All right, she said.
The way these walks would work is, she’d call me at the store before I left if she was going to be able to meet me. Her husband didn’t know about us walking together. Even though, as I’ve said, it was innocent back then, she was afraid to tell him about me walking with her. Apparently, from what I’ve gathered, he doesn’t want her to have any friends, especially men. Even though it sounds like he doesn’t want to spend a lot of time talking with her, he doesn’t want anyone else doing so. So I’d wait ten to fifteen minutes after locking everyone else out, and if she didn’t call I’d go home. Again, as hard as it is to rationalize now, this seemed innocent.
Of course she called. Ready to confess? she said on the phone. Meet me at the corner.
Nothing happened that night. I admitted that if I could control my dreams I’d want to dream about her. She admitted she’d suspected that, and said she thought it was nice of me to say it, and then we talked about dreams and the things people are afraid of and moved gently away from the confession until she had to get back home. I walked her back as far as the abandoned Heinz plant. The apartment complex where she lived with her husband was just across some railroad tracks from the plant, a place we’d come to haunt.
I walked home alone, believing nothing was going to happen. I was, after all, a moral person. A good person. And so was Angela. Nothing was going to happen, of that I was sure. I remember cursing God that night as I walked home, because nothing was going to happen.
• • •
Sometimes I think God is just too cruel. That night as I walked home was one of those times, but not the first. Not by a long shot.
Once, back when I was still a cook, I burned myself. Bad. I hadn’t been to bed the night before. I’d been up all night trying to keep a friend from killing herself. Her boyfriend had been beating up on her pretty regular for months, and had finally bruised her enough to be through with her. He’d taken his stuff and moved back in with his former girlfriend, after telling Stephanie, my friend, how worthless she was. He had her believing it, the bastard.
She’d called me, crying, and told me he’d left her and she had this bottle of pills in front of her, along with whiskey, and she wanted to take the pills. I’d gone right over and spent the whole night and most of the morning talking her out of it, trying to get her to see the guy for the asshole he was.
Why is it some women have such a hard time seeing the assholes that are right in front of them? These same women can easily spot them from the distance of other people’s lives. But when they’re so close to them you’d think they couldn’t possibly miss seeing them, they can’t see them no matter what. That’s always been a mystery to me.
By the time I left her to go to work, I had the pills and she was sleeping, exhausted. I really needed to sleep, and I should have called in sick, but back then I was what they call a trooper. For the first few hours, everything was fine, but as the night wore on I was finding it harder to concentrate, to keep my mind on what I was doing. It was getting hard just to keep my eyes open.
It was a slow night. The manager had already sent the other cook home, and I was already starting on some cleaning when we got a late rush. There’d been some ball game or concert or something at the local high school, and suddenly the lobby was full and I had to get some chicken in the warmer. I breaded and dropped four pots without incident. It was when I was getting the chicken off the stove it happened.
Back then, we cooked the chicken in pots. When the timer went off, you’d pop the pressure valve on the pot and cut off the burner at the same time, wait a few seconds for the pressure to release, pop the lid and place it upside down on the rack right over the stove, then grab the pot’s handle with one hand and the edge of the pot with the other, a folded rag in between your hand and the metal, of course. You’d lift the pot and bring it over to the grease table where there’d be a rack waiting for the chicken. The shortening would flow back into the reservoir where it’d be pumped through a filter into a second reservoir from which you’d refill the pot for the next round and place it back on the stove.
The accident happened at the grease table. What you’re supposed to do is hit the table at just the right spot on the pot so that it makes it easy to tip the pot over onto the table, pouring the chicken over the waiting rack. Because I was so tired and not concentrating as well as I should have been, and this is the part to this day I don’t really know exactly, somehow with the last pot I missed the right spot. Either I hit too high on the pot or too low. What I do know is the hot shortening splashed up over my hand when the pot hit the edge of the table, at which point I dropped the pot and more shortening splashed up and got my arm. I was not quiet about the pain. The manager came back, saw what had happened, and had one of the girls up front drive me to the emergency room.
I had second and third degree burns, and to this day there’s a scar on the back of my left hand to remind me. But the burns weren’t what had me cursing God that night.
After I’d been treated and was waiting in the lobby for a prescription for the pain, a woman came in, wearing some sort of sleeping gown, with something wrapped in a blanket in her arms. It was clear the woman had been crying, that she was all cried out. Her eyes were red and puffy and I don’t think she could see clearly at all. I was standing in front of the desk, waiting for my drugs. The woman must have thought I was a doctor. She ran up to me and whimpered, it was almost pure animal that sound, with the word “Help” just barely recognizable. When she held the bundle out to me, one edge of the blanket fell away and I saw what was wrapped in it. That’s when I cursed God.
There’d been a fire in an old house, one of those broken up into four or five small apartments for college students. The police would determine it was old, poorly insulated wiring that started the fire. This woman had been asleep when the fire started in the apartment next to hers. Probably because of the age of the house, the fire spread fast. One of her neighbors got into her apartment through a window and dragged her out half-asleep. By the time she was awake enough to think of her baby and yell his name, the entire apartment was engulfed in flames. The neighbor used a hose people watered their back yard gardens with to wet himself down and ran back in through the flames after the baby and brought it out, but it was too late.
Hysterical, the woman had run with it the five blocks to the hospital and the emergency room, where she held the baby out to me, charred black and smoking. There was nothing anyone could have done. Two nurses came out from behind the desk. One took the tiny corpse from her hands and the other put her arms around the woman and led her to one of the chairs along the wall of the lobby.
I got my pills and got out of there. I had no idea what to say to that woman, or to anyone.
• • •
Just last night, on the late news, there was a report on the latest in a series of mysterious deaths of babies. In the last several months, five babies have been found burned to death in their cribs. They showed a blurred photograph of the one last night. It was charred just like the one that night in the emergency room. The weird thing about these deaths, though, is that nothing else in the rooms burns. Just the babies. The parents have all found the charred bodies lying in cribs that are charred themselves, but not burned.
The police are calling them murders, and are looking for a serial murderer who’s going around somehow setting fire to babies in their cribs. None of the parents, it’s been reported, have heard any unusual crying. None of the parents have heard anything. No smoke detectors have gone off, and nothing else has been burned. Just the babies and the charred cribs.
On the report last night, they interviewed some guy from the college who was talking about what he called SHC, spontaneous human combustion. He said it’s possible there is no killer. That these babies are just going off, that’s the way he put it, on their own. He said there are documented cases of this spontaneous human combustion, though w
hen pressed by the reporter he admitted that all the cases he knew of involved adults. And there weren’t that many. Five in just a few months in the same town was odd, he admitted. Statistically, he said, it was virtually impossible. Certainly unprecedented.
The police, the reporter concluded, still believe it’s the work of some sick arsonist, and are continuing to follow any and all leads.
What if all this is just some sick person’s way of cursing God?
The Mother Whose Son Wasn’t First
My son wasn’t the first. They told me he was the fifth. That’s what the detectives said. The fifth victim, they called him. I had called him Samuel.
I woke at three that morning. That was when Samuel was usually waking up in his crib in the next room. I could always hear him. We had bought all the right hardware. We could hear him, Harlan and I, making those little noises he made in his sleep, as we fell asleep.
It’s better than one of those ocean sounds machines, Harlan had said the night he’d set it up.
And it was. Listening to Samuel that night while Harlan held me made it easy to drift off to sleep. I’d been worried I wouldn’t be able to sleep at all, that all the fears pressing themselves into my thoughts, all the things that could go wrong, would not let me sleep until exhaustion took over. But having Samuel’s little sleep gurgles, amplified by the monitor, was enough to reassure me and let me sleep. A few months later, when Harlan and I started making love again, Samuel’s sleep sounds was a better backdrop to sex than any music we’d ever tried.
I like to imagine that, when he wasn’t sleeping, when he’d come awake and see the light from the hall reflecting on the birds that floated over his crib, he’d hear the sounds of our lovemaking over the monitor and relax and drift back off to sleep.
Samuel starting to cry around three in the morning would always wake me, and I’d go in and feed him and sing to him and put him back in his crib and, humming, watch till he closed his eyes and went back to sleep. This was our ritual. For months, every morning was the same. I’d come awake to Samuel making those little cries that always came before any real tears, and I’d be in the next room with my breast out before he had the chance to really get going. Sometimes Harlan would join me in Samuel’s room, and he’d sing with me.
But that morning I woke to silence. It seemed strange, though it took a minute for it to dawn on me why it was strange. At three in the morning even mothers don’t think as fast as they might later in the day. Where are Samuel’s little cries? I thought finally. I could hear Harlan, his calm snoring, but nothing was coming from the monitor. Must be on the blink, I remember thinking. Damn. I hoped it was only the batteries, and not some problem with the wires or something inside the thing.
I got out of bed and headed for Samuel’s room, still expecting to find him in those first little cries. Out in the hall was when I first noticed the odor. It smelled like someone had put some bacon grease in a pan and turned the burner on and walked outside to get a breath of air and ended up talking to the neighbor, forgetting about the pan and the grease until smoke started drifting out the kitchen window.
Who the hell’s up cooking this early? I thought. Or this late, I reminded myself. Must be one of the neighbor’s kids, I thought. Two of them were in college and often got home this late. Must have the munchies, I thought.
But the odor got stronger as I walked down the hall, and when I pushed open the door to Samuel’s room, the door that was always left ajar so the light from the hall would keep his room from being too dark, I knew the smell was coming from the crib. Even before I turned on the light, I knew my baby was gone.
Harlan woke to my screams. I screamed for a long time, Harlan says. He ran into the room to find me sitting in the rocker beside Samuel’s crib, holding the charred body of our son in my arms and screaming. Samuel was still smoldering. I ended up with second-degree burns on my arms, though at the time I couldn’t feel any pain that insignificant.
Harlan called 911 from the bedroom and came back in to hold me. I was still screaming. Kneeling beside the rocker, he put his arms around me and cried while I kept screaming with Samuel there in my arms. My gown was streaked with the milk flowing from my breasts.
I was still screaming, intermittent, when the paramedics arrived, along with the police. Harlan went to let them in.
Harlan had to help the paramedics pry our son from my arms. Then he had to pretty much carry me down the hall to the living room where the detectives had settled after looking in the crib at the burned body of my son. They had made some phone calls, and it was while they were talking to us that the coroner arrived.
This was when they told us our son was apparently the fifth victim. They spoke to us in quiet tones, as if any loud noise might break us. It didn’t matter to me how soft they spoke. All that mattered was that while they were speaking to my husband and I some stranger was putting my son into a leather bag and zipping it up. I saw the coroner carry the little bag past us and out the door. I got up to run after him.
That’s my son, I shouted. Where are you taking my son? I have to feed him, I shouted. When Harlan held me and kept me from following the coroner outside, I screamed some more.
The detectives wanted to ask us some questions, but the paramedics insisted they had to get me to the hospital, to have the burns on my arms, which were red and cracking, checked out and taken care of. I was put in the ambulance, and Harlan got into a police car which followed us to the hospital. I wasn’t screaming anymore. I just sat there in the back of the ambulance with my arms crossed just under my breasts.
One of the paramedics, I’ve always imagined, later told his girlfriend that it was eerie, that at one point he looked over at me and could have sworn I had a child in my arms. Must have been the light, he told her.
It wasn’t the light. It was the ghost of my Samuel there in my arms. I felt him there, felt his little gums on my breast, milk flowing out the nipple and through the ghost body of my Samuel. My ghost child rode with me in that ambulance, all the way to the hospital, sucking and making those little noises he always made while I fed him. He was so hungry that night.
When they pulled me out of the ambulance and put me in a wheelchair to wheel me in to the hospital, Samuel stopped feeding. I placed him over my shoulder to burp him and he was gone and my arms were suddenly so empty I could feel the pain of the burns.
Then Harlan was beside me holding my hand as they wheeled me in. The hospital was so bright, it was like it was another world. The burns on my arms were grotesque in that light, and Harlan looked too sad to be real. Nothing could be real in that light, I thought. Nothing but sorrow.
They wheeled me to a table and Harlan helped me up onto it. A doctor came and talked to me as he rubbed something on the burns on my arms. I have no memory of what he said, but I remember thinking his face looked like it was peeling in that light. I guess he was tired. He’d probably been on call for more than twenty-four hours by the time he was rubbing that ointment over my arms. But right then I thought he needed something rubbed into his face, to keep his skin from sliding off. I reached up and touched his face. He was surprised but didn’t stop me. He asked Harlan how I got the burns on my arms.
Our son, Samuel, Harlan told him. He was still smoking when she picked him up out of the crib and held him.
The doctor looked at Harlan. In that light that turned everything into something else, I can’t imagine what Harlan looked like to that doctor.
After the doctor finished with my arms, a nurse came in and wrapped them in bandages. She was pregnant, about six or seven months along, and I couldn’t look at her. I closed my eyes while she wrapped my arms, and I could hear Harlan sniffling, trying to keep from starting to cry again. Later he told me he couldn’t look at the nurse either.
The detectives came over after the nurse was finished. They’d been waiting on the other side of the room while I was treated.
> The older detective, I think he said his name was DeGreco, asked the questions. I could tell he’d seen his share of things in that light.
Ma’am, he said, I know this is a terrible time, but I need to ask you some questions. Can you answer some questions for me?
I nodded my head, and Harlan put his arm around me. If it hadn’t been for that light and the burning in my arms, I don’t think I’d have been enough in this world to even hear what he was saying. Where was Samuel? was what I was thinking. What have they done with my son?
How did you come to find your son, he paused, not knowing how to put it, the way he was when you found him? he finally said.
Samuel always gets me up at three to feed him, I said. I woke up even though I didn’t hear him crying, and went in and found him. I looked down at my empty, bandaged arms that were still burning despite the ointment. Harlan’s arm tightened around my shoulders.
Did either of you hear anything strange before you found him? DeGreco asked.
We both shook our heads and Harlan was able to actually say, Nothing.
It’s just like the other four, the younger detective said. I don’t think I ever heard his name. He let the older man who said his name was DeGreco do most of the talking. I remember thinking a couple of times that he was a ghost, or an angel, standing there in that light so quiet and intense.
Once I almost asked him, Where were you when my son was burning? Why didn’t you protect him? What kind of guardian angel are you? I almost said. I wonder what he’d have said if I had asked him that? In that light, anything was possible. Anything, that is, except my son.
It was Samuel’s time, the angel might have said. Some burn more quickly in the flesh than most, but I was there to pull him from the flames of the body and lift him into an air no flame can feed off. All that’s left of his burning, I imagine the angel, who was no angel but a detective seen in the light of that emergency room, saying, is in your arms.
Report from a Place of Burning Page 3