“Maybe,” I say.
She rolls into me, nearly on top of me. She whispers close, “He’s safe.”
“Yes.”
“Who did this?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” I say, the possibilities firing in my head, though most of them involve Dennis, and now even Jack, the two of them watching the blaze from the periphery.
“Do we need to go back now?”
“No,” I tell her. “We’ll go in the morning.”
“I feel ill,” she says, getting up. She stumbles to the bathroom. I follow her and hold her shoulders as she gets sick into the toilet.
“I’m sorry, Henry,” she says, turning on the tap. “I’m all right now.”
I don’t say any more. I can’t. I walk her back through the dark room to the bed. We lie down and in a few minutes she’s so quiet that for a second I think she’s dead. I put my fingers near her mouth to check. She’s just breathing faintly, not yet asleep.
Now I’m scarcely breathing myself. This is wont with my training in the face of sudden turns or shifts in events. But I’m square in the fear. If you’re skilled you don’t try to steel yourself, you actually do the opposite, you let yourself go, completely, Hoagland told me once, like you are sitting on the toilet, you loosen a certain muscle. It’s a classic NKVD trick, and if you’re careful and practiced it works without disaster. Old Soviets know. You are serene as Siberia.
Once, I do it perfectly. Maybe for years. A child of mine is somehow dead. He is no longer inhabiting our life. I watch my wife go out every morning to wander about the grounds of my father’s house, poking in the bushes and the trees for hours at a time, as if to follow his last tracks. One morning she returns with objects in her hands, pretty rocks and twigs and big oak leaves, and she sits down silently at the small table in our garage apartment to construct a little house. She works slowly. I watch her from the corner, where I often read. Eventually, the rocks show a path, she raises walls with the twigs, and the canopy of leaves she blows gently with her breath, to make sure its utility. She peers inside, expressionless. She blows harder and then leaves it. Then she crawls back into bed.
The twig house sits there for days. Lelia cries on and off. She seems to live in the bed. I don’t speak to her then. I try my best to ignore her. This, I think at the time, is best for us both. I will attempt to eat at the table, or read the newspaper there, but it’s so small and rickety that any wrong movement endangers the house. Finally one day I find it outside, at the far end of my father’s lawn, perfectly intact right down to the rocks. I look back to the garage, to the big house. I don’t see anyone in the windows, including the small oval of the secret room, but I think she is watching me, to witness what I might do. I kneel down before it. Pick it apart, leaf by twig, stone by rock, until I have orderly piles of the material. I stand up and shout out his name. I shout it again, as loud as my meager voice can. Then I fling it all in the woods, dismantled piece by piece. I turn back, ready for her, but even with all of my hope she still isn’t there.
Now I cannot see her face and she cannot see mine. Though I think even if it were light I would not effect my oft-drilled calm, which I have done for her a hundred times but will not do now. I will not rid my expression of the sudden worry and weight. I will not hush or so handle my heart. I will put my hand in her hair. Kiss her ear. Now whisper a speech with my smallest voice. She whispers back, this blessing we share. Now I think we will both dream of fire.
The front windows are blown out. A large crowd is already formed behind the barricade. The fire marshals and bomb squad pick through the burned-out section in the back that serves as an annex for the office, where we keep voting registration and contributor records. Minor devices, one of them says. I hear Janice Pawlowsky cursing, but from where I can’t see. Her wails and epithets carry out from the broken windows, down the fire stairs.
The staff is allowed to go inside in shifts to retrieve records and personal items. John Kwang hasn’t arrived yet, but he’s expected and the media are thick on the ground. They wait outside the yellow police tape, stopping everyone and interrogating them. All of them want to know if we personally knew the dead. I pretend I don’t speak English.
But these are ours: an office janitor, an older, always cheery woman named Helda Brandeis, and the college student, Eduardo Fermin. Both were working after hours; they were found in the back war room, huddled together, trapped, overcome by fumes. They weren’t burned. Nothing in that room burned. Janice didn’t see them but heard they were covered in a film of ash, as if they’d slept through a gentle, black snow.
Eduardo’s family has been holding a vigil in front of the office since last night, his mother and father, his grandmother, his two sisters and his baby brother. The coroner removed the bodies hours ago for autopsy, but Eduardo’s family still remains, unable to leave, as if waiting for his ghost to return to the place he was last alive.
When it’s my turn to go in, I gather the things in his desk next to mine and place them in a file box. I fill it with everything I can find, but I keep for myself an embossed 3×5 note card he had printed with the phrase John Kwang always said: “Honor your family.”
I leave my own things alone. There is nothing I wish to salvage. Better that it’s thrown away. I come back out and place the box of Eduardo’s things near them. His mother gasps something in Spanish, she’s short of breath, and Eduardo’s young brother immediately pulls off the cardboard lid. It smells of smoke. On top of his papers and framed photographs is Eduardo’s gold-tone ballpoint pen, obviously a family gift, maybe from high school graduation, and here’s the little boy taking it, writing slowly in the air. Now they gather up his things and finally go home.
Sherrie walks the site with the authorities. She has me follow them and take notes. Apparently, there are two accelerants: the first, the lethal one, is meant for fire, hurled through the windows in front and back in the alley. Probably just Molotovs. The other is a device, timed and set inside the front reception room of the office. Maybe it was wrapped as a package. Now they’re piecing together how the fire spread through the offices full of paper fuel, pinning in Eduardo and the woman. The explosion is nothing to speak of, nothing special, they believe no plastique was used, no deep electronics, just a stick or two of dynamite, a model airplane battery for detonation, a few rounds of duct tape. Common materials.
“So it could be anybody who works on a construction site,” Sherrie says to the group of men. “Or has access to one.” They stare at her. She wearily asks them, “What are you going to tell the press?”
“Crude explosive,” one of them says. “I wouldn’t let it get in your hair, lady. Just because it’s a bomb doesn’t mean we’re dealing with a terrorist. It’s probably just some crank who’s sore at Kwang.”
Everyone mostly agrees. Nobody wants a situation. The tabloids are already screaming for one, they’re suddenly calling the start of a terrorist race war, American-style. I realize that the men and Sherrie want to quell the notion. But no one is acknowledging what at least is clear, that someone took a little trouble with this one, that it’s not a drive-by situation, it’s not the work of vandals or addicts.
When we finish with the investigators I slip away and call Jack from a deli down the block. He isn’t at home or at work. I call his house again and leave a message saying it’s just me needing some wisdom. That I’ll try again. Then I call the office and the phone picks up.
It’s Dennis.
“Good to hear your voice, Harry,” he says. “You say hello in the nicest way.”
“Where’s Jack?”
“Out to lunch.”