Call if You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose Page 6

  But—and this is the beginning of the hard part—when we reached our neighborhood, the street was blocked off by two police cars. The lights on top of the cars revolved back and forth. Other cars, curious motorists, had stopped, and people had come out of their houses. Most of the people were dressed up and wearing topcoats, but there were a few people in nightclothes wearing heavy coats that they’d obviously put on in a hurry. Two fire engines were parked down the street. One of them sat in our front yard, and the other was in Mary Rice’s driveway.

  I gave the officer my name and said that we lived there, where the big truck was parked—“They’re in front of our house!” Dotty screamed—and the officer said we should park our car.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “I guess one of those space heaters caught on fire. That’s what somebody said, anyway. A couple of kids were in there. Three kids, counting the baby-sitter. She got out. The kids didn’t make it, I don’t guess. Smoke inhalation.”

  We started walking down the street toward our house. Dotty walked close to me and held my arm. “Oh my God,” she said.

  Up close to Mary Rice’s house, under the lights thrown up by the fire trucks, I could see a man standing on the roof holding a fire hose. But only a trickle of water came out of it now. The bedroom window was broken out, and in the bedroom I could see a man moving around in the room carrying something that could have been an ax. Then a man walked out the front door with something in his arms, and I saw it was those kids’ dog. And I felt terrible then.

  A mobile TV unit from one of the local stations was there, and a man was operating a camera that he held over his shoulder. Neighbors huddled around. The engines in the trucks were running, and now and then voices came over speakers from inside the trucks. But none of the people watching were saying anything. I looked at them, and then I recognized Rosemary, who was standing with her mother and father with her mouth open. Then they brought the children down on stretchers, the firemen, big fellows wearing boots and coats and hats, men who looked indestructible and as if they could live another hundred years. They came outside, one on either end of the stretchers, carrying the children.

  “Oh no,” said the people who stood watching. And then again, “Oh no. No,” someone cried.

  They laid the stretchers on the ground. A man in a suit and wool cap stepped up and listened with a stethoscope for a heartbeat on each of the children, and then nodded to the ambulance attendants, who stepped forward to pick up the stretchers.

  At that moment a little car drove up and Mary Rice jumped out of the passenger side. She ran toward the men who were about to put the stretchers into the ambulance. “Put them down!” she yelled. “Put them down!”

  And the attendants stopped what they were doing and put the stretchers down and then stood back. Mary Rice stood over her children and howled—yes, there’s no other word. People stepped back and then they moved forward again as she dropped to her knees in the snow beside the stretchers and put her hands on the face of one child and then the other.

  The man in the suit with the stethoscope stepped forward and kneeled beside Mary Rice. Another man—it might have been the fire chief or else the assistant fire chief—signaled the attendants and then stepped up to Mary Rice and helped her up and put his arm around her shoulders. The man in the suit stood on the other side of her, but he didn’t touch her. The person who’d driven her home now walked up close to see what was going on, but he was only a scared-looking kid, a busboy or a dishwasher. He had no right to be there to witness Mary Rice’s grief and he knew it. He stood back away from people, keeping his eyes on the stretchers as the men put them into the back of the ambulance.

  “No!” Mary Rice said and jumped toward the back of the ambulance as the stretchers were being put in.

  I went up to her then—no one else was doing anything—and took her arm and said, “Mary, Mary Rice.”

  She whirled on me and said, “I don’t know you, what do you want?” She brought her hand back and slapped me in the face. Then she got into the ambulance along with the attendants, and the ambulance moved down the street, sliding, its siren going off, as the people got out of the way.

  I slept badly that night. And Dotty groaned in her sleep and turned again and again. I knew she was dreaming that she was somewhere far away from me all night. The next morning, I didn’t ask her what she’d dreamed, and she didn’t volunteer anything. But when I went in with her juice and coffee, she had her notebook on her lap along with a pen. She closed the pen up in the notebook and looked at me.

  “What’s happening next door?” she asked me.

  “Nothing,” I said. “The house is dark. There are tire marks all over the snow. The children’s bedroom window is broken out. That’s all. Nothing else. Except for that, the bedroom window, you wouldn’t know there’d been a fire. You wouldn’t know two children had died.”

  “That poor woman,” Dotty said. “God, that poor, unfortunate woman. God help her. And us, too.”

  From time to time that morning people in cars drove by slowly and looked at her house. Or else people came up to the front of the house, looked at the window, looked at how the snow had been churned up in front of the house, and then went on again. Toward noon I was looking out the window when a station wagon drove up and parked. Mary Rice and her former husband, the children’s father, got out and went toward the house. They moved slowly, and the man took her arm as they went up the steps. The porch door stood open from the night before. She went inside first. Then he went in.

  That night on the local news we saw the whole thing going on again. “I can’t watch this,” Dotty said, but she watched anyway, just like I did. The film showed Mary Rice’s house and a man on the roof with a hose spraying water down through the broken window. Then the children were shown being carried out, and again we watched Mary Rice dropping to her knees. Then, as the stretchers are being put into the ambulance, Mary Rice whirls on somebody and screams, “What do you want?”

  At noon the next day the station wagon drove up in front of the house. As soon as it was parked, before the man could even turn off the engine, Mary Rice came down the steps. The man got out of the car, said “Hello, Mary,” and opened the passenger’s door for her. Then they went off to the funeral.

  He stayed four nights after the funeral, and then the next morning when I got up, early as always, the station wagon was gone and I knew he’d left sometime in the night.

  That morning Dotty told me about a dream she’d had. She was in a house in the country and a white horse came up and looked in through the window at her. Then she woke up.

  “I want to do something to express our sorrow,” Dotty said. “I want to have her over for dinner, maybe.”

  But the days passed and we didn’t do anything, Dotty or I, about having her over. Mary Rice went back to work, only now she worked days, in an office, and I saw her leave the house in the morning and return home a little after five. The lights would go out over there around ten at night. The shade in the children’s room was always pulled, and I imagined, though I didn’t know, that the door was closed.

  Toward the end of March, I went outside one Saturday to take down the storm windows. I heard a noise and looked and I saw Mary Rice trying to spade some dirt, to turn over some ground behind her house. She was wearing slacks, a sweater, and a summer hat. “Hello there,” I said.

  “Hello,” she said. “I guess I’m rushing things. But I have all this time on my hands, you see, and—well, this is the time of year it says on the package.” She took a packet of seeds out of her pocket. “My kids went around the neighborhood last year selling seeds. I was cleaning out drawers and found some of these packages.”

  I didn’t mention the seed packets I had in my own kitchen drawer. “My wife and I have been wanting to ask you over for dinner for a long time,” I said. “Will you come some night? Could you come tonight, if you’re free?”

  “I guess I could do that. Yes. But I don’t even know yo
ur name. Or your wife’s.”

  I told her and then I said, “Is six o’clock a good time?”

  “When? Oh, yes. Six o’clock is fine.” She put her hand on the spade and pushed down. “I’ll just go ahead and plant these seeds. I’ll come over at six. Thank you.”

  I went back into the house to tell Dotty about dinner. I took down the plates and got out the silverware. The next time I looked out, Mary Rice had gone in from her garden.

  Vandals

  Carol and Robert Norris were old friends of Nick’s wife, Joanne. They’d known her for years, long before Nick met her. They’d known her since back when she’d been married to Bill Daly. In those days, the four of them—Carol and Robert, Joanne and Bill—were newlyweds and graduate students in the university art department. They lived in the same house, a big house on Seattle’s Capitol Hill, where they shared the rent, and a bathroom. They took many of their meals together and sat up late talking and drinking wine. They handed the work they’d done around to each other for criticism and inspection. They even, in the last year they shared the house together—before Nick appeared on the scene—bought an inexpensive little sailboat together that they used during the summer months on Lake Washington. “Good times and bad, high times and low,” Robert said, for the second time that morning, laughing and looking around the table at the faces of the others.

  It was Sunday morning, and they were sitting around the table in Nick and Joanne’s kitchen in Aberdeen, eating smoked salmon, scrambled eggs, and cream cheese on bagels. It was salmon that Nick had caught the summer before and then had arranged to have vacuum packed. He’d put the salmon in the freezer. He liked it that Joanne told Carol and Robert that he’d caught the fish himself. She even knew—or claimed to know—how much the fish had weighed. “This one weighed sixteen pounds,” she said, and Nick laughed, pleased. Nick had taken the fish out of the freezer the night before, after Carol had called and talked to Joanne and said she and Robert and their daughter, Jenny, would like to stop on their way through town.

  “Can we be excused now?” Jenny said. “We want to go skateboarding.”

  “The skateboards are in the car,” Jenny’s friend, Megan, said.

  “Take your plates over to the sink,” Robert said. “And then you can go skateboarding, I guess. But don’t go far. Stay in the neighborhood,” he said. “And be careful.”

  “Is it all right?” Carol said.

  “Sure it is,” Joanne said. “It’s fine. I wish I had a skateboard. If I did, I’d join them.”

  “But mostly good times,” Robert said, going on with what he’d been saying about their student days. “Right?” he said, catching Joanne’s eye and grinning.

  Joanne nodded.

  “Those were the days, all right,” Carol said.

  Nick had the feeling that Joanne wanted to ask them something about Bill Daly. But she didn’t. She smiled, held the smile a moment too long, and then asked if anybody would like more coffee.

  “I’ll have some more, thanks,” Robert said. Carol said “Nope” and put the palm of her hand over her cup. Nick shook his head.

  “So tell me about salmon fishing,” Robert said to Nick.

  “Nothing much to tell,” Nick said. “You get up early and you go out on the water, and if the wind isn’t blowing and it doesn’t rain on you, and the fish are in and you’re rigged up properly, you might get a strike. The odds are that, if you’re lucky, you’ll land one out of every four fish that hit. Some men devote their lives to it, I guess. I fish some in the summer months, and that’s it.”

  “Do you fish out of a boat or what?” Robert said. He said this as if it was an afterthought. He wasn’t really interested, Nick felt, but thought he had to say more since he’d brought it up.

  “I have a boat,” Nick said. “It’s berthed down at the marina.”

  Robert nodded slowly. Joanne poured his coffee and Robert looked at her and grinned. “Thanks, babe,” he said.

  Nick and Joanne saw Carol and Robert every six months or so—more often than Nick would have liked, to tell the truth. It wasn’t that he disliked them; he did like them. He liked them better, in fact, than any other of Joanne’s friends he’d met. He liked Robert’s bitter sense of humor, and the way he had of telling a story, making it seem funnier, probably, than it really was. He liked Carol, too. She was a pretty, cheerful woman who still did an occasional acrylic painting—Nick and Joanne had hung one of her paintings, a gift, on their bedroom wall. Carol had never been anything but pleasant to Nick during the times they’d been in each other’s company. But sometimes, when Robert and Joanne were reminiscing over the past, Nick would find himself looking across the room at Carol, who would hold his look, smile, and then give a little shake of her head, as if none of this talk of the past were of any consequence.

  Still, from time to time when they were all together, Nick couldn’t help feeling that an unspoken judgment was being made, and that Robert, if not Carol, still blamed him for breaking up Joanne’s marriage with Bill and ending their happy foursome.

  They saw each other in Aberdeen at least twice a year, once at the beginning of summer, and once again near the end. Robert and Carol and Jenny, their ten-year-old, made a loop through town on their way to the rain forest country of the Olympic Peninsula, heading for a lodge they knew about at a place called Agate Beach, where Jenny would hunt for agates and fill up a leather pouch with stones that she took back to Seattle for polishing.

  The three never stayed overnight with Nick and Joanne—it occurred to Nick they’d never been asked to stay, for one thing, though he was sure that Joanne would have been pleased enough to have them, if Nick suggested it. But he hadn’t. On each of their visits, they arrived in time for breakfast, or else they showed up just before lunch. Carol always called ahead to make the arrangements. They were punctual, which Nick appreciated.

  Nick liked them, but somehow he was always made uneasy in their company, too. They’d never, not once, talked about Bill Daly in Nick’s presence, or even so much as mentioned the man’s name. Nevertheless, when the four of them were together Nick was somehow made to feel that Daly was never very far from anyone’s thoughts. Nick had taken Daly’s wife away from him, and now these old friends of Daly’s were in the house of the man who’d committed that callous indiscretion, the man who’d turned all their lives upside down for a while. Wasn’t it a kind of betrayal for Robert and Carol to be friends with the man who’d done this? To actually break bread in the man’s house and see him put his arm lovingly around the shoulders of the woman who used to be the wife of the man they loved?

  “Don’t go far, honey,” Carol said to Jenny as the girls passed through the kitchen again. “We have to be leaving soon.”

  “We won’t,” Jenny said. “We’ll just skate out in front.”

  “See that you do,” Robert said. “We’ll go pretty soon, you kids.” He looked at his watch.

  The door closed behind the children, and the grownups went back to a subject they’d touched on earlier that morning—terrorism. Robert was an art teacher in one of the Seattle high schools, and Carol worked in a boutique near the Pike Place Market. Between the two of them they didn’t know anyone who was going to Europe or the Middle East that summer. In fact, several people, friends of theirs, had canceled their vacation plans to Italy and Greece.

  “See America first, is my motto,” Robert said. He went on to tell something about his mother and stepfather, who’d just come back from two weeks in Rome. Their luggage had been lost for three days—that was the first thing that’d happened. Then, the second night in Rome, walking down the Via Veneto to a restaurant not far from their hotel—the street patrolled by men in uniform, carrying machine guns—his mother had her purse snatched by a thief on a bicycle. Two days later, when they drove a rental car about thirty miles from Rome, somebody slashed a tire and stole the hood off the car while they were in a museum. ‘They didn’t take the battery or anything, you understand,” Robert said. “They
wanted the hood. Can you beat it?”

  “What’d they want with the hood?” Joanne asked.

  “Who knows?” Robert said. “But in any case, it’s getting worse for people over there—for tourists—since we bombed. What do you guys think about the bombing? I think it’s just going to make things worse for Americans. Everybody’s a target now.” Nick stirred his coffee and sipped it before saying, “I don’t know any longer. I really don’t. In my mind I keep seeing all those bodies lying in pools of blood in the airports. I just don’t know.” He stirred his coffee some more. “The guys I’ve talked to over here think that we should have dropped a few more bombs, maybe, while we were at it. I heard somebody say they should have turned the place into a parking lot, while they were at it. I don’t know what we should or shouldn’t do over there. But we had to do something, I think.”

  “Well, that’s a little severe, isn’t it?” Robert said. “A parking lot? Like, nuke the place—you know?”

  “I said I don’t know what they should have done. But some kind of response was necessary.”

  “Diplomacy,” Robert said. “Economic sanctions. Let them feel it in their pocketbooks. Then they’ll straighten up and fly right.”

  “Should I make more coffee?” Joanne said. “It won’t take a minute. Who wants some cantaloupe?” She moved her chair back and got up from the table.

  “I can’t eat another bite,” Carol said.

  “Me neither,” Robert said. “I’m fine.” He seemed to want to go on with what they were talking about, and then he stopped. “Nick, sometime I’ll come down here and go fishing with you. When’s the best time to go?”

  “Do it,” Nick said. “You’re welcome to come anytime. Come over and stay as long as you’d like. July is the best month. But August is good too. Even the first week or two of September.” He started to say something about how swell it was fishing in the evenings, when most of the boats had gone in. He started to say something about the time he’d hooked a big one in the moonlight.