CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Ostrander wrote a phone number on a sticky note on the eleventh of December and put it on the corner of a table.
I called it on the sixth of January.
A woman at a restoration company told me that personal property recovered from the units had been bagged and inventoried and was in a container on site, and that I could come and look through it any weekday between seven and three thirty with an ID, and she was very nice about it, and I said thank you and wrote down the hours.
I went on the eleventh of June.
Five months. That is how long it took me to drive four blocks in the middle of the day and look in a box.
Nobody tells you about that part either.
I did every single thing that had a deadline on it.
Forms, appeals, claims, school, court. I did not miss one date all winter.
And the one thing in the entire business that had no deadline on it and that nobody was going to chase me about sat on a list for five months.
1114 South Fenwick had scaffolding on the front of it in June.
They were rehabbing it. New windows were going in on two and three, white vinyl, still with the stickers on them. Somebody was going to live there.
I do not know why that landed the way it did, but I sat in the car for a minute over it.
The foreman was about fifty and had a clipboard and a bad knee and he walked me over to a shipping container at the back of the lot and worked the bar on the door with both hands.
Twelve bins, numbered, on pallets.
“Fourth floor’s these two,” he said, and went and stood about fifteen feet away with his back to me, which I did not ask him to do.
It took twenty minutes and most of it was not worth much.
A ceramic dish. Four spoons. Half a set of measuring cups. A picture frame with nothing in it. A tin box of buttons that had been my mother’s and that I did not know I still had.
And at the bottom of the second bin, wrapped in a contractor bag, the pot.
Twelve pounds of cast iron with a lid. Black. Round. Unbothered.
There was ash in the seasoning and it took me three washings and two hours in a low oven with a coat of oil to bring it back, and there is a hairline scorch on the outside of the lid on one side that will be there as long as the pot exists, which will be longer than I will.
I carried it out of that container with both arms and set it on the passenger seat.
And when I straightened up, Otto Renner was standing about thirty feet away in the parking lot with a plastic bag of bread ends.
He lives with his niece now in a two-family on the other side of Lincoln.
He comes back to that lot four mornings a week to feed the pigeons, because that is where he has fed them since nineteen eighty-seven, and his niece drives him.
He had a hat in his hands.
He had taken it off and he was holding it in both hands and he had been standing there for I do not know how long, waiting for me to notice him, because he cannot call out to anybody. He can barely hear himself.
I went over.
“Mr. Renner.”
“Kiddo.” He looked at the car, at the pot on the seat. “You got something out.”
“I did.”
He nodded a few times.
And then he said it, loudly, the way he says everything, in an empty parking lot, with a bag of bread in one hand.
“It was my wall.”
“Mr. Renner—”
“They come and told me in December. There was a man with a folder.” His mouth was going.
“It come out of my wall, in a box in the wall, and it went up under your boy’s room, and I never heard nothing.
I never heard one thing. I was asleep in there and they had to come in and get me and I never heard nothing at all. ”
He was standing in the middle of a lot at eight thirty in the morning saying that to a woman he has said good morning to eleven hundred times.
“I’ve wanted to tell you since December,” he said. “I couldn’t find you.”
I want to write down what I said carefully, because it is the one thing I did in that whole year that I would do again exactly the same way.
I did not tell him it was not his fault. He would not have taken it. Nobody takes it.
I gave him the facts.
“It’s aluminum wire,” I said, loud, close, so he could get it.
“The whole building is. They installed it in nineteen seventy-three, before you moved in. Somebody spliced copper onto it in the nineties with the wrong connectors and never pulled a permit, and it took thirty years to come apart. The investigator wrote it down. His name is Ostrander.”
“I don’t—”
“There is nothing in that report about you.” I put my hand on his arm so he would look at my mouth. “I read all of it. Twice. There is not one line in it that puts anything on you. You didn’t overload anything. Your detector was current. He told me himself, out loud, and I asked him twice.”
He was shaking his head, not disagreeing, the way old men do.
“I never heard it,” he said. “The alarm. I never heard it go.”
And there it was.
“Neither did I.”
He stopped shaking his head.
“What?”
“I didn’t hear it either,” I said. “It went off in my hallway and I have never been able to find that sound in my head. Not once. I’ve looked. I was awake, I was on my feet, I was eleven feet from it, and it is not in there.”
He looked at me.
“You didn’t hear it.”
“No.”
“You’re thirty-five years old.”
“I know how old I am,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. It went off and I don’t have it. That’s what smoke does to people. He told me that too, and I made him say it twice.”
Otto Renner stood in a parking lot with a bag of bread ends and worked on that for a long time.
Then he put his hat on.
“All right,” he said.
That is all. He put his hat on and said all right and turned around and went over to the corner by the dumpster and started throwing bread, and the pigeons came down off the wire the way they have been coming down off that wire for thirty-eight years.
I got in the car with a cast iron pot on the seat next to me and drove back to a converted motel.
The first Saturday at Delaney Street was the eighth of August.
He pulled up out front at noon and did not get out, because that is the arrangement and neither of us has ever discussed changing it.
He looked up at the building through the windshield for a second.
Two-family, upper, mountain ash out front, Mrs. Ferko’s spider plants visible through the landing window.
I stood on the porch.
He put the window down.
“It’s a good place,” he said.
“It is.”
“That tree’s going to drop all over that walk in October.”
“I know.”
“Okay,” he said, and the kids came down the stairs.
At nine o’clock that night I did what I have done every night since the twenty-third of November, which is unplug my phone at eight thirty, carry it into their room, and hold it out.
Danny was in bed with the light on and the door open on a rubber wedge.
He looked at it.
“You can just leave it,” he said.
I stood there.
“Don’t you want to see it?”
“You’re home, though,” my son said.
I put it on the windowsill.
He went to sleep in about six minutes, and I sat on the floor of that room for probably forty and did not do anything at all.
He asked for it again on the Tuesday.
He asked for it most of that week. He did not ask on the following Sunday, and then he asked on the Monday, and there was a stretch in October where he asked every single night for nine nights in a row and I do not know what happened in October and neither does he.
That is what it actually looks like. It does not go in a line.
It has been a year and a half and he still asks about half the time, and when he does not ask I put it on the sill anyway, face up, where he can see the corner of it from the bed.
In May they had a fire drill at Fenwick Elementary.