Ch53

The last belongings ever touched by Robin Kestrel poured across Nor’s lap, heavy with guilt. The pile was scant and unpredictable, even for a woman Norah felt she once, distantly knew. But ultimately, it came down to paperwork and knick-knacks. That was it.

Her blood grew hot. There’d existed a deep, inner longing for a letter. Some final words written in Robin’s shaky script to her only child and the Kestrels’ final heir. Perhaps it’d voice all the things she’d done wrong, owning her mistakes and mourning the gift she’d lost in losing Norah. But no.

Instead, Robin called Norah from a hospital line before she died and left a voicemail Norah could never delete.

I thought she was all that I needed to be okay. To fix whatever was wrong with me.

That he was all I needed. Leonard’s gruff head bowed in her thoughts, eyes dark and staring beneath his furrowed brows.

She’d even believed it was Dexteras she’d needed to be okay.

But she now knew that no Figments, old gods, mothers, fathers, nor stars in the sky could fix Lenore Kestrel.

They’re all gone, and yet I’m still here.

What I thought I needed, was only what I wanted.

I’m still here.

I don’t need anyone to fix me.

That’s my job. Just like it was Robin and Leo’s job to fix themselves.

It was a nasty, ugly thought, but it was all that kept Norah here at this moment. It was all that gave her hope that she could still pull through at the end of the day.

Her mother’s box was filled with fake flowers from the gift shop, dusty and smelling of the hospital. There were a handful of free items stamped from the local church, plastic pink rosary beads and tiny, gold embossed Bibles that were shortened and revised, seeming to sense the reader was limited on time.

There were incomplete puzzle books and a tiny album of photos. The albums were dusty and gray as though they’d soaked in a wash of muddy water for ages. In them, were pictures from Robin and Leo’s wedding and throughout their life before they were parents. There were grainy snapshots of Norah’s birth, which were surely taken by a NICU nurse, depicting an exhausted yet beaming mother and her beet-red infant.

Her father hadn’t been there that day, a tender subject in the Kestrel home that Nor dared not inquire upon further. There were tiny, wallet-sized class photos of Norah from elementary and middle school, undoubtedly purchased, saved, and scrapbook by her Nana Rose. Norah hadn’t seen any photos of herself after 3rd grade, after Leo had died. Her mother hadn’t the mental investment for such luxuries. But to her surprise, there were even pictures of her high school and college accomplishments from the internet. Pixelated graduation photos, poetry awards, and group shots from the Future Authors Club were cut and tucked in the album’s pages. Though she couldn’t recall Robin ever speaking kindly of her own mother throughout her life, it did seem that Nana Rose attempted to redeem herself in raising Nor, even from afar, until she died.

There was a stuffed cow, heavy with weighted buckwheat and lavender and worn with stains. Nor raised the beast to her nose, hoping its fibers were ingrained with her mother’s scent, a scent she wouldn’t know even if it were there, but the fake fur only held musk cafeteria food stenches and its cereal grains and florals.

As she sat the plush beast down beside her, a familiar clacking of plastic caught her eyes. The cow wore a homemade beaded bracelet around its neck, old worn black letters spelled LJK. It must’ve come from the house and its dredges of Norah’s art. She stared at her initials for what felt like hours, feeling the salt and fire return to her face, wondering why her mother had had it, but finding no reason suitable.

The childish trinket, however, reminded her of something else she’d meant to do, and she quickly retrieved her phone from her pocket, poking at its translator app hurriedly. When it didn’t deliver the answers she sought, she copied and pasted some text into her search engine, tapping through an article on etymology. It was there that Norah found what she needed, nodded, and set the phone back on the bed.

There was a stack of glittery birthday cards from Rose up until the year she died. There were copies of dust-ridden framed photos from the hospital’s rooms walls. A few were also on the walls of their home. It was strange to think she and her mother gazed upon some of the same images each day, several times a day. Clattering at the bottom of the box, there were countless pens and stress balls with the names of prescriptions and specialists on them.

There was a set of cheap reading glasses patterned with black and white cow print. There was a matching thin, fleece blanket scattered in purple cows and florals.

She nearly forgot about her mother’s interest in the bovines but scarcely recalled Robin rolling down the window whenever they passed the chewing creatures, yelling “Moo Cows!” at the top of her shrill lungs like a toddler.

A jab of shame cut Norah just under her breastbone. Her mom would’ve been easy to buy gifts for, but she never did once she moved into EoLC.

One item not encrusted with dust was a white mug with the hospital’s logo partially worn off. Its innards were stained with various copper and brown rings and cracks as though Robin drank black coffee from the thing every day for years.

Nor’s chest burned. She had endless coffee cups at the house that would’ve at least had some character to them. All she could do now was shake her head and put the mug beside her on the mattress.

Then, all that remained in the box was a packet of stapled papers, pixelated from a dodgy copy machine, and slid into a coffee-stained manila folder. They seemed to be reprints of an official record that Norah had to squint at. The papers were nearly fibers with their wear and age.

She dared to wipe the cow bifocals and push them up her nose. Her eyes widened. Reading the blurry typed letters filled her head with black smoke and screams.

CORVID CITY FIRE DEPARTMENT

CASE NUMBER: 07220

FIRE INVESTIGATION REPORT

SUMMARY OF INCIDENT: Investigators Grouse and Vermilion responded to a reported fire at 125 Condor Court, Corvid, at approximately 3:11 AM. Upon arrival, fire crews found heavy smoke coming from the two-story wood-frame construction. The building was an occupied living space for the Kestrel Family, consisting of three members including Leonard Kestrel (M, 39), Robin Kestrel (F, 31), and Norah Kestrel (F,7), and one black house cat. Investigation revealed the fire originated in the master bedroom, nearest its southern-facing window, started by the distribution of a flammable accelerant (trash can receptacle debris, alcohol, high-proof rum) and ignited by an open flame (unextinguished cigarette thrown in a metal trash receptacle) by Robin Kestrel who was tested with a .46 BAC upon emergency intake. Due to these highly debilitating levels, it is determined the incident was accidental and Robin Kestrel was admitted for moderate carbon monoxide poisoning, bronchitis, second-degree burning on her arms, first-degree burns on her thigh, and lung tissue inflammation exacerbating preexisting clinical diagnoses. The fire resulted in 1 fatality of Leonard Kestrel who died of a 6% oxygen level, 95% burn rate, severe fluid loss, and exposure due to a highly aggressive flash fire after opening the bedroom’s outside window, exposing highly concentrated flammable gasses (O2) to the open flame.

That’s how it all happened so quickly.

She wiped at her hot tears.

A flash fire.

She remembered her father’s trembling form, slick with sweat, panicked and trembling. She used to hear his angry screams in her head, but now she heard only his cries of her name, hoping that somewhere in the night, his daughter was safe.

Leonard was a numbers man. Calculated, logical. Type A. An educated gambler. He couldn’t have been expected to understand the complex chemistry of house fires and how they breathed, or how quickly vapors pressurized a room with combustible toxins. He couldn’t know how fatal it was to expose such a swollen, flaming space to immense oxygen.

She’d never laid eyes upon the arson report and didn’t care to before today, but she’d always fought the ache in her gut that pondered how a cigarette fire had escalated into a fucking blitzkrieg before the fire department arrived. Perhaps if she hadn’t had a panic attack when the fire department visited her school when she was a kid, she might’ve learned a thing or two. With a final sniff, Norah read on:

The youngest member, Norah Kestrel was removed from the home with moderate oxygen deficiencies, smoke inhalation, and shock with the most severe injury being a second-degree electrical burn on her palm after attempting to open the doorknob connected to the impacted room. The child’s symptoms included muscle spasms within the electrocuted limb, tingling sensations, and numbness throughout to confirm this diagnosis. Atypical for electric burns, no further damage or muscle impairment was found, and no evidence of tetanic contraction. On-site, investigators did not observe any live wires near the door’s hardware that would’ve resulted in a burn of this nature, and the doorknob was found unlocked. Investigators reported if this electrical charge had not prevented the child from entering the room, the implosion of the flash fire would have likely resulted in her death as well. At the time of investigation, Fire Chief Swift stated, “It doesn’t make sense, but she’s still alive.”

Before she could consider another thought, Norah Kestrel was running. Sprinting at a speed she hadn’t known possible in booted heels as she tore the hospital into shambles with her strides.

There was no time to dry tears or to tuck the fire report into her pocket. No time to wipe at smeared makeup or to embrace Toni upon exiting.

Norah tore doors from hinges and slid into hallways with such momentum she slipped to her palms with sweaty squeaks on the laminate. Nurses mumbled and gasped as she parted their busyness in reaching bounds. She leaped half-a-dozen stairs with each gasp of breath and crashed onto the parking lot with hot feet.

Norah cut through lawns, the cathedral’s prayer garden, and any other landscape which could deliver her as the crow flew. Her ankles screamed, and her knees threatened to buckle atop her stomping heels. Her eyes watered, she was wheezing, and her fists cut through the air with aching joints. But she did not falter.

Finally, home peaked over the horizon. Untamed crops waved her inwards.

Though she couldn’t see him on the rooftop, she bolted through the porch skipping stairs two at a time, shaking the foundations of her home with roaring breaths.

Please be here, please be here.

She burst through her parents’ door, then her own, exploding onto the rooftop.

“Dex!”

But her cries only fell upon the scattering birds.

Dammit, where is he?

She fell to her knees, skinning her dress pants and burying her face into her hands, exacerbated and panting.

“Dex, please. Please. Please listen,” her voice was pinched and loud, and her hands trembled beneath her. She stared at the place where he’d lain. A soft pit...pat... drew her eyes to the paperwork in her hands, where it absorbed her falling tears. She held a breath to assess its precious epiphanies.

“Please…” she began, “Dex, please hear me, I need you. I need you, I need you to be here.” She had no idea how such a message and yearning would be shuttled to the old Figment, but she knew talking aloud was how she sustained her sanity as a child, so perhaps that energy could bring him to her now. She rubbed the running makeup from her cheeks.

“Please…Dex, you’re good. You’re good. You saved me. You saved me that night. Please remember, please don’t leave. I need you to know that you saved me.” She rested her forehead on the crunching roof tile where Dex’s tears had puddled just hours prior. Where her anger had been palpable and afire for him.

She saw the sweet sparkle in his stormy irises. The warmth of his sly smile. The raising of his happy whiskers and brows. The wrinkled eyes that always searched and loved her. All he’d ever done was love and fight for those he loved.

“Dex, you saved me. Let me save you…”