This is Just Exactly Like You (44 page)

“I think so,” says Jack. “I think we are.”

“Good,” he says. “Whose home is this?”

“It’s mine,” Jack says.

Captain Arnold nods. “I’m afraid we had to make a little bit of a mess of your kitchen,” he says. “But the fire’s under control. We took care of that.”

“Good,” Jack says. “Thank you.”

“What kind of a mess?” Beth asks.

“The fire was in the wall,” Captain Arnold says. “We had to go into the wall.”

Another firefighter goes inside, carrying what looks like a video camera.

“What’s he doing?” Jack says.

“That’s a heat sensor. We cut the circuit to the refrigerator, but he’s gonna check to make sure the fire didn’t spread any further. Standard procedure,” he says. “Just precautionary.”

Beth looks at him. “Spread where?”

“Through the electric into another wall.”

“So the walls could be on fire?”

“That’s pretty rare, ma’am,” says the captain. “But that’s why we do the heat imaging. Infrared. To make sure.”

“How rare?”

“They’re checking,” Jack tells her. “That’s why they’re checking.”

“We won’t let you go back in there until it’s all clear, ma’am.”

“How did it happen?” Jack asks.

Captain Arnold shrugs. “You know,” he says, “the wiring fails, gets hot, starts a fire. Simple as that,” he says. “People forget how dangerous electric can be.”

“It was the fridge, then?”

“That, and the outlet,” he says.

“So it wasn’t anything we did.”

“Not unless you put that receptacle in. The connections looked a little screwy, if you know what I mean.”

“I didn’t,” he says. “I didn’t do anything to the electric,” he tells Beth. She nods, and Jack thinks she might believe him.

Captain Arnold holds his hand out to Hen, who’s still staring. “Pleased to meet you, young man,” he says.

Hendrick doesn’t say anything, but he reaches out his right hand, the one that’s not bandaged, shakes Captain Arnold’s hand.

“He’s a little shy,” Jack says, explaining.

“Doesn’t seem shy to me,” he says. “How is he?” he asks the EMT.

“First-degree,” he says. “Maybe second. Small, though. Pretty good, considering.”

“Nobody else injured?” Captain Arnold asks.

“Nope,” says the EMT.

“Good enough,” the captain says. He looks across the yard, at the catfish, the octopus. “What are those things, anyway?” he asks.

“They’re from a putt-putt,” Jack says, a kind of exhaustion coming over him now. Hen’s OK. None of the rest of it makes any difference at all.

The captain looks a little closer at Jack, squints at him, and from the way he’s doing it, Jack can tell he must have a pretty good shiner already. “Y’all been in some sort of accident?” he asks.

“Yes,” Jack says, but doesn’t explain what kind. Captain Gary Arnold doesn’t ask any more questions after that. A small, important kindness. The captain looks at Hen in the ambulance, and at Beth, who’s up there with him now, stroking his face, his hair, whispering to him. It seems like the captain knows. It seems like he knows every piece of it. He tells Jack
Have a good night, now, sir, be safe
, and he goes back to his truck, to his men. Jack looks for Rena, who’s sitting over by the mailbox. She’s still got Yul Brynner. Canavan’s limped over to talk to the firemen out in the street. There’s not much more Jack can do except to wait here with Beth and Hendrick for the last fireman to come out of the house, wait for somebody to tell them they can go back in. Hen’s watching the firemen put all their gear back away in all the open doors on the side of the engine. Jack stands on his auctioned front yard, fire truck lights spinning. This is all mine, he thinks. My house, my marriage, this mess of my own making. Whatever all this is, whatever else it is, it’s his. It belongs to him. He’s done it, he’s made it, he’s punched holes in it, he’s dug it up, he’s lit it on fire. It’s his. It has to be. A radio on the fire truck Canavan’s standing next to kicks on, announces somebody else’s fire, somewhere else. There’s a string of numbers that must mean what kind of fire it is. Jack’s going to need more ice for his eye. Canavan backs up, and the fire truck edges forward, pulls away, turns the siren on at the end of the block. Jack waits. The red lights run right to left across the fronts of the houses. All of this, Jack thinks. All of it mine.

Hendrick’s still not talking, and the kitchen is torn to shit. There’s foam and powder everywhere, footprints through all of it, and it’s tracked back to the front door. The refrigerator’s well out into the room, and from the hole in the wall behind it, it looks like the firemen went after it with the axes. The wire running to the outlet’s been cut. The wallboard and the studs are scorched. The bottom of the fridge is black. It smells like fire. It smells like cigarettes, actually, like wet ashtrays. It’ll be at least a weeklong job to put it all back together. Hendrick’s playing with the foam, pulling his good hand through it. Jack wonders if this is the same stuff they spray runways down with for crashing jetliners. Beth comes in the door with Yul Brynner, walks up behind them. “Don’t put that in your mouth,” she tells Hendrick. He looks at her, doesn’t talk.

“Are Rena and Canavan still out there?” asks Jack.

“Yes,” she says.

“Did he find his crutches?”

“No.”

“Should we be looking for them?”

“No,” she says. She reaches for Hendrick, pulls him gently back away from the foam. “I don’t think so.” Hen’s wearing sneakers and his underwear. Beth’s holding his ruined clothes. “We need to get him dressed,” she says.

“OK,” says Jack.

“You brought his clothes over, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Jack says. “In his room. In his dresser.”

“Right.” Beth walks around the corner, flicks on the light in Hendrick’s bedroom. “Does he have any new favorites?” she calls.

“It’s all the same,” Jack says. She’s opening drawers. Jack holds his hand out for Hen, takes him in there. Beth’s got shorts and a kid-sized Kinnett College T-shirt laid out for him. They sit Hen up on the bed, and he lets them take off his shoes, put the shorts on, pull the shirt down over his head. His bandaged hand is like a mitten. He won’t let them put his shoes back on, which Jack takes for a good sign, a sign that he’s OK.

“Why isn’t he talking?” Beth asks.

“He’ll talk,” Jack says. “Right, buddy?” Hen looks at him, makes a popping noise with his lips.

“He’s not talking,” she says. She sits down in his half-size desk chair.

“He will,” Jack says. “I promise.”

She says, “You said nothing ever happened to him.”

“He’s fine,” Jack says. “You heard the ambulance guy.”

She points at his hand. “He’s not fine.”

“He’ll be fine,” Jack says.

She stands up, and then she sits back down. The chair spins a little to the side. “Your eye looks bad,” she says.

“It does?”

“Go look at yourself,” she says.

He goes into the bathroom, looks in the mirror. He looks like she hit him with a baseball bat. Or a bulldozer. His left eye is swollen half-shut. There are blue bruises in moons above and below it, and on the side of his nose. “You did a good job,” he says. He touches it, and it hurts like hell.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Yes, you did,” he says.

“I’m still sorry. I didn’t mean to do
that
.”

“It’s OK,” he says, turning the bathroom light back off. “I’ll live.” He stands in the half-dark, looks at the outline of his head in the mirror. The air conditioner kicks on again. He can hear cicadas out the window.

“I’m done with Terry,” she says, from the other room. “I’m finished with that.”

He walks back down the hall, stands in Hen’s doorway. “What?”

She says, “I’m finished.”

“We’re talking about it?” he says. “Now?”

“I thought you should know,” she says. “That you’d want to know.”

“Why?” he asks.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, why now? Why are you finished?”

“I just am,” she says. “I have been.”

“No other reason?”

“I had reasons,” she says. “We can talk about them.”

“I don’t know if I want to,” he says.

“People don’t do this,” she says. “I didn’t want to do this any more.” She gets up, pulls the pushpins out of the periodic table on one side, straightens it. She pushes the pins back in.

“Why’d you do it in the first place?” he says.

She says, “I had to, Jack.”

“You had to?”

“Well, what about you? What about you and Rena?”

He thought they were all going to have to sit in some circle in the living room and confess things to each other. He did not think she’d hit him, did not think he’d light the house on fire. He did not think she’d sit in Hen’s chair and tell him plainly that whatever all this was is done.
What about you and Rena?
What is it he’s supposed to tell her? That in some other version of his life, he could have ended up with somebody like Rena? He knows he could have lived a slightly louder life. The life Rena kept wanting him to have. But the life he wants, the life he’s grown to know, is this one, and he knows that he’d rather choose this one, that he needs to, that a life with Rena would be one where no one ever said
are you sure,
or
wait a minute
—she’d be cheering him on, endlessly, cheering them both on. They’d end up owning an ostrich farm, or they’d be owner-operators of a plane-banner advertising concern, or they’d become acrobats, or they’d be like his uncle and aunt, who built a house that sat on its point, a square turned diagonally, tilted up, because the county taxed property by the square footage of the home’s footprint. They hung an addition from steel cables off a tree. When they were kids, they called it the Crazy House.
Are we going to the Crazy House this summer?
He knows he needs Beth to save him from his crazier angels, or try to, and he knows, too, or hopes, that she needs him to try to save her from her plainer ones. “Rena’s over, too,” he says.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” he says.

“I’m not coming back yet,” she says. “You can say no if you want to.”

“What if I had said no?”

“I wouldn’t have come home then, either, you idiot,” she says.

“What’re you going to do, then?” he says. “Stay with Canavan?”

She says, “I’m not sure.” Then she says, “I was thinking I might move back in across the street. To our house.” She slides Hen’s desk light over some. “I thought maybe we could try that for a while. We could be neighbors.”

“Neighbors?”

“We’ve got to be something, Jack.”

“I know,” he says.

“Something else,” she says.

“I know that, too.”

“I miss you,” she says. “I did the whole time.”

“I miss you, too,” he says. He looks at the ceiling, at the ceiling fan, at the model space shuttle hanging there. He did, at least, do a good job in here. It looks almost exactly like Hen’s old room. It’s finished, complete. It’s a room. “I want to ask you something,” he says.

“What?”

“Come outside,” he says. “I want to show you the racetrack. I want to show you how it turned out.”

“Oh, Jack, I don’t think so, OK? Not right now.”

“Come on,” he says. “Five minutes. Just come see it.”

“Now? Really?”

“Yes,” he says. “Really.”

“What about Hendrick?”

Hen looks at her, and then, holding his left hand, his burned hand, above his head, he gets up, walks out of the room. They follow him. He installs himself in front of the television, and the dog lies down almost on top of him while Hen flicks from one channel to another. He can’t quite settle on anything. They stand behind him, watch with him for a while, watch until he’s cycled through all the channels three or four times. “Come outside,” Jack says, quietly. “Please.”

“Do you think his hand’s OK?” she asks.

“No,” he says. “But it will be. He’ll be fine.” She looks at Hendrick once more. “He will,” Jack says, and he can see she’s not sure, but she nods OK anyway, follows him out the broken sliding door.

In the weird wash from Frank’s streetlight he can see well enough to take her around the outside of the racetrack, show her where all the creatures will go, show her the ridges in the concrete the push broom left. She’s let him take her outside. He’s surprised, but he keeps going. He tells her about how he wants to plant something in the middle—wildflowers, possibly—and tries to tell her about Kenny Trimble and the NCDOT. He tells her how at first it was going to be a loop, how then he thought of the eight. He tells her about Randolph, and the Sons. He tests the concrete in a few spots, and it feels dry, or almost dry. “See these posts?” he asks her, showing her the bolts sticking up out of one of the concrete pads. “They get bolted down to these.”