The craziest part of the whole night, in my opinion, was that he did.
OR MAYBE THE craziest thing was this: There was a melee at the gate. I saw Xander plow into the gawker-control barricades the police had set up across the driveway. He ran right over them as if he were a steeplechaser who’d forgotten the hurdles were meant to be jumped. One of the police officers took off after him, shouting. When Xander wouldn’t stop, the officer caught him by the back of his shirt. I saw Xander punch the guy and break free. Another officer joined in the pursuit and put Xander in handcuffs.
“But I live here,” Xander shouted.
I decided not to get involved.
“Let’s see your driver’s license then, sir.” I had to admire the cop’s restraint. It was interesting sitting there on the grass listening to them. Their voices carried across the flat of the lawn the way voices skim across the surface of a swimming pool sometimes, letting you in on the conversation of two people lying on blankets on the other side of the water, whispering to each other.
“You’ll have to uncuff me so I can get to it,” Xander said in a calmer voice. The officer did and Xander massaged his wrists. “Can you tell me how the fire started?” he asked.
“Kid playing with fireworks,” the officer said.
“Was anybody hurt?” Xander asked as he pulled out his wallet.
“Somebody left in an ambulance,” the officer said. “That’s all I know.”
Xander threw his wallet in the officer’s face and took off running. They caught and cuffed him again. “I can’t show you something I don’t have,” he wailed. “I don’t have a driver’s license.”
They’d stopped listening by then. They hustled him none too gently down the driveway and shoved him into the backseat of a squad car.
After they left, I picked up Xander’s wallet. There wasn’t much in it. No driver’s license, of course. Three crumpled one-dollar bills. A monthly bus pass. A piece of paper with a phone number written on it, and the words Sara’s new cell.
OR MAYBE THE craziest was this: a fragment, half paper, half cinder, floated down and landed on my head while I sat there with Frank sleeping in my lap. Bits of paper had swirled everywhere before the firefighters were able to get the blaze in Mimi’s office under control and for some time after that. The dew had fallen so the grass was damp enough now that the arsonous bits sizzled and died without starting any new small fires.
I wasn’t trusting dew to save my hair. I grabbed that fragment and crushed it out against the grass. When it was completely extinguished I could see the part of sentence it held: and then Alice
AND THEN ALICE put Frank’s birthday cake in the fridge in the kitchen and went into what was left of Mimi’s office to see if she could find any part of that finished novel.
Everything was gone. Everything but sodden, scorched carpet and lacy remnants of incinerated drapes and splinters of wood and a sad lump of metal that must have been her typewriter and muddy gray piles of ash. Here and there, scraps of burnt-edged paper with a word or phrase on it. Maddening bits of what must have been her novel the day before, reduced to word puzzles and haiku.
( 23 )
AFTER THE FIRE Mimi was put on a seventy-two-hour psychiatric hold at the hospital. The admitting doctor informed me of this over the telephone after I made it clear I couldn’t leave my distraught younger brother, aka Frank, to come in for a chat. I had no intention of taking Frank to the hospital while his mother was in lockdown. I knew he’d insist on seeing her and I also knew that Mimi wouldn’t want him to see her and in the end all three of us might end up being put away. I told the kid his mother was so tired they’d tucked her in bed in a very private room so she could sleep there uninterrupted for three days straight. “She’s on hiatus,” I said. “All of us could use a little rest, right?”
“We’re keeping your mother under observation as a precaution,” the doctor explained when we talked. “I don’t want to cause you unnecessary alarm, but the paramedics told me about the situation with your late uncle. Also I see from her hospital record that your mom is unusually accident-prone, and that she was brought to the hospital this time after becoming hysterical because her house had burned down. Hmm. That might make me a little hysterical, too.”