Scott Blackwood - See How Small

In the dim glow of the shop’s back door light, his fleshy opening looks like the raw insides of the conch shell. Michael is thinking of the implications of this, Andrew’s return, his own seething hatred and love for his brother’s absence, when he hears the first muffled gunshots inside the ice cream shop.

6 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Part II Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Part III Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Part IV Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Chapter 41 Chapter 42 Part V Chapter 43 Chapter 44 Chapter 45 Chapter 46 Chapter 47 Chapter 48 Chapter 49 Chapter 50 Chapter 51 Chapter 52 Chapter 53 Chapter 54 Chapter 55 Chapter 56 Chapter 57 Chapter 58 Chapter 59 Chapter 60 Acknowledgments About the Author By the Same Author About the Publisher

AT THE FRONT door, one of the officers tells Kate that there’s been a fire. Their breath streams in the porch light. Kate thinks of the small fire at the ice cream shop earlier, the acrid burnt sweetness. Smoke. How it is hardly worth the drive over to tell her this.

“Where are my girls?” she asks.

“Can we come inside, Ms. Ulrich?” the second officer asks, his body hunched against the cold, but also against something imminent. Something that hasn’t happened yet, she thinks, but will when it leaves his smoking mouth. She resolves not to listen.

“Who’s at the door, Kate?” her husband, Ray, the girls’ stepfather, yells from the bedroom. She can hear the jangle of Ray’s belt buckle as he lifts his pants from the foot of the bed and pulls them on. In his pockets, the keys to the ice cream shop, where he’d stopped by just after closing to pick up the night deposit. A movie, he’d said when he got back home late and crawled into bed. The girls were headed to a midnight movie after locking up at eleven. “Didn’t you ask them which movie?” Kate had said, because you always ask which one, always. Good old feckless Ray. She lay there beside him, blood drumming in her head, listening to his raspy breathing, thinking, I will go away. When the girls finally leave home, I will leave home too. Then, a little later, after she’d tried their cell phones and gotten their chirpy voice mail greetings, Kate woke startled from a dream in which her dead mother was combing her hair with an ear of corn. She couldn’t smell the girls in the house.

At the front door, the first police officer tells her something brutally quiet and small about her daughters. Something so dense that it makes everything — the cold, smoking air, the officers’ ashen faces, Ray’s raspy breathing — constrict to a singular point.

Past the officers framed in the doorway she can see the squad car outside, its headlights illuminating the cedar tree beside the driveway. In the fogged back windows, she thinks she can make out Elizabeth and Zadie, their bare feet propped on the metal grill between the seats. Cocksure, dismissive. Playing the parts assigned to them. Certain they can talk their way out of anything.

7 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Part II Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Part III Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Part IV Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Chapter 41 Chapter 42 Part V Chapter 43 Chapter 44 Chapter 45 Chapter 46 Chapter 47 Chapter 48 Chapter 49 Chapter 50 Chapter 51 Chapter 52 Chapter 53 Chapter 54 Chapter 55 Chapter 56 Chapter 57 Chapter 58 Chapter 59 Chapter 60 Acknowledgments About the Author By the Same Author About the Publisher

AFTER FINDING THE dead girls in the fire, Jack Dewey didn’t know what to think. At first, he seemed mostly fine, having gone to see a department-provided therapist for a few months. Bad dreams and cold sweats were nothing unusual, the therapist told him. It was a process he’d need to work through. The firefighters at his station seemed to understand his woodenness at work and offered encouragement — a few of them had been on tours in Iraq and seen bad things happen. Whole families burned. Children’s arms, legs, heads, blown off. But to Jack, this all happened in vast, incomprehensible cities and deserts, places with guttural-sounding names he’d never visit. Still, several of the firefighters made sure, on his four days off a week, to check in or invite him to play softball with some city league team that needed a sub, or to grab a beer in the evening. They had done this too after his wife died ten years before, in his second year with the department. They’d made an effort to fix him up with blind dates — usually nervous, mid-thirties friends of their wives or girlfriends, who had decided they were too old for the music clubs or didn’t like online dating sites.

But things had not gotten better after the fire — if better meant getting along with his girlfriend, Carla, and his daughter, Sam, or having a few moments of stillness in his mind. He often drank at Deep Eddy Bar until he couldn’t feel his face, and would wobble home on his bike down the expressway shoulder. This was after the DUI, when he’d fallen asleep in the car while idling in line at Mrs. Johnson’s Donuts. Now he’d occasionally glimpse himself in the bar mirror, his hands adjusting his helmet for the ride home. His head gargantuan and grotesque. Whose head and face were these? He often thought now, nearly five years later, how the firefighters at his station, or even the detectives on the case who’d questioned him, thought he was drinking to forget the girls. But the truth was, the more he drank, the more stove-in he became on the outside, the more inwardly alive he felt. He doesn’t see the images of the girls’ naked burned bodies anymore, as he once did, stacked upon one another, their open opaque eyes staring at nothing. He doesn’t wake up on fire and thrash in the bed, frantically trying to rip off his burning helmet and airpack. Once he’d flung his arms so violently that he’d broken Carla’s nose. Carla, out of sheer terror, had begun to toss a quilt over him and pretend to smother the fire, and sometimes that would break the spell. He’d gone to see a therapist again after the broken nose, trying to restore some trust between them. Over the past five years, though, the dreams had become more vivid, sharper around the edges, and, to his great shame, even more real to him than memories of his dead wife. To his astonishment and confusion, in these dreams he sees, and even speaks to, the girls from the fire, as they would be now, five years later, in their early twenties, near the same age as his daughter.

“What kind of dad are you?” Jack’s daughter, Sam, said into the phone in a voice that seemed to understand exactly the kind of dad he was. He’d said some things, accused her of some things he shouldn’t have. This was four months after she’d come back home, a year and a half after the fire. She was calling him from Brackenridge Hospital to tell him she and her boyfriend had had a wreck. Sam was a little banged up — some cuts from the glass. The new boyfriend had a concussion. But when the cops and EMS crew found his pickup in the culvert, they also discovered some cellophane-wrapped hashish stuffed into the fingers of a single leather glove in the console. Now the boyfriend needed an attorney and some bail money.

“I guess I’m the kind of dad who comes when you need me,” he said on the phone, trying on a kind of casual bluster because, as she often pointed out, he was afraid of her.