Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down (13 page)

The newspaper's list of funerals: Nick knew Principal Jeffries's service would be tomorrow and that they all would go. He imagined Matt's father somewhere inside the Trenway house or at the police station in his forensics lab, poring over what little remained.
What Matt had told him: nothing left. No bodies. Only ash. He shifted the car into drive and knew he didn't want to go home. Just blank ceilings and walls. No evidence. No outline of a body chalked upon a bed, outlines he knew filled the classrooms and hallways of the high school less than a hundred yards beyond his windshield.

MATT WAITED ON
the front porch all morning for his father, unsure when it was that he'd return. Matt would work that afternoon, a short shift. Something to get him back in the theater and out of the house. He'd read the newspaper already, a curled tube that had been thrown to their lawn just moments after his father's Impala pulled out of the driveway. He drank his coffee black. He read every article, every editorial on gun control and school security, and then a sports feature for diversion on the St. Louis Rams' 36–0 win the night before against the Atlanta Falcons, a
Monday Night Football
game he wondered if anyone in the city had watched. He lingered over the front page. The expansive font. A question of arson he couldn't answer. His mother had watched the news in the other room, a steady stream of commentary and vague reporting that billowed into the kitchen, on-scene coverage from the Trenways' house.

He pulled on an old St. Louis Cardinals sweatshirt and sat on the front porch and watched the light shift, the sun crawling up the sky amid puffs of thick clouds. The television's hum drifted through the front door's screen, a white noise that diminished and eventually stopped. He heard footsteps approaching. The screen door banged open and his mother joined him, the sun leaving them cold when it dipped behind clouds.

When will he be back? Matt asked.

With something like this, I don't know.

A crisp breeze scattered leaves from the trees to the front lawn, a sound like dry paper. Matt wondered what his mother's daily life was, here at the house, what it had been for her to not work through
the entirety of his childhood and to wait every day for his father to come home. Matt knew his father's schedule, knew he so often went in early so he could be home by the time Matt returned from school. A family man. The kind of man Matt thought would embrace and support his son coming out. The kind of man who wouldn't walk down a hallway and close a door. How his father had never apologized but had only softened his temper in the past two years. How his father wanted to be home, to be nearby. How Matt had let his actions speak for words.

What has he told you? Matt asked.

Everything he's told you. I wish I had answers, honey. No one knows what the hell is going on.

Matt looked at his mother. She rarely swore. She let him spew as many
fucks
and
Jesus Christs
and
goddamnits
as he needed but she almost always kept her calm. The only other time she'd broken her poise and let her guard down: when he'd heard his parents arguing upstairs after he'd told them and he could hear nothing of their words except his mother's voice ringing through the floorboards,
What the hell kind of parent are you.

I can't imagine it, she said. Their daughter, now this. Matt felt his mother's hand on his shoulder. I hope you're all right, Matt. I hope you'd tell us if you weren't.

You shouldn't worry.

We'd take you to see someone, if it would help.

Matt knew what was coming. As soon as he returned to whatever school wasn't really their school, a horde of grief counselors would descend upon everyone he knew, every friend and classmate, a line of quickly hired psychologists who'd be available if anyone needed to talk. If anyone needed to chat. Discuss. Ruminate. Feel their feelings.

Thanks, he said. But I'm doing okay.

You say the word and we'll help, his mother said.

The sun filtered through the tree line, spilling fractals of light
across the porch, and Matt felt broken. That his parents loved him. That they would do whatever it took.

He pressed his fingers to his forehead. I could use some aspirin.

It's on the grocery list. I haven't had the chance to go this week.

He stood. I can go grab some. At the store. Anything else you need.

Matt's mother watched him rise. Maybe you should stay here, she said. Just rest. I'll go. Maybe what you need is to just sit awhile.

Matt didn't want to stay. He didn't want to sit on the front porch with nothing but the singing of chickadees and the passing of cars and an oppressive stream of cold early light. But her face was earnest. She wanted to do this for him if she could do nothing else.

I'll pick you up some mellowcremes. The candy pumpkins. I won't be gone long.

Matt watched her pull out of the driveway. He imagined his father at work and could only make assumptions: that his father was hunched over a desk in a lab that was too bright, fluorescent bulbs bearing down on so many photographs and reports scattered across a steel table's surface. The Black report would be reexamined. It would have to be. To know what linked them: another incident, an identical house fire.

Matt didn't have long. He grabbed his coffee mug and went inside. His mother would be back in a half hour, forty-five minutes at most. He dropped the mug in the dishwater and moved down the hallway to the bathroom, a medicine cabinet hiding a pouch of bobby pins. He pulled the mirror open before he could look at himself. He took a cosmetic bag from the middle shelf and drew a single bobby pin, the only one he would need. He made his way to his father's office. To the single locked drawer inside his desk. Matt let his mind fall blank as he bent the bobby pin and broke it in half. He jiggled the two halves together until he felt the lock release. He closed his eyes. He let go of the pins. He pulled open the drawer.

Inside the drawer was every document he expected.

An incident report from October 12, 2003. 3:54
A.M.
Police response, fire engines. Dozens of photographs of the Blacks' house, of the carcasses of armchairs, tables, entire rooms. Photographs of what he assumed was the master bedroom, the bed frame and the mattress scorched. No remains. Nothing at all. Only the faintest outline of two figures. Two autopsy reports from the medical examiner's office, filled out even though they'd found nothing. Both reports cleared, eradicated of foul play, indicating only where the bodies might have lain by imprints in the mattress. Both reports including a diagram of the human body regardless, figures Matt pored over like the drawings of a textbook.

He picked up accompanying photographs, his fingers gliding across everything in the house that had burned. All of them photocopies. So many scans. He knew his father never risked losing originals, that everything he brought home was a facsimile of something else. Matt held them as if they were the objects themselves, as if his hands would streak with ash when he pulled them away. He drew the images close. Squinted his eyes. Made out the shapes of what were once countertops, a coffeemaker, so many broken windows. Matt sat in the desk's swivel chair and leaned back. He didn't know how to read them. How to glean from the documents an answer, something Nick would have been far better at deciphering. He saw only
no foul play
and
clean,
nothing his father hadn't already told him. The only thing he gained was another afterimage, silhouettes in the padding of a mattress, two more bodies he wouldn't forget.

Eric Greeley back in policy custody for questioning. Matt wondered if his father would see him at the station and what connection there could possibly be. Caleb's plan inconceivable and another plot beyond it, past the realm of plausibility. Far more possible: suicide, what Zola had suggested only in a whisper. Alisha Trenway's funeral just hours before her house burned, a home as quiet as any other when he'd passed down so many empty streets. Matt looked at the documents spread out before him. Wondered what he could
possibly ask his father about them, files he was never meant to see. And his father, a man Matt felt he could ask anything though there was still a thin wall, a lack of apology, a storming down the hall.

Matt knew how to pick a lock but not how to refasten one. His father would come home and sit down at the desk and pull out his key, a key hidden in some place Matt had never found, a key that would open nothing, the lock already released. Matt scanned his brain. An excuse. He felt tired. There was no lie to tell. He leaned farther back in the chair, the leather creaking beneath his weight, and stayed until he heard his mother's keys in the back door then the rustle of plastic grocery bags in the kitchen.

I'm home, she called. A loud thump. The bags on the counter.

He wanted to help her but the chair held him. He wanted to say he was sorry. He wanted to gather the documents from the desk and slide them into the drawer.

She found him still seated at the desk, a plastic carton of pumpkin spice creamer in her hands. She met his gaze. Her eyes moved down and she saw the photocopies on the desk and her smile faded.

What's this?

Matt looked away.

I bought you some coffee creamer, she said. Her eyes on the desk. She lowered her hands. Turned away down the hall and he followed.

She busied herself with putting away groceries. Halloween cake mix. A jar of sprinkles he could see from the doorway of the kitchen. Mellowcremes and Sour Patch Kids. Coca-Cola. She pulled the aspirin from the last bag and slid it across the counter.

Mom, I'm sorry.

Don't tell me. Tell it to your father. Tell him when he comes home.

I needed to know. I needed to know something.

And did you find it? Her eyes flashed at him. Did you find whatever the hell it was you were looking for?

Mom. He cupped the bottle of aspirin in his hands.

We are trying so hard, she said. The world like this. We are trying so hard to protect you.

A world like this: Matt looked past her to the kitchen window, light streaming through the panes. October sun. A world like this: pumpkin patches. Haunted hayrides. Ghost walks and apple cider and the scent of firewood, what autumn in Midvale had always been, what a world like this could have meant. Matt saw it in his mother's face, in the grimace of her rage burned down to sorrow. That her anger was for him. For him, always. That the world wasn't what she'd wanted to give him. That she could come home to photographs and reports inside her own home, that she couldn't keep the world beyond its walls.

I'll put them away, he said. I'll put them back and you'll never see them.

I already saw them, she said. I already saw them and so did you.

There was nothing left to say. He moved into the kitchen. He stood next to her and felt the tremble of her shoulders trying to shut it all in, to not break down, to hold away the world though he knew there was nothing either of them could do to keep it out.

MATT WORKED THE
afternoon concessions at Midvale Cinemas, his mother silent on the couch when he left. The War on Terror book in her hands. He didn't want to leave her but knew he had to leave the house. Some sense of normalcy, work an easy return, no films needing construction until Thursday night. People filed in, the crowd light. The scent of popcorn and burnt butter overwhelmed the theater lobby.
Intolerable Cruelty. Kill Bill Vol. I.
A Tarantino movie he'd wanted to see, a movie he should have built last Thursday night. He stood sipping a large Mountain Dew to keep himself awake when Nick entered the lobby doors and made his way toward the concession stand.

One student for
School of Rock
?

I'm not here for the movies, Nick said.

Matt glanced toward the back, his manager out of sight. He scooped ice into a paper cup and handed Nick a free Dr Pepper.

I can't believe this news, Nick said.

I know. I'm trying not to think about it.

Is your dad there? Nick asked. At the Trenways' house?

I don't know. He left the house early this morning.

Has he told you anything else?

Not really. He was up when I got home last night. He only said they were looking at the electrical wiring of the Blacks' house.

The paper said Eric Greeley is back in for questioning.

I saw that. My dad didn't say anything about it this morning.

It seems weird. I know Eric knew him. But Eric never seemed like a bad guy.

A customer approached, a middle-aged man in glasses and a thin sweater, and Nick stepped to the side for Matt to take his order, a large soda and buttered popcorn. The man walked across the lobby and toward the ticket taker and Nick slid back to the glass counter, his soda cup already perspiring in his hands.

I was at Sarah's this morning.

How's she doing?

Not great. She didn't see anything, but she's not great.

Is anyone? I'm only here because I can't stay at home anymore. It's too much time. Too much news.

I know. I had to get out, too. I've just been driving around. I figured you'd be here.

I'll be here on Thursday, too, Matt said. Two shifts this week.

He recalled all the times Nick had come to the theater late on Thursdays while he built the weekend's new releases, Matt still in his work uniform and Nick sometimes in sweatpants, Matt offering him the day's stale popcorn or a forgotten bag of Twizzlers as they
watched the weekend's films together inside the dark of the projection booth.

You want to see something? Matt said. Free ticket. On me.

Nick hesitated. I drove past the school.

Matt felt his face change. Just now?

It was filled with police.

I don't know anything about that. I only know what my dad said. That they're working to retrace Caleb's path.

Do you know why? It seems irrelevant now.

Matt felt tired. A morning's frenzy to seek and find, long gone. The need to know drained away amid the hum of soda machines and a popcorn maker. A return to normalcy. One broken up by Nick's insistence on talking about the school and two fires.