Chapter 14
APRIL
Two Days After the Fire
Leo is lugging stuff to a long green dumpster I had no idea he rented.
My heart sank when I woke up in an empty bed, as it always does. But I assumed Leo would be here, where he can busy himself, and I was right.
When I shut the car door, he straightens and raises a hand to his forehead.
At the same time, he asks, “Where are the kids?” and I say, “You took off.”
Again at the same time: “With Mom.” And, “I didn’t take off.”
Silence stretches between us, and cicadas whine from the treetops in their summer symphony. I’m already sticky from humidity. Leo is drenched in a dirty white T-shirt and work gloves. “What are you doing here?”
“Here at my own house?”
He squints at me under the sun.
I say, “I came to work, same as you.”
That’s not why I’m here, of course. I’m here because of last night in my bed and then he didn’t respond to my text and then I found out my dad has Alzheimer’s, and I couldn’t just sit in an Adirondack and play pat-a-cake.
He assesses my small frame. “It’s a lot of manual labor and throwing stuff away. No big decisions yet. I said I’d let you know if I need you.”
It’s a backward reminder that he doesn’t.
I move a hair tie from my wrist to a ponytail, and I pull it tight. “I drove all the way here. The insurance adjuster is coming later anyway.”
He sighs and tosses me a bandana for the foul smell.
I tie it on and stomp haphazardly over some debris.
He throws a warped shutter into the dumpster, mumbling, “Don’t cause more problems.” Whether it was navy or black before, the shutter is now definitely black and burned to a crisp.
But Leo doesn’t seem to think for a second about shades of paint or our past. And I—the problem-causer—tramp away, going inside to the no big decisions.
I don’t care if it’s a pen that was already out of ink or a basket that’s clearly ruined, I want to put my hands on all of it.
Material possessions are gateways for memory: I want to touch everything and let it flood me.
But with each trip to and from the dumpster, I get angrier.
Eventually, I walk over to Leo and grab an old Americana CD out of his hand.
He blinks. “?Qué verga?”
“Not everyone gets to have a functioning memory, and you’re just wasting yours!”
“Why would I want to remember this?”
I yank off my bandana. “Is there nothing worth remembering about our life together here? God, you’re acting like I’m a monster.”
He stares at me for a long minute. “You’re not a monster,” he says flatly. “You’re just not who I thought you were.” He takes the warped disc back out of my hand, and he hurls it into the dumpster.
You’re just not who I thought you were. It would have hurt less had he slapped me.
Because it’s exactly what I always feared.
When he married me, he saw me in an insanely charitable light, and I knew he was wrong.
He saw a sacrificial teacher; he saw the confidence of youth; he saw my parents’ perfect marriage.
But I’m not who I thought I was either. I haven’t had teaching in years, and I’ve never had my parents’ perfection.
What I’ve had is depression. Weakness. And the warm touch of another man.
A Ford Bronco turns onto our driveway, rolling toward us. The insurance adjuster.
It feels like an undressing as this man with disposable shoe covers and a curling mustache inspects our home to determine the value of its scars.
After the sorry for your loss formality, we do a walk-through, the adjuster saying little.
He takes photos and points out a few hazards.
His stylus flies across his device, a slight whistle coming from his nose with each concentrated breath.
He wears no mask as he mutters acronyms and jargon.
Instead of sympathy, his tone is more, Don’t expect too much; people always expect too much.
To him, our home is the eventuality of clients trying to get x dollars instead of y dollars.
To him, we’re not the Torres family; we’re a claim number.
He can’t give us a dollar amount yet. The company has a couple of weeks to process the claim and give us the requisite paperwork.
But as he steps outside and pops his shoe covers off, he says the kitchen rebuild should be covered at the very least, along with temporary living expenses.
We should keep our receipts. He’ll be in touch.
After manually cranking his window, he drives off to the next catastrophe.
A squirrel scampers across the grass.
Leo says brusquely, “Back to it.”
We’ve been hauling junk to the dumpster for hours. The accumulation that once felt treasured now feels like madness, and I wonder how something can become its own opposite so abruptly.
I step back into the dark house feeling like we haven’t made a dent.
The keep mounds are as overwhelming as the trash, and everything reeks of smoke.
We will move stuff into portable storage, but then what?
And so many things have vanished entirely.
Food. Books. Things we’ll think of in a week, a month, a year, realizing again how much the fire took.
This day is trying to hold way too much.
I can still hear Dad mistaking Sadie for Josie.
Leo saying I’m not who he thought I was.
I huff—it’s so like him anyway, to start tackling this alone and make me feel like that’s normal.
What’s actually normal is to wait for a crew. And I’m out of both energy and water.
Straightening, I take one final armful to the dumpster. Whether it’s a tablecloth or a sheet or my wedding dress, I can’t be sure. Tossing it in, I break the brittle silence. “We need to hire people.”
Leo laughs, and not kindly. He guzzles water, clocking my stare. My chapped lips.
“You didn’t bring water?” He extends his own, shaking his head in a way that says, Figures.
“I did bring some, I just ran out.” I decline his outstretched Ozarka.
He shrugs, screwing on the cap and dropping the plastic bottle beside a boxwood. “We can’t just hire people every time something’s hard.”
I will myself not to yell as I say, “This is a house fire. And we have insurance.”
He turns away. “Whatever.”
I encroach on his space for the second time today.
I was not a confrontational person until Leo started withdrawing.
Now there are moments when the desire for a reaction—any reaction—possesses me.
“No, help me make a plan. Should I do research? Have you talked to anyone yet?” I gesture to the massive green coffin that now contains waterlogged years of our shared life.
“I didn’t even know you got this dumpster. ”
“Fine, hire people.” He throws down his gloves and peels off his shirt. Not what I was expecting. He turns and stalks away—not toward the house or car, but toward the creek.
Once he’s down the hill, I dart to the boxwood and unscrew the cap from his water bottle, gulping and gulping with such vicious thirst that the plastic sucks inward.
Then, in spite of myself, I follow him.
There are gnats and algae on the surface of the creek, and I watch as Leo walks straight into it. There is no wind, and the cicadas are deafening. The sun remains merciless, and birds dot the sky like specks of black pepper. I visor my eyes with a grimy hand. “You always say this creek is filthy.”
“It is.” Leo raises his arms. “But I’m filthier.” He looks me up and down. “You really want to drive home like that?”
We’re both covered in smears and specks of who-knows-what, our sweat like glue. So I peel off my clothes, down to my underwear, and I wade into the creek.
Leo laughs again, only a little, and this time he’s unreadable.
I snap, “What?” He has seen my body at its worst, but he hasn’t seen it in months.
He lowers himself into the water, rinsing gritty arms. “Just—” His eyes bounce away and back again. There’s a shift in the air between us. “If you had told us five years ago…”
So this is the moment I’ve been wanting, when we could commiserate. We could find comfort in each other like we did for so long. I don’t know why it’s happening now in our dirty creek rather than last night or the night of the fire, but it is. Marriage is rife with surprise syncopation.
But the way he’s looking at me is a gut punch of a reminder of everything that went wrong.
After Otto was born, it became clear Leo needed an out.
And because it was gradual, I didn’t see what was happening until it already had: I gave him his out, impulsive and ignoble.
I did something wrong while he did nothing, which can be just as bad.
But I’m the one who has given us a narrative, a pinpoint of blame.
My resolve gathers. I won’t go back to the way it was. So, like a monster from a swamp, I turn and lift dripping feet out of the water. “I’m going back to the kids.”
True to form, Leo says nothing as I collect my clothes and cut abruptly toward my mother’s car, where I get in and drive away, leaving my husband in the creek behind our house, the cicadas screaming.