tomorrow, a Saturday without cutoff saws or pneumatic nailers, or iced-over job sites at seven o’clock in the morning.
Sullivan stepped over me on his way out the door.
“When you get over there, keep an eye on her. No histrionics. Firemen have enough to do.”
“She won’t throw herself on the fire. Though I might if this headache gets any worse.”
“Now that you mention it, you do look like crap.”
“We’ll see you there.”
A few minutes later Amanda ran past me pulling on a gold barn jacket. I was going to offer to drive, but she beat me to her Audi and had the engine going before I reached the car door. I was glad Sullivan had left ahead of us. He didn’t like people speeding through North Sea, even on the way to personal calamity. Amanda’s jaw was set and she held the wheel with both hands as she spun the little car through the tight neighborhood turns. I held onto my internal organs.
We approached the flashing red, blue and yellow lights and the hard crackle of VHF radios. Amanda rolled down her window and the acid smell of wood smoke filled the car. The air was soaked with vapor billowing off the gushing fire hoses. Neighbors stood in tight huddles, staring intently and pointing at the burning house, their faces reflecting the strobe lights and diffused glow from the drowning fire. A Town cop stopped our car. It was Will Ervin.
“I’m the owner,” said Amanda.
“Joe told me you were coming. Park over there,” he said, but Amanda was already underway. She jammed the Audi into a slot in the underbrush and jumped out of the car. I gathered myself up to follow.
There wasn’t much to look at. The last time I dropped by, the rough plumbing and electrical work had been completed and the walls recently sheetrocked. The finish carpenters were partway through the baseboards and trim—the job I had over at Joshua Edelstein’s.
Now it was a blackened skeleton enshrouded in smoke and haze.
I think we simultaneously remembered that the kitchen cabinets had been delivered and stored in big cardboard boxes in the garage. We moved closer and saw the garage was now a mound of charred timbers, with only the south gable standing like a tombstone. I heard Amanda choke in a breath. I thought she was about to burst into tears, but she burst into something else.
“Motherfucking sonofabitch,” she yelled loud enough to provoke a firefighter to spin around.
“What the fuck happened?” she asked him.
“House caught on fire,” he yelled, smirking.
“No shit, genius,” she yelled back.
I put my hand on her arm, but she shook it off.
“Hey, they’re on your side.”
She spun around and pushed me with both hands.
“Nobody’s on my side,” she said through clenched teeth. “Never.”
“Christ, Amanda, what’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, but she was stalking off toward the other end of the house. Sullivan’s caution was apparently warranted. I wondered how he knew. Prescience instilled by twenty years in a patrol car. I looked for him, but he wasn’t in sight. I followed Amanda instead, at a safe distance.
I caught up to her talking to another firefighter, an officer in a yellow slicker and white officer’s hat with a black brim and gold emblem. He held a walkie-talkie and nodded while he listened to Amanda. As I approached I could hear him say, “Won’t know till we can get the investigators in from the County. But it looks funny to me.”
“What’s funny?” she asked.
“Too uniform. And too hot. Without furnishings or carpets, fires in new construction don’t spread so easily. Tend to be confined to one area. Not involve the whole house. Who are you?” he asked me.
“I’m with her. Nominally.”
This close in, the smell of the fire was sweeter, stickier. I assumed because of plastic things like PVC pipes, wiring insulation and vapor barriers. I heard a crash and turned to see Amanda kicking over a stand the carpenters were using to support a cutoff saw. The fire official looked at me like it was my fault.
“Maybe you should get her behind the yellow line,” he said to me.
“Sure, just lend me your gun.”
“We’re not armed.”
Amanda was standing over the aluminum stand as if daring it to get back up and fight. I walked behind her and grabbed her around the waist with my right arm. There wasn’t a lot of meat on her, but she was surprisingly strong, in a rangy, slippery way. I still hadn’t fully mastered my balance, so I had to dig deep to carry her all the way to the yellow tape, where I was grateful to see Sullivan standing with a walkie-talkie up to his face.
I put Amanda back on the ground and held the tape up for her. She ducked under without looking at me.
“The County boys are on their way,” Sullivan said to me. “None too happy about it. Dickheads.”
“Isn’t this what they do?”
“They like it better when the fire’s out.”
“Oughta strike while the iron’s hot,” I said.
“That’s my thought.”
I’d lost track of Amanda again, but then saw her leaning on her car, both hands laid flat on the hood. I walked over to her and wrapped both arms around her waist. I put my lips next to her ear.
“You got insurance,” I whispered. “The foundation’s still there. Start over tomorrow. Make an even better house.”
“Fuck the house,” she whispered back. “It’s the principle.”
“Okay, whatever that means.”
“This project was important to me. Something they couldn’t take away from me. That’s the principle. My life is the principle.”
“Who’s they?” I asked.
I stepped a few paces back from her face so I could better see her eyes. They were unflinching.
“You said, ‘Something they couldn’t take away from me.’ Who’s they? Milhouser?”
She just stared at me, her face now an alien thing.
“That’s ridiculous,” she said.
“Then what’s with all the angst? It’s bad, but it’s not the end of anything. You buck up and do it again. Get back on the horse.”
I tried to hold her, but she wiggled out of my grasp, then came back at me, pushing her chest into mine the way kids used to do on the playground when trying to start a fight. I did the opposite of what I used to do in those situations and dropped my hands to my sides.
“Yeah, like you’re the expert on that,” she said, an inch from my face. “Nice job of bucking up. I should be taking lessons from you.”
She had a valid point. I’d made a pretty spectacular hash of my life, and whatever repair I’d managed was a long time coming. So bucking up wasn’t a specialty of mine. I was much better at resignation and denial. And better yet at avoiding emotional conflict.
Amanda and I had built our relationship out of spare parts, and not all of them fit so well together. It’s unfashionable to find individual fault for romantic shortfalls, but I knew most of ours were mine. But those places where we’d found common ground were more precious to me than I fully understood before that night under the glow of her burning aspirations. I’d lived most of my life in other places, filled with cruel, demoralizing words. I might not have made much of myself since then, but I wasn’t going back there.
“You’re right,” I said. “I’m the last one to be handing out advice.”
I started to visualize my jogging route, which included a stretch from my house through portions of Jacob’s Neck, the connection for which was only about a half block from where I was standing. I zipped up my jacket as I turned on my heel and started to jog that way, weaving through the firefighters and onlookers and cops standing by their cars and trucks, hypnotized by the blinking lights.
In a few minutes I was on the sandy road, which I followed by muscle memory down Jacob’s Neck to the segment of hardtop that ran in front of the abandoned WB factory, then back on to a sandy path that followed the contours to the tip of Oak Point where my cottage waited for me, equipped with a negligent watchdog, a perfect view of the Little Peconic Bay and the remaining half fifth of Absolut, which fit neatly with a tray of ice cubes into
