Tinderbox

by Lisa Gornick

  Arriving in New York, he takes a cab directly to the hospital. Between the billions of lights and the shadows from the buildings and overpasses as the cab exits the FDR Drive and turns into the hospital entrance, he feels as though he is piercing the hide of a dangerous animal.

  He goes first to see his grandson. Omar is sitting up in bed. Rachida and Adam are in chairs flanking his bedside. They are all staring at the television set mounted on the wall. Omar does not appear to be in pain, but his lips are cracked and his eyes glassy.

  Larry brushes his grandson’s cheek with his lips. Omar’s skin feels too dry.

  “He looks dehydrated to me,” he says to Rachida. “Are they giving him IV hydration?”

  A look of panic crosses Rachida’s face.

  “Did you check the chart?” Larry asks. Rachida’s eyes fill with tears.

  Larry walks out to the nurses’ station. He presents his Tucson hospital ID and asks to read his grandson’s chart. The IV hydration was halted three hours earlier. He asks to speak to the resident on call and then, using all the tact he can muster, outlines the clinical signs of dehydration.

  When he comes back, Omar is sleeping with his mother holding his hand. The sound on the television has been turned off, but Adam is still staring at the screen. Caro has told him that, for tonight, Rachida is going to stay in the room with Omar and that Adam will stay with her.

  “Did you have some dinner?” Larry asks Rachida. It occurs to him that he hasn’t kissed his son or, for that matter, his daughter-in-law either. Now it seems too late, too awkward to maneuver himself close enough to reach their cheeks.

  “Caro went to get sandwiches. She should be back soon.”

  “I’m going to visit Myra.”

  “Okay.”

  “Your mother,” Larry says to Adam, who nods without looking at him.

  Larry waits for the elevator. He hasn’t seen his ex-wife since his father’s funeral nearly six years ago. He holds his breath as he enters her room.

  Myra appears very thin and frail under the bedsheets. She is intubated. She waves her fingers in a way that makes it clear that Caro told her he was coming.

  He kisses her forehead. She feels slightly hot. He looks at the IV rack by her bed to check what she is being given, resisting the impulse to lift her gown to see how extensive her burns are. He sits in the chair next to the bed, overcome with sadness, followed by remorse as he recalls the years of her miscarriages when she lay in bed, racked more with emotional than with physical pain, when his response to her pain was to stay away.

  Myra pats his hand. At Adam and Rachida’s wedding, they had stood side by side under the huppah in Myra’s garden, exchanging no words other than the expected politenesses. At his father’s funeral, she gave him a ceremonial peck on the cheek.

  “So, I have to wait for you to be injured to have some time alone with you?”

  Myra points to the pad next to the bed. He gives it to her. “Take care of Omar,” she writes. Her hand shakes.

  “I will. I checked his chart first thing. He needed his hydration reinstated.”

  “Thank you,” Myra writes.

  “He’s my grandchild too.” Larry pauses. He wants to hold Myra’s hand but fears that she does not want that. “How are you feeling?”

  “Worried where Eva is,” she writes, turning the pad so he can see it. She fixes her eyes on Larry, then picks up the pen again. “Keep having thought…” She puts down the pad.

  Larry reads the words twice before they sink in. Then he leans over and whispers in his ex-wife’s ear, “You think she set the fire.”

  Myra looks at him solemnly—the look he remembers from the first time he made love to her.

  “Police?” she writes.

  Larry tears off the paper and places it in his inside jacket pocket. “Caro and I will handle it. You need to rest now.”

  Myra lifts his fingers to her cheek. She closes her eyes.

  11

  Larry goes with Caro and Adam to Caro’s apartment. Caro turns on the shower and marches her brother into the bathroom. She hands him a fresh towel through the door.

  With Adam in the shower, Larry sits next to his daughter, his sensible daughter, as Myra used to call her, always left to pick up the pieces, and talks to her softly.

  “Your mother seems to suspect that Eva might have set the fire.”

  Caro nods. All afternoon she has struggled with the same thought.

  “Why?”

  Caro sighs. “I don’t know. I know she thought Eva was kind of unstable. She’d stopped letting her watch Omar.”

  “There’s a big leap between kind of unstable and setting a house on fire.” Her father pauses. “Your mother was wondering if we should notify the police.”

  “This is terrible to ask. Would that invalidate the insurance claim?”

  “No. I called my broker in Tucson and ran it by him as a hypothetical. The claim would only be threatened if the fire was purposefully set by the policy owner. But it could hold it up.”

  Caro can hear the water turning off in the bathroom, her brother stumbling around. “Look,” her father says. “Everyone is understandably very upset. It’s not as though there’s any concrete evidence here. I think we should wait a few days and see if Eva shows up. Maybe she just got overwhelmed and went to stay with a friend. If she doesn’t show up by the end of the week, we’ll go down to the precinct and file a report.”

  Caro rests her head on her father’s shoulder. “I never heard Eva mention any friends.”

  “Where do you think she is?”

  “I checked Mom’s house, the synagogue where she goes. I don’t know where else to try. She’s never been anywhere, as far as I know, other than the time she came with us to your house in Willow.”

  Her father looks at her. As a child, she’d felt as if she could hear his thoughts—the glances they exchanged, silent consultations about Adam and how to circumnavigate his emotional landmines.

  He puts his arm around her. “We’ll go in the morning.”

  12

  Caro has not used her mother’s car since the trip to Willow, seven months ago. She opens the glove compartment to check that the registration papers are still there. Beneath them is the snapshot of Eva that Ursula sent, the picture in which Eva looks like a deer caught in headlights.

  She waits on the corner of Ninety-sixth and Broadway for her father to arrive.

  Her father lumbers out of the cab, maneuvering a bag with takeout coffees and bagels with too much cream cheese.

  “Do you want me to drive?” he asks through the open car window.

  “Okay.”

  Not until they are out of the city, on the New York State Thruway heading north, does her father mention that he went to the hospital early this morning so he could talk with the attending doing the morning rounds. “I was worried about your mother running a fever last night. With the smoke inhalation, she’s at risk for pneumonia.”

  There are patches of snow between the highway and the stands of trees. She doesn’t tell her father that she’d also gone back to the hospital. It was one in the morning when she crept into Omar’s room. Both Rachida and Omar were asleep. She sat in a chair watching the two of them until a male nurse doing rounds discovered her. She was sure he would throw her out, but he acted as though it was entirely natural to be visiting in the middle of the night.

  “The aunt?” he whispered. He had pale gray eyes and pale arched brows that suggested the towhead he’d been before his long hair, pulled back in a ponytail, turned the color of steel.

  “Yes,” Caro whispered back. “How’s he doing?”

  “He’s got a lot of painkillers in him. But he’s going to be fine, medically speaking. He’s so young, he won’t suffer self-consciousness from the scarring and alopecia for a while. When he’s closer to full-sized, they’ll be able to cover it with skin cultured from his scalp.”

  Talis, that was the name on the man’s badge, checked the gauges on Omar’s IV and
, without waking him, took his blood pressure and pulse. He left the room, then came back with a glass of apple juice that he handed to Caro. She drank it, aware only then of how thirsty she was.

  “How’s your brother?” he asked.

  “Asleep in my second bedroom. He didn’t even stir when I tried to tell him I was coming here.”

  “You’re a little late for visiting hours.”

  “I’m just going to check on my mother, and then I’ll leave.”

  “Don’t think that’s going to fly there. The nursing staff on that floor are more of the cross your t’s, dot your i’s school than we are here.”

  With the thought of her mother all alone, Caro had to hold herself back from crying.

  “Tell you what. I’ll go check on her and bring you a report.”

  “That would be so great.” Caro tried to smile, but her mouth barely moved. “Could you give her a note from me?”

  “Sure.” Talis stood loosely in the doorway, a man who was comfortable in his body, while she wrote a note to her mother: Dear Mom—Dad and I are going to drive up to Willow in the morning. I’ll come see you when we get back. LOVE, Caro.

  When Talis returned a quarter of an hour later, he beckoned for her to join him in the corridor. Caro had appreciated that he gave her the update on her mother without sugar-coating. Her mother was in pain. The resident had been called to increase her analgesics. Her mother nodded after she read Caro’s note.

  Caro rests her head now against the passenger door. She thinks about Talis, the way he leaned against the doorjamb. The way he watched her as she wrote the note to her mother.

  13

  It is nearly noon by the time they pull into the driveway at Willow. Larry had not expected to see the house again. A couple from the city with two young children have signed a contract to buy it. The closing, which his brother, Henry, will attend, is scheduled for next month. They amicably divided most of their parents’ personal belongings two years ago, after their mother’s death, when they sold her Riverdale house, so that this second household of things seems superfluous. Henry has taken the files their father kept on the construction of the house: the correspondence with Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin studio, the bound architectural drawings. Larry took his father’s gardening gloves and a collection of his grandfather’s jeweler’s tools: a magnifying glass that fits over an eye, miniature pliers and screwdrivers and mallets, pincers for closing links of gold chain. The realtor sold the kitchen table and chairs, the Ping-Pong table and the bunk beds to the buyers, and arranged for everything else to be picked up by the Kingston Salvation Army.

  Opening the car door, he inhales the cold air—mulchy smelling after a winter of decomposing leaves. The heavy brocade drapes, so out of character with the house, which his mother insisted on hanging to cover the drafty casement windows, are drawn. He walks behind the house to the flagstone patio where they have always kept the spare key under a chipped clay pot. It is possible, Larry tells himself, that the realtor drew the drapes.

  The clay pot is turned over, the key gone. Larry feels his pulse quickening. Calm down, he orders himself. Perhaps Henry directed the realtor to remove the key.

  Larry can hear Caro coming around the house to meet him. He points to the overturned clay pot, then tries the kitchen door.

  It is open. Larry holds the door for his daughter. Inside, the house is cold and dark, with a sharp, bitter smell, as though a small animal has died behind one of the cabinets.

  Caro sidles next to him. In August, she recalls, Adam never carried a key. Eva would have seen him using the one under the pot. Gripping her father’s forearm, she walks with him through the living room and then back to the master bedroom wing. The room where her grandparents had slept is empty except for a few pieces of stray packing tape left on the floor. Her father opens the closets, the shower stall door.

  They cross the living room to the second bedroom wing. The guest room is empty. The door to what her grandmother called the children’s room is closed.

  Caro looks at her father. She steps back, leaving it for him to do the deed. Slowly, he opens the door.

  Eva is asleep on the bare mattress of the bottom bunk. She is wearing a wool cap pulled low on her forehead and the yellow jacket Caro’s mother gave her. The black-and-yellow scarf is balled up in her hand. She clutches it against her neck and chin. She is sucking her thumb.

  The thumb in mouth, so familiar from her preschoolers, sets Caro’s mind in motion, the balls and cylinders falling into place with the clarity she depends upon when faced with a crisis with a child at her school. She leads her father into the kitchen.

  “We should let her wake on her own. Can you go get some food? She probably hasn’t eaten anything since she’s been here.”

  Caro tries to remember what Eva likes to eat. Candy. That was what she’d wanted when Caro asked her that first day at the airport if she would like a snack. And no meat. “There’s that New Age sandwich place in the center of town. Get her one of their vegetarian sandwiches: cheese and avocado, something like that. And candy.”

  After her father leaves, Caro drinks some water from the tap. Is Eva being here evidence that she set the fire? Isn’t it equally plausible that Eva was out at the time of the fire? That she returned to see the house roped off and everyone gone? Scared, she came here, the only other place she knew?

  Either way, Eva’s job is over. There is no house now to keep.

  14

  Caro sits on the floor watching Eva sleep. Eva has rolled onto her side, facing Caro, her thumb no longer in her mouth. The scarf has slipped out of her hands onto the floor. There is something hanging around her neck, an antique-looking charm shaped like a hand. Is this what Adam lost or what Uri made to replace it?

  Eva cracks her eyes, then closes them again.

  “Eva. Wake up.”

  Eva curls into herself. She clutches the charm. Then she opens her eyes. She sits up, covering her face as though expecting blows.

  “It is not true,” she whimpers.

  “What is not true?”

  “She was not in the house. She was at the neighbors’ house playing a tile game. It is a lie. The wicked lady, the one who said my mother went back to our house, she is a witch.”

  Caro gets to her feet. Looking down, she can see the albumen color of Eva’s scalp.

  “Only my father was in the house. Looking at his dirty pictures. Drinking his nasty stuff.”

  Caro takes Eva’s hand. “Come,” she says, pulling Eva to her feet. “You’re still half-asleep.” She leads Eva to the bathroom, where someone has left a roll of paper towels on the counter. “Use the toilet. Wash your face.”

  15

  Caro waits in the kitchen for Eva to come out from the bathroom. She can hear the water running. It sounds like the tub. Perhaps Eva is giving herself a sponge bath with the paper towels.

  What was Eva talking about? Her mother and someone she thought was a wicked lady.

  Caro wishes she could talk with her own mother about what to do. Should she ask Eva if she set the fire? Should she tell Eva what happened to her mother and Omar? Do they need to turn Eva over to the police? Or should they take her to a hospital?

  She hears the car coming up the driveway.

  She goes back to the bathroom. The water is still running. “Eva,” she calls through the door, “we have some food for you when you’re ready.”

  The water continues to run. Caro’s heart starts to pound. She knocks on the door. “Eva. Answer me, please.”

  She hears the car engine turning off, the car door opening and closing, and then the crunching sound her father’s shoes make on the gravel path.

  Caro knocks again on the bathroom door. There are no sounds other than the running water. She turns the handle. The bathroom is empty, the water running into the empty tub.

  The door to the children’s room is closed. Caro can hear her father unpacking the bags in the kitchen. She knocks on this door. “Eva?”


  She knocks again, then opens the door. The casement window is open wide, the screen propped against the wall.

  On the floor is Eva’s scarf, on the bed the key to the house.

  16

  Caro knows her father does not believe they will find her. She knows Eva is like one of those nocturnal animals who sense where the shadows fall and how to find caves and hidden burrows, an instinct for where a bat will swoop or an owl pounce. But Caro needs to try. Needs to give Eva a chance to explain herself. For two hours, her father circles the roads near the house with an increasingly larger radius while Caro peers out the car window.

  Before they return to the city, Caro writes Eva a note with her phone numbers. Call me as soon as you get this, she writes. She underlines her phone number. Look in the mailbox at the end of the driveway. I left your scarf and a sandwich and candy for you inside where the animals can’t get at them. She tapes the note to the front door.

  Her father lifts the screen back into the casement window and closes the window. She puts the key back under the clay pot.

  “I’ll call Henry,” he says, “and ask him to remove the key and the things from the mailbox when he’s here next week for the closing.”

  Her father registers her unhappiness that he does not think Eva will come back. Caro refuses to tell him that she thinks the same, that she has already decided that if she doesn’t hear from Eva by the morning, she will call the Willow police and go to her mother’s precinct to file a report.

  At the end of the driveway, her father stops the car so she can put the scarf and the food inside the mailbox. She pushes the door to the mailbox tightly shut and climbs back into the car.

  Her father takes her hands and holds them between his own. “She’s a survivor,” he says. “She did what she could to make herself safe.”

  17

  On the week anniversary of the fire, the day Myra is discharged from the hospital, she realizes that they have already begun to acclimate: the crisis, ceased as a crisis, having shifted to their new circumstances with its own order and logic.