Tinderbox

by Lisa Gornick

  “That was 1909. This is nearly thirty years later.”

  “So they’re both in it?”

  Adam can feel his teeth grinding. Whenever he talks about his screenplays, Rachida finds a hole in the narrative logic. Exasperated and embarrassed too, he has on occasion seized the bait, backing himself into ridiculous corners in which he is defending pompous and vague notions of fictive truth. The truth is, he had forgotten about the idea of having Frank Lloyd Wright in the story. Besides, it has never been Wright who interests him. It’s the gruesome scene at Taliesin: the fire set by the deranged Barbadian servant who then ax-murdered Wright’s lover, Mamah Cheney, and her children.

  “I still have to work that out.”

  In the afternoon, when Adam leaves to get Omar, Eva is in the kitchen. She is emptying the dishwasher. He debates saying goodbye, but there is no point. Eva would not respond. “Lucky you,” Rachida said when he raised again the subject of Eva’s refusal to speak to him. “I wish half the people in the world who chatter at me would just shut up.”

  Outside, it is warmer than he expected. He leaves his coat unzipped. The streets are slushy with clumps of wet, black-flecked snow. Over the weekend, his mother told him that she had called Ursula to discuss having Eva return now to Peru and that Ursula had urged her to let Eva stay until May. His mother sighed. “In that case, I might as well let her stay until the beginning of July, our original plan, when you go back to Detroit. No matter how tactfully I put it, she would take it very badly to have to leave early.”

  He had been about to say Jesus Christ, I can’t imagine another season of this, when he heard the front door opening, Eva coming in with grocery bags, and he felt that he should exit the room.

  He stands outside the school, the only father in the group of waiting adults. What he really cannot imagine is July, returning to Detroit, living alone again with his wife and son.

  39

  After Omar finishes the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and glass of milk Eva has left for him, Adam follows him upstairs to his room. They play chess. They build a model apatosaurus with a long snaky neck and tiny head and a protoceratops with elephantine legs and a stubby tail. They look through an old set of the World Book Encyclopedia. For a while, Adam’s mind stays on their play, but then his thoughts drift to the pool at La Mamounia, to the view of the medina walls from their room. He imagines Moishe and Winston Churchill strolling through the lavish gardens at dusk, the red embers at the tip of Churchill’s burning cigar. Moishe walking in leather slippers back to his home, past the Koutoubia, beyond the Djemaa el-Fna.

  “What exactly is a fossil, Daddy?” Omar asks. They are thumbing through the F volume.

  Adam doesn’t really know. Is it the animal bone turned to stone or the imprint of the animal? Once, his father told him that in a mirror the images are reversed so we never see ourselves as we are seen. His mother told him that dreams do the same with desires. We dream we are giving a ruby ring to the brother we want to rob.

  Omar abandons the F volume and turns onto his belly. He holds the apatosaurus in one hand and the protoceratops in the other, softly speaking to himself. Not long ago, Adam asked his mother about Omar’s still talking to himself, the way he spins out loud the stories his toys stimulate in his head.

  His mother looked surprised at the question, surprised, he realized, that he’d asked her opinion about Omar at all—something he has refrained from over the years out of fear of Rachida’s anger.

  “You were the same. You talked out loud to yourself for a very long time. But no, there’s nothing to worry about. That’s just his inner stream of thought.”

  “It sounds like the inside of my head when I’m working.”

  “Exactly. It’s the child’s creative work.”

  “Or maybe it goes the other way. Maybe my work is just child’s play.”

  His mother smiled. “That was essentially Freud’s position. He thought imaginative writing is the mark of an immature personality, an escape into florid fantasy—that there is only a thin line between the creative writer and the psychotic. I think he was just envious because he was probably a novelist at heart himself.”

  Omar pokes a finger into Adam’s side. “Come on, Daddy. Let’s play.”

  Adam did not want to say so, but he understands entirely Freud’s point. Who wouldn’t prefer to live in his mind, moving around creatures who do what they are told and never snap back?

  He lowers himself onto his stomach and tries to pay attention to Omar’s story about the dinosaurs and the cave and the meteorite that is coming. For two weeks now, he has not looked at the photographs. Not since the morning of the big snowstorm when he’d been interrupted by Omar knocking on the door, by his plea that Adam join the sledding. It had gotten to him, his son’s little voice on the other side of the locked door, the glaring white of the snow outside, and then, himself, with his pants unzipped and a dirty picture in front of him.

  Lying in bed this morning, he had a reverie. He’d known it was not a dream because he was sufficiently awake to be aware that he was creating it in his head, but the images had the same hazy, effortless quality of a dream. He was the younger, slighter man—the one being lifted high. The older, heavier man was lying on a bed. He beckoned to him with one finger. “Come on over here,” he said. His voice was gravelly. Adam lay down. He curled his body into the older man, resting his head on the broad chest. The older man hooked an arm around Adam’s shoulders and then looked off, away from him. Adam began to kiss the man’s chest, his neck. Slowly, with a look of amusement, the man turned to him and covered Adam’s mouth with his own.

  “I have some work calls to make. You play by yourself for a while. I’ll come back as soon as I’m done.”

  Like a criminal, he creeps across the landing in his stocking feet, locking the music-room door, lowering the shades, dragging the file box out into the middle of the room.

  He finds the file and takes out the envelope with the photos inside. He has never counted them. At least twenty. There are at least twenty. But why are they sticking together? It is as though the folder got wet. Adam examines the file box. He can see no evidence of water. He will have to get a flashlight, check the closet ceiling, the floor.

  The photo he wants is near the rear of the clump. It is stuck to the photo in front of it. Carefully, he peels it apart. Splotches of white spread over the image, part of the photo imprinted on the back of the prior picture.

  Adam stares at the photo. The men’s faces and their shoulders are covered with white. Erased.

  He feels like crying. He feels as though the older man has jerked away his mouth and stood up from the bed. He gathers up the photos and puts them back in the envelope. He puts the envelope back in the folder and the folder back in the file box.

  He leaves the box in the middle of the room and returns to his son’s room. During the time he has been gone, Omar has taken out a set of iron knights one of the children gave him for his birthday. Adam lies on the floor next to Omar, staring at the ceiling. Omar leans against his arm.

  He tries to conjure again the kiss from the reverie, but all he can see are the white splotches on the ruined photograph. He sits up. He feels sick, disgusted with himself, to be thinking about the photographs with his son next to him. He pinches his cheeks hard enough to make himself wince, to wipe out the splotched photograph, but the moment he releases his fingers, a new thought arrives: he needs another magazine.

  “The knights are coming to save the good vegan dinos from the meteorite.” Omar hands him the model apatosaurus. “You be the dino.”

  Adam takes the apatosaurus.

  “When the meteorite comes, the carnivorous dinos are going to get burned up.”

  There is the bodega five blocks away. The bodega doesn’t have much, but the place in Times Square is too far.

  He looks at his watch. Four twenty-five. His mother is still with her patients. Rachida will not be home until after nine. Eva is in the kitchen. He could be bac
k in twenty minutes.

  “I need to run to the store to get something. I’ll be right back. If you need anything, Eva’s here.”

  Omar will be fine.

  He gets to his feet. Twenty minutes. There will be no need to mention to Rachida or his mother that he left Omar with Eva for twenty minutes. For twenty minutes, no need to go through the awkward exercise of telling Eva that he is leaving.

  He places the apatosaurus next to his son, leans over to kiss his dark glossy hair, and shuts Omar’s door.

  40

  Myra’s office is chilly. She puts on the wool cardigan she keeps on her desk chair and buttons it over her cotton shirt. Then she goes to fetch her patient from the waiting room, a young woman with tight jeans and high-heeled boots who ruins every relationship with a cruelty that emerges as soon as any closeness evolves. The gorgeous viper, an ex-boyfriend called her.

  Is she smelling smoke? She’s definitely smelling something strange. “Excuse me,” she says to her patient. “I smell smoke. Just wait here a moment.” She returns to her office and opens the back door.

  There is definitely smoke.

  She hurries back to the waiting room. “I’m sorry, but I need to go upstairs. I’m going to have to ask you to leave. I’ll call you tonight to reschedule.”

  She races up the back stairs. No one is in the kitchen. The smoke is pouring down the main stairs. She dials 911.

  Then she hears Omar’s cry. “Eva. Eva. I’m scared.”

  She drops the phone and bounds up the stairs. If Omar is here, then Adam is too.

  “I’m coming, Omar,” she yells. The fire seems to be in the music room. Is Adam inside? The laundry basket in the doorway bursts into flames. Where is Eva?

  Omar is at the top of the stairs, gripping the rail. His face is streaming with tears, his cheeks black with soot. The door frame of the music room is on fire.

  She reaches Omar, peels his fingers from the rail. She is hollering, “Adam, Adam, Adam…” The smoke is so thick, she can barely breathe. She pulls Omar down the stairs.

  The railing catches fire. A piece of wood crashes toward them. Omar screams.

  A clump of hair over his ear is on fire.

  Myra smashes Omar’s burning hair into her wool sweater. She rolls Omar’s head against her body. He goes limp. She picks him up and stumbles with him the rest of the way down the stairs. She is still screaming, “Adam, Adam,” but she is heaving, struggling for air, and her voice is hardly a whisper.

  Neighbors are on the street. A man is on the stoop. He takes Omar. “His hair caught fire. Over his ear.” She is barely audible. “Cold water. Run his head under cold water.”

  The man dashes with Omar across the street.

  “My son…”

  The sirens are drowning out her words. She can see fire trucks turning the corner, firemen running toward the house.

  “Get her off those stairs,” one of the firemen hollers. Someone drags her to the curb.

  There is a terrible pain in her abdomen, where she pressed Omar’s burning hair into her side. “My son,” she gasps to the fireman now holding her arm. “The third floor … front room … our housekeeper…”

  Ambulance workers are racing down the street and people are pointing them toward the building where Omar is inside. Dark spots are invading her eyes. Her knees buckle. Everything goes dark.

  FOUR

  1

  Rachida, called by the neighbor because Adam was crying too uncontrollably to speak, waits outside the pediatric operating room. She paces, kicking the toes of her hospital clogs against the linoleum floor. She perches on the edge of a chair chewing a cuticle. She rests a cheek on the rough plaster wall.

  When the surgeon emerges, he places a hand on her shoulder. “Your son is going to be okay. The good news is that because his face was pressed into his grandmother’s abdomen, there doesn’t seem to be serious inhalation injury. The burns, though, are serious. He has third-degree burns on 25 percent of his scalp and the top of his right ear. We shaved his head and debrided the dead skin on his scalp. Where the dermis was destroyed, we applied a porcine xenograft to prevent loss of fluids and infection until a skin graft can be done.”

  Caro, called by Rachida, waits outside the adult operating room. She sits with her eyes locked on the wall, a sensation of something black and heavy filling the cavity from her throat to her groin.

  The attending doctor on the burn unit comes to talk with her. He pulls his chair so close, their feet are almost touching. Her mother has a second-degree burn the size of a handkerchief on her torso, the injury complicated by the cotton fibers from her shirt that adhered to her skin from rolling Omar’s burning head across her middle. “More concerning is your mother’s coughing and wheezing, evidence of smoke inhalation damage. We’ve intubated her so as to prevent her airway closing from edema.”

  Adam waits in the hospital lobby with his head in his hands and a plastic bag at his feet.

  2

  Rachida is not allowed to see Omar until after he has left the recovery room and been delivered to the pediatric burn unit. When an aide finally escorts her to Omar’s room, she hurls herself toward the bed where her child, having surfaced from the anesthesia, is now sleeping, his head wrapped in white gauze, an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose, an IV in his left arm.

  Rachida buries her face in Omar’s belly and weeps.

  Someone grabs her arm. “What the hell are you doing?”

  Rachida looks up. A wiry man with gray hair drawn back into a stubby ponytail and a badge that says HOWARD TALIS, R.N. is scowling at her. As he pulls her away from Omar, she realizes that her hospital scrubs have confused him. “Dr. Amzalag. The mother,” she whispers.

  “You know better than to put your germy head so near to a burn site.”

  Talis draws a chair next to the bed. “You can sit here. He’s going to be out for a while. Actually, I’m going to keep him sedated for the rest of the night since we’re going to have to open that bandage in six hours to check for exudate, and that can hurt like hell.”

  Rachida sits in the chair. She wipes her eyes on the sleeve of her scrubs. Talis hands her a box of tissues and pours her a glass of ice water from a wet plastic pitcher. She drinks. The surgeon told her that had the burn extended another eighth of an inch, Omar would have lost the top of his ear.

  “You’re lucky. Scalps are good. They’re thick. He’s got a third-degree burn, but it didn’t hit bone. The porcine graft lets us avoid the dressing changes. We can keep it there until he’s strong enough for the autologous graft procedure.”

  “I’m a dermatologist. Or was. I’m a respecialization fellow in primary care now.”

  “Well, you probably know all this, then. He won’t get hair from the skin graft, but when he gets older, you can do a tissue expander from the adjacent scalp hair. It usually works pretty well.”

  Rachida takes Omar’s hand. She rubs her wet thumb over her child’s dry skin. He breathes into the oxygen mask.

  “Your mother saved him. She jammed that head right into her belly and put the fire out on her sweater.”

  “Mother-in-law.” Rachida wants to climb into the bed with Omar and cradle him in her arms. She inhales the smells of her injured child, pushing out of mind what might have happened if it had, in fact, been her own mother.

  3

  At first, Talis worked the graveyard shift, eleven at night until seven in the morning, only when he had a foster baby living with him, but now he has come to prefer it. The doctors, save the skeletal crew of residents and the occasional on-call attendant, are gone. The visitors, save the parents dozing on chairs or cots next to their children, are gone. The night has a rhythm: the fussing of tired children accompanied by the anxious nursing calls of their parents as midnight approaches, calls that have more to do with their fears about their children’s futures than any present needs, then the quiet as children and adults fall into exhausted sleep, the rounds every two hours, the inexorability of the sky lighteni
ng from black to steel to pale blue to, on days he has come to think contain hope, streaks of peach and boysenberry.

  The first foster baby was three years ago after he’d gotten so angry he’d nearly come to blows with the hospital administrator. For three weeks, a little boy, burned with an iron by a crack-addict mother, had been on the unit, the nurses and the social worker praying that a foster parent could be found for him before he was discharged. When no foster parent had been willing to take on the continuing wound care, the child was sent to a group home to be watched by shifts of child-care workers. That day, with the child’s sad face stuck in his head, Talis submitted an application to be a foster parent. Since then, he has taken home five children from the burn unit, all cases of neglect or abuse. Two stayed only a few days, until a longer placement could be found, but three, including a seventeen-month-old girl who’d been left to wander the apartment with a pot of boiling water on the stove while her father slept in front of the television, remained with him for more than a month.

  During the times he has a foster child, Mrs. O’Connor, his landlady, stays overnight with the child while he is at work. He always tries to pay her and she always refuses. “Dearie, a human being doesn’t get paid for doing God’s work.” When he arrives home after dawn, the child will be sleeping, rows of onesies and socks and feeted pajamas Mrs. O’Connor has washed by hand hanging on a wooden drying rack she has her husband bring up from her own apartment.

  The healing children and Mrs. O’Connor and his nursing supervisor, who somehow always finds personal days and vacation time to give him when he has a foster child, have made him believe, in the face of the inhumanity he sees inscribed on the flesh of these children, that the world is still more good than evil.

  4

  At three o’clock, Talis checks Omar’s pulse and blood pressure. The mother is snoring softly on a cot set up by the child’s bed. The vitals are fine.