Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down (15 page)

FIND A FIRE'S
point of origin: trace the route from the least amount of damage to the most.

Windows, doors, beam structures: checked. How glass breaks, the angle of sharding, an indication of speed and intensity of fire. Glass broken in the pattern of a half-moon: signification of rapid cooling.

Smoke: a pattern documented by trace in material, a point of origin otherwise lost to dissipation. Film boiling: when vapor sifts between paint and wood and lifts one away from the other. Metal surfaces: color patterns an indication of fire temperature.

An investigator must ask: Are the walls destroyed? What is their condition? Has the paint separated away? Are there burn patterns? Are the walls pushed in or out? Are there char patterns where the wall meets the floor or ceiling?

Burn patterns on the floor: are they seamless? Do they indicate liquid accelerant, the flow of flammable fluid? Are there points of pooling? Are the floors nonporous? Is there a chance that liquid has evaporated? How deep is the grain of charring? How far down has flammability seeped? Is the flooring hardwood? Linoleum? Tile? Carpet?

Detonation: an explosion. Search for indication of broken gas
lines, sewer lines, hazardous storage of flammable items or medical oxygen.

The area of heaviest burning: sweep the floors, the ceiling, every corner and every molding. Sweep the entirety for a cause, for the shifting trace of a spark.

WEDNESDAY MORNING. OVERCAST.
Slate sky, temperatures hovering in the low fifties. We awoke to nothing but the sound of cardinals and robins. The distant honking of Canadian geese flying south. No television hum, no sirens or reporters. Only the weak light of a clouded sky filtering through window blinds. We awoke to more memorials. We awoke to Principal Jeffries's funeral, every last person at school invited.

We anticipated community, a shared grieving. For our principal and for our entire school, so much like the vigil beneath starlight. So many people we hadn't seen since Saturday night, an entire county, our peers and their parents and the one time we'd all been together before fracturing across a week to separate funerals and gatherings that centrifuged us away from a center.

We knew from the paper which funerals had already occurred. Missy Hoffman, Monday afternoon. Nafisa Fields, late Tuesday. Mr. Rourke, our second-floor custodian, a quiet ceremony we heard little about for the media swarm around our peers. Deborah Smalls, the administrative assistant: her funeral equally hushed and also elsewhere, some other town, her family from a small community in southern Illinois. And today: Josh Zimmerman. Darren Beechwold. Alisha Trenway's parents, a service listed quickly. Ceremonies we had no heart to attend. A spectacle for reporters and newscasters. Most of us hadn't spoken since Caroline Black's funeral and the
cornfields beyond it. We still tasted whiskey. Slow wash of bourbon. A burn in the backs of our throats that across college campuses and after-work happy hours and so many years ahead at darkened kitchen tables would remind us always of a star-washed field and the hushed scratch of wind through corn silk.

Principal Jeffries's funeral: 11
A.M.
A memorial service our parents would attend to pay their respects. Not only for how Principal Jeffries rushed from her office, how she tried to stop Caleb before he moved through the hallways and into our classrooms, but how she'd guided our school for the past twelve years well before any of us ever dreamed of high school, how she'd always said hello in the hallways, how she always knew our names. How we would speak hers a last time.

Nick shuttled downtown early in the passenger seat of his father's Dodge Caravan, a fogged sun crowning due east in front of them as they traveled down Highway 40, the central artery of the city. His father had several patients through the morning but would take him to the funeral after, his mother off from the law office for the day and at home with his brother. The funeral would be held in a downtown church, not far from the Barnes-Jewish Hospital obstetrics wing where Nick's father worked. Nick said he would wait in the wing's lobby. What he didn't say: that he would try not to think of his computer at home, the information on fire scene investigation he'd found the night before. How even through a full night of searching there was still no explanation for a lack of remains. How he wondered about Matt's father and what he'd seen, what Matt wouldn't say at the movie theater. Nick found a chair apart from the waiting mothers and their partners and several lone patients, visibly pregnant. He opened a paperback copy of
Crime and Punishment,
the one book he was assigned to still read across Lewis and Clark's weeklong hiatus. To keep him busy. To have something to speak of when everyone returned to class. They'd left
Moby-Dick
behind, too long to leave across a week. Nick bowed his head over the pages and found himself distracted.

He rested his head against a window and through the glass heard the hum of the traffic below, a constant
whoosh
punctured by the din of car horns. The Gateway Arch distant beyond the buildings, a pillared portico curving above downtown, the only marker anyone who wasn't from St. Louis associated with the city. He recalled ascending the monument with his family when he was in elementary school, the one requisite trip every child who grew up in St. Louis made during their childhood. They traveled in an egg-shaped elevator that moved at right angles, an invisible staircase up the entire length of the curve. Nick's brother had cried, the egg claustrophobic, the Arch swaying in the wind when they reached the top. Nick had gazed through the monument's small windows shaped like Pez and barely visible from the street below and had listened to his brother crying. He'd looked down at the pencil-point people moving along the riverfront and was shocked with fear, as terrified as his brother. He watched a riverboat chug along the Mississippi, a toy in a bathtub, and thought
we could all disappear
.

Nick looked down at his book. The eastern sun broke through clouds and cast shards of light directly into the waiting room. He read the same lines of the same chapter over and over again and finally closed the book. In the waiting room: new families. A mother with her baby, a child Nick guessed wasn't more than six months old. The drone of a wall-mounted television running
The Today Show,
Matt Lauer reporting on a foul ball disruption in last night's National League Championship Series game at Wrigley Field. Nick watched the footage of a man in glasses and a green turtleneck reach down for the ball, a Cubs fan reporters said had cost the Cubs the game. Nick's attention moved to a woman sitting beneath the television, a worn copy of
Parenting
in her lap, a magazine she could practically balance on her belly. Nick imagined her life. Whether she had a partner, whether this was her first child, what she did for a living. Lawyer, like his mother. Social worker. Small-business owner. Whether she'd been watching the news every night
thinking of the schools and its students and what would become of her newborn.

Nick slid the paperback into his pocket and moved out of the waiting room, down the hospital hallway, toward the restroom. He leaned over the fountain and wet his fingers and pressed them against the heat of his forehead. When he stood he noticed the fifth floor's only other wing beyond the special care nursery and the antepartum unit where new mothers healed. Cardiology. He peered into its waiting room, one just like the waiting room for his father's division. Panoramic windows. Wall-mounted television. A wall rack of magazines and pamphlets, a receptionist desk of opaque glass. He knew his father wouldn't be done until ten at the earliest. Nick opened the door and moved inside and sat among another group, another television. There was nothing different but the patients, one man completing a crossword with a pen and two women sitting side by side, their hands clasped in their laps. Everything else the same, the television broadcasting the same morning news as the maternity ward, but the room felt changed. Nick wondered where the neuroscience wing was and whether anyone there could tell him for certain what had happened to his brain. Flashbulb. Caleb passing by through the window of Mrs. Menda's classroom door. Whatever image Zola kept of the library, what Matt remembered of Caroline Black's body. Nick sat long enough for his father to find him there just before ten, his appointments finished early. When he felt his father's hand on his shoulder, he didn't flinch. He looked up and his father nodded and they made their way down the elevator, to the parking garage, then to the minivan, where they drove to the church in silence.

WE SAT BESIDE
one another. Nick, his father. Zola and her mother, Christina and her father. Matt came without his parents, his father working, his mother at home though Tyler Cavanaugh followed him into the church and sat down beside him. We said nothing to
each other. We watched a procession of our classmates find seats and await the service. Family members. Adults in the first rows we could only assume were Principal Jeffries's brothers and sisters, her mother and father. Stained-glass windows. The low dirge of organ pipes. A paper program in our hands, its edges crushed inside the damp folds of our palms. We knew what to expect after attending Caroline's service. A minister. Organ hymns. A closed casket we avoided. Pews full of Bibles and passages the minister called to attention, thread-thin pages we never opened. Our hands in our laps, fingers clasped between our knees to halt the pendulum of their trembling.

We expected the rites of a church. Stifled coughs. The soundlessness of tears. A clouded sky strained through patterns of glass. What we didn't expect were hundreds of people pushed against the pews and filling the aisles. People leaning beside the church's brick pillars. People crowding the back, standing behind the last pew.
Love is simple
. The minister waved his hands across the entire congregation.
Look at everyone who loved her. All we need is love to push out the dark.
We followed the movement of his hands across so many faces. We looked closely at the lines that edged so many parents' eyes, the way their pupils tracked downward, how their necks strained with visible tension. How we recognized Jacob Jensen's mother in the pews, her son gone barely a week. How we noticed Alexis Thurber's father by himself, sitting near the back of the church alone, Alexis's boyfriend, Russ Hendricks, nowhere in sight. How love was anything but simple. How love was the hardest thing any of us knew.

Our principal's partner gave a eulogy. A middle-aged woman, her hair frizzed, her glasses large.
You were the love of my life.
Her voice breaking. Principal Jeffries's daughter standing beside the woman, barely the height of her waist, a family we never thought to consider. A principal we only envisioned within the walls of a high school. Behind a desk in her office. Circulating the cafeteria every
so often as we ate our mayonnaised sandwiches and drank Hawaiian Punch. A woman who every year closed out the Homecoming Parade riding in a borrowed convertible and followed by police cars that took away the street barricades before the football game began. A parade we wouldn't have this year. Just a game. A game we knew would be rescheduled elsewhere, at another school, a game none of us would attend.

What we couldn't have anticipated: how sorrow permeated the air of the church for Principal Jeffries but also anger, a bitterness that felt new and strange. How beyond hymns, beyond bowed heads and the carrying away of a casket, people stayed and milled through pews. How we saw Jacob Jensen's mother clasp the hands of Georgia Tarkington's mother, two peers we wouldn't have imagined to have ever known one another. Jacob Jensen a soccer player. Georgia Tarkington a math wiz who served in Mu Alpha Theta. How their mothers were cemented to one another in their loss, a bind neither asked for. How our peers' parents spoke around us. How we heard what they whispered:
arson.
Tips of culpability. Who'd been lurking at the Trenways' house and who'd been seen walking along the empty sidewalks of Caroline Black's street and who'd been taken in for questioning, the Greeley kid, what the paper mentioned and never elaborated upon. How we heard parents speak of guarding. Of tending to one another's children. Of organizing collectives, a neighborhood watch, how they swore they would protect this community and help the police do their job. Parents who knew each other from parent-teacher nights at the start of each elementary school year, from the bleachers of Friday night football games, from dropping us off at one another's homes before we knew what it was to drive. Parents who sent each other holiday cards and missives of school closings due to snowstorms, who we always imagined would gather together to celebrate our high school graduations on some warm May weekend, the future sprawled out like an unbroken
highway. Parents inscrutable to us, how they'd first come to settle down in Midvale County, how it was that their choices had made us what we were, how we'd taken root beside one another because they found a house, a job, a community.

We watched Principal Jeffries's family trail from the church out into the weak afternoon sun. Her daughter's curls. How they caught the light. How Principal Jeffries's partner smoothed the girl's hair and held a hand upon her head, fingertips we could almost feel. There was no lingering this time outside the church. No time for quiet, for standing beside one another as the sky tilted away from us. No time for stars, the sky hazed, the sun sliding behind the clouds. Chilled air. A breeze with muscle.

Matt saw Jacob Jensen's mother alone at the curb smoking a cigarette, her face calm, though he noticed her hand shaking as she brought the filter to her lips. He remembered her from a fifth-grade class party when she'd brought cupcakes but couldn't stay long. How another parent had made a snide comment about her leaving. How she'd whirled back and said some mothers worked and did just fine on their own. How Matt remembered this, the first time he realized not every household had two parents.

His own mother at home. How she'd woken up no longer angry with him, how she'd wanted to come to the funeral and sit beside him. How he knew Tyler would come instead, Tyler who'd stayed in his bedroom long past the darkest hour the night held. How Matt's mother had embraced him and even still neither of his parents knew about Tyler. Matt wanted to keep it that way. He'd told her he would attend with his friends.

He walked up to Jacob Jensen's mother and stood beside her at the curb. In the city's breeze whipping between buildings, he caught the scent of her perfume. He didn't think. Your son was a good person, he said. The first words he could think to say though he barely knew Jacob, knew only the chisel of his legs from afar, the
smooth curve of his calf, and once his daily schedule throughout the high school: an impossible crush he'd kept watch over in the hallways until he met Tyler.

I'm so sorry for your loss, he said.

Jacob's mother exhaled a plume of smoke that dissipated in the wind. Her face still young. Her eyes ancient. The corners of her eyes cracked, fine lines spilling down and disappearing into the gaunt stretch of her cheekbones.

I appreciate that, she said. She pulled a last drag from her cigarette and threw the filter to the ground. She didn't ask who Matt was, how he knew Jacob. She said nothing at all before turning away from Matt, the tails of her black coat flickering in the wind.