Valley of Ashes (18 page)

And maybe those were the healthy people.

I mean, hey, there was a ton of crap in my personal record that required a willing suspension of disbelief—right up until you saw more of it raining down on my head in real time.

Let’s just say I’ve never bonded with anyone over a shared love of sparkly unicorns or anything. It’s virtually always the dark shit. The damage.

A more accomplished conversationalist might be able to tap-dance around all that. Or maybe I’d just never seen the point of trying. I figure land mines have a habit of making themselves known, no matter how many hours you invest in blathering about needlepoint or curtains or housebreaking new puppies beforehand.

I just cross my fingers and come out of the cave with my hands up. Life is short and shallow sparkly-unicorn people have always bored the shit out of me, so why prolong the agony?

I started in on my elk, which was actually pretty damn good.

“Madeline…, ” Cary began.

But Bittler interrupted, guffawing at something beside me with his mouth full before snapping his fingers at the waiter for more Scotch.

“Hey you,” he yelled, “
Pedro!
”

Frat boy chimed in with, “How ’bout some damn refills over here?”

I turned to Cary. “You were about to say something?”

“Your father and Hazy,” he said. “Tell me the rest.”

“We should probably eat first.”

I toppled both food phalli with the edge of my fork, then mashed them into vulva-shapes for good measure.

Fuck Freud. Georgia O’Keeffe rides again.

“Granddaddy Dare bought an autogyro before the war,” I began, once we’d plowed through the rest of the elk. “He’d had a hangar built for it on the property—big steel warehouse kind of thing on a concrete pad. Dad always called it a ‘Butler Building.’ ”

“What’s an autogyro?” asked Cary.

“Kind of a helicopter-airplane hybrid, before helicopters were invented. It had stubby wings with a propeller and a big overhead rotor, so you didn’t need a lot of ground run to take off and land.”

He nodded.

It was nearing the end of the school year, I explained, and Grandmama and Granddaddy had planned a trip to Canada to fish for salmon on the Restigouche River, taking Dad’s twelve-year-old sister with them.

My father was to have stayed home with his nurse, in order to finish out the academic year. I don’t know whether my aunt’s vacation at Spence started earlier, or whether their parents just didn’t think it was problematic to interrupt a daughter’s education.

My mother presumes this all took place on a Friday afternoon, when Dad had finished his week of school in the city.

It would’ve been a day lengthening into summer, the fine old trees on the family place lush and verdant, the acres of close-napped lawn sweet with clover.

“Hazy and Dad sneaked into the hangar, one day after school,” I continued. Something they’d done before.

The boys were armed with slingshots, their pockets crammed with wooden matches.

“Not the safety kind,” I said. “The strike-anywhere kind.”

Cary blanched, hearing that part, knowing this wouldn’t end well.

My stories tend not to.

Somehow they’d learned the trick of shooting a match at the concrete floor sulfured head down so it’d burst into flame on contact before bouncing back into the air, like a stone that skipped once when skimmed across the surface of a pond.

Maybe Hazy’s older brother had passed along this trick, maybe Dad had learned it from a fellow student at Buckley. Hard to say.

“One of those lit matches bounced into a forty-gallon barrel of varnish,” I said. “I don’t know if the thing was just open at the top, or there was a little cap or something that had been left off, but the shit ignited and blew up. All over Hazy.”

Cary grabbed my wrist.

“You okay?” I asked.

He nodded.

“So,” I continued, “Dad told him to roll on the ground to extinguish the flames, but Hazy’s older sister—”

“
Jesus
,” said Cary. “His sister?”

“It’s never been clear to me when she arrived at the scene—she’s just suddenly there in every rendition of this I’ve ever been told—but anyway, she screamed at Hazy to get up and run to the brook, a hundred yards away.”

Cary gripped my wrist tighter, but he didn’t ask me to stop.

“Yeah, so… Hazy didn’t make it to the brook.”

Dad’s parents took him away to the Restigouche the following afternoon. They didn’t talk to him about what had happened—or even mention it, ever again. They just told him he’d be coming with them for the salmon fishing.

“That’s appalling,” said Cary.

“No shit. My mother says that for months afterward, whenever my father heard a siren he presumed it was the police, coming to put him in jail for killing his best friend.”

“But at least he talked to her about it. That must have helped.”

“Right before they got married. He took her to visit Hazy’s grave.”

I think that loss was the basis for everything, really. As though Hazy’s death were the first black rectangle tipped in an elaborate paisley arrangement of dominoes—if dominoes could somehow be made of anti-matter.

My family is defined by the absences, the negative space.

There’d been a dad-shaped void in my life for as long as I could remember, always bleeding just a little bit, around the edges.

“Anyway,” I said. “I don’t know how you could come out of
something like that undamaged. Especially to be left alone with it, as a seven-year-old kid.”

“I’m terrified of fire,” said Cary. “Always have been.”

“Me too.”

He gave me one of those wonderful crinkly-eyed empathy smiles.

Tribal identification.

“Your turn,” I said.

Cary took his hand off my wrist, drew in a deep breath. “This kid on my street—his house burned down when we were ten.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Everyone else made it out, the whole rest of his family. He died.”

“You guys were close?”

“Best friends. We were born a week apart. I still have pictures of us in a playpen together.”

I put my hand on
his
wrist.

“The worst part was…” He hesitated.

“What?”

“Well, you could smell it for weeks afterward. The whole neighborhood—even upwind. Rain didn’t help. I couldn’t sleep.”

I shuddered.

“I kept badgering my parents to buy rope ladders for all the windows, in case it happened to us. My father thought it was pretty funny. Teased me about it mercilessly.”

“No offense,” I said, “but I think that’s a total dick move on your father’s part.”

“He had a point.”

“You were a little kid, Cary.
And
you’d just lost your best friend…?”

“Yeah, but Madeline.” Cary shook his head, grinning at me. “We lived in a one-story house.”

I smiled at that. “Well…”

Before I could finish the thought, Bittler passed out. Face-first into his plate of elk.

“
Kanpai
,” whispered Cary, whereupon I had to pretend I’d been overtaken by a sudden coughing fit to cover my laughter.

C
ary showed up on our porch bright and early the next morning, mountain bike tucked under his arm.

Dean was still in the shower so I answered the door. “He’s running a little late today.”

“That’s fine,” said Cary. “Gives me more time for coffee.”

“Espresso or cappuccino?” I asked as he yanked off his Styrofoam helmet.

“If you’re offering to foam some milk, cappuccino would be a dream come true.”

“I’d be honored.” I started back toward the kitchen, waving him along behind me.

He carried the bike inside, as always. It was a serious machine: carbon fiber and way too kuh-razy expensive to leave on a porch. My husband drooled with lust every time he saw the damn thing.

The girls had finished their French toast, so I sponged off their faces and hands and lifted Parrish up out of her booster seat.

“Hey there, little beauty,” Cary said, unlatching India so he could carry her to the playpen in my wake.

I refilled the coffee machine and started it up.

“So,” said Cary, “are we on for lunch at the Thai place?”

I shrugged, a little embarrassed.

“Madeline, you haven’t told Dean yet?”

“Not exactly.”

“Why not? I would think he’d be happy about it, you getting a job.”

“Well…”

The machine started chugging in earnest, and it was time to get the foamer-nozzle into my glass of milk.

I twisted the dial open and didn’t bother trying to finish my thought over the onslaught of noise, keeping the nozzle’s tip at the perfect depth so the froth burgeoned satiny and uniform, its bubbles too tiny for even Don Ho to detect.

When I’d handed Cary his coffee, I crossed my arms. “I have another fire story.”

“About these arsons?”

“No,” I said. “This was when Dean and I lived in Syracuse. Right after we got married.”

“The plot thickens.”

“I had to watch someone getting prepared to light a house on fire, once. Scary as hell.”

“Given our mutual history with flame, I can see why someone even thinking about doing that would’ve freaked the hell out of you.”

“Well, it wasn’t so much the idea of him
lighting
it that scared me—more the fact that he planned to chain me to a fireplace inside it, first.”

“Did he actually do it? I mean, not chain you to a fireplace in a burning house… you wouldn’t be here.”

“He got as far as pouring a bunch of gasoline around. And then a lot of other stuff happened…”

He shook his head. “Jesus. That’s just… I can’t begin to imagine.”

“Yeah,” I said. “We’re not exactly designed to imagine shit like that.”

“And you still have the guts to walk through a place that burned down
here
?”

“That wasn’t guts,” I said, “it was morbid curiosity. I mean, it’s not like the house here was still
on
fire at the time. It was just the aftermath.”

He nodded, unconvinced.

“But the people who show up first and deal with the actual flames,” I continued, “they have major balls. Running
into
a burning building to get people out? I can’t imagine.”

Cary shuddered. “No fucking way I could do that. I don’t even like yanking burned Pop-Tarts out of the toaster oven.”

I smiled at that image.

“What?” he asked.

“I’m picturing you with your eyes clenched shut, subduing your breakfast pastries with a fire extinguisher.”

He laughed. “I’d be cowering outside in the parking lot, curled up on the asphalt and making little mewling noises.”

That made me crack up entirely.

“Yeah, big tough old Cary,” he said, smiling, “total pansy. But I’ve learned to live with my utter wussitude. And who knows, maybe this will help…” He shoved a hand into the right front pocket of his shorts and pulled it out again, my grandmother’s four-leaf-clover charm now centered in the valley of his meaty palm.

“Hey, I hope so,” I said.

“I’ll break the news of your employment to your husband at the first opportunity this morning. I’ve been craving pad Thai since we talked about this yesterday.”

Dean breezed into the kitchen, briefcase in hand. “Somebody mention Thai food?”

“Your lovely wife has some
really
great news,” said Cary.

Dean looked at me, tense. “What kind of great news?”

Thanks, Cary…

“Um,” I said. “I got a job. As the restaurant critic at the
New Times
.”

“Oh, thank
God
, Bunny.” Dean’s face flooded with relief and he slumped back against the kitchen counter, letting the strap slide through his fingers until his briefcase rested on the floor. “I thought you were going to tell me you were
pregnant
.”

My husband and I looked at each other and both started laughing, somewhat hysterically.

“Triplets…, ” I said, almost choking.

“Quadruplets…, ” Dean replied, tears streaming down his face.

“
Boys
…, ” we said to each other at exactly the same moment.

Which made us both laugh so hard that Cary started looking seriously concerned.

Dean slid down the base cabinet until he was cross-legged on the kitchen floor, and I couldn’t breathe—had to lean over, put my hands on my knees.

Cary whacked me on the back.

Which helped, a little.

But just when I was calming down enough to inhale, I heard him say, “So I guess this means you’re okay with the newspaper thing, then?”

Which totally set me and Dean off again.

I sank to the floor, then flopped onto my back, kicking my sneakered heels against the orange linoleum.

Cary cleared his throat. “I told Madeline we’d go with her to that Thai place out by the office. For lunch.”

I banged my fist against his ankle. “Stop
talking
… you’re going to make me puke.”

When we finally,
finally
stopped laughing, Dean wiped his eyes on his sleeve and said, “Sounds great, Bunny. Can you bring the girls in the wagon?”

“I’d love to.”

He turned to Cary. “I’m sorry to be a pain in the ass, but would you mind throwing your bike in the back of my car? I have to haul a pile of shit out to the office. Or you could ride and I’ll drive. Sorry I didn’t call this morning, let you know you could’ve gone direct.”