White Picket Fences (33 page)

He saw the door in the room with the mats, and together he and Devin opened it wide. They tiptoed back to Keith’s doorway and peeked inside. Keith flicked the lighter, and the flame bounced out of it.

He watched the baby-sitter’s son touch the lighter to a cigarette he had in his mouth. Then he tossed the lighter on his bed and pushed back the curtain on his sliding door. He stepped out onto his balcony and slid the door shut, and the curtain swung back into place. Keith climbed down the balcony into the backyard. They saw him, through the fabric, jump down onto the patio.

Devin pushed the door open wide with his hand and walked into the room. They stood at Keith’s bed and looked at the lighter.

Then Devin reached down and picked it up. He fingered it. Turned it over in his hand and worked the hinged top until he opened it. He ran his thumb over the mechanism the way they saw Keith do it. It took several tries, but finally a little flame appeared, and Devin and Chase laughed. They made it work. The lid slid back and the flame vanished.

“My uncle smokes cigarettes.” Devin pointed to the pack of Marlboros that peeked out of a denim jacket slung over a chair. “He likes ’em.” Devin reached into the jacket pocket and pulled the pack out.

“Those are Keith’s,” Chase heard himself say.

“I just want to see one.” Devin pulled out a slim white cylinder and extended it to Chase. “Hold it.”

“I don’t want to.”

Devin huffed, looked around the room, and then set the cigarette down on the bed. Again he ran his thumb over the mechanism and the flame appeared. Devin held the lighter to the cigarette perched on the bed, frowning as he tried to get the right angle.

“Ow! It’s hot,” Devin said, but he kept at it.

A wisp of gray smoke began to swirl up from the cigarette. Or maybe from the bed. Or maybe both. Devin was frowning at it when they heard Alyssa crying in the other room. If Alyssa kept crying, Miss Carol would come and they would get in trouble for being in Keith’s room.

“Go back!” Devin commanded, letting the lighter snap shut and tossing it onto the bed.

“What about that?” Chase pointed to the cigarette and the plume of smoke now rising from it.

Devin picked up the cigarette and held it like a birthday candle. He blew on it and tossed it back on the bed. “I blew it out. Go! Before she comes!”

They ran back to the napping room and fell down on their mats.

“Shut up, Alyssa! Go to sleep!” Devin yelled.

Chase worried about the cigarette on the bed. What would Keith say about it when he saw it? Would he say something? What if he told Miss Carol? She’d be mad. She’d tell Chase’s parents he’d been in Keith’s room playing with cigarettes and the little silver thing with fire inside it. But maybe Keith wouldn’t tell her. Maybe she didn’t know he had those cigarettes…

The room faded then as if in fog; perhaps he really had napped for a few minutes. The next thing he knew, he was gasping for air and pennants of fire were flapping out of a square hole in the wall, reaching for Alyssa’s crib.

Fire.

Alyssa was crying. Chase couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t see. He called out for his parents, and the breath on his tongue was hot. His eyes burned and his chest hurt. He crawled to the door, but Devin climbed on top of him, kicking him in the head as he reached for the doorknob. But Chase’s body was in the way. The door wouldn’t open.

Devin started pounding on the door with his fists, yelling.

He had to get out.

Had to get out.

Alyssa.

Chase pushed Devin away and grabbed the doorknob. The door swung open, and air filled the room…

A squawk from a seagull penetrated Chase’s mind, and he awoke with a start. Sweat had beaded on his forehead and now trickled down his temples. He bolted upright, and his gaze fell on the little lamb to the left of Alyssa’s name.

The dream had been more than a dream; the dream was a door.

He hadn’t been the one to start the fire.

It wasn’t him.

He sat forward on his knees and looked in the direction the gardener had gone. But Chase was alone in that little corner of the cemetery. He didn’t know how much time had passed. He swung back around and breathed in the salted air and closed his eyes.

It wasn’t him.

Relief and sorrow washed over him in twin waves. He opened his eyes and reached for Alyssa’s name on her headstone. He ran his fingers across the etched letters.

Devin had been the one to hold the flame to the bedspread. Not him.

For several long moments, Chase knelt there on the grass, a stranger to the sensation of subtle release.

Not my fault. Not my fault.

He whispered the words, tried them on. Spoke them into the breeze that riffled through the branches above his head. Waited for them to whisk away the emptiness he still felt as he stared at Alyssa’s name.

It wasn’t his fault, but Alyssa had died anyway. He had crawled away from her, powerless to save her.

He hadn’t known a cigarette wasn’t like a candle. He hadn’t known that when you open a door, you feed the fire.

“I’m sorry, Alyssa,” he whispered.

Several minutes later he rose and began to walk back to his car. He passed a new headstone laden with fresh flowers. A long candle buried in red glass burned a plea that the departed not be forgotten. The flame swayed as if in prayer, whispering its grief in quiet, compliant meditation. A foe of no one.

Nameless.

A few minutes later he was in his car and headed south.

It took over an hour to get back to San Diego, but Chase drove unaware of passing time as he pondered the lost details that had been returned to him and the odd sensation of looseness he now felt.

He’d left the cemetery in sunlight, and now evening shadows were gathering. He was only faintly aware of the wailing of fire engines as he neared his neighborhood. The closer he got to home, the more strident the sirens became. A tiny thread of alarm wove its way across him. Chase turned onto the cross street, and immediately he could see fire engines coming from the other direction. Then he smelled the smoke. His eyes scanned the sky above him through his windshield. He turned down his own street and saw the amber glow of flames shooting out between the seams in the garage doors of his house.

The word fell from his lips in a rush of air. “Fire.”

The woodshop was on fire. And the kitchen.

Tally.

Chase punched the accelerator and pulled up in front of the house, parking half on the lawn and half off. He dashed out of his car as the fire engines screamed their way down his street. A group of neighbors stood at a safe distance and yelled at him to stay back.

“Is Tally with you? Did you see Tally come out?” he yelled to them.

“Who’s Tally?” said the neighbor from two doors down.

He couldn’t see her anywhere.

Chase sprinted to the front door and threw it open, shouting Tally’s name. Smoke and ash fogged the entry. Chase held an arm over his nose and mouth and stumbled in. Flames encircled the kitchen, and the doorway to the garage revealed an open, burning maw. Chase couldn’t see the staircase or the living room.

“Tally!” he yelled. Spreading flames flanked the hallway to the laundry room and sewing room. “Tally!”

From behind he thought he heard her voice.
The stairs? He
turned toward the sound, then moved that direction and fell onto the first step.

“Tally!”

“Chase!” her voice wafted above the roar and smoke. He crawled up two steps and felt her leg.

“The dog! I can’t find the dog,” she sputtered.

“We’ve got to get out!”

He grabbed for her hands. He felt metal and plastic and fabric. His camera and something else. He didn’t know what.

“Come on!” he yelled.

They began to crawl away, and suddenly a dash of fur and weight blew past them. Sammy was charging for the front door.

“This way!” Chase held Tally’s hand and ran for the doorway, aware that she stumbled under the weight and encumbrance of what she carried. A fireman in full gear was now silhouetted against the opening, outlining their exit.

They staggered to the door, and a team of firefighters rushed forward. One firefighter grabbed them by the shoulders and propelled them forward to the far edge of the front lawn.

“Are you hurt?” the firefighter yelled.

Chase looked at Tally.

“I’m okay,” she coughed. DVDs and a small box fell from her arms onto the grass at her feet. A few photographs fluttered out.

“We’re all right,” Chase said.

“Is there anyone else in the house?”

“No,” Tally said.

The man rushed away. Chase looked at the black cases on the lawn, the overturned box of photos, and his camera that she held to her chest.

“What’s all this?” he said.

“I had to go back for my dad’s lighter in your room. Then I saw all your movies and stuff. And then I remembered your mom had all those old family photos on that buffet table in the dining room. Then I couldn’t find the dog.” She coughed and handed him the camera.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

She nodded. “Are you?”

“Yeah. I am.”

“You came back.”

He shrugged. “I finally got what I wanted.”

She looked at him and waited.

“It wasn’t me, Tally,” he said quietly. “I didn’t start the fire that killed Alyssa. It was the other kid in the room. It wasn’t me.”

“You… you don’t seem that happy.”

He shook his head. “It doesn’t really change anything for that little girl.”

Tally shrugged. “It changes things for you, doesn’t it?”

He nodded. “Yeah. I guess.”

“And what about… Ghost?” she said.

Chase looked over his shoulder as smoke rose into the twilight sky. “I’m not sure that I believe in ghosts anymore.”

He began to tell her what happened to him at the cemetery as firefighters rushed past them into the ambitious, nameless inferno.

forty-one

S
he saw them drive up, hit a curb, and then stop the car in the middle of the street. Out spilled her aunt and uncle, and they ran under the ashy spill of a streetlight toward the house, now a smoldering dark mass flanked by spinning red, blue, and white emergency lights.

The house still stood, but the garage had disappeared into ruins, leaving the master bedroom above it to teeter on its floor joists. The front kitchen wall had morphed into a blackened skeleton, and all the downstairs windows had blown out. Glass glittered on the wet driveway. The laundry room and sewing room wall studs shone like obsidian when the firefighters’ heavy-duty flashlights roved across them.

Chase stood near the melted and distorted garage doors several yards away, talking to a policeman. Tally was on her knees in the grass, putting photographs inside a box.

Amanda and Neil rushed to her and she stood up, a pile of photos in her hands.

“Where’s Chase?” Amanda cried. Her aunt’s eyes were shining with dread.

Neil scanned the charred scene. Tally could tell when her uncle’s gaze landed on Chase, standing at the edge of the driveway, ten feet away from the start of the destruction.

“He’s there.” Neil seemed to swallow nails when he said it.

“Are you all right? What happened?” Amanda’s face shimmered in the mix of early moonlight and streetlight and strobes. Her cheeks were wet.

“I’m okay. The garage caught fire. I don’t know when. I fell asleep, and when I woke up the fire was in the kitchen. I left the door open. I…”

But Amanda was looking at Chase too and seemed not to have heard anything Tally said beyond “I’m okay.”

Tally followed their gaze and knew where their thoughts had taken them. She knew at once what Amanda and Neil were assuming. That Chase, in an act of desperation or rage, had set fire to the house.

From across the pavement Chase turned toward them, as if he’d sensed his parents were near. He began to walk toward them and Amanda rushed forward.

Amanda threw her arms around her son, her body shaking. “You’re okay, you’re okay,” she murmured through hushed sobs.

“I’m fine, Mom.”

“Chase.” Neil’s voice sounded thick with sadness, and even in the gathering blackness of night, Tally could see his anguish. “What happened?”

Before Chase could answer, the policeman Chase had been talking to took a step toward them. “Are you Mr. and Mrs. Janvier?”

“Yes.” Neil raised his head. “I’m Neil Janvier.”

“You had the woodworking equipment in the garage?”

Tally saw her uncle flinch. “I…I did. Why? What happened?”

The policeman nodded toward the garage. “Fire department
says it looks like the fire started in the garage. Along the wall shared by the kitchen.”

“But that wall is Type X drywall! It meets fire code.”

“I hear the door to the kitchen was open.”

Tally felt her face grow warm. “I forgot the door had to be kept closed!”

Amanda reached one arm out for her. “It’s okay, Tally. It’s not your fault. No one is blaming you.”

“I’m sure the fire department will tell you more,” the cop continued. “I’m just telling you what they told me. Maybe some equipment was left running?”