Home Fires

by Luanne Rice

  “Come on,” she said, drying her hands.

  “You’re great,” Steve said.

  “Just keep thinking that,” Gabrielle said.

  DID her parents think she couldn’t hear their stupid movie? So what if they had the volume turned down? Maggie sat at her desk, trying to study. She tried to ignore the little squeaks and grunts, the shapeless music, coming from the next room. It embarrassed her, that her parents would watch such a thing. Joanie Mays worked at Island Video. She had a big mouth, and she loved announcing to the world who was renting from the plain-brown-wrapper bin.

  Once Maggie and Kurt (back when there was a Maggie and Kurt) had skipped school and watched the video her parents had hidden under their bed. Kurt had loved it. After they watched it once, he wanted to watch it again.

  To tell the truth, after the first two minutes or so, Maggie had closed her eyes. The girls looked so wasted. They seemed pathetic, pretending to enjoy what was obviously torture. The worst part, the sick part, was that they had sort of reminded Maggie of herself. How many times had she gone along with Kurt, doing whatever he wanted, just to keep him as her boyfriend?

  Well, no more Miss Island Slut. Maggie hardly even missed him. She had seen Kurt’s true colors in the back of Fritz’s truck. If he really loved her, he would never have asked her to sleep with Fritz for money. It was the worst thing she could ever imagine happening. It was degrading and wrong, and it proved that Kurt didn’t love her.

  She couldn’t get the movie music out of her head. With its throbbing backbeat, it reminded Maggie of the noise kids make when they’re playing choo-choo. She wished her mother could read her thoughts and make her father turn off the sound. She didn’t like thinking of her mother watching the movie. Her father, she might expect it of. But not her mother.

  Maggie wished her father would demand more of her. He didn’t care whether Maggie got A’s or F’s. He’d never once objected to her seeing Kurt, even though Kurt was every father’s nightmare. He told Maggie he loved her “unconditionally,” but Maggie wished for conditions. Rules and standards weren’t so bad. They forced you to be your best.

  She tried to imagine Karen all grown up, dating a boy like Kurt. It wouldn’t happen in a million years! Uncle Matt would kill the scuz first. The first time he smelled beer on Karen’s breath: zap. Grounded for life.

  It’s weird, thinking back, how Maggie now realized that she used to wish her father would tell her she couldn’t see Kurt. She’d wish her father thought better of her. That he’d push her to make the honor roll. That he’d expect her to go to college. That he’d ground her for seeing Kurt instead of nice island boys like Josh Hunter or Ned Devlin.

  Maggie hadn’t touched her pizza. She didn’t feel like eating, and knowing her parents were watching zombie sex girls made her even less hungry. Concentrating on a math problem, she tried to block it out.

  I’m not like them

  I’m not like them

  I’m not like them

  Maggie stared at the telephone on her desk. Sometimes she felt so lonely she thought she’d go nuts. The island was too small; it wasn’t as if she would suddenly meet someone new, someone who didn’t know every detail of her past, someone she would actually want as a friend.

  The telephone was tempting her. Call Kurt, call Vanessa. Get back in touch. They’re your friends, aren’t they? Haven’t they called about a hundred times to apologize? Didn’t Kurt leave a red rose in your locker just yesterday? What makes you think you’re better than them? The only person she actually felt like calling was Anne, and that was really ridiculous. Her aunt.

  Still, thinking of Anne made it possible for Maggie to resist calling Kurt or Vanessa. Anne was awesome. She had lived in New York and traveled everywhere. She had style and mystery; you could imagine her as a spy. She was fighting her way through hell, and Maggie was with her every step of the way.

  Anne had raven-wing hair and sex-goddess eyes. You’d never catch Anne watching dirty movies with a lazy blob. Uncle Matt had hurt her, and Anne hadn’t stuck around to give him the chance to do it again. She had too much self-respect for that. Maggie could imagine Anne wearing an evening gown on the Riviera, posing in Vogue, dancing with a prince. Anne made anything possible.

  What she was doing on the island was a puzzle to Maggie. Why would someone like Anne come back to this big stupid mudpie in the middle of the sea? Anne, who could live anywhere in the world, and we’re talking anywhere—Rome, Paris, London, Rio de Janeiro—had come to the island. She was living in a tiny, bare apartment. She could make her collages anyplace. So why was she here?

  In her deepest heart, her most treasured fantasy, Maggie believed that Anne had come back to the island because of her. Because of Maggie. Anne had lost Karen, and she had come to claim Karen’s spiritual sister.

  Okay, not claim. Anne would never take Maggie away from her family.

  But something close to “claim.” Anne and Maggie had a special bond, a love for each other that reminded Maggie of the ideal mother and daughter.

  Sitting at her desk, Maggie turned her gaze from the telephone to her math homework. She wanted to make Anne proud. She had promised herself that Anne would never regret rescuing her and not telling her parents. She would make the honor roll. She wouldn’t give in to loneliness and call Kurt.

  She would not call Kurt. Anne wouldn’t want her to. Maggie would gather the energy that loneliness made her feel and channel it into studying. Night after night she would do her homework, and at the end of the semester she would have a great report card to show for it.

  Brown. Vassar. Harvard. Wheaton.

  She could do it. Maggie could work hard this year and be accepted at a great college. She’d make Anne and her mother proud, and she’d show her father that she was worth more than he thought.

  Suddenly she jumped. She had forgotten about the movie; in fact, she couldn’t hear the soundtrack anymore. No celluloid bimbos panting and begging for what they did not want. Instead, what Maggie heard was quite human. The sounds of her parents’ voices. She heard her mother moan, and she heard her father say her mother’s name.

  “Gabrielle …”

  Maggie heard lust in the tone. Passion and desire. And if she didn’t know better, she would swear that she heard the respect you get from love as well.

  Chapter 9

  One late Saturday afternoon, just before sunset, Thomas Devlin stood at Anne Davis’s door. He had his caseful of clock tools; she had a broken ship’s clock that had once belonged to her grandfather. He was eager to fix the clock, but even more, he couldn’t wait to see Anne.

  He had brought her a bouquet of spring flowers: daffodils, irises, and pussy willows. Waiting for her to answer the door, he shuffled his feet nervously. He shifted the case and flowers from one hand to the other and told himself to breathe steadily. His collar felt too tight around his neck.

  Just then, as he heard her coming to the door, the fire alarm sounded outside. The air horn was located at the intersection of Transit and Benefit streets; its signal rang through perfectly. Thomas heard the message as the signal repeated. The emergency was here in town, down by the old docks.

  All his nervousness disappeared, replaced by an adrenaline rush. Anne opened the door, and he handed her his tool case and the flowers.

  “That’s the fire signal sounding,” he explained. “I’ll be back when I can.”

  She nodded, obviously taken by surprise. It took only a split second for Thomas to register a catalog of information about Anne: her fragrance, the straight dark hair brushing her shoulder, an ivory silk shirt framing pearl-white skin. He wanted to kiss her.

  “Be safe,” she said.

  “I will,” he said, racing off.

  “Come back,” she called. “When it’s over.”

  He waved, to let her know he’d heard.

  Transit Street was full of people standing in animated groups, speculating about whatever might be happening down at the docks. The police cruiser spe
d by, splashing eerie blue light on the stone, shingles, and plate glass of nearby buildings. The people turned to watch it pass; bunches of them had begun to head for the docks.

  Thomas Devlin ran down the hill. Sirens sounded in the distance, and a police car sped across India Street. Thomas didn’t yet know what was wrong. He wondered whether he’d find a fire, an automobile accident, or a drowning. The air horn had told him where, not what. He ran through the steady parade of islanders, on their way to see what was happening.

  Passing the busy ferry docks, he turned onto the deserted road that led to the old marine park. The place was full of abandoned and condemned warehouses, chandleries, and shipyards. Now he heard the electric static of amplified radio transmissions and idling diesel engines. Here it was: fire.

  Smoke gusted through the air. The big red pumper hurtled down the road, Mike Hannigan driving. Thomas grabbed a chrome handle, caught his foot in another grab handle bolted to the side, and hoisted himself aboard.

  “It’s the Dauntless Chandlery, Dev,” Marty Cole shouted over the big engine and the fire’s hurricane wind.

  “Deserted, far as we know,” Leroy Adamson said, passing him a spare coat. Thomas Devlin scanned the scene as he slipped into his Scott equipment, pulling an air tank over the black rubber coat, making sure the breathing mask was clear.

  The old chandlery was blazing. One brick wall had collapsed, and the multistoried interior pulsed with flames. Snakes of black wire dangled from the ceilings, old pipes glowed red-hot. Embers blinked along black sticks of charcoal: structural timbers and the forgotten spars of ships.

  Mike parked the truck close enough for the crew to feel the fire’s full force. Marty Cole scrambled out of his seat and jumped on the large chrome howitzer mounted on the pumper’s rear deck. Throwing the handle, he fired a torrent of water at the fire. Guys already on the scene were smashing windows with poleaxes, and smoke poured from every broken window and through the roof; the structure had become a chimney.

  A crowd of people milled around, at once exhilarated and reverent, and Dick Wade was shouting at them to stay back. Thomas Devlin peeled off a few hundred feet of two-and-a-half-inch hose. He ran it past Hugh Lawson and Bobby Caserta, already working a water cannon. They were all part of the same team, but they didn’t greet Thomas or acknowledge him in any way. They were intent on fighting the enemy.

  Thomas pulled down his face mask and leaned into the thick hose, the water pressure pushing back at him with the force of a linebacker as he aimed the brass nozzle at the chandlery’s broken windows. Flames snapped along the old timbers like popcorn. Orange geysers of fire spewed from the roof, sounding like speeding traffic on I-95.

  Guys backlit by flames attacked the windows with long poleaxes and bludgeons. They smashed panes with the zeal of high-school vandals, and the tinkling glass was as delicate and incongruous as wind chimes. Generators and pumpers sucking water roared through the night.

  In Boston, Thomas Devlin had been at hundreds of fires as bad as or worse than this one, but still the scene gripped him. Fire was untamable, as fierce as weather, with the destructive power of a tornado or a Force-10 gale. He could tell by watching the other firefighters that they were in awe of this fire. To them, this fire deserved more respect than the average house fire, like the one at Anne’s.

  But this fire was no more lethal than Anne’s or any other fire. The fire that had killed Sarah had one tenth the power of this one.

  Engines 2 and 4 screamed down the access road, and Thomas Devlin heard Dick Wade call his name.

  “Tommy! Leave the nozzle and get over here.”

  Thomas grabbed Josh Hunter, a friend of Ned’s who was running by with a pike pole. He was a young kid, and the guys generally treated him as a gofer, sending him back to the trucks for tools.

  “Josh, deliver that pike, then get back here and take the hose,” Thomas said, and he caught Josh’s dazzling expression of gratitude.

  “Thanks, Mr. Devlin.”

  Dick Wade stood by his red Ford Bronco, barking orders into a mike whose cord ran through the open window.

  “Tommy, I want you in the high bucket,” Dick said to Thomas Devlin. He nodded at Engine no. 4, the cherry picker. “Go on up, and tell me what’s what.”

  “Okay, Chief,” Thomas said to the only man alive who could get away with calling him “Tommy.”

  It was unspoken between them, but Thomas Devlin and Dick Wade knew that they operated at a different level from the other volunteers. They’d been trained as Boston professionals. Out here, there was a tendency toward fire-groupie mentality; to some of these guys, disaster was their hobby. They worked hard, and there were heroes among them. But they hadn’t had enough experience to really assess a blaze and know how to handle it.

  You’d have to stick bamboo shoots under Thomas Devlin’s fingernails to get him to admit this, but he knew a lot of these guys were in it for the thrill of the police band. They’d sit around their kitchens after dinner, drinking Bud and listening to the scanner, waiting for a fire or a crash to make them instant heroes.

  So Thomas Devlin clipped the walkie-talkie on his belt and climbed into the aerial. He gave a thumbs-up to Bobby Sullivan at the helm, and the gears began to crank, hoisting the bucket to a vantage point high over the fire.

  Surveying the fire ground from the high bucket, Thomas Devlin found the scene surreal. Reflections of the fire burned red and gold in the harbor and in puddles of water spilled from the hoses. Islanders clustered in small groups behind the police line, with more streaming down the access road from town.

  The aerial lifted Thomas Devlin higher, the sturdy metal extensions unfolding. He gazed through black smoke and flames at the chandlery, a two-hundred-year-old hive of lofts, timbers, warrens, and machinery. He realized that he was witnessing the death of a key part of island history, and he felt his throat tighten up.

  “Tommy, what do you see?” Dick’s voice crackled over the walkie-talkie.

  “It’s three quarters done,” Thomas replied.

  “Do we need to ventilate? How’s the roof look?”

  “The roof’s caved in.”

  “Okay, then. Let her have it.”

  “Roger,” Thomas Devlin said. He braced his back against the bucket’s rim and threw the nozzle’s handle. The hose sprang to life, jetting water into the fire and pinning Thomas against the back of the bucket. Phantoms of smoke and steam escaped into the night.

  Thomas Devlin was fighting the fire. He believed he had been born to do it. Police officers fought bad guys, soldiers fought enemies, and he fought fires. He had seen fires kill, had lost Sarah and nearly been killed himself in one. Certain things in life were black and white to Thomas Devlin. One of them was that fire was evil. Fire was a sneaky, deceptive devil hiding in the walls.

  He felt alert, on edge, but not scared. Standing at Anne’s door, waiting with his tools and the flowers, he had felt something close to panic. But not now. His feelings for the woman made him more nervous than staring into the soul of his enemy.

  He was putting the fire down. He was in command. His eyes stung from the smoke, but he wouldn’t look away from the flames. Not for a second. Anne’s apartment was a quarter mile away. He knew the fire was contained, or would be very soon. The likelihood of it spreading to town, to Anne’s building, was practically nil. Thomas Devlin knew that.

  But deep down, as he aimed the water jet into the burning chandlery, he had the sense of protecting Anne. He would never admit it to anyone, especially not to Anne, but somehow he knew that he was fighting this fire to keep her safe.

  He had made protecting people his life’s work. All the burning houses he had entered, people he had rescued, the names he had once known blurred together in his mind. Well, one name stood out from the others, all by itself, as clear as morning.

  Anne.

  ANNE Davis walked east, toward the fire. Darkness had fallen, and there was a hellish orange horizon, like sunset, in the sky where the sun always ro
se. As she moved closer she saw the flames. Blue strobe lights bounced off the buildings and fire trucks. She looked around for Thomas.

  She recognized many of the rescue workers who had come to her house. They raced around, carrying axes and long-handled saws, oblivious to the crowd. Anne blended in with a group of other townspeople, transfixed by the spectacle.

  The old chandlery was burning. It had been abandoned since Anne was a child, when she and her friends used to play inside. They had explored the old machine shop, the dusty sail loft, the vast storage shed. Graffiti covered the brick walls. Virginities had been lost here, and smoking skills acquired.

  Faces in the crowd were solemn; there was an air of mourning about the scene. Anyone who had spent their childhood on the island must, like Anne, be feeling profound and sad disbelief.

  “Anne Fitzgibbon, is that you?”

  Anne turned to her left and recognized Polly Slater, a girl she’d grown up with. Although she hadn’t seen Polly in fifteen years, maybe more, she instantly hugged her.

  “Isn’t it terrible?” Anne asked, turning back to the fire.

  “It’s unbelievable. I never thought I’d see this spot without the chandlery.”

  “Do you know how it started?”

  “My husband overheard Chief Wade saying something about arson. I mean, what else could it be?”

  “I don’t know.” Anne watched black smoke spiral into the sky, illuminated by the orange flames and blue police lights, and she wished she could paint it.

  “Remember playing here?”

  “I was just thinking about that. Remember swinging on those huge grappling hooks? Jumping off the lofts and swinging clear across the building?”

  “God, we’re lucky we didn’t impale ourselves.”

  “I hope it wasn’t kids here tonight,” Anne said, frowning. She thought of Maggie.

  “The kids don’t hang out here anymore,” Polly said. “They’re not as forgiving of water rats as we were.”

  “Somebody could have fixed this place up,” Anne said, thinking of the huge windows overlooking the harbor, the graceful brick archways, the big boathouse doors. It had been such a stately building, the workplace of generations of islanders. Anne’s paternal grandfather had built boats here. And now it was burned beyond recognition.