The two men who’d been speaking numbers into walkie-talkies had set them down; now they were loading something into the bed of a pickup. It was a lump covered in canvas. William’s scalp pricked with fear, suddenly terrified that it was Louisa under the canvas, but Louisa was right in front of him. “Who is that?” William said, but the men couldn’t hear him, and so he ran for the pickup, shouting, or maybe he just thought he was shouting. “Wait,” he said, but the men loading the lump would not wait. The men bumped the gate of the truck and William saw a paw poking out from underneath the canvas. He turned back toward Louisa. A tear streaked her face in negative, a channel carved in the soot. William found another truck with the gate down and fell against it. Blood rushed through his head. He could not stand but he could not do anything else either. Policemen stretched tape across the front of the property. A small man in a suit spray-painted silver spots on the ground, describing a circle in three points. A rope lay like a snake in the middle of the circle, its tail indicating the blackened doghouse.
Louisa spoke William’s name again. Years before, when they had worked together at the newspaper, William had interviewed a man who had been a hero in the Second World War. He was being devoured by dementia, and all he could do was speak his late wife’s name, after which he buried his face in his hands. Louisa buried her face in her hands. The fireman helped her to her feet. The policeman helped her to his car. The pickup truck with the something in it drove away. An ember floated down from the burning house like an unused wish.
For the first time in months, William could stand at the edge of the lot, facing away from the street, and see the entire sky, a gluttony of blue. He walked around the space where the house had almost been, just as the men in yellow with black stripes had done the night before. The left half of the deck was still intact; the right, where waterproofing had started, was gone, and a light rain pattered onto the smoldering lumber, sending up strands of steam. Wallace arrived soon after William and stood next to his truck, leaning on it, unwilling even to take a single step forward. “I used the space under the deck to store flammable materials,” he said helplessly. “It never occurred to me that it was anything other than safe.” He started explaining what he knew about builder’s risk insurance, and how as far as he knew it covered this kind of thing, and that project disasters were not as rare as he might think, and just when William was going to say he understood, Wallace gasped and brought his hand up to his mouth. With his other hand he pointed to the charred snake of the leash in the grass. “The dog,” he said.
The hospital was only ten blocks away from their old house. If they had moved already, it would not have been convenient. William spotted Stevie and Emma’s car in the visitors’ lot and he took a space a row away. Louisa was up on nine, eyes open. “Hi,” she said. “I am so glad it’s you.”
There was an orderly in the room, a young man who identified himself as Jeffrey and extended a hand that William did not shake. Jeffrey talked like a car whose brakes had been cut. “As far as I know she has not slept yet, sir,” Jeffrey said. “She has no serious injuries but we’re going to want to keep her here under observation. And after a little while someone may want to come by and talk to her about the fire, though of course they’ll have to wait until she’s ready. She was very lucky, sir, to have gotten out the way she did, with only a few minor burns and some smoke inhalation. We’ve seen so much worse.” A phone somewhere on Jeffrey buzzed. “I have to go attend to that, sir. Will you be staying or going? Visiting hours end at eleven but immediate family is welcome at any time.”
“I’ll be right here,” William said, trying to keep his voice level but failing. He sat in the chair next to Louisa’s bed and brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. Her hands lay balled in fists on the white of the sheet. “Do you need anything?” he said, and she said that she could use a change of clothes but that she didn’t need it right away and would he stay and sit with her, and he said of course. He gently squeezed her hand and she closed her eyes but he felt her squeezing back.
Soon, there were others in the room as welclass="underline" an administrator who brought William a large plastic bag that contained Louisa’s wallet and shoes, along with some papers; a nurse, corpulent and capable, who lectured Louisa on the treatment of minor burns, first painkillers, then makeup when the skin grew back with uneven pigment; and then a young Chinese woman, Janet Chen, who identified herself as a city fire investigator. “I just need to talk to Mrs. Day for one moment,” she said, producing a clipboard. “I’ll be taking notes but the clipboard is also a recording device. Do you consent to this interview?”
Louisa nodded.
“We’ll try to keep it brief,” Janet Chen said. She pressed a button on the clipboard. “Can we consider this an official statement?” Louisa nodded again. “You’ll have to speak out loud,” Janet Chen said.
“Yes,” Louisa said.
“Why don’t you just tell me what happened,” Janet Chen said.
Louisa lifted her right hand, tugged at the tube that extended along her forearm. She closed her eyes and then opened them. “We had gotten some bad news about a friend of ours,” she said. “I went out for a drive to think about it and then I stopped to get coffee. Around four, I think, I spoke to William on the phone.” She tilted her head toward him for confirmation. “The connection was bad and I guess we got our wires crossed, except that there weren’t any wires, which was the problem. He thought I wanted him to come and find me at the coffee shop. I thought he wanted me to come meet him at the house. Just a stupid mix-up. I got out to the house and I wasn’t very happy about it.”
“About the house?” Janet Chen said.
“About the fact that William wasn’t there,” Louisa said. “I needed him there. I was in the car, getting more and more anxious, and my phone battery was run almost entirely down, and I didn’t know where he was. So I went to the deck to sit on the railing and look at the trees. I thought it would calm me down. Which is also why I was smoking.” She rubbed her fingers together to recover the memory. “I don’t do it anymore, almost ever, but I had an old pack in the glove compartment and I was smoking it. I had a few cigarettes, and then I decided it was time to go. One of the cigarettes must not have been out completely. Or maybe it was just a spark. I don’t know. Obviously I didn’t notice. I went to the car. I was getting ready to drive away when I saw the start of it in my rearview mirror. It was an orange glow, maybe yellow at the bottom.” Her tone made it sound like something beautiful.
“And what happened moving forward from that?”
The tenses seemed to throw Louisa off balance. “Next, you mean?” she said. “I got out and ran toward the house and then I ran back to the car. I drove across the street, to get farther away from it, and I called the fire department.” Her voice caught. “I didn’t have any idea that the dog was there.” She lowered her head into her hands. “She didn’t make any noise at all.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Janet Chen said. She pressed the button on the clipboard again. “I just have a paper or two for you to sign, and then we’ll be finished.”