White Picket Fences (8 page)

A few years older than she, Gary was likable and witty, wore cartoon character ties every day, was recently divorced, and spent his weekends studying for a master’s in project management. As they were getting their room ready for the first day of school, Gary told her that this was his last year teaching. After twenty years in the classroom, he was ready for something new, which is why he didn’t want a permanent teaching position this school
year. She wondered if what he really wanted was to reinvent himself after his divorce, which he’d told Amanda was not his idea. She sensed a hunger for change in Gary that at odd moments of the day she envied. Amanda hadn’t worked alongside a male teacher before, and she found his presence in the room a bit disarming. Neil never shared as much in an eight-hour period as Gary often had in the three weeks since school began.

She liked Gary as a person and he was easy to talk to, but she missed Becky’s longstanding company. Especially today. It would’ve been nice to talk over her troubling weekend with a trusted friend before the first round of students came.

She let her eyes rove to the tree-shaped climbing structure in the corner that Neil had made. Pillowed niches for reading were hidden among the leafy boughs made from Bubble Wrap and green felt. The students called it the Sherwood Forest, though it was only one tree.

Neil had made it in one weekend a couple years ago, after she had described in the vaguest of terms what she had in mind. It was the envy of all the other teachers in her hallway. They said she was lucky to have such a talented husband.

She began to gently massage her temples.

Neil hadn’t wanted to talk the night before about what happened with Chase at the picnic. Not when Chase was just in the other room, he’d said. She’d persisted.

“Neil, he was
talking
to the fire!” Her low whisper was riddled with tension. They stood on opposite sides of their king-size bed at a little after ten at night.

“How do you know he was talking to the fire?” Neil’s muted voice was fringed in doubt.

“Because I saw him.”

“Well, when you went over there, did you ask him? Did you ask him if he was talking to the fire?”

“Of course not.”

“That’s my point exactly.” Neil had yanked off his Henley and tossed it toward the open laundry hamper. It landed half in and half out.

Amanda walked over to his side of the bed. “You didn’t see it. You didn’t see what I saw. He was standing at the grill, staring at the flames, and his lips were moving. It was like he was under a spell.”

“But you said you talked to him a few seconds later and he seemed fine.”

“Yes, but before that…”

“Before that he might have been practicing how to ask if he could take the car and go home. He didn’t want to come to that picnic. None of his friends were there. But you insisted that he come.”

“Please don’t change the subject and make this about me. Yes, I wanted us to go as a family. Yes, I want to do more things as a family. But this is not about that. Neil, I think he remembers.” Her voice broke.

Neil hesitated, breathed in slowly and then breathed out. “Remembers what? What could he possibly remember? He was four. What do you remember from when you were four? I don’t remember anything from when I was that age. Nobody does.”

“But traumatic events are different. I’ve read about this. A traumatic event can stay with a child.”

“Then why would he just now act like he remembers? That
fire happened thirteen years ago. Don’t you think we would’ve picked up on it before now? That he would’ve clued us in? For God’s sake, Amanda, don’t open up something that you have no right to drag out of the past. We agreed a long time ago—we made a promise—that we wouldn’t.”

“But I’m not the one dragging it out. He is!”

“You don’t know that.”

“I saw him talking to the fire!”

“You saw him standing by a gas grill and his lips were moving.”

She slumped down onto the bed. “You didn’t see it.”

Neil sat down beside her and gently put an arm around her shoulder. “Listen to me. Think about what you’re saying. There’s no way Chase could grow up remembering the fire. If he had, we would know. That child psychologist we saw back then told us what signs to look for, remember? Nightmares. Mood swings. Obstinate behavior. Remember?”

She remembered.

“Chase is a good kid on the brink of the rest of his life,” Neil continued. “We have less than a year with him and then he’s off to college. Do you really want to dredge this up right now when he’s so close to leaving his childhood behind him?”

“I’m not the one dredging it up. He—”

“He deserves for you to back off. If there’s something up with this, and I don’t think there is, we’re going to know. How could we not?”

“I just…”

“We promised we’d give him every chance to live his life like there never was a fire. We agreed that’s what we’d do. He doesn’t need to be confronted with what happened that day. Let it go
for right now. It’s the right thing to do. We’ll wait and see what happens. If there’s another thirteen-year stretch before the next momentary recall, then he’ll be thirty the next time this happens.
If
it happens.”

“Don’t you think maybe we should ask somebody about it?”

“Like who?”

“Like Penny Ryder. The school psychologist at work. I could ask her.”

Neil exhaled. “Go ahead, ask her. Tell her what you saw for ten seconds this afternoon and tell her what we’ve seen together over the past thirteen years. See what she says. But I want you to promise me—and I mean this, Amanda—I want you to promise me you’ll say nothing to Chase about this and that you won’t make an appointment for him to see someone about it. Don’t do that to him. Not unless we’re forced to.”

Several seconds passed before she said okay.

He caressed her shoulder. “I just don’t want to spoil things for him. He has his whole life ahead of him.”

She nodded. And Neil rose from the bed, walked into their master bathroom, and began to floss his teeth.

Amanda sat forward at her desk, dropped her head in her hands, and rubbed her temples. What Neil had said made sense. But if Chase truly didn’t have troubling memories of the fire, why had he stood glassy eyed at the grill, staring at the flames as if hypnotized by them?

She wished for the millionth time that she had been there that day, that she could’ve seen what Chase saw. Then she’d know.
She’d know if what happened to him could’ve stayed with him and been smoldering there in his memory all this time. If it had been her turn to pick Chase up from the baby-sitter’s that day, he wouldn’t even have been there when the fire started. But she’d been eight months pregnant with Delcey and had a doctor’s appointment that afternoon. She and Neil had traded. By the time she found out about the fire, it had already swallowed the babysitter’s house.

A hand touched her lightly on the shoulder, and Amanda jumped in her seat. She pulled her hands away from her face.

“You okay?” Gary stood over her.

She smiled awkwardly. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“I could tell.”

“I’m… I’m fine. I just have a few things on my mind. That’s all.”

Gary set his Starbucks cup onto the desk opposite hers, sat down, and switched on his computer monitor. Today he wore Marvin the Martian on his tie. “How was the funeral? Everything go okay bringing your niece here?”

“Oh yes. Everything went fine.”

“How is she?”

“What?”

“Your niece. How is she?”

“Okay, I guess. She’s quiet, a nice kid, but kind of aloof. She doesn’t want to be here.”

“And no word from your brother yet, I take it?” He reached for his coffee and took a sip.

“No.”

Gary nodded and set his cup down, laughing lightly. “I
thought maybe she was already giving you a run for your money the way you looked when I came in.”

Amanda absently put a pencil back in its holder. “I kind of wish that’s all it was.”

“Oh?”

Amanda felt her face color. She hadn’t planned on saying anything to Gary about what she saw at the church barbecue. “I don’t… It’s not something…”

“Hey, none of my business.” Gary opened his briefcase and took out a lesson planner.

“No, it’s all right. It’s just… Neil and I… I’m worried about Chase, actually.”

“He’s your oldest?”

“Yes.”

“You think he’s in trouble?”

Amanda shook her head. “No. Nothing like that. Neil and I don’t…” Her voice fell away.

“We don’t have to talk about this, Amanda. I shouldn’t have asked.” Gary opened the lesson planner and withdrew a mechanical pencil from the NBA cup on his desk.

Amanda suddenly very much wanted his opinion. Gary could be objective, even more so than Becky could’ve been. He didn’t know Chase or Neil. And he had raised two sons. He’d already shared that he had weathered a few rough times with his boys. He could tell her if she was making too much of the incident at the picnic and lose nothing by telling her.

“Actually,” she said, “I think I’d like your opinion on this. You’ve raised two sons.”

“Uh…okay. Sure.”

“Neil thinks I’m blowing this out of proportion, but I don’t think I am. I really don’t.”

Gary casually folded his arms across his chest. “Blowing what out of proportion?”

Amanda exhaled heavily. “Okay. First, no one else knows about what I’m going to tell you. It happened a long time ago when we lived in Orange County. And we just don’t talk about it.”

Gary’s facial features softened with concern. His eyes encouraged her to go on.

“When Chase was four, our baby-sitter’s son lit a cigarette in his upstairs bedroom. His room caught fire. The upstairs smoke alarm wasn’t working and the fire spread. Chase was asleep with two other children in the master bedroom. He and one of the other kids managed to crawl out into the hall, and they were rescued. But there was a baby in a crib… Nobody could get to her.”

Gary shook his head. “That’s too bad.”

“I know. It was terrible. Chase was taken to a hospital for smoke inhalation, and he was fine physically after they gave him oxygen. Neil got to him while he was still in the ER. I was pregnant with Delcey and at the doctor’s office when all this was happening. By the time I got to the hospital, the doctors were ready to send Chase home.”

“I’m glad he was okay.”

“Oh my goodness, so were we. I felt so bad for the parents of that baby. Her name was Alyssa.” She paused for a moment. Even after all these years, she still ached for the baby’s parents.

Gary looked thoughtful. “So had the baby-sitter’s kid left
the cigarette burning in his room? I mean, if he was upstairs already, why didn’t he save that little girl?”

“He told the police he was outside on the balcony with his cigarette—so his mother wouldn’t smell it—when he noticed that his curtains were on fire and he couldn’t get back in. Personally, I think he was lying. I think he fell asleep on his bed with that cigarette, his room caught fire, and he just got scared and hightailed it off his balcony. I think he wasn’t thinking about anybody but himself.”

“And where was the baby-sitter? How come she couldn’t get to her?”

“Carol was out front with two older kids, talking with the woman who lived across the street. She told the police she had taken the older kids outside so the younger ones could rest, and that she just went across the street for a few minutes so the kids could see the kittens in the woman’s garage. Carol’s next-door neighbor was the first to notice smoke and flames pouring out of the upstairs windows. By the time Carol turned around, the whole upstairs was on fire. Carol told me later she had bought the new batteries for the smoke alarms. They were sitting right there on her kitchen counter.”

“You wonder how she could forget to take care of something like that.”

“I don’t know. She was a nice person, never yelled, and Chase liked her. I liked her. She wasn’t what I would’ve called irresponsible. She was devastated.”

“No doubt.”

“Afterward, Chase kept asking about the baby. He kept asking
me where Alyssa was and telling us his clothes smelled like smoke. For days and days afterward. The neighbor who rescued him heard the baby crying. So the boys had to have heard her too.”

“What did you tell him? About the baby.”

Amanda shrugged. “What can you tell a four-year-old? We told him she was with Jesus.”

“So sad.”

“The thing is, a couple of months afterward, Chase just stopped talking about it. We thought it was a little strange, so we asked a child psychologist about it, and she told us kids that young have a different grasp of reality than adults do. She gave us a list of behaviors that would indicate Chase needed help processing what he’d been through. But he never exhibited any of those behaviors. It was like one day he just started living as if it had never happened.”

“Well, he was pretty young.”

“True. It was weird, though. After Delcey was born, he called her Alyssa a couple times, and each time he did, I didn’t know what to say. But after a while he stopped.”

Gary unfolded his arms from across his chest and reached for his cup. He took a sip and waited.

“Chase never mentioned the fire again.” Amanda gazed at the warmly hued boughs of the tree Neil had made. “Not once. We moved here when Delcey was three months old, and Chase just never brought it up again. We were sure he had forgotten it. And we were okay with that because it was such a sad day. Neil and I didn’t see any point in reminding him of what happened
to Alyssa. He’s always seemed a little cautious around fire… but no more than other kids I know. And like I said, he never mentioned the fire again, so we didn’t either.”

“I suppose I can understand that,” Gary said vaguely.

Amanda turned back to face him. “Now I’m not so sure we were right.”

“Right about what?”

She lowered her voice as if divulging a secret she didn’t want the walls to hear. “This weekend at a church picnic, I saw Chase standing in front of a barbecue grill. Flames were shooting out. It was like he was in a trance. He looked like he was talking to the fire, like he was whispering to it. He had the oddest look on his face. I swear he was having a conversation with the fire. There was nothing normal or explainable about it.”