17
Rowan opened the glass freezer door at the 7-Eleven and grabbed a pint of H?agen-Dazs.
Sometimes nothing else will do.
She also grabbed a small bag of Doritos to share with Thor because he loved the Cool Ranch flavor. She’d left him home for her dash to fill up her gas tank and get ice cream. Guilt hovered around her head.
Not that he cares when I leave.
From where Thor lay on the sofa, he’d opened one eye when she picked up her keys and then promptly closed it, so she’d let him be.
“Hey, Rowan!”
She turned to see a gym acquaintance standing near the Slurpee machine. She struggled to recall his name as she cheerily greeted him and then felt embarrassed about the late-night sugar and fat in her hands. She’d often thought he resembled Evan a bit—if Evan were in his late twenties, lived at the gym, and had the lowest body fat percentage possible. The muscles in his arms rippled as he nabbed a Slurpee cup of the largest size.
Okay. Not a die-hard sugar hater.
They chatted for a long moment about nothing at all as he filled his cup with every flavor of the sweet, blended ice.
Rowan lowered her estimate of his age to early twenties.
He continued to talk as they both paid and went out the door. She tried to wrap up the conversation, but he continued, not picking up her gotta-go body language as she inched toward her SUV. He wasn’t hitting on her; he simply wouldn’t stop talking. She listened another minute and then said, “I need to go before my ice cream melts.”
He respected the need to protect her ice cream, and they parted.
I still don’t recall his name.
She sped home, exhaustion sinking in, and considered saving the ice cream for another day. A few minutes later, she turned onto her street and wound her way along the long road of old ranch-style homes. She steered around the last sharp bend and caught her breath, her heart racing.
That’s my house!
Smoke poured from a broken living room window and another on the rolling garage door. Orange flames flickered inside, making the house glow in the dark.
Thor!
She slammed on her brakes and parked at the curb because three people with buckets were frantically running in her driveway. Her neighbors. She grabbed her phone as one man sprinted toward her. “Where’s your hose?” he shouted.
“Did you call 911?” she yelled back, jumping out of the SUV.
“We all did!” It was Jason from across the street. His wife was in their driveway, filling buckets with their hose.
“My hose and spigot are in the garage!” She lunged back into her Tahoe and hit the garage door opener.
The fire is already getting oxygen through the window. Opening the door won’t matter.
The door rolled up, and gigantic clouds of smoke spilled out. They were dark and heavy with small sparks of flame inside, indicating the smoke was incredibly hot.
“Get back! Don’t go in there!” she yelled at a neighbor who tried to dash into the garage to grab the hose. “Did Thor get out?” she shouted at Jason.
He froze, his mouth falling open. “He’s not with you?”
Sirens sounded in the distance.
Thor!
Her dog hated fire and smoke. As her heart attempted to pound out of her chest, she darted to the back of her SUV and opened the hatch. She grabbed a duffel, ripped it open, and dug out a handful of N95 respirator masks. She pulled off her sweatshirt, slipped on a mask, and shoved the others into Jason’s hand. She plunged her sweatshirt into his bucket of water, soaking it through.
“You can’t go in there!” he told her.
“My dog is fucking in there!” she shrieked, blocking mental images of Thor with burning fur.
“Maybe he got out!”
“He was locked inside when I left!” Regret that she hadn’t taken Thor for the quick trip swamped her, making her weak in the knees. She put the sweatshirt on her head, covering her hair, and tied the sleeves under her chin. She rummaged in the duffel for her heaviest gloves and then ran up the lawn to the front door.
Hang on, buddy!
He must be terrified.
“Rowan!” Jason screamed after her. “Don’t go in there!”
There was no going through the garage: dense black smoke continued to roll out, completely filling the space from floor to ceiling. She approached the front door, arcing around more smoke pouring from the broken front window.
Who broke the window?
Heat baked her skin, and she tugged the wet sweatshirt forward to cover her cheeks.
“Fuck!” She ripped off her gloves to punch the code into the door lock. She hit two numbers and stopped to dig her burning fingers into the wet sweatshirt.
The fire is right behind the door.
Thor is in there.
She pressed the last two numbers of the code, slipped her glove back on, dropped as low as she could, and opened the door, shoving it inward. More black, heavy smoke poured out as she huddled on her knees, her hands instinctively protecting her covered head. “Thor!” she screamed into the house.
The fire roared in her ears, a crackling, rushing, thunderous sound. “Thor!” she screamed again, trying not to imagine her dog’s terror.
She covered her eyes with her gloved hands, trying to peek between the fingers. Heat dried her eyeballs and pushed through her clothing. Through a brief break in the smoke, she saw a wall of fire just beyond the front door.
I can’t go in.
She glanced back. A fire truck now blocked her driveway, and the firefighters were unloading their equipment. Jason grabbed one firefighter and pointed at Rowan. The firefighter did a double take at the sight of her kneeling in front of the open door and strode her way.
He’ll make me leave.
“Thor!” She considered dashing through the flames to find her dog. But she was already too hot. Smoke rose from her gloves and jeans. She needed to get back from the fire.
Barking sounded from inside. Maybe.
“Thor!” she screeched into the house.
More barking. But it was faint.
He’s in the basement. The door must be shut.
There was a door at the top of the stairs that led down to the basement. It was usually left open because Rowan’s office was down there along with their workout equipment and the laundry room. Somehow it had closed.
He’s got to be okay. Fire and smoke go up.
But she wasn’t taking any chances. There could be flames in the basement too. She lunged away from the heat, stumbled to her feet, and ran toward the side of the home. At the back of the house, a slider on the main level opened to a deck that had a dozen stairs leading down to the yard. At the basement level, there were two wide but short windows, one in the laundry room and another in the bathroom. The windows were level with her shins, the basement rooms mostly below ground.
Rowan had never opened the windows in all the years she’d owned the house. There’d been no point; the basement always maintained a pleasant temperature.
But she’d check the window locks every six months or so. When Evan moved in, he’d added small posts that lay in the tracks, keeping the windows from opening more than two inches.
I’ll break a window.
How will I get him out?
Thor weighed nearly eighty pounds. From inside the basement, the windows were six feet off the ground and only about eighteen inches high.
If that.
It would be a tight squeeze for Thor. Assuming she could lift him up to the window.
She tore around to the back of the house in the dark, her lungs straining to draw in deep breaths through the respirator. She threw herself to the ground and tried to peer through the basement’s frosted glass window into the laundry room. She beat on the window. “Thor!”
More barking. But not near the window.
He’s definitely louder down here.
She’d worried that he’d ended up in one of the main level’s bedrooms instead of in the basement.
It was dark inside the home, so she wouldn’t be able to see his black blur through the window, but the door to the laundry room was usually closed. At least there didn’t appear to be flames in the basement. She rolled to her back, jacked up both legs, and thrust them at the glass with all her strength. Then again and again.
Come on!
Nothing happened. Panic chilled her bones.
I need a fireman’s axe or a heavy tool.
Thor barked frantically. The smoke had started to flow out from under the roof’s eaves on the home’s back side, and she knew it could eventually start to stream into the basement through duct work and under the door at the top of the stairs. The fire was spreading inside from the front to the back of the house, and the continuous shriek from her smoke alarms made her sweat. The screeching of the sirens competed against the screaming fear inside her brain for her dog. Rowan leaped to her feet, squinting into the dark of the yard for a big rock or anything she could use to break the window.
The playhouse.
The little plastic house bordered her property. Ten-year-old Lily next door had outgrown the house, and her father had recently tried to pop the plastic walls and roof apart with a sledgehammer. But the joints were stuck tight. He hadn’t wanted to break the walls; they were supposed to come apart. Supposed to. So he’d paused the task for a few days.
Rowan closed her eyes, picturing her yard. She’d looked out her kitchen window and seen the sledgehammer leaning against one of the little house’s walls. But when had she looked? Yesterday? The day before?
Will it still be there?
The playhouse was much closer than the fire truck. She couldn’t see the structure in the dark, but she knew where it was. Rowan jogged down the gentle slope of her yard.
Hang on, Thor.
The outline of the little house under the firs came into view. And there was something thin leaning against it. Rowan grabbed the sledgehammer and raced back to the basement window. She lifted the sledgehammer like a golf club and swung it against the window.
It shattered. Sharp pieces of glass fell onto the tile floor of the laundry room, and jagged pieces remained stuck in the frame. Rowan knocked the bigger ones out with taps of the hammer. The older window had regular glass, not tempered glass that would fall apart in little safety squares. The frequency and volume of Thor’s barking increased at the noise, and she laid her sweatshirt across the bottom edge of the window and shimmied in backward, on her stomach. Tiny shards in the frame poked through the sweatshirt, and she tried to raise her torso over them as she scooted back into the laundry room.
Impossible.
She gave one last shove and dropped to the floor. Pain radiated from her stomach and chest; the glass had cut through the sweatshirt as she dragged her body across it.
Can I get Thor across that?
She hit the small room’s light switch and hesitantly touched the doorknob. It was cool. She yanked open the laundry room door, and Thor plowed her over, knocking her onto her rear, frantically licking her face.
“Hi, buddy! Are you good? Are you okay? We’ll get out of here.” She hugged the squirming, furry dog, feeling him everywhere for any injury. He was okay. Just terrified from the smoke.
A layer of black smoke flowed into the laundry room, hovering at the ceiling, and Rowan was glad she had her mask. A loud crash sounded upstairs, and Rowan pictured the roof falling in. She pushed to her feet, slammed the door, and eyed the broken window and the shattered glass all over the floor.
I’ve got to cover that, or he’ll have a million glass slivers.
Rowan opened the dryer and grabbed the load of bath towels. She covered the floor, her brain in fast-forward as she scrambled for ideas to get Thor out the small window. The six feet up to the window suddenly seemed twice as tall. He couldn’t leap from the floor; he’d hit the top of the window frame.
The weight bench was impossible for her to move on her own. Her office chair was on wheels but not very tall. Her desk was at the other end of the basement and would never fit through the door.
The dryer.
Rowan leaned over the dryer to see behind it and yanked the cord out of the wall. She got a grip on the round door opening and pulled, putting all her weight into moving the heavy machine. It slid forward with a horrible screech, its feet dragging across the tile. Thor abruptly backed up, staring at the new monster.
That sound is better than the roar of flames upstairs.
Loud crashes continued above her. She didn’t know if the firemen had entered the home or things were falling over. The overhead light flicked off, and the room went pitch black.
“Shit.” No light came through the little window, but Rowan knew where everything was. She pulled and pushed and strained to move the dryer the ten feet to below the window. The vent hose made a scratchy hiss as it came out of the wall. Rowan looked around as if she could see in the dark room.
“Thor. You still here?”
A nose pressed against her thigh. “Good. Don’t go anywhere. Sit.” She knew there had to be glass she hadn’t covered on the floor. He coughed several times, and she wished she had a mask for him. She shoved the dryer, getting low against it and pushing with her legs.
This is a beast. Would the washing machine have been lighter?
Small crackles sounded under her feet; the dryer had pushed the towels ahead, and she was stepping on glass.
Rowan gave the heavy machine all she had, and it crashed into the wall under the window.
Thank God.
She attempted to rearrange the towels to cover the glass shards again, thankful for her gloves, but it was hopeless.
Get him out.
“Okay, Thor.” She went back to her dog and attempted to lift him. It was as impossible as she’d expected. She could lift eighty pounds, but that weight spread out over a wiggly, scared dog was different. He whined and coughed as the din grew louder above their heads. “I know,” she soothed. “It’s okay.” The stinging of her eyes told her the smoke was growing thicker in the room. She led him across the room and patted the top of the dryer. “Up!”
His nails clacked and scratched on the metal as he jumped. Hearing his feet slide around on top, she told him, “Sit!” And was thankful the dryer top was flat.
Now the hard part.
Her sweatshirt was still in place on the window frame, but she knew his back would rake along the broken glass at the top of the window. A few cuts were better than being in a collapsing home. Standing beside the dryer, she lifted one of his paws to the lower window edge. “Up!”
Thor lifted his other paw, stood on his back legs, and then sat again. He whined.
They’d never practiced something quite like this. She had taken him under low obstacles, but not ones he had to jump up to and through.
“Rowan? Are you back here?” Shouts came from the yard, and boots pounded on the stairs up to the deck.
Rowan closed her eyes in relief.
Thank God.
She’d regretted not going back for help when she realized she’d have to hoist Thor out the window. “Down here!” she shouted. “I’m at the low window.”
The boots tramped back down the stairs, and a moment later a flashlight beam zipped across her window and then abruptly returned, blinding her and Thor. “She’s down here! And the dog! Let them know we’ve found both of them!” A fireman knelt at the window and set down his flashlight to illuminate the area. “Close your eyes for a sec.” He knocked out more of the glass along the top of the window frame as she placed a gloved hand over Thor’s eyes. “Will he let me pull him out?” he asked Rowan.
“I think so. I’ll push.” She lay a folded towel over Thor’s back to try to avoid any cuts from the top of the window. Then she directed Thor to put up both paws again, and the fireman got a grip in Thor’s armpit and on his scruff.
“Now!” He pulled, and Rowan got a shoulder under Thor’s butt and shoved.
Thor yipped in pain but scrambled out, the towel falling back onto the dryer.
“Now you.” The fireman held his hand through the window.
Rowan struggled to crawl on top of the dryer, her legs and arms shaking. The rush of adrenaline was gone, and her limbs wouldn’t obey. She sucked in a deep breath through her mask and shakily got onto the dryer. She set the towel over the window’s bottom edge and managed to climb out without the firefighter’s help.
That was much easier than dropping inside.
“Good job,” the man said, patting her shoulder as Thor came to her side. “Are you hurt?”
“No. But I think he scraped his back getting out and probably has glass in his paws.”
“I don’t think that’s your dog’s blood.” He indicated her white T-shirt.
Rowan glanced down. Large bloodstains were visible in the weak moonlight. “It’s from the glass when I went in. They’re shallow cuts.”
She grabbed Thor’s collar, and the man led them around the house the same way she’d sprinted to find her dog, giving the burning home a wide berth. Beside her, Thor pulled against her grip on his collar, a loud whine in his throat. Her legs shook, and she stared in shock at the inferno that was her home.
My God.
It’s completely destroyed.
“How’d it start?” the firefighter asked.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t home.” Rowan paused, taking in the firefighters as they sprayed the home and staring at the scared faces of her neighbors who’d gathered across the street. Her home lit up the entire block. “When I got here, I saw two windows had been broken and smoke was pouring out. One in the garage door and one in the living room. But maybe my neighbors did it while they were trying to put out the fire.”
“The neighbor who told me you’d run around the house said they were already broken when they noticed the fire,” said the firefighter.
Rowan couldn’t speak.
Did someone deliberately set my home on fire?