Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down (23 page)

I found it! Matt's mother shouted from the living room.

Popcorn will be ready in five minutes, Matt's father called back.

Can I ask you a question? Matt asked.

Matt's father didn't shake his head no.

What's next for the police? Where's the investigation going?

Give yourself a break, son. Don't worry about it for tonight.

I'm not worrying. I just want to know.

We're working with the FBI and national agents, he said. Fire analysts and specialists. We're still pushing our way through so much debris.

Did Christina tell that officer anything?

She just said what she saw. It helps us gain an idea of what might be happening at these homes when a fire starts.

Would you tell me if it was arson? Is that why they instated the curfew?

Matt's father didn't look at him. It just keeps everyone safe. Makes things easier. All of this has happened at night. It clears the streets in case anything happens.

What's the next step?

The first kernels began to burst. We're still looking at Lewis and Clark, he said. Still retracing the kid's path through the school.

I don't see why that matters. Not now.

It's our only lead. Whatever's causing the fires, it's clear now that they're connected to the people and the kids in the school.

What about advanced arson techniques? Like ways to disguise the accelerant, to make it look like an accident?

Matt's father sighed. Why don't you go join your mother? Popcorn's almost done.

The kernels multiplied in the pan, bursting into tufts. Matt pushed himself into the living room and sat on the couch beside his mother, the lights dim. The wind threw itself against the windowpanes outside and Matt sank deeper into the cushions. The smell of melted butter filtered in from the kitchen. On-screen, an establishing shot showed a quiet neighborhood street in Illinois, the wind spilling leaves down its spine. Matt's father came into the room, a large bowl in his hands. The movie's heroine walked down the wind-whipped street with her friends as trick-or-treaters began to dot the sidewalk. A masked man waited in the bushes. Hulked behind clotheslines. Matt took a handful of popcorn and let himself be submerged between his parents and tried not to think of Christina standing at the edge of a burning house, of Nick at home in his bedroom trying to figure out what it all meant. Of an arsonist prowling through the dark, the same as a killer on-screen stalking a neighborhood's streets.

ZOLA PUSHED A
wet dish towel across the Local Beanery's counter, closing up the shop before curfew when Christina walked in. Her hair pulled into a ponytail, her body obscured by baggy sweats. Zola looked around: no patrons left. No one in the bathroom, no one near the far windows. The sun dropping, a splinter of light. Nearing six o'clock, the shop's closing time and the stated hour everyone needed to be inside. Zola knew the shop would be dead throughout the afternoon. She knew she had to get out of the house, her mother at work, a long night stretching ahead of them once they both got home. She also knew Christina might come as she sometimes did, so many after-school visits for free muffins that would go stale by morning if no one ate them. She saw Christina's eyes, the whites faintly bloodshot, and knew she wasn't here for free food. Zola felt a flood of shame for the way she'd spoken to her at the bookstore.

Hey girl, Zola said quietly when Christina approached the counter.

Christina's eyes welled and Zola set down the dish towel. She forgot her shame and reached across the counter for Christina's hands.

Chris, what?

I don't even know where to begin.

Just tell me. Was it Ryan?

I was at the police station today.

Zola moved to the front door and flipped the business sign to closed. She set a blueberry muffin on a plate for Christina and poured both of them the last of the decaf. Lowered the shop's music. Brought the mugs and plate to a table near the far windows where Christina sat watching the sun slip down the horizon.

Tell me what happened, Zola said.

Matt brought me to the police station. As a witness.

As witness to what?

Christina glanced up. Her face hard, her eyes the only softness. She told Zola about Ryan's visit, what he'd said. How she'd pedaled across town through the trails with the wind tearing at her face and how she'd thrown a rock and smashed his window, her rage the shape of a stone. How she'd fled on Simon's bike back to the edge of the sidewalk where she'd watched Benji's house ignite.

What did the police say?

They took me into a room. I told them everything. I told them everything I just told you, and they told me nothing.

Well, you're the one who saw it.

I don't know what I think. I don't know what I even saw.

Zola touched Christina's hand. No one should talk to you like that.

I know.

I don't mean the police, Zola said. I mean Ryan. Look, I'm sorry for what I said. I didn't mean to say it like that. But he's been talking to you that way since you met.

Christina picked at the blueberry muffin.

Chris, I mean it. No one should ever talk to you like that again.

Christina didn't meet her eyes and Zola knew, finally and with certainty, that it wasn't the first time Ryan had called her something awful. How Christina always spoke carefully as if protecting him, a deep cistern of hurt she hid like a well.

What happened at that party? Zola asked. That one at the end of the school year.

I don't know what you mean.

Come on. The one that made you stop drinking all summer.

Christina looked up. I didn't think you'd noticed.

Of course I noticed. I also noticed how tipsy that whiskey made you the other night. That's what happens when you don't drink for four months.

Christina smiled faintly. Trying to get me back in the drinking game?

No, I've just been worried. Tell me. Tell me what the hell happened.

Christina said nothing but Zola saw her lower lip begin to quiver.

You don't have to hold it in, Zola said. Just let it out.

The school, Christina said. All those homes. There's nothing I can be sorry for, nothing to be sad about.

Let it out, Zola said. It's okay, just let it go.

So Christina did. She told Zola everything. Picture frame. A broken window. The ruby lace of lingerie he'd never touched. The way the surface of water looked from beneath it, her lungs breaking inside a swimming pool.
Get in the car, you fucking bitch
and how she'd kept walking, how she'd walked for over a mile, how her slip-on sneakers had blistered her skin and even still she hadn't stopped until she reached home.

Zola listened until Christina fell silent. Kept her face impassive, rage she'd already unleashed across a bookstore and didn't want to let loose again. She knew they should get home, the sun gone, the horizon purpled beyond the coffee shop's windows. She kept
her hand on Christina's hand. The store's piped-in music the only sound.
Let it go,
Zola said again and Christina began to cry.

BENEATH A SINGLE
weak lamp, Nick sat at his bedroom computer, minding the curfew. He scanned every website, every article. Every shred of information he could find on chemical accelerants. Gasoline. Turpentine. Diesel fuel. A lighter's butane. The day had been a blur beyond lunch. He'd watched
E.T.
with his family once his mother returned home from work, a distraction with levity. A movie he was sure he'd seen at least a hundred times in his childhood, scenes he knew by rote memory but even still when the ship came at the end and E.T. touched his finger to Elliott's chest,
I'll be right here,
something wide and faint spread through Nick's veins, a dull but persistent ache. He'd made himself a sandwich for dinner despite his mother's protests, a lack of appetite after the lateness of lunch. He'd spoken to Sarah on the phone, her voice brighter but subdued, a conversation curled behind the closed door of his bedroom in case his parents overheard him asking Sarah if she still felt okay about what they'd done.

It was late. His entire family asleep. Slivers of moon fell through the slats of his closed blinds. Nick bent toward the screen of the computer, searching websites, finding nothing of substance. He looked up fire debris analysis. How investigators looked for accelerants in materials that were most flammable and absorbent. How they placed clothing, carpet, bits of cardboard in mason jars. How forensic chemists analyzed samples for evidence of ignition. How they distinguished accelerants from ignitable fluids, household substances that were combustible under normal circumstances. Forensic extraction. Mass spectrometry. A seeking of patterns, of ignitable liquid residues. A pattern Nick couldn't find despite two hours of searching.

He pushed himself back from the desk. Closed his eyes, clenched the bridge of his nose. The moon pressed through the window, a
ghost of light. He raised the blinds and looked to the sky, clear and remote. He rubbed a hand across his shirt and felt the tempest of the muscle beneath it, the same organ he'd tried to imagine as a living thing when he looked through the waiting room window at so many people seated in the cardiology ward. So many patients, so many strikes of the heart slackening out of tune. Nick wondered if a heart could physically break. He turned off the computer and let his palm rest against his chest. The same thumping of Sarah's heart through her shirt, her body pressed against him on the couch. A muscle of ventricles and channels. The strongest organ in the body, none of them strong enough for this.

He looked to the moon. Wanted to ask it.
What is happening here?
He wanted to scream it.
What the fuck is happening?
He imagined a flame igniting the threads of a bed, licking across synthetic fiber, breaching the borders of a body. The permeability of skin, fingernails, and human hair and a line of teeth the first defenses before a flame bore down to bone, down to the faulted chambers of so many sorrowed hearts.

ZOLA STOOD ON
the back porch, the house's light spilling through the windows and across the wooden floorboards. She held Penelope clutched against her sweater, nose winking, fur soft against the brisk air. Zola watched points of stars emerge among the wash of dark, names of constellations she'd never learned. The backyard was quiet. Still. The hum of the television pushed through the closed windows behind her. Zola watched the sky and imagined a stretch of flames. She wondered what Christina had seen. How a house ignited. Christina in her bedroom less than two miles away, replaying again and again in her mind an explosion, an interrogation, a smashed window.

Zola heard the back door creak open, then footsteps. She felt a hand on her back.

The Great Square of Pegasus, her mother said, pointing. And up there, that small dot—that's Andromeda.

How do you know all that?

I just do. Lots of years on this earth. Lots of gazing up and wondering.

Zola glanced at the telescope just beyond the porch, her mother's favorite autumn tool. How it would stay in the yard until November's first hard freeze.

But what made you want to learn it?

I don't know. Curiosity. There's so much about this world we don't know.

And that's a comfort to you?

Sometimes. Sometimes there's peace in the mystery of it all.

Penelope fidgeted, nudged farther into her sweater. Zola wanted to stay hard, her body impermeable, skin tough as metal. She felt herself breaking regardless. Alisha's house down the street just remains now of what a home had been. She wondered about peace. If Alisha's parents had known it. If mystery was ever any comfort to them.

How're you doing, baby?

I'm fine.

You say that, but I worry.

I'm as fine as I can be. I'm alive. What else do you want me to say?

You can talk to me, Zol.

I know.

I want to know you're okay.

Zola looked to the sky. We learned in science class that the light we're seeing up there is years old.

Look-back time, her mother said. The time it takes for light to travel that far. What we're seeing right now is starlight from the past.

Zola felt her eyes spill over. Something sudden. Something silent, choking, breathless. She felt her mother's arm enfold her shoulders,
Penelope's warmth against her chest. It's okay, her mother said, it's okay, just let it go. What Zola had told Christina. What she couldn't tell herself.
Let it go,
her mother whispered and Zola closed her eyes against the stars and saw stained carpet and the rough texture of a book's binding and the black thick of more blood than she'd ever seen.

I couldn't help them, Zola said. I couldn't do anything.

No one could. Zola. No one could. No one could do anything.

I was there. I could have.

You couldn't. Zola. Her mother's hand on her hair. You couldn't.

There was a fist inside her chest. Squeezing. Squeezing so fucking hard and at last unfurling. Zola felt herself release into her mother's arms. She felt herself small, nothing more than a seed beneath the sky's swath of impenetrable dark. She curled her arms around Penelope and felt a pulse soft beneath her fur, the metronome of her rabbit heart.

THE HUMAN HEART:
a muscular organ circuiting blood through the body, the approximate size of a closed hand. Pushes deoxygenated blood through the veins of the body to the lungs, then to the arteries bearing breath of the lung's oxygen to tissues and cells. Rests in the thoracic cavity behind the sternum, its base apex just above the diaphragm, two-thirds of its mass tilted at an angle to the left side of the body. Surrounded by the pericardium, a fluid membrane: between the heart and everything else, a protective wall. Lubricates the beating organ, preventing friction. Maintains a margin of error, a hollow space for the heart to expand when too full.

Three layers of the heart: first, epicardium. The visceral layer of the pericardium sac. Then myocardium: a middle layer of muscle, cardiac tissue responsible for pumping blood. At last endocardium: the innermost layer, the most sensitive and most protected.

Keeps blood from clotting. Lines the inside of the heart.

Keeps a guarded hand, every tight-clutched secret.

Four chambers: right and left ventricle. Right and left atrium. A four-leaf clover.

The atria smaller, receptacles for veins pumping blood to the heart. Less work than the duties of ventricles sending blood from the heart to the body's extremities, the ends of its own earth. The chambers of the right side smaller, a nearby circuit while the left pushes blood through the whole body. The reason for the left's
greater size. The reason for the heart mistaken always as a left-sided organ. The reason to hold a hand to the left breast when placing a palm above the heart.

Valves: prevent blood from backtracking, from getting lost in itself.

Atrioventricular valves: in the middle of the heart. Keep blood flowing solely from atria to ventricles, a one-way route.

Semilunar valves: between ventricles and the arteries that carry blood from the heart. Named for the moon, the crescent cusps that form their passage. Controls blood flow through the body, the same as a moon, manipulating the tide of our veins.

The heart: never at rest. Constantly in flux between systole and diastole, either pushing out or taking in. Cardiac cycle: the life span of a single heartbeat. A heartbeat in three phases the eternity of a second, the movement of blood from the ventricles then to the aorta and then to each chamber. Atrial systole, ventricular systole, relaxation. All four chambers filled. The heart sated.

A fraction of second, an infinity. The only moment the heart is alone.

What we know as a heartbeat: the cycle in sound, the first long
lubb
the closing of the atrioventricular valve, the staccatoed
dubb
the subsequent sealing of the semilunar valve. Heart rate: the number of heartbeats a body produces per minute, the average human heart pushing five liters every sixty seconds through a body at rest.

The heart sets its own rhythm. The heart beats a system of orchestration and conduction. The heart holds the wand above a philharmonic of organs, a coordination of gesture and signals and synapses. The heart is electric, its own current, a system of impulses and conductive fire. The sinoatrial node: a cluster of cells, the metronome for an entire body's circuitry. A node located in the wall of the right atrium that sets the pace, the rhythm of every blood cell. A node that screams its own ticking,
I'm here, I'm here
, or else a more piercing rhythm,
You were, You were.
A node partnered to the
atrioventricular node, a cluster sharing the same right atrial wall. A receiver. A transmitted signal. Carried to cardiac muscles that contract in symphonic rhythm.

What blood bears: the mark of parents. The same code of cousins, sisters, brothers. The mark of children. The trail of their lives coiled inside the shell of our veins.

What blood bears: oxygen, glucose. Proteins and minerals and carbon.

What the heart bears: a system of pulleys. A complicated language of levers. An orchestration, a sonata singing inside a chamber. A fortress surrounded by a pericardial moat that if flooded will release, a hollow space.