Burning Down the House

by Lev Raphael

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said.

  “Amen.” Juno slipped on a black sweater-jacket, grabbed her Chanel bag, and followed me out of Parker, which was already assuming its marmoreal early-evening hush. At a time like this it could seem an intriguing stage set, waiting for its play.

  Out in the almost-empty parking lot, Juno said we should have dinner again soon, and she headed off to her Lexus.

  Traffic on Michigan Avenue parallel to campus was lighter now. Across the street was what students called “The Mile,”

  a stretch of mostly student-oriented stores and restaurants running for almost twenty blocks across the northern edge of SUM’s mammoth campus. Stefan and I lived north of that, well beyond the band of frat houses that huddled near The Mile.

  I was parked closer to the lot exit onto Michigan Avenue, and I turned to see Juno approaching her car, feeling a slight pricking of anxiety. Was it for her, or for myself? That faded as I watched her confident, sexy stride and imagined, briefly, that I was slipping into the front seat next to her and that we were driving off madly in all directions, our life suddenly transformed into a road trip—but with a happy ending.

  I could just hear Sharon listening to this fantasy and saying in her wry Claudette Colbert voice, “That’s lovely.

  What would Stefan do? Wait at home for postcards?”

  I started my car and set the heater, since it felt a bit chilly. As I was taking the right turn onto Michigan Avenue slowly, I heard what sounded like a roaring engine. I looked back over my shoulder and watched, helpless and transfixed, as a black SUV rocketed from the far end of the parking lot and slammed into the side of Juno’s Lexus, which catapulted up and over, landing right side up twenty feet away on the grass close to Parker Hall, some of its windows shattered.

  Paralyzed, freaked out, I stared at Juno’s car as if it hadn’t been hit but had somehow magically transported itself from one spot to another, with the fan of my car heater and my own ragged breath suddenly filling my ears. I half expected her car to execute another leap into space. And then I unfroze and frantically reached for my cell phone to call 911, but couldn’t find it. Somebody honked at me to speed up. In my rearview mirror I could see the SUV tear out of the other lot exit onto campus while people started running to Juno’s car from all directions. The honking behind me intensified, and whoever it was pulled around me, shouting abuse. I sped down Michigan to the first campus entrance two blocks away, the bare, spotlighted trees and bricks whirling past.

  But I couldn’t make the turn back onto campus right

  away because of a gaggle of bicyclists. When I finally was able to turn, with the image of Juno’s car rolling up and over and bouncing on its tires stuck in my head, I couldn’t speed up. In fact, I had to crawl. SUM’s roads are almost all narrow and winding to discourage hot-rodders. My throat dry, I kept saying to myself, “No—no—no.” It was unbelievable. Her car had flipped over so quickly, so quietly, it was as if it had happened in a silent film.

  Before I even returned to the parking lot behind Parker, I heard sirens, and I pulled into the lot just after an SUM

  paramedics van and an SUM police car. Their flashing red lights were a beacon for anyone who hadn’t heard the crash, lashing out at the growing darkness.

  I tore open my door and raced toward Juno’s car but

  was stopped by an enormous blue-uniformed SUM officer, who was gesturing people back from the car where two

  young-looking paramedics in light blue uniforms were

  simultaneously opening the driver’s side door and the back of their van, which was parked just a few feet away, half on and half off the grass. One was male, one female, but they looked identical, with short hair and blank faces.

  “You need to stand back,” the officer said to me, while I watched the paramedics reach past the airbag into Juno’s car and fix a large flesh-colored plastic-looking collar around her neck and chin, first the front half, then the back, Velcro-ing the two parts together.

  “What are they doing?” I asked, feeling like a dog

  straining on a leash. I was utterly helpless, wanting to hold Juno in my arms but knowing that even if I did, it wouldn’t matter and might even be a mistake. The officer, as tall and rangy as a basketball player, gazed down at me. The radio at his black gun belt crackled, and he turned his head sideways and said something into the microphone attached to his left epaulet. That’s when I noticed the red-bordered shield-shaped badge on his shoulder with an SUM seal and “SUM Public Safety” in big red letters.

  My anxiety must have sent the wrong message; he

  asked, “Girlfriend?”

  But I didn’t even hesitate. “Yes.” Anything else, and he might not have talked to me.

  He nodded. “They’re immobilizing her neck.”

  “Why? Is she hurt?”

  Before answering, he surveyed the crowd that hung back respectfully. “First thing you do—in case of spinal cord injuries.” His cool tone and his height made it all sound theoretical, and in fact the actions just ten feet away were playing out like some well-rehearsed performance.

  “Why is there a hole in the front of the collar?”

  “In case they have to do a tracheotomy.”

  “Hey—is she dead?” someone asked in the small crowd,

  and I wanted to punch whoever had even used the word.

  The paramedics had opened a large orange suitcase, and one seemed to be talking to Juno while listening to her lungs through a stethoscope. So she couldn’t be too badly hurt, could she?

  I asked the officer if that were true, but he shrugged, mumbled something about how they always checked three things first: airways, breathing, circulation.

  “ABC,” he explained. “Did you see what happened?” he

  asked casually.

  “Yes! I was pulling out of the lot, and some maniac in a black SUV broadsided her and shot off onto campus.”

  “Did you catch the make? Plate number? Did you see the driver? Which way did they go?”

  “It was big—it was black—I think the windows were

  tinted.…” I squeezed my eyes shut to recapture the scene, but the flashing lights penetrated my eyelids and washed everything in red, bloodying my images of Juno’s car being rammed, turning over, and bouncing down on its wheels. I thought of Lady Macbeth rubbing and washing her hands, unable to erase the stain. Would I ever be able to separate the crash from these moments? It already seemed blurred and impossible.

  “I think it headed back onto campus.” I pointed behind me. “That way.”

  The officer turned to his microphone, and I heard him say something about the SUV and “tricounty.” I assumed some kind of call was going out to all the local police forces, and I had a flash of the SUV tearing down a highway in a high-speed chase, hitting a guard rail, flipping over, and bursting into flames. I hoped it would burn slowly.

  “They’re taking her blood pressure,” the officer said, studying me. A faint note of pity had crept into his voice.

  “You’ll be able to talk to her before they take her to the emergency room.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t worry. Michiganapolis has some of the best

  response times and best-trained emergency medicine

  practitioners in the country.” Now he sounded like he was reading from some kind of training brochure: “How to Calm Down Bystanders at an Accident Scene.”

  The paramedics had a long, narrow, plastic-looking

  board with hand grips all along it, and they were turning Juno carefully out of the car as if she were a fragile old woman being transferred to a wheelchair, lifting her onto the board, strapping her down. I heard her curse but couldn’t make out what she had said.

  “Can I get your name, address, and phone?” the officer asked me, taking out a small pad and pen. I complied, and then he moved casually through the crowd of some twenty student gawkers who had all been hanging back respectfully. I glanced over; nobody
else seemed to be claiming to have seen what happened. Perhaps other witnesses had left when they saw the ambulance and police car show up.

  In the mysteries and thrillers I’d been reading so

  intensely, people were always throwing up at moments like this, feeling their stomachs churn or heave or roil or clutch, but none of that was happening to me. If anything, I felt disembodied, numb below the neck, cut off from myself. And my head seemed unbearably, painfully light, with each repeated flash of the red emergency lights an assault, beating at me like strobes.

  Was it taking forever—or only minutes? I couldn’t tell.

  The female paramedic was carefully running a hand

  between the board and Juno’s body, head to toe, while her companion seemed to be feeling for wounds, too, on top.

  When his hand reached below her breasts, Juno shouted, “That hurts!”

  “Ribs,” the cop said confidently, back at my side.

  “Broken?”

  “Even bruised ribs hurt like hell. But she looks like she’s breathing pretty good.”

  The paramedics now had what looked like a laptop out

  and were hooking her up.

  “Is that a heart monitor?”

  “Good guess.”

  The paramedics lifted out a wheeled stretcher from the back of the van, grabbed the handles on the board, and lifted her onto it. At the head of the stretcher was an extendable IV

  pole. One paramedic checked the monitor while the other inserted the IV and hung up the bag. Then they brought out a green tank that read oxygen—flammable and inserted prongs into her nose that connected to the tank via a long tube. It was all very calm, very practiced, very efficient. Neither paramedic raised a voice or seemed at all rushed, yet they moved quickly. The officer was watching them with admiration.

  “They’re in what they call the golden hour,” he said. “When they have the best chance of saving somebody.”

  The paramedics now started to carefully wheel Juno

  toward the van. That’s when I noticed there was someone uniformed seated in the front of the van, speaking on a radio.

  “Okay,” the officer said, and he moved forward with me, perhaps to make sure I didn’t run amok and throw myself on the stretcher as if it were a coffin being lowered into the ground. Juno couldn’t move her head, so she didn’t see me until I was standing right next to the stretcher.

  “He’s cool,” the officer told the suddenly wary

  paramedics, who must have dealt with hysterical relatives in their time. “He’s the boyfriend.”

  Amazingly, Juno seemed unbruised, and there wasn’t any sign of blood. Breathing stertorously, she flung out a hand and grabbed at me. “Turandot—she needs to be fed… let her out into the yard… to run… keys… in my pocket!” And she

  jerked her hand down to her right side. The female paramedic hushed her.

  “It’s her dog,” I explained.

  The officer nodded that it was all right, and I felt in her sweater pocket and found a key ring.

  And then, like waiters simultaneously lifting covers off dishes at a chic restaurant, the paramedics glanced at each other and started hoisting the stretcher into the ambulance.

  Within seconds and almost without any apparent effort, they were loaded up, and the van was wailing off to the nearest emergency room, which the officer confirmed for me was at SUM’s Medical School, at the southern edge of campus.

  In the dark, I hadn’t been able to make out the name on the officer’s badge, but when he told me he’d be back in touch, he introduced himself: Harry Protopopescu.

  “Rumanian?”

  He seemed surprised by my question. “That’s right,

  originally, but my people are from Hungary.” His answer seemed delivered with a silent, “No more questions, you can go now,” and I heard him calling for a local wrecker to tow Juno’s car—to the campus police station, I assumed, since it had been involved in a hit-and-run.

  I walked back to my own car as if after a gap of years, staring at its uncracked windows and undamaged driver’s door. They seemed strangely unflawed to me. I got in and told myself to pay attention to the road or I’d get hurt myself, and I drove off to Juno’s house to take care of her dog before going to see her at the ER, wishing right then for only two things.

  The identity of the driver who rammed Juno’s car.

  And a gun.

  11

  THE five-minute drive to Juno’s house was agony, full of speculation. What if she had a concussion? What if she had internal bleeding? What if she had a punctured lung? What if —what if? Could she have been talking to me one minute, telling me about her keys, and then have lapsed into a coma while she was in the ambulance? Were those closing

  ambulance doors final?

  Before Sharon’s gruesome diagnosis and surgery, I

  wouldn’t have needed Stefan to say such questions were stupidly alarmist, but now even he would agree that anything terrible was possible when it came to the body’s vulnerability.

  Of course, Juno wasn’t facing a brain tumor and dangerous surgery as Sharon had done, but once again I felt I was in my own version of a Poe story where celebrants give way before an ominous masked figure—or was I thinking of the

  masquerade scene in Phantom? I knew that people derided its specious musicality, but lines from that dark show often floated through my thoughts. After Sharon’s diagnosis, we were all most definitely “past the point of no return.”

  What if. What if I’d walked Juno to her car and chatted?

  Or we could have stayed upstairs talking another few minutes.

  Anything, everything, that might have delayed her enough to have missed being a hit-and-run victim, anything that might have changed the shape of those horrendous few moments.

  What if her car hadn’t even started? Then she would have never been in the path of a reckless driver.

  I was doing nothing more constructive than picking at scabs. And each time I stopped at a red light, the round glare of the traffic signal seemed to swell and expand until it filled the windshield, invasive and cruel.

  I tried to calm down by imagining the next half hour as if scrolling down a list, breaking it all down into simple steps: I would get to Juno’s house; I would let Juno’s dog out and feed it; I would call Stefan from there, since I seemed to have unaccountably left my cell phone at home; I would not fall apart on the way to the emergency room to see Juno.

  But that last item undid the minimal flicker of serenity.

  Another hospital. First Sharon, now Juno. Stefan and I had been extremely lucky not to lose many friends to AIDS, so neither of us had been intimate with hospital rooms or halls until Sharon’s illness. Now the word hospital itself seemed polluting and toxic.

  The garish Christmas lights I passed struck me as

  obscenely gleeful, like laughter at a funeral. I found myself thinking of Auden’s devastating “Funeral Blues.” But did Juno mean so much to me already that I could imagine wanting to pack up the moon and dismantle the sun—or was the metallic taste of grief in my mouth a response to feeling ever more unsafe?

  I drove up the quiet residential Michiganapolis street to Juno’s house, picturing myself as an intruder even though she’d given me her keys, and even though the neighborhood was much like ours. Mature trees; large yards; middle-class homes. I parked right out front of the unassuming large brick ranch towered over by arbor-vitae, and walked up the driveway trying not to look suspicious. I heard rustling in the huge shrub along her driveway, but assumed this time that it was only birds or squirrels.

  I fumbled with the unfamiliar locks at the bland brown door, and as soon as I managed to let myself in, I heard whining. Turning on lights as I went, I followed the sound to the bedroom, which I hadn’t seen before. Unlike the rest of the white-on-white house, this room was a riot of purple and leopard print, from the tumble of silk pillows of all sizes on the canopied bed to the heavily swagged and festooned drapes. It was a ba
roque, wild room that seemed pathetic without Juno’s animating presence. Not even a stage setting, but a shell.

  Near a door to what looked like the master bathroom was a large rectangular plastic purple crate with a fat black handle, small side vents, and a little gated door. Juno’s Westie stared out at me, her black eyes and black nose making her look as unreal and adorable as a teddy bear. She barked once, and I reached down, muttered in what I hoped was a reassuring way, and opened the catch to the door, not knowing if she might try to bite me. Turandot raced from the room, and I followed her to the living room, where she did a tarantella in front of the sliding doors. I figured she knew her own routine, so I undid the catch and slid a door open, but it stuck. I fished out a wooden plank in the runner.

  Released, Turandot sped out into the dark yard and

  apparently did whatever she had to quickly, because she was back and tearing off to the kitchen. I closed up the door and found her sitting in front of a counter, gazing upward. The first door I opened had a bag of dog food and a half-cup measure right at the front. Her water bowl was off in the corner, and what I assumed was her food bowl sat next to it.

  While she sat patiently at my feet, I thought I’d try her with a half cup of dog food, and give her more if she were hungry. I set it down near her water. She ate quickly, slurped up enough water to be getting ready to hike the Appalachian Trail, and seemed done.

  It had been easy thus far. But now she sat looking at me with soulful wise eyes as if I was supposed to know what was next. She couldn’t have been much more than ten

  pounds, I thought, mildly alarmed at the image of her fragility.

  What if I hadn’t been there to get Juno’s keys, and no one else had taken her seriously? Or if she hadn’t been able to speak?

  I crouched down to Turandot and held out a hand. That wasn’t interesting. She shook herself, then dashed under the table and emerged with a plush toy shaped like a carrot, dashed to the kitchen door, and stopped, looking at me over her shoulder, the carrot in her mouth like a tango dancer’s rose.

  I’d never had a dog before, but even I could understand that she wanted to be chased, and so I did, ducking around the furniture with her, reversing directions, and letting her chase me while she chomped on the carrot or stopped to fling it in the air and pounce on it, bite it so it squeaked.