Ben Greenman - The Slippage

“What?” Louisa said.

“Wait,” he said. “Hold on.” He got the dog by the scruff and dragged her toward him.

“I can’t really hear you.”

“Where are you?” he said. “I’m out looking for you.”

“For me? What about Blondie?”

“I have her.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, you should come looking for me. Soon.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“William,” she said. He hoped this was not her answer. Then the connection went to pieces and he could hear only a few stray words, “me” and “why” and “get.”

“Where are you?” he said again.

“I’m at the coffee shop, on a bench outside. I’ll wait for you here.” Her voice slightly trembled.

The dog was matted with mud and William had no time to wash her and he wasn’t about to let her back into his car like that. He led Blondie out to the doghouse behind the office, clipped the leash to the metal cleat, and wrapped it until it was short enough to keep her close to the crate. He found a dish in Wallace’s office, filled it with water from a bottle in the fridge, and set it beside her. “Good girl,” he said, hoping the dog would believe him. “Back as soon as I can.”

He went around the back way to the car; from behind the deck, the frame slanted down from left to right. Blondie barked hoarsely, a glimpse of her head protruding above the edge of the desk.

Louisa wasn’t at the coffee shop, though Gloria Fitch was. “No,” Gloria said. “I haven’t seen her. If I had, I would have asked her to stop me from beating that kid who made me the wrong drink.” She sipped it happily. “Hey,” she said. “Did you hear? Emma Wheeler went into labor.” William nodded and said he’d seen her and Stevie driving off to the hospital. “Can you imagine?” Gloria said. “When will people learn? A kid seems fun when you’re making it, but then…” She threw a hand up.

William called Louisa. No answer. He drove slowly home through the hardening dark. She wasn’t there either. Inside he stood in front of the television, watching baseball. He made himself a sandwich and ate just half indifferently. He switched channels and caught a few muted minutes of the movie about the aging cowboy trying to connect with his daughter. He dozed off and woke and saw that two more hours had passed without any sign of Louisa, and then he really started to worry. When the home phone rang at eleven, he picked it up and said, “Where are you?” But it wasn’t Louisa. “Someone from the crew just called me from the lot,” Wallace said. “You’d better get over there now.” His tone had no give in it.

Ennis, Gerrold, Oliva, Finster, Deacon: William was crossing roads so fast they began to blur together, and then he was racing down a long straightaway, and then he was swinging onto Harrow. What he saw in the distance put a fist around his heart. The house was burning.

Men walked around the edge of the lot, keeping an almost respectful distance from the cauldron of orange and white that beat like a heart in the rib cage of the house. They were heavy in slick yellow, with enormous black stripes stretching across the middle of their uniforms. There were eight men on the perimeter, and two had hoses, and there were four more who stood back slightly from the burning frame, and there were two more even farther back pressing buttons on their walkie-talkies and speaking numbers. William looked around, at the ghost of the frame of the house, at the lumber charred and at points eaten fully through, and he was not willing to believe anything he saw until he saw Louisa sitting on the hood of a car across the lot. She was wrapped in a blanket but still shivering, and a fireman was on one side of her and a policeman was on the other, and there was a siren just behind her that gave off red light and then blue light, echoing the two men.

The heart beating in the rib cage of the house slowed and everything else did, too. A man on William’s left said that for a few weeks there he thought he’d never see another fire, not after Lareaux was arrested, and that in some strange way he welcomed this one, though he felt bad for the poor sap whose house was coming down. The poor sap made his way to his wife. When he reached her she did not cry or even blink, just repeated his name as if casting a spell. “William,” she said. “William, William.” He brought his face close to hers, tried to smell the skin beneath the soot and smoke, failed. There were bandages across the tops of her thighs and some kind of foil pack cinched to one calf.

The two men who’d been speaking numbers into walkie-talkies had set them down; now they were loading something into the bed of a pickup. It was a lump covered in canvas. William’s scalp pricked with fear, suddenly terrified that it was Louisa under the canvas, but Louisa was right in front of him. “Who is that?” William said, but the men couldn’t hear him, and so he ran for the pickup, shouting, or maybe he just thought he was shouting. “Wait,” he said, but the men loading the lump would not wait. The men bumped the gate of the truck and William saw a paw poking out from underneath the canvas. He turned back toward Louisa. A tear streaked her face in negative, a channel carved in the soot. William found another truck with the gate down and fell against it. Blood rushed through his head. He could not stand but he could not do anything else either. Policemen stretched tape across the front of the property. A small man in a suit spray-painted silver spots on the ground, describing a circle in three points. A rope lay like a snake in the middle of the circle, its tail indicating the blackened doghouse.

Louisa spoke William’s name again. Years before, when they had worked together at the newspaper, William had interviewed a man who had been a hero in the Second World War. He was being devoured by dementia, and all he could do was speak his late wife’s name, after which he buried his face in his hands. Louisa buried her face in her hands. The fireman helped her to her feet. The policeman helped her to his car. The pickup truck with the something in it drove away. An ember floated down from the burning house like an unused wish.

For the first time in months, William could stand at the edge of the lot, facing away from the street, and see the entire sky, a gluttony of blue. He walked around the space where the house had almost been, just as the men in yellow with black stripes had done the night before. The left half of the deck was still intact; the right, where waterproofing had started, was gone, and a light rain pattered onto the smoldering lumber, sending up strands of steam. Wallace arrived soon after William and stood next to his truck, leaning on it, unwilling even to take a single step forward. “I used the space under the deck to store flammable materials,” he said helplessly. “It never occurred to me that it was anything other than safe.” He started explaining what he knew about builder’s risk insurance, and how as far as he knew it covered this kind of thing, and that project disasters were not as rare as he might think, and just when William was going to say he understood, Wallace gasped and brought his hand up to his mouth. With his other hand he pointed to the charred snake of the leash in the grass. “The dog,” he said.

The hospital was only ten blocks away from their old house. If they had moved already, it would not have been convenient. William spotted Stevie and Emma’s car in the visitors’ lot and he took a space a row away. Louisa was up on nine, eyes open. “Hi,” she said. “I am so glad it’s you.”

There was an orderly in the room, a young man who identified himself as Jeffrey and extended a hand that William did not shake. Jeffrey talked like a car whose brakes had been cut. “As far as I know she has not slept yet, sir,” Jeffrey said. “She has no serious injuries but we’re going to want to keep her here under observation. And after a little while someone may want to come by and talk to her about the fire, though of course they’ll have to wait until she’s ready. She was very lucky, sir, to have gotten out the way she did, with only a few minor burns and some smoke inhalation. We’ve seen so much worse.” A phone somewhere on Jeffrey buzzed. “I have to go attend to that, sir. Will you be staying or going? Visiting hours end at eleven but immediate family is welcome at any time.”