Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down (18 page)

She glanced at the photos and news clippings scattered across the table. This is way beyond us, was all she said. What are we doing? There's nothing we can do.

We're putting together a yearbook, Nick said. That's all we can do.

Why? Who will want it? No one's going to want to fucking remember this.

Look, we have to, Nick said. We have until spring to get this right.

Zola felt her blood spike. Did he? Did he know? His English class, desks pressed to the door. His girlfriend in the choir room, completely safe beneath the risers, everyone quiet and huddled against the walls. Zola wanted to take the articles, the photographs. She wanted to claw them into shreds. She looked at Matt.
What did you see?
Zola wanted to ask him, wanted to resume their conversation from the haloed light of her driveway.
How could you see what you saw and write what you did, how can you be here talking about this shit instead of slashing your own heart out?
She closed her eyes. Breathed.

Have you taken any pictures? Nick asked.

I haven't. Not a single one.

Come on, Zol, Matt said. We need your help.

What if I don't want to help?

Zola couldn't stop herself. She'd lashed out at Nick and Christina and now she could lash out at Matt. Three for three. She knew her role, well defined since they'd first worked together on the freshman yearbook staff. The only one who knew the camera, the angles. The rule of thirds, the principles of composition. She saw Matt flinch at her voice.
You are a bitch,
she told herself.
Stop being such a bitch.

I'll do what I can, she finally said. I promise.

Take pictures, Nick said. Anything you want. Maybe not now. Maybe not right away. But photographs of what we should remember. Pictures we need to include.

Matt looked away, his hands lingering over the photos of burned homes. Christina still held the profile he'd written of Caroline Black.

I'll try to write a profile, Christina said. I haven't gotten to it yet.

I've only done it because I can't sleep, Matt said. It's fine to take your time.

I'll keep researching, Nick said. Not
Billboard
hits or Oscar winners, he knew: all of this so far afield from the current events he'd been expected to include before.

Fine, Zola said. We'll do this.

Words she spoke. Words she didn't believe.

MATT RETURNED HOME
just before lunch to his father's car in the driveway, the sun high and strained. He found his mother in the living room, sitting on the couch still reading her book on President Bush. The War on Terror. Weapons of mass destruction Matt wondered briefly if they'd ever find.

Dad's home?

He's in the office. She glanced up from her book. Came home an hour ago.

Is he working?

How are your friends? Zola, Nick. How are they doing?

We're trying to plan the yearbook.

You have time. You have all year.

Were you at the shelter this morning? Guinea pigs adopted?

I'll find out tomorrow. I've just been here reading since your father came home.

Does he know anything?

He's working. But you can ask him yourself.

Matt walked down the hallway and found the door to the office half-closed, an angle of light slicing the carpet. Matt knocked. When his father didn't answer he creaked open the door. His father sat at the desk, pen in hand, papers scattered across every surface
of the wood: as much paper as the newsprint covering the table at Paul's Books.

Any news? Matt asked.

His father set down his pen. There's nothing here. Nothing you should see.

His father watched him and Matt saw in his face that he couldn't acknowledge his son had seen. The school hallway. The carpet. What he couldn't say, just like moving down the hallway and closing the door while his mother held him, the razored silence of the living room. His face pressed to her chest. The heat of his own breath against her shirt. His mother whispering
it's okay
,
he'll come around,
his mother telling him again and again, you are who you are and you are known.

I wish I could keep you from this, his father said.

You can't, Matt said. He sat down near the desk and his father let him.

I can't show you everything, his father said. I'm bound by my job and the law.

Can you at least tell me what you're looking for?

An arsonist. Even though the evidence we have shows a lack of foul play, we're trying to determine if this is intentional. We're comparing evidence from each of these fires and if they're connected at all to the high school.

So you do know something about the high school investigation.

His father looked at him. Not really. Just the evidence we need.

Evidence,
Matt thought. He remembered the time over summer when, long after he'd locked up the theater for the night, he and Tyler drove back and watched a filmstrip in the projection booth, the theater empty below them.
28 Days Later,
something terrifying, a reason for Tyler to slide closer and closer until his tongue was in Matt's mouth. After-hours. A transgression Matt assumed his manager would never know. How the next day at concessions, the sun pulsing hot through the lobby windows, his manager walked up
and said nothing but dropped a condom on the counter, what had slipped from Matt's pocket to the projection room floor.

What evidence? Matt asked. How can you tell arson from an accident?

Matt's father pulled photographs from the scattering of papers and singled out an image of the Trenways' house just after it burned. A crowd stood at the sidewalk behind a barrier of police tape. His father told him arsonists sometimes lingered with the fire engines and crowds, that they were often the ones to call 911. That neighbors had made the call at both homes, that a comparison of photographs from each crime scene revealed no match of faces in the crowd. That the deliberateness of two fires in two homes of families who'd lost a child suggested something calculated but even still, there was no evidence to suggest either had been intentional. No accelerants at the Blacks' house. No burn trace of gasoline, no residue of flammable agents in the floorboards. Chemical analysis still being done at the Trenways' house, but no faulty wiring in either home.

What about Lewis and Clark? Matt asked. What are the links to school?

We don't have any. Eric Greeley is our only lead, and he's turning up nothing.

He's your only suspect?

He isn't a suspect. A person of interest. They're polygraphing the kid today. That's all I know.

Matt looked at his father and saw the wall: the invisible force field of confidentiality. What he'd brushed up against in his questioning, what his father didn't want to tell him. He knew the language of sidestepping, of skirting, words that placed no blame and spoke of nothing. Words he'd heard in the news, a lack of weapons and a lack of reason for invasion. Iraqi sovereignty. Mistakes were made. Words to conceal information before they revealed anything of substance. And Eric Greeley: short and hunched, his pants always too high and too tight. Christina had been wrong in Paul's Books.
Eric was quiet, solitary, always alone in the back of every classroom they'd ever shared. But not a murderer, Matt knew, as easily as he recognized his father's evasion.

Dad, Matt said.

His father didn't look at him.

Dad, I saw something awful. Inside the school.

I know. His father gathered the papers and photographs into a stack. It's why we shouldn't talk about these things. You should be resting. I've already told you too much.

Matt thought of the bookstore. A fight. How it had been the worst meeting they'd had but had still opened a channel of words between them.

Why is it easier? Matt heard himself say.

Why is what easier?

Talking about all of this. Exchanging facts. Looking at photographs. Instead of talking about how either of us feels.

Matt's father looked at him. What is it, son? How is it that you feel?

He heard the irritation in his father's voice. A familiar impatience. But also something searching and honest, something else beneath a learned temper: that maybe he'd always wanted Matt to ask him how it felt. What it was to be a father. What it was to receive a phone call at the police station, to locate a child in a public library parking lot. To know no other news. To rush through stoplights believing that this was the end. Matt watched his father's face and lost the words, had no clue what to ask, had no idea how he felt. Angry. Exposed. Beyond control of his own life. Pulled open and hollowed out. Lost to photographs and reports that disfigured him if he looked at them too closely, information he drank in like water to flush out Caroline's body on the floor, Tyler vanishing down the hallway, Caleb Raynor depriving them all of a life.

I don't know, Matt said. I don't know how I feel.

His father put a hand on his for a moment before pulling it away.
You tell me when you know, he said. Even if I'm busy. You might not think it, but I'm able to listen.

Eric Greeley, Matt said.

The comfort of facts he put back on like a cloak.

What about him?

We were all talking about him today. If he's not a suspect, then who?

Matt's father rested his hands on the stack of papers.

You don't know, do you? Matt realized.

This might not be arson, his father said. Maybe it's just two unfortunate coincidences. There's no foul play yet. Not a shred of condemning evidence.

Matt glanced at his father's photographs and felt the lining of his throat burn. That what protected them, the police, was nothing but a series of smoke screens. That no one knew anything, nothing was certain. That his father was fallible, as faulted as anyone.

NICK STOPPED BY
Sarah's house on his way home with a fudge brownie, the one bakery item Paul's Books was known for. He hadn't wanted to press Matt any further for details but thought nonetheless across the entire car ride about the fires, the lack of evidence. How he'd looked up cremation, how human skin burns. How high the temperature. How immense the pressure to erase bone, to leave nothing behind. How impossible it was that there was no trace of a single body. He walked up the steps to Sarah's front porch and was surprised to see Sarah answer when he knocked, her face fresh, her hair cleaned and pulled back in a ponytail.

Well, look at you, he said.

Her eyes fell to the brown bag. Did you bring me something?

From Paul's. I was just there.

She pulled the brownie from the bag.

Can I come in? Nick asked.

She left the door open and Nick followed her in.

Where's your mom?

Out. Errands. Every errand she can think of to keep herself busy. We're both going a little stir-crazy here.

Nick followed Sarah into the living room and sat down on the couch, a wide sofa facing the room's bay windows toward the backyard woods. Sarah curled into his lap, jersey shorts fluttering against his jeans. Nick pulled his hands around her legs.

How are you feeling?

I got tired. Tired of lying in bed feeling sorry for myself.

I wouldn't call it that.

She ate the last of the brownie, crumpled the bag, and threw it toward the coffee table, her muscles moving against his chest. She tucked her face into his neck and he looked out the window above her head. Trees shedding their leaves, thin enough to see another row of houses beyond their woods. He thought of the Trenways' home, the Blacks', what made them different from any other home of families who had lost someone.

Those fires, he said. They have to be connected.

Let's just not talk about it. Only one more day before the weekend, then we go back. Timber Creek. Can you even imagine it?

Nick shook his head. There was nothing anymore that seemed unimaginable.

When does choir practice start back up? he asked.

I have no idea. But I promised myself I'd still try out for
Pippin
this spring.

Nick could barely picture the spring, if they'd be back at Lewis and Clark or still at Timber Creek. But Sarah was talking. Far better than the state she'd been in across the past days. He wanted to keep her speaking, keep her thinking ahead even if he couldn't.

I'll come, he said. I'll be in the first row if you get the part.

You'll come. Is that all you'll do?

She grinned and Nick realized she was teasing him, the question of sex. The same conversation they'd had all summer, what he'd
again forgotten for Web pages on fire investigation, on cremation, on the management of crime scenes.

Maybe now isn't a great time to talk about this.

Why not? she said. I think it's the perfect time to talk about this.

Because we've talked about it ad nauseam. And you're just starting to feel better.

Then let's not talk about it then. She smiled. Let's not talk about it at all.

He heard the whoosh of water beyond the window, a creek running somewhere through the ravine of the woods. He felt Sarah's breath in the rise of her back, in and out. He felt her hair against his chin. He felt her mouth still and damp against his neck, her breath pulsing in clouds against his skin.

He felt her lips begin moving up the base of his throat.

He stopped thinking as her mouth moved. A soft suction pattering up his neck. A pressure that scaled his chin. A gravity soft as stars on his mouth, a force that pulled him to respond. He kissed her mouth. His hands running from her back to her jersey shorts. The weight of her mouth increasing, pushing against him. She moved her hands from his face, down his chest to the buttons of his shirt. One button undone. He let himself forget everything that had filled his brain for so many days, every image, every news clipping. He let himself forget every excuse he'd used. Her age. Her well-being. She was telling him what she wanted. She'd been telling him all summer. He slid his hand up the divide of her thighs. Two buttons. Her body opening. Three buttons. He slipped his hand beneath the jersey fabric and under the elastic band of her underwear.