Home Fires

by Luanne Rice

  “How do you do it? Such little bits of paper.”

  “Postage stamps,” she said, cutting the air with the fingers of her right hand. “And very small, sharp sewing scissors.”

  He was gazing at her with such intensity, as if he was listening to her explain the secrets of the universe, that she felt herself blush again. The look in his eyes had gone deep and searching, if possible even warmer than before.

  “I’m glad you liked it,” she said, waving good-bye.

  She’d had the feeling that he’d been about to ask her to join him again, and it made her nervous to think that she almost certainly would have accepted.

  IT took six days and as many restless nights after Ruby’s door closed behind Anne Davis for Thomas Devlin to figure out what he was so afraid of. He was back in Ruby’s, having the blue-plate special before heading down to the firehouse for the weekly drill. He was enjoying his hot turkey sandwich, thinking about his son, Ned, when she happened to catch his eye.

  She was hurrying along the street, glancing over her shoulder as she crossed just ahead of a delivery truck. She wore heavy winter clothes, but her grace was unmistakable. Thomas thought back to that first night, when he’d seen her bounding up the steps of her burning house. Something in her movements now reminded him.

  When she saw him through the plate-glass window, she stopped dead. Their eyes met, and they gazed at each other without smiling. Then Anne raised a gloved hand to wave, and Thomas waved back. She moved along, more slowly now.

  That’s when it came to him: the reason he’d been feeling so jittery and crazed the last weeks. Something about the woman, about the things she had been through and felt and seen, made him know that he had found a kindred soul. Just looking into her eyes was like living a lifetime.

  The realization was so powerful, he paid his bill on the spot and hurried into the fresh air. A knife wind slashed off the harbor, so he kept close to the buildings. His breath came hard. What he felt wasn’t romance. It wasn’t simple attraction, although he couldn’t deny that Anne Davis was lovely.

  What he felt was relief and terror, because he had met someone like him. He had made a home and wonderful friends on the island. They invited him to their parties, to their weddings, to the christenings of their children. They led beautiful normal lives that felt safe and secure and far from harm’s way, and only Thomas Devlin knew that he was a pretender in their midst.

  He had seen the worst, and he knew that no one could be made safe. Truly safe. You could install alarms, build fortresses, keep your kid on a leash like a puppy. You could put in a sprinkler system, place bars at the window, teach your children never to talk to strangers.

  You could do your best, but you couldn’t expect fate to respect that effort.

  Thomas Devlin roamed the town, his hands stuffed deep in his jacket pockets, his eyes scanning the streets for Anne Davis. Perhaps she was still nearby. If he found her he would approach her and say nothing. He would stare into her eyes and he would see if he was right.

  He didn’t see her again that evening.

  After tossing all night, he awakened with the dawn. The sun rose, pale and watery through more snow clouds, then disappeared into a February gale. He brewed a pot of strong coffee and knew that he had to talk to her. That night he would leave the island for a long visit with Ned, and it seemed important that he see her before then.

  At the earliest acceptable hour, when he knew Gabrielle would be getting Maggie breakfast before school, he called the Vincents’ number.

  “Hello,” came Gabrielle’s cheerful voice.

  “Hi, Gabrielle. It’s Thomas Devlin.”

  “Why, you old early riser,” she said.

  His mission had seemed so urgent, but now he felt embarrassed. What would he be wanting with Anne at six-thirty in the morning?

  “I’ll bet this isn’t a call for my catering services,” Gabrielle said dryly. “So you must be wanting a donation for the fire department. God knows we owe you.”

  “Actually, I was hoping to speak to your sister.”

  “Anne? She’s not here.”

  He felt his heart quicken. Of course not; she’d probably left the island. Gone back to New York, to her husband, to her real life.

  “She has a place in town,” Gabrielle continued. “I’ll give you the number.”

  Thomas sensed the curiosity behind Gabrielle’s voice as she told him Anne’s number and address: a building just across the street from Ruby’s. He thanked her and hung up, but he didn’t call Anne right away. She’d been born an islander, but she hadn’t lived as one for many years. Habits change. Maybe she slept till noon now.

  Besides, now that he knew exactly how to contact her, some perverse reluctance was overtaking him. Contacting Anne Davis could be a big mistake. Maybe he was asking for trouble, stirring up more than she could handle. Or more than he could.

  THE worktable in her new apartment looked as if she’d been using it forever. A gooseneck lamp shone down on thousands of stamps from around the world. Many were canceled, sent to her by friends who knew what she needed them for. Others she had collected on trips with Matt, sending them on postcards addressed to herself. She had stamps depicting kings and queens, endangered species, tropical flowers, dead sports heroes, birds in flight, men on the moon, suicide poets, historic monuments. Reds of every shade from mute coral to brilliant scarlet. More colors than Crayola had names.

  Three inches by three inches, Anne’s collage-in-progress was a picture of an alpine lake. The original would be reproduced by Muniche Recordings for a CD of Chopin’s nocturnes, then go on exhibit at her gallery on East Fifty-seventh Street in New York.

  She had been at it since four or five in the morning, when she had given up trying to sleep. Chopin was playing in the background as she cut up stamps, trying to put together her collage, as seamless as possible for this purpose. Her swans’ feathers came from stamps honoring the White House, the sunstruck side of a mountain, and the silvery surface of a rocket. She used tweezers and a magnifying glass, rubber cement, and tiny scissors that left her with a mountainous callus on the middle finger of her right hand.

  She jumped at the sound of the telephone, cutting clear through a stamp she had been working for forty minutes.

  “Damn,” she said, glaring at the phone.

  Finally, remembering she hadn’t yet bought an answering machine, she picked up. She recognized his voice as soon as she heard it.

  “Thomas Devlin,” she said.

  “It’s nearly lunchtime,” he said. “I was wondering if you’d like to grab a bite.”

  The invitation made her feel on guard. She felt grateful to him, but she hadn’t come to the island to make new friends.

  “Thanks anyway,” she said. “But I’m working.”

  “You work at home?”

  “Yes. I do collages. Like the one I put on your note.” She expected him to laugh, if only because he felt nervous. People, especially islanders, often found it ridiculous that she could get paid for snipping postage stamps and turning them into pictures not much larger.

  “Well, you do beautiful work. I can imagine buying one.”

  “Thank you,” she said, surprised and even more wary. The man hadn’t seemed like someone on the make, but he was sounding like it now. She felt a trickle of panic. Talking to the man who had pulled her out of the fire reminded her of what she had gone inside to retrieve, and that brought on an explosion of Karen. Her eyes felt hot and dry.

  “It must seem strange, me calling you out of the blue and asking you out for lunch,” he said carefully.

  “Not really, but I do have work to do. Thank you, though,” Anne said, needing to hang up the phone.

  “Wait, please,” he said.

  She could hear his breath over the line, coming as hard as she felt her own.

  “It’s important,” he said.

  “I can’t,” she said, her voice falling. “I can’t explain it to you, but I need to be alone right now.
It’s nothing personal. It’s—”

  “It’s Karen,” Thomas Devlin said.

  Their silence ticked over the line. Anne should have hung up the phone. If she did, she would simply turn off the desk lamp, lay a cloth over her work to keep it from blowing around, and walk into the bedroom to lie down and take a long, long nap.

  “I have to go now,” she said, giving in to the exhaustion.

  “I’ll be at Ruby’s,” he said. “Never mind lunch. I’ll be there at six tonight. If you change your mind.”

  “I don’t talk about Karen.”

  “You don’t have to. But I hope you’ll come.”

  THE day took forever. Still, she didn’t take a nap and she finished the collage. All day she refused to admit it to herself, but she found herself reluctantly looking forward to going to Ruby’s. She had heard something in Thomas Devlin’s voice that she couldn’t walk away from.

  Six o’clock.

  She bundled herself up and headed into the winter night. There he was, in the same booth he’d been sitting in the other day. She wondered how old he was. Forty-five? Fifty? She couldn’t tell. The windows were steamy, the restaurant lit with a cozy glow. Anne walked inside.

  He stood without speaking, giving her that same sweet, brilliant smile, tugging at his burned cheeks.

  “Hi. Here I am,” she said.

  “Please—sit down.”

  She ordered tea with lemon and honey from a waitress who looked like Charlene Bowen, a girl she’d gone all through Island Consolidated School with. But the woman was icily indifferent. Anne had the feeling the woman had heard the tabloid stories, so Anne didn’t say anything. Still, it made her chest hurt; she touched her throat.

  “Is your breathing back to normal?” Thomas Devlin asked. “Smoke is wicked on the lungs, and the cold weather makes it worse.”

  “I think so,” Anne said, not telling him that it had hurt to breathe since Karen had died, that having the smoke inhalation to blame for the pain had made her feel better.

  “I’m glad you came.”

  “I’m not sure why I did,” Anne said, aware that he was staring at her.

  “Um, I could ask you something nice and general. Like, do you like the island in winter?”

  The question was so benign, Anne started to laugh. “Yes. I always have. My sister used to curse it, dream of moving to Tahiti or someplace, but I loved it. We grew up here.”

  He nodded, and Anne was again aware that he knew things about her. She flushed, trying not to stare at his face, his hands. Now she saw that both his hands were scarred; she found herself wondering how many other burns were covered by his clothes. But she felt herself relax, a little. Something about the man made her feel comfortable.

  “How about you?” she asked. “How do you like being here in the winter?”

  “I’m from Boston. Except for the peace and quiet, it’s not that much different.”

  “Peace and quiet,” Anne said, laughing. “That’s a nice way to put it.”

  “Okay,” he said, laughing also. “Lonesome. It does get lonesome at times.”

  Lonesome. Anne gazed over his shoulder at the big corner booth where she, Matt, and Karen had eaten sundaes one afternoon last summer. Karen had loved the slogan emblazoned in red across the menu:

  RUBY’S SLIPPERS …

  THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME

  HOME-STYLE COOKING AT A PRETTY PRICE

  Karen had recently seen The Wizard of Oz for the first time, and when she and Anne were alone they would sometimes pretend that Karen was Dorothy and Anne was Glinda. That day, eating their sundaes, Karen had told Matt that he could be the Tin Man, which she pronounced “teen-man.”

  Anne and Matt had smiled, trying not to laugh, thrilled by their daughter.

  Lonesome.

  Anne looked back at Thomas Devlin.

  “Are you called ‘Tom’?” she asked.

  “Thomas, usually. Much to my dismay, my parents didn’t believe in nicknames. So ‘Thomas’ stuck. At least they didn’t name me Aloysius or Ignatius.”

  “Yeah, my parents looked to the saints when they had kids, too. My sister and I always considered ourselves lucky to be Gabrielle and Anne, not Anastasia and Eustacia.”

  “Irish Catholic.” A statement, not a question.

  “Lapsed now, but yes. Born that way. Anne Magdalene Fitzgibbon.”

  “Thomas Xavier Devlin. They’d turn in their graves if they knew my colleagues at the firehouse call me ‘Devil.’ ‘Dev’ for short.”

  A shiver went down her spine. For some reason it upset her terribly, hearing that. She no longer went to church, but after Karen died, she’d discovered within herself a childish and pure belief in heaven. With it came a belief in hell.

  “Why do they call you that?”

  He lifted his elbows off the table, studied the backs of his hands. He frowned at them for a long instant, then hid them under the table. When he met Anne’s eyes, she saw that he had neither eyebrows nor lashes.

  “Because I was in a bad fire.”

  Anne didn’t say anything. She looked away, but something about his face pulled her back. His burns were unspeakably ugly. Pocked and raised, like some primeval terrain, they made Anne think of screams and horror. But in some mysterious way, they were beautiful. They also made her think of Karen.

  “They say only the devil could have come out from a fire like that alive,” he said.

  “How did you?” Anne asked, and she realized her voice was barely a whisper. “Come out alive?”

  “Because I was with someone I loved. I had to get her out of the fire.”

  Time stood still. A song played on the jukebox, but Anne didn’t register it. Her tea sat on the table in front of her, getting cold. Anne knew that this was the reason she had come to Ruby’s. She heard her own voice before she realized that she was speaking.

  “Did you save her?”

  His hands were back on the table. Now they were palms up, and he was staring at them with the intensity of a fortune-teller.

  “No,” he said, looking into Anne’s eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Was it your wife?”

  He nodded.

  Anne thought of Karen, of how she had tried to catch Karen. So futile. One second Karen had been in her life, and the next second she was gone forever. Anne pictured the sun streaming through the window, backlighting her little girl. She saw the pigeon land. She herself had handed Karen the slice of bread. As if she was watching a movie, she saw Karen break the bread into pieces. She saw the pigeon take the crumbs from Karen’s hand. And she saw Karen fly away.

  Now, looking at Thomas Devlin, she wished she had scars. They would remind her of Karen. They would make tangible her longing, the passion she felt for her only child. With tears running down her face, she reached across the table and took his hands. She examined his burns, caressing them gently with her thumbs.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  “I know you are,” he said.

  She looked at him, perhaps quizzically.

  “Karen,” he said.

  She stared. “I still can’t talk about her.”

  “In your note? The one you sent to the station? You said that you were sorry that you put me in danger. You didn’t say that you were sorry you went back inside the house, after the bag. I just want you to know that I understand the difference.”

  He was getting too close. She tried to pull her hands back, but he held them.

  “Whatever made you run into the fire, it was all you had. All you had of her. I saw the toys, the dresses. I would have done the same.”

  “It was a picture,” Anne said. “Her last picture.”

  “Did you get it? Is it okay?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded, and his expression was fierce. “Good,” he said.

  “It’s not enough,” she whispered. Tears ran freely down her cheeks.

  The Charlene Bowen look-alike came by with a refill for Thomas’s coffee. A
nne could feel the woman’s gaze, and her judgment. Thomas waved her away. Gently he withdrew his right hand from Anne’s left. Digging into his pocket, he placed a five-dollar bill on the table.

  “Let’s go outside,” he said.

  She felt his hand on her elbow as they walked out the door into the bitter cold. Without speaking, they headed toward the ferry dock. The sun had set and splashes of burnished gold traced the black western sky. In the distance, they saw a ferry lit like a small city, steaming toward the island from across the sound. Six times, every summer of her life and two Christmases, Karen had ridden that ferry from the mainland. Anne felt the wind on her face, turning her tears to ice.

  She slipped on the snow. She reached for Thomas Devlin, steadying herself. His arms encircled her, for just one moment. Self-conscious, she stepped back and continued walking on her own.

  “I’m okay,” she said. She was referring not to the slip, but to the flood of emotion she had experienced in Ruby’s.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t have to be okay yet,” he said.

  She didn’t reply, but watched the ferry draw closer to the terminal. Its horn sounded. People congregated on the upper decks, waiting to go to their cars. Anne heard the hydraulics operating the onshore ramp.

  “One good thing about winter,” he said. “You can get a ferry reservation at the last minute.”

  The statement seemed so incongruous, so normal, that Anne stopped in her tracks. She stared at him.

  “Well, you can,” he said.

  “True,” she agreed. You had to reserve months in advance or know Joe Dunbar, the head of the steamship authority, to drive a car onto the ferry in high season.

  “I’m going off-island tomorrow,” he said. “For a week.”

  “Oh,” she said. This information, for some reason, brought her back to earth.

  “To visit my son.”

  Anne stared at his eyes, but she couldn’t see them in the dark. He had a son. He had lost his wife, but he had his child. Drained, she turned away. She watched the big ferry graze the pilings, then bump the dock.

  “Anne?”

  She shook her head. She wanted to be left alone, but she knew it would be rude to say.