CHAPTER ELEVEN
My feet hit the asphalt and my legs went.
Somebody had me under both arms before I got all the way down, and they walked me, which is to say they carried me while I moved my feet, about thirty feet across the lot, and somebody else put a blanket over my shoulders. It was gray and stiff and it smelled like a warehouse.
“Where is he. Where’s my son.”
“He’s right here. He’s right here, come on.”
They had him on a gurney by the back of the ambulance.
He looked so small on it. That is the stupidest sentence anybody has ever written about a child on a stretcher and it is the only accurate one available.
He had a mask over his face and the mask was an adult one, too big, and a medic was holding it in place with two fingers and talking to him steadily in a completely normal conversational voice, like they were in line somewhere.
“That’s it. Big ones. You’re doing great, bud. What’s your name?”
“Danny.”
“Danny what?”
“Halloran.”
“How old are you?”
“Seven.”
Every answer came out of him at about half volume and each one took him a little while to get to, and I stood there in a warehouse blanket and listened to my son give a stranger his own name and felt something enormous go through me that I could not have identified with a gun to my head.
Ivy was sitting on the back bumper of the second rig with a blanket around her and a mask on her face, swinging her feet.
Next to her, also in a blanket, also in a mask, sat Otto Renner in his pajama pants and one shoe.
They were not talking. Ivy had one hand flat on the bumper next to his leg, not touching him, just there, the way you do with a dog you don’t know.
Otto had his mask in his fist instead of on his face, and every few seconds a medic would reach over without looking and push it back up, and every few seconds Otto would take it down again so he could say something to my daughter.
I got close enough to hear one of them.
“I don’t hear so good,” he said.
“I know,” Ivy said, loud, straight at him.
“They came in and got me.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t hear anything at all.”
He said it three or four times over the next minute in about that many different ways, and my daughter said I know every single time, at full volume, without one flicker of impatience, and she kept her hand flat on that bumper next to an old man’s leg.
I did not know yet that the fire started eight feet under my son’s bed, in a junction box in that man’s wall, in aluminum wire somebody spliced to copper in 1994 with the wrong kind of connector.
He did not know it either.
He found out the same week I did, and he came and stood in a parking lot in June with his hat in his hands, and I will get to that.
A medic got in front of me with a clipboard.
“Ma’am, can you talk to me for a second? What’s your name?”
“Erin Halloran.”
“Any injuries?”
“No.”
“Are you sure? You’re bleeding.”
“Am I.”
“Your foot.”
I looked down. There was a good amount of blood on the asphalt around my right foot and I had not felt a thing and I still didn’t. He got me sat down on a step and put a light on it and took something out of it with a tweezers, and I watched him do it like it was happening on television.
“How much does he weigh?”
“Fifty-one pounds. He got weighed in September.”
“Allergies?”
“Amoxicillin. It gives him a rash, it’s not anaphylactic.”
“Any conditions? Asthma?”
“No.”
“Okay. Good. Do you have his insurance card on you?”
I sat on a metal step in a warehouse blanket with a bleeding foot and looked at that young man and something in me wanted very badly to laugh, and I know exactly what would have happened if I had let it start.
“It’s in my purse,” I said. “My purse is up there.”
He looked at me and then he looked down at his clipboard and wrote something and said, “That’s fine. We’ll get it later. That’s not a problem right now.”
He was maybe twenty-five. He was very careful about it.
I found out in January exactly how much of a problem it was, and how long, and how many phone calls, but he wasn’t wrong that night, and I have thought about him kindly ever since.
Then I looked up.
The whole face of the building was lit like a stage. Two spotlights on it, a hose stream going in at the third floor, water coming back down off the brick in a sheet and running out across the lot in black rivers, and the smoke going up off the roofline into the orange sky.
Our windows were on the fourth floor, second and third from the left.
The bedroom window was a hole with a ladder in it.
And the kitchen window, the one over the sink, the one I stood at every morning of my life for six years, had light behind it.
Not lamp light.
I stood there in the middle of a parking lot and watched my kitchen from the outside with something orange moving around in it.
I had put a load in the dryer at nine that night.
That is where my mind went, and I could not get it to go anywhere else for about a minute. The dryer. Ivy’s leggings and my work pants and a set of sheets. I remember thinking that they were going to be so wrinkled.
Behind the dryer, in the hall closet: two banker’s boxes. Photographs, the ones from before everything went on phones. Our wedding. My mother. Ivy at eleven months in the sink.
On the shelf over the stove: a cast iron Dutch oven that belonged to Mike’s mother, who did not like me, and who handed it over at our wedding with the words let’s see how long this one lasts. I have made every good thing I ever made in that pot.
On the refrigerator: a dolphin, and a newspaper clipping.
Under Ivy’s bed, in a shoebox with a rubber band around it: everything she has ever considered important, which is a thing she does not know I know about.
The floor: six months of saving.
I did that inventory standing up, in one go, without meaning to, the way you count a till.
Then I stopped, because there was a woman standing about four feet away from me holding her phone up sideways.
She was filming.
She was from the building next door, I think. I had seen her at the bus stop. She had a coat on over a nightgown and she was filming the front of the building, and then she panned across and got the ambulance, and then she got me.
She saw me see her.
And she did not put it down. She turned a little, that’s all. She turned about fifteen degrees so it would look like she was still filming the building, and kept going.
There were maybe eight or nine phones up. It was after midnight in November and half of them had come outside without shoes and they had all come outside with their phones.
I would like to be able to say that I did not care. I did care. I stood there with somebody else’s blanket around me and my hair stuck to my head and my son on a gurney behind me and I was aware, in some small unforgivable back room of my mind, that I was being recorded.
By eight in the morning it was on three different local pages. By noon somebody had put it in the neighborhood group with a caption asking if anybody knew the family.
A man came over to me from the crowd.
He was from 2A. He is the one whose drill Mike borrowed for the door. He had a coat over sweatpants and he was holding a travel mug of something, which somebody had presumably made for him, in a building that was on fire.
“Erin. God. Erin, are the kids okay?”
“They’re okay.”
“Is that Danny? Is he okay?”
“He’s okay.”
He looked past me at the ambulance and then up at the building, and then he looked back at me, and his face was doing a thing I would come to know very well over the next several months. It was the face of a person who is about to be helpful.
“Where’s Mike?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Is he up there?” He tipped his head at the building. He was already turning to look, already lining it up, and I could see him getting ready to be the man who tells the whole lot. “Is he working it?”
Behind him, forty people were watching a building burn and waiting for somebody to say something they could carry home.
“Erin.” He put a hand on my arm. “Is Mike up there?”