“If people are going to change so much,” Louisa said, “then we shouldn’t be able to remember them as they were. It’s too awful.” She got her things and went to the front door. It all seemed like labor and William suddenly felt that he, too, was moving with difficulty.
William called Wallace. He needed to arrange a time to pick up some paperwork from him out at the site. “Haven’t seen you in a little while,” Wallace had said on the phone, sounding a little forlorn. He told William he had to go survey a new site at some point, but that he’d leave the papers for him in the command center if he wasn’t around when William got there.
It was time to walk the dog, who wasn’t in the yard or in the kitchen or in the bedroom. William tried the garage, but no luck there either. Out of the narrow window facing the street he saw a shape flash by, and then another. Each darkened the window for only a fraction of a second, and the series of them signaled like a code. He opened the door and saw that it was a pack of boys on bicycles, racing and shouting each other’s names. “Your mother,” one of them said, laughing. Across the street, Emma and Stevie were getting into their car. William waved and Stevie nodded in return. His face was set, not exactly grimly, and he had a zippered duffel slung over his shoulder. He pointed at Emma and said something to her, though the words didn’t carry to William. They backed their car out and drove up the street. Was it the baby already?
William went back inside. “Blondie,” he said, louder this time. No claws scratched on door. No tags jingled on collar. He called Louisa but she still didn’t pick up. “Do you have the dog with you?” he said. “Call me.” That’s when he thought to go out in front and check on the gate, which he found slightly ajar, wide enough to fit his entire forearm.
William started off down the street, whistling sharply for the dog. He knocked on neighbors’ doors, but two houses in a row were empty, and at the third Cassandra Kenner answered, wearing an extra-large men’s T-shirt and possibly nothing else. William asked after Blondie, received an invitation inside to call the neighbors, declined politely, and got out of there quick. He hopped into his car and looped through the neighborhood, up Albert and down Briar, up Pence and down Garth.
On Elster Street a dog idled against the flat wall of a hedge, but when he got closer he saw that it was a dark brown shepherd at least a third heavier than Blondie. Hinton: nothing. Cedar: no dogs, but a pair of cats and a little girl presiding over them in what looked like an extremely important meeting. Then, on Fallows, he saw Blondie crouched beneath a tree, nosing in a patch of high grass. He pulled to the side of the road. “Hey,” he said. “Come here.” She barked but stayed where she was. William got out of the car. Blondie had clawed into the under-soil; ants fled over her paws. “They might think you’re their god,” William said. He tugged the god by the collar, pushed her into the back seat, and sped up Fallows to Kenmore, and then Kenmore to Harrow.
When William pulled up to the house, he noticed that the deck was done. The finish had dried. It was beautiful, the color of dark beer. Wallace’s truck was gone, so he walked to the small office; the lien waiver was folded up inside an envelope and centered on the desk. He turned back around just in time to see Blondie leap from the car and sprint toward the edge of the lot, where the land was soft from recent rains. “Hey,” William said. “Come back here.” He sprinted after the dog. It felt good to run, and particularly good to be running after something. He caught Blondie, or she let herself be caught, and he led her back along the dry high grass that led up toward the hillock. When his phone rang, he reached for it with his free hand, which meant going across his body. His next step was wrong. He did not fall, but he stumbled, and Blondie tore free and went down into the thick bluish mud up to her hocks. “Goddamn it,” he said into the phone.
“What?” Louisa said.
“Wait,” he said. “Hold on.” He got the dog by the scruff and dragged her toward him.
“I can’t really hear you.”
“Where are you?” he said. “I’m out looking for you.”
“For me? What about Blondie?”
“I have her.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, you should come looking for me. Soon.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“William,” she said. He hoped this was not her answer. Then the connection went to pieces and he could hear only a few stray words, “me” and “why” and “get.”
“Where are you?” he said again.
“I’m at the coffee shop, on a bench outside. I’ll wait for you here.” Her voice slightly trembled.
The dog was matted with mud and William had no time to wash her and he wasn’t about to let her back into his car like that. He led Blondie out to the doghouse behind the office, clipped the leash to the metal cleat, and wrapped it until it was short enough to keep her close to the crate. He found a dish in Wallace’s office, filled it with water from a bottle in the fridge, and set it beside her. “Good girl,” he said, hoping the dog would believe him. “Back as soon as I can.”
He went around the back way to the car; from behind the deck, the frame slanted down from left to right. Blondie barked hoarsely, a glimpse of her head protruding above the edge of the desk.
Louisa wasn’t at the coffee shop, though Gloria Fitch was. “No,” Gloria said. “I haven’t seen her. If I had, I would have asked her to stop me from beating that kid who made me the wrong drink.” She sipped it happily. “Hey,” she said. “Did you hear? Emma Wheeler went into labor.” William nodded and said he’d seen her and Stevie driving off to the hospital. “Can you imagine?” Gloria said. “When will people learn? A kid seems fun when you’re making it, but then…” She threw a hand up.
William called Louisa. No answer. He drove slowly home through the hardening dark. She wasn’t there either. Inside he stood in front of the television, watching baseball. He made himself a sandwich and ate just half indifferently. He switched channels and caught a few muted minutes of the movie about the aging cowboy trying to connect with his daughter. He dozed off and woke and saw that two more hours had passed without any sign of Louisa, and then he really started to worry. When the home phone rang at eleven, he picked it up and said, “Where are you?” But it wasn’t Louisa. “Someone from the crew just called me from the lot,” Wallace said. “You’d better get over there now.” His tone had no give in it.
Ennis, Gerrold, Oliva, Finster, Deacon: William was crossing roads so fast they began to blur together, and then he was racing down a long straightaway, and then he was swinging onto Harrow. What he saw in the distance put a fist around his heart. The house was burning.
Men walked around the edge of the lot, keeping an almost respectful distance from the cauldron of orange and white that beat like a heart in the rib cage of the house. They were heavy in slick yellow, with enormous black stripes stretching across the middle of their uniforms. There were eight men on the perimeter, and two had hoses, and there were four more who stood back slightly from the burning frame, and there were two more even farther back pressing buttons on their walkie-talkies and speaking numbers. William looked around, at the ghost of the frame of the house, at the lumber charred and at points eaten fully through, and he was not willing to believe anything he saw until he saw Louisa sitting on the hood of a car across the lot. She was wrapped in a blanket but still shivering, and a fireman was on one side of her and a policeman was on the other, and there was a siren just behind her that gave off red light and then blue light, echoing the two men.
The heart beating in the rib cage of the house slowed and everything else did, too. A man on William’s left said that for a few weeks there he thought he’d never see another fire, not after Lareaux was arrested, and that in some strange way he welcomed this one, though he felt bad for the poor sap whose house was coming down. The poor sap made his way to his wife. When he reached her she did not cry or even blink, just repeated his name as if casting a spell. “William,” she said. “William, William.” He brought his face close to hers, tried to smell the skin beneath the soot and smoke, failed. There were bandages across the tops of her thighs and some kind of foil pack cinched to one calf.