Burning Down the House (21 page)

Not one of the firefighters would admit to having done it. They just shrugged when I asked and looked down carefully at their hands.

I still figure it was Mike.

NINETEEN

I think part of my problem was that there was a period when fires and accidents just piled up as if they'd never stop. If I'd had just the end-over-end Rabbit's crash in my sleep and the mewling man with the two broken legs, that would have been enough. I think I would have been able to deal with that—at least, that's what I keep telling myself. I keep telling myself that it was because there was so much, that it was because the images just kept piling onto each other.

If I'd had just one—just the man in the ditch or the firefighter's wife or the girl who was cut bad—if I'd had just one out of the whole bunch of them, I might have been able to reason my way through it in a rational and even-handed way. I might have been able to just box it all up and put it aside. But I never knew who it would be, who would surface in my nights and my days, and which way they were going to come at me.

I wanted to think it was over when the call was done and I slammed the truck door behind me, making my way up the gravel to the back door of my house. But that was just a hope, never even close to reality.

Instead, I'd get to spend hours awake in the dead of night, the television flickering blue around the walls, while I wondered what was happening to me and if it was ever going to stop. Afraid to close my eyes because I'd had plenty of nightmares that were just waiting for me to sleep so that they could pick up exactly where they had left off when I woke up.

Sometimes, Barby would make her way halfway down the stairs and ask if I was all right. I'd lie—“Fine, just can't sleep”—even though my face might still be wet with tears. I couldn't imagine that anyone else was going through anything like it, or that I would be anything but the subject of ridicule if I admitted what was going on.

It began to give me a certain coldness, too, a kind of brittle, put-on practicality. I began to believe that I wouldn't get hurt—at least I wouldn't get hurt as badly—if I managed to keep everyone just a little farther away. If I could make enough distance that I could live safely in the protective bubble.

I wouldn't argue, wouldn't engage; I was practising holding my face still so that it betrayed nothing. I tried to imagine that my face looked calm or nonplussed—like the nictitating membrane in a shark's eyes just before it bites. Lower the shades on your eyes and don't let anybody know that you're home in there. Not your boss— not your spouse. Not anyone.

Other firefighters seemed to be able to handle things. Even after bad scenes, it was hard to get any of them to acknowledge they were upset or disturbed by anything. Part of my job as deputy chief was to look for people who needed help, because we had assistance programs for them and I was supposed to nudge them along the way. But no one admitted anything, so there was no one to nudge.

None of those other firefighters looked as if they were living on a ragged edge between asleep and awake, night after night. They all seemed able to hang things up as easily as they packed away their fire gear after a call. And if they could do it, then I could too. I tried to convince myself that the night terrors were something that could simply be subdued by sheer will, that I could force myself to be more practical, less edgy—that I could successfully push away from everything, put some distance between myself and any sort of emotion. I didn't know it at the time, but I think now that I was doing the equivalent of packing a container tight with explosives, like mixing air and gasoline, just looking for the right spark.

I suppose it would have been sensible to get professional help then. I would get help later, but only when I was coming close to not being able to function at all. The problem was that there was no sharp, clear defining point, no line that I could say I had clearly crossed between being all right and not being all right at all.

It's like staying at a party too late during an unexpected snowstorm. You're talking away, and outside you can see the snowflakes battering down through the porch light. Sometimes the snow is heavy and sometimes it's just fine, threadlike flakes, catching and turning in the light so that every now and then they flash miraculous silver. Maybe you hear the snowplow a few times, the metal-on-pavement screech of the bottom of its blade, and maybe you even see the blue strobe light on its roof as the heavy truck trundles by. But it's not until you finally say your goodbyes and venture out into the night that you realize the snow is up to your knees—and by then, struck by the surprise of it, you find it hard to do anything except stare out at the smoothed-over hummocks and humps that were originally cars and wonder how you let it get to this point.

By the time I got there, I knew all the infomercials only too well—the amazing Flowbee (“the vacuum cleaner that cuts hair”), the miracle knives sold by men in chef's hats that could cut through a pop can and still cut perfectly thin slices of tomato. I knew about scores of exercise machines and programs that promised perfect abdominal muscles.

I knew movies in French, and art films with subtitles, and I knew that the images could wash over you like water, the colours of the television on your skin like moving tattoos.

And I knew that not one of those images would stick for even one moment the way dealing with a crying relative could—the way someone else's tears on your face burn, like they were leaving marks that won't ever come off. I would have loved to be tormented by dreams about the Craftmatic bed, or to have mysterious, heavy-lower-lipped Frenchwomen sneer and stalk away from me in my sleep. Instead, I got a man who had mowed his toes off with a lawn mower and a woman who couldn't speak, her throat swelling shut hopelessly fast from an allergic reaction.

I didn't even have the option of telling myself that the dreams weren't real, because there were enough elements that
were
real that my waking brain would snap back immediately to whatever their genesis had been. The dream might start like a real memory: reaching across the front seat of a crashed car to get a woman's purse, spilled open on the remains of the passenger seat, gathering up the absolutely expected contents—wallet, glasses case, makeup, balled Kleenex—and taking the purse back to the ambulance because she had to have it with her. The spilled purse looked so normal—no warnings inside, no suggestions of anything but the unfolding of an absolutely average day.

I'd examined the woman when she was pinned like a butterfly behind the steering wheel. I could feel the clear breaks in a line of ribs, the fine, regular barrel staves of her rib cage now all sheared along a new straight and geometric plane. The rising knot over her right eye where her face had turned just as she went into the exploding airbag.

I know I could have just dismissed individual nightmares out of hand and gotten on with my day if they'd included something unbelievable, like a snake coming out of her open mouth. Instead, I walk back to the ambulance through the rain, hearing the hiss of car tires fading as drivers slow down to look at the wrecked car, and when I hand the woman her purse, she opens her mouth to thank me and I can see she's completely bitten off her tongue, that her mouth is full of black blood clots and she's trying desperately to say something, straining forward against the chest straps on the gurney, but the words are just a mess of bubbled air and gurgling sounds.

It may be a dream, but it's been built with too much fact for me to dismiss it all as fiction. The analytical part of my mind screams that this could actually happen, that I wouldn't even find it strange to drive up to a scene and find that it
had
happened—and what's the difference between a dream and reality if all of it could happen exactly that way?

At the same time, I wonder if there isn't a reason my brain selects some elements and not others, and whether there's some secret in the combination that professionals would be able to unwrap in me if I could ever let anyone sort my dreams out properly.

There's no sorting things out alone at three in the morning. I used to tell myself that over and over again, used to tell myself that a trip into the dark of the kitchen to find a slumbering bottle of Scotch wouldn't really help anything either, even if I could picture every single thing about the kitchen in my head—the warm yellow triangle of the light from the back porch cast in across the pine boards, the reassuring hum of the refrigerator, the familiar hulking layout of cabinets and countertops.

There is some small relief in that—walking exactly the same number of steps I always do to reach the counter, running my fingertip along the turned-down curve of its edge. The cupboard doors are so familiar, the knobs just at the height where my hands remember them, as smooth and round as they should be, friendly to my touch. Silent hinges. Really only the whoosh of the door moving through the air, the swing of it that pushes against you as if it almost has its own shape.

Sometimes I even wound up with a glass in my hand, feeling the smooth belly of it against my palm, or else the long cool bottle itself, imagining the smell and taste and smoky bite of the alcohol. The idea that I could just settle down next to the front window with two kinds of cold glass: one, with Scotch, in the palm of my hand, the other, the front window, that I could rest my forehead on and watch the world cycle silently by.

But the truth is that eventually there wasn't even any relief in simple things like the outdoors anymore, glass or no glass: the night stopped distracting me because it just sat there, holding dark blue. The stars turned slowly, but they didn't talk about anything but the blessed far away. Even when cars passed, they didn't wind up being the right kind of distraction, because I would see the yellow cone of their headlights just long enough to imagine that there were other sorts of lives going by, self-contained and complete. I would try to count the heads as the car passed under the street light, try to imagine better lives for all of them.

I tried to imagine that they were happy and laughing and oblivious, that they didn't have to spend their nights awake and alone, that they didn't ever worry about whether the great clock of the world might tick an awkward tock and have them meet a stranger head-on in the other direction, travelling fast and laughing and just as happily oblivious as they were.

That they didn't ever have to worry about finding an airway in the screaming bright mayhem of the crash, when my gloves are all covered with slippery blood and things keep squirting out of my hands, and there's so much sharp metal that I'm cutting my bunker gear and maybe my arms as well. And the night is as still as ever except someone nearby is moaning deep in their throat like a stray cat outside the door, only this is no cat and I'm in the car beside the people who are moaning, and it won't ever goddamn stop.

The people driving by don't ever have to worry about that.

But I do.

And I couldn't stop.

Even on those nights, I would eventually climb back into the warmth of bed, wait for the cold pain in my feet to stop, and stare up through the darkness at the ceiling. Sometimes I would sleep. Often, though, it was a long and lonely wait, complicated by the fact that I was also waiting for the possibility that my pager might provide its own deliverance.

I was like an addict shaking in the agony of withdrawal and at the same time desperate for another fix. Terrified by it, but waiting eagerly for the pageout. It's hard to fathom, but it's absolutely true. If I could have been on back-to-back-to-back runs every night of the week, I would have preferred that to any other option.

Even if it was tearing me to pieces.

If you're on a fire call, you know the wildness you can expect, and you know the feeling of it tight inside you—that building feeling, the excitement, even the dread. It builds like a storm while you're on the road, one that you can't help but anticipate with both foreboding and overwhelming wonder. It's doing, and the thinking stops.

The chief and I went together in his truck up to the back of Western Gully Road, back onto an overgrown farm where the owners thought we could do a controlled burn of the remains of their barn. Surrendering to gravity, the upper part of the barn had toppled backwards onto the hill it was built into, and the only part that remained standing was the ground floor, hemmed in on three sides by fieldstone walls roughed together with mortar. Just inside the lower portion of the barn was an equally weathered tractor, and Gary Collins and I talked about it, said we could probably haul it out of the way if we went ahead.

It would be the sort of fire we could use as a training exercise, pumping water up from the end of the pond, practising spilling the big hose from the pumpers. The biggest concern was exposures; in layman's terms, how things nearby—a rose hedge, a house clad in vinyl siding, and two large trees—would be affected by the tremendous heat a fire load that large would throw off. That, and whether the long pasture running up to the spruce behind the barn would be so dry that it would burn as well.

I took a flashlight in around a partition at the very back of the barn, stumbling in over the broken floorboards that had fallen from upstairs, shining the light into a narrow space onto two 50-gallon drums of diesel, one with a hand pump still screwed into place through the bung, and a wet-looking pile of shallow boxes marked C-I-L—Stump Dynamite. We didn't get any closer.

We drove back into the cove in Gary's truck. He lit a cigarette and rolled down the window of his big Ford.

“Don't think we'll be issuing a burning permit,” he said quietly.

TWENTY

“You could come out and visit if you're out this way.”

My mother's voice, small and thin through the telephone receiver. By then my parents had retired to Victoria, B.C., the absolute other end of the country from Newfoundland, and the trip out to see them seemed both impossibly long and somehow unnecessary.