House on Fire

4

I drove past Sidney’s Clam Shack (Voted best fried clams on the Cape!), a few motels with vacancy signs, and competing beach-toy stores on either side of the road that were both shuttered now that summer had passed. I drove carefully and at exactly forty miles an hour. Westham was a famous speed trap, crawling with cops waiting to ticket summer visitors for driving two miles an hour over the speed limit. This was the off-season, but the Westham cops would probably be even more aggressive than usual given the scarcity of prey.

When I rang the doorbell, Patty flung open the screen door and hugged me, hard. She was a small, compact brunette, a former high school cheerleader who ran almost every day. She was a nurse at Cape Cod Hospital and worked long hours, and she seemed to have an infinite supply of energy. Like a lot of military wives whose husbands were gone so much, she ran the house; she had no choice.

But now you could see she was depleted, her eyelids heavy, her eyes swollen. Her mascara was smeared. She was still in her hospital scrubs. Her kids were swarming and bickering behind her.

“Thank you, Nick,” she said.

“For what?”

“For being here.”

“Come on,” I said.

Brendan was ten, and the oldest. He was a cool, smart kid whose dad had been deployed for much of his childhood. And when Sean got back, he soon became an opioid addict. So for much of Brendan’s life, his father was absent, in one way or another. I was Brendan’s godfather and his surrogate dad. I was sort of a surrogate dad to his brother, Andrew, and his sister, Molly, too.

I know I’m never going to have children — I don’t want them, thanks — but I admit to getting a paternal glow from helping these kids out. My nephew, Gabe, is the closest I’ll ever come to having my own. I love him dearly, but he’s an odd one.

I felt terrible for Brendan and his siblings. Normally, when I came by their house, Brendan would come running. Not like when he was four or five, literally racing through the house to fling himself at me. But still, he hustled and beamed. This time he was hanging back. His eyes looked bruised. He was mournful and distant, just like his mother. Brendan was often called on to be the man of the family with Dad gone a lot, and he took it seriously.

I stepped into the room and hugged Brendan and then Molly, who was eight and just as tall and played soccer. “Where’d Andrew go?” I said. I could see Andrew, six, hiding behind the La-Z-Boy recliner. “He just disappeared.”

Andrew burst out laughing. He didn’t seem to be sad at all. I wondered if he was too young, if he just didn’t get the enormity of what had happened to him.

“Andrew’s being annoying,” Brendan said.

Andrew ran over to me and hugged me around the legs. “When’s Daddy coming back?” he said, his words muffled.

Oh, he understood something.

“Baby,” Patty said, “Daddy’s not coming back. He’s in Heaven, honey.”

“No!” Andrew said, correcting her as if it were obvious. “He’s coming back. Daddy always goes away, and he always comes back.”

“Dad’s dead,” Brendan snapped, stunning everyone into silence.

“Hey, Bren,” I said. “How’s the coin collection?”

He turned to me. “I got the new proof set — you wanna see?”

“I would.”

We went to his room, where he pulled out from a desk drawer the latest additions to his coin collection and made sure I understood their importance. How all the proof coins bore the “S” mark of the U.S. Mint at San Francisco. The special-edition Lincoln penny struck with the “W” mark of the West Point Mint. When he finally fell silent, I said, “I know how hard it must be to lose your daddy.”

“But isn’t your dad still alive?”

“He is,” I admitted.

“What about your mom?”

“She’s alive too. Lives outside of Boston.”

There was a pause. “Isn’t your dad in prison?”

“Yep.”

“Was he in prison when you were growing up?”

“Part of it. When I was a teenager he fled the country, went into hiding. Left us with nothing. Eventually the good guys caught up with him in Switzerland.”

“‘The good guys’?” Brendan smiled. “Was your dad a bad guy?”

“Very much.”

“But he’s alive.”

“Yes.”

“Oh. Did Mom tell you how Dad died?”

I hesitated. Had she told Brendan? I wondered. He kept talking. “It was an overdose. He was back on the drugs. I knew it. I knew he was. I could always tell when he was using.”

I nodded.

“He’d get all sad and really angry, and him and Mom used to fight all the time. I don’t — I don’t understand, Uncle Nick. Why’d he do it?”

“Because he was an addict, and it’s really hard to quit some of those drugs.”

“No. Why’d he go and... kill himself?”

“I’m not so sure he did.”

“He took an overdose.”

“But it’s really easy to do that by accident. Even if he didn’t mean to.”

“But we really needed him! Why did he do it?”

“He couldn’t help it.” A long moment passed, and then I said, “He was really proud of you, you know that?”

Brendan’s face had gone red. He’d begun to weep silently. Tears were dripping off his cheeks. He shook his head.

I went on. “He was. He was always telling his friends stories about you. Like how you insisted on carving the Thanksgiving turkey? And your mom didn’t want you to use the big sharp knife? But you did it anyway and you did it perfectly. Didn’t even cut yourself. He was so proud of you.”

Brendan clamped his hands over his face. “He showed... He showed...” He was choking out the words and finally got out: “He showed it in a great way, huh?” he said with bitter sarcasm.

I went back downstairs to the family room with Patty. It was a cozy, crowded place with a fireplace, an orange shag carpet, a big TV.

“‘He always comes back,’” Patty said, quoting her younger son. “Do you know what Andrew means? He’s talking about the Oxy. He’s talking about how even when his dad was here, he was gone.”

“So he knows?”

“He’s seen the light go out in his father’s eyes. The way he’d disappear for days at a time. Then come back. But he just doesn’t know that this time, Daddy’s not coming back.”

“Patty, I talked to Sean three weeks ago and he seemed fine. He was off the pills. He said the rehab worked.”

“Yeah, but you know how precarious addiction and recovery can be. He wasn’t strong enough. He gave in to it. Went back to it. Then got fired. From the construction crew.”

“You mean, laid off?” Cape Cod contractors worked a seasonal, cyclical business.

“Fired. Couple days ago. He’d gone back to using, and his boss could see it.” She paused, turned away, and suddenly broke down in tears. I put my arms around her. It seemed like the right thing to do.

There had always been a spark between Patty and me, but neither one of us ever acknowledged it or acted upon it. That would have been the ultimate betrayal of my comrade, off fighting the war after I’d come back, and that was unthinkable. Still, she had lively eyes and an irresistible smile, and her daily running kept her in great shape.

She said, her words muffled against my shirt, “I found him passed out on the bathroom floor. Overdosed on an Oxydone inhaler.”

“Did the kids see him?”

She sniffed, pulled away. Shook her head. “They were at school, thank God. He’d bought the Oxy off another vet whose doctor prescribed him twice as much as he needed.”

I nodded. I didn’t know what to say.

“I just have to hold it together for the kids. When you have kids, you don’t get to fall apart.”

“I know.”

“You’re not a parent; you can’t really know.”

“Fair enough. But I think I understand.”

“You understood Sean, that’s the thing. Sometimes I felt you knew him better than I did. What you two went through together.”

I nodded, attempted a smile.

“It’s gonna take all the energy I have just to get up in the morning and get through the day,” she said.

I nodded again.

She’d moved over to a corner of the family room where a small writing desk was stacked with envelopes and staplers and a Scotch-tape dispenser and a calculator. She picked up one stack and waved it.

“The funeral home wants twenty thousand bucks. That’s twenty thousand bucks I don’t have. He used up all our savings on drugs.”

“Twenty thousand? For what?”

“Well, eighteen, to be exact. A couple years ago Sean saw a flier somewhere advertising free burial for vets in the national cemetery in Bourne. You may now prequalify! it said. He wanted to plan for the future. So the funeral home sold him what they called a pre-need funeral contract. I guess he didn’t really look at the fine print. So now I have to come up with eighteen thousand bucks on top of whatever Brendan’s braces are going to cost.”

“I’m happy to loan you whatever you need,” I said. Though I wasn’t sure how liquid I was these days. Business had been slow.

I took the top envelope from the stack she’d been waving. Haddad Funeral Home. I opened up the bill and read it over.

“I’m not taking a loan from you, Nick,” she said.

“Interesting,” I said, slipping the statement back into the envelope. I took note of Haddad Funeral Home’s address in Orleans, Massachusetts. “Mind if I borrow this?”

“No, you’re not paying them a visit. It’s my problem, not yours.”

I gave her the envelope back. “Okay. Hey, I’m keeping you from your kids, aren’t I?”

“More like protecting me from them. Nick, do you think Sean always had this... weakness? Was he always like this?”

She meant the drugs.

“People change, Patty.”

“You think?”

“When he came back the last time, he was different. All that breaching, all those explosives, all those years — I think it did something to him.”

“And the stress of what you guys went through.”

“Maybe. But, man, he could do anything. I remember when the Humvee broke down and we were waiting hours for the mechanics, he finally got out and got under the thing and got the hoses unkinked or whatever it was, got it running again. Sean was the engine whisperer. There was nothing he couldn’t fix.”

“Yeah,” she said sadly. “Except himself.”