Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down (29 page)

WE HEARD THE
news Tuesday morning: another headline, breaking news. A constant scroll on CNN. We heard from newspapers and from television well before we heard from Christina. Blared in headline:
FIRES RESUME
. Thick letters stamped across the front page of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The word
resume,
its implications: that this was expected. That fire had a life of its own. We barely wanted to read the article but couldn't look away. We learned that Jacob's mother perished in the fire before medics could save her. A woman we'd just seen at a funeral, wind displacing her hair,
cigarette crushed beneath the heel of her pump. We learned that the fire erupted just past midnight, that firefighters fought the blaze for over an hour and that nothing had been saved. That Jacob had no siblings, no pets. That the second floor of the house undertook the greatest damage, that nothing of the upstairs bedrooms remained. That Parents for Home Protection would meet immediately to consider their options, a homegrown vigilantism. We thought of Matt's father and imagined a blank autopsy, nothing left.

We cast the thought away for other headlines, other news stories more and less imaginable. The mundane: that a man survived falling over Niagara Falls without any protective capsule. The less mundane: that a member of Al Qaeda had killed Daniel Pearl, a
Wall Street Journal
reporter. The War on Terror escalating. Human Rights Watch accusing U.S. troops in Iraq of excessive force against civilians. We turned away from the world, too tangible, too real and too sharp. We opened the sports section: the St. Louis Rams soaring on a 6-2 winning record. The World Series tied, a third game on the horizon in Miami. We gleaned only one last piece of information before we turned away from the newspaper: that Midvale's evening curfew had been canceled overnight.

A futile restriction. Everyone inside and a house still ignited. We sat in the mess of our beds and our living rooms and our kitchens and our basements, air that had long grown stale, a curfew that in the end accomplished nothing but trapping everything inside except a match and a flame. We turned off the news. We sat in the dark, the light of a clear morning pushing through the slats of our blinds, illuminating specks of dust. We pulled on our clothes, jeans and sweatshirts, pullovers and fleece sweaters. We said goodbye to our parents, embraces they held for a moment too long. A mass phone message each of them had received from the administration that school would continue, that we would stay strong. We didn't look back to see the faces of our mothers and fathers watching us from the window as we walked away. We traveled the streets of
our neighborhoods, our community, our radios and car stereos and portable headsets blocking out the lingering sound of sirens, the streets a chaos of police cars and FBI vans, the presence of reporters a constant for nearly two weeks.

At school, Christina watched Simon meander up the stairwell toward his physical science class and felt her chest constrict, to turn away from him and lose sight of where he was. His breathing so close in his bedroom through the night, a sound she couldn't hear through their shared wall but knew he was within a body's length if she had to protect him. She thought of her profile. Elise. Her entire family cheering on their swim team from natatorium's metal risers. Jacob's mother gone in the night. Christina wondered if Elise's family was in danger, along with everyone in the entire school. No one spoke in the hallway. No one made eye contact. Everyone moved as if through a dream. She stepped into her algebra class as the passing bell rang and took her seat and opened her mathematics textbook and found nothing in its pages that could make her focus.

Matt moved down the hallway and imagined his father, already gone again before he awoke, already at the station reading analysis or else somewhere in the streets near Christina's house bagging evidence. Matt felt his lungs tighten. He'd barely slept. He'd stayed awake with the images of a computer echoing through his brain. What was so often only Nick's task, what he'd taken upon himself after returning from Zola's house. What he'd done to fill time before his father came home and leaned into the office and Matt made up a quick excuse that he was only checking email and would be to bed soon, and his father said there was nothing new on the investigation but confirmation that no chemical accelerants were found in the debris, that only organic materials were present.

Matt had leaned back in his father's desk chair. Organic?

His father sighed. Organic materials were all we found in the reports.

Matt blinked. As opposed to what? What the hell does that even mean?

As opposed to telltale accelerants, his father said. No fire starters. No gasoline, no chemicals. All it means is that no one tried to burn down these homes with rags and solvents. Look, Matt, I'm tired. I just wanted you to know what we found.

His father had left the room and walked down the hallway and closed his bedroom door and Matt had stared at his own reflection in the computer screen. Organic materials. No ready-made search terms. No key words. Nothing to plug into a keyboard and easily find. Proteins. Lipids. Oxygen and carbon. Words that could have pulled up anything on a browser from diet management to science reports, each of them vague and wide-open and unrefined and meaningless. Matt had shut down the computer and retreated to the basement and had slept a dreamless sleep until he awoke to the news.

Matt made his way down the hallways of Timber Creek. He'd seen the newspaper. Jacob's mother. How he'd just spoken to her at the funeral, the stupid mumblings of saying nothing to a parent in grief. The mother of a boy he'd tracked since junior high, every class and every extracurricular. All at once he felt the blank walls of Timber Creek's hallways press in, the school's air leached of oxygen, too many students and teachers crowded into a small space. He couldn't make sense of himself, this nausea, only now after two weeks of staying numb and finally falling to sleep. He turned toward his English classroom, the last door down a hallway that stretched too wide and long. He pushed himself instead into the nearest men's bathroom and dropped his textbook to the floor, his lungs seizing and his head between his knees.

Hey man, it's okay.

A voice beyond him: someone unlocking a stall door, stepping toward him. A hand on his back. Matt glanced up long enough to see the face of Samuel Winters, a running back on Lewis and Clark's varsity football team who Matt once knew to avoid. A player with a known temper, a boy who in other versions of their
lives might have slammed him into a locker for nothing more than knowing he didn't prefer girls.

It's all right. I'm fine.

You don't look fine. You need the school nurse?

Matt listened and heard nothing, no one else in the bathroom stalls or at the sink. He was alone with Samuel. A quick fuse. He felt his body tense, his heart tighten.

I can call the school nurse. Samuel kneeled beside him. Not a problem.

I'll be fine, Matt said. You'll be late to class.

Panic attack? Man, sit down.

Matt glanced up at him. His chest hurt to speak. He sat on the bathroom floor.

I used to have those, Samuel said. Sometimes before games. Sometimes at home. Feels like you're seeing stars or dying.

Matt closed his eyes. Pinwheels of light.

You just need to breathe, Samuel said, and Matt felt a hand on his back again. In and out, Samuel said. Big breath in. Good. Breathe out. I'll stay here until you stand.

Matt focused on the sensation of Samuel's hand. The weight of it. What it was for another human being to touch him. Someone beyond his mother, his father, the heat of Tyler pressing him to a wall.

Good, Samuel said. Everything's all right. See, just breathe. Everything's all right.

You'll be late to class, Matt whispered.

No problem. I don't think I'll be the only one today.

Matt felt his lungs relax. He took two large breaths and sensed himself strong enough to look up. He met Samuel's gaze. Thanks, he said. You didn't have to do that.

Samuel slapped his back lightly. Hey, it's nothing. What was I going to do, just walk away?

Matt smiled and Samuel got to his feet. He pulled Matt up.

You all right? Okay to stand?

I'll be fine.

You take it easy, man. You'll be okay.

Thanks, Matt said, but Samuel was already out the door.

WHEN ZOLA WALKED
into chemistry class, Nick was already seated near the far wall, with nothing open on his desk, his hands folded in his lap. There were no windows to stare through. No pictures on the wall. She took her seat beside Sejal Chaudry and wondered what Nick was thinking, whether he was replaying a house fire in his brain and calculating causes, things he'd surely spent all night looking up on his computer. Zola glanced at Sejal, who sat drawing the same lines over and over in her open notebook.

Hey, Zola said. Sejal nodded in return.

You okay? Zola asked.

Sejal didn't look up. I just don't really want to be here.

Zola didn't know what else to say. Justin Banks. A boyfriend she'd had for only weeks. She wondered if Sejal lay awake at night wondering if his house would burn.

It'll be okay, Zola said.

We were in Students for Humanity together, Sejal said. Me and Jacob.

Zola knew where Jacob lived, only a few streets from Christina. She wondered what Christina had seen, what sirens had awoken her and her family. Her brother. Her father. What smoke had blown over every home, the same scent of Alisha Trenway's house, where Zola had been standing taking pictures as Jacob's home ignited.

The passing bell signaled the start of class and Mr. Albertson looked out over the room.
Okay, everyone, let's get started.
He said nothing of the news or yesterday's school-wide assembly but only stood at the front of the room in his white lab coat, what he wore every time they conducted an experiment. He'd lined up a series of powders on the sheet-metal laboratory table at the front of the room.

Today we'll be discussing flame colors and chemicals, he said. For safety purposes, this will be demonstration-only. Get out your notebooks for observations.

Flame color. Zola glanced at Nick, obscured by the hulking shape of Dennis Carroll, his lab partner. She couldn't see him, couldn't tell the expression of his face. Zola couldn't believe Mr. Albertson hadn't thought to realign the lesson in light of the fires.

For review, he said, can anyone tell me the difference between a flame test and the temperature of a flame?

No one spoke. The last time the class had spoken of elements and flame tests, a lifetime ago in another building. She fully expected everyone to resist, to ignore Mr. Albertson's eyes and the absurdity of conducting this lesson now. So many fires in their streets. Flames they already knew firsthand without need of test tubes or powders. But Michele Theroux raised her hand in the front row, timidly at first, then higher.

The textbook said incandescence depends on the object on fire's temperature, she said. And flame tests, on the spectrum of gas excitations produced by an element.

Correct, said Mr. Albertson. And what is gas excitation?

Peter Longworth raised his hand. It's when the atoms of gases are excited by heat or electricity, when either moves from lower to higher energy levels.

That's right, Peter. And what makes them produce flame?

When they return to their ground state, they emit photons of energy.

Zola couldn't believe Mr. Albertson was continuing with this lesson plan, that despite his social awkwardness a week away from class hadn't given him time to rethink. Even more, she couldn't believe that her peers were answering him. That everyone had thought to study across a week meant for mourning. That they'd buried themselves in a textbook to keep from thinking about what they'd lost.

That's right, Mr. Albertson said. Can someone else tell me what this has to do with flame color?

Dennis Carroll raised his hand. Someone who never spoke in class. The chapter we read said energies correspond to wavelengths of light, he said. Spectrums we see as colors. Each element has its own line emission spectrum.

Good. So what we have here is a spectrum of elements, and hence, colors.

Mr. Albertson waved a hand over the piles of powders lined up before him on the laboratory table. He pulled a small torch from his coat pocket and instructed the class to take notes as he lit each pile sequentially. He held a blue flame to the first pile on the class's left, powder that ignited in a wash of crimson light.

Red, he said. Can anyone recall which element corresponds to red chemical flame?

Lithium, Claire Gallagher said. It's what emergency flares are made of.

Correct. Take notes, everyone. The colors and their corresponding elements will be on next week's midterm.

He lit the next pile: orange flame. Danielle Watkins identified its corresponding compound, calcium chloride. Yellow flame: table salt. The easiest, the one Zola imagined everyone knew. Simple sodium chloride, small crystals she could have lit up in her own kitchen. Green flame: boric acid, copper sulfate. Often found in laundry detergents, Adam Wu offered from the lab table beside hers, and in disinfectant and sometimes insect and weed killers. Zola glanced at Sejal's notebook on their lab table, empty of notes, Sejal's gaze cast away from the line of flame colors. Mr. Albertson lit the second-to-last pile, a blue burning. Blue flame: alcohol, regular fuel. Zola closed her eyes and saw nothing but the Trenways' home in flames. The Jensen home. The Ndolo home. All of them full of table salt and detergents and disinfectants, homes in flames like nothing she'd imagined: crimson fire but also cobalt, also
sapphire, a rainbow of household items ablaze. Mr. Albertson lit the final pile of powder and a violet flame erupted.

Salt substitute, Zola said aloud. Potassium chloride. Often used in plant fertilizers and processed foods.