Tinderbox (33 page)

She walks north on Columbus Avenue, past Dominican grandmothers in long dark dresses
and vendors selling coconut and lemon ices. Inside the school, she waves to the camp’s
security guard and makes her way upstairs to Omar’s group’s room. She gathers up Omar’s
wet bathing trunks and towel and stuffs them inside his camp bag. “It occurred to
me,” she says as they leave, “that you don’t have a bike. Did you have one in Detroit?”

“A baby one with training wheels. I never learned how to ride without them.”

“Well, seems like now’s as good a time as any. There’s a bike store on Ninety-sixth
Street.”

It is surprisingly simple. Budget or better construction, red or blue for bike and
helmet.

“Better construction,” Caro says.

“Blue,” Omar says.

Caro wheels the new bike down the hill and into Riverside Park. Omar is wearing the
new blue helmet. She taught Adam how to ride a bike after their father had been too
impatient. She finds a wide, deserted path and runs alongside Omar, holding the handlebars.
“Pedal faster,” she yells.

Omar pauses and the bike slows.

“The faster you pedal, the steadier you’ll be.”

Caro watches her nephew absorbing the paradox with the pleasure of a seven-year-old
wrapping his mind around an idea. He licks his lips, lowers his chin, and pedals fast.
She runs beside him, and then, at the instant when she feels the balance shift from
her hands into his body and the bike itself, she lets go and he sails forward.

24

They celebrate with cheeseburgers and fries and icy sodas at the outdoor café in the
park where Caro ate years before with her mother when their conversation had veered
in a direction her mother always claims inspired her teleology of love. Since Caro
was last here, the enormous sandlot has been outfitted with circus rings. A few accomplished
swingers are now making graceful arcs from ring to ring, the movement all in their
hips, while the rest of the adults laugh self-consciously at their own clumsy attempts
and children climb on top of an overturned trash can to reach the rings.

“Look,” Omar says, holding up his half-eaten burger. “That’s Nurse Talis.”

Caro looks up to see Talis dip his hands into a plastic bag filled with ground chalk.
His arm muscles bulge as he loops, pelvis first, from ring to ring.

“Nurse Talis, Nurse Talis,” Omar cries. Omar stands to wave.

Talis squints in their direction. He waves back. He does a final course over the rings,
agile as a monkey, then climbs the steps toward Omar and Caro, wiping his hands on
the back of his jeans.

Caro pulls out a chair and extends her hand. She wonders if Talis will remember her
from Omar’s second night in the hospital, when she came at one in the morning. “I’m
Caro, Omar’s aunt. We met once.”

“I don’t think you want to touch these hands.” He looks at her in a way that seems
to take in the moistness across her collarbone, the grease smudge on her shinbone.
“You gave me a note to take to your mother.”

“Have a seat.” She is embarrassed at the sound of her voice. Too high and thin.

Talis sits. He leans back in the chair, stretching his legs out to the side. “So how
are you, bud?” he asks Omar.

“I just learned how to ride a bike.”

“No kidding. That’s a big deal. I’m going to have a beer to celebrate that.”

“Can you teach me how to do the rings?”

“Sure. If it’s okay with your auntie.”

Caro nods.

Omar jumps to his feet. He forgot to put on his baseball cap after taking off the
helmet. “I’ll go practice until you’re ready.”

Caro looks at his half-eaten food. “Are you done?”

“I’m full,” he calls as he heads for the steps.

“Do you think he needs to cover his head?” she asks Talis.

Talis glances up at the sky. “He’ll be okay. The sun’s low now.” He waves over the
waitress and orders his beer. “How’s he doing?”

“Very well, I think. I was worrying about him today because his mother went back to
Detroit this morning. His parents are separating.”

“Sorry to hear that. It happens a lot after a fire.”

It is hard to tell how old Talis is, but she guesses ten years older than she is.
She dampens a paper napkin and rubs the grease smudge off her shin. Then she sneaks
a look at his left hand.

25

Larry has insisted on managing the sale of the house, the price of which he has had
determined by an appraiser. “What you have will eventually go to the kids,” he e-mailed
Myra. “But it’s not good for you to be cash poor now.” She knew immediately that he
was right, that she should maintain her assets so she will not be dependent on Adam
and Caro when the time comes for her to stop her practice. And although he doesn’t
say it, she is certain that he also means that it is not good for Adam to be subsidized.

In May, she found a two-bedroom apartment on Central Park West with a layout that
with slight modification will allow her to have an office at home. It has high ceilings
and egg-and-dart moldings and a newly renovated kitchen entirely unlike the earthy
one of her brownstone but pleasing to her, with stainless-steel counters and ash cabinets
opened by chrome pulls. There are picture windows in the living room from which she
can see the great green rectangle of Central Park with the blue oval of the reservoir.
There is an alcove that will fit a grand piano. In the room that will be her bedroom,
French doors lead to a small Juliet balcony with cream balusters where she imagines
having her morning coffee.

It is a perfect apartment for a woman living alone, and that, she realizes, is precisely
what she desires now. She buys a hundred-year-old Series O Steinway with the original
ivory keys, the only antique she intends to have in the new apartment. She hires the
super to do the alterations needed to convert the second bedroom into an office from
which the rest of her apartment will not be visible. She hires a good painter to turn
the already skim-coated living-room walls a silvery gray and those of the office a
café au lait, leaving the rest to be done in a color, white dove, whose very name
brings her pleasure.

She takes her summer break earlier than usual, moving into the new apartment at the
end of July. The city feels empty save for her children, Adam about to take Omar to
Detroit for a visit with Rachida, Caro involved in supervising the renovations on
the house. Without the constraints of her patient schedule, she takes her walks in
the morning, circling the reservoir, some days on the jogging path, other days, as
she does this morning in early August, on the more ample bridle path. From the eastern
side of the reservoir, she can pick out her new building in the skyline that towers
over the trees. It is a magical, almost mythic view: the water, the trees, the sculptural
buildings, stately as dowagers.

It is just ten o’clock, but the sun is already hot, the waistband of her shorts chafing
against the new skin that has formed where she was burned. Now, five months after
the fire, she can see what happened with Eva more evenhandedly: as with her marriage,
the ending involved a mutual rupture, a mutual betrayal. Although she would never
have chosen either, both shook her loose, catapulted her forward.

Moving her things out of the house, she found the Smokey Bear editorial, the edges
curled and rimmed with soot, still stuck with a pushpin to her bulletin board. Across
the top, in her own hand,
The Tragedy of Good Intentions
. She removed the pushpin, crumpled the newsprint into a ball.

She stops to rest on the stone battements between the reservoir and the tennis courts.
What Eva did was what fire does in the forest. She cleared the tangled underbrush:
protection against greater catastrophe, preparation for a new season’s growth.

26

Adam takes Omar to visit Rachida—a fourteen-hour overnight train trip to Toledo and
then an hour bus ride on to Detroit. They will stay three weeks, Layla decamping to
a friend’s apartment while they are there. Adam will watch Omar during the first week
while Rachida still has to work, then stay alone in what was once his home so he can
pack up his remaining things while Rachida and Omar spend two weeks at a resort on
Lake Michigan.

Rachida meets them at the bus station. Her face is pasty and bloated, with a painful-looking
blemish on her chin. She kisses Omar without smiling.

The house is even dingier than Adam recalls. He sits in the dank living room drinking
orange juice and flipping among the four channels available without cable while Rachida
settles Omar for a nap in his old room. When she comes back downstairs, he turns off
the television.

“Was Layla mad about having to stay somewhere else?”

Rachida sits next to him on the couch. She puts her feet up on the coffee table. “She
moved out.”

“For three weeks?”

“For good.”

Turning to look at Rachida’s face—the bloat and blemish, Adam now understands, marks
of misery—he feels sad for her. It is not her fault that she doesn’t love him. It
is hard to imagine how anyone could.

“She decided she doesn’t want to be with a woman. She’s dating a guy now, a neurosurgeon.”

Adam pats Rachida’s leg, cautiously, the way he might touch an unknown dog. “Do you
want a sip of my orange juice?” he asks.

“Okay.”

He hands the glass to Rachida. She drinks most of it and gives the glass back to him.
“He has blond hair,” she says. “He wears those shirts with alligators on them.”

“I hate those.”

“He plays golf. Layla claims now that she loves golf. She’s full of shit. She went
on a golf trip once with her father.”

“He sounds like a jerk. The neurosurgeon, I mean.”

“Hassan II irrigated deserts to build golf courses while there were people in the
south of Morocco without enough water to have schools.”

Adam puts an arm around Rachida. She rests her head on his shoulder. She feels like
an old friend. This is what they should have always been: friends comforting each
other over their heartbreaks.

27

Wanting to move into the house free of clutter and junk, Caro plans to use the days
with Adam and Omar gone on a blitzkrieg purge of her apartment: weeding through her
files, bagging up old clothing to bring to the Salvation Army store, throwing out
chipped dishes and frayed towels. Instead, she feels a strange combination of anxiety
and lethargy. She spends the first day alone in her apartment in bed until noon, and
then reading the newspaper and a novel until dusk. On the second day, she goes through
her books, managing to identify only a dozen to give away. She gives up by three o’clock,
puts a magazine and a bottle of water into a tote bag, and walks over to the park.

Since seeing Talis at the circus rings, she has not been able to get him out of her
mind: this man who can swing from ring to ring and take care of children with burns.
The thoughts are more unpleasant than pleasant, unpleasant because they have made
her aware of how many years have gone by, not only since she let herself be touched
by a man, but since she has even wanted to be touched.

She walks by the sandlot. She sits at the café. She orders a diet soda. She orders
a salad. She orders a beer. He does not come.

At night, she cannot get comfortable. Her back hurts, the air conditioner is too loud.
The sheets feel rough, then clammy. She gets out of bed and makes tea. She watches
the five o’clock morning news, the sky lightening with the approach of day. With the
end of Talis’s shift.

She sits at her desk. On a pad of lined paper, she writes out a script, word for word,
inviting Talis for breakfast to talk about a program for teaching fire safety to the
kids at her school.

She bites her lip as she dials the hospital number, which she still remembers from
the month Omar was there. She asks for Talis, then waits for what seems like a very
long time. Had she not given her name, she would hang up.

It gets only worse once he is on the line. “This is Caro. Omar’s aunt.”

He doesn’t respond right away. She imagines him trying to recall who she is. Or remembering
her and trying not to smirk.

“I didn’t tell you this, but we’d met, well, I’d seen you before that night I let
you stay after visiting hours.”

Her heart is pounding so hard, she can feel it against her ribs.

“It was the first night your mother and Omar were in the hospital. You were sleeping
in the chair in your mother’s room. I covered you with a blanket.”

She looks at the piece of paper, with her script written on it, the words a blur through
a scrim of tears.

“You were so damned cute, I had to use my willpower to be professional about it.”

“Don’t use your willpower,” she whispers into the receiver.

28

He has the next night off. In all the years she has lived in the apartment, she has
never had a man for dinner other than Adam or her father. Now, with the still empty
boxes piled in her living room, she makes a summer salad of frisée greens and chopped
shrimp and corn she takes off the husk herself. She makes gazpacho and bakes dinner
rolls from a paper tube. She washes her hair, taking care to scrunch it the way Rolando
had instructed to bring out the curls, puts on a summer shift that flatters her curves.

He is taller than she remembers. He wears knee-length khaki shorts and a pressed cotton
shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His forearms are long and thin, his wrists graceful.
He brings yellow dahlias.

“I looked for you in the park on Tuesday,” she tells him.

“I haven’t been there in a while. I had one of the babies with me last week.”

She doesn’t understand.

“Some of the kids on the unit can’t go back home. I do short-term foster parenting
until longer placements can be found for them.”

“How old was the baby?”

“Nineteen months. A pip, into everything, talking up a storm. At the last minute,
his grandmother from Louisiana agreed to take him, but she had to wait for the weekend
to travel up here.”