Flame Out

For Bridget and Mary

A stranger drowned on the Black Sea alone,
with no one to hear his prayers for forgiveness.

—
“STORM ON THE BLACK SEA,”
UKRAINIAN TRADITIONAL SONG

Each morning my mother's velvet purse
wilted on a chair, empty of midnight contents:
ruby lipstick, tiny lake of a pocket mirror.

—
“FANCY,” JEHANNE DUBROW

T
HE RAIN WAS UNFORGIVING
.

Dave was doing a lousy job of holding up his half of the house. My arms strained under the weight of his niece's birthday gift—a large backyard playhouse—and it was slow going back to my car. The spring rain had soaked through the layers of cardboard, and my knuckles scraped against the hard red plastic panels where the box disintegrated.

“You know,” I said, “that spin-art kit would've fit in the back seat with room to spare.” I hefted the playhouse, shoving it hard, but it jammed against my trunk's lockbox, which held my service revolver. “And I bet Tara would've had a lot of fun with the costume trunk.”

“My niece isn't a princess dress kind of girl.”

I stopped short as a red Subaru sped past, spraying the back of my legs with water. “The kit includes fake mustaches and Groucho eyebrows. She could wear those with the glittery pink sandals.”

“Until she trips and breaks her skull. Blood. Everywhere.” He reversed, backing the box into the trunk. “Can you lift your left side a little higher?” I raised it up to my shoulders.

“That's the trick,” he said.

It wasn't the trick, and the edge slipped out of my hand and dropped to the ground.

“You. Out of my way,” I said. He stepped aside, defeated. The steady rain flattened his black curls, and the wet white box smeared the arms of his Jets windbreaker with saturated cardboard. I balanced one side of the box on the edge of the trunk, and using leverage, shoved most of it in. The trunk wouldn't close, so I bungeed the top to protect it from the rain, not that it mattered at this point. I ran around front and climbed into my dry car, starting the engine to get the heat going, and unlocked the door for Dave, who made a distinct squelching sound as he dropped into the passenger seat.

“I hate to tell you,” I said as I backed the car out of the spot, “but Tara won't be very impressed with a big soggy box.”

“She'll be
very
impressed with a big soggy box because she and her dad will have a project,” Dave said. “Is it too late to go back to get the kiddie tool set?”

“Yes.” I pulled out, bouncing through a pothole. My thirteen-year-old Saturn was close to the end of its life. “Yes, it is.”

“Yeah, and she wouldn't go for the kiddie version anyway. I should remember to buy her gift at Home Depot next year.”

I drove slowly out of the packed lot and negotiated the traffic circle, passing the exits for Colonie, Latham, and Cohoes. I missed the Hopewell Falls exit and was forced to loop around a second time. Dave snorted.

On the outskirts of town we passed St. Agnes Cemetery, where my husband lay buried. In the first year after he died I would've insisted we stop. In the second year, I would've taken the drive through the cemetery so I could see his grave. This year, I thought a message to him: “Miss you, babe. See you on Thursday. Wait until you hear Lucy's theory on where babies come from. She's definitely your daughter.” I would never cut the thread to Kevin.

The landscape crested, dropping into the city below. Hopewell Falls was all downhill. The Mohawk River bounded the city on the
east and the Hudson on the south, the waterfall that formed where the two rivers met giving the town its name. Through newly sprouting trees and mist from the rain, I could make out my own house in the distance. Dad was babysitting Lucy while I helped Dave and worked the three to eleven p.m. patrol. In this weather, I wished I were at home. There would be plenty of car accidents tonight, but the bigger threat were those people trapped inside on a Saturday with their “loved ones,” drunk, and if I was very unlucky, armed.

The streets got twisty the closer we got to the river. We stopped at a light, waiting to cross Interstate 787 and beyond that, the short bridge that spanned a small waterway, the last remains of the Mohawk River before it joined the mighty Hudson.

Dave was frowning, his eyes on the Ukrainian church, its gold and sky-blue dome bright against the gloomy afternoon sky.

I touched his arm. “You OK?”

“Never better, Lyons.” He shook off my hand. Something must be wrong—I spent most of my time extricating myself from the hugs, pats, and leans Dave used with everyone, but especially me.

“You sure? It's only a birthday party. You're too late to be forced into pin the tail on the donkey. And if you really wanted to escape, you could take my shift for me . . . put on the blues, drive around for eight hours.”

“Uh, huh.”

“And your brother's doing better.” His brother, Lucas, had been unemployed for a while and had divorced again for the fourth time last year, leading to a drunk-and-disorderly charge outside his most recent ex-wife's house. Thankfully, the arrest scared Lucas straight.

“Lucas is doing great, although his plan is to score points off his ex today. I guess Felicia threw a roller-skating extravaganza for Tara's school friends, and Lucas insisted on throwing a second party for all the kids from the church. I'm expecting balloon animals.”

“So?”

“So what?”

“So why are you tense?”

He didn't answer. The light changed to green, and in less than ten seconds we had crossed the highway and the bridge from the mainland to the Island.

“It's just, the Island's so closed off,” Dave said finally. I stifled a laugh. Annexed by the same Dutch settler who farmed Hopewell Falls back in the sixteenth century, DeWulf Island was hardly some isolated outpost. The channel separating the mainland from the Island was narrow enough that I could probably cross it with a running jump, and if I followed the main thoroughfare we'd be in Troy in another half mile. Instead of taking the straight shot across the Hudson, I veered right, passing a series of side-by-sides, apartments built by the Ukrainian and Polish immigrants who had fled first the Soviets, then the Nazis, and then the Soviets again. The remains of the Golden Wheat bakery, burned down two years ago, lay on our left, and we passed a small Polish grocery that sold Cheetos, Cokes, frozen pierogies, and pickled beets.

“Left here,” Dave said, and we turned onto a street populated with more trees than houses, plants lush with the recent spring rains. The street dead-ended at a modest home surrounded by several acres of land. The home's façade was brick with a white porch and black shutters. Purple balloons swung wildly in the breeze, and four cars were parked out front. The bench on the front porch was freshly painted, and a lilac bush sprang up on the lawn, trimmed and blooming. We were at Lucas's house. Or rather, his Aunt Natalya's.

Dave and I wrestled the playhouse up the narrow walk to the front door and rang the bell. Lucas greeted us, beer in hand.

“Jesus, Davey. Did you have to be so late?” he said. “And Aunt Natalya'll kill you if you sprinkle dirty cardboard through the house. Oh, hi, June.” He stepped outside and dropped his beer on the arm of the bench, picking up my end of the box. He got a good look at the contents for the first time and grimaced.

“Oh, wonderful. A construction project of my very own.”

Matching Dave's 6'4'', Lucas was fairer than his brother, his light brown hair sporting some gray, straight, and almost fine. He'd worked construction for over twenty years until suffering a vague injury involving a lot of Vicodin. His new work as a bartender agreed with him. Dave and Lucas bickered about the gift as they walked around the house to the backyard where the party was in full swing.

Backyard was perhaps an understatement. Dave jokingly called it the back forty, and it wasn't a complete exaggeration, the lot extending north three acres. The lawn had room for a two-tiered bouncy house and a swing set. Beyond that was a garden that could produce enough fruits and vegetables to feed everyone on the Island, with sunflowers sprouting along the border between the cultivated plot and the meadow near the property's far border.

Despite all the wide-open space, the adults were grilling and eating on the porch, clustered under the small green tin awning to stay out of the rain. The bouncy castle's turret listed to the left, the weight of the water pooling on the roof about to send the structure sideways. A bunch of kids flinging themselves against the sides didn't help. I was pretty sure this birthday party was going to end in tears, either with the puffed-up monstrosity tipping sideways or the kids being told no, really, they needed to come in.

“Dad!” the birthday girl shouted, “the roof's caving in!”

Lucas Batko handed the box back to me. “This is going to be a disaster,” he said as he jogged across the lawn to the castle that was wiggling like a basket of puppies. On the way he picked up a toy axe lying on the ground outside the door. Squeals sounded as he entered the inflatable structure, and the castle surged and rolled as Lucas trudged across the inflated floor, designed for a 50-pound child, not a 200-pound man. He took the axe handle and pressed up on the roof, sending the water from the first turret splashing over the side. Dave and I maneuvered up the steps to the porch.

Dave's Aunt Natalya intercepted us. She moved rapidly despite
her pronounced limp, twisting her left hip forward before propelling the right foot in front.

“David, how could you! Forcing June to march through muddy grass with a heavy box.” Dave told me she had been in the US since the late 1940s but her Ukrainian accent hung heavy on the edge of her words, her
g
's lapsing into
h
's, dropping articles left and right. Small and sharp eyed, her black hair laced with gray, Natalya rested her hands on her uneven hips, the left a few inches higher than the right. “You are no gentleman.”

Dave had to fold in half to give his aunt a kiss. “That's not news to Lyons,
teta
.”

Dave and I dropped the house on the ground in front of the gift table, and Dave took a green polka-dotted bow out of his pocket and slapped it on the corner. Natalya frowned, but it wasn't at the gift-wrapping.

“Showing up your brother with your big gift?”

Dave held up his hands in surrender. “Can't compete with a bike,
teta
.”

Despite being almost eighty, Natalya yanked me toward her, pulling me into a hug. I could smell hairspray and powder, the two things that kept her fresh and presentable in the damp weather.

“Food now,” she said. “The children stuff themselves with junk Lucas purchased”—she eyed the pizza rolls with distaste—“but I grilled sausage and have salad from greens I picked myself.”

Dave hooked Natalya's hand through his arm. “Good idea. Lyons starts busting stuff up if you don't feed her.”

Dave prepared our lunches under Natalya's careful direction. He came back with two plates piled with perfectly grilled kielbasa, dumplings, and salad, a pizza roll balanced on top, with a beer in his hand and a bottle of water tucked in his elbow. We settled in a few chairs near the edge of the porch.

“Hail the conquering hero,” Dave said to his brother as he returned,
tipping his beer at him. Lucas reached out and grabbed it, taking a swig. Dave's protests were hard to make out with the dumpling shoved in his mouth.

“Good, right?” Dave said. It was delicious. The pierogies were homemade, and the sausage, grilled perfectly, came from a local butcher who made his own. Heavy fare, but delicious.

Dave said between mouthfuls of dumpling, “Aunt Natalya picked out the best food on the table for you.”

“Yeah,” Lucas said. “She's always trying to butter up Dave's girlfriends.”

Dave choked on his pierogi. “I have no idea where she got that idea.”

“Wishful thinking on her part.” Lucas pulled out a lighter. “I'd better go. We were holding the cake until Tara's favorite uncle got here”—Dave saluted as Lucas continued—“and since he's deigned to grace us with his presence, I better try to get the candles lit before her next birthday.”

“Get me another beer, will ya?” Dave called to his brother, but Lucas was already inside. Dave knocked his knuckles against mine. “You're going on shift, but you want one?”

At my no, Dave went to grab one for himself. I dug into my meal.

I was almost done when Dave broke my food reverie. “Me and Special Agent Bascom grabbed a beer last night.”

“You and Hale?” I said.

“Yep. I invited the G-man over today. Once I told him about the bouncy house, he signed right up.”

I wiped my mouth, preparing to escape before Hale arrived.

“What's your hurry? You two buried the hatchet.”

“Mostly.” I collected my trash and stood to go. “He's still a shark, but a friendly one.” What I didn't want to tell Dave was that I was avoiding Hale because he was chasing me for an answer: Was I or was I not going to consult with the FBI? It had been almost
four years since I left, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to rejoin. What's more, I couldn't figure out why they would want me. Why Hale might want me.

As I was about to say my good-byes, Lucas came out with the biggest cake I'd seen this side of my wedding. Scratch that, it was bigger. A princess sat on top, the highest tier making up her skirt, pink and detailed with icing and candy, surrounded by four birthday candles. Below lay her kingdom, the tiers decorated with characters from the
Dora the Explorer
TV show.

“Tara, come up and blow out your candles!” Lucas called. The kids were slow to leave the bouncy house, and Lucas started to pace, beer in hand, checking to see that the candles were still lit while yelling for Tara to hurry.

“Calm down a little,” Dave said to his brother. “Let me get her.”

Dave pretended to be a giant and said he was going to eat slow children, and the kids came running up the steps and were corralled into singing. At first deliriously happy, the birthday girl began to cry when they went to cut the cake.

“But it's pretty!” Tara said. I worried that Lucas would get upset by the tears but instead he scooped her into his arms, kissing her on both cheeks, and promised to cut
around
the toys dotting the top.