On the road for my book’s prepublication tour, I traveled to trade shows in Denver, Portland, and Cleveland. At ballrooms in each city, I attended parties and sipped wine and carried around tote bags full of other writers’ advanced reader copies.
I took the train to Massachusetts to appear onstage at the Boston Book Festival in front of hundreds of people at a historic church. The night before the event I went to put on a new dress and old boots to head to the welcome party at the huge library near my hotel. Only it turned out I had brought two different boots: the left of a pair with three-inch heels and the right of a pair with four-inch heels.
I looked at my phone map and found that there was a department store on the way to the event, so I put my sneakers on with my dress and stopped off there. As I was trying on pairs of discounted black boots, my phone vibrated. It was an email from the Grove publicist. My Gen X book had just gotten a rave from Publishers Weekly. They called it a “bracing, empowering study … humorous and pragmatic.” My editors at Grove instructed me to have extra drinks that night. I promised I wouldn’t let them down.
At the party, I stood in the library’s lobby and gossiped with friends I hadn’t seen in a while. I ate single-serve noodles out of a box. A bunch of writers swept me into a procession to a nearby bar, where we laughed and drank and snacked for hours. Back at my hotel later that night, on the plush bed, I fell asleep happy.
The next morning, I woke up at 7:00 a.m., several hours before I was supposed to take the festival stage. I planned to go back to sleep. But first I checked my phone. I saw a voice mail from a Waltham, Massachusetts, number, left at 2:22 a.m. Probably spam. Just to be sure, I pushed Play.
Brooke Alderson—Voice Mail—10/19/19
Hi, Ada. It’s Mom, calling you probably close to two o’clock in the morning and um, we’re out on the street because we had a fire in the apartment. And we’re trying to figure out what we’re going to do. This phone is an EMS worker’s so it’s not— Unless you get this within the next ten minutes or so I think it’s not going to be valid. I will try and call later, or I’ll let you know where we are at some point. Okay, talk to you in a little while. Bye.
My mother sounded calm. But she didn’t give me very much information. I called their apartment number, and it was out of service. I called her cell and my father’s—straight to voice mail. I checked the New York Times, New York Post, and NY1 and found no mention of an East Village fire, so I thought it couldn’t have been serious. Then I looked on the neighborhood app Citizen and saw there had been a fire on St. Marks Place the night before. Some guy on the next block who kept burping shot a video from his window of the flames between First and Second Avenues. It looked like my parents’ part of the block, and it looked bad. Fire trucks lined the street.
I called the Ninth Precinct. The dispatcher said there’d been a shift change, but he asked around to find someone who was on duty the night before. After a while, the man on the phone returned and told me: “There were no displacements.” I asked if that meant they got back into the apartment and the cop on duty said yes, that must be the case or there would be information about where they were taken. I guessed the options were a hospital, shelter, or morgue. I was relieved. It must not have been that big a fire. Still, I was worried that I couldn’t get either of my parents on the phone and that the last I’d heard from them was five hours earlier, as they’d stood on the street watching their home burn.
I called Neal and woke him up. I asked him to go to St. Marks Place to see if they were back in the apartment. I made hotel-room coffee and ate a granola bar and took a shower and felt helpless. Neal called about an hour later and put my mother on. He’d found her at the building, but no one had stayed there the night before. No one would be staying in that building for a long time. Every surface was covered with rubble and water and soot. On the phone, I learned that my parents had slept a few hours at their next-door neighbor George’s place, at 55 St. Marks. To soothe their nerves, George had given my mother a glass of scotch and bought cigarettes for my father from the corner store, Gem Spa.
My mother told me what they knew: at around 1:30 a.m. my father had woken up in dense smoke. It was a miracle he woke up at all given how many drugs he was on because of the cancer—Ambien, Xanax, codeine.
On his way out of the bedroom, he opened the door to his office and flames shot out. He went to the front room, woke up my mother, who was sleeping in my old room because he coughed so much at night. They fled down the four flights of stairs in their bare feet. As they stood outside watching the building burn, neighbors came running outside to bring them shoes and coats. A representative of the Red Cross appeared and gave them blankets and a gift card for $250, which they promptly lost. One cat, Theo, was carried out unconscious in his cat bed and revived by a fireman with an oxygen mask. The other cat, Bertie, could not be found.
My father was afraid he’d started the fire with a cigarette and went up to a fireman to tell him that. The fireman said that given what they’d seen so far he was almost certainly not the culprit. Later they would learn that an electrical fire had started inside the bathroom ceiling of their neighbor’s apartment, which was under construction. Given how charred the joist was, the fire had probably been burning for hours in the floor below his office, directly under his desk.
Marooned in Boston, I wondered if I should get the next train. But my publisher had already paid for my hotel room and train ticket. I figured I should go onstage at the appointed time and then take off right after, skipping the remaining parties. I changed the time of my ticket and packed.
When I arrived at the festival holding area carrying my bag, I told the moderator what had happened.
“Oh no!” she said. “Did you lose all your family photos?”
That hadn’t occurred to me.
“I guess so,” I said.
During the event, the moderator mentioned that I epitomized the “sandwich generation” phenomenon and that in fact there’d been a fire the night before in my parents’ home and my father was already dying from cancer. I said that was true and then I changed the subject.