Chapter 13 Made Safe
BIRDIE couldn’t sleep, which is not news, but this was a specific not-sleeping, the kind with a reason, and the reason was that I’d smelled something on my own street at ten at night and told myself it was nothing until I couldn’t anymore.
I’d been standing at my dark front window doing the thing I don’t do, watching, when a truck I half-recognized went slow up Larch, white, older, a ladder rack, and did not stop and did not speed up, just did the slow single pass that people who think about buildings do, and was gone.
And I stood there with my heart going in the flat far-off way, and I waited ten minutes, and then I put on shoes over my pajama pants and I went out, because I had to know, because the not-knowing was going to be worse than the knowing, it always is.
The night was warm and the Flats were asleep.
I walked quiet, along the fences, and I came around the side of Ren’s building, my building, Ren’s father’s building, to the narrow gap between it and the Kowalskis’ now-empty place, the dead space where the trash cans live and nobody looks, and there, tucked in low against the foundation where the two buildings almost kiss, exactly where a fire would eat both at once and where a sleeping mother and a twelve-year-old were forty feet and one floor above, was a thing that did not belong there.
And Birdie left, and the flat clean far-off person took the wheel, and what that person did is not the point, and was never the point.
Here is what I can tell you. I knew what it was.
Not a fire waiting to happen. A thing built to make a fire happen, on purpose, at a chosen time, by a person who’d bought the boring legal front half of it at a hardware store from a woman who’d rung it up and dropped a dime to read his plate.
And I knew, in the same instant, with the same flat certainty, that Ren was on nights and Theo was asleep upstairs, that the nearest person who could handle this was two counties away, that calling it in meant waiting, and waiting meant a device sitting live against my family’s foundation for however long it took a truck to come, and that I was the one standing there, in my pajama pants, in the dark, with the only pair of hands in Halford, Ohio that knew what to do with it.
That was the vow. I heard it, clear, the whole speech I’d made to myself a thousand times.
And then I heard Theo, through a ceiling, telling me it’s always a smaller thing than you think, and I got down on my knees in the trash-can dark next to my family’s house, and I broke the vow.
I’m not going to describe it. I’ve promised myself and I’ll promise you.
What happened in that gap between two buildings took a while and did not look like anything, which is the whole nature of it, and my hands did not shake, and the far-off person counted and confirmed and worked slow because slow is what lives, and made the thing not a thing anymore, made the scene safe, rendered it inert and separated and harmless in the specific unhurried way I was taught in a life I’ve spent three years pretending I never had.
And when it was done, when I was certain with my ears and not my hopes, when there was nothing left there that could hurt the two people asleep above me, I sat back on my heels in the dark and I was, for one held breath, exactly and only who I really am, and it was the most relief and the most terror I have felt in three years, arriving in the same second, which is how I know it was true.
Then Birdie came back, and Birdie was horrified.
Because I could not be here. Do you understand?
I could not be the person found kneeling by a made-safe device at ten forty at night with hands that plainly knew what they’d done.
That woman does not exist in Halford. That woman is a suspect, or a legend, or a phone call I can’t take back, and she is the opposite of everything I’ve built, and the wanting to run was so total it nearly knocked me over.
I’d made the scene safe. I’d broken my vow to do it.
And now the evidence of who I am was sitting right there in the dark, and the only thing I had left to protect was the not-being-seen, so I did the thing I do.
I stood up. I stepped back into the ordinary shape of a jumpy woman who’d wandered out and gotten a fright. And I heard, from the mouth of the gap, tires, and then a truck door, and then a voice I knew, flat and calm and careful, saying my name like a question he already half-knew the answer to.
“Birdie?”
Wes Calder. Of course it was Wes Calder.
I’d half-registered a second set of headlights while I worked and filed it under later, and later was now, and he was standing at the end of the gap with a flashlight down at his side, not pointing it at me, which I’d notice, and looking at the space between the two buildings, and then at me, and then, slowly, at the thing on the ground that used to be dangerous and now wasn’t.
“I heard a truck,” I said, and I heard my own voice reaching for the octave, the dithery river coming up on reflex, oh gosh I couldn’t sleep and I thought I saw and I got so scared and I don’t even know why I came out here — and it came up, it did, but it came up thin, because I was still shaking from the work and the shaking was real and too soon and I couldn’t make it look like the right kind of shaking, and he was already not listening to the words, he was reading the scene, the way he does.
He crouched by the thing on the ground. He looked at it for a long time with his flashlight low, the way I’d looked at it, and he understood two things in order.
First, what it was, or had been. And second, that it wasn’t anymore.
That someone had gotten here before the marshal and before the fire and before anyone official, and had, with no tools and no time and no backup, in the dark, quietly and completely, made it safe.
I thought about running. I’ll own that — the way Wes would want his own considered-and-rejected on the record.
For one long second the animal in me measured the gap and the fences and the dark and calculated a route out of my own backyard, and it would have worked, I’d have made the corner before he cleared the gap and been a jumpy woman safe in her bed by the time anyone knocked.
I didn’t run. Not because I was brave. Because I was tired, the specific bone-tired of a person who has just been, for forty seconds, exactly herself for the first time in three years and cannot, right that instant, find the energy to become someone else again.
The disguise is heavy. I’d set it down to work. I hadn’t picked it back up yet.
He stood up. He didn’t reach for his radio.
He looked at me across the gap between the two buildings, past the octave-up patter I was still weakly producing, and his face wasn’t shocked and it wasn’t accusing.
It was the face of a man who’d already, for days, known he was looking at two people, and had just watched the wrong one step forward, and it was quiet, and it was certain, and it was, more than anything, gentle in a way that terrified me worse than any device ever had.
“You want to try that again,” he said, not unkind, not loud, “without the voice?”
And I stood there in my pajama pants next to the safe, dark, ruined evidence of exactly who I am, three years of careful nothing coming apart in the space between two buildings, and for the first time since I’d come to Halford, I could not, for the life of me, think of a single thing Birdie would say.