Tinderbox (29 page)

“He’s going to be okay. It’s a bad burn, but it’s contained to his scalp. They put
a porcine graft on it. Pig skin. In a couple of weeks, when he’s stable, they’ll replace
it with a skin graft from his buttocks. It should heal fine.”

Adam takes the napkins from Talis. Tears stream down his cheeks, falling unheeded
on the table.

“Your mom’s burn is less severe, but she inhaled a lot of smoke so they have to keep
her on close watch.”

Adam blows his nose. “It’s my fault. I left him to go to the store. I thought it would
be only twenty minutes but it took longer. It took thirty minutes.”

Talis’s jaw tightens. Every time he hears this story about kids having been left,
it is always thirty minutes. The adult who was supposed to be watching the kid was
gone only thirty minutes.

“You left him alone?”

“Eva, she’s the housekeeper, she was there. And my mother was on the ground floor
seeing her patients. I thought he would be okay.”

“So you didn’t leave him alone? The housekeeper and your mother were there?”

“I went to buy these.” Adam lifts the plastic bag off the back of the chair. He hands
it to Talis.

Talis looks at the bag and the tear-streaked man. Whatever is in the bag, he knows
he doesn’t want to see it. Adam is staring at him. It reminds Talis of the way he
has seen certain patients with terrible disfigurements study his face, as though testing
their own humanity. Would he be able to look at the horror they’ve become and still
see them as human?

Talis pulls one of the magazines partway out of the bag. On the cover, an Oriental
woman with her naked butt stuck up in the air is being led on a pearl leash by a black
man in a leather thong. “Christ, man, are you crazy?” Talis stuffs the magazine back
in the bag. Adam stares at the remains of the pound cake.

“You left your kid to go buy porn?”

Adam nods. Talis’s hands have formed fists, his thoughts sirening:
Break the fucking pervert’s nose, break the fucking pervert’s nose
. As a kid, he’d been on a hair trigger. One word about his mother, Dot—the town widow,
too comfortable, some thought, from the insurance money she got after her smoke jumper
husband disappeared packing out from a fire west of Yellowstone, too popular with
the married men—and his fists would rise.

Talis stands. He ties the plastic bag shut and picks up the tray filled now with their
debris. He drops the plastic bag into the garbage can and dumps the trash on top.

5

At five, Myra wakes. Caro is sleeping in the chair beside her with a blanket pulled
to her chin. Adam. Where is Adam? Then she remembers that he arrived while she was
being lifted into the ambulance.

Her throat aches from the tube. Her chest feels tight. Her abdomen is burning. She
pushes the buzzer.

A Filipino nurse comes. Myra pantomimes for pencil and paper. The nurse leaves, then
returns with a small pad and a pen.

“My grandson,” Myra writes. “How is he?”

“You want to see your grandson? No children are allowed on this floor.”

Myra shakes her head. She takes the pen and adds. “He’s here.”

“Your grandson is here. He’s a patient here?”

Myra nods. She writes
Omar Mendelsohn
on the paper.

A pleased look, as though she has figured out a charades clue, forms on the nurse’s
face. “I’ll call.”

Caro sits up as the nurse leaves. “How are you feeling?” she asks her mother.

Myra moves her hands in a wave motion.
Mezzo. Mezzo
. She points to the pen and paper the nurse put on the bedside stand.

Caro stands to get them. In her haste to get to the hospital, she’d grabbed without
looking an old pair of jeans from before she’d lost weight. Now she has to hold them
up. She hands her mother the pen and paper, then drags her chair next to the bed.

Her mother writes something, then sinks back on her pillows. She turns the pad so
Caro can read it.

“Eva?”

6

When Rachida wakes, Omar is still sleeping. The oxygen mask has been removed. With
the white gauze wrapped round his head, he looks like a small Sikh.

She does not want to think about what she knows is under that gauze: the skin burned
to a pasty white or a leathery gray, the pig skin placed on top. The skin graft that
will follow. Then the series of operations, perhaps years from now, to replace the
hairless grafted skin with a skin flap created by an inflatable balloon from the adjacent
scalp that will hopefully allow for hair growth.

It could have been worse. It could have been much worse. As a dermatology resident,
she saw children whose hands had been charred to stumps, whose lips no longer existed.
She saw legs so badly burned, amputations were required. Watching her drugged, sleeping
son, she thanks the God in whom she has never believed. She vows that if Omar is okay,
she will give up Layla and her button nipples. She will eat her tongue before saying
a sharp word to Adam again. She will take care of her mother, let her come live with
them if she wants, or visit for however long she wants. Take her shopping at every
outlet she can find. Then she closes her eyes and silently cries because she cannot
believe in a God who will bargain with her.

7

Caro tightens her pants with the safety pin one of the nurses has given her and goes
to see Omar, asleep, with Rachida holding his hand, and then on to find Adam, seated
in the lobby staring at the morning talk shows. After promising her brother—
Cross my heart, hope to die
, she says in their oath from childhood—that no one is too scary, Caro leads him first
to their mother, groggy from having been sedated again, and then to Omar, still sleeping,
where she leaves Adam while Rachida goes to see Myra and she goes to look for Eva.

She takes a cab to her mother’s house. Strips of yellow plastic printed with
DO NOT ENTER
are strung across the walkway to her mother’s office and the steps that lead to the
parlor level door.

Caro studies the house. The windows on the second and third floors are boarded up.
The glass has been swept from the sidewalk, but the steps are littered with shards.
The stench of wet burned wood and smoke permeates the air.

A man comes out of the brownstone across the street. He asks about Omar and her mother,
tells her that he carried Omar into his apartment and held his head under cold running
water until the ambulance arrived. No one had realized that her mother was also injured.

“She was so brave, your mother. A fireman had to restrain her from going back in to
look for your brother. That’s when she passed out. She came to for a few minutes while
they were lifting her into the ambulance, and we dragged your brother over to her
so she’d see that he was okay.”

“Did anyone see the housekeeper, Eva? A young woman from Peru?”

The man shakes his head. “The firefighters went in to check for other people, but
no one else was inside. We were all here on the street for over an hour. I never saw
her.”

“Could I borrow a piece of paper and a stapler? I’d like to leave her a note.” When
the neighbor returns, she writes:
Eva, I hope you are okay. Please call me on my cell.
She adds her cell phone number, then staples the folded paper with Eva’s name on
the outside to the yellow police tape.

She walks to the synagogue where her mother has told her Eva attends services. The
sanctuary is empty except for a man sweeping between the pews. No one has been here
today, he says, other than the rabbi and the Misters Finkelstein and Mandelbaum, who
come together every morning.

At home, she brushes her teeth and washes her face. Her mother gave her the name of
her insurance broker and the number for her colleague Jim Meyers, who she wants to
call her patients. Caro sits down at her desk with a pad of paper. She writes the
two names at the top of the page and underlines them both. Then she calls her father.

8

As far as Talis can tell, the family is pretty shaky. When he returns from sign-off
rounds to check on Omar a last time before he goes home, Carol, the day nurse, tells
him that the mother, the Arab woman doctor, went to visit the grandmother. The aunt
asked for a safety pin to hold up her pants and then left the father, weeping in a
corner of the room, alone with the sleeping boy. Omar woke up a few minutes ago, but
so far the father hasn’t been able to say a word to him.

“Get your skinny ass to bed,” Carol tells Talis. “You should’ve been out of here an
hour ago.”

“I’m just going to bring in some games for the kid.”

“Do you like checkers?” he asks Omar.

“Do you have chess?”

Talis rummages through the shelves of the children’s day room for a chess set. The
box is missing two black pawns. He takes two black checkers and carries the set into
Omar’s room, where he pushes back the IV rack and sets up the board on a stand that
rolls over the bed.

Omar picks up one of the checkers.

“Just pretend these are pawns.”

Even on painkillers, the kid plays a wicked game of chess. The father watches from
the corner. After Omar has beat Talis, Talis motions to Adam to come sit by the bed.
“Play with your son,” he says.

9

Except for those times when he has a foster baby with him, Talis has the post-graveyard-shift
routine down to a science. Immediately upon getting home, he pulls the blackout shades
and makes a cup of elderberry tea sweetened with milk and honey. He drinks it while
he takes a hot bath, then puts on a sleeping mask to cover his eyes. He is usually
asleep within a few minutes.

This morning, though, he feels restless. He puts on the teakettle, trying to stick
to his routine, but already he can tell that he isn’t going to fall asleep anytime
soon.

It’s that damned movie,
Red Skies of Montana
. It has set him to thinking about his father, Kip.

In his twenties, Talis had tried to locate his father. He went to Tennessee, where
Kip had grown up, to find out if anyone had heard from him. But his father’s father,
the town preacher, Howard Talis, after whom Talis had been named, had died the year
before and his grandmother was lost to Alzheimer’s, leaving Talis with only the stories
his mother had told him. How his grandfather had inculcated in his father the belief
that war, all wars, even the war against Hitler, was evil. How Kip, drafted in ’43,
registered as a conscientious objector and was assigned to the Civilian Public Service.
With so few able-bodied men to fight fires, some of the CPS guys, Kip heard, were
being used in McCall, Idaho, at the newly formed smoke jumpers’ base. He immediately
volunteered.

“Your father was just nineteen,” Talis’s mother, Dot, told him. “I think he needed
to prove that he wasn’t a conscientious objector because he was a coward. And it suited
him. He was a loner. He loved trees. He loved the animals that live in the forests.
The elk, the bears, the raccoons, the deer. And the birds. The ravens, the hoot owls,
the sparrows.”

Talis’s father had made his 238th jump into a fire near Yellowstone two days before
Talis’s first birthday. After an hour on the ground, Kip Talis told his crew leader
he wasn’t feeling well and was going to pack out. He was never seen again.

Talis’s mother refused to believe that Kip was dead. “Your father knew the forest
too well to die in a fire. He just wasn’t suited to being a family man. Too many people
around all the time.” Until Talis was ten, she waited every day for the mail, hoping
Kip would send a clue. She imagined a postcard from Alaska, the smoke jumpers’ base
at Fort Wainwright, the idea so vivid that in the fourth year Kip was gone, she called
the Wainwright base and asked for someone with a cowlick in front and a scar on his
right cheek.

On the tenth anniversary of his father’s disappearance, Talis’s mother gave away his
father’s clothes. She cut the thick red hair she’d worn in a long braid down her back
since she was a girl. The new hairdo brought out her green eyes and gave her a come-hither
look. She threw out her oxford shirts and sensible shoes and started dressing in tight
skirts. The kids in town took to calling her Red Hot Dot.

At twelve, Talis dropped his first name, the embarrassing Howard that made him think
of his Tennessee preacher grandfather. Anyone looked at him cross-eyed, he bloodied
their nose. He did bungee jumping from cliffs over the Snake River. He married his
high school sweetheart, only to learn on their honeymoon, from which he came back
alone, that she’d been fucking his best friend for the past year. He did a dozen parachute
jumps landing on a farmer’s six-hundred-acre corn field. He moved to San Francisco,
where he worked construction and discovered that if there was any genius in him, it
was in his hands. He learned to fit pipes, tape walls, pull wires, lay tiles. He learned
to do Venetian plaster and dirty washes and gold filigreeing on egg-and-dart moldings.

On his thirtieth birthday, Talis woke up with a girl whose name he couldn’t remember
on a mattress on the floor of the otherwise empty studio apartment he called home
by default. For the first time in his life, he felt old—with too little time left
to be wasting it beautifying the already sufficiently beautiful homes of people with
too many beautiful things. He enrolled in nursing school.

During his second year of nursing school, Talis did a rotation in a pediatric burn
unit. Classmates who had tolerated gunshot wounds and stillbirths threw up in the
bathroom sinks when they saw children with feet burned off, gray dead flesh. Children
who screamed when their dressings were changed. Talis, though, felt immediately that
he understood burns. The dermis needs to be prepared for its new layers in the same
way as old walls do for paint. No rushing, no cutting corners.

Although Talis would never say it out loud, he believes his work is his father’s legacy.
His father cared about the trees and the animals, large and small, on whom fire inflicts
its damage. He cares for the children whose delicate skin depraved adults, on purpose
or by neglect, have let fire destroy.