Looking toward the street, Harry was relieved to see that fire trucks had entered the sprawling Los Cabos complex. Less than a block away, the sirens began to die, but the beacons kept flashing.
People had rushed into the street from other buildings, but they quickly got out of the way of the emergency vehicles.
An intense wave of heat drew Harry’s attention to his own building again. The blaze had broken through to the roof.
As in a fairy tale, high upon the shingled peak, fire like a dragon was silhouetted against the dark sky, lashing its yellow and orange and vermillion tail, spreading huge carnelian wings, scales scintillant, scarlet eyes flashing, roaring a challenge to all knights and would-be slayers.
11
Connie stopped for a pepperoni and mushroom pizza on the way home. She ate at the kitchen table, washing the food down with a can of Coors.
For the past seven years, she had rented a small apartment in Costa Mesa. The bedroom contained only a bed, a nightstand, and a lamp, no dresser; her wardrobe was so simple that she was easily able to store all of her clothes and shoes in the single closet. The living room contained a black leather recliner, a floor lamp on one side of the big chair for when she wanted to read, and an end table on the other side; the recliner faced a television set and VCR on a wheeled stand. The dining area in the kitchen was furnished with a card table and four folding chairs with padded seats. The cabinets were mostly empty, containing only the minimum pots and utensils for cooking quick meals, a few bowls, four dinner plates, four salad plates, four cups and saucers, four glasses — always four because that was the number in the smallest set she could find to buy — and canned goods. She never entertained.
Possessions did not interest her. She had grown up without them, drifting from one foster home and institution to another with only a battered cloth suitcase.
In fact she felt encumbered by possessions, tied down, trapped. She owned not a single knickknack. The only artwork or decoration on the walls was a poster in the kitchen, a photograph taken by a sky-diver from five thousand feet — green fields, rolling hills, a dry riverbed, scattered trees, two blacktop and two dirt roads narrow as threads, intersecting in the manner of lines on an abstract painting. She read voraciously, but all her books were from the library. All videotapes that she watched were rented.
She owned her car, but that was as much a machine of freedom as it was a steel albatross.
Freedom was the thing she sought and cherished, in place of jewelry and clothes and antiques and art, but it was sometimes more difficult to acquire than an original Rembrandt. In the long, sweet free-fall before the parachute had to be deployed, there was freedom. Astride a powerful motorcycle on a lonely highway, she could find a measure of freedom, but a dirt bike in the desert vastness was even better, with only vistas of sand and rocky outcroppings and withered scrub brush rolling toward the blue sky in all directions.
While she ate pizza and drank beer, she took the snapshots out of the manila envelope and studied them. Her dead sister, so like herself.
She thought about Ellie, her sister’s child, living up in Santa Barbara with the Ladbrooks, no image of her face among the pictures but perhaps as much like Connie as Colleen had been. She tried to decide how she felt about having a niece. As Mickey Chan suggested, it was a wonderful thing to have family, not to be alone in the world after having been alone for as long as she could remember. A pleasant thrill shivered through her when she thought about Ellie, but it was tempered by the concern that a niece might be an encumbrance far heavier than all the material possessions in the world.
What if she met Ellie and developed an affection for her?
No. She wasn’t concerned about affection. She had given and received that before. Love. That was the worry.
She suspected that love, though a blessing, could also be a confining chain. What freedom might be lost by loving someone — or by being loved? She didn’t know because she had never given or received any emotion as powerful and profound as love — or as what she thought love must be like, having read of it in so many great novels. She had read that love could be a trap, a cruel prison, and she had seen people’s hearts broken by the weight of it.
She had been alone so long.
But she was comfortable in her solitude.
Change involved a terrible risk.
She studied her sister’s smiling face in the almost-real colors of Kodachrome, separated from her by the thin glossy veneer of the photographic finish — and by five long years of death.
For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: “It might have been!”
She could never know her sister. However, she could still know her niece. All she needed was the courage.
She got another beer from the refrigerator, returned to the table, sat down to study Colleen’s face for a while longer — and found a newspaper obscuring the photographs. The Register. A headline caught her eye: SHOOTOUT AT LAGUNA BEACH RESTAURANT… TWO DEAD, TEN WOUNDED.
For a long uneasy moment she stared at the headline. The paper hadn’t been there a minute ago, hadn’t been anywhere in the house, in fact, because she had never bought it.
When she’d gone to get a fresh beer from the refrigerator, her back had never been turned to the table. She knew beyond doubt that no one else was in the apartment. But even if an intruder had gotten in, she could not possibly have missed seeing him enter the kitchen.
Connie touched the paper. It was real, but the contact chilled her as deeply as if she had touched ice.
She picked it up.
It stank of smoke. Its pages were brown along the cut edges, feathering to yellow and then to white toward the center, as if it had been salvaged from a fire just before it burned.
12
The crowns of the tallest palm trees disappeared into roiling clouds of smoke.
Stunned and weeping residents moved back as firemen in yellow-and-black slickers and high rubber boots unrolled hoses from the trucks and pulled them across walkways, flowerbeds. Other firemen appeared at a trot, carrying axes. Some were wearing breathing apparatus so they could enter the smoke-filled condominiums. Their swift arrival virtually insured that most of the apartments would be saved.
Harry Lyon glanced toward his own unit, at the south end of the building, and a sharp pang of loss stabbed through him. Gone. His alphabetically shelved collection of books, his CDs neatly arranged in drawers according to type of music and then by the artist’s name, his clean white kitchen, carefully nurtured houseplants, the twenty-nine volumes of his daily diary which he had been keeping since he was nine (a separate journal for each year) — all gone. When he thought of the ravenous fire eating its way through his rooms, soot sifting over what little the fire didn’t consume, everything glossy turning mottled and dull, he felt nauseous.
He remembered his Honda in the attached garage behind the building, started in that direction, then halted because it seemed foolish to jeopardize his own life to save a car. Besides, he was the president of the homeowners’ association. At a time like this he ought to stay with his neighbors, offer them reassurance, comfort, advice about insurance and other issues.
As he holstered his revolver to avoid alarming the firemen, he remembered something the vagrant had said to him when he was pinned against the wall, the breath knocked out of him: First everything and everyone you love… then you!