This Is Where We Live

by Janelle Brown

  Except that the fire extinguisher was fizzling now, coughing out a few last gusts of chemical powder, but the flames were still growing. The fire had finished consuming the curtains, leaving only blackened webs of fabric behind, and was now eating a hole in the wall, a hole through which Jeremy should be able to see the deck and the view down the canyon, except that the smoke was too thick to see much of anything at all. As he watched, the blaze doubled in size, and climbed north to begin greedily devouring the crown molding. Great bright sheets of flame ascended the wall and then turned left to skim across the ceiling. Jeremy dropped the useless fire extinguisher and let the heat propel him backward, out into the hallway, where a thick layer of smoke had gathered, and farther back across the hall into his own bedroom, where Lucy was clutching the telephone and watching him.

  “They’re coming,” she said, whispering for some unfathomable reason. “The fire department.”

  “What did you do?” he barked. “What happened?”

  “I didn’t know! I didn’t know they would burn like that.”

  “What would burn?”

  “His scrubs.”

  “You set Pete’s scrubs on fire?”

  Snot blew from Lucy’s nose and lodged on her upper lip. “And some other things of his. I thought if I did it in the trash can ….”

  Through two doorways he could see the flames advancing across the master bedroom, making their way toward the hallway and the rest of the house. “That was really stupid,” he said.

  She nodded meekly, and then began to cry. “My things! Can you save my trunk?”

  His throat was scorched, his tongue thick and dry; he couldn’t summon the saliva to swallow. He was going to lose the whole house, and what would Claudia think of him then? “No,” he barked, and then lunged back into the hallway, ducking low to avoid the smoke, this time turning right into the bathroom. There, he closed his watering eyes and blindly felt for the bath towels, dousing them with water from the sink. (How did he know to do this? Why wasn’t he frightened? Who was this fascinating person who was so calm and efficient in the face of disaster?) He lurched back out and yanked the door to the master bedroom closed, pressing a wet towel against the crack in the door.

  “Go outside,” he told Lucy, handing her a wet washcloth. She stared at him with moist boiled-egg eyes, clutching her robe around her, then pressed the washcloth against her nose and ran down the hallway. Jeremy followed her.

  A thin haze of smoke was collecting near the ceiling of the living and dining rooms. Lucy ran toward the front door and yanked it open. Jeremy watched her flee into the darkness, the marabou feathers that trimmed her robe trailing along behind her like an obedient pet. He didn’t follow. He turned in the opposite direction, crossing the living room to the sliding glass doors, and stepped out onto the deck. The clear night air was a balm for his lungs. The black void of the canyon fell away below him. Above, the moon was obscured by a thick cloud cover that reflected the glow of the city lights back down at him. He limped down the deck toward the outer wall of the bedroom, where flames were pouring out through the hole that had burned through the wall. They licked at the outside wall, tasting it and finding it to their liking.

  The garden hose was coiled in a pile at the end of the deck, next to the potted tomato plants. Jeremy turned it on full blast, and the hose began to buck and flip, spurting water in every direction. He seized the nozzle and pointed it in the general direction of the house. The jet of water was depressingly anemic compared to the voracious appetite of the fire. Flames were climbing up toward the vulnerable shingles of the roof and out toward the rotting wooden rail of the deck; and so he directed the hose first at one, then the other, and back again, soaking the back of the house with a gentle arcing motion. Water droplets drenched his shirt and cooled his blistered lips and clung to his chin.

  Time passed obliquely; he wasn’t sure whether he’d been out there for a minute or an hour. He was in a curious meditative state, nearly hypnotized by the motion from the hose. The fire spat at him as it battled to surge forward; he pushed it back with a blast of water. Out here, it was the just the two of them, a battle of wills, and he was determined to win. The world beyond this deck ceased to exist. He forgot that the fire truck was even coming. He began to feel almost fond of the fire, as if it were holding up a mirror and showing him something about himself that he’d never imagined before. Even as the flames took hold of the drenched deck and began crawling toward him, he was strangely calm, unwilling to flee to the safety of the front yard. His body proceeded mechanically forward, insisting on its moment of victory, while his thoughts mindlessly trailed behind. I can still beat this. Claudia will come home and see that I saved the house and I will be the hero. I will save the house for her!

  It wasn’t until he heard the sirens screaming up the hill that Jeremy finally broke out of his trance. The fire was dangerously close. He dropped the garden hose and ran through the sliding glass doors back into the house. The east end of the house had vanished in smoke, and he wondered how much was lost. At the front door, he paused: What else should he save? Looking around the living room, he considered their possessions: The photos arranged on the wall, the guitars propped against the couch, the furniture crouching low in the smoky gloom, Claudia’s laptop blinking sleepily on the dining room table. He found himself standing underneath Beautiful Boy, prying it off its hook. He wobbled under the painting’s weight: it would be impossible to carry anything else. Bracing the canvas against his chest, he awkwardly steered it out the front door and into the driveway, where the orange and red lights from the fire truck were illuminating the street like an apocalyptic disco.

  He stood there in the road next to Lucy, with Beautiful Boy propped up beside him, and watched the firemen in their reflective yellow suits run their flaccid hose in through his front door. Within minutes, water was pouring down the street in a dirty black stream. Two firemen stood on the east end of the roof, chopping away the shingles with a hatchet in order to gain access to the fire below. The sound was like breaking bones. The fire began to recede, releasing a few last angry clouds of smoke.

  His neighbors had come out to watch the spectacle. Across the street, Dolores stood in her front yard, wrapping a ratty blue flannel bathrobe tightly closed around herself even though the night was warm, as if by doing so she might protect herself against the horrors she was witnessing. They made eye contact; Jeremy managed a weak shrug of acknowledgment, but Dolores’s face remained devoid of expression, her mind somewhere else completely. Jeremy took it on himself to fill in the blanks: She was judging him for being so irresponsible as to burn down his house, and for having failed to put out the fire on his own. She didn’t know how hard he had tried! Where was Claudia, anyway?

  It was only now that he was safe from harm that he finally stopped to register what had just happened. His foot throbbed. He coughed dryly, wiping black grit from his face. And then his consciousness arrived back with a rush, throwing him backward with its force as it once again collided with the present moment. What it said to him, with its insidious rationality, with its perpetually self-serving greed, was this: You could have solved all your problems. You could have just let the damn house burn. How free you could have been!

  According to the fire marshal, Jeremy’s quick work with the extinguisher and garden hose had managed to save the house—and, therefore, maybe even the entire hill of tightly packed homes—by confining the worst of the fire to the master bedroom. The kitchen and living room and dining room, at the other end of the house, were relatively unscathed, but the master bedroom was a blackened husk with a gaping hole in the ceiling, and the deck that led off it had been so weakened by the fire that it would need to be rebuilt from scratch; the adjacent guest bedroom and hall and bathroom all had heavy smoke and water damage. Still, Claudia and Jeremy were lucky: The structure remained fundamentally sound, and they could still live in their house by throwing an air mattress down in the living room, even if it was hard to sle
ep because of the sour, dank smell that pervaded everything.

  That was about where their luck ended. The contractor who had come out last Tuesday had offered a staggering estimate of $62,000 for repairs, which at first they thought didn’t matter, because they had insurance (not by any foresight on their part; but because it had been required for the mortgage). Except that, as Jeremy discovered on the phone with their insurance agent the next day, their policy came with a $15,000 deductible. Fifteen thousand dollars—more than the cost of mixing and mastering an entire album!

  Lucy should, of course, be paying the bill; but she’d vanished entirely after the night of the fire, leaving behind her charred belongings, the gluey marshmallows in the fridge, a stack of gossip magazines in the living room. Their furious phone calls had gone unanswered, and the taciturn brother who had arrived to pick up Lucy’s floral chaise a few days later had refused to divulge her whereabouts. They could sue her—the lawyer that Claudia had spoken with had said they had a very strong case—but it might take years to recoup their money, and they’d have to cover the cost of repairs in the interim.

  The situation was impossible. They had landed back where they’d started in August, only now everything was even more dire. Without the $1,000 rent payment from Lucy there was no way they would make the mortgage payment that was due next week; how many months would the bank give them before it stepped in and foreclosed? In hindsight, the stupidest thing Jeremy had ever done was fight that fire. He was about ready to throw his hands up and tell the bank to just take the fucking albatross of a house already, he was done with it and he’d deal with the consequences. Except that he kept remembering the look on Claudia’s face when she finally arrived home that night, a look of confusion that, as he watched, evolved into an expression of personal anguish unlike anything he’d ever seen before. She’d looked from Jeremy to the painting to the smoldering house and back again, and then burst into uncontrollable tears. The sound broke his heart. He gathered Claudia in his arms, torn between relief that she had come home after all and panic that he had just made the biggest mistake of his life. “Don’t worry,” he reassured her, “it’s going to be OK. It’s fixable.”

  And here was Barry to fix it. He and Ruth had arrived in Los Angeles on Thursday, uninvited, two days after Claudia called to tell them about the exorbitant deductible. They settled into a Best Western downtown and arrived on their doorstep every morning at 7 A.M., ready to get to work. “Your pop hasn’t forgotten all his old tricks,” Barry had said, eyeing the disaster zone with a self-satisfied gleam in his eye, more energized than Jeremy had ever seen him. “Don’t forget I’m the one who built that rumpus room in the basement and your mother’s garden shed, remember, Claudie?” He could fix up the smoke-and water-damaged guest room and hallway, making the house habitable again, he promised, and probably rebuild the deck too, if Jeremy and Claudia would throw in an elbow. The bigger damage—the obliterated master bedroom, and the gaping black hole in the roof above it—required a professional. But they were making progress, and by mid-week Claudia and Jeremy would probably be able to move their air mattress (the water-logged bed had gone to the dump) into the guest bedroom.

  Any time not spent pouring a new foundation for the deck had been spent poring over spreadsheets with Claudia as they tried to figure out where the money for their outrageous mortgage was going to come from now. They’d decided that Jeremy would look for a second job, maybe bartending a few nights a week like he had back in New York when he was still a struggling musician. It seemed he was slipping backward to meet an old half-formed version of himself. This was not the life that Jeremy wanted—there would be, it had gone unsaid, no time for fun at all, and certainly no time for music. It was ridiculous even to consider starting a new band right now. The charred remains of this house was his new jail cell; he was doomed to a life sentence of hard labor in its service. How ironic that he had chosen his own incarceration.

  Sometimes he imagined telling Aoki what was happening to his life (What Would Aoki Think?) and the look of predictable contempt on her fantasy face made his heart twist. You could be so much bigger than you are, she’d told him. So what would she think of him now? It was a relief, he supposed, that he hadn’t spoken to her since their coffee. He was tempted to skip her opening this Wednesday entirely, and for a brief moment he’d even considered selling her painting, even though Claudia hadn’t said a single word about that. Selling it would rid him of Aoki’s voice in his head forever, and dig them out of their financial straits to boot; except that he couldn’t quite take that first step toward letting it go. Something inside him was still waiting—maybe until Aoki had finally left town?—to make that last, final break. In the meantime, he gritted his teeth and soldiered on. Yesterday he’d picked up a few job applications at bars downtown, today he would work on repairing that charred deck, and on Thursday, after Aoki’s art opening had come and gone, he would try to move on. Become the husband that Claudia wanted him to be.

  And so Jeremy pushed the cart through Home Depot, obediently following Barry through FIXTURES and INDOOR PLUMBING. As Barry picked through a box of washers—letting them rain through his fingers—Jeremy stood and watched a young family trudging down the aisle. The parents were just about his age: the father with a Baby Bjorn strapped to his chest, milky spit-up stains on the shoulder of his U2 Popmart Tour T-shirt; the wife makeup-free and dumpy around the hips, furiously chasing a screaming three-year-old down the aisle. The father stopped next to a display of plastic toilet seats, right next to Jeremy.

  “Honey,” he called. “What’s our budget on this?”

  “We have forty bucks left,” she called, “but don’t forget we still need to get the shower curtain.” She was trying to tear a plunger from her toddler’s insistent grip. The toddler slammed the plunger against the warehouse floor, taking his boundless rage out on the handle. The plunger splintered, and the mother ripped it away, shoving it back onto the shelf.

  The man turned to Jeremy with an expression of infinite fatigue. “Hey, dude,” he said. “Which brand’s supposed to be better, American Standard or Pegasus?”

  Jeremy turned to stare at the toilet seat closest to him, imagining the man before him sitting on it, rereading a two-year-old copy of Popular Mechanics for the tenth time, lingering over his bowel movements in order to snatch just a few minutes of solitude. It seemed desperately sad. “You’re asking the wrong guy.” He shook his head, pleased for a moment not to fit here at all. This megastore was a sinkhole for humanity’s dreams, replacing lofty ideals and ambitions with soulless mundanity: self-heating toilet seats, faux-wood vinyl siding, and three-quarter-inch plastic piping. Of course Jeremy didn’t belong at Home Depot; he was an artist! It was a badge of goddamn honor not to know what a PNI-hardened T-nail was! “No, man, I have no clue.”

  “Whatever, it’s all the fucking same.” The man grabbed the cheapest one and lugged it back to his wife, as the baby strapped to his chest began to wail.

  Jeremy turned and found Barry watching him. “You want a quick lesson about how to seal a pipe joint?” Barry asked.

  Jeremy’s first instinct was to shake his head—No, absolutely not—but something about the hardness of Barry’s face stopped him, as if Barry had realized Jeremy was headed astray and was determined to herd him back into his proper position in the pack. “Sure,” Jeremy said, weakening.

  Barry smiled, revealing square white teeth that Jeremy suspected were dentures. “It’s something you really should know about. You’ll never have a leak again, I promise you.”

  “Why don’t you show me when we get home,” Jeremy said, trying to sound cheerful rather than doomed, trying to sound like a man in charge of his own destiny. “We have everything we need now?”

  “Yessirreebob,” Barry replied, and let Jeremy push the heavy cart down the carpentry aisle toward the front of the warehouse. There, Jeremy would pay for the supplies with his father-in-law’s money before heading back home to Claudia and Ruth for a
n afternoon of mixing concrete and sanding plaster. He walked as slowly as he could.

  Jeremy found Ruth and Claudia in the guest bedroom: Ruth scrubbing soot from the walls with a toxic-smelling cleaning product, Claudia attempting to dry an area rug with a hair dryer. His mother-in-law wore a rubber apron over a pink-collared sweatshirt that was fronted with an appliqué of three frolicking kittens. (She’d worn this sweatshirt nearly every day since their arrival; sometimes, when Jeremy closed his eyes at night, he imagined those three kittens clawing his eyes out.) Gray hair bristled about her head in tight curls. Under the blast of the hair dryer Jeremy could hear a light-jazz song playing on the stereo—was that Herb Alpert? Claudia turned and caught the quizzical expression on Jeremy’s face. Mom, she mouthed, rolling her eyes. Then: Save me.

  Ruth wiped her yellow rubber gloves on the front of her apron and shook her head. “I just don’t understand how you two could have spent so much on this house,” she shouted, over the hair dryer. “It’s less than half the size of ours, and ours cost a tenth of yours.”

  “Well, it’s not worth what we paid for it now,” Jeremy said. “Maybe we should just move into my convertible. It’s probably more valuable.”

  Neither woman laughed at his joke. Claudia snapped the hair dryer off. “Can you both stop it with the doom and gloom?” she complained. “We’re going to repair it. And I’m sure the market will bounce back eventually. Los Angeles is a desirable city and always will be.”