Tinderbox

by Lisa Gornick

  “I know. But behind the feeling that I should do this, for everyone, there’s a feeling that I want to. Having Adam with me this past month has cured me of the need to keep everything perfect. And the house is so large. I’ll take the top floor, and Adam and Omar can have the third floor. We can rent out your office. I’ve talked to Dad. He says he owes Adam a down payment, since he helped me with my apartment. Between what I’d make if I sold my apartment and what Dad would give Adam, we’d be fine.”

  Myra can see it already, Caro in what had once been Myra’s room, Adam using the music room for his bedroom and office, Omar in the room where he’d stayed before the fire.

  She would leave the furniture—what survived—as her gift. On the fourth floor, the bed frames and dressers were saved, but the mattresses had to go. On the third floor, everything had been destroyed by flames or smoke or water. The piano had suffered all three. It was the only item over which she cried. Afterward, she gave herself a stern lecture. Her family was spared. Omar is recovering nicely. Objects, not even pianos, do not deserve tears.

  On the parlor floor, all the upholstered items—the stuffing infused with smoke—were added to the garbage heap. That left the farm table, the Indo-Pakistani and Tibetan rugs, the Empire sideboard she and Larry bought when they were first married. The secretary Larry’s father gave them when he closed his office. The stools the children sat on doing their homework at the soapstone counters. These items she will leave behind.

  22

  Rachida departs for Detroit before dawn on the first day of July. Omar says goodbye to her the night before. As her parting present, she gives him a cell phone. “You can call me now, whenever you want. I programmed my number in.” She shows him how to use the pre-set dialing. She will be back in two weeks for a visit. In August, when his camp is over, Adam will take him on the train to Detroit.

  Omar does not cry. He wanted to, he tells Adam as they walk to camp the next morning, but he felt that he should not. They are staying in New York, Adam has told Omar, because he has taken a job as a teacher. He hopes, he has explained, to eventually get a job at Omar’s school, but there are no openings. For now, he will be teaching seventh-grade English at an all-boys school.

  With his baseball cap on, Omar looks like any other kid. Before he left the hospital, the social worker had met with Rachida and Adam to counsel them on how to help Omar with the questions he would inevitably be asked about the bald part of his head or the headgear he might wear to cover it. “We need to help Omar understand that most of the time children who stare at him or ask questions are not doing it to be mean. They’re doing it because they’re curious, just as he would be if he didn’t know so much about burns and scars.” On Omar’s first day back at school, he took off the baseball cap to show the kids in his class where the graft had been stitched. “I can’t show you where it came from,” he told them, “because I don’t think the teachers would like me showing you my butt!”

  Adam takes Omar’s hand as they cross the street. “Auntie Caro will be picking you up for the next few weeks. Her school’s out for the summer, and I’m trying to finish my screenplay before my new job starts.”

  “Can Eva pick me up sometimes?”

  Adam feels a moment of panic. Has no one explained to Omar that Eva will not be coming back? Before the fire, he would have mumbled something and left it for Rachida to talk with Omar. Now he forces himself to look at his son. “You wish Eva were still here?”

  Omar nods. “But I know she’s not.”

  They reach the sidewalk and Adam releases Omar’s hand.

  “Do you know where she is?” Omar asks.

  “No, I don’t.”

  Inside the camp classroom, Adam rubs the special sunblock they keep stored in a cubby into Omar’s scalp. He reminds Omar to keep his baseball cap on when he goes outside and to rinse off his head in the shower after he goes swimming. He kisses him on the cheek and watches his son turn to join the table of children making potato block prints.

  23

  Caro spends the afternoon in her apartment in cutoff jeans, packing books. When the time comes to get Omar at camp, she looks outside at the hot haze, thinks screw it, and walks out the door as she is. Over the past few months, she has put back a few of the pounds she lost in Morocco, but the seesaw of secretive nighttime eating followed by daytime starvation has blessedly not returned. No weaving and unraveling. Rather, she feels as though she has settled into the body she was meant to have: no tire of shame hiding her shape, but still flesh covering her bones.

  She walks north on Columbus Avenue, past Dominican grandmothers in long dark dresses and vendors selling coconut and lemon ices. Inside the school, she waves to the camp’s security guard and makes her way upstairs to Omar’s group’s room. She gathers up Omar’s wet bathing trunks and towel and stuffs them inside his camp bag. “It occurred to me,” she says as they leave, “that you don’t have a bike. Did you have one in Detroit?”

  “A baby one with training wheels. I never learned how to ride without them.”

  “Well, seems like now’s as good a time as any. There’s a bike store on Ninety-sixth Street.”

  It is surprisingly simple. Budget or better construction, red or blue for bike and helmet.

  “Better construction,” Caro says.

  “Blue,” Omar says.

  Caro wheels the new bike down the hill and into Riverside Park. Omar is wearing the new blue helmet. She taught Adam how to ride a bike after their father had been too impatient. She finds a wide, deserted path and runs alongside Omar, holding the handlebars. “Pedal faster,” she yells.

  Omar pauses and the bike slows.

  “The faster you pedal, the steadier you’ll be.”

  Caro watches her nephew absorbing the paradox with the pleasure of a seven-year-old wrapping his mind around an idea. He licks his lips, lowers his chin, and pedals fast. She runs beside him, and then, at the instant when she feels the balance shift from her hands into his body and the bike itself, she lets go and he sails forward.

  24

  They celebrate with cheeseburgers and fries and icy sodas at the outdoor café in the park where Caro ate years before with her mother when their conversation had veered in a direction her mother always claims inspired her teleology of love. Since Caro was last here, the enormous sandlot has been outfitted with circus rings. A few accomplished swingers are now making graceful arcs from ring to ring, the movement all in their hips, while the rest of the adults laugh self-consciously at their own clumsy attempts and children climb on top of an overturned trash can to reach the rings.

  “Look,” Omar says, holding up his half-eaten burger. “That’s Nurse Talis.”

  Caro looks up to see Talis dip his hands into a plastic bag filled with ground chalk. His arm muscles bulge as he loops, pelvis first, from ring to ring.

  “Nurse Talis, Nurse Talis,” Omar cries. Omar stands to wave.

  Talis squints in their direction. He waves back. He does a final course over the rings, agile as a monkey, then climbs the steps toward Omar and Caro, wiping his hands on the back of his jeans.

  Caro pulls out a chair and extends her hand. She wonders if Talis will remember her from Omar’s second night in the hospital, when she came at one in the morning. “I’m Caro, Omar’s aunt. We met once.”

  “I don’t think you want to touch these hands.” He looks at her in a way that seems to take in the moistness across her collarbone, the grease smudge on her shinbone. “You gave me a note to take to your mother.”

  “Have a seat.” She is embarrassed at the sound of her voice. Too high and thin.

  Talis sits. He leans back in the chair, stretching his legs out to the side. “So how are you, bud?” he asks Omar.

  “I just learned how to ride a bike.”

  “No kidding. That’s a big deal. I’m going to have a beer to celebrate that.”

  “Can you teach me how to do the rings?”

  “Sure. If it’s okay with your auntie.”r />
  Caro nods.

  Omar jumps to his feet. He forgot to put on his baseball cap after taking off the helmet. “I’ll go practice until you’re ready.”

  Caro looks at his half-eaten food. “Are you done?”

  “I’m full,” he calls as he heads for the steps.

  “Do you think he needs to cover his head?” she asks Talis.

  Talis glances up at the sky. “He’ll be okay. The sun’s low now.” He waves over the waitress and orders his beer. “How’s he doing?”

  “Very well, I think. I was worrying about him today because his mother went back to Detroit this morning. His parents are separating.”

  “Sorry to hear that. It happens a lot after a fire.”

  It is hard to tell how old Talis is, but she guesses ten years older than she is. She dampens a paper napkin and rubs the grease smudge off her shin. Then she sneaks a look at his left hand.

  25

  Larry has insisted on managing the sale of the house, the price of which he has had determined by an appraiser. “What you have will eventually go to the kids,” he e-mailed Myra. “But it’s not good for you to be cash poor now.” She knew immediately that he was right, that she should maintain her assets so she will not be dependent on Adam and Caro when the time comes for her to stop her practice. And although he doesn’t say it, she is certain that he also means that it is not good for Adam to be subsidized.

  In May, she found a two-bedroom apartment on Central Park West with a layout that with slight modification will allow her to have an office at home. It has high ceilings and egg-and-dart moldings and a newly renovated kitchen entirely unlike the earthy one of her brownstone but pleasing to her, with stainless-steel counters and ash cabinets opened by chrome pulls. There are picture windows in the living room from which she can see the great green rectangle of Central Park with the blue oval of the reservoir. There is an alcove that will fit a grand piano. In the room that will be her bedroom, French doors lead to a small Juliet balcony with cream balusters where she imagines having her morning coffee.

  It is a perfect apartment for a woman living alone, and that, she realizes, is precisely what she desires now. She buys a hundred-year-old Series O Steinway with the original ivory keys, the only antique she intends to have in the new apartment. She hires the super to do the alterations needed to convert the second bedroom into an office from which the rest of her apartment will not be visible. She hires a good painter to turn the already skim-coated living-room walls a silvery gray and those of the office a café au lait, leaving the rest to be done in a color, white dove, whose very name brings her pleasure.

  She takes her summer break earlier than usual, moving into the new apartment at the end of July. The city feels empty save for her children, Adam about to take Omar to Detroit for a visit with Rachida, Caro involved in supervising the renovations on the house. Without the constraints of her patient schedule, she takes her walks in the morning, circling the reservoir, some days on the jogging path, other days, as she does this morning in early August, on the more ample bridle path. From the eastern side of the reservoir, she can pick out her new building in the skyline that towers over the trees. It is a magical, almost mythic view: the water, the trees, the sculptural buildings, stately as dowagers.

  It is just ten o’clock, but the sun is already hot, the waistband of her shorts chafing against the new skin that has formed where she was burned. Now, five months after the fire, she can see what happened with Eva more evenhandedly: as with her marriage, the ending involved a mutual rupture, a mutual betrayal. Although she would never have chosen either, both shook her loose, catapulted her forward.

  Moving her things out of the house, she found the Smokey Bear editorial, the edges curled and rimmed with soot, still stuck with a pushpin to her bulletin board. Across the top, in her own hand, The Tragedy of Good Intentions. She removed the pushpin, crumpled the newsprint into a ball.

  She stops to rest on the stone battements between the reservoir and the tennis courts. What Eva did was what fire does in the forest. She cleared the tangled underbrush: protection against greater catastrophe, preparation for a new season’s growth.

  26

  Adam takes Omar to visit Rachida—a fourteen-hour overnight train trip to Toledo and then an hour bus ride on to Detroit. They will stay three weeks, Layla decamping to a friend’s apartment while they are there. Adam will watch Omar during the first week while Rachida still has to work, then stay alone in what was once his home so he can pack up his remaining things while Rachida and Omar spend two weeks at a resort on Lake Michigan.

  Rachida meets them at the bus station. Her face is pasty and bloated, with a painful-looking blemish on her chin. She kisses Omar without smiling.

  The house is even dingier than Adam recalls. He sits in the dank living room drinking orange juice and flipping among the four channels available without cable while Rachida settles Omar for a nap in his old room. When she comes back downstairs, he turns off the television.

  “Was Layla mad about having to stay somewhere else?”

  Rachida sits next to him on the couch. She puts her feet up on the coffee table. “She moved out.”

  “For three weeks?”

  “For good.”

  Turning to look at Rachida’s face—the bloat and blemish, Adam now understands, marks of misery—he feels sad for her. It is not her fault that she doesn’t love him. It is hard to imagine how anyone could.

  “She decided she doesn’t want to be with a woman. She’s dating a guy now, a neurosurgeon.”

  Adam pats Rachida’s leg, cautiously, the way he might touch an unknown dog. “Do you want a sip of my orange juice?” he asks.

  “Okay.”

  He hands the glass to Rachida. She drinks most of it and gives the glass back to him. “He has blond hair,” she says. “He wears those shirts with alligators on them.”

  “I hate those.”

  “He plays golf. Layla claims now that she loves golf. She’s full of shit. She went on a golf trip once with her father.”

  “He sounds like a jerk. The neurosurgeon, I mean.”

  “Hassan II irrigated deserts to build golf courses while there were people in the south of Morocco without enough water to have schools.”

  Adam puts an arm around Rachida. She rests her head on his shoulder. She feels like an old friend. This is what they should have always been: friends comforting each other over their heartbreaks.

  27

  Wanting to move into the house free of clutter and junk, Caro plans to use the days with Adam and Omar gone on a blitzkrieg purge of her apartment: weeding through her files, bagging up old clothing to bring to the Salvation Army store, throwing out chipped dishes and frayed towels. Instead, she feels a strange combination of anxiety and lethargy. She spends the first day alone in her apartment in bed until noon, and then reading the newspaper and a novel until dusk. On the second day, she goes through her books, managing to identify only a dozen to give away. She gives up by three o’clock, puts a magazine and a bottle of water into a tote bag, and walks over to the park.

  Since seeing Talis at the circus rings, she has not been able to get him out of her mind: this man who can swing from ring to ring and take care of children with burns. The thoughts are more unpleasant than pleasant, unpleasant because they have made her aware of how many years have gone by, not only since she let herself be touched by a man, but since she has even wanted to be touched.

  She walks by the sandlot. She sits at the café. She orders a diet soda. She orders a salad. She orders a beer. He does not come.

  At night, she cannot get comfortable. Her back hurts, the air conditioner is too loud. The sheets feel rough, then clammy. She gets out of bed and makes tea. She watches the five o’clock morning news, the sky lightening with the approach of day. With the end of Talis’s shift.

  She sits at her desk. On a pad of lined paper, she writes out a script, word for word, inviting Talis for breakfast to talk about a program f
or teaching fire safety to the kids at her school.

  She bites her lip as she dials the hospital number, which she still remembers from the month Omar was there. She asks for Talis, then waits for what seems like a very long time. Had she not given her name, she would hang up.

  It gets only worse once he is on the line. “This is Caro. Omar’s aunt.”

  He doesn’t respond right away. She imagines him trying to recall who she is. Or remembering her and trying not to smirk.

  “I didn’t tell you this, but we’d met, well, I’d seen you before that night I let you stay after visiting hours.”

  Her heart is pounding so hard, she can feel it against her ribs.

  “It was the first night your mother and Omar were in the hospital. You were sleeping in the chair in your mother’s room. I covered you with a blanket.”

  She looks at the piece of paper, with her script written on it, the words a blur through a scrim of tears.

  “You were so damned cute, I had to use my willpower to be professional about it.”

  “Don’t use your willpower,” she whispers into the receiver.

  28

  He has the next night off. In all the years she has lived in the apartment, she has never had a man for dinner other than Adam or her father. Now, with the still empty boxes piled in her living room, she makes a summer salad of frisée greens and chopped shrimp and corn she takes off the husk herself. She makes gazpacho and bakes dinner rolls from a paper tube. She washes her hair, taking care to scrunch it the way Rolando had instructed to bring out the curls, puts on a summer shift that flatters her curves.

  He is taller than she remembers. He wears knee-length khaki shorts and a pressed cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His forearms are long and thin, his wrists graceful. He brings yellow dahlias.

  “I looked for you in the park on Tuesday,” she tells him.

  “I haven’t been there in a while. I had one of the babies with me last week.”

  She doesn’t understand.