36. Jonny
Chapter thirty-six
Jonny
We don’t make it as far as the apartment before I kiss him.
It happens in the elevator—the same elevator where he carried me on his back a lifetime ago—and this time it’s me who presses him against the wall, me who tangles my fingers in his shirt, me who says “I missed you so fucking much” into the space between his mouth and mine.
He laughs against my lips. “It’s been four days.”
“Four days too many.”
He carries me across the threshold again, because he has decided this is our thing now, and this time I don’t protest. The apartment smells like him—coffee, laundry detergent, the faintest trace of alcohol he hasn’t quite cleaned away.
Lance reaches into his jacket and takes out the Kermit bracelet. He kept it. He puts it around my wrist himself.
What happens next is nothing like any time before.
It’s not the desperation of the first night or the tenderness of the anniversary game.
It’s joyful. That’s the only word for it.
We laugh into each other’s mouths. We bump foreheads.
I try to pull his shirt off and get the button stuck in his hair and he swears and I can’t stop giggling.
When he finally gets me onto the bed, I look up at him and say the thing I’ve never said to anyone.
“I want you inside me.”
He goes still. “Are you sure?”
“I declared myself a top to you on our first night together and I’ve been rethinking that decision ever since. Yes, I’m sure.”
He is so careful with me that I almost cry.
He takes his time. He checks in. He watches my face for every signal, and when I finally feel him push inside me, the sound I make is not pain or pleasure but something deeper—the sound of a wall I’ve been maintaining for a decade finally coming down.
I wrap my legs around him and pull him closer, and for the first time in my life, I let someone all the way in. Not just physically. All the way.
Afterward, we lie in the wreckage of the bed and he traces the phoenix on my arm. The Kermit bracelet is pressed between our wrists.
“The ticket,” I say.
He tenses.
“No, listen. I’m not angry anymore. I understand why you did it. You wanted me to be free, and you thought paying for the ticket was the way to make that happen.” I turn his hand over and trace the lines of his palm. “But I want you to get your money back. Can you do that?”
“It’s not about the money.”
“I know it’s not. It’s about the principle of you not bankrupting yourself for someone who didn’t even know you were doing it. Get your money back, Lance. For me.”
He’s quiet. “Okay.”
“Thank you.” I kiss his knuckles. “Now. I’m starving. Can I make you dinner without trying to poison you this time?”
He laughs. “What are you making?”
“Korma. No heat. I promise.”
“Can I watch?”
“You can help. I’ll teach you how to eat with your hands.”
He looks skeptical but follows me to the kitchen.
I walk him through tearing naan, scooping curry, eating without a fork.
His first attempt is catastrophic—korma down his shirt, rice on the floor—but he tries, and when he finally gets a clean scoop to his mouth without dropping anything, he looks so triumphant that I applaud.
“I knew you could do it.”
“This is the hardest thing I’ve done since Basic.”
After dinner, we sit on the bed with our laptops. The Kermit bracelet catches the lamplight every time I move my wrist, and Lance keeps glancing at it like he’s checking it’s still there.
“I’m looking at dojos,” I say. “There’s an Okinawan Kempo on Twelfth and Maple. Good?”
“Not bad. Keep it on the list.”
“Taekwondo on—”
“Keep walking.”
“What’s wrong with Taekwondo?”
“Very rules-based. Good for controlled sparring, but there are a lot of things you’re not allowed to do, which limits its usefulness in combat.”
“How do you know that?”
He gives me a long, steady look over his coffee.
“Oh. Right.” I take a sip of chai. “Is BJJ a thing? Or is that just really dirty sex?”
“Brazilian jiu-jitsu. And I like. Where is it?”
I look. “Umm, it’s actually within walking distance. North Chancellor Street. Right around the corner from the Music building.”
“Beginner class this evening at six.”
“Good. We’ll go together, and if the instructors aren’t assholes, we’ll sign up.”
“You’re coming too?”
“I don’t know BJJ. You’ll probably be able to kick my ass in no time.”
I give him a doubtful look. “And the therapist?” I ask, more carefully.
“Gregory Elion. Office on Third. Extremely good with PTSD. Combination of EMDR and some other approaches. I’ve read every review.” He pauses. “I have an appointment on Thursday.”
I stare at him. He already made the appointment. Before we even reconciled. He was going to do it regardless.
“Thank you,” I say. “I love how seriously you took me.”
My inbox pings. Two emails. The first is from Henry Drumm, forwarding a copy of Alice’s memorial speech with a note: “This is what she would have wanted read at the ceremony. I thought you should see it.” I open the attachment and skim it.
It’s warm and measured and sounds exactly like Alice. I close it and save it for later.
The second email is from Rita Cadwalader.
“Lance.”
He looks up. I turn the laptop toward him. He reads the email and his face changes.
“Do you want to watch it?” he asks.
“Together.”
He moves next to me. I click play.
The video opens on Alice’s house—her front door, her car in the driveway. “Actually, because I don’t know if any of these houses are going to survive, I’m going to record the whole neighborhood,” she says. “Maybe some of my neighbors might need this video too.”
She walks down the street. Halloween decorations are still up—abandoned pumpkins grinning on porches, fake cobwebs and a skeleton on a porch swing. She films the Robesons loading their car. “You evacuating now?” she calls.
“If the wind changes, this whole area’s gonna be cooked,” the man answers.
Cars pull away. Ringtones. People darting in and out of their houses. The garden flags, the last procession of vehicles merging onto asphalt. And then Alice approaches 112, where Henry Drumm has a box of things he’s depositing into his car.
“Look at Henry,” Lance says. “Wasting time moving things from car to car. He must have been in an absolute panic.”
On screen, Alice calls to Henry. “Where you evacuating to?”
He squints at her. “Why are you recording?”
“Insurance,” she says. “I figured the more I had recorded, the less those bastards could diddle us if the worst happened.”
Henry’s brow furrows. “Well, let’s hope it doesn’t.” He goes to the front door and peers inside. “Suzannah, for God’s sakes, you don’t need it! Would you please get moving?”
Alice’s camera pans to my house, and suddenly, there I am. Taking out the trash. Seventeen years old.
We both gasp. “How was I ever that young?” I whisper.
I watch my teenage self deposit the trash, look up at the sky, and freeze. On screen, I look really scared. This must have been the moment it sank in. I take my phone out—Lance is calling me, I realize now—but before I can answer, the front door opens.
Elliott comes out.
I go rigid. Lance grabs my hand and holds it tight.
My brother’s face fills the screen—his dark hair, which he never let me brush without a struggle.
“Oh my God, look at how big he is,” I manage.
I’d forgotten that. And also how, even though he was fourteen, he still moved with the sweet, lumbering grace of a toddler. Oh, Elliott.
“On the TV they say everything’s bad,” he declares. “I don’t like this. Are people hurting?”
I watch myself square my shoulders, take a deep breath, and smile at my brother. “I think the people who lived there have all gone away now. Let’s go inside.”
“But all their stuff got burned up.” He looks straight up. “How come the sky’s still blue here?”
Alice must have felt she was intruding, because the camera pans back to the woods. Through the trees, I can see the gap between our house and the Drumms’, the garbage bin, and above it all, the billowing smoke like an ugly curtain.
As Alice records the other side of the street, my own voice carries in the background, gently coaxing Elliott to do what I need him to do.
“You’ve got Mr. Snail,” the boy on the recording says, and he sounds so certain about it. “Mr. Snail isn’t scared of anything, so we’re not scared either.”
Alice turns the camera back to us. I watch as I put my hand on Elliott’s back and guide him gently inside. “Hey!” Alice calls over. “You folks gonna be okay? Do you need any help?”
I turn and look right at the camera. “Thank you, ma’am. We’ll be fine.”
That is my voice. That flat, easy, unbroken voice, carrying across a street without any effort at all, and I have not heard it in ten years and I did not know it was gone until right now.
I sound like somebody else.
The front door closes behind us. The video ends.
Lance reaches out and stops the playback. Then he enfolds me in his arms and we rock together—I feel waves of grief for Elliott, for Alice, for the boy who squared his shoulders and smiled at his brother and walked back into a house he was about to lose.
It takes a long time before I can detach myself from Lance.
When we do, Lance wipes his face with the heel of his hand and makes an attempt at lightening it, because that is what he does.
“I’ll say this for Henry,” he says. “At least he was packing that car properly. Boxes flat, heavy things low. When I cleared out your mother’s car I threw everything into the back of my truck like I was gritting a road.”
I laugh, wetly, and then I stop laughing.
Because something has just gone past me and I did not catch it.
“Play it again,” I say.
He plays it again. Henry with the box. Henry crossing the driveway. Henry putting it carefully into his own trunk.
“Wait.” Lance leans in. “He’s taking it out of hers.”
“What?”
“Out of her car. Into his.” He points at the screen. “And look at the back seat of hers. It’s half empty. There’s room in there for everything he’s carrying and twice as much again. Why would you unpack a car that isn’t full?”
And we say it at the same time, in the same words, because he said them to me in a closet four days ago.
“You don’t put stuff in a car that’s going nowhere.”
I look at him. “You take it out.”
“Just like I did with your car.”
The room goes very quiet.
“He knew her car wasn’t going anywhere,” I say slowly. “Half an hour before that fire came over the ridge, he already knew she wasn’t driving out of there.”
“Maybe there was a problem with the car like there was with mine.” I pause. “Wait. I remember this now. I remember in my car, trying to start it, and I looked over and saw her car there with the trunk still open, and I realized that I would have to abandon it, too.”
“If that’s the case, why isn’t he in more panic to get everything? Why is he standing in the driveway shouting at her to hurry up?” Lance asks.
He scrubs the video back and plays it again, and this time neither of us is looking at Henry’s hands.
“Suzannah, for God’s sakes, you don’t need it! Would you please get moving?” he shouts into the house.
“Huh.” He plays it again, this time with the sound turned up a little bit more. “Do you hear anything?”
“The microphone probably didn’t pick her up. This was technology from ten years ago.”
He turns the sound all the way up and plays it.
Nothing. No answer. No voice, no movement, no shape behind him in that hallway. He shouts twice into an open door and nobody in that house says one single word back to him.
“She doesn’t answer,” Lance says. “But he’s talking to her like she was. You were maybe fifteen feet away. Did you hear her?”
“I can’t remember.” I close my eyes. “I mean, you saw the video. People were calling to each other and packing. It was so busy and loud. I thought I…” I shake my head.
“I don’t know. But I would have. Suzannah wasn’t quiet.
My bedroom faced the road, so when she would pull into her driveway, if she was on the phone, I would hear her very clearly.
She had that kind of voice. I remember that now. ”
“One more time,” he says, and this time, we play it with the volume all the way up, so loud that we can hear neighbors three doors down asking each other if they locked the front door.
I look at Lance. “They found her in the living room. It was in the paper. Lying on her side with one arm stretched out toward the hall door, and I remember reading it and thinking she must have been trying to crawl out when the smoke got her. I was seventeen and I thought about that for weeks.”
He plays it a fourth time. We are both leaning into the screen now like a pair of idiots.
“There.” He stops it and puts his finger on the screen. “On the hall floor, coming through from the lounge. Just at the edge of the door frame.”
It could be anything. It could be a shoe, or a bag, or a fold in a rug. It is a pale shape on a dark floor for about two seconds of a phone video shot ten years ago by a woman who was not looking at it.
And then Henry walks over and stands in front of it.
Neither of us says anything for a while.
“That can’t be right,” I say. “The fire wasn’t even on that side of the ridge yet. There was no smoke on our street. How could she be—”
I stop.
“Hear me out,” Lance says. “If she was already dead before that fire got anywhere near Denning Court, then it wasn’t the fire that did it.”
“You think Henry killed his wife?”
“I think a man stood in a doorway and shouted at somebody who wasn’t answering, in front of a witness with a camera, and then blocked the view.” He says it very evenly. “And I think most women who are killed are killed by somebody they know.”
“But he loved her.” I hear how stupid it sounds coming out. “He talks about her at every meeting. He got a park named after her.”
“Yes,” Lance says. “He did.”
We sit with it.
“We don’t know anything,” I say finally. “We have got two seconds of a bad video and a thing I read in a newspaper when I was seventeen. That’s not proof of anything at all. There isn’t even a reason. Why would he?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then what do we do?”
He looks at the frozen frame for a long moment.
“We stop guessing,” he says, “and we give it to people who can actually look at it.”