This is Just Exactly Like You (43 page)

Beth gets one of Canavan’s crutches, jabs at the smoke alarm until she knocks it down, and then she crushes it on the floor. It stops beeping. “What do you mean, there’s not a fire?” she asks. “Isn’t that a fire?”

“It’s an electrical fire,” Jack says. “Probably. The fridge’s been acting up. We just have to unplug it.”

“I think it’s a real fire,” Rena says, and they all look, and the back wall is on fire right around the socket.

“Holy shit,” Canavan says.

“Call the fire department!” Hen screams again, and Rena picks up the phone, looks at Jack, and he nods at her,
yes
, because that is what you do in an emergency. You call the fire department. Hen had it right all along. Rena dials.

“Do you have an extinguisher?” Canavan asks.

“Maybe in the garage,” says Jack. Canavan heads that way. Jack can’t remember if it’s baking soda for a grease fire or an electrical fire. It doesn’t matter, because he’s got no baking soda over here. He turns the faucet on, pulls the sprayer out, and sprays the wall, which makes it much worse. Now it’s certainly a fire department fire. The flames jump up higher on the wall, and there’s fire coming out from underneath the refrigerator now, too, like some obscene cartoon rocket. He can’t understand what would even be burning under there. Hendrick walks up to the fridge, transfixed, and before Beth can stop him, before Jack can, Hen reaches out—Jack can’t believe he’s watching him do it—he reaches out and tries to take hold of the flames, tries to grab one, to touch one. Jack knows he knows better than that, knows he does, but there he is doing it anyway, and there’s nothing he can do to stop him. Hen screams right away and pulls his hands back, but he loses his balance and falls forward onto the fridge, into the fire, and Canavan’s back now with an extinguisher, running, limping on his braced leg, and he puts the whole thing out immediately, so fast that Jack can’t even tell if Hendrick was ever on fire, or if his clothes were. The extinguisher sounds like radio static. You’re supposed to put butter on a burn. They don’t have any butter. Canavan covers Hen in powder, and Hen’s screaming, screaming, ash-white from the extinguisher, and Beth picks him up, runs him to the sink, tries to fit his whole body under the faucet, but he’s too big, so she carries him down the hall toward the bathroom. Jack follows her. Rena’s saying his address into the phone, is saying
fire
, is saying
we may have an injury, we may have somebody burned.
Beth’s got Hen in the shower by the time Jack gets in there, and she’s in under the water with him, asking him what hurts, what hurts. He’s still screaming, but now it’s a breathless, noiseless scream, no real sound coming out any more, just air.
Where
, Beth’s asking him,
where
,
honey,
and he’s not saying anything. His mouth’s wide open. No tears.
Where,
Beth’s saying, more and more insistently, and the water’s running out of the shower, pooling on the floor, seeping into the hall. She’s soaked. Hen gets a breath, starts again, a horrible, impossible sound, a sound that’s not any kind of sound at all. Jack does the only thing he can think to do, which is to get in there with them, to wrap his arms around Hendrick, around Bethany, to stand with them in the freezing water in his clothes and shoes with his eye throbbing and his house on fire and try to figure out what to do to get Hen to take another breath, to try to find out where he’s burned and how badly, to try to be there with him so that even if he can’t ever tell them anything at all, he’ll still know they were both of them in there, together, trying every way they could to hear him.

The night they first bring him home from the hospital, they set him in the center of the floor in his carrier, stare at him. The house is stone quiet. They’re afraid even to move. Beth’s in pain, exhausted. Jack isn’t sure what to do with himself. They’ve got a book on swaddling, on how to wrap him up so he doesn’t cut himself with his fingernails. He’s come equipped to do himself harm right from the start. Every now and then he moves, blinks, stretches. Mostly he stays still.

The room they’ve got set up as a nursery seems ridiculous, somehow. The dresser full of diapers. The crib. The changing table. The mobile hanging in the corner. Jack doesn’t know what they’re going to do with any of that. He sanded down the corners of the top of the dresser a couple of weeks back. Beth had asked him to.
He won’t be tall enough to hit his head on the corner for years,
he told her.

So he did it. Sandpaper, sanding block. He repainted each rounder corner white. The dresser’s white. The mobile is cats, something Beth picked out, all these wildly colored cats, sitting, smiling. Pink. Yellow. Blue. Jack hangs a wind chime outside Hen’s window. Two weeks later, after it keeps waking him up, he takes it down, moves it to the back yard.

Jack sits there on the sofa with her looking down at him, feels like he’ll never be ready to be a father, never know what to say to this creature to solve the world for him. He already doesn’t know how to solve the world for Beth, keeps trying to even though she tells him he doesn’t need to, that she needs him to do other things, different things.
What things?
he’ll ask her.
You’ll know,
she’ll say. But he doesn’t know, or he hasn’t. They watch him. Maybe it’s nothing more than this, he thinks. Maybe it’s nothing more, after all of it, than sitting in some rented house on a thrift-store sofa with your infant son at your feet, his mother beside you, and it’s not, finally, that you’re supposed to try to survive each day until evening, but instead that you’re supposed to survive each night, looking all the time for ways to make it to the next day as whole as possible.

Firemen get them out of the shower and take them to the ambulance, which is parked on the front lawn, near the undersea creatures. Three fire engines are out in the street, lights turning, flashing red on his house, his other house, his neighbors’ houses. It certainly looks like an emergency. A few more firemen come jogging past, axes in hand, saying
get back, get back, get back.
The inside of the ambulance is lit up. Everything is very white: White sheets, white towels, white gauze, white uniforms on the EMTs, who want to know if Beth or Jack are hurt, too, and they’re saying
no, no.
The EMTs have got Hen sitting up on the stretcher in the back. He’s breathing more regularly now, at least. But he’s silent. He hasn’t said anything since the kitchen. Somebody brings them blankets, and Jack uses his like a towel, dries Hen’s hair, then his own. The EMTs are wearing latex gloves, are working every inch of Hen’s body. Nothing. They’re finding nothing.

Jack keeps looking back at the house, at the roof, keeps waiting for flames to come shooting out the windows. He’s seen houses on fire in movies, on television. This does not look like that. It looks like a training exercise. They’ve got everything but the fire. Another fire truck arrives, sits at the end of the street, engine idling. The neighbors are out of their houses. Frank’s standing on his porch. Jack’s life is on full display. Nobody’s hooking hoses up to the hydrant yet. That has to be good. The EMTs scissor Hendrick’s shirt and pants off him, saying
This is just a precaution
. Jack looks. Still nothing. Hen’s clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth.
Where’s he hurt?
Beth wants to know.
Is he OK?

I don’t see anything yet,
one of the EMTs says.
So far, so good.
It comes to Jack that there might be too many ambulances and fire trucks in his life of late.
Wait,
another EMT says.
Here.
They’ve worked his entire body over and come back to his hands. Hen’s got his left hand balled into a fist, and they pry it open, and inside is a little constellation of blisters, white and red, a palm full of raw skin. Jack reaches up for him, takes his arm, and the EMTs push him back, saying
Please, sir,
and he wants to say
No, you don’t understand
, wants to explain it all to them, wants to tell them that one easy mistake could land Hendrick sprinting back into the fire, if there even is a fire, but it doesn’t matter: Hen’s not paying any attention to what they’re doing to him. He’s watching the lights on top of the nearest engine. His legs hanging over the stretcher don’t make it anywhere near the floor of the ambulance. He’s a doll, a toy.
It doesn’t look so bad,
the EMT says. He shows Jack and Beth.
I think we can deal with this right here.
Beth’s blinking a lot, and she picks up Hen’s cut shirt, holds onto it.
Hand me a burn box,
the EMT says to his partner, and she does, opens a drawer and takes out a kit wrapped in plastic. She pulls the wrapping free and gives it to him, and he opens the box, opens a tube, squeezes some kind of gel onto Hen’s hand.
This ought to cool things down,
he says to Hendrick, who ignores him, lets him do it, stares out at the yard, the trucks, the street.

“Is he OK?” Beth asks Jack.

“I think so,” he says.

Canavan and Rena are across the lawn. They’ve got Yul Brynner on a leash Jack’s never seen before. Maybe a neighbor brought it. Maybe Rena keeps leashes in her car for emergencies. Canavan doesn’t have his crutches. They must still be in the house, Jack figures, and he’s thinking about what else is in there, what he’d lose if the roof did suddenly collapse in a hail of sparks and fire. Beth’s shaking his arm, pushing at him. “Listen,” she’s saying. “Listen.”

“What?”

He turns and it’s the EMT who wants to talk to him, to both of them. He’s got Hen’s hand wrapped up already. His thumb’s just barely sticking out. “OK, folks,” he says. “We can take him in if you like, but it’s really not a serious burn, and that’s an expensive ride, if you want my opinion. It’d probably be just as good if you just keep an eye on him, change his bandage out in the morning.”

“OK,” Jack says.

“But if he loses any significant amount of skin, you should see a doctor.”

“What’s a significant amount?” Beth says.

“Anything bigger than a quarter,” he says.

“Oh my God,” she says, wrapping and unwrapping his shirt around her own hand.

“That shouldn’t happen,” the EMT says. “It really shouldn’t.” He reaches behind him, into another drawer on the other side of the ambulance. “If he’s in any pain,” he says, “give him these.” He hands Jack some little packets.

“What is that?” Beth wants to know.

“Headache powders,” the EMT says. “We’ve got other stuff on the truck, if you want, but that works the best. If he won’t drink it in water, put it in peanut butter.”

“Like he’s a dog?” she says.

The EMT smiles. “I just always figure whatever works.”

“You can put it on ice cream, too,” his partner says.

“So he’s OK?” Beth wants to know. “He’s fine?”

“Yeah,” the EMT says, and pats Hen on the back. Hen flinches away a little. “He’s real brave.”

“Thanks,” Jack says.

“What happened in there?” the EMT asks.

“The refrigerator was on fire,” says Jack. “He was reaching for it.”

“Reaching?”

“I don’t know what he was doing,” Jack says. “I don’t know why he did that.”

“Kids do some things that don’t make sense,” the EMT says, and wraps a blanket around Hendrick’s shoulders. Hen shrugs it right off.

“How did it catch on fire?” Beth asks.

Jack says, “It just did.”

“Can that happen?” she asks him. She turns to the EMT. “Can that even happen?”

The EMT says, “Ma’am, I wouldn’t know about anything like that.” He shakes his head. “But I’ve never heard of a refrigerator being on fire.”

The firemen come back out of the house, finally, coats open, carrying their helmets. Walking. They walk back to the truck, hang their coats in one little compartment, their axes in another. Two of them sit down on a step on the truck, and the other one walks over to Rena and Canavan, who shake their heads, point Jack out. The fireman crosses the lawn to the ambulance. “Captain Gary Arnold,” he says, introducing himself. “Everybody OK here?” Hendrick stares at Captain Gary Arnold like he’s some kind of god.