Tinderbox (30 page)

10

Larry hangs up the phone after talking with his daughter and instructs his secretary
to cancel his afternoon patients and to book him on the next flight to New York. He
calls Betty and asks her to pack him a suitcase, enough for a week, and to meet him
at the airport. From the car, he pages his partner and signs off his hospital patients
and then calls the Stanhope Hotel in New York, where he always stays, to reserve a
room.

As a cardiologist, he has learned that you don’t ask stricken people what you can
do to help. A drowning man might say, Go ahead and finish your lunch. Or, I’ll be
fine. Or, Don’t bother. You take off your shoes and jump in.

Arriving in New York, he takes a cab directly to the hospital. Between the billions
of lights and the shadows from the buildings and overpasses as the cab exits the FDR
Drive and turns into the hospital entrance, he feels as though he is piercing the
hide of a dangerous animal.

He goes first to see his grandson. Omar is sitting up in bed. Rachida and Adam are
in chairs flanking his bedside. They are all staring at the television set mounted
on the wall. Omar does not appear to be in pain, but his lips are cracked and his
eyes glassy.

Larry brushes his grandson’s cheek with his lips. Omar’s skin feels too dry.

“He looks dehydrated to me,” he says to Rachida. “Are they giving him IV hydration?”

A look of panic crosses Rachida’s face.

“Did you check the chart?” Larry asks. Rachida’s eyes fill with tears.

Larry walks out to the nurses’ station. He presents his Tucson hospital ID and asks
to read his grandson’s chart. The IV hydration was halted three hours earlier. He
asks to speak to the resident on call and then, using all the tact he can muster,
outlines the clinical signs of dehydration.

When he comes back, Omar is sleeping with his mother holding his hand. The sound on
the television has been turned off, but Adam is still staring at the screen. Caro
has told him that, for tonight, Rachida is going to stay in the room with Omar and
that Adam will stay with her.

“Did you have some dinner?” Larry asks Rachida. It occurs to him that he hasn’t kissed
his son or, for that matter, his daughter-in-law either. Now it seems too late, too
awkward to maneuver himself close enough to reach their cheeks.

“Caro went to get sandwiches. She should be back soon.”

“I’m going to visit Myra.”

“Okay.”

“Your mother,” Larry says to Adam, who nods without looking at him.

Larry waits for the elevator. He hasn’t seen his ex-wife since his father’s funeral
nearly six years ago. He holds his breath as he enters her room.

Myra appears very thin and frail under the bedsheets. She is intubated. She waves
her fingers in a way that makes it clear that Caro told her he was coming.

He kisses her forehead. She feels slightly hot. He looks at the IV rack by her bed
to check what she is being given, resisting the impulse to lift her gown to see how
extensive her burns are. He sits in the chair next to the bed, overcome with sadness,
followed by remorse as he recalls the years of her miscarriages when she lay in bed,
racked more with emotional than with physical pain, when his response to her pain
was to stay away.

Myra pats his hand. At Adam and Rachida’s wedding, they had stood side by side under
the huppah in Myra’s garden, exchanging no words other than the expected politenesses.
At his father’s funeral, she gave him a ceremonial peck on the cheek.

“So, I have to wait for you to be injured to have some time alone with you?”

Myra points to the pad next to the bed. He gives it to her. “Take care of Omar,” she
writes. Her hand shakes.

“I will. I checked his chart first thing. He needed his hydration reinstated.”

“Thank you,” Myra writes.

“He’s my grandchild too.” Larry pauses. He wants to hold Myra’s hand but fears that
she does not want that. “How are you feeling?”

“Worried where Eva is,” she writes, turning the pad so he can see it. She fixes her
eyes on Larry, then picks up the pen again. “Keep having thought…” She puts down the
pad.

Larry reads the words twice before they sink in. Then he leans over and whispers in
his ex-wife’s ear, “You think she set the fire.”

Myra looks at him solemnly—the look he remembers from the first time he made love
to her.

“Police?” she writes.

Larry tears off the paper and places it in his inside jacket pocket. “Caro and I will
handle it. You need to rest now.”

Myra lifts his fingers to her cheek. She closes her eyes.

11

Larry goes with Caro and Adam to Caro’s apartment. Caro turns on the shower and marches
her brother into the bathroom. She hands him a fresh towel through the door.

With Adam in the shower, Larry sits next to his daughter, his sensible daughter, as
Myra used to call her, always left to pick up the pieces, and talks to her softly.

“Your mother seems to suspect that Eva might have set the fire.”

Caro nods. All afternoon she has struggled with the same thought.

“Why?”

Caro sighs. “I don’t know. I know she thought Eva was kind of unstable. She’d stopped
letting her watch Omar.”

“There’s a big leap between kind of unstable and setting a house on fire.” Her father
pauses. “Your mother was wondering if we should notify the police.”

“This is terrible to ask. Would that invalidate the insurance claim?”

“No. I called my broker in Tucson and ran it by him as a hypothetical. The claim would
only be threatened if the fire was purposefully set by the policy owner. But it could
hold it up.”

Caro can hear the water turning off in the bathroom, her brother stumbling around.
“Look,” her father says. “Everyone is understandably very upset. It’s not as though
there’s any concrete evidence here. I think we should wait a few days and see if Eva
shows up. Maybe she just got overwhelmed and went to stay with a friend. If she doesn’t
show up by the end of the week, we’ll go down to the precinct and file a report.”

Caro rests her head on her father’s shoulder. “I never heard Eva mention any friends.”

“Where do you think she is?”

“I checked Mom’s house, the synagogue where she goes. I don’t know where else to try.
She’s never been anywhere, as far as I know, other than the time she came with us
to your house in Willow.”

Her father looks at her. As a child, she’d felt as if she could hear his thoughts—the
glances they exchanged, silent consultations about Adam and how to circumnavigate
his emotional landmines.

He puts his arm around her. “We’ll go in the morning.”

12

Caro has not used her mother’s car since the trip to Willow, seven months ago. She
opens the glove compartment to check that the registration papers are still there.
Beneath them is the snapshot of Eva that Ursula sent, the picture in which Eva looks
like a deer caught in headlights.

She waits on the corner of Ninety-sixth and Broadway for her father to arrive.

Her father lumbers out of the cab, maneuvering a bag with takeout coffees and bagels
with too much cream cheese.

“Do you want me to drive?” he asks through the open car window.

“Okay.”

Not until they are out of the city, on the New York State Thruway heading north, does
her father mention that he went to the hospital early this morning so he could talk
with the attending doing the morning rounds. “I was worried about your mother running
a fever last night. With the smoke inhalation, she’s at risk for pneumonia.”

There are patches of snow between the highway and the stands of trees. She doesn’t
tell her father that she’d also gone back to the hospital. It was one in the morning
when she crept into Omar’s room. Both Rachida and Omar were asleep. She sat in a chair
watching the two of them until a male nurse doing rounds discovered her. She was sure
he would throw her out, but he acted as though it was entirely natural to be visiting
in the middle of the night.

“The aunt?” he whispered. He had pale gray eyes and pale arched brows that suggested
the towhead he’d been before his long hair, pulled back in a ponytail, turned the
color of steel.

“Yes,” Caro whispered back. “How’s he doing?”

“He’s got a lot of painkillers in him. But he’s going to be fine, medically speaking.
He’s so young, he won’t suffer self-consciousness from the scarring and alopecia for
a while. When he’s closer to full-sized, they’ll be able to cover it with skin cultured
from his scalp.”

Talis, that was the name on the man’s badge, checked the gauges on Omar’s IV and,
without waking him, took his blood pressure and pulse. He left the room, then came
back with a glass of apple juice that he handed to Caro. She drank it, aware only
then of how thirsty she was.

“How’s your brother?” he asked.

“Asleep in my second bedroom. He didn’t even stir when I tried to tell him I was coming
here.”

“You’re a little late for visiting hours.”

“I’m just going to check on my mother, and then I’ll leave.”

“Don’t think that’s going to fly there. The nursing staff on that floor are more of
the cross your
t
’s, dot your
i
’s school than we are here.”

With the thought of her mother all alone, Caro had to hold herself back from crying.

“Tell you what. I’ll go check on her and bring you a report.”

“That would be so great.” Caro tried to smile, but her mouth barely moved. “Could
you give her a note from me?”

“Sure.” Talis stood loosely in the doorway, a man who was comfortable in his body,
while she wrote a note to her mother:
Dear Mom—Dad and I are going to drive up to Willow in the morning. I’ll come see you
when we get back.
LOVE
,
Caro.

When Talis returned a quarter of an hour later, he beckoned for her to join him in
the corridor. Caro had appreciated that he gave her the update on her mother without
sugar-coating. Her mother was in pain. The resident had been called to increase her
analgesics. Her mother nodded after she read Caro’s note.

Caro rests her head now against the passenger door. She thinks about Talis, the way
he leaned against the doorjamb. The way he watched her as she wrote the note to her
mother.

13

It is nearly noon by the time they pull into the driveway at Willow. Larry had not
expected to see the house again. A couple from the city with two young children have
signed a contract to buy it. The closing, which his brother, Henry, will attend, is
scheduled for next month. They amicably divided most of their parents’ personal belongings
two years ago, after their mother’s death, when they sold her Riverdale house, so
that this second household of things seems superfluous. Henry has taken the files
their father kept on the construction of the house: the correspondence with Frank
Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin studio, the bound architectural drawings. Larry took
his father’s gardening gloves and a collection of his grandfather’s jeweler’s tools:
a magnifying glass that fits over an eye, miniature pliers and screwdrivers and mallets,
pincers for closing links of gold chain. The realtor sold the kitchen table and chairs,
the Ping-Pong table and the bunk beds to the buyers, and arranged for everything else
to be picked up by the Kingston Salvation Army.

Opening the car door, he inhales the cold air—mulchy smelling after a winter of decomposing
leaves. The heavy brocade drapes, so out of character with the house, which his mother
insisted on hanging to cover the drafty casement windows, are drawn. He walks behind
the house to the flagstone patio where they have always kept the spare key under a
chipped clay pot. It is possible, Larry tells himself, that the realtor drew the drapes.

The clay pot is turned over, the key gone. Larry feels his pulse quickening. Calm
down, he orders himself. Perhaps Henry directed the realtor to remove the key.

Larry can hear Caro coming around the house to meet him. He points to the overturned
clay pot, then tries the kitchen door.

It is open. Larry holds the door for his daughter. Inside, the house is cold and dark,
with a sharp, bitter smell, as though a small animal has died behind one of the cabinets.

Caro sidles next to him. In August, she recalls, Adam never carried a key. Eva would
have seen him using the one under the pot. Gripping her father’s forearm, she walks
with him through the living room and then back to the master bedroom wing. The room
where her grandparents had slept is empty except for a few pieces of stray packing
tape left on the floor. Her father opens the closets, the shower stall door.

They cross the living room to the second bedroom wing. The guest room is empty. The
door to what her grandmother called the children’s room is closed.

Caro looks at her father. She steps back, leaving it for him to do the deed. Slowly,
he opens the door.

Eva is asleep on the bare mattress of the bottom bunk. She is wearing a wool cap pulled
low on her forehead and the yellow jacket Caro’s mother gave her. The black-and-yellow
scarf is balled up in her hand. She clutches it against her neck and chin. She is
sucking her thumb.

The thumb in mouth, so familiar from her preschoolers, sets Caro’s mind in motion,
the balls and cylinders falling into place with the clarity she depends upon when
faced with a crisis with a child at her school. She leads her father into the kitchen.

“We should let her wake on her own. Can you go get some food? She probably hasn’t
eaten anything since she’s been here.”

Caro tries to remember what Eva likes to eat. Candy. That was what she’d wanted when
Caro asked her that first day at the airport if she would like a snack. And no meat.
“There’s that New Age sandwich place in the center of town. Get her one of their vegetarian
sandwiches: cheese and avocado, something like that. And candy.”