“I’m sorry?” the doctor says, pen still to paper.
“It’s what I do. I clean up stains—get rid of residue. I’d give you a card if I had one. What do you guys use?”
“I don’t know,” he says, confused. “We have a good maintenance team, I suppose.”
“Maintenance,” William says. “That’s an apt term.”
Then like William’s attempt to befriend never happened the doctor looks into his eyes and asks him how much he has been told about Julie’s condition.
“I heard she got in a wreck,” William says. “I just got in town.”
The doctor nods. “She is doing well. Not great, but maybe someday.”
“Has she said anything?”
The doctor pauses.
Too briefly
, William thinks for that slight instant. He hunts the old man’s sagging face for a twitch, a slight eye roll, anything that could signify decision making. He stretches the moment in his head, large enough to blanket the entire spectrum of possibility. William wonders if Julie has said something. Has she described him? Has she mentioned his attempts to convince her of a child’s futile life, and this Doctor Something is putting it all together?
“No,” he says. “See, with an unconscious patient—” “Unconscious?” William says biting back the hope this brings.
“Still?”
“You didn’t know?”
“I was pretty hysterical when they told me,” he says allowing a frown. “I might’ve been told.”
“I’m sorry to be the one to remind you.”
“It’s fine,” he says. “It’s fine,” and turns away from Doctor Something.
“Do you want to see her?” the doctor asks, almost yelling across the distance William has created so quickly.
“No,” he says, quick to escape the situation, but truthfully he does. The last image he has of his fiancée is her body against glass, a circumstance dictated by time. He recognized the situation they were in—a destroyed van and a destroyed person with only Mrs. Rose and himself there to receive accusations. But now it’s different. Heart monitors and medications govern the present. The doctor ’s face contorts at William’s quick “no,” so to dodge suspicion he breathes deep and admits, “I’m a little scared to see her hooked up to those monitors.”
The doctor nods. “It’s not nearly as bad as you probably think.”
He enters the room one step behind Dr. Something. The doctor leaves, tells William to notify a nurse when he is done. William agrees, waits for the doctor to turn a corner before moving toward Julie’s body. His slow footsteps match the steady beep of one of the many machines stacked tall against the wall behind the hospital bed.
Her stitches melt into the skin, striving to pull her many pieces back to their single, original form. Staring at the stitches, at the pale skin around them, staring at the tubes and drips entering, exiting her body—this massive display of maintenance—he can’t help but take notice of the way
he
breathes so easily, of
his
lungs pumping air unaided into a body strong enough to stand on its own. Julie lays wasted and drained, yet he stays conscious and able to contemplate the implications of this situation beyond the sterile air and beeping monitors. She is a casualty, no doubt, to a world shifting in accordance to the methodologies of contention, Mrs. Rose’s methodologies.
There is no pinnacle
, he thinks, panning the full ceremony of wires and monitors keeping her alive.
But even Mrs. Rose couldn’t find harm in simply keeping up with the world
.
He leans over to his sleeping fiancée and presses his lips to her forehead, stitches interrupting any intimacy. What skin he can touch feels foreign against his own.
How long since a kiss
, he wonders. As he pulls away he whispers, hoping she can hear, fearing that she cannot: “when you wake I promise I’ll teach you why our baby had to leave.”
Philip greets him at the waiting room, eager to his feet and questions on his lips before William has a chance to forfeit any news on his own.
“Unconscious,” William says.
Philip says nothing, just accepts the answer and pulls the keys from his pocket.
They endure silence for the initial drive to William’s house. Philip attempts conversation more than once, but is met each time with stern refusal. Near the end of their drive, William apologizes again for his earlier hostilities.
“It’s fine,” Philip says.
“It’s going to be hard without her.”
“It should be…if you loved her enough.” “I’ll make the best of it,” William says.
They arrive at William’s house to find it flaming, those same emergency vehicles that grazed the crash site on the newscast now circle the angry glow of his burning house.
A firefighter signals for Philip to stop the car. “You the owner?” he asks.
William steps from the car. “I am,” he says.
“Come this way,” the firefighter pulls him aside. William turns to Philip and motions for him to leave. Hesitantly, he does.
“Do you know if anyone is in there?” the firefighter asks. “Nobody,” William says. The flames pull sweat from his forehead. His arm hairs curl and extinguish. “It’s only me. It’s always only been me.”
“We’re thinking it was gas,” the firefighter says, “though there’s no way to be certain, yet.”
The flames lap the walls and roof of the home. Between heat spires, William swears he can see the threads and notes of his wall collapse. It concerns him that of all the possessions in his home, the wall is what he covets.
It takes a fire to reveal importance sometimes
, spoken like a lesson from Mrs. Rose, though he does not recall whether the words have any deeper origin than this current shock.
“Will anything be saved?” William asks.
“We’re not sure. Whatever fuels this fire, there’s a lot of it. It’s taking some time so, to be honest, I wouldn’t count on anything.” A voice calls the firefighter back to the flames. He leaves William alone to watch the home fall.
A police officer approaches, his uniform’s chrome accoutrement sparkling. William steps aside. He tries to fade beyond the reach of the flames’ light, into the dark halo surrounding his home, but the officer calls him out.
“So you’re the owner?” the officer says. “You need to call anyone?” and he holds out a phone.
“Yeah.” William exhales the pent-up breath. “You got a cigarette?”
The officer smiles. “You found the right cop,” and he hands William a cigarette and a lighter, along with the phone.
He steps away from the officer, lighting as he dials Mrs. Rose. She would know, he reasons, so much about moving beyond sudden grief. No answer.
The officer stands at his periphery, attention split between the fire and his phone.
William dials Philip. His friend answers at the first ring, says “Shelia,” with an eager hope in his voice.
“It’s William. Can you come back to get me?”
Philip calms. “Sorry. It’s just, Shelia’s not home yet. She was supposed to be with Mrs. Rose tonight, doing the therapy thing, but she’s not back yet.”
“Could we talk about this when I’m not watching my house burn?”
“Right,” and Philip says he will be right over.
William returns the officer ’s phone and lighter. “Thanks,” he says and turns quick before the officer has a chance to record his face.
Chapter Fifteen
A life forever altered by fire. This, a situation Philip knows well. He consoles William in the timid way he deals with most interaction: speech limited to clichés, though backed by honest intentions.
“Things come around,” Philip says. The wet road hums beneath the car. Philip, drunk on emotion, weaves within the extremes of the road’s tight lane. “Time keeps moving. Remember Maxine? She was like the flame to my house, but I got over her.”
Maxine was Philip’s girlfriend at the time that William moved to Brackenwood. They had been dating for a few months, long enough to encourage Philip’s signature rash thinking. He gave her a ring. She said yes. Philip came home one day soon after to find his home cleaned out and a note from his then-fiancée: “I’ve changed my mind,” it read.
The ring turned up that same afternoon at a jobsite, still attached to Maxine’s finger as the rest of her lay on a coroner ’s steel table somewhere. Police officers later blamed something they called “internal combustion.” Her criminal outfit, they had a disagreement—large or small—someone shot, then the room exploded.
Phillip felt justified by the ring in the flowerpot. He held tight to it as William ripped up carpet, tore out insulation, broke down walls, all stained with his ex-girlfriend. The ring meant vindication and that something better was bound to arise. He now keeps the ring in a small box under his bed.
It gave him great satisfaction, he said, to know that people who do bad things would probably end up shot, stabbed, disemboweled, dead. And people who do good will keep living, find a ring, find a new girl, and wait for the sunset.
“I thought I’d lost everything when Maxine left, but then I found her finger in a potted plant, and everything looked a little brighter, you know?”
William doesn’t know. He’s never settled in with a criminal. He doesn’t know how his burning home is parallel to Philip finding an ex’s severed finger. But he respects Philip’s melodrama. He stays quiet as his friend’s compassion slowly drifts into self-absorption. Shelia’s untimely disappearance steals the sentiment: “Now I don’t even have Shelia,” and his eyes fill.
William buries his own dilemma. “Maybe it’s better,” he says. “Shelia could just be another Maxine. People with that little to fear make me afraid to sleep,” William says.
“She’s never coming back,” Philip says. “She hates me, I know it. I just want to
have
someone, like you and Julie. I’m getting old, William.”
William smiles, hearing his and Julie’s relationship interpreted as desirable. “I doubt like me and Julie,” he admits.
“It’s what I want,” Philip says. “Despite all that has happened you know the other is there. It’s a security I envy.”
“Security,” William says, swallowing the word, “is just a fringe benefit. It’s soon for Shelia and you?”
“What we have is like a movie, William. Or like that head thing after a building fire. You know that light-headedness that happens when you open kitchen cabinets just after the fire crew leaves. Everything makes sense and trying to rationalize it with words just defeats its beauty. That’s how I feel when I am with her.”
“That’s formaldehyde, Philip. From the burnt glue fumes trapped in the cabinets. It’s deadly.” He pulls a cigarette from his pocket and puts down a window. The air outside pours in with an eager ferocity. William retreats, returns the cigarette to his pocket and instead chews a thumbnail.
A quick honk from a blurry set of oncoming headlights shakes Philip back into his own lane. “Christ,” William says reaching over and steadying the wheel with his bitten arm. The wound roars. “I don’t need this again.”
“Sorry,” Philip says, but all concern remains with Shelia. Philip has a soul made stable only by another. It pains William to be a spectator, to see the man deteriorate. He is liquid. Had Shelia motives involving Philip’s death or another full- house robbery, a cleaned bank account, or a new addition to a collection of lives, consider it accomplished. And through it all Philip embraces the idea of a nuclear family.
“When has formaldehyde ever told the truth?” William asks. They round the final turn before spotting Philip’s house. “Don’t be so fucking literal,” Philip says and breathes for continued reprimand, but stops when he sees his home. Bright like William’s, only lit by candles and bulbs. “Shelia,” he says and parks, leaving William to turn off the ignition.
Shelia’s silhouette dominates a beige kitchen curtain. Philip leaps the front steps and swings open the door. His silhouette appears. The two noir shadows meld. Philip, all energy. Shelia, strangely pensive. The single shadow works with William’s smoky nostrils and his throbbing arm to flood the gap left by his absent fiancée. William has not cried once since meeting Julie. He wipes the drops quickly away. He steps from the car and enters the home with a stranger ’s hesitation.
Shelia stands with a bird in one hand and a doll in the other, barely reciprocating Philip’s embrace.
William finds gasoline in the air. He tries his own clothes for the scent, but sweat and dirt dominate. It wafts from Shelia. Before he can comment, he notices a slight glimmer at Shelia’s finger. A ring.
The
ring. This is territorial, now. Before the two drop their hug, William yells. “Your girlfriend burned down my house.”
They pull apart slowly, each acknowledging William with more pity than concern. He could have eased into the accusation by commenting on a curious smell or wondering aloud about the temperature of his couch, his chair, his empty crib, but tact only masks reaction. William needs something genuine. He wants something from Shelia, a gasp, stuttering denial, but she just puckers her lips at the bird in her hand and ignores him.
She smashes the bird and the doll together at the heads and makes kissing noises, a child and her toys. Philip pulls her in again as though William’s comment was a misplaced joke. “Shelia,” he says embracing everything in one gigantic hug. “Where were you? I thought you’d be back hours ago.”
“Sorry.” She speaks with a trench in her throat, scratchy and deep, and her pronunciation seems bent, but William cannot decide exactly how. The mole on her forehead moves when her mouth widens.
“For burning down my house?” William offers. “Don’t do this,” Philip says. “You can’t say that.” “Smell her,” William says.
“Look, it’s terrible that your house is gone. It really is. You can stay here, I said that, but you’re going to have to respect Shelia,” and he raises her finger, his ring. “You have to respect us.”
William wrestles his tongue, tasting the black smear of burnt wood on his lips. “I’ve got to use the bathroom,” he says and parts Philip and Shelia en-route the toilet just beyond Philip’s room. Their shoulders collide, a single unit for one moment, but William breaks away and is behind the bathroom door before the moment can mature. His wounded hand smacks into the door, preoccupied by anger.
Alone, he searches for reason. The bite suddenly throbs, tender even as he slowly unwinds the dirty cloth strip. He bites his lip to red and speaks softly to himself through his teeth.
Did she really burn down my house
—the towel reveals a dark crust of skin and scab, signs of internal corrosion—
or do I just want it to be her? I saved that woman and this is her payment?
He throws the wrap into the toilet and washes his hand.
My house is gone. Shelia is not.
He leaves the soap red, flushes the toilet for effect, and searches drawers for gauze.