Ben Greenman - The Slippage

“I’ll be right here,” William said, trying to keep his voice level but failing. He sat in the chair next to Louisa’s bed and brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. Her hands lay balled in fists on the white of the sheet. “Do you need anything?” he said, and she said that she could use a change of clothes but that she didn’t need it right away and would he stay and sit with her, and he said of course. He gently squeezed her hand and she closed her eyes but he felt her squeezing back.

Soon, there were others in the room as well: an administrator who brought William a large plastic bag that contained Louisa’s wallet and shoes, along with some papers; a nurse, corpulent and capable, who lectured Louisa on the treatment of minor burns, first painkillers, then makeup when the skin grew back with uneven pigment; and then a young Chinese woman, Janet Chen, who identified herself as a city fire investigator. “I just need to talk to Mrs. Day for one moment,” she said, producing a clipboard. “I’ll be taking notes but the clipboard is also a recording device. Do you consent to this interview?”

Louisa nodded.

“We’ll try to keep it brief,” Janet Chen said. She pressed a button on the clipboard. “Can we consider this an official statement?” Louisa nodded again. “You’ll have to speak out loud,” Janet Chen said.

“Yes,” Louisa said.

“Why don’t you just tell me what happened,” Janet Chen said.

Louisa lifted her right hand, tugged at the tube that extended along her forearm. She closed her eyes and then opened them. “We had gotten some bad news about a friend of ours,” she said. “I went out for a drive to think about it and then I stopped to get coffee. Around four, I think, I spoke to William on the phone.” She tilted her head toward him for confirmation. “The connection was bad and I guess we got our wires crossed, except that there weren’t any wires, which was the problem. He thought I wanted him to come and find me at the coffee shop. I thought he wanted me to come meet him at the house. Just a stupid mix-up. I got out to the house and I wasn’t very happy about it.”

“About the house?” Janet Chen said.

“About the fact that William wasn’t there,” Louisa said. “I needed him there. I was in the car, getting more and more anxious, and my phone battery was run almost entirely down, and I didn’t know where he was. So I went to the deck to sit on the railing and look at the trees. I thought it would calm me down. Which is also why I was smoking.” She rubbed her fingers together to recover the memory. “I don’t do it anymore, almost ever, but I had an old pack in the glove compartment and I was smoking it. I had a few cigarettes, and then I decided it was time to go. One of the cigarettes must not have been out completely. Or maybe it was just a spark. I don’t know. Obviously I didn’t notice. I went to the car. I was getting ready to drive away when I saw the start of it in my rearview mirror. It was an orange glow, maybe yellow at the bottom.” Her tone made it sound like something beautiful.

“And what happened moving forward from that?”

The tenses seemed to throw Louisa off balance. “Next, you mean?” she said. “I got out and ran toward the house and then I ran back to the car. I drove across the street, to get farther away from it, and I called the fire department.” Her voice caught. “I didn’t have any idea that the dog was there.” She lowered her head into her hands. “She didn’t make any noise at all.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Janet Chen said. She pressed the button on the clipboard again. “I just have a paper or two for you to sign, and then we’ll be finished.”

Then it was just the two of them and Louisa turned to William, gave him the full of her eyes. “The phone battery should have lasted longer than it did. I was sitting in one of the chairs where I would have sat at the party. You think you’re building toward something, but it’s just an illusion. You put things on top of other things, but then everything can come apart just like that. Poor Blondie.” She had the rhythm of a ranter but everything she said was thuddingly lucid.

“Wallace says we’re covered,” William said. At this, finally, Louisa began to weep. “We can start over. It’ll be okay.”

“I’m sure it won’t,” she said. “I don’t want to be the villain but I don’t see any other way to tell this story.” She closed her eyes again and would not open them. By degrees, sleep drew a curtain of relief across her face.

William backed out quickly, careful not to hit Stevie and Emma’s car, and hurried home. Louisa had said the fire was an accident, and it had to be. She had been smoking a cigarette, which had fallen. A cigarette was more earth than fire. It had dropped into the space below the deck, where chemicals were stored. Chemicals became fire if only given the opportunity. But then the black butterfly passed close enough to him that he could feel the beat of its wings on his face. Maybe Louisa knew about Emma. Maybe she had found the letter. Maybe she hadn’t been out there thinking of Jim but rather cursing William. Business, even immoral business, was distinguished from casual deception by the presence of records. His legs were matchsticks that could hardly hold his weight.

He went into the house, into the bedroom. He was moving slower than he had at the lot, but his mind was moving faster. He sat on his side of the too-high bed and opened the drawer of the bedside table. The picture of him and Christopher at Lareaux’s arraignment was flat on top where he’d left it, and he drilled down into the drawer, down through the old postcards, through the dirty magazines. But the letter was still there, just as he had left it, untouched and undetected. The fire was an accident. His wife had been in an accident. He put the letter back in the bottom of the drawer, closed up the table, and went to the deck. The tubs were in the yard. The lanterns were on the rails. He thought he heard the boy in the adjoining yard admonishing his parents, proving their unfitness by exhaustion. He took a seat in one of the large wooden chairs, lit one of the lanterns, the cactus, and everything that had been waiting for him, like a policeman around the corner, now appeared to make its arrest, and he touched his elbows to his knees, and he did not dare to breathe.

When the phone rang, it was Tom, returning a call William didn’t remember making. “How could something like this have happened?” he said. “Where are you?” His voice was sharp with worry.

“I’m home,” William said. “Getting her some clothes.”

“Where is she? I tried to call but it went straight through to voice mail.”

“She’s in the hospital. For observation, mostly. She seems to be okay. Are you going to visit her?”

“First thing in the morning,” Tom said. “I’m upstate. I’ve been here all week. This is crazy, though. I can’t imagine how she must feel.”

“She feels terrible,” William said. “She’s been pretty clear about that.”

“It’s a shock,” Tom said. “It’s nothing anyone would have thought. What a terrible accident. We’re thinking of you.” William heard a woman’s voice in the background, Jesse’s voice, and he understood that the clarity in Tom’s voice was not from worry alone. It was from happiness. “And tell her I’ll see her soon.” Tom left the line open long enough for William to hear him tell Jesse they’d have to leave at dawn.

At the hospital, Louisa’s clothes balled up in his backpack, he took the elevator up to six, where he squared up in front of the water fountain and pressed the button. He stayed with his head down and let the water run over his lips and chin for a long time. He traversed the hall, glancing left and right, until he found Emma’s room, which was the first beyond a second elevator bank. He heard Stevie asking how far apart they were. “My legs or the contractions?” Emma said. “Tilt the TV so I can see it better.” William took a brochure about vaccination from the wall rack and tried to look busy. “Sir?” a nurse said with polite hostility. “You can’t be in the hall here, sir.” He let her see him press the elevator button, but when she was gone he slipped into a side room, bought a soda he didn’t want from the vending machine, and clasped it between his hands until his palms were cold from the metal. He found a niche near the elevator area where no one could see him and pretended to talk on the phone. He heard Stevie’s voice again, this time saying something he couldn’t make out, and then a doctor came up the hall, striding purposefully, and went into the room. Sometime before three, a baby was born, not his, never his, a capital expenditure, someone else’s miracle.