Nine days after the fire, Sam fumbled for the key at the door to Flo’s apartment. The dead-campfire smell of smoke hung thick in the hallway. Inside, the damage from both fire and water was far greater than he’d expected. His shoes squished and sunk into the carpet. Good thing he’d persuaded Zoe not to miss school for this trip. He couldn’t imagine how her wheelchair tires could roll across this soggy mess or how she would handle seeing the scorched ruins of Flo’s home.
His throat ached at the blistered finish of the old upright piano that no one ever played. He traced the deeply charred wood of the admittedly rickety coffee table he made for Flo’s birthday one year, the overlapping circular marks from her tea cups now almost obliterated by flames. Must’ve been ninth grade, the year he took wood shop. He felt particularly close to his mother that year, after his father’s heart attack. Brad’s heart attack.
Brad, who for some incomprehensible reason in his mother’s jumbled and seared brain, was no longer his father. Not that he believed Flo for a split second, not about Brad.
His head spun—must be the smoke or toxic fumes—and he grabbed the arm of the blackened sofa for support. The fabric was soaked and he jerked his hand away. This room was a mess, and he didn’t want to see the kitchen, where the blaze started, where the cat died. Maybe Flo’s bedroom, down the hall and farthest from the fire, was less damaged. Maybe some of her special things could be retrieved.
He hesitated in the doorway. He grew up in this apartment but rarely entered his mother’s bedroom. When he woke up with a nightmare, Flo came to him, and snuggled in his bed until he fell asleep. Sam’s bedroom was now her office, stripped of his things two decades ago. Flo’s room had always been hers alone, mysterious and private, even when she shared it with Brad.
The damage was minimally less in the bedroom, and draped across the bed was Flo’s favorite jacket, a patchwork of Sam’s outgrown blue jeans from toddlerhood through high school. Anna sewed it for Flo’s birthday the first year Sam and Anna lived together and Flo loved it. Sam reached for it, then realized that it had become a mosaic of soot and scorch, a fabric corpse flame-fused to the comforter.
He backed out of Flo’s room. He couldn’t do this. He’d take a quick look at the rest of the apartment, just so he could tell his mom he checked, but there was nothing here to save. Nothing to bring comfort. In the kitchen, his foot kicked something hard and sent it skittering across the burnt and curled linoleum floor. Probably one of poor Charlie’s toys, he thought, bending over to pick it up.
Not a cat toy; nothing recognizable. A bumpy blob of melted something, maybe a paperweight? Had the cat been playing with it? Sam spit on the blob and rubbed it against his T-shirt. Under the thick soot coating, emerald green appeared, and purple. They were marbles, fused together by the fire into a lump of glass.
There was a soft knock on the apartment door. Sam put the destroyed marbles into his pocket and squished across the rug to answer it.
Mimi wasn’t sure why she needed to see Flo’s apartment, except for her profound regret that she didn’t come over that Saturday evening when Flo had sounded so out of it and hung up on her and then wouldn’t answer the phone. Of course Mimi should have gone over, should have checked on her best friend, should have at least called Sam. Flo could have died in that fire. Mimi would never forgive herself for doing nothing.
Now, she looked at Sam. Tears had washed lines through his soot-smeared cheeks. She opened her arms.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I should have come that night. I could have prevented this. This is all my fault.”
Sam stepped back, out of Mimi’s arms. “Of course not. Something like this was inevitable. You know that.”
Mimi walked to the middle of the living room and looked around. “I had no idea it was this bad.” She opened the coffee table drawer and took out a framed photo, blackened and charred. The soot smudged when she tried to wipe it off with her hand. “That’s Flo and me, the year we met,” she said. “Can I keep this?”
“Sure,” Sam said. “Take anything you can salvage.” He hesitated. “Listen, I have a question. Did you know anything about Charlie?”
“The cat?”
“No. The man. Ma’s lover.” His voice broke. “She says he’s my father.”
Mimi shook her head. A lover? How could Flo have kept a secret like that, all these years? If that were true, she’d be furious at Flo. If she weren’t already overwhelmed with guilt and sorrow.
“I never knew about any guy named Charlie.”
“Me neither,” Sam said. “It’s probably just the dementia speaking.”
When he got home, Sam scrubbed the marble blob with dish soap and water, dried it carefully, and put it on his desk, next to his computer. It was grotesque, how the different colored marbles kept their basic spherical shape but their edges melted into each other. Beautiful too, in a way, and the only salvageable thing from her apartment.
He was procrastinating. He had promised to visit Flo this morning. But first, what about Charlie? The guy was probably just a fantasy or a phantom, but Sam couldn’t stop thinking about him. He wanted to Google him, but couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. For one thing, what was he going to do with the information? Confront his mother? She’d been through enough recently, hadn’t she? On the other hand, if not now, when? She wasn’t getting any better. Every week she lost a little more of herself.
Besides, he didn’t know where to start. Well, that wasn’t true. He had a few clues, facts that Flo had mentioned weeks ago in connection with Charlie: Glen Echo. 1960. Picketing. Of course, that was before she said who Charlie really was, and 1960 seemed so long ago. Irrelevant. At least, that’s what he’d thought.
Now, he put those keywords into the search field, hesitated for a moment, and pressed Enter. Easy as pie.
He read old newspaper articles about Glen Echo, the segregated amusement park near Flo’s childhood home in Maryland. Howard University students picketed, whites from the local neighborhood joined them, and counter-demonstrators came from the American Nazi Party. He searched files of black and white photos, reading each picket sign and every caption. He never found his mother’s picture, not for sure, but there was one small, unidentified white face in a crowd shot that could have been a young Flo.
There was only one Charles, a tall guy who showed up in almost every photo. The caption identified him as Charles Elwood Anderson, a student at Howard and one of the picket organizers.
Charles was black.
Sam looked at down his hands, his skin dark against the white keyboard. Then he typed Charles Elwood Anderson into the search engine.
Flo closed her eyes to concentrate better on the radio program. She had heard about this research a few years ago and she understood it perfectly then, but either the science was getting murkier or her brain was. The reporter was saying that fetal cells circulate in a mother’s bloodstream for decades after a pregnancy. It wasn’t clear if these cells helped the mother, or hurt her, but they stuck around, even after the children grew up and moved away or even died. In one case, hundreds of fetal cells in a woman’s liver cured her hepatitis or maybe it was pancreatitis, at least Flo thought that’s what he said. Even if she got it wrong, it didn’t matter. What mattered was she wasn’t alone. Even when she could no longer talk with him, when she stopped recognizing his dear face—it was impossible to believe that could ever happen—Sam’s cells would roam her veins, keeping her company. She wouldn’t be alone.
“Knock knock.” Sam’s voice filled the doorway.
She didn’t answer. Walking into her room, Sam couldn’t tell if Flo was awake or asleep. She was curled up in bed and the radio volume turned up loud. She looked a decade older than before the fire, just two weeks ago. She was aging fast. Not so much in body but in her brain certainly, and maybe in her soul, if such a thing existed. Suddenly he wished that Zoe had come or that Anna were next to him, holding his hand.
He turned down the volume on the radio and Flo opened her eyes.
“Got two things for you, Ma.” He leaned down to kiss her cheek. “A present and a question.”
Flo smiled. “I like presents.”
He sat on the edge of her bed and reconsidered. Should he give her the marble blob? Would it please her or upset her, making concrete the damage from the fire? Why would she want it now, when the marbles and what they represented offended her before?
“I went to your apartment, to try to save some of your things.” He touched her hand. “But the fire destroyed pretty much everything.”
“Everything,” she echoed.
He nodded, then handed her the blob of multicolored glass. “It burned so hot. Look what it did to the bag of marbles I gave you.”
She held it on the palm of her hand and stared, turning her hand this way and that. The morning light from the window flashed a prism of jewel colors onto the wall. Flo moved the glass so that the colors danced.
“So pretty,” she said.
Sam closed his eyes. She didn’t know what it was, didn’t remember. No way would she be able to talk coherently about Charlie. Still, he had to try.
“Now the question.” He moved to the bedside chair. Giving her space would be good, right? “Tell me about my father.”
She rubbed her thumb across the marble glass, polishing the surface. “Brad died. Don’t you remember?”
“Not Brad. Tell me about Charlie.”
Flo smiled. “I loved him very much.”
I loved Charlie and I was a coward, Flo thought. She didn’t realize she spoke the words aloud until Sam answered.
“Coward? You’re the bravest person I know.”
That was not true. A brave person would have told Charlie about the pregnancy. A brave person would not crawl back to her old boyfriend and move north with him. A brave person would not lie to Sam about his father or keep the whole awful, wonderful thing from her best friend. Those were the acts of a coward.
Some things, some people, you know all your life, Flo thought, and they were true and solid and you trusted they would never change. Like Sam. Like Zoe. Like the memory of Charlie. So real, so sweet, so necessary.
But then they do change. People and places begin to unravel a bit at the edges, to fray like linen napkins washed too many times. The people were still there but not in sharp focus. The memories soften and begin to dissolve. Flo had always known that life could implode in an instant, in a moment of inattention, a routine lab test. But she had believed that if she worried enough, if she imagined each catastrophe, it would be a talisman against it happening.
She was wrong about that. Even with all her worrying, disaster arrived and she was unprepared. She could do nothing to stop it.