THE POWER OF THREE (10 page)

             
Yelling, screaming for him, I retreated to my bedroom again, got my window open and climbed up, still calling, hoping for a small voice to answer. I was crying hysterically, trying to find clean air to breathe. I tipped over the sill, falling to the ground outside with a hard thump that knocked the wind out of my lungs, leaving me in fetal-form, knees to chest, waiting an eternity for air so I could move, so I could run for help, so I could find someone to save my baby.

             
Across the street I flew, making for the home of my friends, the only ones who might be home and not at work on this bright, sunny week day in October. I got to the front door and lifted both my arms to bang the door and then I saw the horror of my condition, my skin falling off my arms in strips, blackened with soot.
Does not matter
, I thought, nothing matters. I hit the door with
both damaged
arms, fists balled, banging and screaming, “FIRE
FIRE
FIRE
, help me!”

             
The door flashed open and the man stood there. He glanced quickly at me--burned, skin hanging, wild in my underwear, wild in my eyes, and then he looked across the street at the burning house. He was moving like thunder, like lightning, he was moving faster than any man ever moved, with me right behind him.

             
I heard sirens and knew someone had called the fire department. Sanchez hit my front door like a bulldozer. He put his shoulder into it and all his weight, but the door held, vacuumed closed by the sucking hot fire inside. He hit it again and again and suddenly the front plate glass picture window in the front of the house exploded, spewing glass all over the front lawn,
scorching black clouds of smoke chasing it.

             
I can’t remember the sequence of events after that. An ambulance came and they had to physically force me onto a stretcher and tie me down. I saw my arms had clear plastic wrap around them, but I didn’t remember when that had been done or by whom. Later I discovered it had been Sanchez’s wife, who had she not done that, I might have lost at least one of my arms to the deep burns. “I just wrapped Saran Wrap around and around your arms, trying to keep the air from them,” she said weeks later when I asked. “The doctor said I did the right thing.”

             
I fought the ambulance attendants. Firemen were spraying my house with water and I had yet to find my son. I kept telling people to let me go, I had to get inside, I had to find Brady,
I had to save him.
 

             
My next recollection was in the emergency room with the whole place swarming with doctors and nurses. I remember how they peeled off my wrist watch, how the skin peeled down with it like a rubber glove coming off, how they pulled off my rings and the skin pulled off down my fingers.
My wedding ring, I never have taken that off
, I thought, my mind a hazardous wasteland of meaningless connections. I was crying and screaming and they were giving me shots of something to try to calm me down enough to try to dress my wounds.

             
The problem was no one was telling me where my baby was, where he had gone, why wasn’t I with him? I shouldn’t be alive. It wasn’t fair I was alive.

             
My mother-in-law was the first to show up at the hospital while I was in emergency and as soon as I saw her face, I knew it was probably a lost cause, that my son was in the inferno they’d taken me from, but I said, “Ma! Brady’s in the house! I tried to find him, I couldn’t find him!
Someone find him!”
 

             
Time sped forward again, whole pieces of life being wiped out by sorrow, by anguish, by my dying heart that longed only for forgetfulness. I came to again in a room where my husband hung over me, eyes glassy with tears. It was not a regular hospital room, but some kind of holding area where I lay alone. I tried to say something about how I’d tried, how hard I’d tried, and how much I hurt, how much my soul was teetering on the edge of giving up. I couldn’t tell him more. I couldn’t tell him how bad this thing hurt deep down inside. It was worse than dying. Dying was preferable to this depth of pain. I shut my eyes and I stopped breathing. Just like that.

             
I heard in the distance my husband call for a nurse, his voice seemingly half a hospital away.
“Help!
She stopped breathing!”

             
Then I heard a woman’s voice. I knew she was the nurse who had been called, though my eyes were closed and I saw only the dark. She said and kept saying, “Breathe! You don’t need to die yet!
Breathe,
goddamnit
!”

             
It didn’t seem to me that I should. I was becoming more and more content and at peace. I knew I was dying. I was letting myself die. It felt that was my only alternative. I was twenty-four years old and this was the end. All my pain and sorrow was moving away from me as if it were a mist, drifting away. I was in an ebony void without star or planet, a place of such ultimate peace that I felt it enveloping me and helping me forget. I wanted to forget the world. I wanted to leave the world. I knew without anyone telling me that Brady was gone. Brady died in the fire. Why should I live?
I was his mother
. He was my only child. I hadn’t kept him safe. Something happened while I slept and it was my fault, my fault, all my fault. I needed to die. I needed to die right here and now in this cold dark peaceful place and be done with the world and all the grief it was sure to bring if I continued living.

             
Then the nurse’s voice intruded even louder and I was annoyed. I was dying and that’s exactly what I wanted and what I deserved. Yet this woman wouldn’t shut up. She kept shaking
me and screaming right into my ear, “Breathe!
Breathe,
goddamnit
!”

             
Isn’t that odd
, I thought.
The nurse is so frantic, she’s cursing
.
She really wants me to come back…
 

             
I sucked in air without my volition. Her voice made me do it. I was following orders even though I didn’t want to do it. I was breathing again and I opened my eyes to see a woman’s face, relief like a red flag waving in her eyes.

             
I was in the world again and damned to live.

             
Days went by. I was in a critical care burn unit under an oxygen tent. I rarely woke. I was told later that I died two or three times and was resuscitated. Smoke inhalation had done great damage and my
arms, especially the left one, was
burned terribly. I had third degree burns over a large portion of my body. Arms, hands, face, chest, maybe even my legs, I didn’t know. Even my hair had been singed down to a couple inches of length, curled like fried snakes on my head.

             
When I finally woke to myself, I knew life was so dreary that I was going to have to find some way to live through it without a road map, without a rule book. First, I had to know what happened.

             
A fire department marshal came to see me and explained. “We investigated and found the fire started near a chair that had an outlet nearby. Either the boy you were babysitting or your son turned the swivel chair around and around with the wire wrapping around the metal bottom until it shorted out. We think the older boy did it, but there’s no way to say for sure. You saved Eddie by throwing him out the window.

             
“We estimate you were in the fire for ten minutes. Most firemen without an oxygen mask would have succumbed. It’s a miracle you’re alive.

             
“You son didn’t suffer. He was found across the room sitting on the floor near the sofa. The smoke would have…”

             
I couldn’t hear any more, not another word. I had the picture that would be indelibly etched in my brain forever. “Please stop,” I begged. “No more, please…”

             
Brady had been near the sofa when I’d come to the entrance of the living room and I couldn’t reach him, why hadn’t I been given the time to reach him? Why hadn’t I woken five minutes earlier, three,
two
? Why couldn’t I have rushed through the flames and grabbed him up and rushed my baby away from danger? If I had known, if I could have seen him, I would have braved anything, any fire, any danger.

             
My visitor went away, his head hanging in
a despair
almost as deep as my own.

             
Days later too many people came to visit once I was out of ICU and in a private room. When something of this import, a tragedy of this measure, happens, your relatives come, your friends, your friends’ friends. One day a preacher came. I didn’t know him. He said he was the pastor of the church my in-laws went to. I expected the usual religious comfort a man of the church might want to give me. I was disappointed. He began saying all the wrong things.

             
“Your arm looks bad. You know, I knew someone had his arm burned that
bad
and he lost it.”

             
I looked away. I wanted to tell this horrible man to go, to leave, but my throat was filled with tears. My throat constricted, leaving me voiceless. It choked me until I could manage to swallow down all the pain.

             
The pastor went on, compounding his errors. “I heard you’re a smoker. They found your cigarette lighter on the floor where you’d been reading a book. Maybe if you had…”

             
I turned to him, my anger overriding grief. “They didn’t start the fire! The fire marshal said it was caused by an electrical short. Now you get out of here. You get out of my room and
don’t you EVER COME BACK! What kind of a bastard, are you?”

             
The man
back-pedalled
to the door and disappeared, leaving me weeping. I already had my guilt and it was boulder-sized, it was the size of a mountain, it was really as large as the world. I didn’t need more guilt to shoulder. If I had one ounce more I would stop breathing again, I would just close my eyes, tune out reality, and go back into that pleasant nowhere of the void.

             
People came and went, some helping, some not. They held a funeral for Brady without me because I couldn’t be released from the hospital yet. I was shown pictures of the little white casket in the church. I was shown clippings from the newspaper showing the house with windows broken, soot streaked all around the frames, soot lines reaching to the roof, half the roof collapsed. In the yard lay a tricycle lying on its side. Brady’s toy, a forlorn thing, spoke silent volumes of what had happened at this place.

             
There was no going back to the house. It was destroyed, the fire eating up half of it and the floors falling through to the basement. The finance company let us sign off the mortgage. They knew what had happened, what terrible thing we had survived. It had been in all the newspapers.

             
People stayed with me every hour at the new house we had rented--my brother, my female neighbor from across the street whose husband had tried, even with his life, to save my baby. I was fed Valium and moved in a medicated daze. Even when Mrs. Sanchez tried to brush my burned hair and couldn’t get a brush through it, even when she began crying, I couldn’t feel very much.

             
Then suddenly one day no one was there. My husband had to work, my woman friend wasn’t there that day, and my brother had to return to college in New York.

             
Alone I woke and alone I lay listening to a baby’s footfalls as they rolled across the wood floor somewhere in the house.
Pat…pat…pat.
A pause.
Pat…pat…
I got up, searching, forgetting everything for a few minutes, forgetting my baby had died and was not running through the house. I called out, “Brady? Where are you?”

             
I got to the living room of the house before I recalled he was dead, my baby was dead. He would not run again. If I hunted for him forever, across every floor in every room of every house, I’d never find him.

             
I fell to my knees crying harder than I had ever cried before, harder than anyone can cry before it kills her. I cried out to heaven asking why this had happened, why had my baby been taken, why hadn’t I woken up sooner, how was I going to live, how…was…I…going…to…live…?

             
#

             
Apparently I was going to live in a daydream. Brady came to me weeks later. Again I was alone in the rental house, packing. I had talked my husband into taking us from this city where all the memories resided. We would move South, down to Florida, and I wouldn’t have to see the streets where I’d walked with my son, the park where I took him to play, the stores and restaurants where we’d eaten. He would sit in his high chair at our favorite café and bang the tray saying, “Eat! Eat!” Everywhere I looked he was there.
The feeling of him.
The memories of him.