Tinderbox (28 page)

“I need to run to the store to get something. I’ll be right back. If you need anything,
Eva’s here.”

Omar will be fine.

He gets to his feet. Twenty minutes. There will be no need to mention to Rachida or
his mother that he left Omar with Eva for twenty minutes. For twenty minutes, no need
to go through the awkward exercise of telling Eva that he is leaving.

He places the apatosaurus next to his son, leans over to kiss his dark glossy hair,
and shuts Omar’s door.

40

Myra’s office is chilly. She puts on the wool cardigan she keeps on her desk chair
and buttons it over her cotton shirt. Then she goes to fetch her patient from the
waiting room, a young woman with tight jeans and high-heeled boots who ruins every
relationship with a cruelty that emerges as soon as any closeness evolves. The gorgeous
viper, an ex-boyfriend called her.

Is she smelling smoke? She’s definitely smelling something strange. “Excuse me,” she
says to her patient. “I smell smoke. Just wait here a moment.” She returns to her
office and opens the back door.

There is definitely smoke.

She hurries back to the waiting room. “I’m sorry, but I need to go upstairs. I’m going
to have to ask you to leave. I’ll call you tonight to reschedule.”

She races up the back stairs. No one is in the kitchen. The smoke is pouring down
the main stairs. She dials 911.

Then she hears Omar’s cry. “Eva. Eva. I’m scared.”

She drops the phone and bounds up the stairs. If Omar is here, then Adam is too.

“I’m coming, Omar,” she yells. The fire seems to be in the music room. Is Adam inside?
The laundry basket in the doorway bursts into flames. Where is Eva?

Omar is at the top of the stairs, gripping the rail. His face is streaming with tears,
his cheeks black with soot. The door frame of the music room is on fire.

She reaches Omar, peels his fingers from the rail. She is hollering, “Adam, Adam,
Adam…” The smoke is so thick, she can barely breathe. She pulls Omar down the stairs.

The railing catches fire. A piece of wood crashes toward them. Omar screams.

A clump of hair over his ear is on fire.

Myra smashes Omar’s burning hair into her wool sweater. She rolls Omar’s head against
her body. He goes limp. She picks him up and stumbles with him the rest of the way
down the stairs. She is still screaming, “Adam, Adam,” but she is heaving, struggling
for air, and her voice is hardly a whisper.

Neighbors are on the street. A man is on the stoop. He takes Omar. “His hair caught
fire. Over his ear.” She is barely audible. “Cold water. Run his head under cold water.”

The man dashes with Omar across the street.

“My son…”

The sirens are drowning out her words. She can see fire trucks turning the corner,
firemen running toward the house.

“Get her off those stairs,” one of the firemen hollers. Someone drags her to the curb.

There is a terrible pain in her abdomen, where she pressed Omar’s burning hair into
her side. “My son,” she gasps to the fireman now holding her arm. “The third floor …
front room … our housekeeper…”

Ambulance workers are racing down the street and people are pointing them toward the
building where Omar is inside. Dark spots are invading her eyes. Her knees buckle.
Everything goes dark.

FOUR

1

Rachida, called by the neighbor because Adam was crying too uncontrollably to speak,
waits outside the pediatric operating room. She paces, kicking the toes of her hospital
clogs against the linoleum floor. She perches on the edge of a chair chewing a cuticle.
She rests a cheek on the rough plaster wall.

When the surgeon emerges, he places a hand on her shoulder. “Your son is going to
be okay. The good news is that because his face was pressed into his grandmother’s
abdomen, there doesn’t seem to be serious inhalation injury. The burns, though, are
serious. He has third-degree burns on 25 percent of his scalp and the top of his right
ear. We shaved his head and debrided the dead skin on his scalp. Where the dermis
was destroyed, we applied a porcine xenograft to prevent loss of fluids and infection
until a skin graft can be done.”

Caro, called by Rachida, waits outside the adult operating room. She sits with her
eyes locked on the wall, a sensation of something black and heavy filling the cavity
from her throat to her groin.

The attending doctor on the burn unit comes to talk with her. He pulls his chair so
close, their feet are almost touching. Her mother has a second-degree burn the size
of a handkerchief on her torso, the injury complicated by the cotton fibers from her
shirt that adhered to her skin from rolling Omar’s burning head across her middle.
“More concerning is your mother’s coughing and wheezing, evidence of smoke inhalation
damage. We’ve intubated her so as to prevent her airway closing from edema.”

Adam waits in the hospital lobby with his head in his hands and a plastic bag at his
feet.

2

Rachida is not allowed to see Omar until after he has left the recovery room and been
delivered to the pediatric burn unit. When an aide finally escorts her to Omar’s room,
she hurls herself toward the bed where her child, having surfaced from the anesthesia,
is now sleeping, his head wrapped in white gauze, an oxygen mask over his mouth and
nose, an IV in his left arm.

Rachida buries her face in Omar’s belly and weeps.

Someone grabs her arm. “What the hell are you doing?”

Rachida looks up. A wiry man with gray hair drawn back into a stubby ponytail and
a badge that says
HOWARD TALIS, R.N.
is scowling at her. As he pulls her away from Omar, she realizes that her hospital
scrubs have confused him. “Dr. Amzalag. The mother,” she whispers.

“You know better than to put your germy head so near to a burn site.”

Talis draws a chair next to the bed. “You can sit here. He’s going to be out for a
while. Actually, I’m going to keep him sedated for the rest of the night since we’re
going to have to open that bandage in six hours to check for exudate, and that can
hurt like hell.”

Rachida sits in the chair. She wipes her eyes on the sleeve of her scrubs. Talis hands
her a box of tissues and pours her a glass of ice water from a wet plastic pitcher.
She drinks. The surgeon told her that had the burn extended another eighth of an inch,
Omar would have lost the top of his ear.

“You’re lucky. Scalps are good. They’re thick. He’s got a third-degree burn, but it
didn’t hit bone. The porcine graft lets us avoid the dressing changes. We can keep
it there until he’s strong enough for the autologous graft procedure.”

“I’m a dermatologist. Or was. I’m a respecialization fellow in primary care now.”

“Well, you probably know all this, then. He won’t get hair from the skin graft, but
when he gets older, you can do a tissue expander from the adjacent scalp hair. It
usually works pretty well.”

Rachida takes Omar’s hand. She rubs her wet thumb over her child’s dry skin. He breathes
into the oxygen mask.

“Your mother saved him. She jammed that head right into her belly and put the fire
out on her sweater.”

“Mother-in-law.” Rachida wants to climb into the bed with Omar and cradle him in her
arms. She inhales the smells of her injured child, pushing out of mind what might
have happened if it had, in fact, been her own mother.

3

At first, Talis worked the graveyard shift, eleven at night until seven in the morning,
only when he had a foster baby living with him, but now he has come to prefer it.
The doctors, save the skeletal crew of residents and the occasional on-call attendant,
are gone. The visitors, save the parents dozing on chairs or cots next to their children,
are gone. The night has a rhythm: the fussing of tired children accompanied by the
anxious nursing calls of their parents as midnight approaches, calls that have more
to do with their fears about their children’s futures than any present needs, then
the quiet as children and adults fall into exhausted sleep, the rounds every two hours,
the inexorability of the sky lightening from black to steel to pale blue to, on days
he has come to think contain hope, streaks of peach and boysenberry.

The first foster baby was three years ago after he’d gotten so angry he’d nearly come
to blows with the hospital administrator. For three weeks, a little boy, burned with
an iron by a crack-addict mother, had been on the unit, the nurses and the social
worker praying that a foster parent could be found for him before he was discharged.
When no foster parent had been willing to take on the continuing wound care, the child
was sent to a group home to be watched by shifts of child-care workers. That day,
with the child’s sad face stuck in his head, Talis submitted an application to be
a foster parent. Since then, he has taken home five children from the burn unit, all
cases of neglect or abuse. Two stayed only a few days, until a longer placement could
be found, but three, including a seventeen-month-old girl who’d been left to wander
the apartment with a pot of boiling water on the stove while her father slept in front
of the television, remained with him for more than a month.

During the times he has a foster child, Mrs. O’Connor, his landlady, stays overnight
with the child while he is at work. He always tries to pay her and she always refuses.
“Dearie, a human being doesn’t get paid for doing God’s work.” When he arrives home
after dawn, the child will be sleeping, rows of onesies and socks and feeted pajamas
Mrs. O’Connor has washed by hand hanging on a wooden drying rack she has her husband
bring up from her own apartment.

The healing children and Mrs. O’Connor and his nursing supervisor, who somehow always
finds personal days and vacation time to give him when he has a foster child, have
made him believe, in the face of the inhumanity he sees inscribed on the flesh of
these children, that the world is still more good than evil.

4

At three o’clock, Talis checks Omar’s pulse and blood pressure. The mother is snoring
softly on a cot set up by the child’s bed. The vitals are fine.

The shift supervisor told him that the father is in the lobby, too scared to come
up. The grandmother is on the floor below. Her daughter is with her, the supervisor
said.

On his break, Talis goes downstairs. He reads the grandmother’s chart. Her breathing
is labored. If it doesn’t stabilize by morning, they will do a bronchoscopy. Talis
peeks in the door. A handsome woman, younger looking than the fifty-nine years it
says on her chart, is sleeping propped on pillows. She has a thin nose and a high
forehead. Her lips are parched from the tube that goes into her lungs. Even in sleep,
she appears to be in pain.

The daughter is curled up in the chair with her knees pulled into her chest. She is
tinier than her mother, with a mop of curly brown hair. Her hand rests on her mouth.
Talis covers her with a blanket from the closet. In her sleep, she pulls the blanket
up over her shoulders.

Talis takes the elevator down to the lobby. It is empty except for a guy with a scraggly
beard and dirty sneakers. A ratty jacket and a plastic bag with what looks like some
magazines in it are on the floor next to him. A television, bolted to the wall, is
playing with the sound turned off. The guy stares at the screen, his neck arching
back from his hunched shoulders like a turtle poking its head out of its shell.

Talis sits next to him. From Omar’s chart, he knows the father’s name is Adam. Talis
looks at the TV. It is an old movie, vaguely familiar. His mouth goes dry. “I know
that movie,” he says. “It’s about smoke jumpers.”

“
Red Skies of Montana
,” the guy says without taking his eyes from the screen.

“It’s about the fire at Mann Gulch where twelve smoke jumpers died.”

“Richard Widmark, Jeffrey Hunter, Richard Boone.”

Talis saw the movie with his mother when he was maybe nine or ten. He’d always known
that his father, Kip Talis, had been a smoke jumper, but it wasn’t until he saw the
movie that he connected the image he’d had in his mind, his father sailing through
blue skies with a red-and-yellow parachute overhead, with an inferno of smoke and
flame and crashing trees.

Talis turns from the screen. He looks at Adam. The grandmother and kid were admitted
a little before six. Has this guy been sitting here since then? Talis takes the remote
from the magazine table and turns off the television. The guy blinks like a kid whose
glasses have been stomped on by a bully.

“Let’s get you something to eat.” Talis picks up Adam’s coat and the plastic bag.
He leads Adam to the section of the cafeteria that stays open all night. Only a few
of the tables are occupied: people drinking coffee or sodas to help them stay awake,
eating sandwiches or chips. Adam follows Talis through the line, not reaching for
anything.

“Hey, man,” Talis asks, “what do you like to eat?”

Adam doesn’t respond. Talis puts a yogurt container and a piece of pound cake and
a turkey sandwich on the tray. He fills two cups with coffee and adds a bottle of
juice. Adam trails after him, bumping into the rail.

Talis pays for the food and leads Adam to a table in the corner. He hangs Adam’s jacket
and the plastic bag over one of the seat chairs. He wants to tell the guy to go take
a piss and wash his hands and face, but that seems like crossing a line. He opens
the juice bottle and hands it to Adam with one of the sandwich halves.

Adam chews the sandwich without looking up. He gulps down the juice. Talis puts the
other half in front of Adam. He unwraps the pound cake, breaks off a piece for himself,
and passes the rest to Adam.

When Adam finishes the food, he looks up at Talis. “Who are you?”

“I’m your son’s nurse. I’m on break. He and your wife are both sleeping.”

Adam covers his face with his hands. From behind his hands come snorkeling sounds.
Talis pulls a wad of napkins from the dispenser and pokes the backs of Adam’s hands
with them.