CHAPTER EIGHT
The first thing I typed was four lines long.
It began do you know what your children are.
It had a question mark in it and then another one, and somewhere in the third line it turned into an inventory, because that is what those messages always turn into.
Fifteen years, three department parties, the cologne, the showers before shift instead of after, and I was two words from putting down the thing about my hands on his stomach in the hallway.
I got most of the way through it before I understood what I was doing, which was standing in a burning apartment writing a speech.
I deleted it.
The second one was shorter and it started with the word your, and I got as far as your son and stopped, because I could feel where that sentence was going and I knew what would happen when he read it.
He would go somewhere behind his own face.
He does that. Whenever anything comes at him with a shape like that, he goes about two inches back inside himself and waits for it to be over, and then he says something reasonable.
I deleted that one too.
The third one was one word. It was please.
I looked at that for a while.
Then I deleted it, and I have been glad about that ever since. Of everything I did wrong that night, and there is a list, deleting that word is the one thing I would not take back.
And then I sat on the floor of my bedroom with sixteen percent left and I worked out what to write to my husband, and the answer was that I should not write to my husband at all.
I should write to a fire officer.
So that is what I did.
1114 S Fenwick. 4C. 4th floor.
3 occupants. 2 children.
Door is steel, they cannot get it. Stairwell gone.
Danny is 7 and he is not breathing right.
I read it over once.
There was not one word in it that was mine. Not one. No punctuation of the kind I use. No name at the top. It was an address and a count and a condition, and it was the exact language I have heard come out of that man’s mouth at my own kitchen table for fifteen years, flat and stripped and useful.
That was the only dialect he had ever been fluent in.
Fifteen years of marriage and to reach him at all I had to file.
There is a version of that message somewhere in a file now. They pulled it off my phone in December, printed it, gave it an exhibit number, and read it out loud in a room with a flag in it, and a man I had never met read my four lines in a flat voice and then said, no further questions.
It read like a size-up.
That is what the investigator called it, later, in the hallway, apologizing for the word before he used it. He said a size-up is the first thing an officer does when he gets on scene. Occupancy, floors, exposures, trapped occupants, conditions. He said mine was a good one.
He meant it kindly. He was being kind for about nine seconds, which was eight more than anybody else managed that whole winter.
I sent it.
Then I sent one more line under it, because I could not help myself, and because there was a thing in me that still believed the first one might not be enough on its own.
It’s us.
And then I watched the space underneath.
There is a little word that shows up under a message when it lands. You never look at it. It’s the smallest, dumbest thing on the whole screen and I have never once in my life waited for it.
I waited for it now.
I lay on my side with the phone six inches from my face in a room I could not see across, and I watched a piece of empty gray screen where a word goes.
It did not come.
I have thought about that a great deal. Not the affair, not the phone call, not the twenty-one minutes. That. Four square millimeters of nothing.
Because a phone that is on will take a message even from the bottom of a lake. It stacks them up. It waits. It gets them to you eventually and you sit down at some point and go through them all going oh, God, oh, God, and you call everybody back.
Nothing was stacking up.
That is what an off phone means. Not busy. Not underground. Not in a basement full of smoke with a mask on his face, which was the story I had been telling myself and everybody else for four years.
Off.
Somebody’s thumb had gone to the side of a phone and held it down, and waited for it, and then set it down.
That takes about four seconds. I have timed it since. I sat on a bench outside a courtroom with my own phone in my hand and I held the button down and counted, and it was four seconds, and then the screen went black and I sat there looking at myself in it.
Four seconds is not an accident.
You cannot do it in your pocket. You cannot do it by leaning on it. A phone asks you first. It puts the thing up on the screen and makes you drag it across, and then it takes another second or two to go, and the whole time it is lit up in your hand telling you exactly what you are about to do.
He did that. On purpose. At a specific minute, in a specific room, with his hand.
I could see the room. I have never been in it and I could see it.
A lamp on a nightstand. A glass with water in it.
Clothes on a chair, folded the way he folds them, because he does fold them, he is not a slob, he is a very neat man.
And the phone lying face down on the wood next to the lamp, dark, with the whole city trying to get into it.
Fourteen percent.
I opened Jess.
Building’s on fire. 1114 S Fenwick. We’re in 4C, they can’t get the door.
Then, because my mind is what it is, and because it will not stop being practical even when there is nothing left to be practical about:
Kids’ insurance cards are in my purse.
I sent it and lay there and it took me maybe a second or two to work out that my purse was on the counter in the kitchen, twelve feet from the front door, and that there was no kitchen.
Jess started typing immediately. The three dots came up and moved and stopped and came up again.
Somewhere across town a woman had grabbed her phone off the nightstand in the dark, and I watched her try to find something to say to me, and fail, twice, and I lay in the smoke and felt something for her that I did not have any room for.
Then: im coming
I did not answer her. I went back to him.
Mike.
That’s all I sent that time. His name. No period.
There was nothing under it.
I want to put down here, because it matters later, the thing I did not write.
I did not ask him how he could.
Not once. Not that night, not in the hospital, not at the hearing, not on the steps of a building in March with him standing three feet away from me holding his hat in both hands.
It has never seemed like a question with anything at the end of it.
The phone on the floor next to Danny’s head said something. I had forgotten she was there. I got over to it and put my mouth down close.
“Erin? Still with me?”
“Yes.”
“How’s Danny doing?”
I looked at him.
And here is where I stop being able to give it to you in order.
I know he was on his side with his cheek on the wood. I know the wet shirt had slipped down off his mouth and was lying across his chin. I know Ivy had her arm over him.
What I don’t know is how long I had not been looking.
Thirty seconds. Ninety. Long enough to type two messages to a man and one to a woman and watch a piece of blank screen.
“Erin?”
“He’s,” I said.
Ivy raised her head off the floor.
She looked at her brother and then she looked at me and her face did something I had not seen it do all night, and had not seen it do since she was about four years old.
It came apart.
“Mom,” she said. “He stopped.”