4

“There’s somebody here!” I could hear Rebecca turning to listen, her nightgown rustling, her breath a soft thunder into the receiver. “There’s someone in the house!”

Call the police, I began to say. Why did you call me first, why didn’t you punch 911? I didn’t have to ask. I knew why—I knew in my heart how much I meant to her. But before I could tell her what to do the connection went dead.

“What is it?” asked Connie, rising on one elbow. “Is it Dad?”

“No, it’s a client.”

“It’s not Dad?” she asked again, still half-asleep. Her father had suffered heart trouble a few years before, and a phone call at a strange hour made both of us fear bad news.

“Some kind of emergency,” I said. I stabbed numbers into the phone, 911, that magic code. I got that one-two-three ascending tune the phone company plays when you have misdialed. I tried again and got it wrong once more, my fingers working so fast I pushed two numbers at once. “A client having trouble with a prowler.”

“Which client?” Connie was asking. “Richard, tell me what’s happening.”

“Nobody you know,” I said, steadying myself to try it again.

“It’s too early for anything to go wrong,” said Connie. She knew better. There were phone calls at odd hours. Once a landslide took a just-finished house halfway down a hill while my client rode the floor screaming, pulling on his pants. An attempted suicide in the midst of an eviction process, an ex-wife who wouldn’t vacant the Stinson Beach weekend retreat—there were emergencies even in my prosaic practice.

I did it carefully this time, a stiff-fingered caricature of a man making sure he got it right. The phone company took its time.

And then there was that electronic staccato chime, the sound of a phone ringing. The phone was ringing beside a dispatcher’s elbow, as though this was just an average call to see if the car was tuned yet or to see if someone’s secretary could rearrange that meeting. The phone was ringing and I was standing there with my eyes shut tight.

But just as I sank into the chair in disbelief one of those efficient voices was there, one of those bored voices you know has answered thousands of emergencies. And I realized it was all in my mind, that the wait had not really been so long after all, the problem was being handled, there was a city out there, services.

I told him the address, cross street College Avenue, a big brown-shingle house. With wisteria on a trellis. I saw the house in my mind, green garden hose looping across the front lawn. The dispatcher said the incident had already been reported, making an effort to soften his voice, to sound reassuring.

“Who is it?” Connie was asking. “Richard, all you have to do is give me a name. If it’s a client, the client has a name.”

I scrambled down the stairs. “Richard, I don’t like this,” Connie was saying from the bedroom, and I could picture her staring straight ahead, listening to the front door as it shut.

The Mercedes wouldn’t start. And when it did I couldn’t see very well, the windshield covered with blisters of dew. The windshield wipers only made it worse. I was halfway down the street before I realized what I was doing to my life. I was deciding. There would be no returning to Connie.

Driving cleared the windshield. There was no doubt in my mind. Rebecca was caught up in one of those too-common felonies, breaking and entering, and I could not hide a thought from myself. Maybe assault. Maybe rape. I ran a red light on The Alameda. I ran another on Cedar, and almost hit a jogger in a baggy white sweatshirt plodding methodically up the middle of the street.

It was a blessing. I told myself how lucky I was. I could see how much Rebecca meant to me. The air was milky white, half smog, half spring haze. A man in a large brown overcoat rummaged through the trash at Shattuck and University, and litter had been strewn across the street, paper hamburger cartons and wads of pink and silver aluminum, the sort of colors I associate with Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Eve. Plywood had been nailed over one storefront, particle board over another. Two dogs frolicked past a mountain of sodden newspaper. The sidewalk glittered with broken glass, someone’s recycling gone awry.

My tires squealed and I prayed as I sent mental messages. I’m coming, Rebecca, and everything will be different. It isn’t just a man coming, another unfaithful husband, a man duplicitous by habit and profession. This was a new day on its way, a break with the past. Nothing would be the same.

I saw the smoke from two blocks away, billowing over the rooftops. The smoke shouldered upward and flattened in the morning light, plowed eastward by the breeze.

It has nothing to do with her. There was a time when smoke was the sign of village life, of industry. Only in the contemporary imagination is so much smoke necessarily sinister. I was scaring myself. Everything would be okay.

I nearly rear-ended an old Toyota, its red finish faded to pink, that made its way up Derby Street delivering newspapers. I laughed at myself, a soundless, stiff-lipped chuckle. I was never calm in a crisis. I didn’t actually panic, I just quietly disintegrated. I leaned on my horn to clear a quartet of cyclists heading toward the smoke. One of them turned his head to look at me before giving way with a look of intelligent incredulity.

Lime green fire engines were parked with the authority of freight cars, blocking the street. I braked the car, and then was in the street, running toward her house. It was all changed, unfamiliar, the wisteria and its trellis gone, the roof alive. Water was spearing the flames as I arrived, and sirens were still approaching from the distance.

I was on the lawn when a bulky figure stepped in front of me, walking backward as fast as he could. He was a big man in a fireman’s coat trimmed with strips of day-glo green. He said the yard was off-limits, and tried to straight-arm me. “You have to go back to the curb.”

As I brushed past him, he tackled me, almost knocking me down. The fireman and I struggled, his sheer bulk and animal power bearing me to the wet grass.

He was strong, and he wrestled me into a gym-class hold, a position I remembered from a lecture in how arrest warrants were served. I suffered a few moments of pain compliance, and then the wind slackened and the smoke drifted our way.

The smoke tasted poisonous. A house does not burn with the thick, stifling purity of grass. It has a bitter stink, furniture and wiring and in this case something else, the metallic tang of gasoline.

“Mr. Stirling,” gasped the fireman. I was a little surprised he knew my name, but my face was often in the news, defending tenants against landlords and speculators.

As soon as he said my name I had some power over him. Not much, but a little handhold, a tiny bit of leverage. “She’s in there,” I said.

Another man might have used the momentary lapse in his grip to spring free. But I knew that my best plan was to talk, to explain that Rebecca had called me, that there had been a prowler, and that I believed she was still trapped. I kept talking as I got to my feet, and when I saw my chance I ran.

He had me again, but only for an instant. The big man called for help. I broke free, rolling, twisting. It was difficult, the stronger men clinging to me as I screamed her name.

The windows were darker recesses in the flame. The heat warped the air, sending me reeling involuntarily backward. I waded forward against the naked power of the heat.