I knew Matthew wasn’t lying about the homeless shelter because when he told me about it, he actually looked at me, but when he told me about riding barges on the Missouri River, he looked away, at the peeling wallpaper in my room or the old paint that lay hidden beneath.
He had a bag with him, stuffed near full with everything he owned. He said he wouldn’t be going back to that or any other homeless shelter ever again. He was through.
At first he didn’t tell me exactly what happened to give him those burns. But he did tell me about the shelter itself. How it was too crowded. How there weren’t enough beds for everyone, how some nights he had to sleep on the floor. How he kept his belongings tucked beneath his bed, feeling lucky if they were still there come morning. He told me about the rows of identical bunk beds with the gaunt mattresses and mismatching bedspreads, some stained and torn, others brand-new. Donated, Matthew told me, because they weren’t good enough for the rest of the world, and I could see in his eyes that that’s how he felt: not good enough for the rest of the world, and I wanted to tell him that it wasn’t true.
He said that the others there, they were drug addicts and drunks, and the people that ran the place, they couldn’t care less. He told me that in order to get clean sheets or a square meal, sometimes he had to do things he didn’t want to do.
“Like what?” I asked.
“You don’t want to know,” he said.
And then he told me what happened there, in that homeless shelter, to give him those burns. He didn’t tell me because I asked, because I didn’t ask. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know that, either.
He told me about a fire. Maybe faulty electric wiring, he said, but more likely arson. I asked him what that meant—arson—and he said someone was upset when there wasn’t enough room in the shelter for them to stay, and so they took a match to the place, and torched it, he said, leaving two dead, a man and his ten-year-old son. The fire escapes were barred with beds and belongings, so that there was only one way in or out.
I looked hard at those burns, the red skin that bulged from his hands. I pictured a building consumed in fire the way Matthew said it was, the walls left black and charred, everything inside burned to a crisp. This picture made me think of that place Joseph told me about, the one where sinners go. Hell. A place of never-ending punishment and torture, with demons and dragons and the devil himself. Eternal punishment. Lakes of fire. Fiery furnace. Unquenchable fire. Fire, fire, fire.
And I decided then and there that I wouldn’t ever step foot in a homeless shelter. Didn’t even matter that I didn’t know what a homeless shelter really was.
“Where did Matthew stay after he left that shelter?” Ms. Flores asks, her voice tearing me away from my thoughts. I’m thinking about Matthew and a complicated look that had developed in his eyes, one which I liked, the brown somehow browner, warmer, like the syrup Momma poured on our hot fudge sundaes.
That’s what I thought of Matthew’s eyes: warm and sweet like hot fudge, rich and delicious.
“Claire,” she says. “Are you listening to me?”
But before I can answer a phone rings and Ms. Flores dives her hands deep into the pocket of a bag and sets it free. She gazes at the screen, her eyebrows wrinkling up like raisins.
She skids her chair back from the table abruptly, making me jump. “Stop there,” she says. “We’ll talk about Matthew in a minute.” And then, to the boy in the corner, “Watch her. I’ll be back,” and with that, excuses herself from the cold room, the sound of her heels clattering down the concrete floor.
When she’s gone, the barred door sealed shut by a second guard who follows her out of view, the boy in the corner whispers to me, “If it was me, I would’ve killed ’em, too.”
HEIDI
In the morning, there’s a knock at the door.
Zoe is in her bedroom, preparing for the school day, getting dressed, brushing her hair and such. Willow is in the bathroom. I pass by, en route to the front door, the knock beckoning me from the master bedroom where I’ve partially dressed in a pair of tweed pants and a cami, a cardigan left abandoned on my bed. My hair is wet, drying more quickly than I’d like.