“We were playing a game of Who Am I?” she explains. “D.J. had to guess he was Homer Simpson. What did he choose for me?”
She lifts her face to mine. The note is curling at the edges, but I recognize the small, neat block print.
YOU’RE DEAD.
I find enough air to speak. “Where’s Mum?”
The urgency in my voice frightens her. She takes a step back and sees the bloodstains on my shirt and the sheen of sweat. My bottom lip is swollen and the stitches are crusted with blood.
“She’s downstairs in the basement. D.J. told me to wait here.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s coming back in a minute, but he said that ages ago.”
I push her toward the front door. “Run, Charlie!”
“Why?”
“RUN! NOW! Keep running!”
The basement door is shut and wet paper towels have been pushed into the doorjamb. There is no key in the lock. I turn the handle and gently pull it open.
Dust is swirling in the air— the sign of leaking gas. I can’t yell and hold my breath at the same time. Halfway down the steps, I stop to let my eyes adjust to the light. Julianne is slumped on the floor beside the new boiler. She’s lying on her side, with her right arm under her head and her left reaching out as though pointing to something. A dark fringe has fallen over one eye.
Crouching next to her, I slip my hands under her arms and drag her backward. The pain in my chest is unbelievable. White dots dance in front of my eyes like angry insects. I still haven’t taken a breath, but the time is close. I take the stairs one at a time, dragging Julianne upward and sitting down heavily after each exertion. One step, two steps, three steps…
I hear Charlie coughing behind me. She takes hold of my collar, trying to help me, pulling when I pull.
Four steps, five steps…
We reach the kitchen and Julianne’s head bounces off the floor as I set her down. I’ll apologize later. Hauling her over my shoulder, I roar in pain, and totter down the hallway. Charlie is ahead of me.
What is the trigger? A timer or a thermostat, the central heating, a refrigerator, the security lights?
“Run, Charlie. Run!”
When did it grow dark outside? Police cars fill the street with flashing lights. I don’t stop this time. I scream one word, over and over. I cross the road, dodge the cars and get to the far end of the street before my knees buckle and Julianne falls onto the muddy grass. I kneel beside her.
Her eyes are open. The blast begins as a tiny spark in the midst of her deep brown irises. The sound arrives a split second later, along with the shock wave. Charlie is thrown backward. I try to shield them both. There is no orange ball like you see in the movies, only a cloud of smoke and dust. Debris rains down and I feel the warm breath of fire drying the sweat on my neck.
The blackened van lies upside down in the middle of the street. Chunks of roofing and ribbons of gutters are draped over trees. Rubble and splintered wood covers the road.
Charlie sits up and looks at the desolation. The note is still stuck to her forehead, blackened at the edges, but still legible. I pull her against my chest, holding her close. At the same time, my fingers close around the yellow square of paper and crush it within my fist.
Epilogue
The nightmares of my recent past still see me running— escaping the same monsters and rabid dogs and Neanderthal second-row forward— but now they seem more real. Jock says it is a side effect of the levodopa, my new medication.
The dosage has halved in the past two months. He says I must be under less stress. What a comedian!
He phones me every day and asks if I fancy a game of tennis. I tell him no and he tells me a joke. “What’s the difference between a nine-month pregnant woman and a
“I don’t know.”
“Nothing, if her husband knows what’s good for him.”
This is one of the cleaner ones and I risk telling Julianne. She laughs, but not as loudly as I do.
We’re living in Jock’s flat while we decide whether to rebuild or buy a new place. This is Jock’s way of trying to make amends, but he hasn’t been forgiven. In the meantime, he’s moved in with a new girlfriend, Kelly, who hopes to be the next Mrs. Jock Owen. She will need a harpoon gun or a cast-iron prenup to get him anywhere near an altar.
Julianne has thrown away all his gadgets and the out-of-date frozen meals in the freezer. Then she went out and bought fresh sheets for the beds and new towels.
Her morning sickness is over, thankfully, and her body is getting bigger each day (everything except her bladder). She is convinced we’re having a boy, because only a man could cause her so much grief. She always looks at me when she says this. Then she laughs, but not as loudly as I do.
I know she’s watching me closely. We watch each other. Maybe it’s the disease she’s looking for or perhaps she doesn’t trust me entirely. We had an argument yesterday— our first since nursing things back together. We’re going up to Wales for a week and she complained that I always leave my packing until the last possible minute.
“I never forget anything.”
“That’s not the point.”
“What is the point?”
“You should do it earlier. It’s less stressful.”
“For who?”
“For you.”
“But I’m not the one who is getting stressed.”
After tiptoeing around her for five months, grateful for her forgiveness, I decided to draw a gentle line in the sand. I asked her, “Why do women fall in love with men and then try to change them?”
“Because men need help,” she replied, as if this were common knowledge.
“But if I become the man you want, I won’t be the man I am.”
She rolled her eyes and said nothing, but since then she’s been less prickly. This morning she came and sat on my lap, putting her arms around my neck and kissing me with the sort of passion that marriage is supposed to kill. Charlie said “Yuck!” and hid her eyes.
“What’s wrong?”
“You guys are French kissing.”
“What do you know about French kissing?”
“It’s when you slobber over each other.”
I rubbed my hand across Julianne’s stomach and whispered, “I want our children never to grow up.”
Our architect has arranged to meet me at the hole in the ground. The only thing left standing is the staircase, which goes nowhere. The force of the blast sent the concrete floor of the kitchen through the roof and blew the boiler into a yard two streets over. The shock wave shattered almost every window on the block and three houses have had to be demolished.
Charlie says she saw someone at a first-floor window just before the blast. Anyone on that floor would have been vaporized, say the experts, which might explain why they didn’t find so much as a fingernail or a fiber or a stray tooth. Then again, I keep asking myself, why would D.J. stick around once the gas had been turned on and the timer set to fire the boiler? He had plenty of time to get out, unless he planned this as a final act in every sense of the word.
Charlie doesn’t understand that he could have done these things. She asked me the other day if I thought he was in heaven. I felt like saying, “I just hope he’s dead.”
