Back on the Connecticut highways, it all starts to feel dreamlike as the beach diminishes behind her, the boats creaking, the seagulls crying, the waves breaking. During the past two days, Michael tried to show her there is nothing to be afraid of. She rounded forty and he was waiting. Glancing in the rearview mirror, she knows he’s been waiting since May when she stopped him from leaving Joe’s deli at the last possible second. Since tying bowling shoes and rolling balls and knocking down pins.
But pulling into her driveway, there’s more doubt about leaving here. She feels it now that she’s alone: How compulsive is Michael’s vigilance, a caution that stems from not believing in your own safety? There will always be triggers, but can he really lessen his worry? How do you know what’s merely someone’s way of loving? Carl loved her and always wanted her safe, too. And for a moment, she wishes Carl were still here and that Michael’s demons hadn’t found her life too.
She carries in her bags, drops the mail on the kitchen table and opens the windows. A week stretches before her to tidy up the house, weed the garden and mow the lawn.
There is a message on her answering machine. A reporter with The Addison Weekly picked up a fire call on his scanner and asks if she can get to Old Willow Road for the photo op. He apologizes for the early hour, but a fire of this scope is big news in sleepy Addison. He gives the address quickly, a garage of some sort going up in flames.
Suddenly there is too much to do. The kettle on the stove whistles. She pours an instant coffee and pulls the telephone book from the hall closet to compare addresses. “March, March.” She passes the page twice before finding the name and seeing if the address matches.
The truth of it all makes her grab the phone to call the reporter back.
Sara Beth scrubs every speck of grease from the stove top, bent over the burner grates and control knobs, reaching into the oven walls. Her gloves are soiled with cleanser and grit, her hair tied back beneath a bandana, her breath short as she scours away every threat.
If she’d only been attentive, she thinks, scrubbing endlessly. If she’d only installed an alarm in the carriage house, or a sprinkler system. If she’d only, if she’d only, if only.
So now Sara Beth makes herself aware. She knows that in the United States, home fires take a life on average once every three hours. Kitchens are the most prevalent origin for home fires and cause the highest percentage of home fire injuries.
No more fires, no more emergencies. First came the trip to Smith’s Hardware to buy fresh batteries for the smoke alarms and three additional alarms. No more chances. She bought fire escape ladders for each upstairs bedroom, something they’d always meant to do. Now, done. Yesterday she installed the new heavy-duty fireplace screen in front of the living room fireplace. No sparks could jump through that finely knit mesh. As if she can look into a fireplace and ever see anything good, anything comforting.
And every precaution breeds new threats, new sparks she imagines jumping from a heater or furnace or wick or stovetop or outlet, sparks jumping one step ahead of her, taunting her.
Like candles, there are so many candles in the house! Dozens of votives in the dining room alone, where they love to scatter them on the table for formal dinners.
And the potholders, near the stove. She takes them off the hook and shoves them deep in a drawer as she’s scouring off specks of stove grease.
While she’s at it, her mind spins a fire escape plan. A drill. They’ll schedule drills, even during the night, and practice until all the kids have it memorized, with different variables, where the fire is, alternate escapes, testing doors for heat, learning to crawl, Owen, checkpoints.
Part of that drill is that all the windows need to open easily in case someone has to climb out, if smoke is pouring into a bedroom from beneath the door. Towels, too, she can’t forget towels to stuff around the bottoms of the doors. So once the stove is cleaned, starting downstairs she unlocks and opens each window, moving through the kitchen, living room, family room, upstairs in the bedrooms, checking for ones that stick. She sprays a little oil and slides the window opened and closed repeatedly, greasing the tracks. Then she goes through the entire house again, starting downstairs and working her way through, double checking every window, just in case.
Afterward she pulls an armful of towels from the linen closet, dropping a couple in each room. They can be stored in a drawer, or beneath the beds, where they can be grabbed and stuffed into spaces where smoke gets in. Smoke spreads faster than fire. Smoke kills. They need some type of fire box, something to hold the ladders, towels, flashlights.
And the electrical outlets. Are any overloaded? Any wires frayed? She goes through each room, touching every outlet for warmth or anything out of order. Her hand cups each cord, sliding up to the stereo or clock radio or lamp.
A lamp’s light bulb can burn between two hundred twelve and nearly six hundred degrees. And cotton burns at four hundred eighty-two. She’s teaching herself. And in the girls’ closet, a pile of clothes towers on a shelf precariously close to a bare bulb fixture. She heaves the tower of clothes onto a bed.
A bed that can cause a fire. The majority of furniture fires involve upholstery or bedding. Jen’s bed is too close to the radiator. If cotton burns at four hundred eighty-two degrees, who knows what a cotton dust ruffle might heat up to, resting against a winter radiator. So she takes the headboard first and drags the bed away, then the foot, then the headboard, then the foot again until the bed is about four feet from the wall. She’ll have to rearrange the whole room now, moving Kat’s bed to a different angle, shifting one of the dressers to the other side. Jen wanted to Feng Shui anyway. They’ll do cool colors, blues and greens. Because there’s no other way. She has to keep them all safe. And so she pulls out the drawers from Kat’s dresser, sets them on her bed, and begins shoving the dresser, out of breath, a little at a time, across the room.
Tom walks into the house and sets down the grocery bags, looking up at the ceiling when the loud scraping noise comes again. And again. Rhythmically, but insistently.
“Juice, Daddy. Juice!”
He pulls a juicebox from the refrigerator and pushes the straw in, keeping an ear tuned to upstairs.
“Here you go, guy. Have a seat.” Owen kneels on a chair at the kitchen table while Tom starts unpacking, putting the gallon of milk in the fridge, setting the ketchup and salad dressing on the counter. But he stops then, noticing the microwave oven pulled out from the corner, leaving a full eight inches of clearance behind it. The toaster’s been repositioned too. And rubber gloves lie in the sink with wet sponges and dirty rags.
So something’s going on that has him scan the room. That’s when he sees bags of garbage shoved beneath the breakfast bar. One is filled with candles, votives and pillars and tapers, and on the top, two small packages of birthday candles. The other is stuffed with two electric blankets, balled up and shoved in. There’s a bag of newspapers and magazines, along with pieces of mail and the kids’ artwork.
And the scraping noise keeps coming. So he picks up Owen and first looks into the living room, noting the new fireplace screen. The dining room seems the same except for the lack of candles in the brass candlestick holders on the table and the empty glass votives in the hutch.
With a particularly loud bang coming from a bedroom above them, Owen looks up and holds on tight.
“Let’s go see what Mommy’s doing, okay guy?”
Owen keeps his eyes riveted on the ceiling and Tom decides, climbing the stairs, it’s better to leave him in his crib until he scopes out the situation.
“Here you go,” he says, handing him a couple books and a stuffed bear. “Daddy will be right back. You wait for me, okay?”
When his son starts to whine, Tom raises his finger to his mouth. “Shhh. I’ll go get Mommy. Shhhh.”
He leaves Owen standing in his crib and goes to Jen and Kat’s room, slowly pushing open the door. Sara Beth’s back is to him as she gets behind a dresser and heaves it a f
ew feet, then moves to the other side and gives another shove. The room is a disaster, furniture randomly moved everywhere, piles of clothes falling off the beds, Jen’s stereo haphazardly sitting unplugged on a desk chair, curtains thrown up over the curtain rods.
“Sara,” he says, gently taking her arm, which she wrenches away.
“Don’t!” she warns, gasping a deep breath. Her hair hangs, clinging to her perspiring face, her hands are covered with oil and dirt, her clothes soiled and messy. Suddenly she goes for the head of Jen’s bed and tugs it, scraping the bed along the floor, nearly tripping on a sweater tangled at her feet.
Tom doesn’t say another word. He knows, watching Sara Beth’s devastation, that this isn’t about the fire. It took this long, this much time, for her to react to her loss. Finally, it’s for her mother. He walks up behind her and enfolds her, wrapping his arms around her tightly, locking her in his embrace, pressing against her back, tipping his head down over her shoulder, closing his eyes and resisting with all he’s got when she struggles fiercely, to break free.
“It’s your fault,” she cries. “It’s your fault she died.”
“What?” Tom asks, not loosening his hold. “What are you talking about?”
“Your car,” she whispers. “Your tank was empty, you were running late.” She inhales as though she can’t get air. “You had to go to court later.”
Tom releases her from his grip and turns her to face him. “And I drove your car so you could fill my tank and swap cars with me at work.”
“When I was supposed to meet my mother, Tom. We had plans that morning, and you didn’t care. You said my plans could wait, that you really needed your car to go to court. That Mom would wait for me. What difference does an hour make? Those were your exact words.”
And he knows then. He looks around the devastated room in which they stand; it is the devastation she lives. It is the hour the aneurysm struck.
It’s impossible to get Sara Beth on her cell, so Rachel calls their home on Sunday and gets Tom. They meet at the window booth at Whole Latte Life. He sits across from her, his hair freshly shorn in that buzz cut he won’t part with. She sees he’s still not used to the short trim, running his hand back through it as though it were longer.
“She’s tormented by it,” he says. “If she’d gotten to her mother’s earlier, she thinks she could’ve saved her. Called for help before it was too late.”
“So in her mind, it was your fault. For having her run around with the cars.”
Tom looks out the window, not answering.
“You couldn’t have known though. It was just bad timing.”
“What if she’s right?”
“Tom. She had a brain aneurysm. Once they strike…”
“I know, Rachel. I’ve tried telling her that.”
“Well tell me about the fire. How did it all happen?”
“We don’t know what started it yet. How much do you know?”
“Only what the paper told me. I tried calling Sara Beth, but she’s not picking up.”
“No.” Outside on The Green, the geranium blossoms hang heavy and red, the spikes tall behind them. “She won’t talk to anyone right now.”
“It’s no wonder.”
“I checked with her doctor. He’s concerned, especially with this coming so soon after the episode in New York.”
“Can we do anything for her?”
“He says to really listen to her. Be supportive, sympathetic, you know, all that stuff. But she’s completely shut down.”
“Not good, Tom.”
“No. Did you hear about our house?” The warmth outside makes its way through the window and he perspires, his tee shirt damp.
The waitress brings their coffees and Tom tells her about their futile hunt for a shop location. The town storefronts are booked solid. Addison is that kind of town, brimming with cottage industry shops: boutiques filled with sachets and twig wreaths and handmade birdhouses, nurseries blossoming with flats of flowers and baby vegetables, farmstands lined with native produce and honey, and the bookstore and ice cream parlor and vintage bridal shop.
“Tourists drive miles to stroll around this Green. I see them all the time, sitting at the benches, never leaving without a keepsake. That’s why we were sure her antique shop would do well. So we bought the big, old house. It seemed like the right choice with that two-room addition for her antiques, and it’s historical itself. The ambiance couldn’t be better.” He looks outside in the direction of the house while his fingers tightly pleat a napkin.
“I had no idea you got the house. Nothing survived the fire? A few pieces she could start up with?”
“Not enough to matter. A dozen or so pieces in the back. Some remnants of tables and chairs if you poke through the ash, but the rest is gone.”
“Was it insured?”
Tom shakes his head. “Antiques are tough. Their value changes, depending on different variables. An appraiser’s appointment was scheduled for next week.”
“Oh no.”
“And it’s all tied in with her mom, too, because she bought half that stuff before she died. Sara feels like she’s lost her all over again.” The strain shows in his tired eyes, his drawn face. “It’ll take a few more days for the Fire Marshal to know exactly how the fire ignited. But for Sara Beth to start over again? The God damn cards are stacked against her.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Sara Beth’s fear is that the fire took her mother, too. Ravaged her spirit so much that it’s lost.
“So I can only find you here now?” she asks a week later while washing the gravestone with a sudsy scrub brush. “Can’t you come with me a little bit, like before?” She runs the brush over the edges of the stone, then rinses it with fresh water. Once Tom left for work, she dropped the kids at Melissa’s and stopped here before meeting the Fire Marshal. The sun is strong and she stands then, head dropped for a long while beneath the rays. Had it been real? If she can’t recall details from their life together, did her mother even exist? She feels so completely gone, now more than ever. Since the fire, there were no more emails, no cell phones pressed to her ear, no imagined conversations, no gratifying signs. Living was somehow easier when she still had that connection.
“Mom?” she whispers, standing with one hand clutching her velvet beaded bag, the bucket hanging from the other, standing awhile longer before turning to leave.
At the carriage house later, she wonders the same thing: If she can’t remember its details, had it existed? She stands where the building had been, struggling to picture how it looked only a short time ago.
Rays of sunlight shine through the trees, dropping like sparks on the debris. She walks through the rubble, feeling her furniture crunch in burnt bits beneath her feet. One piece, though, doesn’t give. She pokes through the ash, finding a mahogany cabriole leg dusty with ash but untouched by the flames. It feels cool to the touch.
It’s hard to tell what’s left in her life. Sometimes her dreams of the carriage house are so vivid, it’s as real as it was two weeks ago. She walks over to the split rail fence. It still stands, miraculously escaping the flames…the fence she drank tea at, the fence little Slinky sunned on.
“Sara?”
Lately her mind has a way of getting so lost in thought that it shuts out all else around her. But she knows that voice, it cuts right through her sadness.
“I’m so glad I found you,” Rachel says as she comes up behind her. “I wanted to tell you how sorry I am.”
With the mahogany leg still in her grip resting atop the split rail fence, they look at the debris. “The Fire Marshal just left.” It’s all Sara Beth can say without sobbing, now that she knows about the fire’s origins.
“Let’s walk,” Rachel says. Walking means talking. If they’d kept records, there’s no telling how many miles they’ve walked together in twenty-five years. Walked and talked. Probably as many miles as cups of coffee they’ve had. And talk helps. Tom told her it’s therapeutic.
“Any respectable collector or antique dealer,” Sara Beth starts as they move along the fence past the black furniture remnants, “has a basic knowledge of the field of antiques. Then, they specialize. But there is first a broad, general knowledge. One of the most obvious rules regarding antique lamps would be, well, what do you think it would be, Rachel? Tell me.”
“Lamps?” She watches her friend cautiously. “Rewire?”
“You see? It’s so obvious, everybody knows it. Old lamps have to be rewired, and they need new sockets and new plugs. Never, ever, ever are you supposed to take a chance with lamps. Frayed wiring is treacherous.”
“Sara Beth?”
“No. Wait.” She holds up her hand, still studying the charred remains. “Let me finish. I had two antique lamps. A Steuben art glass lamp and my desk lamp, a beautiful brass lamp from 1916 that I hadn’t rewired yet.”
“A lamp caused this?”
“My desk lamp. They traced the fire to it. Apparently I left it on that night when I rushed out to celebrate the new house. The wires ignited and spread to the electric box and the old carriage house walls went up in a flash fire.” Still she looks only into the carriage house remains. “So this is all my fault.”
“But the newspaper mentioned some sort of a flare-up during the fire.”
“Ed March stored gasoline for the lawn mowers on the other side of the center wall.”
“Oh no.”
“It was a small can, and almost empty, but it didn’t cause the fire. Nothing stood a chance once that lamp went. Between the dried out timber and the old electrical circuits, the flames spread so fast.”
Whole Latte Life Page 28