Smoke Page 10

  “Unhappy was yesterday,” Rich said. “Today it’s all, ‘I’ve got this whole room of beds and food and only three guests.’”

  “Guests? That’s a good one.”

  “What’s she calling you for?” the head of tourism asked Rich. “Housing’s my department.”

  “That’s what I told her. But she thinks that because my girl is investigating the fire, I somehow have control over the rest of it.”

  Mindy cringed. If Elizabeth knew Rich was referring to her as “my girl,” she’d be livid.

  “Phillips been brought in for questioning yet?” the mayor asked.

  “Nah, not yet,” Sheriff Thompson said. “Thought I’d let him stew for a couple days. Get him in the right frame of mind before we tackle him.”

  “You’re a sadistic bastard, aren’t you?” the mayor said.

  “How else you gonna keep this town in order?”

  Rich pulled out his ringing phone and made a face. “Just make sure you’re not digging your own grave come election time.”

  Sheriff Thompson laughed. “I wouldn’t start planning any funerals just yet.”

  “She didn’t want no funeral,” John told Mindy an hour later.

  They were sitting at a folding table in the gym at Nelson Elementary, where they’d been for the last twenty minutes. The cup of coffee one of the volunteers had brought him was sitting untouched on the table. He wore a camp blanket around his shoulders like a cape, tied at the neck above the V of his hospital scrubs.

  “Your wife?” Mindy asked, feeling slightly disoriented.

  After she’d finished her coffee and Danish, she had another two hours to kill before the Fall Fling meeting, and she found herself driving to the elementary school. She wanted to meet John Phillips, she decided. Newspaper articles and overheard conversations weren’t enough to propel her through the fight she knew was coming. Besides, it seemed kind of odd to be advocating for someone when you weren’t even on a first-name basis.

  After a brief hesitation on his part, now they were. It hadn’t taken long for Mindy to get an introduction to John’s peculiar, circular way of talking. He seemed to have no filter, and there were moments when she wasn’t sure if he was talking to her or to his dead wife, Kristy. As far as Mindy could tell, John hadn’t had anyone to talk to in a long while, and now that he’d gotten started, he didn’t quite know how to stop.

  For instance, when she asked him how he was doing, he told her that he’d woken up that morning feeling confused and lost. It wasn’t that he didn’t know where he was, he said. He felt like he didn’t know who he was. It was likely something he’d never known. But to the extent that he had, well, all that knowledge, that accumulated life, had been burned to dust, to earth, broken back into its original elements, like Kristy was at her insistence.

  And that’s how they’d gotten to talking about funerals.

  “‘Don’t you be wasting our money on funerals and caskets and nonsense,’ Kristy had said when the doctors made it clear that the cancer was going to take her,” John said, delivering his wife’s words in a high-pitched wheezy voice that made Kristy come to life. “‘You need to act sensible and take the cheapest option. Don’t let those funeral people push you around neither. They’s worse than used-car salesmen, I tell you. You listening to me?’

  “She never thought I was listening to her. But I always was. Course I used to talk more, when we were first together. But she didn’t really like what I had to say, and it got so it was easier to keep myself to myself, if you know what I mean.”

  Mindy did know. She’d often felt that it was easier to stay silent, to agree, to express herself only when she absolutely had to. Mindy told him it was a natural way to feel.

  John gave a deep grunt and continued.

  He’d been sitting by Kristy’s bedside at the hospital, wondering how they were ever going to pay for the treatments he was sure the doctor was going to say were necessary. When they’d talked about it earlier, Kristy thought the army would pay for everything. She said it was “his due,” but that was because she thought, since he never corrected her, that he’d done something in the army worth a damn. He hadn’t known how to tell her, all those years later, that what had really happened was that, just shy of his second year in, when he heard he was being sent back to Vietnam, he’d tried to escape (“desertion” it was called), and it was only because he’d tripped and fallen down a hole some sadistic CO had made one of the other privates dig that he’d been allowed to leave for “medical reasons,” rather than be thrown in the stockade.

  Mindy thought about intervening then, telling him he didn’t have to confess these things to her. But she stopped herself. She was supposed to be making him feel better, after all. And if this helped, well, who was she to judge or censure?

  She made a sympathetic noise, which was all the encouragement he needed to continue.

  After Kristy died a few pain-filled weeks later, John said he’d done what she wanted. He hadn’t listened to that slick man in a suit who talked about payment plans and how to give Kristy an “appropriate” send-off. He’d used their small savings to pay for her to be cremated and poured her remains from the plastic bag they’d given him into an old ceramic pot she liked.

  Then he’d put her up on the kitchen shelf and gone back to work.

  “I’m so sorry,” Mindy said, reaching out for his coarse hand. “Were her . . . were her ashes lost in the fire?”

  John got a far-off look in his eyes, like he was trying to remember exactly where he put something. “I guess they were. Jesum. I never thought of that.”

  “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  “That’s all right, miss. Aren’t nothing you can do about it. What did you say you were here for again?”

  “I, uh, wanted to ask you something.” She took a deep breath and sprang ahead. “Do you know the Fall Fling? No, well, it’s this big fund-raiser some of us throw every year. Usually we raise money for the hockey team or something like that. But this year, I thought, we thought, we’d rather do something different. And I wanted to ask your permission first, to make sure you were okay with it.”

  “What do you need my permission for?”

  “We’d like to put the money we raise toward buying you a new house.”

  “Oh, no, I couldn’t possibly—”

  “Nothing fancy or anything—goodness, we don’t raise that much money—but enough to buy you a condo, maybe, or at least let you rent something decent while your insurance and everything gets sorted out.”

  “Don’t have no insurance.”

  “Well, something more permanent, then.”

  He turned his eyes toward her. They were wet with tears and reminded her of the basset hound her family owned when she was a kid.

  “Why’d you do something like that for someone like me?”

  “Everyone deserves someplace to live,” Mindy said.

  He bent his head, and Mindy couldn’t tell whether the sobs that escaped through his hands were sounds of gratitude or grief.

  CHAPTER 14

  Accusations

  Elizabeth

  After talking to Andy, I decide to try to find some of the other Cooper Basin residents to see if they saw anything that night. Everyone in the immediate vicinity should have evacuated, but having seen human fire nature up close, I’m sure I’ll find at least someone hanging around. Unfortunately, the one neighbor I’m able to track down—a nosy parker in her midseventies who’s standing at the fire perimeter watching the hive of activity like it’s an episode of The Real Housewives of Nelson County—doesn’t “know nothing.” John Phillips kept to himself, apparently, and she’d never had any problems with the kids who were causing him trouble.

  “So you’ve seen them?” I ask. “Around his house?”

  “Not seen them, exactly. Heard them, more like. They find themselves awful funny, and that’s a fact. Remember that? When you thought whatever you were doing was so important you could be as loud as you
liked? When you didn’t even think about whether it was disturbing others?”

  I did remember. I might have even been the loudest of my high school friends, and I still feel embarrassed for my fourteen-year-old self tramping through the snow in full living color.

  Oh, but we could laugh, though.

  “And Monday?” I ask. “Right before the fire? Did you hear anything that night?”

  “I might have. Memory’s not the same as it was. Age, you know. It happens to everyone.”

  I take down her name and information so I can pass it on to Deputy Clark, and then I decide that my only real option at this point, other than going to the high schools and seeing what I can dig up there, is to go to the shelter. Surely John Phillips isn’t the only person who’s using the gym.

  I’m not entirely sure why I’m so reluctant to go poking around the schools. Part of me feels out of my depth. Ben has such an intuitive understanding of what makes teenagers tick. I used to tease him that it was because he was still a teenager himself, back when we used to tease each other without it leading to an argument.

  I seem to be missing that skill. It isn’t that I’ve forgotten what it was like to be a teenager. I can still torture myself with all-too-accurate recollections of the stupid things I blurted out in class, or the way my heart felt when my first love decided I wasn’t worth the effort. But all those years spent in the wilderness unplugged me from popular culture. I didn’t listen to the music or watch the TV shows that connect this generation, if anything does. Whenever Ben tells me about something teenagers are using to torture one another these days—things like Ask.fm or Snapchat—I shudder. The record in my head of my youthful transgressions is enough. Who needs something that the entire world can see forever?

  My decision to go to the elementary school turns out to be fruitful when Honor Wells assures me that, yes, several of John Phillips’s neighbors are staying there. But my relief is immediately tempered when I see Mindy standing up, inexplicably, from a table where John is sitting.

  Two sightings in two days. I feel like the universe is calling me out. Here’s someone you should do better by, it’s saying. Something else you need to fix.

  Mindy seems just as surprised to see me, and we stand there, on opposite sides of the cavernous gym, staring at each other as if we’ve both seen ghosts.

  Then Mindy raises her hand in a half wave, and I wave back, and she hustles out the back door like something’s chasing her.

  Mindy and I were in the same “Welcome to Nelson” class that I took soon after I moved to Nelson.

  It sounds stupid, like something for elementary-school students rather than adults. But I was encouraged to join by Ben’s mother, and she was right. Nelson is a small town, but it has so many aspects to it, so many activities and nooks and crannies, that it’s helpful to have a guide.

  It was also nice to meet others in the same boat. Most of the people in the class were women, young ones at that, and even Mindy and I weren’t that old at twenty-eight (me) and thirty-four (her). But we both felt older, somehow. She, because of all the crap she’d been through with her daughter, and me because of everything I’d seen in my job. I’m sure there are some people who can watch generations of houses and wildlife destroyed repeatedly and keep a sense of joie de vivre; I am not one of those people.

  Mindy and I wouldn’t have been friends in other circumstances. That much was clear from the beginning. She was afraid of her own shadow; I got a thrill from running into deadly situations with a rebel yell. But beneath the surface differences, there was enough to hold us together. We were both new. We both felt like outsiders. We had husbands who fit right in to the town like they were putting on a pair of comfortable slippers.

  We each had trouble making friends.

  I think we both also felt like we had something to learn from the other. Me, to be less heedless, more mindful, and to transform into the person I’d need to be, to be a mother to the children we were going to have, of course, just as soon as we were ready. And Mindy, well, I’m not sure if she’d put it quite like this, but I always thought Mindy saw something of herself in me. Not how she was when I met her, but maybe how she used to be. Sometimes I’d get these glimpses, in a quip or an inappropriate laugh, that hinted at the person she might’ve been if life had dealt her a different hand.

  Despite our differences, we got close pretty quickly that first winter. It was a quiet fire season, and I didn’t get called away. It was also particularly cold and snowless, a combination that had the whole town going stir-crazy. We took a pottery class together, just for something to do, and in between the off-kilter cups and bowls we fashioned with our hands, we ended up as confidantes.

  Life moved on after that. Spring came, and I went away. She had her family to care for, but we stayed in touch. We’d grab lunch when I was in town, and Ben and I would have her and Peter and the kids over for dinner. I always liked that, especially once Ben and I had moved into our house. The way the kids’ shouts and laughter echoed off the high beams in the great room, that was going to be the sound of our house all the time soon, soon, soon.

  Spending time with Mindy was one of the things I was looking forward to when I moved back home full-time. But instead, our friendship turned out to be the first of the things I ended up shedding.

  The first in a line that ended with Ben.

  We’d been trying to get pregnant for several years before I quit my job. When I first saw Ben after coming home from the fire started by little Timmy, I knew. Knew that all my hesitation and waiting for the time to be right was the wrong way to go about it. That if I didn’t plunge in without overthinking every potential aspect, I’d never do it.

  I threw away my birth control pills and told Ben I wanted to get pregnant. The smile that lit up his face strengthened the beat of my biological clock. And we two, to whom nothing bad had ever happened, to whom life had come easy, were so certain that this decision, once taken, would be no different. That my want, and Ben’s want, and the chemical reaction we always produced when we hadn’t seen each other in a couple of months would be enough. Pow! The miracle of life. Easy peasy.

  It hadn’t worked out that way. The months turned to years, and I never even had a close call. Being away from each other half the year didn’t help. I began to read about infertility obsessively online. I became convinced that one of the factors keeping us from getting pregnant was the stress related to my job. And then I learned that there were physical impediments, and it felt obvious to me that if we really wanted it, I would need to make trying to get pregnant my full-time gig. Ben insisted that I didn’t need to give up my job. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be for us, and that was okay. But I knew some things he didn’t, and a hard reality set in: I wasn’t going to have it all if I didn’t make a change. Maybe not even then. And though I loved what I did, I loved Ben too. I wanted to be a mom. In that moment, that felt like the thing I wanted most of all. I could find another job. There would always be another fire I could go back to. I couldn’t say the same about the family I now desperately wanted.

  So I quit. I came home. We had a sex schedule we stuck to rigorously. I ate all the right foods and exercised and kept my stress to a minimum. Only I still didn’t get pregnant. I got crazy. So damn crazy that being around kids started to feel like punishment. Every month where the line didn’t turn blue added another layer of resentment. Toward Ben, myself, the choices I’d made years ago that were coming home to roost.

  And being around my best friend, with her two perfect children and her better-than-average husband and her overwhelming fears that it would all be taken away, became a form of torture. But I couldn’t tell her that because what kind of person did that make me? Ungrateful. Awful. Being around Mindy was making me start to feel awful.

  Then Mindy had a pregnancy scare. She was forty-three, and she and Peter had sex irregularly, I knew. Like not even weekly, sometimes not even monthly, and yet, there she was with a missing period. Feeling that feeling she alw
ays had when she was pregnant, she said. But how could she have a baby? How could she go back to all those sleepless nights, and then there was the genetic risk the baby would end up just like Carrie had, only worse.

  We were sitting in Joanie’s when she leaned in close and whispered, “I’m thinking of . . . not keeping it.”

  My coffee cup slipped from my hand and cracked in its saucer.

  “You’re what?”

  “Shhh, people are staring.”

  I looked down at my ruined cup. My hands were trembling.

  “I know I’ll probably have to go out of state,” Mindy continued. “But . . . would you come with me? I’ll never get Peter to agree.”

  I felt like the blood was draining from my body. I was—am—100 percent pro-choice, but that she could be making that choice in the face of what she knew I was going through, that she could be asking me to participate in it . . .

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I said, trying to keep myself from throwing the two halves of the cup against the wall above her head. “You’re asking me that? Me?”

  “Oh, Beth, I’m terrible. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “How could you be so goddamn selfish?”

  “Now, hold on—”

  “After everything Ben and I have been going through, and you just want to . . . throw it all away? Because it might be a bit inconvenient? Because it isn’t on your wall chart of activities?”

  “That’s not what I said at all.”

  “Isn’t it, though?”

  Mindy’s face was bright pink. “I’m a mess. I don’t know what to do. I guess I shouldn’t have talked to you about it, but who else am I supposed to go to?”

  “You guess you shouldn’t have talked about it to me?”

  “Don’t do that. Don’t talk to me like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you’re the only one who’s had bad things happen in their life. Carrie was born with a huge hole in her heart. She almost died. It’s genetic. It would be totally irresponsible to have this baby.”