All right? All wrong.
“Your sister-in-law said her little girl was unconscious?”
“She’s at the hospital, recovering.… Thanks for saving our coats.” Her mouth twisted up in an inane grimace.
“I wish we could have done more, but we didn’t dare go in. The fire was tremendous! You’re lucky to escape.” Annette trailed after her to the back of the house. “They said to stay out.”
“I’ll be careful.” Stay out of her own house? She turned on the flashlight she had taken from the Rabbit. “Where’s Torte? Is he with you?” She envied Annette being dressed, wearing shoes. She still had on her flimsy mules, soaked through from the water in the street.
“No …” Annette said. “I hope he’s not lost.”
The glass of the door that led from the terrace into the living room was broken, but she could see the lock was still on. Reaching carefully through the broken glass, she turned the catch. The beam of the flash played over smashed and overturned lamps, waterlogged and gutted upholstery, a charcoal ruin that must have been the draperies, all surrounding like spectators an immense hole chopped through to the basement. She retreated with a groan. Lost, all lost.
“He came and took most of the antiques. I can’t believe it!” she said with sudden passion. “His papers, his photography equipment. And the antiques he thought worth the most! He had a list!”
“What are you talking about?” Annette hovered on the terrace, peering at her.
She could not speak, rage closing her throat till she thought she would choke. The kitchen door that led into the yard was locked too. She opened it with her key. “Wait here. It might be dangerous. I don’t know how much of the floor’s left.”
She walked into her kitchen and before she thought about it, turned on the light switch. Nothing happened, of course. It was unnerving to creep around bearing a flashlight and playing its beam over the counters and cabinets, proceeding so cautiously into such a familiar room. As the fire had not reached the kitchen, it had a comforting semblance of order, although the floor was tracked with mud composed of charred material and water. The gas, she thought, I wonder if they disconnected the gas. Oddly enough they had not. The pilot lights were out but the stove functioned. She lit them with a match. It was ridiculous that the one intact object in her entire house should be the stove.
The air stank, almost unbreathable with the stench of charred wood, plaster, plastic, wool. The air itself seemed scorched. But perhaps only the living room was seriously damaged. She could picture the rooms as they had been in the light of day, could picture them so clearly that surely they must still exist. She turned back to the open door. “Annette, would you have any boxes? The food in the fridge. In the freezer. I might as well save it.”
“Of course.” Annette sounded oddly placating. “I must have some boxes in our garage. I’ll be right back. But be careful. You really shouldn’t be in there.”
The hall was a gaping hole. She could not reach her office. So much for her hopes. She stood on the verge of the blackened pit that had been the central stairwell and wept with rage and sorrow. She did not know how long she stood there but finally she shook herself. “Torte!” she called half-heartedly. She could not believe any living creature could be hiding in the ruins of the house. She called him twice more. Then she walked to the entrance to the dining room.
Her favorite room. The firemen had broken through the floor and the far wall. The trestle table had survived and her things in the near corner cupboard. The chandelier was smashed. Fragments lay scattered about the floor, making walking treacherous, particularly in slippers. She retreated, too sad to press further. This was his revenge on her: revenge for what? Failing to say, don’t bother sharing our accumulated property with me, I can live on rice crackers and water? The house had represented her: he had wanted to kill her and he had almost succeeded. He had killed the house.
Picking her way back across the kitchen, she began to climb the narrow steep back stairs down which she and Sandra María had fled. “Torte?” she called again. When she heard a sound she called his name again loudly, but it was only water dripping. Cautiously she climbed, testing each runner, playing the flash over the treads.
Tracy’s room was intact. Too bad it wasn’t still Daria’s office. The door to her bedroom stood open. Calling her dog, she crossed to the hall, but it was a blackened shaft down to the basement, dark and dank as a mine and dripping. She could not cross from her room to the far bedrooms. She turned back. The floor was puddled and the firemen had broken through the wall against the burning hall, knocking over a bureau. Her bed lay as she had left it, the sheet pulled off, the covers askew. On her vanity all the little bottles stood in their places under a new dusting of ash. Her robe lay on the floor marked with a big footprint.
She was chilled in her nightgown. Quickly she pulled underwear from her dresser and clothes from her closet, putting them on mostly by feel with the flashlight perched on the edge of the vanity. Perhaps she could dare to hope about the contents of her office, directly underneath the bedroom, as was the kitchen. The fiercest blaze seemed to have attacked the center of the house and the side where the living room was located downstairs and Sandra María and Mariela’s rooms lay above.
She wanted her everyday black shoes with the little heels. Kneeling with the flashlight she looked under her bed. They lay where she had kicked them. There too lay Torte, his head pushed into his paws. “Torte!” She grabbed at him. But he was dead.
She sat with her legs straight out, her back propped against the bed holding him across her lap and weeping again, quietly. His fur was matted with the water that had seeped under. He had deserved far better than to die alone, deserted, terrified. He must have been killed by the smoke. Why hadn’t he followed her? She should have been able to save him, she should have. She couldn’t grab all three animals. She had caught up the pregnant Sheba in a sheet—the easiest choice. Ali had followed her on his own. But somehow she should have been able to save Torte. She had betrayed him. Why hadn’t the firemen found him? But they had had an out of control fire to contend with. And she had Mariela to rush to the hospital. If Mariela had been conscious, if Sandra María had been able to drive a stick shift, if Torte had followed her when she called him, if she had held on to his collar when he snapped at her, if she had not burned her hand grabbing for him.… But Mariela had been unconscious and she had to run ahead to find her purse with the car keys in it.…
She heard Annette calling. Wrapping Torte’s body in the rug beside her bed, she carried him down, surprisingly heavy. She bore him out to Annette and laid him in a bundle on the grass. “My old dog,” she said, her voice shaking. “I’ll bury him when it’s light.… You have the boxes. Fine. I just remembered, there’s a cooler in the garage. Hold on.”
She talked Annette into unpacking the freezer into the cooler and the refrigerator into the boxes. She set up a battery-powered lantern from their camping days for Annette to see by, and took two candles from the kitchen drawer for herself, to supplement the flashlight.
“Be careful!” Annette warned.
“With the candles? Yes, I wouldn’t want to start a fire.” She went back to her bedroom, dragging her suitcase from the closet, and packed by candlelight what she would need for the next few days. Tracy’s off-season clothing stored in the closet that had been Ross’s looked damaged, but except for what was in the dresser that had fallen over into the puddle, her things smelled of smoke but were salvageable. The cash she had in the house was still in the top drawer of her vanity so she took that too. Then she closed her jewelry box, tucked that under one arm with the suitcase under the other and felt her way down the steps one at a time.