Forty-Five

We arrived with the fire trucks, but the house was already lost. Orange flames boiled out of the windows and through the front doors. Flames broke though a window on the side and shot out into the night. They’d immediately latched onto the maple tree outside my mother’s window.

I ran toward my mother’s bedroom. The heat buffeted me, but I fought through it, trying to reach the window, shielding my eyes and yelling for her. The buffeting turned to stinging. I stepped forward into the pain.

“Ma!”

Gloved arms grabbed me and pulled me backward.

I struggled for the window. “My mother’s in there!”

One of the guys yelled, “You’ll die here!”

They pushed me out onto the lawn away from the flames. Cool air washed over me. They handed me off to the fire chief, turned, and ran back toward the house. I struggled after them, but the chief held me.

“They’ve got protection. You’ll get burned just standing near that thing.”

“My mother doesn’t have protection!”

“They’re doing all they can. You watch from over there.” He handed me off to Bobby and Jael, who led me toward a lawn across the street, then turned. “Do you know why this place is burning so fast?”

I looked at the paper shooting into the sky through a new hole in the roof. It hadn’t occurred to me that my mother would have filled the attic with paper. I said, “She’s a hoarder.”

“Sweet Jesus.” He turned and called out, “We’ve got a hoarder! Maximum fire load! Defensive strategy! Defensive strategy!”

I stood on the neighbor’s lawn as the hoses swung away from my mother’s house and started soaking the neighboring houses and the trees. I could see two firefighters trying to check my mother’s bedroom; they couldn’t even get close. Flames melted the window frame, popped the glass, and shot into the night. The firefighters retreated. The skin on my hands ached where I’d been burned.

The chief made eye contact with me and shook his head. Then he went back to directing the effort to save the rest of the neighborhood. More trucks showed up. None of them wasted water on my mother’s little house. The heat drove me and the other spectators down the street. The house became an x-ray of itself. Orange flames filled every window and door, silhouetting the walls and roof. Fire broke through the roof. Flames shot into space.

I stood across the street. A memory dragged and pulled at my mind: gin rummy. My mother and I would sit at the kitchen table, alone because my father was away on business or whatever, and play game after game of gin rummy. I was thirteen and had gotten skillful enough that I had a fifty-fifty chance of winning. My mother would ask me about school and try to listen when I described the program I was writing on my new computer.

Gin rummy morphed into thoughts of tonight’s dinner and the few pleasant moments we’d had in front of the television, where nobody could have distinguished us from a normal mother and son enjoying their time together.

Bobby and Jael stood beside me. Jael placed her hand on my shoulder. She murmured, “Hamakom yinachem eschem b’soch sha’ar availay Tzion v’Yerushalayim.” I didn’t know what it meant, but her touch, and her gentle voice, broke through the fragile wall I had built against my emotions. A tsunami of sorrow pummeled me. I grabbed Jael. She pulled me close as sobs punched their way out of my gut.

I don’t know how long we stood like that, but when the sobbing stopped, I released Jael and stood between my friends, watching my mother’s house burn to the ground.