Finn (8 page)

I made it out to the living room, but just barely. My head was pounding. The whole world smelled like gas. I said a word or two to Dad, to the effect that if I blew myself up for real, I hoped I’d see him soon. In some bizarre part of my mind, I found myself hoping my face wouldn’t look too bad if it got burned. I pulled out a match and lit it. The living room didn’t blow up, so I walked the tiny flame over to the kitchen, opened the door, and threw it in.

I
learned something that night: it’s almost impossible to keep a thrown match lit. It was out before it even left my fingers. The match fell to the floor, still glowing a little at the tip. The stove hissed away. I thought I heard faint laughter, but then I realized it was the crickets outside.

I was hoping that a glowing match tip might still be enough to ignite the gas, but then the tip died out and gave up a wisp of black smoke. I checked my watch. Half a minute late. Bobby’s cowboy boots rang out on the front walk. His walk was very distinctive and irritating. He had a way of coming down hard on his heels and scraping them a little.

I needed some kindling, and fast. The best I could come up with was the apology note I had just written, which I had planned to leave on the table in the front hallway, next to the Intruder money.

My apology was the last thing I wanted to burn. I was afraid of what my grandparents would do with my body if they didn’t have instructions, but I crumpled the note anyway and lit a corner. I held on until the whole sheet was burning. Then I tossed the burning note into the kitchen. It’s odd, but thinking back, I can’t imagine why I didn’t feel the flames scorching my fingers.

That didn’t work either! The blackened note curled and fluttered to the ground, devouring itself in glowing red rings. Bobby was at the front door. I could hear him fumbling with his keys, then dropping them. I even heard a faint “Oof” as he bent over to pick them up.

I had one last chance. I took a deep breath, held it, and dove into the kitchen for the big bag of charcoal my grandfather kept in the pantry closet. It was heavy, but I managed to drag it out. I pushed it nice and close to the oven, for good measure. I hadn’t taken a breath. My muscles were shaking. I could barely keep my fingers still enough to light the match. The match didn’t stay lit. I tried another one. It went out, too. In my imagination, the stove, fearing for its life, kept blowing them out. I finally got a corner of the bag lit. I had to blow on it to really get it going. I remember watching it take and admiring the purple and green flame. It reminded me how Dad and I used to throw the Sunday funnies in the fireplace when we had a fire going, just to see the ink flare up in strange colors. Don’t ask me why I was so mesmerized. Blame it on the gas.

An explosion in real life isn’t anything like what you see in the movies. Explosions in movies are almost always seen from the outside, or at least from a distance. They’re beautiful. You usually get a big “whompf!” sound effect, and a slow-motion flameball. Slow motion is the opposite of what’s it like in real life.

I did hear a sound, but it was a sort of negative sound, like a sound chasing itself backwards. Then there was unbelievable heat—like opening an oven, only times a thousand. That heat, I found out later, totally crisped my eyebrows and eyelashes. After the heat, I was still on the floor, but in the dining room, behind the table, lying on my left wrist funny, watching the polyester fringe on the curtains melt in drippy red corkscrews.

And that was it, at least all I remember of it. The windows were gone, and the front door, which Bobby was in the process of opening, had been blown shut by the explosion. There was the odd fire here and there in the carpeting, as if tiny pioneers had circled their wagons and were making camp for the night. Glowing charcoal briquettes had landed all over the place like meteors. The smoke detectors were screaming their heads off. I pulled myself up to the windowsill. Broken glass glistened in the shrubs and on the dewy lawn. The night air was thick and sweet.

Bobby was sitting on the front walk, rubbing his sore bottom and staring at the front door. He was probably wondering who had slammed it. He looked surprised and upset, somewhere between being pissed and wanting his Mommy.

The van was honking insistently. Bobby waved back over his shoulder to show that he was okay, but the van didn’t seem interested in that. It kept honking. People were starting to come out their front doors. Bobby got up and brushed off his pants. His monobrow furrowed as he took in the broken windows. Instead of rushing into the house to save me, he squatted down and studiously poked at some broken glass. He wasn’t more than ten feet away. It was stupid and careless of me to watch him. Bobby could have easily seen me, if he was an observant person. My head was right there, framed by the empty window. But I couldn’t stop. It was like watching my own funeral. For all Bobby and Mom knew, I was dead. I pretended that the reason he couldn’t see me was that I was a ghost.

The van was really honking now, if you can still call it honking when there’s just one long blast of the horn. Bobby shook his head and put his hands on his hips. The only word he said was, “Damn,” which, to me, sounded almost like an apology. Then he minced back over to the van. He was in a hurry, but he still managed to drag his heels a little.

Although I was glad he didn’t actually do it—trust me!—I appreciated the fact that Bobby at least considered coming into the house after me, which is more than I can say for his wife. As the van pulled away, I tried to get one last look at her face, but she was hiding it with a magazine. Then the van turned the corner.

I lowered myself down to the carpet. It was hard to believe that they were really gone. I could still smell gas, but the outside air was coming in so it didn’t smell very dangerous. I knew I should have been happy that my plan had worked, but I just sat there picking at bits of fused carpet and thinking that as low as my expectations were about some people, sometimes they weren’t anywhere near low enough.

T
heoretically, I was dead. But that didn’t mean I was safe.

The fire trucks were coming. There was no question about that. I didn’t doubt that the firemen would be very nice when they arrived. A big gallant fireman with a mustache would probably offer me his heavy yellow jacket. I would have accepted it gladly, too, along with any snacks or juice he happened to foist on me.

The problem wasn’t the fire department. It was the TV trucks. TV news people loved a good fire, particularly if there’d been an explosion. I knew for a fact that Mom and Bobby would be watching the news that night—Mom, to see close up what had happened; and Bobby, to prove to Mom how much danger he’d been in. They’d also be looking for pictures of me, their little thief, dead or alive.

I couldn’t just ask the TV people not to show me. They’d do it anyway, no matter how good a reason I gave them. They love showing people who don’t want to be seen, especially grieving families and victims of gunshots and fire. The less you want to be seen, the more the TV people want to show you. It’s perverse, but true.

I would have loved to stay for the nice firemen, and then, in the morning, when my grandparents got back from visiting my father’s grave, to apologize in person about destroying the house. But the TV people made that impossible. If Mom and Bobby saw me alive, they’d come get me. It was as simple as that.

I stood in the front hallway for a minute, even though I knew I had to go. I tried to force myself to think about the next step, but I kept getting distracted. It was strange to see what the explosion had blown up, and what it hadn’t. For instance, I wouldn’t have expected the curtains to drip the way they did, or the carpet to melt and pool in places like glass. I was just as surprised to see that the hundred dollars of Intruder money hadn’t burned up, or even been ruffled. It was bizarre! A picture on the wall nearby was totally scorched, but the five twenties were still fanned out on the table in the hallway, just the way my grandmother had left them. So I took them. I figured that my grandparents would understand. They were always telling me not to leave the house without money.

I was too scared to scavenge any food or clean clothes. The gas was still on, and who knew how long it would be before the place blew up again?

It was time for phase two of my plan: the getaway. I ran down the basement stairs. The iron hand rail was still warm from the explosion, but everything else in the basement seemed normal. The door to the maid’s apartment—Silvia’s old room—was closed, as usual. My grandfather had a habit of closing it whenever he saw it open. The pingpong table was stacked high with laundry. The bookcase shelves bowed under the weight of my grandparents’ dusty encyclopedia. The car keys were in their usual place, a miniature fishbowl on one of the shelves. My grandparents had taken the fancy car, which meant I’d have the Dodge.

I took a long look back. The upstairs was crackling quietly and giving off a nasty smell. I know I should have felt sorry about blowing up the house—and I did—but I was still a little proud of myself. I thought,
Oh, well.
Then I opened the door to the garage.

The garage was pitch black, which was fine by me. I didn’t want to turn on the light or open the garage door until the last second, in case there were any gawkers outside. The familiar smells of fertilizer and lawnmower and clean rubber tires made me feel oddly safe. I guided myself by touch, running my fingers along the garden hose that my grandfather had nailed to the garage wall to protect the car doors. Feeling my way along the wall, I had to smile. There was a time when the garage used to creep me out, when the sound of the motor and the grinding of the rusty wheels of the electric garage door opener would frighten me. That’s how skittish I was when I first came to live with my grandparents.

I was fiddling with the car lock when I heard sobbing coming from the basement. I thought I’d been alone in the house the whole time. I hadn’t counted on my grandparents getting another maid so soon.

It’s embarrassing to say, but I almost didn’t go back in the house. Call it my mother’s stellar influence. I was scared. My body was beginning to hurt, my wrist in particular. I knew I had to get out of there. But the sobbing just went on and on. I wanted to scream, “Shut up!” but screaming was out of the question. Nobody in their right mind stays in a burning building and sobs—not even an ignorant Mexican.

Thinking of Silvia was what finally convinced me to go back in. I wasn’t about to be responsible for someone’s death. Honestly, if I hadn’t thought of her, I might have just hit the road.

I knew I could walk right in to Silvia’s old apartment. The door didn’t lock. It was held shut by a magnet at the top. The knob didn’t even turn. You just pulled it straight open, like a closet door. That had gotten me in trouble once or twice with Silvia and Roberto. I suppose there wasn’t a real security reason to have a lock on it, but now, in light of what I knew about my grandparents, it made sense that they wouldn’t want the maid to be able to lock her door.

Even before I opened the door and turned on the light, I knew who was inside. I could smell her.

It was Silvia. She wore a distinctive ultra sweet kiddie perfume, some berry or other—but she also used my grandfather’s brand of deodorant. She said it reminded her of her father. So she gave off a confused smell, half man and half woman, which generally annoyed me. But for once, that mixed signal of hers was making me incredibly happy.

Silvia’s sobbing was so scary and intense, for a moment I thought she might be having her baby. I turned on the light. There she was, sitting on the floor with her skinny little legs splayed out in front of her, her round belly resting like a basketball on her lap. She aimed a hammered tin cross at me and started screaming in Spanish. She seemed to think I was some kind of demon.

It took a minute or two to calm her down enough to talk. I kept saying, “It’s just Chlo, it’s Chlo.” She waved her finger at me each time I said it, as if saying my own name was a no-no. “If you’re who you say you are,” she said, “then stand over there.” Meaning, in front of the mirror, to prove I had a reflection. She was being absurd, but I understood a little better when I saw myself in the mirror. My chin was smudged black from the windowsill. That plus the missing eyebrows and eyelashes did make me look pretty ghoulish, not to mention the fact that the left side of my hair was all curled up from the heat, which made it look like I had gotten a lunatic perm, or at least half of one.