There are words that sear our innards when we hear them, especially if accompanied by a piercing scream. I have heard such words and I remember each instance with the horror they evoked that first moment. The frantic cry of “Mommy!” by a lost or hurt child. “Look out!” shouted as someone steps off a curb. A cry of “Help!” from someone walking a city street on a dark night.
Most recently it was a bloodcurdling scream followed by the single word “Fire!” on a beautiful beach near dusk as summer came to a happy and noisy end. I remember looking toward the town that bordered the beach, then up to where dark smoke was furling like a tornado in the darkening sky and I remember, too, thinking, Those poor people. Their house will never be the same.
I had no idea who the people were or where exactly the house was, except that it was north of where we were standing, and slightly to the west. And I could not have imagined, as the men in the fire brigade started running from the beach, that the house that was burning was the least of it, that much worse had happened than a house fire, that the lives of a small group of people on that island would never be the same after the smoke settled and the water ran off and the truth was uncovered. If it could be uncovered.
And later, when it was dark, there would be the shadow up on the dune, the dusky figure of someone sitting, facing the ocean, and a glow that brightened and waned, brightened and waned. At the beginning, I had no idea who or what it was. At the end, it was what I remembered best.