See How Small. Scott Blackwood

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СКАЧАТЬ hear the jangle of Ray’s belt buckle as he lifts his pants from the foot of the bed and pulls them on. In his pockets, the keys to the ice cream shop, where he’d stopped by just after closing to pick up the night deposit. A movie, he’d said when he got back home late and crawled into bed. The girls were headed to a midnight movie after locking up at eleven. “Didn’t you ask them which movie?” Kate had said, because you always ask which one, always. Good old feckless Ray. She lay there beside him, blood drumming in her head, listening to his raspy breathing, thinking, I will go away. When the girls finally leave home, I will leave home too. Then, a little later, after she’d tried their cell phones and gotten their chirpy voice mail greetings, Kate woke startled from a dream in which her dead mother was combing her hair with an ear of corn. She couldn’t smell the girls in the house.

      At the front door, the first police officer tells her something brutally quiet and small about her daughters. Something so dense that it makes everything — the cold, smoking air, the officers’ ashen faces, Ray’s raspy breathing — constrict to a singular point.

      Past the officers framed in the doorway she can see the squad car outside, its headlights illuminating the cedar tree beside the driveway. In the fogged back windows, she thinks she can make out Elizabeth and Zadie, their bare feet propped on the metal grill between the seats. Cocksure, dismissive. Playing the parts assigned to them. Certain they can talk their way out of anything.

       7

      AFTER FINDING THE dead girls in the fire, Jack Dewey didn’t know what to think. At first, he seemed mostly fine, having gone to see a department-provided therapist for a few months. Bad dreams and cold sweats were nothing unusual, the therapist told him. It was a process he’d need to work through. The firefighters at his station seemed to understand his woodenness at work and offered encouragement — a few of them had been on tours in Iraq and seen bad things happen. Whole families burned. Children’s arms, legs, heads, blown off. But to Jack, this all happened in vast, incomprehensible cities and deserts, places with guttural-sounding names he’d never visit. Still, several of the firefighters made sure, on his four days off a week, to check in or invite him to play softball with some city league team that needed a sub, or to grab a beer in the evening. They had done this too after his wife died ten years before, in his second year with the department. They’d made an effort to fix him up with blind dates — usually nervous, mid-thirties friends of their wives or girlfriends, who had decided they were too old for the music clubs or didn’t like online dating sites.

      But things had not gotten better after the fire — if better meant getting along with his girlfriend, Carla, and his daughter, Sam, or having a few moments of stillness in his mind. He often drank at Deep Eddy Bar until he couldn’t feel his face, and would wobble home on his bike down the expressway shoulder. This was after the DUI, when he’d fallen asleep in the car while idling in line at Mrs. Johnson’s Donuts. Now he’d occasionally glimpse himself in the bar mirror, his hands adjusting his helmet for the ride home. His head gargantuan and grotesque. Whose head and face were these? He often thought now, nearly five years later, how the firefighters at his station, or even the detectives on the case who’d questioned him, thought he was drinking to forget the girls. But the truth was, the more he drank, the more stove-in he became on the outside, the more inwardly alive he felt. He doesn’t see the images of the girls’ naked burned bodies anymore, as he once did, stacked upon one another, their open opaque eyes staring at nothing. He doesn’t wake up on fire and thrash in the bed, frantically trying to rip off his burning helmet and airpack. Once he’d flung his arms so violently that he’d broken Carla’s nose. Carla, out of sheer terror, had begun to toss a quilt over him and pretend to smother the fire, and sometimes that would break the spell. He’d gone to see a therapist again after the broken nose, trying to restore some trust between them. Over the past five years, though, the dreams had become more vivid, sharper around the edges, and, to his great shame, even more real to him than memories of his dead wife. To his astonishment and confusion, in these dreams he sees, and even speaks to, the girls from the fire, as they would be now, five years later, in their early twenties, near the same age as his daughter.

      “What kind of dad are you?” Jack’s daughter, Sam, said into the phone in a voice that seemed to understand exactly the kind of dad he was. He’d said some things, accused her of some things he shouldn’t have. This was four months after she’d come back home, a year and a half after the fire. She was calling him from Brackenridge Hospital to tell him she and her boyfriend had had a wreck. Sam was a little banged up — some cuts from the glass. The new boyfriend had a concussion. But when the cops and EMS crew found his pickup in the culvert, they also discovered some cellophane-wrapped hashish stuffed into the fingers of a single leather glove in the console. Now the boyfriend needed an attorney and some bail money.

      “I guess I’m the kind of dad who comes when you need me,” he said on the phone, trying on a kind of casual bluster because, as she often pointed out, he was afraid of her.

      Later, in the emergency room, he sat near a large tinted window and could feel the day’s heat through the glass. Another man sat nearby, cupping his limp arm at the elbow as if cradling an infant’s head. He signed in at the desk and a pregnant Hispanic nurse wearing slippers helped him navigate the maze of cubicle rooms.

      Sam was born in this hospital. She’d developed an infection from breathing meconium during a long, difficult delivery, so they’d put her in the neonatal ICU for two weeks to treat it, strapped a tangle of wires to her chest and head to monitor her vitals. She was stout compared with the other babies there. Premies not any bigger than potatoes — they were even swaddled in aluminum foil to keep their heat in. It scared him to think something so tiny could still be a human being. Some of them had been there for months because of heart ailments, kidney problems, or congenital defects that wouldn’t allow them to breathe on their own. The terrible, contingent life of these infants, the wires, the constant beeping and buzzing alarms, warning of some impending failure, made him constantly on edge. Everything in the neonatal ICU — a room festooned with the false cheer of newborn blues and pinks — seemed to partially negate the future. The thought of Sam forever dependent on machines and nurses and catheters made his throat constrict at night. He heard her raw-throat crying in his dreams. His wife, recovering in a nearby room from a torn cervix, would ask him for a report after the midnight feeding. “How’s our sweet baby girl?” she’d ask from beneath the tide of sedatives. “Dreaming of her momma,” he’d say.

      A number of the premies wouldn’t survive. An intern had told him this while eating a sandwich at the nurses’ station. There was a point at which the parents — often sleep deprived, living in a fog — had to make a decision. Jack also remembered the hospital chaplain, a chain-smoker, telling him that one of the premies — his heart malformed and too weak for surgery — had completely baffled the neonatologists. Miraculously, the chaplain said, his body had “learned” to reroute his oxygenated blood to his brain through a system of collateral arteries. But to Jack this seemed only a reprieve, a story of deferred grief that made the later one even harder to bear. He remembered his grandfather’s stories of families during the 1918 flu pandemic waiting to name their children until it was clear they’d make it to their first birthday. When Jack would take bottles of his wife’s breast milk into the ICU to feed Sam, he’d see the parents of the critical premies coming and going in their ill-fitting visitor scrubs, their bright, haggard faces. They seemed like castaways who didn’t know they’d been abandoned. And seven years later, in the weeks leading up to his wife’s death from a brain aneurysm, he knew he’d worn that same expression on his pilgrimages. He’d made any bargain, buoyed any false hope, explained away, even at the end, the inevitable signs of his wife’s body shutting down.

      Jack knew now that luck was unearned — arbitrary, even. But in the ICU with his daughter those early weeks, surrounded by premies swaddled in aluminum foil, he’d studied the tiny maps of capillaries on Sam’s eyelids and considered himself a fortunate man.

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