“Nothing,” Karla said.
“Tell me,” Christopher said. “Please.”
“See?” Karla said.
TWO
Among the many things William didn’t understand was himself. When Emma had moved to town, he had pushed a chair against the dining room wall and stared out the front window for hours, and when he saw her, it only intensified his desire to see her again. Now he never saw her and hoped he never would; only by remaining absent could she be as important to him as when she was present. One morning in the coffee shop, he thought he spotted her standing along the back wall, looking at a painting of a girl on the beach. He shut his book, stood, and left without picking up his drink from the counter, though he had already paid for it.
He achieved his aim, in part, by staying away from his house, and that meant, increasingly, visiting the site of the new house and asking Wallace questions whose answers he didn’t understand. What were his options for supporting floor joists? Did new wireless technologies mean that the electrical phase would go more quickly? “It’s almost like you have a job again,” Louisa said.
“Except that instead of getting paid, I’m the one doing the paying.”
“Six of one, half dozen of another,” she said. “But see? I was right. It’s the thing that’s keeping you sane.”
“I’m glad you think so,” he said.
Nine was too early, and even nine thirty slightly obsessive, so William showed at ten. Wallace was there, along with Hank, his architect, and two other men William could not exactly tell apart. Hank was a rockhead, six feet tall, two hundred pounds, with very few ideas but perfect certainty about how to express them. He had a hand with at least two mangled fingers, which he held up whenever he counted things, which was often. “We’ve just done sill plate anchors,” Hank said, “and now we’re putting in the soil cover.” William nodded, and Wallace told Hank to show him what he meant, and Hank smiled sharply like someone’s unkind father and spread a blueprint out on a bench. He touched one spot and then another and William nodded again, quicker this time, like he was absorbing everything, when in fact he was watching the two workmen saw boards for the deck. The sky was clear of clouds and the sun was bright and the men joked over the sounds of their work. “I can see your house from here,” one of the men said to the other. “And your wife, too. I think I see the two of you screwing in front of the window.” The other man laughed and said something William couldn’t hear.
Wallace and Hank conferred in the space above the blueprint. “It’s the vapor retarder,” Hank said. Wallace shook his head. “I’m telling you,” Wallace said. “Joints have to be lapped. I don’t even know why there’s any discussion.” Hank nodded and Wallace turned to William. “And we might backfill the retaining wall,” he said. “And Hank has some ideas about the landscaping.”
“It’s too early for that,” Hank said, shocking William by flashing a quick smile that looked a little shy.
“Or is it too late?” Wallace said. He hummed a B-movie suspense cue.
William wondered why Louisa wasn’t visiting the lot more often. “Frankly, I’m a little insulted,” he said. “Boy meets girl, girl asks for house, boy agrees to house after being unjustly accused of dragging his feet, girl doesn’t seem to care.” He shook his head slowly enough for comedy.
“Work’s been crazy,” Louisa said. “Pick a day.”
There was a calendar hanging alongside the phone, and he stabbed a finger blindly into it. “How about… today?” he said. Wallace had finished the deck at the new house, and William couldn’t wait to see it.
“As long as you drop me off at work and then pick me up. No point in taking two cars all the way out there.”
“Deal.”
Louisa was waiting outside her office, sun starting to set behind her, when William arrived. He rolled down the passenger window. “Would you like some candy?” he said.
“Only if you’re a total stranger,” she said. “It doesn’t taste as good when it comes from someone you know.” William’s laugh iced over; the joke had run away from him.
The traffic on Oswald was awful, so he cut over to Pemberton — no better — and then to Rockwood, which moved at a slightly faster creep. Cars coming the other way flowed easily through the afternoon. “There’s probably an accident,” Louisa said, pointing vaguely ahead of them, and William noticed a plume of smoke snaking over the roof of a house up on the right. “Look,” he said, and Louisa did. But it wasn’t the house: the smoke, dense and black, was coming from the discount-retail mart with the statue of a pig on a pole.
William pulled the wheel and cut across a parking lot. A fire engine was already there, and one of the firemen was fitting a hose to a hydrant. They found a spot close enough that they could hear the firefighters talking to each other and he and Louisa sat and watched the place burn. The Bond Street façade was already charred; heat had melted half the struts under the sign that overlooked Lucas Avenue. The firemen were carrying cash registers and other equipment out under the sign with the huge plastic pig. William rolled down the car window to get a better sense of things, and rolled it back up immediately when he smelled the smoke: it was chemical, acrid, unvirtuous. Then one of the retail mart’s windows blew out, and the flames went like a vine up the side of the building, and the sign, its last struts melted, gave way and crashed to the pavement. The pig, thrown free, skidded out into the center of Lucas Avenue. William inched the car forward. Heat reached them through the doors. Cold air inside the car bulged to keep it away. The pig, defenseless on the pavement now, had lost a leg and one side of its face had melted flat. Louisa took his hand and touched her knee with it, and then moved it higher up on the inside of the thigh. “There’s something about a fire,” she said, burlesquing but also really feeling it.
“Prove it,” he said. But she let his hand fall free, and by the time they made it out to the lot she was stood chastely before the house like a parishioner who had come to church at off-hours just to feel the holiness of the place. That night there was another fire. They were coming closer together now. A corner of a warehouse on the east side of town had burned, damaging the contents but harming no one. “Isn’t that right near my brother’s studio?” Louisa said, and William nodded, though he had no idea. The fire had started in a trash can. A coffee cup had been stuffed with toilet paper that was dipped in gasoline. It was significantly cruder than the others, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t connected. “Sometimes, a perpetrator will try to break his own pattern to throw us off,” the fire commissioner said. It didn’t make the six o’clock news but it led at eleven.
William expected to meet Tom at Stevie’s event, but Louisa, twisting in small silver earrings, asked if they could pick him up. “There’s something wrong with his car again,” she said, fluffing her hair and frowning.
He was standing outside already, wearing a red sport coat that came off as clownish. “Hey ho,” he said, sliding across the back seat. Something sloshed in his hand.
“Is that a beer?” William said. “In my car?”
“Life just gets better.”
“That hasn’t been my experience,” William said.
“Oh, because you have it so bad,” Louisa said.
“Mom and Dad are fighting,” Tom said, and crushed the can.
The event was in a temporarily converted garage a few blocks from Louisa’s office. A sign hanging in front said SPECIAL EVENT in red letters. William parked in the side alley and they went in through the back door. Eddie Fitch was the first to greet them, in a narrow hallway by the bathrooms. He kissed Louisa hello and shook Tom’s hand and then hung back as they went on up the hall, bugging his eyes out at William like a bad spy in a movie. “Something’s up with TenPak,” he said.