I pulled myself free. Pulled myself free and stood up. Me, a hero. Fuck off. If there’s a chance he’d do it again? All of this was one big again. Nothing different, but the same story you told over and over again, about how you did something terrible when you were a kid and lived your life hoping that one day you’d get the chance to redeem yourself. To make amends.
Well, this was your chance, and you fucked it up. Dr. Genet. Cécile Métrailler. A three-year-old fucking girl. Not to mention all those people in the AMC. I’d been right there and I hadn’t seen it.
I hadn’t done a thing to prevent Nick from sending all those people to their deaths.
Me and my escapades. I’d woken up the monster in him. I’d nurtured the monster in him. Now I was watching the fire around me spread. Me, the father of the fire, and the only thing missing was Grandma screaming. Grandpa face-planting the snow like a smokin’ human torch.
How life made you run in circles and turned you into an uber epic failure when it served you a second chance and you didn’t take it.
I was no hero. I was the monster.
Julia bit her lip and said, “I brought you something.”
She bent down, picked up her Tumi travel pack, and put it on her lap. Unzipped the main compartment.
I couldn’t believe what she took out.
I was the kind of kid for whom a single stuffed animal just didn’t cut it. If you were to pay a visit to my New York bedroom between the Huckleberry Wall winter and, say, puberty, you’d have seen that it was, um, stuffed with plush elephants. Plush monkeys. A plush T. rex. And all hand-me-downs. The pandas had eyes missing. My duckie was squashed flat. Ears were frayed. Furs worn out. Ma Avery once asked how come I only had these duds with torn seams and Pa Avery said, leave him be, he sticks up for the underdog, it shows character. Till one day he walked into my room and saw me beat a baby seal to a pulp with my Hasbro lightsaber. Saw me rip the stuffing out of my rhino plushie like a poacher on the Serengeti.
He’s precocious, the shrink said. Can’t argue with a diagnosis like that.
Seriously, all those sessions and I don’t think the guy ever got a single smile out of me. Like I was gonna tell him anything. What was the point, if an asshole like that didn’t understand that every kid had a favorite stuffed animal? That I’d set mine and the rest of my childhood accidentally on fire?
And my grandfather. I’d set him on fire, too.
Everyone gets stretch marks when they grow up, but there comes a point when you’re stretched to the limit. Then you just snap.
And that’s why it was completely, insanely impossible what Julia took out of her Tumi travel pack, here, fifteen years later.
Dr. Jingles.
“I always kept him,” Julia said. Scratching herself behind the ear. And me, I got it now. No mystery at all. It was a teddy that looked like Dr. Jingles. He had the same plush golden retriever fur. The same friendly snout. The same shiny eyes. The bear Julia took from her bag, his entire hindquarters were all singed, like he’d sat his big fat ass on a barbecue. What you were looking at was a knockoff. A carbon copy. A clever fake. Why? Who knows, but the teddy that, cuz of me, got caught in a shower of smoldering ashes in Huckleberry Wall had disappeared in a raging inferno. Gone up in smoke. Cremated, together with the rest of humanity.
I took the bear from her and held it out in front of me.
The slightly skewed snout. The worn-out patches on his paws.
I remembered that the real Dr. Jingles had a tiny tear in the lining at the bottom of his back, through which you could see the gray stuffing. Julia’s bear, I turned him around. There was a tiny tear in the lining at the bottom of his back, through which you could see the gray stuffing.
Just above the edge of the singed patch.
I pressed my nose against his chest, just like I always used to do when I was a kid, and inhaled deeply. What I smelled was myself. What I smelled: the sunlight through the tall windows when you woke up on Saturday mornings. What I smelled: the sirens and the din of Second Avenue. Sweet July and driving the Montauk Highway to the Hampton Bay Boys Camp. Mom, coming to kiss me good night. My jammies with the sailboats. Hadn’t thought about any of that for eighteen years.
Burning pinewood. Shrieking monster birds circling above the snow-laden branches, searching for prey, while a big, smoking devil pulled us onward on a sleigh. A devil I’d summoned.
All the things I’d run away from, all those things I smelled.
It was Dr. Jingles.
I had to clear my throat before I could say, “Where’d you find him? I mean, what do you remember about that night?”
Everything was shaking. My fingers. My lips. Everything.
“The panic, mostly. You woke everyone up, and the house was full of smoke and Grandma was screaming and then there was panic. I vaguely recollect picking up Dr. Jingles in a flash while you were hauling me out of the house by my arm.”
“I did that?” And then, more importantly, “But where? Where did you find him?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I was six, remember. I just have the image of snatching him up on the way. From the bed, I suppose. What matters is—”
“That’s not where he was.”
“O . . . kay.”
It dizzified me. If Julia had taken Dr. Jingles, it meant he didn’t burn. Then the way I remembered it all these years was wrong. The way I remembered it is Grandpa screaming that we had to get out of the house. Julia and me dragged along by his hand, me looking over my shoulder to see whether there were still any traces that could unmask me as a pyromaniac. Traces of Dr. Jingles, Twig, and Porcupiny. What I remembered: the living room one red-hot, burning oven where nothing could survive.
Pull out one, and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.
All. Those. Years.
Everything I’d believed in.
My whole trauma. My whole execution.
And Julia said, “Listen, Sam. There’s nothing in the world that you can’t do. You can end this today.” Took a breath, reached out for my hand. “You have to get out of here. Get away from Nick for a while. Gather your wits. That’ll help you see things more clearly. So you can do the right thing.”
She held Dr. Jingles up and showed me his singes. “Sooner or later, we all get burned. We all make mistakes. But without you, all of us would have suffocated from the smoke, Sam. If you hadn’t woken us up, we wouldn’t be here right now.”
Julia, she fixed me with her gaze and said, “You can be a hero again.”
4
Google. LinkedIn. Instagram. Facebook. Eyes wide open, hunting through the right profiles, the right lists of friends, using the right search terms. That’s how you gathered evidence. Julia’s words in your head: First thing, I’d want to know for sure if it’s really true. Your MacBook on your lap, your face glistening with sweat, and Julia’s words: I would never want to risk falsely accusing anyone.
Three thirty in the afternoon. Julia out on the sofa, power napping her jet lag away. Dr. Jingles staring glassy-eyed into the fire. Dr. Jingles, who should have been millions of minuscule ash particles spread over the Catskills, and me, since I was reunited with my old teddy bear I couldn’t get warm again. My lungs unable to suck in enough air.
Nick. How dangerous was Nick?