Late One Night

21

Before Brandi made that call, she talked to Angel. They sat together on the side of Brandi’s bed, and Angel wished more than anything that she could be with Missy. She kept her head bowed and listened to Brandi talk to her in low tones so Hannah and Sarah and Emma wouldn’t hear from the living room.

“You know this is very serious.” Brandi hadn’t even taken off her coat, a black pea coat with a double row of big buttons. “Angel, do you hear me? Are you telling the truth about finding your father’s knife behind the trailer?”

Angel kept thinking about that knife, his pocketknife, and she’d given him a chance to say it didn’t mean anything, and he wouldn’t say that, couldn’t say it, because the truth was he’d been behind their trailer the night it burned. Somehow he’d dropped that knife in the snow, and though he wasn’t willing to tell her what he’d been up to, he’d left enough room for her to believe that the rumors were true. He’d come to do her and her mother and her brother and her sisters harm.

“I showed him the knife.” Angel looked up at Brandi and tried to keep her voice level. “He didn’t deny anything. He was there that night.”

“That doesn’t mean he did anything.”

“Then why was he there? Mr. Rowe saw him. He was there right before the trailer caught on fire.”

Later, Brandi would wonder who she’d been trying to protect — the girls? Ronnie? Herself? She’d scold herself for not being more sympathetic. She’d try to think back to that moment when she understood what was about to happen, and she’d try to determine whether even the smallest part of her could imagine that Ronnie had started that fire. What she knew for sure, even as she spoke to Angel, was that this family that she and Ronnie were trying to keep together would never be the same. Maybe, she’d think, it had been her and the dream she’d always had of having a man to love her and a family to take care of that she’d been trying to save above anything or anyone else.

“This will change us,” she said to Angel. “No matter what turns out to be the truth.”

When Angel didn’t answer, when she just hung her head and kicked her heels against the bed frame, Brandi left her there. She walked out of the bedroom and went to the computer to look up the phone number of the bar in Brick Chapel, where she thought Ronnie might be. She’d driven around Goldengate and Phillipsport before it had hit her — Brick Chapel — and she’d hurried home to make this call, but Missy was there and she said she needed to tell her something.

Now Brandi had no idea how long it would be before everything got sorted out, and she didn’t know what would happen to her and Ronnie and the girls because of it. She laid her hand on her stomach as she settled down into the chair at the library table, and for the first time she felt her baby kick. Once, twice. Enough to thrill her for just an instant. Her first thought was, I can’t wait to tell Ronnie. Then she remembered what else she would have to tell him, and the wave of sorrow that swept over her was greater than any she’d ever felt. Already, just because Angel had said what she had, he seemed different to her. Even though it might not be true — it couldn’t, could it? — just the thought and the fact that they’d have to talk about it was enough to make everything seem strange. Brandi knew that the story would continue to spread. People were already talking, and that notion would always be there even if it got proved a lie.

And if it turned out to be true? She couldn’t bring herself to think about that. She found the number of the Kozy Kiln and she picked up the phone.

Ronnie drove out of Brick Chapel, not knowing what was waiting for him at home. He was worried. He’d told Brandi he was sorry for not picking up Sarah and Emma from school, and she’d said that fumble had better be the least of his sins. He wondered what she knew.

He picked up Route 50 to Goldengate, and though he’d had a few beers — how many exactly, he couldn’t have said — he pushed the Firebird up to seventy-five and hurried on through the dark.

Soon he crossed the river, and there on the flat bottom land, the lights of Phillipsport twinkled in the distance ahead of him.

Just outside the city limits, where the highway curved past the Wabash Sand and Gravel yard before straightening out for the last clear shot into town, he let his foot off the gas and brought the Firebird back to the speed limit. He eased into the curve, and when he came out of it and glanced up to his rearview mirror, he was surprised to see red lights flashing behind him. As much as he wanted to keep going — to be home with Brandi — he knew he had no choice but to pull off the road into the parking lot of WPLP to see why someone wanted to talk to him.

It was Biggs. He got out of his sheriff’s car and made his way to the Firebird. Ronnie didn’t give him the chance to get in the first word.

“Was I speeding?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Why’d you stop me, then?”

“Taillight’s out.” Biggs had his hands on the door frame, leaning in through the open window. “Where you been, Ronnie?”

“Brick Chapel. Seeing after that job you cost me.”

“Now how did I do that?”

“All that nonsense this afternoon.”

Biggs leaned in closer. “Get that taillight seen to,” he said, and Ronnie told him he would.

He pulled the Firebird back onto the highway and followed it, just under the speed limit, on into Phillipsport and then the eight miles to Goldengate where Brandi’s house was full of light. To Ronnie, at the end of this winter day when so much had gone wrong, it was tempting to believe that something festive was waiting for him inside those brightly lit rooms.

The first thing he noticed when he came through the front door was that Brandi had on her coat, and that gave him a strange feeling. To see her standing there with her coat on as if any second she might walk out the door, which, stunned as he was, he didn’t bother to close. He’d taken the old storm door down a while back, meaning to replace it with a new one, but he hadn’t gotten around to it yet, so there was nothing to block the cold air rushing into the house.

“Brandi?” he said.

She had her arms crossed, resting on her stomach. The girls were nowhere to be seen, and to Ronnie’s dismay there was no sign of them living in that house. No toys or dolls scattered on the floor as usual. None of their snow boots or gloves or coats tossed willy-nilly. Someone had picked up everything and put it away. The house was quiet. No television. No video games. No music. No squealing laughter. Just Ronnie and Brandi facing each other across the tidy living room. Just the two of them, the way it’d been before the fire.

Then, with a suddenness that startled him, she said, “Did you burn up that trailer? Is that why you went out driving that night?”

Ronnie felt all the air leave him. Here he was in that place he’d never wanted to be, that place where he had to start answering questions, and he knew it was because Angel had found his pocketknife and had apparently started to tell the story.

“Oh,” he said. That was all. Like he’d been punched in the stomach and couldn’t get his breath. “Oh,” he said again. “I wish Angel hadn’t told you about that.”

He’d never seen a look on Brandi’s face like the one that came to it now, not even on the night Pat Wade came to tell them about the fire. It was like something gave way inside her, and he could see the fear in her quivering chin, and the disbelief in her slack jaw and the distress in her watery eyes. It hit him with a force that almost brought him to his knees, because for a moment he had the eerie sensation that he was looking at Della’s face, the way it surely was countless times after he left her heartbroken and fearful of what the future might hold, or, worse yet, the way she looked the night of the fire at the moment she lost hope and knew she wasn’t going to get everyone out of the trailer.

Such a thought froze him, and even though he knew he should say something more, should explain it all — he could only stand there, dumb and looking guilty as sin.

Brandi was shaking her head. She was pointing to the door. “Get out.”

“But, baby—”

“I mean it. Now.”

“But my girls.” He looked around the room again, eager for some sign of them, something that would tell him all of this was a bad dream and any second he’d wake from it and find his family welcoming him home. “What’s happened to my girls?”

Brandi was on him now, her hands balled into fists, beating against his face, his arms, his chest. He could smell her perfume, Love’s Musky Jasmine — he’d given it to her for Christmas. She wouldn’t stop hitting him, and, finally, stumbling backward to the front door, he thought to take out his pocketknife. If he could show her that knife, maybe he could start to explain.

He wasn’t aware that he’d opened the blade. Just a matter of habit, but Brandi had no way of knowing what he intended. She was screaming now. She made one more rush at him and he let her come. She shoved him backward through the open door and he stumbled over the threshold strip and fell. Just before the door closed, he saw Angel in the hallway, her arms folded over her chest. He called out to her. He got to his feet and pounded on the door. He pounded and pounded. “Brandi,” he said. “Brandi, let me in.” But there was no answer, and then, one by one, the lights went off inside the house.