After good nights, he headed for the bedroom at the far end of the house—his since childhood. He was beat. Without bothering to change out of his sweats, he slipped into the creaky old bed like a tired foot into a well-worn slipper.
Bill awoke coughing, with stinging eyes and nose. Either he was having an allergy attack or—
Smoke! Something was burning!
Then he heard the approaching sirens.
Fire!
He jumped out of bed and turned on the lamp but it didn't work. He pulled the flashlight he'd kept in the nightstand since he was a kid and that did work, but feebly. He stumbled through the white smoke that layered the air of his room and swirled in his wake. His bedroom door was closed. He spotted the smoke eddying in around the edges.
The house was on fire. Mom! Dad!
Bill grabbed the doorknob. It was hot—blistering hot—but he ignored the pain and pulled it open. The blast of heat from the hallway threw him back as a torrent of smoke and flame roared into the bedroom. He lurched for the window, yanked it open, and dove through the screen.
Cold fresh air. He gulped it. He rolled onto his back and stared at the house. Flame was jetting from his bedroom window with a deafening roar, as if someone had opened the door to a blast furnace.
And then an awful thought tore through his gut and propelled him to his feet. What about the rest of the house? What about the other end where his parents had their bedroom?
Jesus God oh please let them be all right!
He ran to his right toward the front of the house but froze when he rounded the corner.
The rest of the house was a mass of flame. It gushed from the windows and licked up the walls and climbed toward heaven through holes in the roof.
Dear God no!
Bill dashed forward to where the firemen were setting up their hoses.
"My parents! The Ryans! Did you get them out?"
The fireman turned to him. His expression was grim in the flickering golden light.
"We just got here. You really think there might be someone in there?"
"If you haven't seen a man and a woman in their seventies out here, then yes, they're definitely in there!"
The fireman glanced at the blaze1, then back at Bill. His eyes said everything.
With a hoarse cry, Bill ran toward the front door. The fireman grabbed his arm but he shook him off. He had to get them out of there! As he neared the house, the heat buffeted him in waves. He'd seen blazing houses on the TV news over the years but film and videotape had never conveyed the true ferocity of a fire once it had the upper hand. He felt as if his skin was going to-blister, as if his eyes were going to boil in their sockets. He crossed his arms in front of his face and pushed forward, hoping his hair didn't burst into flame.
On the front porch he grabbed the brass door handle but winced and let go. Hot. Hotter even than his bedroom doorknob had been. Too hot to grip. And then he cursed as he realized it didn't matter how hot it was—the door was locked.
He ran around the shrubs toward his parents' bedroom. The flames were roaring unchallenged from the windows. And yet from within, above the roar, he thought he heard… a scream.
He turned to the firemen and let out his own scream.
"In here!" He pointed to the pair of windows that opened into their bedroom. "They're in here!"
Bill ducked as the fire fighters got the hose going and directed the fat stream directly through the window and into the bedroom.
He heard the scream again. Screams. It was two voices now—wailing in agony. His father and mother were in there burning alive!
The fire fighter he had met before ran up to him and began pulling him back.
"Get away from here! You'll get yourself killed!"
Bill fought him off. "You got to help me get them out of there!"
The fire fighter grabbed Bill's shoulders and turned him toward the blaze.
"Take a look at that fire! Take a real good look! Nobody can be alive in there!"
"My God, don't you hear them?"
The fireman stood still a moment, listening. Bill watched his craggy face as he took off his fire hat and cocked an ear toward the house.
He had to hear them! How could he miss those terrified, agonized cries? Each wail tore through Bill like barbed wire across an open wound.
The fireman shook his head. "No. I'm sorry, pal. There's no one alive in there. Now come on—"
As Bill pulled free of his grasp again, the roof over the bedroom collapsed in an explosion of sparks and flaming embers. The blast of heat knocked Bill off his feet.
And that was when he knew they were gone. He felt his chest constrict around the pain. Mom… Dad… dead. They had to be. The bedroom was a crematorium now. Had been for some time. Nothing could have survived an instant in there.
He didn't—couldn't—resist as the fireman dragged him back to safety. He could only shout out his grief and anguished helplessness at the flames, at the night.
FIFTEEN
Why?
Bill stood alone beside the double grave under an obscenely bright late winter sky. The unfiltered sunlight stung the healing burns on his cheeks, feebly warmed his chest and shoulders, but left his soul untouched. The March wind was a cold knife slicing across the bare knolls of Tall Oaks Cemetery, ripping through the thin fabric of his black pants and jacket.
The mourners were gone; the caretakers had yet to arrive. By tradition he should have hosted a gathering at home for the mourners, but his home was gone. Home was now a tumble of blackened, ice-encrusted timbers.
Why?
Bill had made all the mourners go, practically pushed them away from the graveside. He had wept his tears, he had pounded his fists of rage against unyielding walls until they were bruised and swollen, now he wanted to be alone with his folks one last time before the earth was resealed over them.
How alone he felt at this moment. He realized that subconsciously he had taken it for granted that his parents would always be around. Consciously, of course, he had known that their remaining years were numbered in single digits, but he had envisioned them leaving him one at a time, taken off by natural causes. Never in his worst nightmare had he envisioned the possibility of such a… catastrophe. Their sudden departure had left a gaping hole in his life. Even the old ranch house was gone. Where was home now? He felt adrift, as if his anchor had been torn loose three days ago and could no longer find purchase.
A long three days—two for the wake, then the Requiem Mass and funeral service itself this morning—full of pain and the sympathy of friends and acquaintances, days in which he'd tried to leaven his grief by telling himself that his parents had led long, happy, productive lives and hadn't had much time left anyway, and how lucky he'd been to have had them around as long as he did. But none of it worked. Whatever tempering effect that sort of reasoning might have had on his almost-overwhelming sense of loss was repeatedly blasted away by the insistent memory of the two blackened, twisted corpses he had seen removed from the ruins of his parents' bedroom.
Why?
How many times had he offered pat, soothing bromides to a deceased's mourning family when they turned to him with that same question? He had always avoided perpetuating the nonsense that it was God's will, that God was "testing" the living, trying their faith. Circumstance, the capriciousness of reality, those were what tested one's faith. God didn't have to stick his finger into the soup and squash somebody. Disease, injury, genetic accidents, and the forces of nature were all quite capable of ruining and ending lives without the slightest help from God.
And yet here he was, Father Ryan, asking the same question—one chagrined Father Ryan, realizing that he never really had answered the question for others, and he now could do no better for himself.
Chief Morgan of the Monroe Fire Company had provided some sort of an explanation, though. He had pulled Bill aside in the rear of Cahill's Funeral Home during the wake.