Three

His motel room’s only window looked out on a nickel casino called the Fat Cat. Its sign showed a cartoon cat in a top hat and tuxedo. The cat’s diamond stud lapel pin had a light in it. Even with the curtains drawn, Matthew could see the light blink on and off, on and off. It was ten paces across the brown office-park carpet from the door to the kitchenette counter. Five paces from the head of the bed to the wall-mounted TV. He sat on the paisley bedspread and stared at the TV, half listening as a weatherman in a plaid suit jacket warned of a winter storm blowing through just in time for Christmas. “Santa Claus is in for a bumpy ride,” the guy said, pointing at a green-screen map full of evil swells.

He thought about Georgie Porter. The two of them had been exchanging messages for a few months, but he was having a hard time finding a place inside himself for the feeling of actually seeing her in person. After getting out of the military and moving to Florida, he’d found an old address for her in his e-mail archive. As part of trying to put the missing pieces of his old life back together, he’d sent her a short note his first week back. His mom said the two of them had grown up together, had been best friends and high school sweethearts, but had broken up when Georgie went away to college. After that, they’d fallen out of touch. Just like he had with his dad. Just like he had with everybody.

He didn’t know if the address he had was still good, but he’d described what was going on with himself in broad terms. Nothing too heavy, sparing her the worst details. He was surprised a day later when he got a response. After that, the two of them had picked up again, starting slowly, with short, cautious messages. Soon they were writing each other almost daily. They started taking small chances, telling each other about their lives. He was delighted to find it was easy to talk to her. They still spoke the same language. When he found out he’d be making this unexpected trip back home, he asked her if she would pick him up from the airport and she agreed.

As far as he could tell, before tonight the two of them hadn’t spoken since they were nineteen years old. Everything about her scratched something in him deeper than memory. During the fifteen-minute drive from the airport to the motel he’d already learned a new thing about himself: that he’d quit swimming after his first year of high school. He couldn’t imagine doing it, but Georgie’s words had the ring of truth. It fit with what his mom had already told him: that Matthew had been a normal kid, generally happy, good at sports, maybe a little ADHD. Then, about the time he hit puberty, he changed. Like a snap of the fingers, his mom had said. Like shutting off a light. One day he was fine, the next he grew quiet and withdrawn. At first, his parents thought it was just a phase, adolescence coming on strong. Things only got worse for him over the next few years and he ended up dropping out of high school during his senior year. He started getting into drugs, snapped at people he loved, shut them out. To hear his mom tell it, he alienated pretty much everyone. Just after he turned eighteen, his parents divorced and she moved to Florida.

His mom couldn’t tell him much about what happened next. She’d left the state, after all. The next five years of his life were a black box, leading up to his decision to join the military. He was hoping someone here would be able to help him fill in the blanks. Georgie, maybe, though she had been away at college.

He switched off the TV and listened to the rattle of the flagpole chain in the motel parking lot. He thought the full day of travel would make him tired, but he felt jumpy and restless. Pulling the curtain back on the window, he pressed his face to the cold glow. The casino light blinked. The bedside clock flashed one minute, then the next. Not even eight o’clock yet. In the sliver of time he could remember, Matthew hadn’t had many unsupervised moments. He’d gone straight from the army to his mom’s house in Florida. His mom and stepdad both worked, so he was alone most days, but he always felt like an intruder in their house. He tiptoed around in his socks on the hardwood floors. Made sure his water glass didn’t leave a ring on the coffee table. Plus, they lived outside of town and he didn’t have a car. Even if he could’ve thought of things he wanted to do—which he couldn’t—he was stranded. Now he was all by himself. He was back in his hometown and no one was watching. He could do whatever he wanted.

He put on an extra flannel shirt before grabbing his room key off the bedside table. It was just a few blocks’ walk back to the town’s main drag and the extra layer protected him from the worst of the wind. When he got there he was surprised to find it lit up and busy, most of the stores still open. Everything was decked out for Christmas—outside speakers playing Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole. Sidewalks brisk with nighttime shoppers. He half hoped someone would recognize him, call out to him on the street, but of course, no one did.

At the south end of downtown he watched the black current of the river gurgle between mounds of ice. His camera was in his shoulder bag and he dug it out to take a picture. He’d found the camera in the closet of an upstairs bedroom at his mom’s house. It was a few years old, a little beat-up around the body, but still perfectly good. His mom had gotten it as a birthday gift for his stepdad—a potential hobby that never took. When Matthew asked if he could borrow it, she said, “Knock yourself out.” Since then, he’d been hauling it everywhere, shooting photos of things he found interesting. Later, he would scroll through the pictures and reflect on what he’d seen—each new experience precious to him now that he had so few to go on. He soon found he loved the camera. He loved the weight of it in his hands, loved the hefty clack of the shutter as he shot pictures. Along with swimming, it was one of the few things that made him feel normal.

He took a half-dozen shots of the river and eyed them in the digital screen on the back, deleting all but the best two before retreating the way he’d come. The town’s tallest buildings stood five or six stories. Tinsel stars and Christmas lights hung from old-fashioned black lampposts. He snapped pictures of a rugged-looking brick bank with a great brass dome and an antique clock that looked like it hadn’t kept the right time in years. He followed Higgins Avenue north until it dead-ended at the railroad tracks and veered off onto a side street. He passed a wall-eyed old woman smoking a cigarette under the neon sign of a bar. Music and loud voices drifted out the open door and the two of them nodded to each other without speaking.

A block later, a towering walking bridge appeared out of the dark. It stood roughly three stories, stretching over the wide jumble of the tracks. He consulted the map on his phone and saw the bridge led into the Northside neighborhood where he and Georgie had grown up. The phone also said it was after eleven o’clock. He knew he should turn back, get some sleep before the trip north to his dad’s house in the morning, but he had already come this far.

Snowflakes crept under his collar as he hiked the concrete ramp to the bridge. The path was speckled with bird shit and broken glass, and at the middle of the span, he paused to look down into the railroad yard. The twisting road map of tracks was lit with the orange glow of safety lights and he counted four trains parked and full of coal. Piles of it crested the open cars like the backs of whales. He thought about digging out the camera again, but as he stood there one of the trains began to move. It went slowly at first, but as it picked up speed the wood planks of the bridge thrummed under his feet and the vaulted metal ceiling buzzed as if electrified. Wind tickled his belly under the hem of his coat and he walked on, ready to get back to ground level, away from the chill and the noise.

As he came to the north end of the bridge he noticed some commotion amid the quiet of the houses beneath. A funnel of smoke reached into the sky, bending over rooftops in a graceful swoop. He saw the pulse of emergency lights and heard the rude grunt of fire trucks. He broke into a jog, ping-ponging around the four turns of the ramp until it spat him out into the street. Out on the blacktop, he nearly collided with a homeless man—a tall figure loping out of the night with his hair matted and hanging over his face. The guy wore a tattered green trench coat, a puffy black hat, and carried a large duffel bag slung over one shoulder. Matthew’s feet almost went out from under him as he pivoted to avoid him. Their bodies came so close he caught a strange smell coming off the man, a mixture of sweat and the chemical tang of industrial grease. The guy didn’t look up, didn’t acknowledge Matthew as they passed. His gaze remained fixed on the footbridge and the train moving beneath it.

“Sorry,” Matthew called, but the man was gone.

Later he would play this scene back in his mind, straining to see if there was anything he’d missed. If he’d taken his time, if he’d stopped and really looked at the man with the long hair and the trench coat, maybe the rest of it wouldn’t have happened the way it did. But at the time he barely noticed the strange figure. It happened so fast, just a split second where the two of them nearly touched before they headed off in their own directions. It felt good to run, his body waking up after a full day of sitting. City plows had left a three-foot Mohawk of snow in the center of the street. He hurdled it to step up onto the sidewalk, where streetlights sparkled on the pavement like a spilled bag of diamonds.

The hairs in his nose froze as he jogged the final three blocks to the scene of a house on fire. In the middle of a tree-lined corner lot, a squarish two-story house belched smoke from its upper windows. Sawhorses had been set up in the street to keep back the small crowd of neighbors wearing coats and boots over their pajamas. A line of cops stood at the curb shining flashlights on their own toes. Behind them, firefighters hauled hoses through the snow-blanketed front lawn. They already had a truck backed up to the hydrant. Emergency lights coiled and heaved. Everybody’s face said the same thing: it seemed too cold for something to burn like that. At least, not on its own.

Matthew filtered into the crowd. Up close the fire was terrifying and beautiful, pulsing like a living thing. The heat pushed him gently back and now he did go into his bag for the camera again. Behind the lens he felt invisible, as bold as a ghost. After taking a few pictures of the burning house at a distance and getting some shots of the gawking neighbors, he moved out of the crowd and toward the house, barely registering the low murmur as he ducked under the sawhorses.

He’d gone as far as the edge of the lawn before a cop yelled at him to get back. Matthew held up a hand to tell the cop it was cool, the way he imagined a professional photographer might do. He stepped back off the curb and an enormous boom shook the night. It dropped him to one knee, his eyes pinched shut, chin tucked into his chest. The caustic smell of scorched metal and bubbling plastic filled his nose. For a moment, he was gone, his mind unmoored and wandering. He felt the punch of the explosion as the Humvee went up on two wheels, pushed across a narrow road, and slammed into a concrete retaining wall. He didn’t know if he was thrown free or stumbled out, but the next thing he knew he was lying on the ground watching flames turn the vehicle to blackened bones. Was it Stephen Hugo screaming or someone else? Was it himself? He felt hot sand against his face but forced his eyes open and realized the sound was just workers shunting cars back at the railroad yard.

The sting of the sand vanished, replaced by the clean cold of winter and the campfire smell of the house fire. When he looked up, he saw the noise had jarred the cop from his post. The officer was young and blond, with a weight lifter’s body. He marched over and studied Matthew’s expired military ID under his Maglite. The cop’s scowl softened when he saw the army crest in the top right corner, turning the card in his black-gloved hand, checking the grainy computerized photo against Matthew’s face. He asked for a current address and jotted down the name and room number of his motel room in a notebook.

“Do me a favor, Matt,” he said, like they knew each other, like they were pals. “Beat it.”

The cop handed the card back. Matthew’s skin brushed the smooth leather of his gloves just as the rear of the house collapsed. The noise was startling and they both spun around to look. A bright ball of flame erupted into the sky, flushing the yard with a sudden brightness. A closed-in back porch and half of the second floor tumbled down in a heap of siding, studs, and roof shingles. The police and firefighters yelled for everyone to clear the street, the bark of their voices snapping the neighbors out of their fire-induced trance. The young cop shined his light dead in Matthew’s eyes. “Go,” he shouted. “Now!”

The neighbors slumped off to their homes as Matthew drifted back the way he’d come. The smell of the fire was stuck in his throat and he saw spots from the cop’s Maglite. The sight of the house coming down had left him strangely out of breath. Just a few minutes later he was alone again, walking through a neighborhood of dark houses. People inside slumbering, unaware of what was happening just up the street. Once, before the fire was out of sight, he turned back to snap a final photo of the swirling mess of lights and smoke.