Squaring off with the hearth, hands at her side gunslinger-style, Abigail said, “What’s next? Matches.”
A search of the kitchen drawers was fruitless. Most were stuck. Of those she was able to jimmy open, one held a dull set of silverware, another a tarnished eggbeater. The third was full of crumbs.
“Not too promising.”
The upper cupboards were her last hope. Mismatched plates and bowls were stacked haphazardly behind the first set of doors. The next held a motley ensemble of mugs and glasses. There was one cabinet left. From underneath a mound of dinged pots and pans protruded a box of long wooden matches. Abigail shook the box and heard a rattle of salvation.
“You’ve got matches. You’ve got wood. You can do this.”
Her hands shook as she opened the chimney flue and removed a match from the box. Right as she was about to strike it, Abigail stopped herself.
“Kindling.”
She needed paper or newsprint, neither of which she had. The idea of ripping a page from one of her books darted through her mind. It was swiftly rejected. Scouring the kitchen cabinets and drawers again would be futile. As Abigail was eyeing the living room curtains as prospects, it came to her. She ferreted through her purse for the Chapel Isle tourist brochure Lottie had sent her.
“You’re here. What do you need the brochure for?”
Kneeling in front of the fireplace, she pinched the match between her fingertips, but could not strike it. She simply couldn’t do it. Defeated, she tossed the brochure aside, curled up on the couch, and shivered. Every ounce of her was cold, yet she was incapable of lighting the fire.
Abigail had thought she was dreaming that night when she opened her eyes and saw her own home burning to the ground. Support beams buckled and brayed. Windows bellowed as they blew out, exhaling the stench of scorched metal and chemical fumes. The roof roared as it tore from its moorings. The walls crumbled in a crescendo of screams. She had seen and heard and smelled it all as she lay in the street, barely conscious, muzzled by the smoke that had burned her throat, unable to tell the firemen that her husband and their four-year-old son, Justin, were still inside. As her house collapsed before her, the air filled with a swirling storm of burning cinders, a sea of stars cascading through the clouds of smoke as if the heavens had descended to earth for a single night. Neither her husband nor her child could have survived. There were no words Abigail could think of, no words she would have spoken, even if she could have.
She awoke in the hospital to the faces of her parents, her brother, and two policemen. Her father described her injuries, gave her the prognosis. Her windpipe was damaged, but in time she would be able to speak again. Her mother begged her not to try to talk. Her brother urged her to listen to the officers, who explained that the neighbor who called 911 had seen her husband, Paul, carry her out of the house, unconscious, her body limp. He’d laid her gently on the grass, then run back inside to get their son.
Abigail understood why Paul had saved her first. He was a mathematician and had been true to form. Justin weighed about thirty pounds. Abigail was four times as heavy. It was an easy equation. He’d decided to use what strength he had to bring her to safety first, then would go back for their son. He couldn’t have calculated that the house would cave in.
The fire department made every attempt to rescue them; the officers assured Abigail of that. The inferno was too ferocious. It took fire trucks from three towns to quell it.
There was only one question Abigail had for the policemen, though the medication the doctors had her on made it slippery, almost too slick to get a grip on. The mix of anguish and potent sedatives was mentally obliterating. Laboring to stay conscious, she motioned for a notepad.
She wrote the word:
The officers traded glances with her father. Abigail felt her family bracing for her reaction. The source of the fire was a gas leak from the new oven that had recently been installed. A poorly fitted pipe allowed a stream of gas to bleed in between the walls, filling the shell of the house. Then something sparked the gas. The fire department couldn’t pinpoint the exact cause. A power surge. A defective wire. Even the flipping of a faulty light switch would have been enough to ignite the gas that had leached into the structure. Despite the drugs, Abigail could comprehend what the officers were telling her, and instantly she knew.
She and Paul had purchased the oven a week earlier. They’d spent hours looking at a multitude of ranges, comparing features and prices. The oven Abigail was leaning toward was expensive, so she’d been open to other models. Paul wouldn’t hear of it.
“Get the oven you want,” he had said, taking her hand. “You deserve it” were his exact words. “Forget about the money. Think about that first batch of cinnamon sugar cookies. I can practically smell them.”
Cinnamon sugar cookies were her son’s favorite, so the morning the oven was delivered, Abigail went and bought the ingredients. She’d planned on baking them the following day. She wouldn’t get the chance.
For a month, Abigail remained in the hospital. Her family and friends visited daily. Their company did little to console her. The drugs kept her too drowsy to do much other than nod if someone addressed her. Her injuries were slower to heal than the doctors had predicted. During the fire, Abigail had breathed in a combination of burning hot gas and smoke, scalding her lungs and scorching her throat. The mundane matter of breathing became a torture; swallowing, a misery. Abigail could feel the weight of air passing through her nostrils, making its journey through her chest. Although the medication made her thoughts gluey, she was grateful not to have to endure the brunt of the pain. Her grief, however, was an agony unto itself. It had degrees no thermometer could measure. The irony was that she had been burned on the inside of her body. The flames had spared her skin and burrowed deep inside her, leaving scorch marks that wouldn’t heal.
The fire charred everything Abigail cherished, branding both her past and her future. The lawsuit her brother, an attorney, filed for her against the company that installed the stove would take months to settle, maybe years. Meanwhile, the money from Paul’s life insurance policy was cold comfort. Though it meant she wouldn’t have to work for some time, Abigail didn’t care, because she loved her job. She was the lead lexicographical consultant for a company that produced electronic dictionaries for foreign markets, a plum position. But she no longer had the drive to work nor the strength to concentrate for very long. Whenever she tried to read, the words would scramble on the page. Snippets of old conversations with Paul would flare in her mind or, out of nowhere, she would have the sensation of running her hand through Justin’s hair. He’d had cherubic curls that sagged into his eyes if allowed to grow too long. For an instant, she would sense the hair between her fingers, then the feeling would vanish. That was what was left of her family—memories that would blacken around the edges like burning paper and turn to ash.
