Angela, when I asked, said she didn’t have any scars. I guess that should have told me something.
• • •
Sometimes it’s odd the things you remember. Just a few months ago, we were at the end of one of our walks and were sipping Bailey’s from a flask I had taken to carrying. We were in one of the buildings in better condition of the old Heinz plant. We had found a number of chairs in the rubble and had cleared out a space with some desks in pretty good shape. We often ended our walks there. We were sipping Bailey’s and Angela had straddled my lap so that, when she wasn’t sipping from the flask, she had her arms around my neck and her inner thighs pressed up against my outer thighs. The morality argument had changed by this time.
There we were, holding each other in this burnt-out shell, this place a fire had flashed through, and, while Lena was chasing some sort of insect, jumping and trying to close her mouth around it in midair, Angela was talking about her fears over having a child. Her husband had done such a number on her by that time. She was convinced she was worthless.
I think you’d make a great mother, I told her. I’d love to have a child with you.
I said this into her hair, as she was pressed up against me, her head on my shoulder, her arms around me and my hands on her back, rubbing her back like I often did.
No one’s ever said that to me, she whispered. It almost sounded like she was trying to keep from crying. I held her tighter. Later, I thought, I would tell her how I had never felt the desire to have a child before in my life. But with her I wanted a child. I didn’t tell her that then. It just didn’t seem right, not in that ashen place.
I never did find the time or the place to tell her, and now, of course, I wish I had told her that night. Now that she’s pregnant. With his child.
• • •
Things are different. I can’t even watch bad TV without crying. Even some stupid, insipid half hour situation comedy. If something works out for some couple, if they go through some silly trial in the first sixteen minutes and in the last seven work things out and they hug one another, I can’t stop crying. I keep tissues by the chair I sit in to watch TV to dry the tears. I cry with hour-long dramas and movies and anything where two people struggle through some dilemma and make things work out. I cry because I know what a lie that is. I cry for all I have lost. I cry at home in front of the TV.
Angela’s given her two weeks’ notice.
Tonight I cried with the local news. There was no way not to. They found another baby charred and dead in its crib. Again, like the others, nothing else in the room burned, and the parents never heard anything, no crying of the baby as it started to burn, no wailing of the fire alarm on the wall almost right next to the crib, no sounds of broken glass or forced entry. Nothing. Like all the others. The police have no suspects, the reporter said. She wasn’t smiling. Sometimes a certain amount of decorum is required.
What is going on? I can’t stop crying. All over town, babies are going off, like little Molotov cocktails, in their cribs. Seven of them so far, and counting. And Angela is carrying his child. I can’t stop crying long enough to curse God. I need to stop crying. I need to curse God.
The Mother Gets Back Her Tragic Intuition
I was the first to be able to say what had happened, how it had started, at the Heinz plant. The fire that gutted so much of it and closed it down.
Arson was the suspicion. It’s what we started with, the assumption someone had been pissed off enough to set fire to the plant. Heinz, of course, didn’t want it to be arson. They needed the report to read accident so they could just write off the plant as a loss and save a bundle on taxes.
For days my team and I made our way from one part of the plant to another, while outside the chain-link fence the men and women who had worked at the plant milled about, even those who had been on shift when the fire started and had had to file out through the smoke and the blaring of the alarms and the almost-recognizable-as-human voice booming over the alarm telling everyone to Leave the building immediately. Some looked as if they hadn’t slept since that panicked waltz through the smoke and the sirens. Some held babies or the hands of small children dancing beside them. Some held onto the fence as they watched us moving among the still-smoking ruin of the plant with our notebooks and our tape recorders and our video cameras. They were all waiting to learn what would happen to them.
I couldn’t tell them anything. Certainly not anything they needed to hear. What Heinz would decide to do wasn’t what I was there for. I was there looking for the cause. I was there to trace the fire back to its beginning and there to find either motive or faulty equipment, malice or random chance.
This was not the first time I’d been in charge. I had come up fast in the company. Seems I had a flair for the work, an intuitive grasp of details in and around tragic events that helped me to focus the attention of others in ways that almost always bore fruit. Guess you could say I was a bit of a phenom. And my team knew it. They had already, by the Heinz plant fire, come to trust my intuition, even more than I did.
The suspicion was arson, but my intuition was telling me something else. We combed each of the buildings the fire had gutted while men and women suddenly left without jobs made an event out of watching us. They picnicked on the lawn just outside the chain-link fence their children would climb on till they yelled at them to get down off that fence and come over and eat their egg or tuna salad sandwiches. Outside that fence was the feel of a festival mixed with the scent of desperation. Children of varying ages were running around loudly engaged in games my intuition had no feel for, and their parents stood at the fence or sat on the lawn facing the fence and their eyes stayed focused on my team with an almost religious fervor.
It was on the third day I noticed it. It’s possible several of us had gone right by it more than once without thinking a thing of it. Maybe it was because that day was clouded over and threatening rain. Maybe it was the almost greenish tinge to the light that made it through the clouds, a light someone remarked meant it was tornado weather. Maybe it was just random chance. Whatever it was, we still had an audience, despite the threat of rain, and they knew something was up. Those loitering on the lawn got up and came to the fence to peer through it. Something’s about to happen, they must have been muttering among themselves. Something had been discovered.
I called Gene over right off. He had the video camera. I wanted him to record what we saw as I started to pull some of the collapsed wall away. I called Ralph over to help with the bigger chunks of fallen wall. The watchers outside the fence were pointing to where the three of us were working together. They must have been asking one another what this meant, what was happening. Some must have been calculating what part of the plant the three of us were rooting about in.
Once we’d gotten enough of the charred rubble cleared away, it was obvious to each of us what we had found. Beth and Carl joined us without my even having to call for them. They had figured something was up and headed over.
Well, Gene said, guess it wasn’t arson after all.
Nope, I said. Too bad, I said and smiled. We all chuckled a little and set to work recording every detail for our report.
Only the children past the fence ignored us, playing some game that required them to run for a bit before diving into the grass and rolling as if they were on fire and trying to put it out, rolling over and over and getting up and running again before they dove and repeated the roll. All the out-of-work adults were watching us, as if nothing could be happening to their kids that could come close to what it was we were doing.
• • •
Where’s my intuition now? Where was it the night Samuel needed it to kick in and wake me and send me in to him while he could still be saved?
Last night I dreamt I was back working. Gene and Beth and Carl and Ralph were with me, moving through a room that had no apparent damage, though there was a heavy odo
r of smoke in the air. The room seemed familiar, but something about it was off.
The dimensions, I said. The dimensions aren’t right.
I told Beth to get some measurements, to make them accurate. She started sticking pins in the walls at regular intervals but everything kept shifting until the pins were not regular in their spacing at all. In fact, it began to look like the pins Beth was sticking in the walls were taking on a shape, some sort of four-legged animal. And whatever it was, it was running in an awkward motion, like in a very old movie. A jerky motion. The room began to take on the grainy quality of those old movies. All around us, unrecognizable animals were panicking and trying to run off.
I can’t get these measurements right, Beth said, almost in tears. They’re fighting me.
Forget it, I said. It’s not important.
Carl put his arms around Beth to comfort her. Nothing about any of this was right, I knew. Still, it all felt so familiar. Where had I seen Carl put his arms around Beth like that?
Over here, Gene said from behind the glare of the light on his camera. He was taping something. The odor of smoke and of something else got stronger as the rest of us moved toward the light. Suddenly the stench of smoke and the other was too much and I was choking. Gene was standing over a crib and pointing the camera down into it, but there was no baby in the crib. Instead, there was a ruptured pipe. Light from the camera was in my eyes, and I couldn’t make out what the pipe was.
Then a baby was crying in the crib.
Samuel, I whispered. What’s wrong, Samuel? I reached into the crib to lift my baby out of the dark and smoky place and my arms were burning. The flames of my arms touched Samuel and set him on fire and both of us were burning in that room that was suddenly smaller, too small for all of us. Of course, no one but Samuel and I were there, both of us on fire. I picked up my burning baby and held him to my breast, and the room was nothing but fire.
I woke up sweating and tangled in the sheets, alone in the bed. Harlan was sleeping in the living room on the couch, as he had taken to doing when I would get too violent in my sleep. I could hear his gentle snoring.
The monitor was silent. It was still hooked up to the other monitor in what had been Samuel’s room, but both had been turned off since that night. Harlan had wanted to put the monitors away in a closet somewhere, but I said no. Some nights when I wake up at three in the morning, a habit I haven’t been able to break myself of yet, I imagine I hear Samuel’s little sleep-noises coming out of the speaker. Some nights I can swear I hear his little body shifting, asleep.
Some nights, I want to tell Harlan but haven’t yet, Samuel’s ghost drifts into the monitor. Those are the nights I hear the quiet shifting of what used to be his body under the blankets I had wrapped around him in his crib after singing him to sleep.
Some days, I hear those little sounds he used to make that I said were him giggling. It makes me feel a little better for a while, thinking that Samuel is off playing somewhere, able to laugh and more. There are times when I hear those little noises he would make when he was at my breast. When I hear those sounds my breasts ooze milk still. There’s so much I don’t understand anymore.
• • •
Harlan doesn’t think what I’m painting is good for me. I’m not sure, Honey, it’s healthy, he says.
Fires are everywhere. Canvases of all sizes surround me. Some are hung on the walls, some are on easels, and others, on the floor, lean against the walls. Over twenty different canvases in various stages, and on each of them a fire. Some have what look to be structures of some kind, as if the fire’s wrapped around what’s left of a house or a factory. There are places where blackened wood beams are almost plainly visible. In other canvases, shattered glass and melting plastic window-frames give in to flames.
My current favorite canvas is a large one, eight feet by ten feet. Visible amidst the burning on this one is a wall in which a number of pins have been stuck. The pins, done with excruciating detail, are beginning to melt. Some are dripping green or blue or red plastic onto what must have been a floor. The metal interiors of the pins will stay, and are staying, embedded in the wall, which is charring and breaking out here and there into flames that will finally consume everything in the canvas, of this I have no doubt. But for now there is a kind of stasis suggested by what remains of those melting pins.
And the pattern of charring along the wall should tell me something about how this fire started. If I had my intuition still I could say what that is. I could probably say how this fire had started. I’m sure I could. I should be able to. It’s tearing me up that I can’t say what it is I should know from this. All I can do now is paint the fire and the damage it does. There’s very little I can say about it. Maybe Harlan is right. Maybe what I’m painting isn’t healthy.
• • •
When the wrens and the sparrows aren’t enough, with their little songs, to keep me in bed sobbing all day, I paint. When I’m not painting and not in bed crying, I spend time working on my scrapbook. Harlan has seen the scrapbook only once, close to when I started keeping it. He found it on the kitchen table where I had left it for a moment while I hunted down some scissors, and he opened it to see what it was. When he saw what was in it, Harlan started to cry, standing there in the kitchen holding the open scrapbook. I waited till he put it back on the table and went out the back door before coming back to it with the scissors to add another article from the newspaper.
The scrapbook is a little history of sorts. A history of this season of burning babies. I have cut and pasted all the articles I could find in the local paper, all the grainy photographs. None of the photographs are clear and most are so dark it’s impossible to say what the photograph’s of, not without the help of the captions, which say things like The body of Aaron Finter, found by his parents smoldering in his crib the morning of the 15th.
Nothing’s explained in this scrapbook. Everything is speculation, theory after theory proposed and shot down by a whole host of experts. Reconciliation is not what this scrapbook is about. I can’t imagine reconciliation is even possible in this world anymore.
I think that’s what worries Harlan the most. Harlan still works, still goes out into the world most days and talks to people because he has to. Some he talks to because they are friends and offer him some solace with their company. Because he goes out into the world almost every day and has these conversations, he has, he has said to me, a sense of the passing of time.
Distance, he says to me, it’s distance you need. Not the fire over and over again, stilled in time in those canvases.
Harlan has it wrong. Nothing is stilled in the canvases. It all rages on, a fury of motion and consummation. Nothing is still. Nothing.
The Detective Gives Up on Coincidence
Not enough sleep makes the world move in ways that just aren’t right. The body knows this but the brain, reeling from lack of oxygen, keeps arguing, positing new theories of space and time to explain the wrong motion. DeGreco says exhaustion is the body’s way of either getting something done so it can rest or, if that doesn’t happen, at least making things interesting.
The photos I’ve taken of all seven of the charred babies are pinned up around our office. Every one of the seven, in those cribs, looks like some genetic experiment gone awry, with what’s left of their tiny arms crossed over their chests. The last few days, when I haven’t been out interviewing folks connected to the case, I’ve been in this office reading lab reports, going over them for something, some clue we keep missing. It’s got to be there. DeGreco’s right about that, though not even DeGreco, not even the legend, has been able to see it yet. Hours I’m at this cluttered desk, scanning reports which sound the same, the seven dead babies watching me from the walls of the office, from the photographs I took of them smoldering in their cribs. It’s no wonder I haven’t slept.
• • •
Yesterday I was back a
t the scene of the fifth victim. It was the husband, Harlan, who came to the door and it was Harlan I was there to talk to, due to a caller who wondered if he was doing the right thing, calling the police.
I don’t want to cause trouble for no one, especially someone who recently lost a baby that way, the man said.
Just what is it that’s on your mind, sir? I asked. Patience, DeGreco says, comes in handy when you’ve got some time to kill. That DeGreco, what a card.
Well, I work with Harlan Burke. A while ago, his baby, Samuel, burned in his crib, like the others. You know?
Yes, sir. I’m one of the detectives assigned to the case. I’ve met Mr. Burke and his wife.
It’s really about his wife, detective. The other day Harlan seemed worse and when I asked if there was anything I could do, he asked me to tell him if I thought it was strange, what his wife was doing, and he told me about how she’d taken up painting again, since the death of Samuel, something she hadn’t done since college. I told him I didn’t think that was strange. She needs something to fill up her time, I told him. Sounds perfectly natural.
Not the painting, he said. That I could deal with, even see it as a good thing. It’s what she spends her time painting that gets to me.
What does she paint? I said, to remind him he hadn’t actually told me yet, since it seemed he thought he had.
Fires, he told me. She paints fires. She’s got over a couple dozen canvases of different sizes all going, all of fires. In some, he told me, it looks like some building is burning, you can see some beams and maybe part of a wall here and there. In others it looks like there might be animals running in the flames, he said, animals on fire themselves and frantic.
Report from a Place of Burning Page 9