Marcia Talley - A Quiet Death

I kneeled down to check my friend for damage. Both her shins were scraped and bleeding, her left ankle purple and beginning to swell. I touched the ankle gently. ‘Can you move your foot?’

Wincing, Lilith rotated her foot. ‘It hurts, but I guess it’s not broken.’

‘Let me help you out of here.’

‘I’m so embarrassed,’ Lilith wept as I pulled her up until she was leaning against me, her injured leg crooked behind her. ‘I didn’t want anybody to see this terrible house. Nobody will understand, and I can’t explain.’ Tears streamed down her face.

‘Can you put weight on your foot?’

She tried it, yelped. ‘Ouch!’

‘Bad idea,’ I said.

‘No, I can do it.’ She set her foot down experimentally, winced. ‘Lend me a shoulder?’

With Lilith’s arm draped around my neck and my arm around her waist, we hobbled toward the bedroom door with me kicking obstructions aside like autumn leaves.

‘I smell smoke,’ Lilith said. With her free arm, she pointed. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Look!’

Tendrils of smoke drifted through the narrow opening I’d made between the door and its frame.

‘Wait here.’ I escorted Lilith to the bed, shrouded by mountains of clothing except for a small, semi-circular nest she’d dug out for herself. ‘I’ll be right back.’

Heart pounding, I eased into the hallway, stumbled along, following the smoke down the hall and into the kitchen.

‘Jesus!’ The passageway leading to the back door was engulfed in flames, the boxes it had contained burning brightly, buckling, collapsing in on one another. Flames licked greedily at the stove. Was it gas or electric? I couldn’t remember.

On the floor near the refrigerator, a stray issue of Life magazine from December 1989 smoldered, its cover gradually blackened and curled, the image of a smiling Jane Pauley transformed bit by bit into a negative of gray ash.

Did Lilith have a fire extinguisher? I gripped the back of a kitchen chair and laughed hysterically. Of course she had a fire extinguisher. Maybe two, maybe a hundred! Somewhere under all this crap!

In the kitchen, the heat was intense. A wall of flame blocked the back door, our only exit. Somewhere in the basement, a smoke alarm began to scream.

Keeping my head low, I made my way to the bathroom, scooping up a couple of towels along the way. I tossed the towels in the bathtub and turned on the shower, soaking them with water. When they were thoroughly wet, I returned to the bedroom where I’d left Lilith.

‘That crazy bastard set your kitchen on fire,’ I told her, my voice urgent. ‘Here, you may need this.’ I draped a wet towel over Lilith’s head, put one over my own head, then grabbed her by the hand. ‘We’ll have to go out through the front door!’ I croaked, dragging her down the cluttered hallway after me. ‘Keep low. Crawl if you have to.’

When we reached the perimeter of the living room, I dropped her hand so that I could use both of mine to shove boxes aside. ‘Help me!’ I yelled when I noticed that Lilith had simply plopped herself down among the ruins. ‘We’ve got to get to the door!’

‘That’s my new coffee-maker!’ Lilith moaned as I sent one biggish box flying into the piano. Seemingly oblivious to the smoke and the heat, she held another box in her hands and was gazing at it, looking morose. ‘This is a tide clock!’

I knocked the box out of her hands. ‘Lilith!’ I screamed. ‘Screw the tide clock! We have to get out of here!’

It seemed like hours, but it probably took only a few adrenaline-fueled minutes for Lilith and me to clear a path to the front door. It was then that I understood what Hoffner had been doing while he was crashing around Lilith’s living room. He’d engaged the deadbolt. Stolen the key.

Son of a bitch!

I began searching desperately for an object I could hammer against the living-room window.

Maybe all of Lilith’s junk was working in our favor, I thought as I floundered around, flinging boxes aside. I didn’t know how long it would take for the fire to consume all the magazines and newspapers that were stacked in the back hallway, spilling over into the kitchen. What worried me was the smoke, swirling, growing thicker, gathering in a dense black cloud that pushed against the ceiling, descending more quickly than I thought we had time for.

‘Lie down on the floor!’ I yelled to Lilith. I yanked the drapes off the windows, grabbed a lamp, shade and all, and took a swing. The lamp shattered, but the window remained intact. ‘Shit!’

From her spot on the floor next to the front door, Lilith coughed. ‘Fireplace poker!’

‘Where?’

With one hand covering her mouth, she used the other to point toward the far wall. With all of Lilith’s goddam rubbish in the way, the fireplace and its tools might as well have been in Siberia.

My clothing clung to me, wet and hot. My skin smarted. I surveyed the room, eyes stinging, spotted what I thought might be a coffee table under a mound of quilts and thrashed my way toward it. I swept the quilts aside, pulled the table toward me and flipped it over. A cheap table, thank God, with screw-on legs. I wrenched off one of the legs and was crawling toward the window with my head protected by the wet towel when someone began pounding on the outside of the front door. ‘Mother! Mother! Are you in there?’

‘It’s Nick!’ Lilith croaked.

I didn’t have a second to waste in wondering how Nicholas had gotten there. I pressed my cheek to the door. ‘Nick! The deadbolt’s thrown and we don’t have a key. Can you break down the door?’

‘Wait a minute!’ Lilith cried. ‘There’s a spare key in the flowerpot!’

‘Did you hear that, Nick?’ I shouted. ‘Spare key! Flowerpot!’

Nick heard. In seconds the deadbolt turned and the door flew open. A tsunami of air whooshed past us as we stumbled out of the burning house and collapsed on the brick steps, coughing until our lungs ached.

Supporting himself on a cane, Nick backed away from us, limping painfully, face sweaty and streaked with soot. ‘We tried the front door, we tried the back! Burned my hand on the doorknob. Jesus, Jesus!’

‘It was Hoffner,’ I screamed, too preoccupied to wonder who ‘we’ were. ‘He’s crazy, Nick! He set the fire. Have you called 9-1-1?’

Nick wore a soft neck brace, held on by Velcro straps, so he nodded with difficulty. ‘I came in a cab. The cabby called it in.’

A metered cab all the way from Baltimore? How much did that cost, I wondered as I guided Lilith down the steps. I couldn’t help it. Must have been my New England genes, frugal down to the last molecule.

After Nick had paid off the cab driver and insisted he be on his way, I said, ‘Thank you, Nick. If you hadn’t showed up…’ I let the sentence die.

‘I telephoned, Mother didn’t answer, and I got worried. Hoffner’d been acting so squirrelly.’

Lilith and I staggered past Nick, across the driveway and on to the grass. With tears streaming down her face, Lilith watched her house burn. ‘My things! All my precious things!’

I thought about all the ‘precious’ handbags, shoes and wicker baskets, all the indispensable toiletries, medical supplies and cross-stitch kits. The four Crock-Pots still in their original boxes, more than a dozen different flavors of Kraft salad dressing – from Asian Toasted Sesame to Zesty Italian – the sixteen-ounce bottles arranged on her kitchen window sill like mismatched chessmen. I grabbed Lilith’s arms in case she took it into her head to dash back into the inferno to try to save them. I dragged her across the lawn, forced her to sit down against a tree, well away from the blazing house.

Out in the driveway, every door of Lilith’s Toyota stood open; its trunk yawned. Hoffner had torn her car apart looking for the letters. Mercifully, he hadn’t bothered with my Volvo.