A Fireproof Home for the Bride

by Amy Scheibe

  “Not like that,” Birdie said. “Like an animal in pain.”

  The door opened into Emmy’s side and she stumbled slightly before turning to see her mother in the frame.

  “What are you girls doing?” Karin whispered as she crossed to Birdie’s bedside and placed the back of her hand against the girl’s forehead.

  “I have to go,” Emmy said, hoping that Karin had sent Ambrose away. “But I’ll be back soon.”

  A look of calculation stacked the lines at Karin’s brow, as though she were thinking her way through the situation for the best way forward. “Maybe you should wait here until he leaves.”

  “Why would I do that?” Emmy asked. “I’m not afraid of Ambrose.”

  “He won’t like that you’re here,” Birdie said. Her voice sounded smaller.

  “I can handle him.” Emmy crossed to the door, turned back. “Besides, my car is here.”

  Karin studied Emmy’s face. “Then please tell Ambrose I’ll be right down,” she said, settling Birdie into the bed and tucking the sheet along the mattress. “You can handle yourself.”

  Emmy could neither fully read the subtext of her mother’s words, nor did she consider them longer than was necessary to get down the stairs and into the kitchen in order to retrieve her coat. Ambrose stood next to the stove, a man so transformed by great ideas that he looked as if he had grown an inch. The hair lifted on Emmy’s arms, but she wasn’t afraid of his polished aspect, nor of what he might say to her. Their childhood friendship nagged at her core even as she brushed its innocence behind her impatiently. Too much had happened, too much still lay ahead.

  “Emmaline,” he said, the light behind his eyes sparking on her name. “Your mother said you were here.” He seemed to have more hair, and his suit had the cut and flair of cloth that had been tailored.

  “I was just leaving,” she said, putting down the satchel and buttoning her coat. “Birdie’s got a fever and can’t come down.”

  Ambrose lifted his gaze from Emmy’s face to just above the crown of her head. It seemed to her that there was relief, not disappointment, there.

  “I’ll walk you to your car,” he said, and drew on his long camel hair overcoat. The imperious cocoon of it unnerved Emmy more than the ostentatious suit. She could only imagine what all of Mr. Davidson’s polishing had done to Ambrose’s interior, if this is how he looked on the outside, though the way he had stuffed objects in the pockets ruined the effect just enough for the awkward man he really was to show through.

  Emmy slung the bag on her shoulder and passed through the kitchen door. She sensed Ambrose close behind her, a feeling that was familiar, if unnerving. He follows you. Birdie’s words echoed. Everywhere. Emmy gathered the collar of her coat more tightly around her neck and walked briskly through the thickly accumulated damp snow, shocked by how much had fallen in the brief time she’d been at the farm. No matter how many years she had lived in this place, the rapid onslaught of winter caught her unprepared every November. As she approached the Crestliner, something about it seemed amiss in the yellow haze of the pole lamp: The nose pointed slightly down and to the left. She kicked the sticky snow away from the tire, unnerved to see that it was flat.

  “I’ll change that for you,” Ambrose said. His face was shadowed, but his voice kind.

  “This is the last thing I need,” Emmy said as she went to the back of the car and popped open the trunk, causing all the snow that was stacked on it to dump soddenly onto the spare. “I don’t even know if there’s air in this one,” she said, hefting it on her own and bouncing it to the ground. It too was flat. Ambrose took it from her and put it back in the trunk, closing the lid.

  “I’ll give you a ride,” he said. “I’m headed to town.”

  Emmy stepped a foot away. “It’s all right,” she said. “Mother can run me in after dinner.”

  Ambrose looked up at the second floor of the house. “She should stay with Birdie, in case.”

  At the mention of her sister’s name, Emmy’s temper rose, and she broke the fragile shell that had held back her hostility toward Ambrose, toward them all. “What did you do to her?” she snapped at him. “Why is she so scared?”

  “It’s been hard,” he said, tipping his head down in a way that caused the snow that had already collected on the brim of his hat to fall back into a sweep of wind. “I’ve tried.”

  “Not hard enough.” Emmy started toward the house.

  “Wait,” he said loudly. “Let me give you a ride, please. I can explain.”

  She didn’t turn. “I’d rather not.”

  “Don’t you trust me?” he asked, a boyish note of disappointment in his voice. “Have you really gone that far away from us all?”

  Emmy thought about the cards in her bag. Whatever they might hold, her instincts told her she needed to get back to the office quickly and show them to Jim. It wasn’t a matter of trusting Ambrose but of expedience. She balanced her weight between one foot and the other, an aerialist with no wire, not even a net. She pivoted toward his truck on her heel, confident that stepping up into the cab held no more portent than any other vehicle in the yard. He slid behind the wheel and engaged the engine, his costume suddenly at odds with everything else. Only the round segment of his face that glowed in the faint light of the dashboard struck Emmy as familiar, and even that changed as he put the truck into gear and drove slowly out of the yard. Emmy’s nerves inexplicably started firing with fright, her right hand clutching at the door handle in an attempt to remain calm. The acrid familiarity of the interior sparked images that flashed like a magician’s card trick through her mind, even as she refused to take in the sleight of hand of any of them. The truck bumped up onto the county road and Emmy bit her tongue—no blood, just pain.

  “Do you have a cigarette?” she asked in order to break the maddening spell his silence had thrust her into.

  “I gave it up,” he said proudly. “The council stands against any sort of vice.”

  Emmy moved her sore tongue against the offending tooth, thankful for the distraction of the pain. She gazed into the swirl of snow that shot at the windshield, and contemplated the council’s definition of vice. From the little she knew, it was obvious to her that hypocrisy was not on the list.

  “It’s looking pretty good for me next week,” Ambrose continued. “The election.”

  “Township board?” she prodded. His smile grew wider in the scant light.

  “Curtis says it’s the first step toward mayor. I know there are plenty of steps in between … and I’m willing to make them in order to serve my country.” He absently fidgeted with the radio, but finding only static, he turned it off completely and tapped out a rhythm of his own on the steering wheel. “It’s everything we dreamed of, Emmy.”

  “It is?” she asked, her pulse doubling.

  “Remember?” He glanced at her. “At the basketball game. You said you’d like to live in town, have a big house. Well, if all goes right, we’ll have that before you know it.”

  Emmy pursed her lips and sipped in a thin stream of air. We’ll. “Yes,” she said. “I remember.”

  “It’s not too late for us,” he said, turning the truck onto the highway toward Moorhead. “You don’t know everything about Bobby Doyle, but once you do, you’ll see that we’re meant to be.”

  “You’re married to my sister,” she said quietly, but with enough calculated tenderness to placate a child on the verge of a tantrum.

  He slowed the truck and turned onto a side road. Emmy’s hopes dropped with the confirmation of his instability. She settled her bag on the seat between them and laid a gloved hand on his arm as a sign of peace. “I need to go to work,” she said. “Now. At The Fargo Forum.”

  “I know where you work,” he said, a slightly lower note in his voice as he shrugged off her touch. “And I’ll get you there, in time.”

  Emmy’s temper rapidly shot above her fear. “You’ll get me there now,” she said as sternly as she could manage.

 
“Hold on, and hear me out.” He raised a flat hand up into the space between them. “There are a few things you need to understand. One, I’m not the father of that child. John Hansen took advantage of Birdie, and I did what was right to protect your family by marrying her. If I hadn’t, they would have lost the farm to us and been destitute.”

  Emmy leaned forward, close to the dashboard, and tried to make out any landmark along the gravel road. Not once in all the years that she had known her sister had Birdie ever even shaded a truth. A series of calculations began to work their way through Emmy’s head so swiftly that they instantly added up to one clear thought: She needed to get out of the truck, and soon.

  “If you turn left up here, you can drop me off at my aunt’s,” she said, unable to stop the quaver in her voice. “She’s expecting me for dinner.”

  “Two,” Ambrose continued without heed. “You’ve strayed far enough for long enough. I know that none of this would have ever happened if I hadn’t given in to the Devil’s temptation and drank his poison. But I’ve made my amends by taking care of your sister, and now I can’t let you fall any deeper into his clutches due to my sins.” He slowed the truck at a stop sign and turned left. Emmy bit at a ragged thumbnail, restraining herself from saying anything that would turn them away from the lights of Moorhead, which she could barely make out through the driving snow. If they could just get into the town limits, she could slip out of the vehicle the first time he stopped, run to the nearest lit house.

  Ambrose held the face of his watch at an angle to the speedometer’s light. Whatever he saw caused him to make the truck go faster, grinding the engine into fourth gear. “I’m late,” he said. “You’ll have to come with me.”

  “Where are you going?” she asked without challenge, changing her tactics. If she could get her shaking under control enough to play into his fantasy of having a chance to save her, perhaps he’d take her home.

  “To do His work,” Ambrose said. “The council is a beacon of truth, light, and liberty. We must stop the evil knocking at our doors, in the misshapen form of papists and perverts, Semites and communists. I need to save you, Emmy, from all of them.”

  A numbing cold crept up from Emmy’s toes even though the heat blowing in the cab had become stifling. The truck slowed but didn’t stop as they entered the Moorhead city limits, and Emmy realized they were on Twelfth Avenue, headed for the bridge.

  “The council has grown with God’s careful tending,” Ambrose said, a methodical surety fueling his speech, as though he were standing at a pulpit. “We’ve even started our own church, adhering strictly to the Good Book. With Curtis’s guidance I’ve been preaching, just like Pastor Erickson always said I should. I’ve found my voice, Emmy. People listen to me, they follow me. Don’t you see, they’ll understand when I let Birdie free because she’s sinned against us and God. You and I can stand together against the whores and blasphemers. The road to Heaven is paved with forgiveness. Walk with me down that road, and the Kingdom will be ours.”

  Emmy lowered the window slightly to let in enough air to combat her nausea. He’s gone mad, she thought. She was desperate to get away, but the truck was still moving too fast. She moved her hand from the window crank and back to the door handle. She knew the route well from her daily trip to work, knew that once they crossed the river they would be at Elm Street, a few blocks from the house Mr. Doyle was building for her and Bobby. Where Bobby was right now, polishing the banisters of their abandoned future. The thought of her second failed engagement sapped at what remained of her patience. Emmy focused on a plan: She would throw open the door at Elm and take the back alleys to Plum Circle. There she would find Bobby and ask him to take her to The Fargo Forum. Two more blocks to the bridge, she counted, as Ambrose filled the air with increasingly unhinged words. He clutched her arm.

  “I should have never let you go, it was my mistake alone,” he said, one block from the bridge. “You can’t keep running away. You’ll see. I’ll take care of your mother and Birdie, we’ll give them the farm. It can all work out if you just trust in God’s plan.”

  The front tire bumped up onto the Moorhead edge of the bridge, and Emmy whistled low as they reached the center, her fondness for Jim’s strange habit lending her courage. She looked out across the surface of the river and briefly thought how cold it must be in that soupy ice-flecked pool. Moving her body slowly forward so as to block Ambrose’s view of her grip on the door handle, she steadied her breath and counted down the seconds as they approached the red sign.

  Ambrose released her arm in order to downshift into a carefully glided full stop, and as he looked to the left for any oncoming cars, she threw open the door and bolted from the truck, finding her footing sure and swift. She cut through the yard on the corner and skirted around to the alley through a stand of poplars. The snow was unplowed here, as she had hoped, and thick enough to keep a vehicle from gaining easy purchase along the narrow utility road. As she passed by the backs of houses, their warmly lit interiors beckoned.

  By the end of the second block, she stopped and listened for the truck’s engine, suddenly realizing that if he had been following her for months, then he would have figured out where she was headed. She needed to rethink her plan, find a phone, call Jim. The satchel! She’d left it in the truck. Thunder sounded off in the near distance, something she had heard only once before during a blizzard. She swiveled her head, trying to decide which house to approach, and whether it was less crazy to knock on a kitchen door than a front door, and what words would she use to explain her dilemma?

  Pressing forward another block, Emmy thought she could hear muffled footsteps approaching from behind, and she turned to see only the two tracks made by her own boots. The snow-fogged air crackled in her ears as she stood there, frozen by the emergence of a new, more frightening sound: a cacophony of sirens began to wail, seemingly from all around, and moving toward her specifically.

  The white night sky was newly rosy to the northeast, lit by the swirling lights that had converged no more than two blocks beyond. Emmy broke into a clumsy run in that direction, led as much by the sirens as the pull to see what new disaster lay ahead. There, at the intersection of Fifteenth Street and Plum Circle, Emmy watched in horror as the flames shot through the collapsed roof of the concrete house and high into the snow-speckled sky. She moved closer slowly, stunned.

  “There’s another one in here!” a fireman shouted as he carried a limp body over his shoulder toward an ambulance.

  Emmy felt everything around her slow to a crawl as she recognized Pete’s lanky brown hair. She tried to run in his direction but couldn’t move when she realized he wasn’t wearing a shirt. Why was he there, and not Bobby? She ran ten steps closer and saw another fireman carrying Bobby from the house, limp. Greater confusion gripped her and she spun around, fleeing in no direction other than away.

  People from the neighborhood had begun to gather: a woman in a man’s coat hastily thrown over her housedress, a rabble of young boys, eyes agleam with the thrill of explosions and fire, a handful of men looking as though they wanted to help but didn’t know how. Emmy wove past them, her breath jagged and raw in the cold wind. Clearing the main cluster of gawkers, she stopped when she saw three men standing at the curb, effectively blocking her way. Ambrose ran up from behind them and stood tall in the center, next to the much shorter Curtis Davidson. To Ambrose’s right, Frank Halsey stood, a malicious glow lighting his pointed face. Emmy bunched her fists and sprang forward, a pain suddenly shooting through her temples. She doubled over, bracing her head with one hand as she fell to her knees.

  “That’s not necessary,” Mr. Davidson said to Frank. “Put her in the car.”

  “I’ve got her,” Ambrose said, and Emmy could tell by his expression that he hadn’t thought things through enough to know how to handle this turn of events. He wrapped an arm around her and whispered, “It’ll be okay, just stay quiet.”

  “I thought you said the house would be empty,” Mr.
Davidson snarled at Ambrose as they passed, “This ruins everything.”

  “It should have been,” Ambrose replied. All of his earlier hubris was gone—subservient groveling had taken its place. He bundled Emmy into the backseat of the car, moving her across the leather bench to make room for Mr. Davidson on his other side. She reached for the door handle; Ambrose stopped her. “Don’t,” he whispered. “Please.”

  “I’ve misplaced my faith,” Mr. Davidson said as he settled into the car and slammed the door.

  “I keep telling you he’s weak.” Frank smirked as he started the car.

  “Shut up and drive,” Mr. Davidson said.

  Emmy panicked as the car pulled away from the curb, and responded to her fear by taking in every detail she possibly could—if she was to escape, she would need to remember what had happened. Jim’s voice from the phone echoed in her ear: Kidnapped his secretary. I don’t want you anywhere near the council. As the car made a U-turn in the middle of Plum Circle, Emmy caught sight of a large sign that stood proudly in front of the burning house, proclaiming ROBERTSON DEVELOPERS as its builder. “Low-income housing,” she murmured, following the clumsy logic of her thoughts past the ambitious plans for Golden Ridge on Mr. Doyle’s desk, the rally held by Mr. Davidson’s mayoral candidate, the evidence in John Hansen’s murder pointing toward the wrong man—a Mexican.

  “Look at that baby burn!” Frank exclaimed. “That’ll show ’em.”

  Mr. Davidson grunted, but Emmy could see on his face that he was proud of the handiwork. “Take the other bridge!” he yelled. “This road is too slow.”

  “What happened to John?” Emmy asked directly into Ambrose’s ear, hoping Mr. Davidson was too busy directing Frank to hear her. The snow slowed their progress to a pace unsatisfactory to him, but for Emmy, it was time she needed to recover from her shock.

  Ambrose pressed his lips into a hard, small line and minutely shook his head. Something about the gesture told Emmy that Ambrose had been there, possibly held the gun himself. “Birdie?” She said the name so softly that only the harder sounds of it were audible. Ambrose winced.