Cozy, Brenda answered, thinking, An artist’s garret is going to be even smaller, honey.
She turned her face toward the pillow, did the math in her head; she could just squeeze out the tuition and the mortgage. The car was old but serviceable. She could even watch YouTube videos on how to repair it herself. She turned over. Two a.m. Then she did the math for how much sleep she could get before her next shift as a paramedic. The bed still felt empty without Rick, but she had, finally, gotten used to his absence.
She closed her eyes, the torture of the math done for the night, and fell asleep. She dreamed of walking through a vast glass house. She reached for a sculpture of delicate crystal, glowing with light.
She heard the sound first, the breaking of glass, and thought she was still in her dream. Brenda Hobson sat up; no more sound. A distant shattering, maybe next door. The empty, new, unsold houses. She’d heard people would break into them to steal the copper wiring and resell it. They weren’t her houses, but this was her neighborhood, her new best hope, and the thought of thievery on a house belonging to a future neighbor made her mad. She’d call the police—
The smoke alarms blared.
She opened her bedroom door.
Flames were spreading across the den’s carpet like wind, surging, and the window beyond the fire was shattered. On the other side of the room was the staircase leading up to her children’s bedrooms.
“Hunter, Lindsay!” she screamed. She couldn’t get through the fire to them. She ran back into her bedroom, forced open the window, climbed out into her front yard. A strange calm kicked in; her training, to do her job in the midst of chaos. She picked up a heavy white stone from the edge of her planned flowerbed, and lobbed it at the upstairs bedroom window. Hunter’s. After a moment he came to the window, his face twisted in panic.
“Get your sister and climb out onto the roof,” she screamed. “Now. You can’t get down the stairs.”
He nodded and vanished back into the rising smoke. The smoke. It would all be rushing upward, toward her kids, choking them, suffocating them…
She turned and ran along the length of her house.
She saw a flash of light in the windows of the house next door. Fire. Her mind registered it: the house next door is on fire, too. Nothing to be done for that—Hunter and Lindsay were her only focus.
She ran around to the back, to the garage. She heaved it open and pulled out a ladder. It felt like it weighed nothing in her arms. She ran with it back toward the front of the house.
The house across the street—also empty—was burning as well. Flames burst from its upper windows. Again she registered it but kept her focus. She shoved the ladder against the house, by the window. She ran up its rungs, crawling across the roof. No sign of her kids, smoke pouring from the open window. No, no, she thought. Then she saw Lindsay coming through the window, coughing, gagging, Hunter sliding out behind her. They both rolled onto the roof, racking coughs. She pulled them to her, hearing a loud explosion inside the house.
“Hurry, hurry!” she screamed. Lindsay went down the ladder first, falling the final few feet onto the new grass. Brenda sent Hunter, but he was coughing so hard—he had gone after his sister in the thickening smoke—he fell from the ladder, sprawling on the lawn. Brenda could feel the fire raging, rising, through the roof. Hunter lay curled at Lindsay’s feet in a fit of violent coughing and vomiting. Brenda rushed down the ladder and started protocols on her son.
“Mom!” Lindsay screamed. “All the houses are burning!”
The houses around them—all five of them—were ablaze, flames licking out their empty windows. The For Sale signs in every yard glowed as the flames rose. No neighbors to call 9-1-1. Her phone was inside, and her son was choking to death.
She began to pound on her son’s back, trying to drive the smoke from him and the life back in, willing him to breathe, while everything she’d worked for burned.
11
Jane’s Book of Memory, written in the
days and weeks following the crash
The most ill-advised Faceplace posting in the history of Faceplace postings, courtesy of my mother:
Jane now remembers a deer running out in front of the car.
This was Mom’s big, nasty, Lakehaven-unforgettable lie. She said it, I suppose, to lessen (futilely) the evidence of the suicide note. And I went along with it, because the world seemed to not like me much once the news of the suicide note spread through Lakehaven, except for Mom. (It wasn’t initially in the news reports. The Halls’ investigator found it in the debris field of the crash the next day, gave it to the police, who didn’t release it to the press, ever, it was part of the investigation. Then, in performing some forensic test on it, the note got ruined. Destroyed. But the lawyer’s investigator, a guy named Randy Franklin, or the Halls, leaked the news of the note’s existence to a few people in Lakehaven, and then word of mouth took over, and that was that. I was damned.)
You’d think, given Mom was a widow and the mother of an apparently suicidal amnesiac, that people would be more forgiving. Some were, but many were not. If she had stayed quiet, maybe it would have been better for me and for her—Lakehaven can be a very generous place. But this one, stupid lie seemed to change something between us and the town, forever. What do they say about sports and celebrity scandals? The lie is worse than the cover-up.
Plus, there was the sense she was protecting her own interests. Her blog, Blossoming Laurel. She’d made a name on the Internet for being a stellar mother and sharing her insights. All the entertaining, oddball moments of my youth—which normally would have been told only to family or close friends over coffee, at reunions, or on holidays—were instead written up in her breathless prose and posted for the world. Every moment when she had faced an “Important Choice” as a parent. And then each thing was commented on. She finally shut them off when they turned cruel or twisted. I had become vaguely aware of her blog as my memories of her surged in like a slow tide. And then I read a few entries the day after I got home from the hospital—at the suggestion of Dr. K, that it might help prompt memories—with a kind of detached numbness, like I was reading about another girl, a stranger. In the blog I was “The Blossom”—never referred to as Jane. That was her idea of protecting me: changing one detail, not using my name. Some entries were funny, others touching—her love was clear. But it was strange to see my life laid out like a novel, available to anyone who wanted to read about it. She had written about my first crush, my first period, my first failing grade. Had she ever asked me if that was cool with me?