House on Fire

by Bonnie Kistler

  “Shoot me their names anyway. My investigator can be very persuasive. I’ll send him out to talk to the neighbor, too, the one who called nine-one-one. And, Pete, I’m going to need some up-front money for the experts. I can wait for my fee, but they won’t. So factor that into your budget.”

  His budget. Like this was something he knew was coming and tucked a little money aside for. A rainy day fund, in case his son was ever arrested for killing his stepdaughter.

  “Any questions?”

  “Yeah.” Pete cleared his throat. “These charges—they’re all adult crimes, right? But what if it happened before midnight? What if he was still seventeen?”

  “Right. Well, here’s the thing. Where the offense is a felony, anyone fourteen or older can be transferred out of juvenile court. The fact that Kip was only minutes away from adulthood, if not there already, would almost certainly get him kicked upstairs to circuit court.”

  Pete stopped a minute to take that in. “Okay, but if they’re calling him an adult, shouldn’t he have to be adult-level drunk? His blood alcohol was only point-oh-five-five.”

  “Good question. But vehicular homicide has two alternative prongs. The first one is BAC of point oh eight or higher. The second is simply driving while under the influence of alcohol. That one’s not as scientific. All competent evidence can be considered. Erratic driving. Boisterous behavior. Failing the field sobriety test, which is what the arresting officer will say.”

  “I didn’t!” Kip said. “I passed her stupid tests just fine.”

  Pete shot him a glare. It was probably that attitude right there that made the cop haul him in for the blood test.

  “With no other witnesses,” Shelby said, “it’ll be pretty hard to dispute what she says.”

  No other witnesses, Pete thought with a stab. Because the only one who could back him up was the one he stood accused of killing. “What if he’s convicted? What then?”

  “Worst case? Ten years. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Most prosecutors don’t pursue vehicular homicide cases when they’re intrafamily. Maybe Harrison only wanted the headline in today’s paper and tomorrow he’ll settle for probation and a fine. We have to wait and see how it all shakes out. Let’s circle back tomorrow, okay? Meanwhile, get some sleep and don’t talk to anybody about the case.”

  Ten years. Pete felt a whiteout of panic as the call ended. Almost four thousand nights to spend the way he spent last night, with terror gnawing a hole through his gut. The light turned red at the shopping center intersection ahead, and as he braked to a stop, he peered up through the tinted glass of the windshield, scanning the rooftops of the stores and the hilltops beyond them. He almost longed for the days when a sniper was the only threat to his family. When he could protect his kid simply by shielding him with his own body. He had no idea how to shield him from this.

  Chapter Eight

  Waking was when it was worst. The little white pills wore off during the night, and Leigh rose up out of sleep on a buoyant senselessness. Feeling normal. Facing an ordinary day in her ordinary, happy life. For thirty seconds she floated there on a raft of contentment before the Oh no crashed over her. The realization that Chrissy was dead. It was like a tsunami, the way it knocked the breath from her body and left her drowning in grief again.

  It was unnatural for a parent to lose a child, people said. Unthinkable. But when she was awake it was all she could think about. Her magic child was gone. She’d never see her face again or hear her tinkling laugh or feel her skinny arms in a hug. The last time she saw her was at her bedroom door Friday night. The last thing she said to her was We’ll talk about this in the morning. But she never talked to her again. She never saw her again. Not in the hospital and not in the funeral home either. She wasn’t Chrissy anymore, they told her. Her head was shaved. Her scalp was stitched. You don’t want to see, they said, but they were wrong. How could she not want to see her own child? When she tried to push past them, they told her not to torture herself this way. As if this pain were something she was inflicting on herself.

  It was too much, to have to lose her over and over again, every time she stirred from sleep, to have her heart gouged out again every single time. It would be better never to sleep, and better still never to wake.

  The mattress dipped during the night, and for one foggy moment she thought it was Ted come back to her bed, and she kicked off and cast herself away from his touch. It was only later in the night when the currents of sleep bumped her up against him that she realized it was Peter, and she grabbed on and clung to him like a lifeboat. He wrapped his arms around her and whispered words to her, but, no, she couldn’t listen. She couldn’t wake to that pain again, and so she pushed herself back down, deep into the numbing waters of sleep.

  She didn’t feel the mattress rise again in the morning. She never heard him leave her.

  It was afternoon before sunlight slipped through the cracks of her eyelids, and there was the pain, lurking in the corner of her consciousness with its glowing red eyes, waiting for her to wake so it could lunge at her again. She barely had time to cower before its great yawing jaws opened wide to swallow her whole. Blindly she groped along the nightstand, knocked her knuckles against the lamp and a half-empty glass of water and scrabbled her fingers through a snowdrift of used tissues, but she couldn’t feel the prescription bottle.

  She forced her eyes open. Bright afternoon light stabbed her retinas; her mouth tasted of cotton; her throat felt like steel wool. Noises reverberated through the house and in her head. A car door slamming in the driveway, Shep barking in the kitchen, drawers sliding open and crashing shut in the twins’ room, footsteps pounding on the stairs. Shouts in fragmented conversations. Zack’s flight, Dylan’s train schedule, did you see my phone, is there anything to eat.

  The last sound she ever heard from her daughter: the soft snuffles of her sleep-breathing. Through a closed door. While an artery was bursting in her brain. While Leigh hurried off to meet a new client.

  The pain crashed over her again, and again she reached for the prescription bottle and when her fingers met only air, she raised up on an elbow to look. There it was, rolling on the floor. She slid off the bed and landed on hands and knees on the rug and peered through the amber plastic. The bottle was empty. She flattened on her belly to search for any spilled pills under the bed. It was dark there, and so alluring. Like a cave or a cocoon. How nice it would be to crawl in under there. Like a return to the womb, she thought.

  A tap on the door. Her mother’s voice. “Darling, the airport limo’s here. We have to go now.” Another tap. “Leigh, darling?”

  She needed to get up. She needed to go to her parents. If it was unthinkable to lose a child, it was even more unthinkable to lose a grandchild, and they loved Chrissy beyond all measure. I look at that precious girl, her mother once confided, and I know my time on earth has counted for something. They were facing their own mortality in these last years of their lives—this was a loss they might never recover from. They needed Leigh now more than they ever had. She had to get up right now and hug them good-bye and tell them how much she loved them. Her boys needed her, too, and poor little Mia. They were all grieving, too. And Peter—Peter!—whose heart must be aching. The heart that he’d pledged to her care. She needed to get up and tend to them. All of them.

  She didn’t move. She lay silent and still on the floor until her mother’s heavy sigh sounded through the door. “We’ll call you tonight, dear.”

  Leigh closed her eyes and escaped into sleep again.

  Another set of noises bombarded her ears. Shouts, ugly words, a slamming door. She reached for a pillow to clamp over her head, but she was on the floor and the pillows were up on the bed. She hooked a hand on the edge of the mattress and hauled herself up. More shouts, strangled cries that ricocheted like bullets from the children’s wing. Some kind of argument was going on, she understood that much. Over the years she’d broken up a lot of tussles and scrapes among the children, an
d she had a routine. Pull them apart, send them to neutral corners, deliver a quick scolding about respect and communication, Now, calm down and apologize. She wouldn’t listen to accusations or assign blame. She didn’t care who started it. All that mattered was that the fight end, now. She made them say the words. I’m sorry. Then, I forgive you. She must have done it a thousand times over the last twenty years. She needed to stand up and do it now.

  Something caught her eye. There, on the nightstand, another bottle of pills. She grabbed it like a lifeline and downed two and fell headlong into bed.

  Later. Peter was in the room, and she tried to wake for him but the drugs were holding on too tight. Her eyelids weighed a hundred pounds each, and her ears were submerged in an underwater tank. He was telling her something, but the words came to her in aquatic garbles. He moved through the room in starts and stutters like a poorly spliced videotape, quick jerky cuts from the closet, to the bath, to the chest of drawers. The volume faded in and out as he spoke. Something about the bail hearing. Expert witnesses. The words tripped an alarm. This was important. She needed to wake up and listen. But the alarm was in another room, on another floor, and it grew fainter and fainter until it faded into silence.

  She couldn’t wake even when the twins tiptoed in to say good-bye. She felt their kisses on her cheek, and her eyelids fluttered and her fingers twitched with the effort to pull herself awake. But it was no use. They were already gone.

  Pete hollered for the twins to get a move on, and they galloped out to the driveway and wrestled over the shotgun seat but ended up losing to Shepherd, who darted between them to claim it. They grumbled into the backseat, and Pete headed out like the family chauffeur.

  An unfamiliar silence descended, and they were halfway to Dulles before there was anything but the sound of four males breathing a little too heavily inside the car. It was Zack who finally spoke and only after a dry round of throat clearing. “Um, we talked to Mia this morning.”

  Pete gave a guilty start. “Yeah?” He’d been putting that off. He didn’t know how to tell her about this, any of this, especially over the phone.

  “Skyped,” Dylan clarified.

  “How’d she look?” He’d been meaning to go and see her, every day he meant to, but there was never any time.

  “Scared,” Zack said.

  “Lost.”

  Pete glanced up at the mirror. They were big burly college men but looked just as scared and lost as his ten-year-old. “Yeah,” he said.

  “We wanted her to know the schedule doesn’t change. Every other Sunday at two, same as always.”

  The twins started it when they first went away to school. During Mia’s visitation weekends—Pete had her every other weekend plus dinner every Wednesday night—they’d set up a three-way Skype call. Chrissy logged on, with Mia squeezed in the chair beside her and Kip’s head looming in and out of camera range over theirs, while in split screens on the monitor, the twins grinned and mugged from two different time zones. For twenty or thirty minutes twice a month, the five of them bantered about nothing while their parents eavesdropped with big stupid smiles on their faces.

  “She might need help logging on, though,” Dylan said.

  “Right,” Pete said. Because Chrissy wouldn’t be there to do it. “Thanks, guys. I’m sure that means a lot to her.”

  The first stop was Dulles for Zack’s flight to Austin. Shep barked indignantly at his departure at the terminal while Pete went through the curbside litany of reminders: call on arrival, be good, be careful, and please don’t break any bones because he was counting on his help this summer. “Yeah, yeah,” Zack said with a big bear hug while Pete pressed a couple hundred dollars into the boy’s hand.

  It was what he always did, slip them some traveling money, but his bank balance was scrolling rapidly through his mind as he drove on to Union Station for Dylan’s train to New York. He was going to have to make some steep austerity cuts. Ten thousand dollars was the 10 percent premium for the bail bond, and it was gone forever, no matter what happened. If Kip was cleared, even if the charges were dropped tomorrow, the bondsman still got to keep his 10 percent. Then there were the expert witness fees, not to mention Shelby’s. We’ll talk about that later, she’d said, but he didn’t hold out much hope for a discount. She had a law firm to answer to, the same as Leigh.

  They reached the drop-off circle at the train station, but Dylan didn’t get out. “Hey, Pete?” He hesitated, his hand on the door handle. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

  Pete braced himself. Failing grades or he got some girl pregnant. Those were the worries he and Leigh most often had about these two.

  “It’s about Kip. Zack and me—we kind of roughed him up.”

  “What?”

  Pete’s tone held nothing but surprise, but Dylan winced like he’d been chewed out. “I know, I’m sorry. It was only heat of the moment, you know? But I feel bad about it now. I mean, I know it was an accident. It could’ve been me or Zack behind the wheel as easy as Kip.”

  “How rough?”

  “A couple punches to the gut. One to the face.”

  “Jeez, Dylan.”

  “I know. I feel terrible now. But we were just hanging out in our room thinking about Chrissy, then Kip walked in, and we took one look at each other and jumped him.”

  Their secret twin communication. It wasn’t the first time they brought out the worst in each other.

  “Would you tell him I’m sorry?”

  “Ought to come from you, don’t you think?”

  Dylan sighed. “Yeah, I hear you.”

  Pete got out and hoisted his bag from the trunk and peeled off another couple hundred dollars at the curb. “Thanks for telling me,” he said when Dylan hugged him good-bye.

  “We’re gonna get through this, right, Pete?”

  “If we can keep the punches to a minimum? You bet.”

  He wondered. All the way home he wondered. What if his son was actually convicted of killing Leigh’s daughter? How well would they be blended then? Their son, their daughter, Leigh always said, but what now?

  Shep jumped into the backseat and gave one last plaintive bark out the rear window as they left the District. He still seemed agitated at how he’d lost track of Chrissy. For four days he’d been nosing into every corner and cranny in the house, trying to pick up her scent. He leaped back into the front seat, and Pete hooked an arm around him and ruffled the fur on his chest. “I know, buddy,” he said. “I know.”

  Chapter Nine

  Leigh woke and rode out another tidal wave: Chrissy was dead, she was still dead and she’d always be dead. This was the world she was going to wake to every day for the rest of her life. World without Chrissy. Amen.

  The world without. There was a world beyond this bed, this room, and as the fog of sleep began to lift, her awareness of that world began slowly to sharpen. She forced her eyes open. It was nearly as dark in the bedroom as it had been inside her head. She rolled over to squint at the alarm clock on Peter’s nightstand. It was almost seven. By now her parents would be back on the ground in Florida. Zack would be in the air and Dylan on the train or maybe already off it, and she’d never said good-bye to any of them. She’d slept the day away.

  Soon it would be the week. For four days, almost five, all she’d done was sleep. Her family needed her and she wallowed in sleep when she should have been with them. It was her duty to be strong for them. She’d never shirked it before and she mustn’t now. They had to find some way to get through this, all of them, but she knew it had to start with her.

  She staggered into the bathroom. The shower was too cold then too hot but she forced herself to stand in it and held her face toward the full jet-force of the spray. Strands of memory began to rise, loose tangled threads of everything that had happened in the past five days, and slowly they began to knit themselves together. Events came back to her. The surgery, the funeral, the luncheon. People—a slide show of the faces of friends and strangers. The
words they spoke that she must have heard even when she couldn’t respond. It was all coming back to her, and a list started to form in her mind of all the things she must do. Phone calls to make, thank-you notes to write.

  But there was something else— Something else was struggling to climb up into her consciousness. It slid and scrabbled against the slippery slope of her memory, but finally an axe struck and held and the memory vaulted to the summit.

  Kip.

  He’d been arrested. He spent the night in jail and the morning in court, and he must be more terrified than he’d ever been in his life.

  She shut off the shower and yanked on a robe and hurried down the hall. His door was open, and his computer screen glowed a blue light from the desk to the bed where he lay with his eyes closed and a pair of headphones on. Not asleep, though; one foot was moving in rhythm to whatever music was being piped into his ears. Her eyes misted as she stared at him, and the blue light bled into the shadows of his body. Slowly his dark hair blurred into copper curls, and suddenly it was Chrissy lying there, it was Chrissy’s foot tapping, and Leigh gasped out loud.

  Kip’s head jerked at the sound, and the image dissolved in a puff of smoke.

  Drugs. It was only the drugs. She took a steadying breath. “Want some company?”

  His foot went still. He shifted over a few inches, and she came in and perched on the edge of the mattress. Across the room his suit coat was draped over the desk chair. He was wearing sweatpants now and a rumpled T-shirt, and she could see the tension in the clench of his fingers.

  “Can you tell me about it?”

  He tugged off the headphones but didn’t answer, and the only sound was the music trickling tinny and faint through the speakers. It wasn’t his usual percussive rap music. It was something more melodic, sad and eerie, like an Appalachian ballad. One night in jail and he was a country music fan.

  He fumbled for the mute button. “Leigh, I—I don’t know what to say.”