obeyed only one master now and that was his naked need to know.
'Where is she?' He grabbed Renee's chin, forced her to face him. Hands grabbed at him, plowing new furrows of agony on his shoulders.
'Where do you think?' Renee's lips trembled, bitten through in spots, cheeks shiny with tears. She appeared to have escaped the fire without injury. At least any visible, physical hurt.
'She's in the hospital, isn't she?'
'You said nothing would ever happen to her.'
'Please, Mr. Wells,' came Dr. Masutu's voice as if from another land, one where reason prevailed and patients were expected to will themselves back to health.
Jacob elbowed the doctor away and climbed onto Renee, his left leg skewed limp and useless. Half of him wanted to crawl inside her and hide, to seek those soft places that had always offered him sanctuary. The other half wanted her to bleed, to suffer, to choke on her words. And that half was taking over.
He drew back his hand to slap her. Dr. Masutu tried to grab his wrist, but he squirmed free, losing another piece of skin in the process. He swept his hand toward her face and her eyes locked on his, not blinking against the blow. Inviting him. Daring him.
And he stopped.
She couldn't win. Not like this.
He collapsed into a fetal position, the ointment sticky against the tiles. The floor smelled of pine cleanser and bleach. Dr. Masutu gave directions to the nurse, and someone was mopping up fluid. Dr. Masutu knelt and took Jacob's arm. This time, Jacob didn't resist as the needle entered the inner crook of his elbow.
'Mattie is in the hospital, Jakie,' Renee said.
Numbness crept up his arm, rushed into his head, and the drug massaged his brain with its icy fingers.
'On the bottom floor,' Renee said, as Jacob slipped back into the grotto, surrendered once more to the black soothing liquid of unconsciousness.
He drowned at Renee's last words: 'In the morgue.'
CHAPTER THREE
Renee didn't know what was more terrible, burying an older child or burying an infant.
Mothers should not outlast their children. Mothers should go first, by any rule of the universe, under any decree of a caring God.
She wiped her eyes and the dishwater stung. She only had three plates, and they were all clean, but she washed them again anyway. Same with the coffee cup. She had scrubbed it until no hint of brown remained. If she rubbed the cup any harder, she would wear through its ceramic skin.
The apartment was devoid of any personality. Beige couch, matching armchair, solid oak table in the kitchenette with matching benches. Bare walls of antique white, a drab sea of gray carpet. Perfectly lifeless.
She was afraid she would never feel alive again. Sure, her lungs inflated and her heart pumped blood, her fingers and toes moved, her eyes blinked. But life was more than the sum of working parts.
Once, while making love to Jacob in their first year of marriage, she had the sensation of floating outside her body. She saw the two of them below, Jacob on his back, her with blonde hair dangling as they moved in a smooth and careless rhythm of hips.
'How happy and alive they look,' the disembodied part of herself had thought. Even without her glasses, she could see with great clarity from her ethereal vantage point. A voyeuristic guilt tugged her back into her flesh and the sensation had passed, but not the notion that she was totally and absurdly right where God had wanted her to be.
She experienced that same discorporate sensation last year when the tractor was lowering Christine's coffin into the rectangular, red hollow of the Earth. There had been no pleasure in the sensation that time, only an aloof split, and then she rose like a polluted balloon. She swept over the scene on a September wind, cold, brittle, bound for the dead of winter. The cemetery stones jutted like broken icebergs, the greater part of their mystery unseen beneath the surface. The ancient maple by the steel gate had already lost its leaves and stood as helpless as the priest while the tractor's engine whined. Jacob stood in a dark wool coat, holding Mattie against him. Mattie wore black mittens, and their ends were damp because she had wiped her nose with them.
The tractor stripped a gear in its winch box and the coffin jerked, the chain from which it was suspended digging into the well-shined surface. Lawrence McMasters, the funeral director, kept his lips pursed in practiced, stoic sorrow as he tried to usher the grieving family away.
The Renee she'd left behind on the ground couldn't take her eyes from the coffin, which began to spin awkwardly two feet deep into its final resting place, knocking against the earthen sides of the grave and raining dirt. The tractor operator cursed and Father Rose crossed himself. Jacob called Renee's name and then Christine's, and Renee was grateful that the main service had been at St. Mary's and that the graveside service was restricted to immediate family.
A family whose membership was now reduced.
She witnessed the debacle from the distant safety of the sky, and remembered looking down at herself with pity, though part of her was glad to be momentarily free of the pain.
She had no delusions of being an angel. In that bleak stretch of impossible perspective, she saw herself as she really was: scared, fragile, clinging to the threads of a reality whose fabric threatened to unravel.
It wasn't at all how she viewed herself in the mirror, when vanity battled insecurity and the face was always familiar, plain, and far too old. That woman standing beside the oblong hole was an utter stranger, alone and futureless, unconnected to the flesh she had created and nurtured.
The escape was all too brief, and the wind pulled her spirit back into her body, or the illusion dissolved, or the dissociative episode of grief ended. And all that was left was the coffin swinging from the end of the chain like the tool of a brutal hypnotist.
Dishes. She plunged her hands back into the soapy water. The plates needed to sparkle like those in detergent commercials. Out, out, damned spots.
There was a knock on the door. She hadn't had a visitor in several days, when the last of her friends had paid their obligatory sympathies. Her best girlfriend Kim, who knew secrets about her that even Jacob hadn't plumbed, had resigned herself to the fact that Renee wanted to get through it on her own. A stubborn blonde, that's what Kim had called her, and if she ever needed a shoulder to cry on, give a call. Otherwise, here's a casserole and don't hurry about returning the dish.
Renee dried her hands on a towel that was wrapped around the refrigerator handle. She didn't want company right now. The house was a mess. No, 'house' wasn't the right word, house had connotations of home, and what had once been her home was now a heap of dark, dead ashes. This apartment wasn't home, it was a temporary sleep chamber of the soul.
The knock came again, more insistent, authoritative. Be polite, she told herself. A good hostess. Mrs. Jacob Wells. She opened the door.
It was Kingsboro's fire chief, stocky, dressed in an informal uniform of dark trousers and blue shirt. Her red hair was tied back but the sun caught some stray strands that glowed like firecracker fuses. Renee wondered if her hair color had led the woman to her career choice, the result of some homeopathic psychological pull. Or maybe she'd suffered some long-ago disaster of her own that had compelled her into public service.
'Hello?'
Renee had forgotten the woman's name, since their first meeting had been in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy. The Tragedy, with a capital T. That was how she referred to the night, both in forced conversation and in the hidden depths of her private thoughts. But now she saw the name above the badge, Davidson, and remembered they had spoken at some length, but couldn't recall a word either of them had said.
'Davidson, Kingsboro Fire Department. Sorry to bother you again.'
'That's okay,' Renee said, struggling to drive images of The Tragedy from her mind: the confusion as she rolled from the blankets, the stench of chemical smoke, the winking numerals of the alarm clock, Jacob's shouting, her attempt to follow him before the flames cut her off, the flight down the stairs, the descent into hell, the escape
