Singe (26 page)

“Oh, trust me, she
thought
of it,” Jenn says, meaning Aunt Marianne. Whenever Jenn talks about her mother now her tone is spiky and foreign, like someone snuck a capful of vinegar under her tongue. “She was just hoping someone else would bite the bullet first.” Then, “God. You know, I haven’t seen the twins in almost a year?”

Addie didn’t. After that, it doesn’t feel like the right time to mention Eli. Jenn doesn’t ask.

Kristine is waiting under an overhang at the edge of the parking lot with a handful of her and Danielle’s friends hovering around her like a coven, their church-supplied pinnies all tied and tucked to bare midriff. Addie counts three belly button rings and two boyfriends. Not for the first time, she wonders whether it was divine irony or cruelty that made Jenn’s little sisters turn out so aggressively straight.

“Hey,” Kristine gasps when she climbs into the front seat. She’s white underneath her streaky makeup, wide, scared eyes. The rain slicked all her hair against her skull in a way that makes Addie think of Chicken Cat after a bath. “Have you talked to my mom? Did she say anything?”

“Dani’s gonna be fine,” Addie promises. “She’ll limp for a bit is all.”

“I heard the crack,” Kristine supplies, turning on the radio. “It was nasty. Mom screamed.”

Well, that was helpful
, Addie thinks unkindly. “Sit tight,” she tells her cousin, flicking Gertie’s windshield wipers up another bump.

The rain’s letting up by the time they get to the hospital, a steady trickle—they’re headed through the sliding glass emergency room doors when Jenn calls out their names from across the parking lot.

“Jennie!” Kristine cries excitedly, all her teenage apathy dissolving like a communion host as she throws herself at her big sister, squeezing tight. “Hi!”

“Hi, goose,” Jenn says, lifting Kristine off her feet a little even though Kristine’s just as tall as she is. “Oh my gosh, you’re a grownup. Look at you.”

Addie’s chest aches just watching them—it feels like way too much for one day, all these things she hasn’t been able to fix. “Hey,” she says, slinging an arm around Jenn’s back. She’s still wearing Liz’s Cornell T-shirt, which strikes Addie as odd and time warp-y. It feels like a lifetime ago that she was in Jenn’s apartment Googling Eli’s family, not just a few short hours. “I’m glad you came.”

“Me too,” Kristine chimes in, snuggling in to Jenn’s other side. They walk through the front doors together, all three of them in a row.

Chapter Fifteen

Sharpie and Parker are watching
Kathie Lee and Hoda
in the rec room when Eli gets in the next morning, tossing a box of donuts on the table—he got mostly chocolate glazed because he knows they’re Addie’s favorite, but he doesn’t see her hanging out anywhere downstairs. He lingers by the lockers, hoping to catch her coming out of the closet she and Buono share. Finally he checks the daily chore sheet. Her name isn’t on it.

“Family thing,” Brooks tells him when he asks. “Someone in surgery. Why?”

Eli shrugs. “Wanted to switch with her for Friday.”

“Switch with Gaarder,” Brooks instructs, shuffling his file folders. The arsons have generated a lot of paperwork, a lot of community buzz about safety. A lot of headlines. Eli can’t help the creeping feeling of déjà vu. “Kid has a dentist appointment.”

Which is how Eli ends up working an opposite shift from Addie right through the weekend. He texts her a couple times,
hey
and
how are you
, getting one-word answers back. He thinks he probably scared the crap out of her. He told Chelsea as much when he went back upstairs that day, Hester jumping up and down like a pogo stick to greet him. Chelsea told him it wasn’t his fault. She told him that all through their marriage too, every anniversary of Will’s death. Eli never quite believed her. But he let her tell him again for another two hours after Addie left, the familiarity of it washing over him like an old drug. Finally, when the rain let up and the streets were mirror-slick under the moon, he walked his ex-wife and ex-dog back down to the parking lot. He thinks she and Dave made up over the weekend. It doesn’t sting the way he thought it would.

He and Addie line up again on Tuesday morning, Addie coming in through the garage as he’s checking the equipment, her wild hair damp and braided down her back. “Gentlemen,” she calls, addressing him and Sharpie and Jill all as a unit, heading inside toward her locker with her giant canvas bag swung over one shoulder and her sunglasses obscuring the top half of her face. It’s the middle of August, still stifling. Addie looks cool as a whiskey on ice.

“Manzella,” he calls after her, following her inside like he’s got something work-related to discuss, then taking her by the wrist and steering her into a storage alcove off the hallway. “Addie,” he says then. “Hey.” She smells like herself, that gardenia smell from back at the beginning of the summer. Eli wants put his face in her neck and breathe. “How’s your cousin?” he asks her, feeling awkward and dumb in a way he hardly ever does with a woman—the way he only ever has with her, pretty much.

Addie shrugs. “She’s okay,” she reports, taking her sunglasses off and perching them on top of her head. She looks tired. “I mean, she’s done with soccer for the foreseeable future, but it’s not a ‘one-leg-shorter-than-the-other-for-all-eternity’ kind of situation or anything.”

Eli nods. “Look, princess,” he starts. He’s been waiting for days to talk to her, but now that he’s got a chance he’s not entirely sure what he wants to say. “Can we just—”

“I think you drink too much,” Addie interrupts him.

That’s when the siren goes off.

“Now wait a second,” Eli starts, but she’s already turned and out the door, jogging in the direction of the lockers. Eli swears and follows, banging a hand against the wall as he goes.

Pulling on his turnout gear feels like getting dressed underwater, no AC in this part of the building and Eli’s head still foggy from last night’s beers. Four or five, he thinks, stepping into his boots. No, definitely four. Four is fine. The steel toes seem heavier this morning, footfalls like King Kong. He’s still working both arms into his jacket when Sharpie starts heading for the truck.

“You’re on the wheel, Grant,” he yells. Eli swears again.

It’s not far from the other arsons, he sees when he gets up there, the truck’s GPS plunking down a triumphant flag. The radio has Fifteen already on route, a three-alarm with multiple EMTs requested. Eli swallows. Every residential call makes him nervous lately, even the ones they know ahead of time are just barbecue flare-ups, someone getting tipsy and being too free with the propane. Already he’s pretty sure this isn’t that.

He turns on the engine, checking all the tank levels. Addie, Jill and Sharpie are in the back, scrambling to get their folding jumpseats down, Brooks buckling himself into the front. Eli hits the sirens and lights them up, then steps on the gas.

The flag’s planted in one of the old post-war developments in Lee called Berkshire Woods or some ridiculous thing, a cluster of small single family homes all identical in their ugliness except for paint color. The streets are all named after different kinds of trees. “Jim’s ex-wife lives somewhere over here,” he hears Addie say as he turns onto Pine, then Birch, then Cedar. The address they’re looking for is on Oak.

“Fuck me.” Eli can tell it’s another arson before he even hits the brakes on the engine: the burn pattern, how fast and hot the bastard’s lit up. Fifteen’s just parking at the curb. Eli’s hauling himself up to the roof of the engine as fast as his leaden body will take him, but he’s still close enough to hear Addie swear.

“That’s Renee,” she says, pointing across the yard at a forty-some-odd woman screaming her face off, a balding guy holding her back. Then, as somebody launches himself out of Fifteen’s engine, “And that’s Jim. Where’s Bryan?
Renee
!” Addie hollers, as she and Buono yank at the crosslays. “Where’s Bry?”

“I can’t find him!” Jim’s ex-wife yells back. She and her new husband are pristine, no soot or scorch marks. They must have got out early. “I think he’s—”

Eli doesn’t need to hear the rest of her sentence. He swears, turning on the water and the crosslays all at once with one fierce wrench, then turns his attention to the sprinting figure. “Jim!” he screams into his helmet mic, even though he knows Fifteen and Eleven are on different frequencies. “Wait!”

But Jim is already disappearing through the open front door. The parlor windows are lit up from inside by a terrible wall of flame, so bright it’s casting a glow down onto the grass outside. For just a second, it feels like everything stops.

“Did—did he have an O-mask on?” Jill asks into the open mic. No one answers.

Eli recovers first, yelling at a frozen Sharpie to run a line to the hydrant. Brooks sticks his head into the truck cabin and gets on the radio to Fifteen’s driver, wrangling everyone onto the same channel. The first thing Eli hears when he switches frequencies is the guys from Fifteen yelling and yelling for Jim to come back. They don’t stop until their captain tells them to keep the comm lines clear. Eli swallows, forcing himself to concentrate on the gauges.

Five minutes later the blaze isn’t anywhere near controlled yet, even with seven hoses and over 1,000 gallons of water on it. Eli switches over to the auxiliary supply just as Fifteen switches to foam. Nothing seems to make a difference. Which is why he’s so surprised to find Addie strapping on a respirator when Brooks calls him down to man an extra hose.

“What the hell are you doing?” he demands, the taste of his heart like a handful of pennies pulsing at the back of his throat. To Brooks: “What’s she doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?” Addie asks him. She’s got her helmet off to fit the mask on, dark hair wisping out of its practical braid and a look on her face like she’s wasting his time. Fuck, he loves her so much.

He—oh,
God
.

“Are you insane?” he asks, to cover—he can’t think about that now, he can’t. “No way is it clear to go in there. Cap—”

“Jim’s in there alone,” Addie interrupts. “Who knows where Bry is—”

“So send somebody else,” Eli blurts. He wants to grab her and shake her until she listens—although realistically that would probably be forever, all the stunts he’s pulled so far this summer. Well, tough. He’ll play fast and loose with his own life, maybe, but not hers. Never hers. He
loves
her.
Fuck
. “Send somebody else,” he repeats, not caring if the captain hears.

Addie cares though. “I
know
you didn’t just say that to me,” she tells him, fitting the mask over her face with finality. Just like that, she’s gone. Eli watches her head through the front door, hands open and closing helplessly.

“What the fuck?” he asks Brooks when she’s out of sight. He forgets to push transmit on his radio and has to repeat himself, fingers slick against the button. He forgot his Kevlar gloves up in the truck. “Let Fifteen send someone in!” he adds. “Jim is their guy!”

Even through the helmet visor, Brooks’s stare is like a slap. “O’Neill is a firefighter, Grant,” he says crisply. “We don’t distinguish. Now pick up a goddamn hose.”

They call that
pulling the goalie
, getting the driver down off the roof. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good sign.

“Mother
fucker
,” Eli swears, picking up Addie’s hose and aiming it toward the upper level. The paramedics are arriving now, unloading their gurneys to wait by the curb. Eli doesn’t like the look of those empty stretchers, like coffins lined up in a row. He glues his eyes to the front door and prays.

Five minutes later, Addie reappears like Eli’s own personal miracle, half-dragging half-carrying Jim. The EMTs kick into gear immediately, sprinting across the lawn with their equipment. Jim’s entire face is blackened, soot or burns or both. Eli nearly drops his hose in relief.

But, “Where’s Bry?” Renee screams, tearing free of her new husband. “Jim, where is Bryan?”

Addie pulls her mask off. Her face is pink with heat, a solid brick red Eli associates with orgasm number two. Jesus God, he loves her. “Haven’t seen him yet,” she pants. Renee starts screeching, and Addie holds up a hand. “I’m going back in, okay? I’m gonna go back in.”

“You’re
what
?” Eli roars, but both his hands are on the hose and it doesn’t transmit.

What does though: the panicky look in Jim O’Neill’s eyes as they load him onto the stretcher, fighting the EMTs as they try to get an oxygen mask on over his ravaged face. At first Eli thinks he’s just delirious, heat and smoke and fear, but then he raises an arm and points and Eli realizes he’s trying to get something out.

“Grant,” Jim manages, voice wheezy and barely audible. “Grant, he’s not—”

Eli turns and looks over his shoulder, following Jim’s sight line—there’s a kid on the porch three houses down across the street, one arm wrapped around a support beam. Bryan’s far enough away that nobody noticed him in all the commotion, all haze and flame and noise—but not so far that Eli can’t recognize the transfixed, hypnotized expression on his face as he watches the house go up in front of him.

It’s the exact same expression Will used to get.

Just like that, Eli fucking
knows
.

“House is empty!” he yells into the radio—keeps on yelling like his life depends on it, because Addie’s
does
. “He’s out here, kid’s out here. Addie. Addie, do you hear me? Get out of the house.”