by Robyn Carr
Carrie and Kyle pressed closer to Chris, and her arms wrapped around them reassuringly, enfolding them in a circle of safety she herself didn’t quite feel. As she drew Kyle up onto the tailboard and hugged Carrie closer with her other arm, she saw that all the neighbors she had never met were up, watching her house burn down.
“Maybe we should have a block party,” she muttered, kissing one child’s head, then the other, then getting a dog’s tongue right across her lips and nose. “Phlettt.” She grimaced.
“Do we have a second alarm?” one fireman asked another.
“Yep.” Just that fast another huge rig rounded the corner, bringing the total to four. They had not heard the sirens, Chris assumed, because of the general pandemonium immediately around them: shouting, engines, radios, gushing water and the hissing, creaking, crackling sound of everything she owned in the world turning to ash.
This new fire truck blinked its headlights like a great behemoth, and soon its ladder and basket rose like a stiff arm over the tops of the eucalyptus trees. A hose that was threaded upward began to pour water down on the little house.
Fire fighting had turned to demolition, from Chris’s point of view. She flinched at the sound of crashing glass and splintering wood as windows and doors were smashed in. She looked back to the mounting traffic. Police cars blocked the street, and an ambulance had arrived. Chris and her kids and dog sat quietly on the bumper of engine 56.
Tears ran down her cheeks. There it all went. And there hadn’t been very much. Five weeks until Christmas. She was twenty-seven years old, and this was the third time in seven years that she’d stood by, helpless, hopeless, while everything she had, everything she thought she was, disappeared—this time, before her very eyes. First, when her parents both died in a small plane crash. She had been twenty, and an only child. Then, when Steve walked out on her without so much as a goodbye after having used up her every emotion and every penny of what her parents had left her. Now this.
“Mommy, where are we going to sleep?”
“I…uh…we’ll work that out, baby. Don’t worry.”
“Mommy? Did our sleeping bags burn up? How can we sleep without our sleeping bags?”
“Now, Carrie,” Chris said, her voice breaking despite her effort to fake strength, “don’t we always m-manage?”
The house was fifty-six years old and, because of the landlord’s minimal maintenance, badly run-down. It didn’t take much time for it to look like one big black clump. Chris sat watching, stunned, for less than two hours. She wasn’t even aware of being cold.
The last fire truck to arrive left first. The neighbors went to bed without asking if there was anything she needed. Hell, they went back into their houses without introducing themselves. A policeman took a brief statement from her: the furnace came on after she set the thermostat, then it made smoke. Not much to tell. He gave her a card that had phone numbers for Victims’ Services and the Red Cross and headed back toward his car. The disappointed ambulance was long gone. Kyle snored softly, his blond head against her chest, the fireman’s blanket that she wore wrapped around him and Cheeks. Carrie leaned against her, wrapped in her own blanket, watching in fascination and fear. She was silent but wide-eyed. It was after 2:00 a.m., Chris estimated, when she found herself sitting on the bumper of engine 56 with no earthly idea of what she was going to do next.
The fireman who had saved her life stood in front of her. He seemed even taller now that her house was a mere cinder. His hair, thick and brown and curly, was now sweaty and matted to his scalp. Dirt and perspiration streaked his face. His eyes were deeply set and brooding under thick brows, but there was a sympathetic turn to his mouth.
“If you take this fire engine out from under me, I have absolutely no idea where I’ll sit.”
“You don’t know any of the neighbors?”
She shook her head. If she attempted to say a word about how all the neighbors had just gone off, she might cry.
“Is there someone you can call?”
She shrugged. Was there? She wasn’t sure about that.
“You can go to the police station and make some calls. Or we can wake up a neighbor so you can use their phone. Or you could come to the firehouse and—”
“The firehouse,” she requested abruptly. “Please.” She couldn’t face a police station tonight. Or her ex-neighbors. At that moment, looking up at the man who had carried her out of a burning house and even managed to rescue Cheeks, she had the uncanny feeling that he was all she could depend on.
“Got any family around here? A husband? Ex-husband?”
“Oh, there’s an ex-husband…somewhere,” she said.
“Don’t I know you?” he asked.
She frowned.
“Iverson’s,” he said. “The grocery store.”
Of course, she thought. Before tonight, that was the only thing she had known about the local firemen. They shopped for their groceries together, finicky and cohesive, in much the way women went to restaurant rest rooms together. Chris was a checkout clerk at Iverson’s grocery store, and it had always amused her to see the truck pull into the parking lot and five or six big, strapping men wander in to do their shopping for dinner. “Yes. Sure.”
“Well, you must have some friends around here, then.”
How that followed, she was unsure. Did being a clerk in a grocery store ensure friendship? She had only moved to Sacramento from Los Angeles in late August, just in time for Carrie to start school. She had a few friends at work, but their phone numbers, which she’d rarely had time to use anyway, were in that big ash heap. And she couldn’t call anyone in L.A. She’d live in a tent in the park before she’d go back there.
“I’ll think of someone on the way to the firehouse,” she emphasized. “There are probably fewer criminals there than at the police station.” She looked down at her slippered feet. “I’m not dressed to fend off criminals tonight. How long can I use the blanket?”
For the first time Mike remembered the purple panties and was glad it was dark. His cheeks felt warm. He felt warm. It was a vaguely familiar feeling, and he liked it. “Until you’re done with it, I guess. You can get some things from the Red Cross. I’ll get the officer to drive you to the firehouse. We can’t take you on the engine.”
“What about my house?” she asked.
“Well,” he said, looking over his shoulder, “what house?”
“Won’t it be looted or something?”
“Lady, there isn’t a whole lot left to loot. You have any valuables that might have survived the fire?”
“Yeah,” she said, squeezing her kids. “Right here.”
He grinned at her approvingly; it was a great, spontaneous smile of crowded, ever-so-slightly protruding, superwhite teeth. A smile that did not hold pity but humanity. And one deep dimple—left side. “You got the best of it, then.” He started to turn away.
“The refrigerator,” she said, making him turn back. “Did the refrigerator go?”
“Well, it’ll never run again.”
“I don’t care about the refrigerator itself,” she said, her voice gaining strength. “I put my laptop in there. And research papers. There’s a book on the computer. It’s the very last thing of any value I—” She stopped before her voice broke and she began to blubber. She hugged her children tighter. Inside she felt like a little girl herself, a defenseless, abandoned, pitiful orphan. Won’t someone do something, please. Why, oh, God, why does my luck get worse and worse, and just when I think I might make it, it goes wrong and I don’t even know what I did to deserve this and, oh, my God, my kids, my poor kids.
“Is that what you were doing?” he asked her.
She looked up at him. Brown eyes? No, green. And crinkled at the corners.
“What…what did you think I was doing?” she asked.
He reached into the engine cab for an industrial-sized flashlight. “I had absolutely no idea. I’ll go see if the fridge made it.”
She stood suddenly, s
truggling to hold on to Kyle and Cheeks. “Well, be careful.”
The hoses were being put away, and the shortwave radios were having distant and eerie conversations with one another.
He came back. He had it. A laptop she’d salvaged from her former life. He showed it to her, smiling. It wasn’t even singed. “It’s got butter on it. And something red. Ketchup, I think.”
“I don’t believe it,” she breathed.
“Well, I hope it’s good. It almost cost you way more than it could possibly be worth. Don’t you know better than to go into a burning—”
“The sleeping bags? Toys? Clothes?”
He shook his head, exasperated. “Really, there wasn’t time to save anything in there. We tried, but…Come on, let’s get you into the squad car. These old houses, jeez.”
Chris walked ahead of him in the direction of the police car. She carried Kyle and Cheeks while Carrie held on to Chris’s blanket, trailing behind. The fireman followed with the laptop. “I’ve known women to go back for their purses, but I couldn’t imagine what you were doing in the refrigerator! They’ll never believe this one. You’re lucky, all right.”
“I’m not feeling all that lucky.”
“Well, you ought to. That old house went up like kindling.”
Taking her precious laptop, Chris managed to get into the police car without saying anything more, and they followed the fire engine to the station. The policeman carried Kyle inside, but Chris was stuck with Cheeks because of his obnoxious attitude. She struggled to hold the terrier and her laptop.
Inside the station she was taken into a little living room that boasted two couches, several chairs, a desk, a telephone and television and even a Ping-Pong table. This must be where they lounged between fires.
The big fireman, out of his coat now, suspenders holding up his huge canvas pants, a tight T-shirt stretched over his enormous chest and shoulders, was standing in the living room as if he were the welcoming committee.
Carrie tugged on his pants. “Our mother types on her book every night because she is trying to be a book writer and not work at the grocery store anymore.”
“Oh?” the fireman said.
“And it’s worth a very lot,” Carrie informed him proudly.
Chapter 2
After the other firemen were finished, Mike Cavanaugh took his turn in the upstairs shower to wash away the acrid odor of smoke that clung to his hair and skin. While he lathered his hair he thought of his mother, who lived nearby. She would have heard the sirens and might be lying awake, wondering if her firstborn was all right. Mike knew this because his father had told him; his mother had never admitted it. He could give her a call, his father had suggested, making Mike suspect it wasn’t only his mother who worried. But, hell, he was thirty-six years old. He was not going to call his mother after every middle-of-the-night alarm so she could fall back to sleep without worrying. Besides, it would start a bad pattern. If he obliged, sometimes his phone call would come fifteen minutes after the sirens, occasionally it would be hours. Calling would become worse than never calling. Sooner or later she would have to get used to this. He had been a firefighter for more than twelve years.
He did, however, check in with his parents during the daytime. And he had bought them a multiband radio scanner so they could listen to the radio calls. He wasn’t as stubborn as he pretended.
It had been 3:00 a.m. when he left the woman—Christine Palmer, he’d learned when they finally had a moment to exchange names—and her kids in the rec room. He’d given her a couple of pillows and blankets to tuck her little ones in on the couches, and some extra clothing for herself—the smallest sweatpants and sweatshirt that could be found. He’d told her which line to use to make her calls. He’d told her to go ahead and close her eyes for a while if she could; the men would be getting up for breakfast and a shift change in a couple of hours—around 6:00 a.m. She could have someone pick her up in the morning so as not to upset the kids’ sleep any further.
Upstairs in the sleeping quarters there had been some grumbling. It was not customary to bring homeless fire victims to the firehouse. It was very rare, in fact. Jim had said it might set a bad precedent. Hal had said the kids might be noisy and rob them of what little sleep they had left. Stu had said he suspected it was that little purple tushie Mike had carried out of the house that had prompted this innovative move. Mike had said, “Go to sleep, girls, and try not to get on my nerves.” Mike was in charge tonight.
He couldn’t stop thinking about her, however. It wasn’t the purple silk butt, even though that did cross his mind from time to time. It was the way she seemed unusually alone with those two little kids. He thought he’d picked up a defiant loneliness in her eyes. Blue eyes, he remembered. When she thrust out her chin it gave her otherwise soft face a sort of challenge. It was peculiar, especially during a catastrophe as exciting to the average man or woman as a house fire, not to have people rally around the victims. Even in neighborhoods where folks were not well acquainted or friendly, it was odd not to have someone break out of the crowd and ask all the right questions, take the family in, call a church or a victims’ aid organization. The Salvation Army. But Christine Palmer seemed to hold them all at bay with her look of utter isolation.
Mike could have called the Salvation Army himself. Or the Red Cross. He’d taken a shower instead. His first reaction had been to distance himself from this little family; their aloneness made him feel vulnerable. But he felt them pulling him like a magnet. Now he decided to go downstairs and see if she was awake. He wouldn’t bother her if the lights were out. Or if her eyes were closed. He was just too curious to go to sleep.
Christine Palmer was a curiosity—an attractive enough one, to be sure—but it was that precocious little blond bombshell who’d gotten right under his skin. He had had a daughter once. And a wife. They had been dead for ten years. Joanie had been only twenty-three and Shelly three when a car accident stole them away and left holes in Mike’s soul. He had felt a charge, like a shot of electricity, when that Shirley Temple reincarnate tugged on his coat. What a kid. He felt a giddy lightness; then a familiar, unwelcome ache.
When his foot touched the bottom step he heard a predictable grrrr. Then he heard “Shut up, Cheeks.” So he knew she was awake. Mike stood in the doorway of the rec room and saw that Cheeks was sleeping on the end of the little boy’s couch, right on the kid’s feet. He liked that, that the dog guarded the kids. He felt as though these kids needed that. They slept soundly; the boy snored softly. Christine Palmer sat at the desk nearby, her feet drawn up and her arms wrapped around her knees. An old phone book was open in front of her, and her back was to him.
The terrier stiffened his front legs, showed his teeth and growled seriously. She turned to see Mike standing there, surprise briefly widening her red-rimmed eyes. Then she turned away quickly and blew her nose as though it was humiliating to be caught crying after your whole world had burned up. “Shut up, Cheeks,” she commanded sternly. “Down.” The terrier obliged, but he watched.
“Has he ever actually bitten anyone?” Mike asked, working hard at sounding friendly and nonthreatening.
“No,” she said, wiping her eyes before swiveling the chair around to face him.
She had pulled sweat socks up to her knees over the sweatpants, probably to take up some slack; she was drowning in the smallest sweats they could find. Small boned, but with a wiry toughness that showed. She was a very pretty woman. Her blue eyes were fierce, her thick, light brown hair willfully wavy, springing loose around her face. If they hadn’t just been through a fire and if he hadn’t caught her crying he would wonder if contacts gave her eyes that intense, penetrating color.
“Cheeks is only crabby,” she said. “He’s not dangerous. But I don’t mind if strangers are wary around my kids.”
“Why’d you name him Cheeks?”
“His mustache. When we first got him, Carrie grabbed him by that hair around his mouth and said, ‘Mommy, look at his cheek
s,’ and it stuck.” She shrugged and tried to smile. The rims of her lips were pink, and her nose was watery. “This is very embarrassing,” she said, becoming still more fluid.
“Look, it was a bad fire. Of course you’re upset.”
“No…no, not that. I…I have no one to call. See, I’m new in Sacramento. I only moved here at the end of August, just before Carrie started school. I got a job at Iverson’s about a month, no, six weeks ago. I only know a few people. I don’t know anyone’s phone number except Mr. Iverson’s at the store. I have a babysitter for Kyle and for Carrie after school, but she doesn’t have—” She stopped. Anything was the next word. The babysitter, Juanita Jimeniz, was the mother of another grocery-store clerk; the Jimenizes were practically destitute themselves. There were more family members living under one roof than there appeared to be beds. No help there.
“I could give you a lift to the bank after my shift change if you—”
“My checking account has $12.92 in it.”
“Where’d you come from, then?” he asked, moving to sit on one of the chairs near the desk. Cheeks growled, watching. Mike wasn’t convinced he wouldn’t bite.
“Los Angeles.”
“Well, that’s not so far away. Maybe someone there could send you a few bucks? Or invite you back down till you get, you know, reestablished?” He felt his heavy brows draw together, and he tried unsuccessfully to smooth out the frown. His mother had warned him that he looked mean, threatening, whenever he got that brooding look, his heavy brows nearly connecting over the bridge of his nose. But his forehead took on contemplative lines now because he was confused.
Something about Christine Palmer did not sit well. She appeared indigent, yet he’d shuffled a goodly number of indigent families off to Victims Aid, and she didn’t fit. People totally without resources, without family, friends, money, without memberships in churches, clubs or unions, did not usually rush into burning buildings to save the books they were writing. Strange. What’s missing from this picture? he asked himself.