Farah sank to the base of the oak tree and let her head rest against the trunk. Her wet cheek pressed into the cell phone as Wayne spoke softly from the other end. She couldn’t remember crying, but she must have.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m okay,” she said. “I mean, I feel like a fool, but I’m okay.”
Most of the yard had cleared out by then. Only the firefighters were still walking the grounds while the cops talked with the family. Everything smelled like campfire.
“I’m so glad you weren’t in there when it happened. God, Farah, I can’t even think about that! I’m so glad you’re okay. I nearly had a heart attack when I saw it on the news.”
“Thanks. It’s lucky, I guess. I didn’t know you watched cable news, Wayne.”
“You couldn’t miss it today. Coverage has been wall-to-wall.”
Farah had the feeling that, although she’d lived through the fire and watched the garage burn to a blackened shell, she hadn’t been standing on her own feet while it happened.
“I’m so sorry to have to ask this, but...” Wayne hesitated. “Is our footage all gone?”
“It is. I’m so sorry, Wayne. Everything except what’s on the cameras from today is gone. I kept all the storage in my room above the garage. Some of it was on an external drive, but most of it was on SD cards. They were in a shoebox.” A choking laugh escaped her. “Everything’s gone. I don’t even have a wallet anymore.”
“Well, I guess that’s that.”
She had to fight back tears and the overwhelming urge to keep apologizing to Wayne. His concern for her was genuine, but so, too, was his disappointment that all this work—all this prime drama—was lost now. It wasn’t her fault that the garage had burned down and all her efforts went down with it. But there were a million things she could have done to protect her work. She could have stored everything in her car, or sent the memory cards back to the office. She could have backed up her computer or emailed the files to herself. It was the dumbest sort of bad luck.
Still, there was the good luck of being unharmed. The garage was a charred skeleton of itself, but it was lucky none of the nearby cars had blown up and no one had been hurt. The house would need a new paint job, but it was basically fine.
It was confounding, the entire episode.
In the distance, the fire marshal emerged through the back door of the house and made a gesture toward Farah.
“Wayne, I think I have to go talk to the authorities. They’re interviewing everyone.”
“About what? Why do you have to talk to them? The networks are all saying it’s probably domestic terrorism.”
“Jesus, is that what they’re saying? I didn’t know that.”
“I’ll call you later. I’m so sorry, Farah.”
“No, I’m sorry.”
She shoved her phone into her pocket and hoisted her stunned body onto her feet. As she walked toward the house, she forced herself to consider the possibility that the cops might think she had done something to cause this. That was the part she couldn’t bear to tell Wayne: she was maybe a little responsible for the fire.
Farah had done two things while she was supposed to be manning the entrance gate, two things that she desperately regretted now. First, she’d let Jeff—from the hack news site—in. He was a marginally legitimate journalist, but he didn’t have any real credentials when she’d asked for them. It hadn’t seemed like a big deal at the time. The second thing she had done was simply walk away from the gate. She’d forgotten to make sure it latched after each entrant. The gate was probably open when she left it.
Why did she do those things? She was not sure. She didn’t want to sabotage the Brights, not consciously. She just wanted to get back to work and look out for herself. She was still bruised by Philip’s rejection. Fuck it, she’d said at the time, and then she walked back up the driveway. Fuck it. It seemed a relatively harmless infraction, a quiet act of protest. But the facts of the situation weren’t looking so good for her now.
Farah followed the man through the screen door to the kitchen. Inside, a policeman was sitting at the table with the Brights. They were all drinking ice tea. Farah noticed that the puppy was curled up in the dog bed in the corner. She was glad it had survived.
“Are you Farah Dhaliwal?” the sitting officer said. He had an open notebook before him covered in chicken scratch.
“Yes.”
“You’re the documentary filmmaker.”
“Yes, though I’m obviously not making this documentary anymore.”
“And why is that?”
Farah looked around at John, Patty and the rest of them. She couldn’t tell if maybe they thought she’d done this, too. It might make sense to these people. She wasn’t family. They didn’t really know her. She’d rebuffed one son and was secretly obsessed with another. She had brown hair and brown skin and long-dead relatives from a part of the world that Americans think all terrorism originates. It suddenly felt like everyone in the room (except Philip, the one she wanted to hate) was looking expectantly at her now, open to the possibility of her guilt.
“Nearly all the footage I’ve taken here this summer was in the fire,” she explained. “It was all up in that room. About fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of equipment, too. It’s gone.”
The cop looked at the fire marshal and made a note on his pad. “You should be able to file those claims with your employer’s insurance. Be sure to itemize thoroughly or they’ll really screw you.”
She nodded. Was that a thing you’d say to an arson suspect? Maybe he was trying to earn her trust.
“And you were down at the entrance at one point?”
“Yes, for most of the speech.”
“Did you let anyone in who wasn’t a credentialed journalist?”
“No.” Was she was really doing this? Was she really lying to local authorities?
He nodded, made a note. “Then, I understand, you walked away from the gate. When did you leave? Did you push it closed when you left?”
“I left right before the speech, um, ended. I thought I heard it latch behind me.”
Another note on the pad. “You thought it latched?”
“Yes, I thought so, but I don’t—”
And then Patty spoke up. “It did.”
Everyone turned to her.
“I snuck away from the speech about halfway through, as you know,” Patty explained. “It was difficult for me, and I needed a little air. So I walked down to the gate and then turned around and came back up. When I got down there, Farah was gone and the gate was locked.”
The cop exchanged another look with the fire marshal. Farah couldn’t tell if they believed Patty or not. Why was she covering for her?
“Do you have anything to add to that account, Ms. Dhaliwal?”
Farah swallowed. “No, that’s my recollection, too.”
“Well, then, it seems whoever did this must have gotten here some other way, maybe on foot or by water. We’ve interviewed all the press people, and they all have corroborating footage or witnesses who can attest to their presence in the garden. We’ll need to take a look at all the footage you gathered from today as well, Ms. Dhaliwal.”
“Of course.”
“It’s pretty rare that you have a dozen cameras running while a crime is committed, so we’ll likely find something when we go through it all. The fire team believes this to be a highly suspicious incident, but we have no evidence to support that yet.”
John Senior shook his head and slammed a fist on the table. “This is an act of domestic terrorism, goddamn it! I’ve been very outspoken on this issue in my career, and I’m a logical target. It was an American flag they set on fire, for Christ’s sake!”
“Yessir, that’s what it’s looking like. But, of course, we can’t comment on the matter until we know more.”
“Maybe the video footage was the point of all this,” JJ suggested. “Maybe they had some reason to sabotage the production of the documentary.”
“It’s a possibility,” the cop said. “Do you have any idea of who might want that?”
“Of course not,” Patty snapped. “Can you just tell us what happens next?”
The cop looked at the fire marshal again. “Federal investigators are on their way here now, so this is probably the end of the road for us. They’ll have more questions for you.”
“Well, are we safe here?” Mary-Beth asked.
“We’ll keep a squad car at the end of the driveway through the night, ma’am. The feds will have further instructions after that.”
She looked stunned. They all did.
As the cop and the fire marshal collected their things and shook everyone’s hand, one of the firemen stuck his head in the front door to tell them they were leaving, too.
Everyone went outside to watch the firemen roll up their hoses and steer their trucks down the driveway. The police cars went next. Cameron tried to capture it on his cell phone, but Mary-Beth snatched it from his hands.
As the last vehicle disappeared around the gravel curve, another car pulled up. It was a black sedan with a middle-aged man at the wheel.
“Did someone call a car?”
Ten seconds later, Chelsea emerged from the house with an overstuffed frame pack over one shoulder. The driver got out of the car and hoisted her pack into the trunk. And then the entire family tried to avert their eyes as Charlie kissed her, hard. They were both crying. Charlie’s face pressed into Chelsea’s as hair matted against wet cheeks and more tears fell.
Finally, they separated. Chelsea thanked John and Patty for their hospitality. She kissed Ian and Mary-Beth on the cheek, and offered a fist bump to each of the boys. Lucas held the puppy out to her face, and Chelsea let it lick her skin as everyone looked on.
Farah was last in line for goodbyes. Chelsea wrapped her arms around her in a great bear hug, and as she did, she whispered into Farah’s ear: “Go home.”
Farah wanted to keep holding on to Chelsea. They’d been outsiders here together. Extras. Mary-Beth and Ian thought extras was their little secret, but Farah had always known about it. It was her job to know everything. Chelsea smelled like grapefruit shampoo and burning wood in her arms, a memory of good and terrible things.
They said their goodbyes, and Chelsea went back to Charlie for another long, shamelessly handsy, public kiss.
She cried and wiped her nose, waved to the crowd and got into the car bound for the airport. It was time to go home.
Farah assembled a makeshift bed on the couch in the living room that night. She showered and changed into clothes borrowed from Mary-Beth. Tomorrow, she’d be gone, too. And the strangest thing happened as she lay on the big, soft couch of the Bright vacation home: she felt okay with it all. She was better than okay; she was relieved.
Farah didn’t want to tell this story. She didn’t want to convince herself she wasn’t in love with Philip and spend the next six months sorting through footage to find the most humiliating moments of his family life for the world to gawk at. She just wanted to walk away and let them have all their terribleness—and their undeniable goodness—to themselves. Maybe it meant she wasn’t great at this work. Maybe it meant she was a soft documentarian, but a decent human. She could live with that.
Just as Farah was ready to surrender to sleep, she heard footsteps coming toward her in the dark.
“Hey.” It was Philip.
“Hey.”
“Are you okay down here on the couch? We could set up an air mattress in the study if you want something more private.”
She sat up. It was so dark in the room that only the whites of his eyes and the glow of the moon through the window were visible. “No, this is fine. I just want to sleep.”
“My mom said you’re leaving tomorrow.”
“Yeah. First thing.”
A pause.
“I guess you have to get back to your life,” he said.
“I do.”
“Listen, Farah, I’m really sorry about everything that happened. I mean, to all your work. This must be really bad for you.”
She sighed. “It’s not that bad...considering everything. What I mean is... I’m sorry for you. Philip, what are you going to do now?”
He sat down at the end of the sofa and put a hand on her socked foot.
“I don’t know. For now, I’m still going to the seminary in a few weeks. Maybe while I’m there, I’ll figure out how to think about my father...and my other father. And my mother, too.”
“Your mother did a nice thing for me today, you know. She covered for me about the unlocked gate. I don’t know why she did that, but it was nice.”
“Yeah, she’s a surprising person sometimes.” Philip seemed to already know about the gate. He knew more than she did.
“But about the fire. I just don’t understand how—”
“It doesn’t matter how. It’s over. Don’t worry about the fire.”
Farah didn’t understand how he could say this, how it could be over. But she thought she saw a faint smile on Philip’s face, and it was enough to make her feel slightly better about it all. No one blamed her.
“Farah, I just wanted to tell you that I’m leaving next week. I’m sticking with my plan. But I do have feelings for you. That part was true.”
They sat in silence for a long time after that. Her chest pounded.
Finally, Philip spoke again. “I wish I knew what to do or say. I’m so sorry.” He put his face in his hands and wept silently.
Farah leaned toward him and put a hand on his back. She wanted to do more. She wanted to throw her arms around him and hold on until he stopped resisting.
She also wanted him to just go, and let her mourn the end of this in peace. She was surer now that she would be okay without Philip. She understood that she could take some of this experience with her, and that might eventually be enough. She could take some of Philip’s vulnerability, his faith in others and his moral endurance with her into the next chapter of life. She would be sad, but she would survive this.
“Let’s stay in touch, okay?”
He nodded. “Definitely. And I’m sorry.”
She smiled. “Don’t be. Really, Philip. You’re maybe the only person in the world with nothing to be sorry for.”