Late One Night

10

It was a little after ten thirty that night when Brandi heard the firehouse siren. The television news had gone off, and she’d come to bed. She was sitting up with the lamp on, reading a book called Getting Ready for Baby. She had a whole stack of books like that on her night table: The Calm Baby Cookbook, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, Pregnancy Without Pounds.

“Fire,” she said, not looking up from her book, and Ronnie, who was on his side, the blankets pulled over his shoulder, didn’t say a word.

He’d gone out for a drive earlier — no, he didn’t want company, he’d told her — and he’d come back, got into the shower, and then slipped into bed. It wasn’t uncommon for him to go driving when he got antsy — just getting the kinks out, he always said — and Brandi didn’t make a fuss about it. She knew it wasn’t easy for him, all this mess with Della, particularly now that she’d filed for divorce. But Brandi, with no family nearby, had long ago grown tired of being alone. She’d come to count on Ronnie.

Just that morning, she’d run out of gas when she was so close to work that her boss, Mr. Samms, was able to push her Mustang into the parking lot at the Wabash Savings and Loan. She’d called the house, and Ronnie had gotten out of bed and carried five gallons to Phillipsport and poured it into her tank. If he wanted to get out for a bit in the evening and be alone with his thoughts, as he had tonight, who was she to say anything about it?

She was wearing a low-cut black chemise that came down over her hips and a pair of black bikini panties. A little pooch had already come to her stomach. It wouldn’t be long, she’d told Ronnie, before she wouldn’t be able to wear anything sexy to bed, or at least not that he’d want to see her in, so he’d better get an eyeful while he still could. She’d brushed out her hair, and it fell in waves over her bare shoulders, the tips snaking across the tops of her breasts.

For just an instant, she looked over the tops of the round rimless glasses she wore for reading. She looked toward the window and then quickly went back to her book.

Ronnie knew everyone thought he’d left Della because he was chasing tail and it ended up being his own that got caught in the door, but that wasn’t true. More than anything, he’d ended up with Brandi because she’d given him what he needed most: a peace in the heart he’d been hard-pressed to find on his own. She just had this calm way about her. She never got flustered, never flew off into a panic, never felt sorry for herself. He convinced himself that life with her was going to be easy. He believed it right up to the point when he drove out the blacktop with that five-gallon can of gas. Now he heard the firehouse siren and a chill went through him. He’d come back from the trailer, and Brandi had asked him where he’d gone.

“Nowhere in particular,” he’d told her. “Like I said. Just driving around.”

Now he was thinking about how he’d driven that last quarter mile to the trailer with his headlights off so no one would see the Firebird making its way so slow and easy through the cold night.

Even now in the warmth of Brandi’s bed he was trembling, chilled to the bone. He knew it would be a long time, if ever, before he’d be able to talk about that night and what had happened out there at the trailer. So for the time, he tried to hold himself suspended in that last quarter mile, the Firebird gliding along in the dark. He could see the trailer ahead of him, not a speck of light anywhere. He was almost there — just a little bit farther — almost to that place he’d known so long as home.

“Bite-ass cold night to have to fight a fire,” he finally said to Brandi. He listened to the trucks’ sirens start up and then grow faint. “Somewhere out in the country it sounds like.”

“Yes, it does,” said Brandi, in a faraway voice.

He lay there shivering until, finally, he fell into a fitful sleep.

Then someone was knocking on the front door of the house, knocking in a way that brought Ronnie up from sleep with a start, his heart pounding in his chest.

Brandi was up and slipping into her old chenille bathrobe, the yellow one with red hearts on it. A big one across the back had pink letters in the center that said BE MINE. She took her time. She pushed her bare feet into her house shoes. They were sock monkey house shoes, ones with the face from that kids’ doll across the toes: black buttons for eyes, red-and-white mouth. Just a silly thing to make the winter a little brighter, she’d told Ronnie. Normally, when he saw her wearing them, he got a light-in-the-heart feeling, but tonight, still groggy from sleep, he was trying to figure out why she was taking time to put them on. She even picked up a brush from the dresser and ran it through her hair.

“Guess someone wants to talk to us,” she said. Then she went to find who’d come knocking in the middle of the night.

Ronnie tried to get his wits about him. He got out of bed and started toward the knocking. Then he realized he was only wearing his boxer shorts, and he stopped to fumble around for his jeans. His foot kept getting caught in one of the legs, and finally he stumbled backwards and sat down hard on the bed.

That’s where he was when Brandi came back and said to him in a voice so soft he had to take a second to make sure he’d heard her right, “Ronnie, you better come out here.”

She helped him pull on his jeans, and while he fastened them, she brought him a flannel shirt from the closet. She held it for him and he put his arms through the sleeves. Then, with a gentle nudge against his shoulders, she turned him around so she could do up the buttons.

Her fingers were trembling, and it took her a good while with each button. He watched those fingers, and he knew something was wrong — so wrong that even she didn’t know how to handle it.

Pat Wade was in the living room. He’d come because he’d asked to be the one to carry the news. He’d told Ray Biggs that he’d gone to school with Ronnie, had known him all his life, and he wanted to be the one to tell him. Better for this kind of thing to come from someone familiar rather than someone in a uniform who was merely doing his duty. Besides, Pat had been at the trailer long before Biggs arrived. He’d taken Sarah when Shooter handed her to him, and he knew he’d never forget the way she put her arms around his neck and clung to him, the way her body quivered, and the little whimpering noises she made in the cold night.

“Where’s my daddy?” she said. “I want my daddy.”

Biggs would never be able to tell Ronnie something like that, something to make him understand that no matter the choices he’d recently made he still had a family to see to, and he’d have to make sure he did right by them. Pat had taken it upon himself to be the one to try to hold him up and ease him along, knowing that if, God forbid, he ever found himself in his shoes, he might very well say the hell with it all.

He’d never been in Brandi Tate’s house, never had any reason to be there until that night. Even in a nothing town like Goldengate, which wasn’t more than the three blocks of Main Street, the B & O Railroad tracks crossing the heart of it, and streets named after trees and presidents running at right angles — a town of a thousand people living in small frame houses like this one on Locust — you could go your whole life and not think that some of those people would ever matter to you at all. Then a night like this would come to prove you wrong.

Pat felt ill at ease standing in Brandi’s living room surrounded by the signs of her and Ronnie living together in what Missy had always called their “love shack.” Ronnie’s work boots on the floor by the couch, a pair of his gray wool socks lying across the toes. An empty plastic bottle of Mountain Dew was on the coffee table, along with an issue of Gearhead Magazine he’d apparently been looking at earlier in the evening, before what Pat had now come to tell him had happened.

“Who is it out there?” he heard Ronnie ask from the bedroom down the hall.

“It’s Pat Wade,” Brandi said.

“Pat Wade? This time of night. Maybe he wants me to come to work tomorrow.”

“No, sugar. He’s not come about a job.”

The soothing tone of her voice caught Pat by the throat, and he choked down the ache it left. He’d never really thought of her in any way at all before. Or if he had, he’d only seen her through Missy’s eyes. Home wrecker, concubine, tramp. A girl not yet thirty — maybe no more than twenty-five — who’d worked her charms on Ronnie and stolen him away from Della and the kids. Temptress, Jezebel, harlot. Missy always stopped just short of the harsher words—slut, bitch, whore—but Pat knew they were right below the surface of everything she said.

Here was her voice, soft and low, and a little shaky with what she knew that Ronnie didn’t. Here on the coffee table was a necklace she must have unfastened from around her neck sometime while she was sitting on the couch with Ronnie. Just a simple silver necklace with a heart on the end of it. Maybe she’d had the television on. Maybe she’d asked if he wanted a Mountain Dew. Maybe they’d just been a couple like that, spending an ordinary night at home the way Pat and Missy had done before she looked out the window and saw Della’s trailer on fire.

As he stood in Brandi’s living room, waiting, he felt whatever ember of moral judgment Missy might have wanted him to stoke go cold. He could only think of Brandi as one more person whose life was going to change forever because of what had gone on out the blacktop.

The first thing that registered with Ronnie when he came out to the living room was the odor that Pat had carried into the house: a sharp scent that reminded Ronnie of the smell around the burn barrel at one of his foster homes, where they let him set fire to the trash for the time he lived there. Cold and smoke and something like burnt plastic and melted tin.

“Ronnie, there’s been trouble.” Pat had on an orange sock hat and he took it off and twisted it around in his hands. “That’s why I’m here.” He could barely bring himself to look at Ronnie. He looked down at that sock hat instead as if it were the most fascinating thing.

Ronnie was used to Pat’s easygoing ways, and he’d always liked having him as a neighbor. Pat even tossed some work his way when he could. He always did Ronnie square even when Ronnie knew he didn’t deserve his favor. He never felt like Pat sat in judgment of him — he wished he could say the same thing about Missy — but instead just took him for what he was. Pat never got ruffled or took a sideways route toward anything troubling that stood before him, but now he looked like he was having a hard time getting his bearings. He looked worn out: coppery whisker stubble on his face, creases in his forehead as he bunched up his brow, slump of his shoulders as if he carried so much weight he could hardly stand. He was a lanky man with big hands beat to hell from hammers and crowbars and roof shingles and concrete. He had a long, narrow face and big old hound dog eyes. Eyebrows so white it seemed like they’d been permanently coated with plaster dust. A bald spot on top of his head.

“Sugar, listen to him.” Brandi slipped her arm around Ronnie’s and held on. “I’m right here,” she said, and she squeezed his bicep with a fierce grip that made fire shoot up his arm.

Pat didn’t know any other way to deliver the news but to say it straight out.

“Ronnie, there’s been a fire,” he said. “The trailer’s gone, not much left but the gas furnace and the hot water heater.”

“They were having trouble with that furnace,” Ronnie said. “Della’s dad was supposed to fix it.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” said Pat. Then he gathered himself for the next thing he had to say. “Missy saw the flames from our place, and she called 911. By the time I got up there, Shooter Rowe and Captain were already doing what they could.”

Ronnie said, “Thank God Della and the kids weren’t there. Good thing they went to her folks’ tonight.”

Pat let him have that one moment of comfort, that brief time of believing that no one had been inside the trailer. Then he started in again. He took it slow. He let Ronnie have time to take in each thing he was saying. “They were there,” he said. “Della was in the trailer, and she was seeing to the kids. She was handing Emma to Shooter when I got there. Angel and Hannah were already out. Then Sarah. Then—”

“They were there?” He couldn’t believe it. He’d called from the payphone at Casey’s, and no one had answered. Della’s car hadn’t been in the lane the way it always was. He’d gone out there to burn the trailer — that’s how mad he’d been because Della had filed papers on him — but he hadn’t intended anything like this. “She got them all out, right? Della? She got all the kids out?”

Just then, a clock on the wall marked the hour — one o’clock — with birdsong. A robin’s happy call: Cheerup.

Brandi explained that the clock had a light sensor to keep it from sounding when the room was dark. She pointed up. “Ceiling light,” she said, to make it clear why the clock had sounded.

Pat knew he couldn’t take any of the pain from Ronnie. All he could do was say the rest.

“Della went back for Emily and Gracie and Junior. By that time, the fire was too hot, the smoke was thick.” The orange sock hat slipped from his hands, and he had to bend over and pick it up from the floor. “I couldn’t go in there, Ronnie.” His voice was nearly a whisper now. “The roof and walls were already starting to go. If I could’ve done something. If I’d been there sooner.”

Ronnie felt, then, like he was somewhere far, far away from where he really was, and, when he finally spoke, it was like he was listening to someone he didn’t know — someone who was a stranger to him.

“Not one of them?” he asked Pat. “Not Della or Emily or Gracie? Not Junior?”

When Pat didn’t answer right away, he turned to Brandi. She reached out and laid her hand to Ronnie’s cheek. “No, sugar. Not a one.”

Then Pat found his voice again, and he said the hardest thing of all. “The roof and the walls. They just went before Della could get the others.” He remembered how the heat had forced him and Shooter and Captain and the four saved girls out into the road, where they could do nothing but watch the trailer collapse and listen to the sirens on the fire trucks as they came out the blacktop from town. “They’re gone, Ronnie. Della and the baby and Emily and Gracie. They’re all gone.”

It was said now — everything — and Pat waited for whatever would come next.

Ronnie got a hard look to his face. That gaunt face with the sharp cheekbones and the watery blue eyes and the little knob of a chin that wasn’t much of a chin at all. He looked the way he had the first day he’d come to Bethlehem School, a new kid. He was no more than seven or eight, then, and yet he looked like an old man fretting something to death.

He took a few steps across the room, and for a moment Pat was afraid he was coming to do him harm with his fists, enraged because Pat had stood as witness to the fire. Then Ronnie stopped, and he said with a no-nonsense tone, “Where are my girls?”

“They’re at my house,” Pat said. “Missy’s seeing to them.”

Ronnie turned to Brandi. “I’ve got to go there. I’ve got to be with them.”

She nodded. “I’ll get dressed.”

“Brandi.” He stopped her as she started toward the bedroom. He reached out a hand. “Baby?”

She came to him and she threw her arms around his neck and pressed him to her, saying, “Sugar. Oh, sugar.”

They stood there, rocking back and forth a little, and Pat, watching, didn’t know what to do with this tenderness between them on such a night. “I guess sometimes, the hurt’s so big,” he’d say to Missy later, “nothing matters except getting over it.”

He’d tell her about the way Brandi held onto Ronnie and told him she’d do whatever she needed her to do. “If you want me to stay here,” she said, “I will. I’ll be right here waiting for you to come back.”

“I expect that’d be best,” he said.

He knew she was offering to stand by him, the way she would if she were his wife.

That word was strange to him now. It flamed inside his head and got all twisted up with what he felt for Brandi and the child she carried — his child — and the life he’d shared with Della until he’d decided to walk out of it. He’d had this wife and seven children, and now three of them were dead, and Della too, and it made no sense — it nearly brought him to his knees — that they were gone and he was alive.