Bone and Bread (4 page)

After that, walking around the corner to get milk turned into a twenty-minute trip as Sadhana and I high-stepped over the cracks, our solemn, anxious faces wed to the sidewalk. Ladders we shunned as if they were lepers, though we more or less agreed that doing much of anything outside was too perilous anyway, given the number of black cats in the neighbourhood. Instead, we played mostly indoors, or on our two balconies when the weather was fair.

We removed the salt shaker from the table and hid it in the cupboard. Mama, exclaiming upon finding it there, held it up and studied our faces. “Girls,” she said, “I've been looking for this. Don't worry, I'm not going to spill it. Is that it?”

Sadhana shook her head until her braids started to come out, and Mama put the salt back out of sight. My job was to hide the umbrellas, which was easier, as we had only one. Mama was a great lover of rain. Mirrors were less easily disposed of, but we gave a wide berth to the dresser in Mama's bedroom, which had its own tilting mirror as well as a hand mirror that was part of an heirloom set she'd brought from Ireland. The mirrored medicine cabinet in the bathroom we handled only with something equivalent to a surgeon's careful touch.

If our mother noticed us becoming more worn and manic, she never said anything. She liked to leave us to our games and amusements. With Papa gone, she had her own shadow side in which she laughed a little less and did more yoga, and every once in a while, when the phone rang or the kettle whistled, I'd see a flicker of fear cross her face, and I wondered if she was afraid that something else bad was going to happen.

The fire came in like a stray dog, slinking up the stairs as we slept, dragging its empty belly along the floor and blackening the walls with its great dirty hide. From where I lay in bed, it sounded like nothing so much as a large animal, sniffing and snapping as it prowled. I awoke to the crackle of it chewing on the thick green rug that Papa had stapled to the staircase when he and Mama first moved in. In the faint glow of the nightlight, I could see its hazy floating shadow in the hallway. I sat up and made myself scream to scare it away. Instead I only woke my sister, who kicked off her covers and, without opening her eyes, declared that this time she was sure we were going to melt before morning.

“A dog,” I said, and it came out in a whisper. My throat felt ragged, as though I'd screamed more than once. The only reply from Sadhana was a grunt. She had probably fallen back asleep before her covers even touched the floor.

While I was still deciding what to do, Mama came running in. Behind her I could hear a beeping, as though she had decided to set her alarm clock for the middle of the night.

“Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!” Her voice was a loud, strange singsong. She was carrying sopping wet towels she told us to press to our faces. I sputtered against the shock of cold water.

“Stop it,” I said. “Did you see the dog?” But the sound had changed, and I wondered if I had been confused. “Are we going to look at the stars?” I asked. Once or twice Mama had woken us up well past our bedtimes to go and look at the night sky — the three times that Mars was in conjunction with Jupiter, and another time for a lunar eclipse.

“No, not stars,” she said. “Wake up.” Though her face was mild, something in her voice and eyes was fierce. She was naked apart from a wet towel that was dripping onto the bed. “You're dreaming. We're going to the balcony. We're holding hands in a chain and running to the balcony.”

Mama hauled Sadhana out of bed and pushed her ahead as she pulled me behind, holding us by the wrists instead of our hands. Outside of our bedroom, the heat was immense, like a force field pushing us back from the front door. The dog's shadow I thought I'd seen was a black cloud of smoke that stung at our eyes.

“Duck down,” said Mama, crouching with us, but she did not slacken her pace for a moment. Choking and gasping, the three of us flew through the cloud across to the kitchen, out to the large balcony through the sliding patio doors, and down the fire escape.

Mama didn't slow down once we reached the ground. She pulled us around the corner into the alleyway and then out front to the shop, to get them to evacuate and call 911. Uncle wasn't working, but Travis, the night manager, along with Carlos and Ajay, who had worked there the longest, came outside with big white buckets full of water. Mama shook her head at them as they approached our front door.

“There's nothing but possessions in there now. Sticks and stones. Please don't take a chance.” And when they began to insist: “Don't you dare.”

The fire station was just around the corner, so in almost no time at all there were wailing sirens and three red engines and a dozen firefighters in impossibly heavy-looking yellow suits hurtling into our apartment. Bagel customers arrived and stood staring with us on the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. In half an hour, the fire was out, though in that time it had made its way up our front staircase and into the apartment, where it had begun to char the living room.

It was one of the firefighters who called us lucky. He came out and announced that the fire was out, and Mama threw her arms around him in a ferocious hug.

“Not everybody remembers to change the batteries in their smoke detectors,” he said, patting her shoulder as she pulled away. His cheeks were dark with soot, and beneath that we could see the deep blush left behind by Mama's embrace. She was still wearing only her towel.

Mama told him he had no idea how lucky. “The girls and I, we can't smell smoke anymore,” she said. “From living over the store with the wood ovens going all day and night. Like the people who live near Niagara Falls and don't notice the roar of the water.”

The fire chief said the blaze had started with a gas-soaked towel stuffed through the mail slot, followed by a match. The shop itself had escaped unscathed, but our front stoop had been spray-painted all over with a symbol that made Mama gasp when she saw it. Nobody said they saw anything, though the shop had been open all night, as usual. Uncle, when he arrived later, began shouting for somebody to get the turpentine.

The apartment, when we got back from a stay with one of Mama's yoga friends, was no longer the spoiled child of fire and water. The green rug on the front stairs, soaked by the firefighters where it was spared by the flames, had been torn up and replaced by a blue one. The drywall all along the entryway had been patched up, and everywhere, as far as the fire had penetrated, had a new coat of paint. Sadhana and I were amazed that so much had come to pass during our absence. It was Mama's way to do most things herself.

“The wonders of insurance” was all she said about it. She touched her fingers to the new banister and looked at the fine dusting of white powder as she pulled them away. “Fixed up in broad strokes. Cleaned in a hurry.”

At first, Sadhana and I were absorbed in discovering every little thing that had been altered. Mama let us do as we liked and unpacked all our bags by herself.

My sister stepped carefully around the apartment with her hands in her pockets, looking at everything as if she had never seen it before. “Everything's different,” she said. She picked her way across the living room as though the charred debris from the night of the fire was still strewn in its wet piles, trailing from the front door.

“It does smell different,” I said. There was a clean, chemical scent of fresh paint, and after our time away I could detect the persistent campfire smell of woodsmoke from the shop's ovens, the one Mama had said kept us from smelling the fire as it came. But I thought I knew what my sister was feeling: that it was strange and awful to be away from home, and even more strange and awful to have things transform on the sly without us there to stop them.

Mama let us stay up late. Between the new paint and the fresh enjoyment of being restored to the delights of all our belongings, Sadhana and I were much too excited to fall asleep. It was after midnight when Mama finally tucked us into our separate beds, each surrounded by toys or books from which we could no longer bear to be parted.

When I woke, the apartment was dark and silent, and I sat up to look out the bedroom door, remembering the woozy fear of the fire. I checked to see if Sadhana happened to be awake and was astonished to find that her bed, apart from an orderly row of stuffed toys, seemed empty.

“Sadhana,” I whispered, in case she was hiding somewhere in the room. But there was no answer.

I was afraid to get out of bed, but more afraid for my sister, so I forced myself to swing my legs over the side. The feeling of my feet planted on the carpet was a comfort. Maybe Sadhana had had a bad dream and gone straight to our mother.

But Mama's room had only Mama in it, asleep on her stomach, naked except for a cotton sheet that covered her up to the waist. I stepped back from the doorway, both wanting and unwilling to wake her.

There were only so many other places Sadhana could be. The living room, emptied of the ruined yoga mats and the sheepskin rugs, seemed stark and unfamiliar, though the mantelpiece altar persisted with its determined parade of little objects. At a glance I could see the room was empty, but I crossed to the fireplace to examine Mama's special items, as I had seen my sister doing the night before. Most were no worse for wear apart from a little soot. Only the feathers had really been burned by the heat. The quill of the former peacock feather looked like an oversized straw.

When I remembered my mission, I wandered into the kitchen, where I found Sadhana near the stove, her breath coming in quick little pants.

“What are you doing?”

“Checking to make sure it's off,” she said. She was on her tiptoes, waving one hand in a kind of rhythm over the dials as she used the other to grip the stove. She was leaning in so closely I could see the oven handle digging into her stomach.

“We didn't even use it tonight,” I said. “Of course it's turned off.”

“No,” said Sadhana. “No, no. We have to be more careful. We don't want another fire.”

“Okay, so it's off,” I said. I decided not to point out that the fire hadn't started with the stove, anyway. It occurred to me that Sadhana had been out of bed for a long time. “Let's go back to sleep.”

Sadhana turned to look at me then, and I could see that she was crying, her cheeks streaked with the tally of her misery's duration. “I can't,” she said. “Every time I try and leave, I start worrying that I've done it wrong, and I have to check it again.”

With coaxing, Sadhana followed me back to bed, and her exhaustion seemed to make it easier. But my sister's strange behaviour in front of the stove made me uneasy.

In the morning, Sadhana seemed normal. She moaned about not wanting to get up, she complained that I'd taken the nicer piece of toast, and she almost fell off her chair laughing when I indulged her with my awful impression of Daffy Duck, which was performed only under circumstances of extreme benevolence or necessity. Though I watched her with unusual attention, my eight-year-old sister seemed as fun and annoying as she'd ever been, and as I didn't see her taking any particular notice of the stove, I decided not to mention our midnight wanderings to Mama.

But Mama had her own ways of knowing when something was amiss. Sadhana began dragging her feet every night at bedtime, always calling for one more story or glass of water, and once even asking to brush her teeth for a second time. While she was putting us to bed, Mama asked Sadhana about her new unease, just as if it were any other question Sadhana was capable of answering.

“My darling, what are you worried about? I can tell there's something fretting you.”

Sadhana looked at me, probably thinking I'd betrayed her, but I shook my head.

My sister exhaled an emptying sigh as our mother's slender fingers ran through her hair. Mama was stretched out on my sister's bed, her tiny feet crossed at the ankles below her wide cotton pants. She was speaking softly, as though there were someone else asleep in the room with us she was afraid of waking. There was a pause so long that I could feel it like a belt starting to tighten around my waist, urging me to break it. But I could sense Mama's will, too, a force stronger than my own impulses, compelling me to accept the taut silence as part of the tonic for my sister's disquiet.

“Sometimes,” said Sadhana, “I want to make sure the door is locked. And I forget if I've checked already.” I could tell from her voice that she was very close to tears. “And the same thing with the stove, when I go to make sure it's off.”

“Don't you think you can trust me to take care of all those things?” said Mama. She had her head tilted to the side, the way she always did when she was trying to process new information. “Don't you think that's my job?”

It was a moment between the two of them, and my role was to be invisible. To strive not to undo whatever magic Mama might be working.

“It's everybody's job,” said Sadhana, “to keep us safe.”

Our mother began to say something else, but Sadhana wept then, with her head pressed to Mama's chest, and when I tried to share a smile with Mama over my sister's silliness, my mother gave me a look that might have meant I wasn't turning into the person she hoped I would be. I always faltered when Mama's eyes were on me like that, the hungry flame of mild reproach catching in her irises. That she would always love and forgive us was as clear as the fact that we were bound to disappoint her again and again. The weight of her trust that I could be good would come over me like gravity's spell on a returning astronaut. It burdened my very bones.