Ajar (5 page)

“
C’mon, Mom, c’mon,” I
urged.

My mother bent, and curled herself into a
ball. I helped her out the window. As I followed her out onto the
porch roof, I glanced back and could see the smoke begin to rush
under the door, quickly filling the room. The porch roof was not
hot, though smoke was rising rapidly to where we were. The night
was warm. We could hear the sound of the night insects mixed with
the crackling of the fire.

“I can’t do it,” Mom whispered.

“Yes, you can.” I grabbed her arm.

We scooted on our butts over to the edge of
the porch roof. Luckily, the pitch of the front porch was not
steep.

“I’m going to help you,” I tried to sound
even, “I’m going to hold onto you. It’s not really that far of a
drop. When you hit the ground, roll.”

“I...” she started.

“Turn around, lie on your stomach,” I
ordered like Uncle Elliot. Somehow, I knew she'd listen.

I helped her get on to her belly and slide
to the end of the porch roof. I clutched her wrist as she slowly
inched over the edge. I could hear the back windows popping out as
the fire raged inside. The smoke was getting heavier, even up where
we were. She slid over the edge. I held her as long as I could and
then released. She fell like a rag doll onto the lawn. She did not
roll.

My descent was more controlled. I was able
to grab onto the gutter, then the porch post: I hung for a few
seconds, trying to calm my breathing and then let go. I let myself
fall into a roll.

“I think I twisted my ankle.” Mom was lying
on her back. She hadn’t twisted her ankle, she had broken it. I
could see her ankle, bent out at a right angle. I helped my mother
out onto the sidewalk and propped her up against the fence. The
entire house was alive with flames. I could see in every window the
orange and red eating up the curtains.

“I’m going to get help.”

I left my mother on the sidewalk and pounded
on my neighbor’s door. It took a long time for Mr. Allen to
answer.

“What the hell...” he started yelling, the
chain on the door.

“Call the fire department,” I yelled over
his voice, “and the ambulance!” I left him; I didn’t wait for a
response.

When you are waiting, it seems like a long
time for the fire trucks to get to your house. The windows all
began to explode outwards because of the intense heat. Smoke and
flame rose high about the trees. I stood transfixed, watching the
fire. There is something both beautiful and terrifying about fire.
I heard the back porch collapse. Then I watched the roof sink into
itself. In the night air I knew something more than just the house
was burning.

The paramedics made us both go to the
hospital. I didn’t know that the space under my nostrils was black
from having breathed the smoke. It looked like I was sporting a
moustache. In the mirror above the sink in my cubicle in the
emergency room, I thought I looked like a fire-breathing dragon.
Even my hair was dusted black with soot.

The fire was labeled arson. The headlines
read, “Sawyer Shooter’s House Fire Bombed”. But they never found
out who did it. I’m not even sure they investigated.

Chapter
Eight

My mother was still sitting on the hospital
gurney. The hospital had called my aunt and uncle and they were
sitting in green, plastic visitor chairs. Mom’s ankle had been set
and she had a big, soft cast. She had been given a painkiller and
her eyes were glassy. The nurse had gone to get crutches for her.
She sat there not looking at anything. The disorder, Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder, hadn’t been coined yet. The ER only treated our
bodies. I could tell something was wrong with Mom, more than just
her ankle, but, like my brother Dan, it was something indefinable.
I knew if I asked how she was doing she’d say “ok” even though she
wasn’t “ok.” The nurse came in and told her she could get dressed
but she just sat there as if she hadn’t heard her at all. Aunt May
motioned for Uncle Elliot and me to step out into the hallway while
she went in to help Mom dress.

I had been treated for smoke inhalation.
They had given me an x-ray and some pills. I also had a little
plastic breathing device they called a spirometer. It had three
balls inside that looked like colored ping pong balls that I was
supposed to breathe in every half hour. My goal was to get the ping
pong balls to the top of the device and hold them there for as long
as I could. My chest felt sore, but other than that, I was fine. I
was dressed in a T-shirt and sweatpants Aunt May had brought for
me. It was clear they were Uncle Elliot’s. He was shorter and
stocker than I was; the T-shirt hung loose, the pants were too
short. On my feet were cheap hospital slippers. I opened the paper
bag the nurse had given me. The scent of smoke wafted up from my
soot-stained T-shirt and pajama pants. This was the sum total of
all my worldly possessions.

My mother hobbled out on her crutches. She
wore a loose shift that belonged to Aunt May. On one foot she had a
flip-flop sandal, the kind you wear to the beach, on the other, was
her cast.

“You can’t stay with us,” Uncle Elliot said.
He stated it hastily, like it was an obvious fact, not open for
discussion.

“Where will we stay?” I asked because my
mother just looked at Uncle Elliot’s face like she couldn’t
remember who he was.

My aunt May looked away, smoothed her hair,
and checked her watch.

“It’s just not safe, Helen.” Uncle Elliot
spoke to my mother while at the same time ignoring me.

It was midday now. Our house had burned to
the ground, we had lost everything we owned and now even Uncle
Elliot would not take us in. He was making us homeless. Part of me
understood; he was afraid that someone would burn down his house.
But part of me was really, really mad. Where were we supposed to
go? He was our family. A faint smell of smoke entered my nostrils.
I wasn’t sure if it was my mother or my sooty hair.

“The Red Cross will put you up,” Uncle
Elliot said. “I checked.”

“The Red Cross...?” my mother said. Her
voice was wan and distant.

“Oh, I hope you understand,” Aunt May said
rapidly but Uncle Elliot hushed her with a glance.

So, we ended up in yet another crappy motel.
The Lumberjack Motel really
was
a welfare motel. It was a
mile outside of town. The New York State Thruway ran behind it. The
rooms smelled faintly of a mix of urine, mold, food smells and
cigarette smoke. The carpets were gray with grease and age. The
shower leaked.

There were two women at the motel—Dottie and
Georgie—and about eight kids. I didn’t really know how many because
the kids never stayed in one place long enough to count. Dottie and
Georgie always had a child on their respective hips. The babies
were always naked, except for a diaper.

Dottie was slim, small boned and tiny. She
had a heavy pock-marked face. Her teeth were brown. Her hair was
dusky red and she wore it pulled back in a knotty ponytail. She was
usually barefoot, her feet black from walking in the dirt. She wore
faded jeans and a t-shirt with baby stains down the front. Her
children looked pasty and vacant like their mother.

Georgie was Dottie’s antithesis. She was
tall, corpulent, with enormous black curls, tight and unruly all
over her head. Her face was fat and swollen. As a result, her eyes
were dark slits. She appeared to have no neck; her skin flowed from
her chin to her upper chest. Georgie wore spandex pants and a tank
top, both too small for her. The most amazing thing was she had the
smallest feet I had ever seen. She wore tiny black canvas shoes.
She looked like those Chinese women who bind their feet. Georgie’s
drugs of choice were pizza and a bottle of Coke.

They descended on our hotel room with their
little horde in tow. They saw themselves as some sort of welcoming
committee. They both eyed the room with intensity as they spoke to
my mother. They filled us in about the “lay of the land” as Dottie
put it. There was a sex offender in 6A, Lenny was the owner’s
good-for-nothing son.

“Don’t you let Lenny in your room,” Dottie
said to my mother then turned to me. “You hear? All he wants is a
little hanky-panky. Don’t turn your back on him.”

“Either of you,” Georgie said in a poorly
disguised whisper and the two women laughed heartily.

Billy Simons lived next to us. He was old,
deaf and retarded.

“Billy won’t give you no trouble.” Dottie
went on, “Every once in awhile the TV gets too loud, but just pound
like hell on his door.”

When Dottie left, she pressed four pills
into my mother’s hand.

“For the pain,” she said softly.

When Dottie and Georgie left with their
little flock of children, my mother’s noticed her purse had been
moved from the nightstand to the floor. When she opened it she
found her prescription and twenty dollars were missing from the
purse.

The next day, two ladies from the Methodist
Church showed up in a station wagon with some canned goods and
clothes. We weren’t Methodist; we were Catholic. I asked my mother
why the Catholics didn’t show up. “Maybe they don’t know where we
are,” she said idly and then added as an afterthought, “We really
weren’t ever able to give a lot in the collection plate.”

The Methodist Church ladies didn’t say much.
I don’t think they realized who we were until they got to the
motel. The Red Cross must not have told them exactly whose house
had burned to the ground. By the time they realized who we were, we
had opened the door for them and it was too late for them to leave.
By then Dottie, Georgie and the little crowd had joined us outside
the station wagon. Dottie and Georgie were reaching in and pulling
out things they liked.

“I really don’t want to take charity,” Mom
said. She was embarrassed. I thought that was a good sign. Up until
now I didn’t think my mom felt anything.

“Oh, you don’t have to think it of it as
charity,” one of the do-gooders said, eyeing all the children
uncomfortably. “When you get back on your feet, pass it along to
someone else who needs it.”

Dottie and Georgie each started to hand me
things with their free hands, holding their babies on their hips.
My mother stood on her crutches unable to look at me or the ladies
as Georgie and Dottie continued to pull things out. They held up
clothes for me.

They’d say, “This’ll fit,” or “Jesus Christ,
who donated this piece of shit? Throw it out.”

Between the three of us, we filled a box
with canned goods, oatmeal, macaroni and a few changes of clothes.
The ladies looked overwhelmed and slightly horrified. I saw Dottie
and Georgie spiriting away things in their own pockets or handing
stuff to the children with nods for them to take it inside.

We desperately needed clothes. We only had
what Aunt May had given us and the sooty pajamas. As I selected
some jeans and T-shirts, I wondered whose clothes they had been. I
imagined my friends’ mothers cleaning out their closets donating
the cast-offs to charity. None of the shoes fit. I ended up with a
pair of sneakers a size too big. My mother said I could stuff
toilet paper in the ends.

We stayed in our room. We were trapped like
prisoners. We tried to avoid Dottie and Georgie but they insisted
on stopping in to “check” on my mother. I hid our things so they
couldn’t steal from us. The sad truth is they did distract my
mother some. Their children and gossip kept my mother’s mind on
other things. But most of the time I just told Dottie and Georgie
Mom needed to rest.

Luckily no one asked us about our past. That
seemed like a taboo subject at the motel. We all felt free to talk
about the present, the stinky hotel, the strange residents, but no
one talked about the past. And that was just fine with me. I had no
desire to try to explain how I got here.

Chapter
Nine

The day after I got my new clothes, I put on
the shoes that were too big and jeans that were too short and
walked the four miles to our house. I think my mother knew where I
was going but she didn’t say anything. She was taking her
painkillers and they made her look dazed and spacey. She propped
herself up on the saggy bed and watched soap operas. I wished we
could have sat down and talked but I didn’t know how to start the
conversation and my mother didn’t seem to be able to do anything,
let alone talk. And what would we say to each other? Neither of us
knew how we had gotten to this miserable place and neither of us
had any ideas about how to get out.

I did not walk down Broadway, even though it
would have been quicker. I don’t know if anyone recognized me as I
walked. I walked looking straight ahead. A few cars slowed down as
they passed me, but I just kept walking.

The neighborhood still smelled of smoke.
There was nothing but a cellar hole filled with what little was
left of our house; charred and ashy remains, nothing I could
recognize. I stood at the front gate a long time, not able to move
into the yard. The police had put yellow caution tape all around. I
suppose that was a flimsy attempt to prove that an investigation
was going on. I finally scooted under it and went into the yard.
Even the grass was gray and sooty. I found my bike, still in the
shed. Also in the shed was our lawn mower and a few gardening
tools. And that was it. That was the sum total of our lives at 35
Mill Street. Everything else was gone. I got on my bike and rode
away.

On the way home, I rode directly down
Broadway. That way was shorter and I’d have to do it sooner or
later. Black crepe was on the door of Tillson’s Pharmacy. I rode
past it quickly. There was black crepe on most of the doors in
town. My stomach felt tight. I felt nauseous. It had been a
mistake. I ducked my head and cruised down an alley. I rode over to
the A&P. I slid two quarters in the newspaper dispenser. I
tucked the paper under my arm and pedaled to the River Front Park.
I found a quiet place under a tree. I sat down and opened the
paper. “Sawyer Shooter Incompetent” the headline read. I nodded my
head. So, Danny was crazy. I got on my bicycle and rode away,
leaving the paper on the ground.