The Slippage: A Novel

by Ben Greenman

  William went back inside. “Blondie,” he said, louder this time. No claws scratched on door. No tags jingled on collar. He called Louisa but she still didn’t pick up. “Do you have the dog with you?” he said. “Call me.” That’s when he thought to go out in front and check on the gate, which he found slightly ajar, wide enough to fit his entire forearm.

  William started off down the street, whistling sharply for the dog. He knocked on neighbors’ doors, but two houses in a row were empty, and at the third Cassandra Kenner answered, wearing an extra-large men’s T-shirt and possibly nothing else. William asked after Blondie, received an invitation inside to call the neighbors, declined politely, and got out of there quick. He hopped into his car and looped through the neighborhood, up Albert and down Briar, up Pence and down Garth.

  On Elster Street a dog idled against the flat wall of a hedge, but when he got closer he saw that it was a dark brown shepherd at least a third heavier than Blondie. Hinton: nothing. Cedar: no dogs, but a pair of cats and a little girl presiding over them in what looked like an extremely important meeting. Then, on Fallows, he saw Blondie crouched beneath a tree, nosing in a patch of high grass. He pulled to the side of the road. “Hey,” he said. “Come here.” She barked but stayed where she was. William got out of the car. Blondie had clawed into the under-soil; ants fled over her paws. “They might think you’re their god,” William said. He tugged the god by the collar, pushed her into the back seat, and sped up Fallows to Kenmore, and then Kenmore to Harrow.

  When William pulled up to the house, he noticed that the deck was done. The finish had dried. It was beautiful, the color of dark beer. Wallace’s truck was gone, so he walked to the small office; the lien waiver was folded up inside an envelope and centered on the desk. He turned back around just in time to see Blondie leap from the car and sprint toward the edge of the lot, where the land was soft from recent rains. “Hey,” William said. “Come back here.” He sprinted after the dog. It felt good to run, and particularly good to be running after something. He caught Blondie, or she let herself be caught, and he led her back along the dry high grass that led up toward the hillock. When his phone rang, he reached for it with his free hand, which meant going across his body. His next step was wrong. He did not fall, but he stumbled, and Blondie tore free and went down into the thick bluish mud up to her hocks. “Goddamn it,” he said into the phone.

  “What?” Louisa said.

  “Wait,” he said. “Hold on.” He got the dog by the scruff and dragged her toward him.

  “I can’t really hear you.”

  “Where are you?” he said. “I’m out looking for you.”

  “For me? What about Blondie?”

  “I have her.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, you should come looking for me. Soon.”

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “William,” she said. He hoped this was not her answer. Then the connection went to pieces and he could hear only a few stray words, “me” and “why” and “get.”

  “Where are you?” he said again.

  “I’m at the coffee shop, on a bench outside. I’ll wait for you here.” Her voice slightly trembled.

  The dog was matted with mud and William had no time to wash her and he wasn’t about to let her back into his car like that. He led Blondie out to the doghouse behind the office, clipped the leash to the metal cleat, and wrapped it until it was short enough to keep her close to the crate. He found a dish in Wallace’s office, filled it with water from a bottle in the fridge, and set it beside her. “Good girl,” he said, hoping the dog would believe him. “Back as soon as I can.”

  He went around the back way to the car; from behind the deck, the frame slanted down from left to right. Blondie barked hoarsely, a glimpse of her head protruding above the edge of the desk.

  Louisa wasn’t at the coffee shop, though Gloria Fitch was. “No,” Gloria said. “I haven’t seen her. If I had, I would have asked her to stop me from beating that kid who made me the wrong drink.” She sipped it happily. “Hey,” she said. “Did you hear? Emma Wheeler went into labor.” William nodded and said he’d seen her and Stevie driving off to the hospital. “Can you imagine?” Gloria said. “When will people learn? A kid seems fun when you’re making it, but then . . .” She threw a hand up.

  William called Louisa. No answer. He drove slowly home through the hardening dark. She wasn’t there either. Inside he stood in front of the television, watching baseball. He made himself a sandwich and ate just half indifferently. He switched channels and caught a few muted minutes of the movie about the aging cowboy trying to connect with his daughter. He dozed off and woke and saw that two more hours had passed without any sign of Louisa, and then he really started to worry. When the home phone rang at eleven, he picked it up and said, “Where are you?” But it wasn’t Louisa. “Someone from the crew just called me from the lot,” Wallace said. “You’d better get over there now.” His tone had no give in it.

  Ennis, Gerrold, Oliva, Finster, Deacon: William was crossing roads so fast they began to blur together, and then he was racing down a long straightaway, and then he was swinging onto Harrow. What he saw in the distance put a fist around his heart. The house was burning.

  Men walked around the edge of the lot, keeping an almost respectful distance from the cauldron of orange and white that beat like a heart in the rib cage of the house. They were heavy in slick yellow, with enormous black stripes stretching across the middle of their uniforms. There were eight men on the perimeter, and two had hoses, and there were four more who stood back slightly from the burning frame, and there were two more even farther back pressing buttons on their walkie-talkies and speaking numbers. William looked around, at the ghost of the frame of the house, at the lumber charred and at points eaten fully through, and he was not willing to believe anything he saw until he saw Louisa sitting on the hood of a car across the lot. She was wrapped in a blanket but still shivering, and a fireman was on one side of her and a policeman was on the other, and there was a siren just behind her that gave off red light and then blue light, echoing the two men.

  The heart beating in the rib cage of the house slowed and everything else did, too. A man on William’s left said that for a few weeks there he thought he’d never see another fire, not after Lareaux was arrested, and that in some strange way he welcomed this one, though he felt bad for the poor sap whose house was coming down. The poor sap made his way to his wife. When he reached her she did not cry or even blink, just repeated his name as if casting a spell. “William,” she said. “William, William.” He brought his face close to hers, tried to smell the skin beneath the soot and smoke, failed. There were bandages across the tops of her thighs and some kind of foil pack cinched to one calf.

  The two men who’d been speaking numbers into walkie-talkies had set them down; now they were loading something into the bed of a pickup. It was a lump covered in canvas. William’s scalp pricked with fear, suddenly terrified that it was Louisa under the canvas, but Louisa was right in front of him. “Who is that?” William said, but the men couldn’t hear him, and so he ran for the pickup, shouting, or maybe he just thought he was shouting. “Wait,” he said, but the men loading the lump would not wait. The men bumped the gate of the truck and William saw a paw poking out from underneath the canvas. He turned back toward Louisa. A tear streaked her face in negative, a channel carved in the soot. William found another truck with the gate down and fell against it. Blood rushed through his head. He could not stand but he could not do anything else either. Policemen stretched tape across the front of the property. A small man in a suit spray-painted silver spots on the ground, describing a circle in three points. A rope lay like a snake in the middle of the circle, its tail indicating the blackened doghouse.

  Louisa spoke William’s name again. Years before, when they had worked together at the newspaper, William had interviewed a man who had been a hero in the Second World War. He was being devoured by dementia, and all he could do was
speak his late wife’s name, after which he buried his face in his hands. Louisa buried her face in her hands. The fireman helped her to her feet. The policeman helped her to his car. The pickup truck with the something in it drove away. An ember floated down from the burning house like an unused wish.

  For the first time in months, William could stand at the edge of the lot, facing away from the street, and see the entire sky, a gluttony of blue. He walked around the space where the house had almost been, just as the men in yellow with black stripes had done the night before. The left half of the deck was still intact; the right, where waterproofing had started, was gone, and a light rain pattered onto the smoldering lumber, sending up strands of steam. Wallace arrived soon after William and stood next to his truck, leaning on it, unwilling even to take a single step forward. “I used the space under the deck to store flammable materials,” he said helplessly. “It never occurred to me that it was anything other than safe.” He started explaining what he knew about builder’s risk insurance, and how as far as he knew it covered this kind of thing, and that project disasters were not as rare as he might think, and just when William was going to say he understood, Wallace gasped and brought his hand up to his mouth. With his other hand he pointed to the charred snake of the leash in the grass. “The dog,” he said.

  The hospital was only ten blocks away from their old house. If they had moved already, it would not have been convenient. William spotted Stevie and Emma’s car in the visitors’ lot and he took a space a row away. Louisa was up on nine, eyes open. “Hi,” she said. “I am so glad it’s you.”

  There was an orderly in the room, a young man who identified himself as Jeffrey and extended a hand that William did not shake. Jeffrey talked like a car whose brakes had been cut. “As far as I know she has not slept yet, sir,” Jeffrey said. “She has no serious injuries but we’re going to want to keep her here under observation. And after a little while someone may want to come by and talk to her about the fire, though of course they’ll have to wait until she’s ready. She was very lucky, sir, to have gotten out the way she did, with only a few minor burns and some smoke inhalation. We’ve seen so much worse.” A phone somewhere on Jeffrey buzzed. “I have to go attend to that, sir. Will you be staying or going? Visiting hours end at eleven but immediate family is welcome at any time.”

  “I’ll be right here,” William said, trying to keep his voice level but failing. He sat in the chair next to Louisa’s bed and brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. Her hands lay balled in fists on the white of the sheet. “Do you need anything?” he said, and she said that she could use a change of clothes but that she didn’t need it right away and would he stay and sit with her, and he said of course. He gently squeezed her hand and she closed her eyes but he felt her squeezing back.

  Soon, there were others in the room as well: an administrator who brought William a large plastic bag that contained Louisa’s wallet and shoes, along with some papers; a nurse, corpulent and capable, who lectured Louisa on the treatment of minor burns, first painkillers, then makeup when the skin grew back with uneven pigment; and then a young Chinese woman, Janet Chen, who identified herself as a city fire investigator. “I just need to talk to Mrs. Day for one moment,” she said, producing a clipboard. “I’ll be taking notes but the clipboard is also a recording device. Do you consent to this interview?”

  Louisa nodded.

  “We’ll try to keep it brief,” Janet Chen said. She pressed a button on the clipboard. “Can we consider this an official statement?” Louisa nodded again. “You’ll have to speak out loud,” Janet Chen said.

  “Yes,” Louisa said.

  “Why don’t you just tell me what happened,” Janet Chen said.

  Louisa lifted her right hand, tugged at the tube that extended along her forearm. She closed her eyes and then opened them. “We had gotten some bad news about a friend of ours,” she said. “I went out for a drive to think about it and then I stopped to get coffee. Around four, I think, I spoke to William on the phone.” She tilted her head toward him for confirmation. “The connection was bad and I guess we got our wires crossed, except that there weren’t any wires, which was the problem. He thought I wanted him to come and find me at the coffee shop. I thought he wanted me to come meet him at the house. Just a stupid mix-up. I got out to the house and I wasn’t very happy about it.”

  “About the house?” Janet Chen said.

  “About the fact that William wasn’t there,” Louisa said. “I needed him there. I was in the car, getting more and more anxious, and my phone battery was run almost entirely down, and I didn’t know where he was. So I went to the deck to sit on the railing and look at the trees. I thought it would calm me down. Which is also why I was smoking.” She rubbed her fingers together to recover the memory. “I don’t do it anymore, almost ever, but I had an old pack in the glove compartment and I was smoking it. I had a few cigarettes, and then I decided it was time to go. One of the cigarettes must not have been out completely. Or maybe it was just a spark. I don’t know. Obviously I didn’t notice. I went to the car. I was getting ready to drive away when I saw the start of it in my rearview mirror. It was an orange glow, maybe yellow at the bottom.” Her tone made it sound like something beautiful.

  “And what happened moving forward from that?”

  The tenses seemed to throw Louisa off balance. “Next, you mean?” she said. “I got out and ran toward the house and then I ran back to the car. I drove across the street, to get farther away from it, and I called the fire department.” Her voice caught. “I didn’t have any idea that the dog was there.” She lowered her head into her hands. “She didn’t make any noise at all.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Janet Chen said. She pressed the button on the clipboard again. “I just have a paper or two for you to sign, and then we’ll be finished.”

  Then it was just the two of them and Louisa turned to William, gave him the full of her eyes. “The phone battery should have lasted longer than it did. I was sitting in one of the chairs where I would have sat at the party. You think you’re building toward something, but it’s just an illusion. You put things on top of other things, but then everything can come apart just like that. Poor Blondie.” She had the rhythm of a ranter but everything she said was thuddingly lucid.

  “Wallace says we’re covered,” William said. At this, finally, Louisa began to weep. “We can start over. It’ll be okay.”

  “I’m sure it won’t,” she said. “I don’t want to be the villain but I don’t see any other way to tell this story.” She closed her eyes again and would not open them. By degrees, sleep drew a curtain of relief across her face.

  William backed out quickly, careful not to hit Stevie and Emma’s car, and hurried home. Louisa had said the fire was an accident, and it had to be. She had been smoking a cigarette, which had fallen. A cigarette was more earth than fire. It had dropped into the space below the deck, where chemicals were stored. Chemicals became fire if only given the opportunity. But then the black butterfly passed close enough to him that he could feel the beat of its wings on his face. Maybe Louisa knew about Emma. Maybe she had found the letter. Maybe she hadn’t been out there thinking of Jim but rather cursing William. Business, even immoral business, was distinguished from casual deception by the presence of records. His legs were matchsticks that could hardly hold his weight.

  He went into the house, into the bedroom. He was moving slower than he had at the lot, but his mind was moving faster. He sat on his side of the too-high bed and opened the drawer of the bedside table. The picture of him and Christopher at Lareaux’s arraignment was flat on top where he’d left it, and he drilled down into the drawer, down through the old postcards, through the dirty magazines. But the letter was still there, just as he had left it, untouched and undetected. The fire was an accident. His wife had been in an accident. He put the letter back in the bottom of the drawer, closed up the table, and went to the deck. The tubs were in the yard. The lanterns were on the rai
ls. He thought he heard the boy in the adjoining yard admonishing his parents, proving their unfitness by exhaustion. He took a seat in one of the large wooden chairs, lit one of the lanterns, the cactus, and everything that had been waiting for him, like a policeman around the corner, now appeared to make its arrest, and he touched his elbows to his knees, and he did not dare to breathe.

  When the phone rang, it was Tom, returning a call William didn’t remember making. “How could something like this have happened?” he said. “Where are you?” His voice was sharp with worry.

  “I’m home,” William said. “Getting her some clothes.”

  “Where is she? I tried to call but it went straight through to voice mail.”

  “She’s in the hospital. For observation, mostly. She seems to be okay. Are you going to visit her?”

  “First thing in the morning,” Tom said. “I’m upstate. I’ve been here all week. This is crazy, though. I can’t imagine how she must feel.”

  “She feels terrible,” William said. “She’s been pretty clear about that.”

  “It’s a shock,” Tom said. “It’s nothing anyone would have thought. What a terrible accident. We’re thinking of you.” William heard a woman’s voice in the background, Jesse’s voice, and he understood that the clarity in Tom’s voice was not from worry alone. It was from happiness. “And tell her I’ll see her soon.” Tom left the line open long enough for William to hear him tell Jesse they’d have to leave at dawn.