Chapter 9
Russ’s gawped at him. “Died? How?”
Zach traced a figure eight with his mitten in the snow. “A fire.”
“Whoa! Really?”
“Yeah. At their house.”
“Holy shit. But your dad got out?”
“He wasn’t home. My—my half brother died, too. He was eight.”
Russ’s face went long with horror, Zach feeling a pressing need to fill the silence as he watched Russ picturing his own little brother, and what it would be like to lose him. “I mean, it was a long time ago. And it’s not like I knew them.”
“Yeah, I mean, that sucks for your dad.”
“He doesn’t really talk about it.”
Why had he told this lie? Maybe jealousy over how often Bram described how Serena, his first wife, had been the most beautiful woman he’d ever known.
Charming, modest, the food she made the best he’d ever eaten, their home tasteful, pristine.
How Zach’s never-brother had been well behaved, tough, gifted at sports, at math, the kind of strong, silent type of child, Bram said pointedly, that you don’t see anymore.
Every time his dad spoke about this half brother, this other wife, Zach felt himself, his mother, fade into a dim echo of the vivid, superior family Bram had lost. Only Bonnie, the sole daughter, stood outside this, incomparable and special.
But that was all right. Because Bonnie was special.
“He’ll never admit it, but all this is because of Serena.” His mother’s voice slurred as she flung an arm out to encompass their house, their life. “I didn’t know for years. Years! All he’s done is spend and lose what she left him.”
The fire was the first thing Zach looked up online by himself. Though Bram frequently watched television while simultaneously swiping at his iPad or phone, he would go cold and self-righteous at seeing his wife or children looking at a screen.
You’re rotting your brains, you’re staring at that when the house looks like this?
The evening whine of Bram’s garage door led to a Pavlovian response, screens off, make yourself showily busy.
Until one day, Underself contorting his expression, Bram came home clutching printouts, lists of television hours, internet hours, each text and search and call logged, the data pulled from some mysterious surveillance software.
Seven-year-old Zach had cowered at this evidence of his father’s all-knowingness, and screens were black when Bram wasn’t home.
When Grace asked Bram if she could take the children on a hike, sign them up for ski team, go on hut trips, she would end with, After all, we want them active!
Don’t want them to be iPad kids, like everyone else’s children.
Bram, appeased by her submission to his ideas and to the concept that they were, as a family, superior, allowed their mother to shift the axis of daily life and expand their world.
They could only venture into spaces he didn’t value, of course, and only into places where he had little interest in going.
But this gave them the vastness of the wilderness.
Belly down on a mountaintop, Grace identified tundra plants. “The book says it’s called pedicularis groenlandica, or elephant’s head. Can you guess why?”
“The flowers look like little elephants!” said Bonnie, Zach blowing a puff of air to set miniature ears and trunks dancing.
They’d cross-country ski through ghost towns up Hunter and Castle Creek. Pull caddisfly larvae from clear pools, eyeing the tiny, protective shells the insects built themselves.
“Look how this one shines! It must’ve used mica,” his mother marveled.
She’d dig a pit to prevent wind whipping out a fire in the snow. “Snap the dead stuff right off the tree. And any branches of orange pine needles—those are ideal fire starters, they’re dead and dried out, very flammable, so they’ll flare even if wet.”
When sunset forced them home, Grace cooked as the children finished their homework or played, Bonnie’s narrow face breaking into a smile whenever she beat Zach in a board game in a way that made losing almost worth it.
They waited for Bram to return from work before they ate dinner.
At the table his voice would boom through them, and they’d nod, make sympathetic noises, talk about their own days only if asked.
Their mother vanished into her wine as she ate, nodded, made those required sounds.
Her hand curled loose around her glass by the time Bram left the table to watch TV or use his computer.
Her eyes would have a blurriness to them by the time she finished cleaning the kitchen and went to fold laundry.
And after Zach and Bonnie brushed their teeth, after Zach read his sister a story, if their mother came to tuck them in her words would slur; her voice gone wrong and strange, and each breath a cloud of awful, oversweet scent.
The only digital space beyond Bram’s reach was the library, where Bonnie paged through books of wildlife identification while Zach read graphic novels and their mother browsed on the public computers through bloodshot eyes.
By the time he began using iPads in school, Zach couldn’t remember when he’d last held a screen of his own. He’d immediately searched “Bram Fisher fire Palm Beach.”
Under a 2008 headline, Heiress and Son Killed in Fire, Bram said his loss was unimaginable, that Serena had been in treatment but her demons had been too strong.
In a linked follow-up, Serena’s siblings denied she’d had any substance problems, and asked why, if she did have issues, hadn’t Bram taken Abraham Jr. with him when he went to stay at a nearby hotel that night after he and Serena argued?
The classroom around Zach faded to a dull hum.
In all his bragging about Zach’s never-brother, Zach realized Bram had never once uttered the boy’s name, let alone mentioned he’d named this lost son after himself.
The words “substance problems” made Serena and his mother overlap in his mind, an unsettling feeling compounded by the photo next to the article of a blond woman with a wide smile, different from his mother, yes, but with similar hair, makeup, and wearing a necklace he’d seen on his mother many times before.
Even now as he sat in the snow shelter, Zach felt a pang of pity for Serena’s family.
Aunt Felicity had been the same as Serena’s family was in the article, refusing to believe Grace had an alcohol problem.
But Zach had lived with his mother. Loved her.
Tended to her when she went fumbling and sleepy and sick—peeled down to a different type of Underself.
Not a looming, threatening thing, but a hidden, frightening self nonetheless.
The article with the most recent date was the longest. Serena had both “prescription sleeping pills” and “controlled substances” in her blood at the time the fire took hold at almost midnight.
The signs of smoke in the lungs of mother and son proved they’d been alive as the fire burned.
This and the source of the flames being traced back to a cigarette at Serena’s bedside ruled out foul play.
Serena had been curled up in her bed and hadn’t woken, authorities surmised, because of the drugs they’d found in her system—things meant to treat pain, depression, sleeplessness, but not used at such high dosages.
Abraham Jr.’s remains had been discovered beside the closed door of his room.
He’d been wheelchair bound since birth, the article said, so had been unable to escape fast enough without it, the chair charred to almost nothing in his mother’s room.
Zach felt a sickening tightness in his stomach over the way the article seemed to revel in gruesome speculation about the sheer terror and helplessness of the boy’s last moments as he succumbed to smoke inhalation.
The reporter closed with a quote from Bram, who requested that in lieu of flowers donations be made to a memorial fund he’d established to help opioid addicts.
Zach tried to match Bram’s description of his first son—tough, strong, sporty—with the grainy newspaper photo of the small, smiling boy in a wheelchair, his mother’s arm tight around his narrow shoulders.
But then again—a smile like that with difficulties like those?
A boy who so obviously had made a valiant attempt to save himself despite all odds?
Yes, tough and strong sounded correct after all.
Russ fiddled with a loose thread on his glove, and Zach struggled to come up with something to make Russ forget about fire and death. He didn’t want Russ to avoid him like his classmates, who lately acted like Zach’s misfortune might be contagious.
“What’s with the birds?” Russ asked as a loud cacophony echoed from somewhere nearby.
“Dunno. Sounds like crows.” Recalling that crows were carrion feeders, Zach’s mind leapt to the elk.
“We saw the weirdest thing on the way here. A dead elk?” He cringed, death again, why had he brought this up?
“But it was…super strange. Maybe the crows found something like that? My dad thought birds had done it.”
“He thought birds killed it?”
Zach shook his head. Described the whitewashed bones, the exposed muscle, the petrichor scent. Russ peppered him with questions, until finally he sat back in exaggerated astonishment. “So gross,” he said approvingly. “So, so gross! Let’s go look. Maybe the birds found something cool like that.”
Zach pictured a coil of razor-wire teeth suspended over the elk. A face bristling with eyes. Thick hair, clotted and tangled, shrouding a dripping snout.
But Russ was already scrambling out of the shelter, putting on his skis. Zach hurried out behind him and did the same.
“Where the hell are they?” Russ asked, the crows’ calls seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere, noises always so difficult to locate when they came from above.
Zach spotted a flurry of skybound motion. “There,” he said, and skied toward the birds, Russ following.