Don't Leave Me (3 page)

Up close the fire hoses seemed unreal, like somebody staging a giant Halloween prank.

But Chuck felt the heat and the spray slapping him like gloved hands. And the insane pumping of his heart. Orange and yellow flames shot out of the garage roof, and what was once painted beige was covered in soot streaks black as midnight.

And he knew, as clearly as he knew his own name, that this was the Mad Russian’s work.

But
why?

A firefighter nudged him and said something. Chuck didn’t hear the words. Just looked at his house. Well, not his, technically. It was a rental, but it did not have his landlord’s stuff in it. It had Chuck’s. His life. And Stan’s.

The firefighter pushed again. Chuck jerked away.

“Get back,” the firefighter said. “We’ll handle it.”

Chuck heard a muffled scream as Stan ran up, arms flapping.

“Okay, okay, Stan. Easy.”

Stan looked at the fire. Chuck felt Stan’s finger slip into his rear pocket. “Don’t leave me, please Chuck.”

No, Stan, no, I won’t leave you. But what about inside? In that ruin were the last vestiges of Julia’s life with him. The scrapbooks she kept, her CD collection, her laptop from work. Gone. The last tokens of when things were good, before his deployment, before they began to look at each other like confused strangers.

When he first got back, she came to see him at the VA. She was there in the room and she looked like two women at the same time. She looked like the woman he loved more than anybody he’d ever loved, and she looked like some neighbor down the street, the one you wave to every now and then but never really get to know. She’d had some rough patches growing up, but she never wanted to talk about them. But that is exactly where he wanted to go with her, to help her get past all that, to heal her. Be something to her that she didn’t have in her life. But now he was the damaged one, and the guilt ripped him like a clawing thing under his ribs.

Guilt he could never assuage now, because she was gone.

As the flames of the house licked upward, the shimmer of Julia’s face in his memory was consumed by the heat, and he was powerless to stop it.

“Chuck!” It was his across-the-street neighbor, Belva, standing in her driveway.

Chuck gave her a quick nod. Belva Gilbert loved to talk, and he was in no mood.

“Chuck, come over here, please!”

Stan said, “Chuck, Belva wants you to––”

“I know, Stan.”

“Right now, Chuck!” Belva said.

Well, it wasn’t like he had any buckets of water to throw on the house. He crossed the street, Stan still hooked to his pocket.

“Are you two all right?” Belva put her robust hands on Stan’s cheeks. Stan winced and nodded. Belva was sixty, with long white hair that befit a former hippy, which she happily admitted being. She still favored tie-dyed X-L tee shirts and didn’t care about hiding her amplitude.

Chuck liked her, but she did play the earth mother role with a bit too much emphasis on
mother
. This was not the time. His house was
burning down.

Chuck said, “You have any idea how this happened?”

Belva shook her head. “I was in the back, by the pool, absorbing my D. Next thing I hear sirens, and they came.”

“Did you see anybody in the neighborhood today,” Chuck said, “who looked like they didn’t belong here?”

“I’ve been inside all day, except when I went out by the pool. That’s my life now, you know, inside and the pool, ever since McSchmuck hit the road.”

McSchmuck was Belva’s ex, who, as she put it, had flown the coop for a spring chicken.

“Have you seen a black Escalade around here at all?” Chuck said.

A look of concern crinkled the corners of her eyes. “No, dear, no. What’s the matter?”

“A guy with a knife!” Stan said. “He has brown hair and brown eyes and his knife was this long”––Stan showed with his fingers––“and it goes into a silver holder, and he put it in his black jeans and––”

“Okay, Stan,” Chuck said.

“Knife?” Belva said. “Chuck, what on earth––”

“You wait with Belva,” he said to Stan, and walked quickly to the corner, to Lucy Bowers’ house. He knocked on the front door.

No answer.

He tried the doorbell, then knocked again. Checked the door. Locked.

He could hear Lucy’s dog barking like mad in the back yard.

And yes, this was very much like madness, the whole thing. Stuff like this didn’t happen here, in the nice part of the Valley. This was West Hills, safe and suburban, not Canoga Park where Latino gangs tagged signs, and businesses operated on asphalt shoestrings. No, this was supposed to be where you brought kids up and took dogs for walks in the evening, and maybe stopped off at the Starbucks on Victory, or quick shopped at Trader Joe’s. No, it wasn’t like it used to be, post World War II. Chuck knew that. That kind of close-knit neighborhood fizzled in the sixties and died in the seventies when transiency became the norm for American life.

But here, in this part of the 'burb, the houses still looked the same—Chuck’s, what was left of it, was built in ’64—and the people, aging Baby Boomers and a few young families starting out, were decent and community-minded.

So what were knives and thugs and fires doing here? More, what were they doing directed at
him
?