It worried Edith, and not just because C.J. had been the same way as a boy, but because it made the world a difficult place to live in if your view of it was always black-and-white—a difficult place for those who believed that, and for those who had the misfortune to love them.
Edith wanted to think that his strong personality had to do with the fact that he was an only child like his father, and wondered whether having a little brother or sister would help him to see that all things didn’t revolve around him, that sometimes your favorite shorts weren’t clean yet or your potatoes touched the Brussels sprouts on your plate. Cecelia had tried twice before, miscarrying each time, the last just three weeks earlier. She’d tripped and fallen down the stairs. She’d been far enough along that the doctors had been able to tell that it had been a little girl. Cecelia had taken it well, her eyes dry when they’d brought her home, and she’d immediately gone upstairs and closed the nursery door. It was almost as if, Edith thought, she’d become only a shadow of the bright, pretty girl she’d been when C.J. had first carried her across the threshold.
“I want to play fire truck,” Cal said, pointing a chubby finger toward his favorite toy, a large, bright red fire truck with a working siren and a ladder that went up and down.
Edith had mentioned the previous day that she’d play fire truck with him soon, and to him that meant right then. She thought of the Christmas presents she still needed to wrap, and her dress for the party that night, which she still needed to iron. And the seating assignments from the plane, which she’d recently acquired through her friendship with a local newspaper journalist and that offered her so many more opportunities for further study of the crash. But Cal would scream until she’d played with him, so it wasn’t as if she really had a choice anyway.
“All right,” she said, standing up and lifting him from the bed. She helped him put on the big plastic fire chief helmet, then knelt on the floor next to the truck and waited for Cal to give her orders. He was always the fire chief, and she a firefighter who had to do everything he asked. It was her job to make the Lincoln Log structures that would go up in flames, but it was up to Cal to come up with the reason for the fire. He was very good at placing blame: The candle was left where the dog’s tail could knock it over; the man with the cigarette didn’t put it out all the way and the garbage caught on fire.
Edith had no idea where his scenarios came from, only that C.J. thought it funny when he read accident reports from the newspaper out loud at the breakfast table, each story concluding with one of them shouting out who was to blame. The only benefit to that, Edith had found, was that Cal had a deep-seated belief that there were no such things as accidents, just people not paying attention.
“Where are your little people?” she asked.
He pointed to a LEGO house they’d made together with enough bedrooms to house the small dolls she’d made for him. He hadn’t liked the Fisher Price people because they didn’t look real, with no arms, and legs and hair that came off. He liked the dolls Grandma Edith made, because they had painted faces and wore real clothes and had hair that moved. It wasn’t that he lacked imagination; it was just the way things should be.
“What’s burning?” Edith asked.
“A house. Somebody had real candles on the Christmas tree and it got burnt down.”
Edith remembered the story from the Sunday paper. A family of six had perished because the mother had wanted to give her own mother a reminder of the Christmases of her childhood.
“All right. Where is everybody when the fire starts?”
He studied the large LEGO house, pointing out all the places the dolls should be.
“Are you going to save everybody?”
He nodded, his face serious. Despite his rather fatalistic outlook toward the cause of the fires he and his imaginary crew fought to extinguish, it was always his goal to save every life. It was the right order of things, the way he saw how to make all the pieces fit together. Edith took a great deal of consolation from this, from his clear knowledge of right and wrong. Surely this meant that despite everything else, he might still find his way in the world.
They played for nearly half an hour—or, rather, Cal played while Edith followed instructions. This was the part of her grandson she enjoyed most, when he was absorbed in his role-playing and he was happy because he could control the miniature world he’d created. His chubby fingers were surprisingly agile at manipulating the small levers on the fire truck and moving the doll-people down the fire ladder. He’ll be fine. Edith found herself thinking that often, ever since she’d first gone to his crib when he’d been just an infant and found that the reason for his high-pitched crying was that a corner of his blanket had exposed one tiny foot.
“Oops.”