Call If You Need Me (9 page)

“I didn’t hear any fire trucks,” Joanne said. “Did you guys hear fire trucks?”

“I didn’t either,” Robert said. “You kids go play now. We don’t have much longer.”

Nick stepped to the bay window and looked out, but nothing out of the ordinary seemed to be happening. The idea of a house fire on the block in clear, sunny weather at eleven in the morning was incomprehensible. Besides, there had been no alarms, no carloads of rubberneckers or clang of bells, or wail of sirens and hiss of air brakes. It seemed to Nick it had to be a part of a game the children were playing.

“This was a wonderful breakfast,” Carol said. “I loved it. I feel like I could roll over and go to sleep.”

“Why don’t you?” Joanne said. “We have that extra room upstairs. Let the kids play, and you guys take yourselves a nap before starting off.”

“Go ahead,” Nick said. “Sure.”

“Carol’s just kidding, of course,” Robert said. “We couldn’t do anything like that. Could we, Carol?” Robert looked at her.

“Oh, no, not really,” Carol said and laughed. “But everything was so good, as always. A champagne brunch without the champagne.”

“The best kind,” Nick said. Nick had quit drinking six years ago after being arrested for driving under the influence. He’d
gone with someone to an AA meeting, decided that was the place for him, and then went every night, sometimes twice in one night, for two months, until the desire to drink left him, as he put it, almost as if it’d never been there. But even now, though he didn’t drink, he still went to a meeting every once in a while.

“Speaking of drinking,” Robert said. “Jo, do you remember Harry Schuster—
Dr
. Harry Schuster, a bone-marrow-transplant man now, don’t ask me how—but do you remember the Christmas party that time when he got into the fight with his wife?”

“Marilyn,” Joanne said. “Marilyn Schuster. I haven’t thought of her in a long time.”

“Marilyn, that’s right,” Robert said. “Because he thought she’d had too much to drink and was making eyes at—”

He paused just long enough for Joanne to say, “Bill.”

“Bill, that’s right,” Robert said. “Anyway, first they had words, and then she threw her car keys on the living-room floor and said, ‘You drive, then, if you’re so goddamn safe, sane, and sober.’ And so Harry—they’d come in two cars, mind, he’d been interning at the hospital—Harry went out and drove her car two blocks, parked it, and then came back for
his
car, and drove that about two blocks, parked, walked back to her car, drove it two blocks, walked to his own car and drove it a little farther, and parked and walked back to her car and drove that a few blocks, et cetera, et cetera.”

They all laughed. Nick laughed too. It
was
funny. Nick had heard plenty of drinking stories in his time, but he’d never heard one that had this particular spin on it.

“Anyway,” Robert said, “to make a long story short, as they say, he drove both cars home that way. It took him two or three hours to drive five miles. And when he got to the house, there was Marilyn, at the table with a drink in her hand. Somebody had driven her home. ‘Merry Christmas,’ she said when Harry came in the door, and I guess he decked her.”

Carol whistled.

Joanne said, “Anybody could see those two weren’t going to make it. They were in the fast lane. A year later they were both at the same Christmas party, only they had different partners by then.”

“All the drinking and driving I did,” Nick said. He shook his head. “I was only picked up once.”

“You were lucky,” Joanne said.

“Somebody was lucky,” Robert said. “The other drivers on the road were lucky.”

“I spent one night in jail,” Nick said, “and that was enough. That’s when I stopped. Actually, I was in what they call detox. The doctor came around the next morning—his name was Dr. Forester—and called each person into this little examining room and gave you the once-over. He looked in your eyes with his penlight, he made you hold out your hands, palms up, he took your pulse and listened to your heartbeat. He’d give you a little talking-to about your drinking, and then he’d tell you what time of the morning you could be released. He said I could leave at eleven o’clock. ‘Doctor,’ I said, ‘could I leave earlier, please?’ ‘What’s the big hurry?’ he said. ‘I have to be at church at eleven o’clock,’ I said. ‘I’m getting married.’ ”

“What’d he say to that?” Carol said.

“He said, ‘Get the hell out of here, mister. But don’t ever forget this, do you hear?’ And I didn’t. I stopped drinking. I didn’t even drink anything at the wedding reception that afternoon. Not a drop. That was it for me. I was too scared. Sometimes it takes something like that, a real shock to your nervous system, to turn things around.”

“I had a kid brother who was nearly killed by a drunk driver,” Robert said. “He’s still wired up and has to use a metal brace to get around.”

“Last call for coffee,” Joanne said.

“Just a little, I guess,” Carol said. “We really have to collect those kids and get on the road.”

Nick looked toward the window and saw several cars pass by
on the street outside. People hurried by on the sidewalk. He remembered what Jenny and the other child had said about a fire, but for God’s sake, if there were a fire there’d be sirens and engines, right? He started to get up from the table, and then he didn’t.

“It’s crazy,” he said. “I remember when I was still drinking and I’d just had what they call an alcoholic seizure—I’d fallen and hit my head on a coffee table. Lucky for me I was in the doctor’s office when it happened. I woke up in a bed in his office, and Peggy, the woman I was married to at the time, she was leaning over me, along with the doctor and the doctor’s nurse. Peggy was calling my name. I had this big bandage round my head—it was like a turban. The doctor said I’d just had my first seizure, but it wouldn’t be my last if I kept on drinking. I told him I’d got the message. But I just said that. I had no intention of quitting then. I told myself and my wife that it was my nerves—stress—that had caused me to faint.

“But that night we had a party, Peggy and me. It was something we’d planned for a couple of weeks, and we didn’t see how we could call it off at the last minute and disappoint everybody. Can you imagine? So we went ahead and had the party, and everybody came, and I was still wearing the bandage. All that night I had a glass of vodka in my hand. I told people I’d cut my head on the car door.”

“How much longer did you keep drinking?” Carol said.

“Quite a while. A year or so. Until I got picked up that night.”

“He was sober when I met him,” Joanne said, and blushed, as if she’d said something she shouldn’t.

Nick put his hand on Joanne’s neck and rested his fingers there. He picked up some of the hair that lay across her neck and rubbed it between his fingers. Some more people went by the window on the sidewalk. Most of the people were in shirtsleeves and blouses. A man was carrying a little girl on his shoulders.

“I quit drinking about a year before I met Joanne,” Nick said, as if telling them something they needed to know.

“Tell them about your brother, honey,” Joanne said.

Nick didn’t say anything at first. He stopped rubbing Joanne’s neck and took his hand away.

“What happened?” Robert said, leaning forward.

Nick shook his head.

“What?” Carol said. “Nick? It’s okay—if you want to tell us, that is.”

“How’d we get onto this stuff, anyway?” Nick said.

“You brought it up,” Joanne said.

“Well, what happened, you see, was that I was trying to get sober, and I felt like I couldn’t do it at home, but I didn’t want to have to go anyplace, like to a clinic or a recovery place, you know, and my brother had this summer House he wasn’t using—this was in October—and I called him and asked him if I could go there and stay for a week or two and try to get myself together again. At first he said yes. I began to pack a suitcase and I was thinking I was glad I had family, glad I had a brother and that he was going to help me. But pretty soon the phone rang, and it was my brother, and he said—he said he’d talked it over with his wife, and he was sorry—he didn’t know how to tell me this, he said—but his wife was afraid I might burn the place down. I might, he said, drop off with a cigarette burning in my fingers, or else leave a burner turned on. Anyway, they were afraid I would catch the house on fire, and he was sorry but he couldn’t let me stay. So I said okay, and I unpacked my suitcase.”

“Wow,” Carol said. “Your own brother did that. He forsook you,” she said. “Your own brother.”

“I don’t know what I’d have done, if I’d been in his shoes,” Nick said.

“Sure you do,” Joanne said.

“Well, I guess I do,” Nick said. “Sure. I’d have let him stay there. What the hell, a house. What’s that? You can get insurance on a house.”

“That’s pretty amazing, all right,” Robert said. “So how do you and your brother get along these days?”

“We don’t, I’m sorry to say. He asked me to lend him some money a while back, and I did, and he repaid me when he said he would. But we haven’t seen each other in about five years. It’s been longer than that since I’ve seen his wife.”

“Where are all these
people
coming from?” Joanne said. She got up from the table and went over to the window and moved the curtain.

“The kids said something about a fire,” Nick said.

“That’s silly. There can’t be a fire,” Joanne said. “Can there?” “Something’s going on,” Robert said.

Nick went to the front door and opened it. A car slowed and then pulled up alongside the curb in front of the house and parked. Another car drove up and parked across the street. Small groups of people moved past down the sidewalk. Nick went out into the yard, and the others—Joanne, Carol, and Robert—followed him. Nick looked up the street and saw the smoke, a crowd of people, and two fire engines and a police car parked at the intersection. Men were training hoses on the shell of a house—the Carpenter house, Nick saw at a glance. Black smoke poured from the walls, and flames shot from the roof. “My God, there’s a fire all right,” he said. “The kids were right.”

“Why didn’t we hear anything?” Joanne said. “Did you hear anything? I didn’t hear anything.”

“We’d better go down and see about the girls, Robert,” Carol said. “They might get in the way somehow. They might get too close or something. Anything could happen.”

The four of them started down the sidewalk. They fell in with some other people who were walking at an unhurried pace. They walked along with these other people. Nick had the feeling that they could have been on an outing. But all the while, as they kept their eyes on the burning house, they saw firemen pouring water onto the roof of the house, where flames kept breaking through. Some other firemen were holding a hose and aiming a stream of water through a front window. A fireman wearing a helmet with straps, a long black coat, and black knee-high boots
was carrying an ax and moving around toward the back of the house.

They came up to where the crowd of people stood watching. The police car had parked sideways in the middle of the road, and they could hear the radio crackling inside the car, over the sound of the fire as it ripped through the walls of the house. Then Nick spotted the two girls, standing near the front of the crowd, holding their skateboards. “There they are,” he said to Robert. “Over there. See them?”

They made their way through the crowd, excusing themselves, and came up beside the girls.

“We told you,” Jenny said. “See?” Megan stood holding her skateboard in one hand and had the thumb of her other hand planted in her mouth.

“Do you know what happened?” Nick said to the woman beside him. She was wearing a sun hat and smoking a cigarette.

“Vandals,” she said. “That’s what somebody told me, anyway.”

“If they can catch them, they ought to kill them, if you ask me,” said the man standing next to the woman. “Or else lock them up and throw away the key. These people are traveling in Mexico and don’t even know they won’t have a house to live in when they come back. They haven’t been able to get in touch with them. Those poor people. Can you imagine? They’re going to come home and find out they don’t have a house to live in any longer.”

“It’s going!” the fireman with the ax shouted. “Stand back!”

Nobody was close to him or to the house. But the people in the crowd moved their feet, and Nick could feel himself grow tense. Someone in the crowd said, “Oh my God. My God.”

“Look at it,” someone else said.

Nick edged closer to Joanne, who was staring intently at the fire. The hair on her forehead appeared damp. He put his arm around her. He realized, as he did it, that he’d touched her this way at least three times that morning.

Nick turned his head slightly in Robert’s direction and was
surprised to see Robert staring at him instead of the house. Robert’s face was flushed, his expression stern, as if everything that had happened—arson, jail, betrayal, and adultery, the overturning of the established order—was Nick’s fault and could be laid on his doorstep. Nick stared back, his arm around Joanne, until the flush left Robert’s face and he lowered his eyes. When he raised them again, he didn’t look at Nick. He moved closer to his wife, as if to protect her.

Nick and Joanne were still holding each other as they watched, but there was that familiar feeling Nick would have from time to time, as she absently patted his shoulder, that he didn’t know what she was thinking.

“What are you thinking?” he asked her.

“I was thinking about Bill,” she said.

He went on holding her. She didn’t say any more for a minute, and then she said, “I think about him every now and then, you know. After all, he was the first man I ever loved.”

He kept holding her. She let her head rest on his shoulder and went on staring at the burning house.

We had both been involved with other people that spring, but when June came and school was out we decided to let our house for the summer and move from Palo Alto to the north coast country of California. Our son, Richard, went to Nancy’s grandmother’s place in Pasco, Washington, to live for the summer and work toward saving money for college in the fall. His grandmother knew the situation at home and had begun working on getting him up there and locating him a job long before his arrival. She’d talked to a farmer friend of hers and had secured a promise of work for Richard baling hay and building fences. Hard work, but Richard was looking forward to it. He left on the bus in the morning of the day after his high school graduation. I took him to the station and parked and went inside to sit with him until his bus was called. His mother had already held him and cried and kissed him good-bye and given him a long letter that he was to deliver to his grandmother upon his arrival. She was at home now finishing last-minute packing for our own move and waiting for the couple who were to take our house. I bought Richard’s ticket, gave it to him, and we sat on one of the benches in the station and waited. We’d talked a little about things on the way to the station.