The Fire
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
-Philip Larkin
“This Be The Verse”
The night before our house burned down my father had been fixing the sink. It’s been ten-no, eleven years, but I can still remember everything about that day. After all, I spend enough time going over it in my head and in my dreams. Something was stopping the sink up again, so it was down to the garage to shut off the water, and then up with the tools, to learn plumbing.
“OK, now take that pipe off.” my father directed, from his vantage point standing over me. I was laying on the floor, ribs crushed against the edge of the cabinet under the sink, the cabinet that housed the pipes that refused to work. “It should twist easily.”
“Well, it’s not,” I retorted. “It won’t give. And my arm hurts from being in this position.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Try leveraging against the side of the cabinet.”
“I’m afraid of breaking through it!”
“Oh, that won’t happen,” he dismissed. “You just don’t want to work.”
“Damn right I don’t want to work,” I muttered. “Here, you try,” I said in a louder voice. I backed out and handed him the wrench. He looked at me for a moment, then got down on his hands and knees and reached into the cabinet. I waited behind him, stretching and looking out the window.
“No wonder,” issued a voice from under the sink. “Is this where you were trying to unscrew the pipe?”
I couldn’t see, but I said, “Yeah,” it what I hoped sounded like an interested tone of voice.
“Well, that’s not what we wanted to remove. Here, see this? That’s what we wanted to fix.”
I just bent over his shoulder, leaned on his shoulder some, and said “Oh,” as he twisted the wrench. A sudden flow of water poured out of the pipe and spread onto the bathroom throw rug.
He backed out hurriedly, wiping his face on the sleeve of the old floppy green shirt he wore for around the house work. “There. Get me some towels, we’ll spread them around. I don’t want the water to soak through the wood of the cabinet.”
“What, these towels?”
“Yes, those towels! Hurry!”
I grabbed the towels off the racks. “I just didn’t know if you meant bath towels or what.”
“Well, this cabinet is right above the electrical wiring for the lights above the sink.”
“The water shouldn’t be able to reach that,” I said.
“It could.”
“Well, then, somebody screwed up,” I said, knowing that he designed the wiring, that he decided where to put things, that he had built most of this house.
“Found it yet?” he called out.
“No!” I yelled. I stared at the bucket, and then tipped it over, pouring the screws and nuts and nails all over the floor. I squatted down to sift through them. There were all sorts of oddball pieces of scrap metal in there. I found at least three caps to the valves on bicycle tires. The missing set of scissors from the sewing kit in the rightmost kitchen drawer. Nails that were almost rusted through. Bolts that almost certainly would never find a home, no matter what old machine they were cannibalized from.
My grandfather had owned a car repair shop. When my father had asked for a car back in 1955, my grandfather had gone to the dump and come back with eight peach baskets and a chassis. “Here,” said, “put it together and it’s yours.” My father loved to boast that that car had run for ten years, and that he kept it ’til he got out of college. I wondered how many of the screws in the gray bucket came from that car, or whether it lay abandoned in some field in Ohio, like my grandfather.
Bang bang bang thud.
The loft was going to house my father’s consulting business. The zoning authorities weren’t allowed to know about it, just like they didn’t know about the extra wiring behind the wall in the living room, or the vacant apartment that used to be the old garage, until the add-on had been completed.
My dad had some wild scheme to get the family back on its financial feet. It was simple: buy a house in a neighborhood with rising real estate prices, fix it up and expand it, then sell it a few years later for twice the amount we had paid for it. At the rate we were going, we might have paid off the mortgage in time to sell the house. Might have. We were in a posh neighborhood, full of retirees who owned grocery store chains and banks, and of young yuppie neurosurgeons who sent their kids to the Jewish day school across the highway. They complained about the hammering on Sunday mornings, before they got up, before noon. They fined people who lived in their community but didn’t obey rules, rules about which way the driveway faced, or how orderly the lawn was kept.
I hadn’t mowed it again this weekend.
Bang bang bang thud.
Then the sound of the back door opening and closing. I began to sweep the bolts and stuff back into the bucket. Ella was coming, probably to tell us that dinner was ready. Sweat was running down my back, grime covered my hands, and my foot was asleep. I felt ready for a shower, not food. After that, I wanted to ignore my homework and head up to my room, grab my charcoal pencils and draw.
From where I was squatting, half behind the table saw, I could see Ella’s legs where they emerged from her long light green skirt. “Dinnertime,” she yelled, loudly enough for our father to hear upstairs.
Bang bang bang thud. “Coming,” he said. Scraping noises came through the plywood.
She was wearing her hair up again. Since she had been growing it out she had taken to wearing buns and topknots. My father said that it looked like mother’s had, but how could I tell? “What’s for dinner?” I asked.
“Stir-fry.”
I groaned. “Again? You know I’m always hungry after that. And there’s no meat in it.”
“It’s cheap and easy,” she said defensively. “If you’re really hungry there’s stuff in the fridge.”
“It’s all health food stuff.”
“It is not. There’s some chicken left if you want to make a sandwich.”
I groaned again. Ella was older than I was, by about two and a half years. She was usually a quiet girl, but the kitchen was her domain, and I always got in trouble when I criticized her cooking or what she chose to make.
My dad came down the makeshift wooden stairs. “Come on,” he said, “let’s wash up.”
“Ella, would you like to say grace?” asked my father. He was smiling at the prospect of seeing us all together. I thought that the importance he placed on the family eating together was ridiculous. While I served myself stir-fry, picking through the wok and making sure I didn’t get any squash or zucchini, Ella blushed and ducked her head; it was her standard evasion technique.
“Then I’ll say it,” my father said. He held his hands out to his sides-Ella took his and offered me hers. I dropped my other arm to the side of my plate, idly playing with the silverware. His hand lay palm up, extended along the empty table to his right, like a fish that’s done with flopping.
“May God bless this meal we’re about to eat, and may we all have as successful and happy a day as we have had today. And thanks for my wonderful children, who are so talented and helpful.” He fell silent for a moment. “And may Carolyn, if she’s watching, guard over us all and keep us safe.” He raised his head and gave that smile of his. “Amen.”
“Amen,” we murmured, and began to eat.
“So, what do you want to do tonight?” he asked.
“Well, I have homework to do,” I started to say. He nodded encouragingly.
“That won’t take all evening, will it? We can rent a movie or something.”
“Well, after that I was going to draw some.”
He withdrew. “Oh. Okay. What about you, Ella?”
“A movie sounds good to me.” She smiled wistfully. “I’m not going anywhere, and my homework days are done.”
“Well, we’ll have to see about getting you into college,” he said, grinning jovially.
She grimaced. “Don’t start, Dad, okay? Don’t start.”
“What do you mean, start? You’ve been out of school for two years now. You’re going to lose the habit of schoolwork.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to go to college,” I said. Ella shot a glance at me, a glance that said, Don’t get in the middle of this.
“But she has to! It’s near impossible to get a decent job in the world today without a college degree. Ella,” he said, turning to her, “you don’t plan to not go to college, do you?”
She remained silent, eating her food.
“Ella? You understand that…”
“Listen, I don’t want to talk about it, okay?” Her cheeks were flushed, and she slammed her fork down onto the table. “Does anyone want anything else?” She got up and went into the kitchen. I could hear her opening the fridge.
“So, what are you doing this summer?” he asked me.
“I don’t know yet.”
“Well, you graduate this year, don’t you? That’s only a couple of months away.”
“I know.” I kept eating. I knew it was going to be the get a job speech, pay your way through college. When my dad went to college, he lived off of tomato soup for half a semester when a loan didn’t come through in time. He got sick as a dog. And when my dad went to college, he held down three jobs. He paid for all tuition himself. Never got a cent from his father, who stayed at home in Ohio monkeying with car innards. “When I was your age…” was his rallying cry. I saw things differently, and we both knew it. “I figure I’ll get a job,” I said.
Ella came back to table. She had gotten milk. “Your medicine,” she said shortly, dropping some high blood pressure medication next to my dad’s plate.
“Have you given any idea to where yet?” he said, idly picking up the pills and looking at them in the light before swallowing them dry.
“No.” I was done eating. Not much to pick over in stir-fry. Even Ella’s plate looked still full, with all the yellow and purple vegetables pushed to one side. “May I be excused?”
“Well, I’d like to finish this conversation, at least.”
“Well, what do you want to say?”
He seemed saddened by my tone of voice. “Well, I’d like to get some idea of your plans for after high school. Are you going to work? Do you think you can afford college next year? I’m sure you could get some scholarships.”
“I haven’t really thought about it,” I said, taking my plate to the sink. “I’d like to do something in art.”
Nowadays when my dad brings up college, I tell him not to worry about it. I’m doing fine: the design business is going well, now that my name is talked about in the right circles, and the college here asks me to lecture once in a while. But he still worries like he did then, trying to make sure I’m solvent. He always seems to be on the verge of offering a loan.
“Well, your mother and I always hoped you’d choose a career in which you could be assured of security, and…”
“It’s what I want to do.”
“I understand that, but you should also face some financial realities…”
I turned around and began to rinse off my plate. I was swallowing anger. “Listen, I know you have plans for me, but it’s my life, and I think I should follow my interests, okay? What you and my mother might have planned for me when I was three years old doesn’t seem to matter.”
“Now, look. I’m trying to help you. If art is really what you want to do, then we can look into the matter. You know your mother was very interested in it, and-”
I turned around. “Look, I don’t want to hear anything else about my mother. She isn’t here now, and even if she were still alive it wouldn’t make a difference in what I wanted to do.”
A surprised and birdlike face came over my father’s face, his blue eyes opened wide; then they narrowed. “Don’t talk like that about your mother,” he said angrily. He set his fork down heavily and everything on the table shook.
I never knew my mother. I know I should have walked a little more carefully around my dad. But he and I still don’t talk together well-both of us too full of guilt I guess. But back then I challenged him every chance I got.
“Why not?” I said. “She doesn’t care now. Get real, Dad.”
He stood up. I could see his fist cocked, he was ready to swing, like always when he got this mad, when I pushed those buttons. I faced him. I was thinking about why I said what I did.
He looked at his fist with an effort, and a look of shock came over his face., He uncurled those tight fingers and let his arm fall limply to his side. To this day, whenever I’m furious, I try to remember the way dad uncurled those fingers, looking at them like they weren’t part of him.
“Listen,” he said. “I don’t understand why you say what you do. Why do you have to always push?”
I didn’t know. I think I have an idea now. I should have said, “Because otherwise I’ll just go down the road you did, the one your father told you to follow.” I should have talked about idolizing the dead. Or maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned the dead at all.
My dad lives down in Florida now. I told him about the nightmares I’ve been having lately, and I think he understood. Several years ago he moved out of town, and the change did him good. With only one of us to worry about, one of us who really didn’t want someone staring over his shoulder, he was able to let go. He met some woman down there. I think her name is Susan. He married, she’s got some kids by a prior marriage.
Ella just sat at the table quietly though all this, as I walked away without anything to say.
I used to draw Ella all the time. From all angles. I’d catch her when she was re-reading her old high-school guidance brochures, trying to figure out what to do with her life. She’d stare off the paper, and the drawing on black would look like an ice sculpture that moved. A couple of times I’d caught her stepping out of the shower, when she didn’t know I was looking. It only takes a few seconds to get a gestural drawing down. It was as she walked down the hallway, her towel slipping down her back. She was terribly embarrassed when she saw the final drawing.
She used to take the drawings she liked, and hang them on her wall. She never took any of the portraits of herself, just anything else I drew. She hung them, without frames, just with Scotch tape. When she got tired of one, she’d take it down. I could tell how much she liked a drawing by how long it had been up on the wall. Now that I’ve had a couple of small shows-nothing major, no critical acclaim-I still wish I could recapture the feeling it gave me to walk into my sister’s room and see everything I produced hanging, and her face smiling in the middle of it.
Pencils and paper in hand, I leaned back in bed, board on my lap. There was a still-life on the chest at the foot of the bed, but I was drawing from memory. It was Ella, flushed and angry, at the table. The glint off her fork contrasting nicely with the deep shadows on her neck. Except it wasn’t going to be a fork, but a knitting needle, and the face was older. I was drawing my mother again. It happened all the time. It was easy to go from one face to another. Mother was just an older version. I wondered sometimes how similar the two were actually. I wondered whether my mother was as non-assertive a personality as my sister.
Mother died when I was three. I don’t remember her at all, except sometimes in dreams. It happened in a cooking fire. Ella was there, and saw it happen. She was terrified of open flames for years, and didn’t learn to cook until she was in her mid-teens. I sometimes wondered if her insistence on doing most of the kitchenwork was her way of tackling her fears. The woman my dad’s married to now cooks.
Steps coming up to my door-I put the picture aside and waited for the knock. It came; Ella of course.
She sat beside me on the bed, at a loss. Her eyes, darting around, saw the unfinished drawing. “It’s Mom,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “It wasn’t supposed to be, but it is.”
She looked at it a for a while longer, then set it reverently on the bed. “Why did you have to bring her up at dinner?”
“I didn’t, he did.”
“You know what I mean.” Her lips were pressed into a tight line. I could smell the dishwater on her hands.
“Well, I’m just sick and tired of his holding her up for us like some supernatural whip.” I mimicked his voice. “‘Now, son, you know you have to analyze your priorities and try to do what your parents want you to.’ No way, Ella. No way.”
“He only wants-”
“What is best for me, I know. But I don’t want to have to live my life trying to be the kind of son he was to that jerk in Ohio.” She gasped at the way I referred to our late grandfather. “I don’t want to spend my life as the slave to dead people!”
“Look, all I’m trying to say is that you have to be careful about how you talk about Mom around him. I don’t care how much you argue with…”
“Why do I have to be careful?” I was almost shouting now. “Why? If we didn’t live with her all the time she wouldn’t keep coming up. He’s obsessive, okay? She’s dead, I can’t remember her, and I don’t see why she has to affect my life any more.”
“Can’t you be a little nicer about it?”
“No! Jesus, you saw how he said grace. Like she’s hanging around to watch over us fourteen years later.”
“Don’t joke about her. I’m serious.”
“So am I. I don’t know why he has to treat her like some guardian angel. I don’t care!”
Ella was very upset now. “She was your mother. She loved you. You can’t just-”
“Sure I can. Why should I care about a woman I never knew and only hear about second-hand? It’s like some goddamn cult or-”
“Because you are her son! She birthed you and nursed you. She loved you, you are her son!”
A knock on the door. “Come in!” I yelled.
“Could you two keep it down? I want to take a nap,” my father said, peering in past the door. I could tell he knew what we were yelling about, that he must have heard it coming up the stairs. I rolled over in bed, said a muffled OK into the pillow, and pretended to be trying to sleep. Ella rustled out of the room, past my father, and the door shut. When I turned around, sure they had both gone, I realized she had taken the unfinished drawing with her.
The drawing that had stayed the longest on Ella’s wall was one of the old house. Mother was on the rocking chair that now sat in the living room downstairs. She was rocking on the porch, in pencil and some washes of ink, rocking quietly, looking right out at you. I’d done it about two years ago, and it still hung, discolored and ragged, tape eating into the wall’s paint, above Ella’s bed. It was her favorite, hanging right next to that high school diploma that actually was framed, the diploma that was also brown at the edges, glass stained somehow and the gilt edging tarnished. As neat as Ella was in the kitchen, her room got a little messy sometimes. The walls with their loose paper taped on, the dresser with a few trophies from sports. And the diploma and drawing of Mother, over her bed, right where they stared at her every night in the mirror. You could see the faint borders of the browned area where the sun hit it squarely on summer afternoons. Ella’s room always did get more sun than mine.
I rolled over. “No. It’s too dark to do it now.”
“Well, there are lights.” He sounded impatient with my laziness. I knew perfectly well it was laziness. Sometimes I just didn’t feel like doing the work he set me to doing. I didn’t think his priorities were right. He worried more about getting the house presentable than he did about basic necessities. He wanted to be able to use it for entertaining and thence for career advancement. His consulting business was limited, he said, by the fact that he worked at home, and could not bring clients to visit. The consulting business folded after the disaster, of course.
“Well, could you do that now, please? I want to get the balcony doors removed tomorrow, and then I can order new ones made.”
It was a warm spring evening. I wasn’t doing homework. “Sure,” I said. “Where’s the hammer?”
“On the tool bench in the garage, where it’s supposed to be.” He began to shut the door, then paused, said, “Thanks,” and left.
The hammer was still up in the loft office, of course. Although my father tried to organize things, he never did. Every summer he set me to cleaning the workbench area. It was back to a disaster in a week’s time.
We had a balcony that ran along the front of the house on the second floor. Both my bedroom and Ella’s faced the street, and we could supposedly walk out onto the balcony and enjoy the air. But Ella’s door was nailed shut, and the doors had been badly painted away, and so were not weatherproof. They needed replacing quite badly, and it was about time that my dad did something about it.
I went out onto the balcony from my room. I had no curtains on the French door, and from outside, in the dark, the room looked like a haven of warmth and yellow light. I walked along the balcony past the bathroom window, and over to Ella’s bedroom. The light was feeble, but it was enough. Her curtains were partially shut, but I could see the diploma and the picture of mother, hanging over her head. She was laying on her bed, in her short bathrobe, with some soft music playing and a book in her hand. Her legs slid out from underneath the terry-cloth when she rolled over to favor her back. She couldn’t see me, looking from a well-lit area into a dark one.
I looked for the nails in the door. There were only three of them, along the left side. Maybe some family had once kept a child in there and didn’t want the kid out on the balcony. I pulled one out with my fingers. It was rusted clear through. It came out silently. The next one was more reluctant. I took the hammer to it, but quietly, using the claw on the hammer’s head to pry at it. The head was biting deeply into the wood, but if the door was going to be pitched, it didn’t matter. When the nail finally came loose, it was with a long chunk of wood attached to it.
Ella turned over again. I stood quietly, hoping she wouldn’t see me. She dug under her pillow, pulled out her nightgown, and began to slip out of the robe. While I watched, she changed clothes, facing the street, facing me. She wore nothing under the robe. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
Then, her pinned up hair coming loose, she sat at her desk and took out her journal. She began to write in it, probably the poems she never showed anybody.
I went back to my room for the sketchbook, grabbed it and some pencils, and came back to the window to squat before her French doors. With an eye on her bent over form, I began to draw.
“Of course, but it makes a person feel more secure if they’re told.”
Security was always Ella’s bugaboo. She felt like a coiled spring back then, like someone who had been quiet all her life but wasn’t really like that. When I draw her now, her face is sadder than ever, but I always try to bring out the energy that I remember lurking behind the surface. She knew that her life was going nowhere, but she was afraid to take the step she needed to, because it would have been a risk. She needed to step off a cliff, like my wife does, but she never did. She didn’t even make it off the goddamn balcony.
She talked about boys incessantly, and even asked Dad for advice. She was no expert about relationships, because even then she had few dates, never mind that she was a very pretty girl. I used to wonder why. Maybe she was just too bookish.
She didn’t do the things the other artsy students did. When she was in her junior year, a particularly blunt and honest teacher told her that her writing didn’t show any evidence of true talent, and she came home and cried all afternoon. I still don’t know poetry from doggerel, but I hadn’t really liked the few ones I’d seen in her journal when I peeked. There were a few crude sketches there too, of flowers and such-typical thirteen-year-old girl’s stuff. Evidence of her crushes was scattered along the margins.
She came to talk to me one night, after breaking up with the only boy she’d gone steady with. I was watching TV-I forget what show.
“Well, why are you so upset,” I asked, “if he was such a jerk?”
She looked at me like I was a fool. I was only fourteen at the time, and hadn’t gotten a girl to pay any real attention to me. That didn’t start until the next year, when I started taking advantage of my drawing to capture hearts.
“Well, I loved him. I guess I still do.”
It sounded stupidly sentimental to me. But she went on.
“Just because someone hurts you doesn’t mean you stop loving them.”
“Well, love means trust, right? I wouldn’t trust someone who hurt me.”
“It’s not that simple!” she said. “I still think there has to be a reason why he’s doing this. After all, Carrie’s such a slut.”
“Maybe it’s what he wants,” I suggested.
She blushed, and it was then I figured out that my sister was not a virgin.
“Well, if he’s this bad, then I would try to just forget about him,” I said, to cover my blunder.
“I can’t!” she said, “I can’t just let go.”
I was itching to get back to the TV set by then. “Well, I don’t know what to do to help you then. Either you forget him or you don’t.” I turned back to the TV.
“Jesus,” she said. “Is that all you can say? Don’t you think emotion might be a little more complicated than that?”
“Not really,” I said. I changed the channel. While flipping past ads I looked back at her to see if she had any preference as to what to watch. She was crying.
“Maybe someday something will hurt you enough so that you care,” she said, and ran out of the room.
I set my textbooks with the homework I hadn’t even looked at back in my bookbag, and got ready for bed. I locked the door, as usual. My dad was prone to coming in whenever I really didn’t want to be disturbed, usually to explain to me how to do some obscure handyman thing that I was sure a paid worker could do better. My dad could never figure out that I didn’t give a shit about what he was telling me. Like I always tell the art students, you have to ignore the technique they teach you sometimes. If you don’t care about what you’re doing, you’ll never do a good job. I told my dad that, and he said it was something his grandfather always said-it figures that he thinks I’m right now.
With some music to lull me, I went to sleep.
Reddish light was dancing under the door. I became aware of a rumbling, crackling noise. When I reached for the doorknob, I snatched my hand away from it before I touched it. I could feel the heat rising from it. Grabbing a t-shirt from the dirty laundry by my bed, I held the doorknob gingerly and opened the door to the hall. And it was on fire.
I shut the door damn fast, and stood there for a minute thinking. Then, I got dressed, taking my time. I figured I was going to jump from the balcony anyway. Somehow, in the back of my mind I wasn’t surprised. All the cutting corners on labor and wiring and so on had to show up somehow. But I was damned if I was going to lose all my belongings to my dad’s foolishness.
I opened the balcony doors, and the feeling of the cold air was like ice on my sweating skin. It had rained the night before, and the grass was damp. I just hoped the wet didn’t soak my pads too much as I began to throw them over the edge, as far as I could from the house. Then I took my tapes. They were in plastic racks. Right then I didn’t care, really, if the cases cracked, but I didn’t want to try to track down all the tapes I’d accumulated over the years, to buy them again if they were burnt along with the house. I threw clothes over the edge, books, everything that seemed small enough to take. They say to leave all that when there’s a fire. My property wasn’t insured. My dad’s was.
When the room was stripped bare of my essentials, I looked at the door again. Paint was bubbling right off the inside of it, and patches were beginning to glow like the slow-motion overexposure of film. I ran for the balcony and jumped carefully, trying to avoid the cement walkway that lay underneath my window.
“Listen, things become clichés because they happen, okay?” She slammed the steering wheel with her hands, honked angrily as the cars in front of the high school refused to move out of the way fast enough.
“Well, I still think it’s hokey.” I stared out the window. Ella had come to pick me up from school and to give me the news that we were moving to a house in a fancy neighborhood. We were leaving the old house behind, the one with the porch with its rocking chair that trembled in the wind. Dad was trying to move up in the world.
“Well, he’s trying to do the best for us. It’s in a better neighborhood, in a better school district, a bigger house…”
“Why do we need a bigger house? There are only three of us now. We should be moving to a smaller house. Should have done that a long time ago.”
“Well…” she said. She was beginning to relax as we hit the street, and the traffic eased up around the school.
“I think he’s doing it for his business. I think he’s doing it as a financial move,” I continued. “And I resent having to give up my house and my school for that.”
“Well, he promised at Mom’s grave that…”
“You keep saying that, dammit! That doesn’t make any difference! So he said he’d take care of us? He’s supposed to anyway! He’s our father, for chrissake! He’s not going to just dump us out in the cold, kick you out when you’re eighteen, make you sink or swim! Jesus!” I was breathing heavy. Fear lay behind my words, and we both knew it, because our grandfather had done that to him, sent him out with a blessing and a prayer at eighteen, and watched from his cozy home by Lake Michigan while my dad paid his own way through college, married, had kids, struggled with money, made wrong career choices, and was widowed. My dad couldn’t wait to go back for the family reunion this summer, to stand before his old man and say, “Look what I’ve done.”
Ella sighed. “Cool it, okay?” We were threading our way through our suburb.
“Why?” I challenged. “Do you know what you’re going to do after graduation? It’s only a few months away. Got a job lined up? A college picked out? Career, husband, retirement home picked out? Not much time left!” I sank back into the seat, sullenly.
“Shut up, okay?” she said. “I get enough of that from him.”
Shadows. Everywhere. Firefighters standing all around, watching with detachment as flowers of flame grew like ivy all across the walls, trying to pull themselves up to the sky. Paper and sparks flew heavenwards from the roof, swirling like fireflies on a summer night. The breeze was defeated by the wall of heat that pushed outward from the house, carrying with it the smell of cooking plastic, of treated wood, of tangy metal.
My father stood there, tears streaming down his cheeks, eyes bright and unbelieving as they slid from corner to corner, door to door, window to window to window, looking maybe for a piece of furniture that was trying to escape, hoping the firefighters would catch it and save his investment. His jaw hung slightly open, and he watched.
He turned to me then, as I came up beside him, and pointed up at the balcony door. He looked like a zombie, mouth open, voiceless and ragged.
One of my sketchpads had opened, and white pieces of paper were flying blankly like ghosts into the night. Most of my tapes had been crunched underfoot by the firemen, or buried in the mud that grew around the walls like a grave. My father’s face had soot on it. A drawing of mine, of Ella, blew to his feet, and he bent over to pick it up. The corner was browned, scorched from being too close to the heat. You could see the line where it had been exposed to the flames. As he saw the portrait, he sobbed, and fell to his knees, folded up and ready to be carted away. I looked around for her, but there were nothing but shadows and firemen, and the fire growing, fueled and stretching its arms upwards.
I was a cold son of a bitch, and just stared up at Ella’s room, as the roof collapsed, and thought about one more nail.
I turn then, crying then, and I see the figure on the balcony. It is in the shadows, and then it comes into the savage light and I see her face. It is my mother, there on the balcony, in her rocking chair, looking right at me, in inks and brown wash like a daguerrotype.
I scream then, and wake then, and my wife hits me hard and then holds me tight while I cry myself back to sleep. It must be hard on her, now that the baby is coming, to have a hysterical husband; but it is a great comfort to put my hands on her swelling belly and feel the life growing within. I can think already of all the things this child will have, of all that he will be able to do.
I don’t have any of my drawings of Mother anymore. I just don’t draw her. I do Ella all the time, but I won’t draw Mother. She looked like Ella-I can remember her face; but I don’t draw her face. I don’t draw her out of fear, I think. I still don’t know what to say to her when I pray before sleeping. I still avoid talking about her to everyone, especially my dad. And I never draw her-I saw what happened once, when I made a sketch for my wife, who wanted to know what she looked like. I saw what she looked like, and now I try to forget her face. I don’t draw her out of fear of what I would see in her eyes.
I’m afraid I would see that she loved me.
