Apparitions

by Luke Boyd

Part 1, Part 2
appear in this issue.

part 3 of 5

The second story is totally engulfed and the blackened brickwork around the windows is pouring out fire like an open furnace. There’s a team of firefighters with chainsaws and ropes trying to safely fell a half dozen towering hackberry trees so a waiting tanker truck can drive up onto the front lawn. Everywhere there is chaos: throngs of bystanders getting in the way of news crews getting in the way of emergency workers who are trying to carry ladders and drag hoses up to the base of the two-story brick inferno.

Keith has apparently already scrambled out the back of the ambulance and you see him moving through the crowd with a backboard under one arm. His body seems to be sputtering through stages of light and transparency and he plows straight through a milling crowd of housewives in satin negliges and fur-lined slippers, swinging the backboard wildly around him like a paddle. You watch them scatter and crash like gumballs but when you blink it doesn’t seem like they’ve even moved and Keith is gone.

Rummaging through the sandwich bag of pills you snare two Xanax-looking candies, forcing them down dry. Then you take a deep breath, try to work out the stiffness in your right arm, grab your bag and head over to a taped off area where a few other paramedics and some police officers are gathered.

You jog up to them trying to look eager and meet rolling eyes and a few dirty looks from the other medics. One of the guys you know, Gage, glares at you with extreme contempt as he smokes a cigarette and leans against a huge hackberry tree.

Where the hell you been? All the mess is already cleaned up, though I’m sure you figured on that.

You awkwardly mumble something about Keith getting you caught in construction while trying to make eye contact with anybody else but there are no takers. Instead Gage seems like the only one who has anything to say, and it’s not anything you want to hear.

What the hell’s wrong with you anyway, man? You’ve been pulling this crap for months — when are you gonna admit you’re just a screw-up?

He steps away from the tree, flicks his cigarette off into the night and takes a few strides toward you. The circle of cops and paramedics seems to part, separating themselves from the two of you as you fumble for a more genuine apology.

I know. You’re right, man. Keith wasn’t driving — I was — and I just got the address all wrong and I don’t know — I’ve just been working too many hours.

Gages advance stops abruptly a foot away and something between sympathy and arrogance comes over his face.

Then do the right thing. Take some time off, go on a cruise, get away, whatever. Just get your act together man, because look in the back of my truck and there’s a present for you — a couple of torched filet mignons who could’ve used your undivided attention.

Most of the group has dispersed now and there’s little reason to point out to Gage that in a fire like this, in a brick house that acts like a convection oven, there’s no such thing as first degree burns anyway. There’s also really no point in asking him about survivors. You settle for reminding him to pick up his cigarette butt before he leaves, warning him against smoking in bed — the leading cause of nighttime house fires. He stands there stupidly, alone as you turn away, and you hear him say something like Pillhead or Pillcase but you’re already halfway over to his ambulance and looking in through the open back doors.

Sure enough there are occupied stretchers on each side and a sooty mess of bootprints and charred clothing tatters between them. On each stretcher the lumpy sheets are ratcheted down tightly, revealing an ominous black presence beneath the translucent white. The halogen lights are glaring and final and the only sound is a faint hissing where tiny wisps of smoke rise from the newly dead.

In two hours time the house is a skeletal outline of scorched brick and smoldering roof timbers, open to a starry void above. The front lawn is littered with chopped and charred trees, and huge clods of earth are piled all over where the tankers drove through. Everything is wet and smells like black earth and everyone has gone home except for the house’s residents who are waiting in stainless steel trays at the coroner’s office to be identified through dental records. You are sitting on a scratchy wool fire blanket leaning up against the front tire of your ambulance sipping pensively on an Americano from Second Cup.

The ground is swampy with water and the thin moonlight coming through the trees of an adjacent lot puts a spectral sheen on everything stretched out before you — the fallen hackberry trees, piles of brick and rubble, a Styrofoam cup nestled into a little valley of dug out black loam. From somewhere off inside the charred walls you can hear Keith whistling something Somewhere Over The Rainbow? and the tapping noise might be him kicking through piles of debris or the popping and hissing of rubble settling in the darkness. Behind you morning has just begun to show and the sky still ink-black overhead tapers off to gray and then blue in the corners.

You’re having one of those moments when you could just lay back on that blanket and watch the sky slowly melt into morning colors. You dig around in Keith’s sandwich bag and can’t find anything familiar looking so you pick out three smooth little pills that are robin’s egg blue and etched with pharmaceutical numbers in red. You look at your watch and decide you can only stay for ten more minutes — the day shift will need the ambulance and if you don’t bring it in on time you’re worried they’ll cut your hours. You close your eyes and try to remember how far ahead you’ve paid the rent but cant, so you make a mental note to slip a rent check under your landlord’s door when you get home.

Settling into a light doze you try to think about Sachaa far away in Chicago and what she’s doing right now — maybe taking a shower before work, maybe having coffee in a kitchenette with a lot of sunlight coming in through the windows. Sitting there on the saturated ground with your head resting against the tire you try to remember exactly what the questions were she had asked, the ones you could never answer right. They were always things like:

Would you strangle someone with a shoelace if you had to save my life? If I gained a hundred pounds, would you still stay with me?

They were the kind of questions what just aren’t fair to ask people. You tried to explain to her that most people would give the obvious answer, take the easy way out, but you tried to be real with her. You told her things like:

There are circumstances in which anything can be possible. Unconditional promises are foolish.

She didn’t want you to rationalize the questions though — she said that wasn’t the point. The point was supposed to be that she wanted the assurance, even if the questions were stupid. It wasn’t the end of the relationship or anything but you remember how once she started asking those questions, they always seemed to find their way into other conversations.

What would you do if I got cancer?
My stomach never stays as flat in the winter, can’t you tell?

You started to feel like she was trying to trip you up and she said you weren’t giving her the affirmation she needed. So you went out of your way to fix the problem, and that became more of a problem. You were taking nights off from work to plan dinners and overnight trips, buying the linen-scented bath salts that you know she loved, leaving notes when you left for work at night that she would find in the morning when she woke up. All of these things added up to:

You shouldn’t have to think about it and you shouldn’t have to try so hard.

Confusion and frustration, and then Sachaa’s mother got sick in Chicago and she went down for a week to stay with her. Her condition worsened and Sachaa said she would have to stay through the winter, then a gallery owner took a liking to her stuff and bought some painting from her that ended up being featured in a show. All of this while back in Montreal her black dresses and sweaters and coats hung quietly in the closet and waited for her to come back. The bath salts remained untouched in their little wicker basket on the bathroom windowsill.

When are you coming back?

I don’t know, my mom is still so sick.
I need to take advantage of the gallery here while I can.

What about your things?

I’m going to come back to see you and tie up any loose ends and I’ll take my things.
Things are so busy here, could you box them up and ship them to me? I’ll write you a check...

You’re startled out of your nap by a diesel engine as across the street a school bus groans to a halt next to a crowd of sullen children and laughing, lipsticked mothers. You look at your watch and realize it’s well past time to go so you shake out the wool blanket and your right arm feels sore — you figure you must have been laying on it. Stowing the blanket in the ambulance you hear someone humming Somewhere Over the Rainbow and the voice is lilting and female and it floats across the crisp air to you from the direction of the burned out house.

The synapses in your brain start crackling like wildfire and you’re not sure why but you feel like you’ve been here before and your feet are taking you across the dewy, torn up lawn at a jog. The house is completely gutted and you creep down what may have once been a long hallway — there are charred timbers on each side and a few blackened doorframes still standing.

The humming is louder as if you’re right on top of it, as if it’s coming from inside you rather than around you.

Then you see her, kneeling in a white nightgown picking through a pile of debris next to a caved in fireplace. She doesn’t notice you at first and keeps humming as she pushes chunks of brick and plaster to the side. Her hair is the color of raw, unripe corn and it hangs down wildly across her face and the tapping sound you’re hearing is her fingers striking pieces of broken silver and china.

You walk up to her slowly, afraid to frighten her as if she’s an abused kitten lapping at a bowl of milk. She hears you approach, sweeps a wave of stringy gold hair behind her ear and turns her head toward you. There are soot marks across her face and her fingers are caked with black grime and embedded with bits of shining glass. A thin trail of blood trickles down from her wrist and disappears like the rest of her, into the white emptiness of her nightgown. Somehow she gives off the impression of not even being there — you can’t place whether it’s her airy voice, or her cornstarch hair, or her porcelain smooth skin, but she is at once both captivating and transparent.

You kneel beside her in the mess and she lets you take her hands as you try to pull some of the glass slivers out and wipe the muck off. You tell her that she needs to have the cuts cleaned out, that she should follow you back to the ambulance. Finally as she sits in the passenger seat with the door open and her bare feet mud-caked and dangling playfully you ask her what she was doing digging through the rubble. She asks you what you were doing watching her dig through the rubble and you smile as you wipe a wide swath of iodine across her hand with a cotton ball. You tell her you’re a paramedic, you’re allowed to be here — what’s her story?

You grimace expecting a violent reaction as you quickly pull an inch long shard of glass from under her fingernail. She continues swinging her legs out into space as a spurt of blood shoots from her nail down across the front of her nigthtgown and she answers evenly.

I was looking for my jewelry box.

The drive to the hospital is fine until you tell her you want a doctor to check her out. She asks why, says:

I’m fine, and I won’t let some stranger handle me so don’t even bother.

Her attitude goes from serene to snarling in a blink and she shrinks away from you into the corner of her seat. You leave the issue there and drive on for a few minutes in silence until you pass a police sub-station — you swing the ambulance over to the side of the street and throw it into park so abruptly that the vehicle is still rocking back and forth. You fold you arms across your chest and turn to face her.

The police station is right here and I’m betting you don’t want to go in, so why don’t you start talking.

She wraps your heavy coat around her shrinking body and looks at her hands that you’ve bandaged up, tugs at the strips of gauze. A smile plays around the corners of her mouth and she replies theatrically.

I’m a phoenix — I’m only alive because the fire killed me. Between us I’m Chloe, but as far as anyone else is concerned my name is Jane Doe, or Presumed Dead, or Unidentified Remains.

She says it was likely that she was vaporized by the heat of the inferno and that the investigators will be too preoccupied with figuring out why her parents never woke up, why the fire took them right in the bed as they slept, to sift through the ashes for her fire charred bones. They will find out the fire started with an explosion in the furnace — they will survey her vaporized basement bedroom. Conclusions will draw themselves.

There’s no emotion in her voice as she tells you all of this and still none as she explains that her father was not a good person — his hands had roamed large and cold over her body so many times while her mother pretended to be asleep upstairs. She doesn’t need to finish or give any details because somehow you understand what she did and you know if you try to make her turn herself in you will never see her again. You hear the machinery somewhere inside you click into motion and it’s decided that this is now officially happening.

You look down and fumble with the keys, dropping the shifter into drive you look straight ahead. Thinking of all the mistakes you’ve made there is confirmation in her fragility — this is a chance for redemption — maybe for the both of you. You think of the clothes Sachaa left behind when she went to visit her mother and suddenly there is purpose and direction to everything that has happened. Feeling moved to action, you realize that you’ve got to get the ambulance back right away but your head is too loopy with sleeplessness and excitement so you reach over next to Chloe’s seat for the bag of pills — maybe just one Valium — and something is instantly very wrong.

The bag you pull out is bulging just as you remember, but with candy: gumballs, jellybeans, starlight mints, salt water taffy. You freeze, the bag dangling from your hand and swaying, and Chloe’s hand moves over the top of yours and takes the candy from you. Your arm just hangs there and you feel the soreness seeping down through your fingertips and out, and suddenly everything is happening so fast and it’s skewed out of focus except Chloe’s soft eyes pulling you in. She swipes a wave of golden hair behind her ear, pries the bag from your fingers, and says to you silently with her eyes,

You didn’t need them anymore.

There is no more conversation as you pull back into the deserted street. The radio clock shows 8:30, which makes you an hour late, so you flip a row of switches overhead for sirens and lights and make fast time back to the Emergency Room where a first-shifter named Al, an older guy who platoons the unit with you, is sitting in a folding chair outside with the newspaper spread out on the ground around him. You come to a screeching stop and he snaps his head up as you grab your bag and pile out of the driver’s side door with the engine still idling. Then you remember Chloe and spin back to tell her to get out the other side and wait for you but she’s already gone. All that remains is your coat wedged against the back of the seat with the arms extended out like some storefront display window.

You must stand there and stare at the inside of the cab for a minute because the next thing you know Al is right beside you staring in, too. His gray hair is oiled and slicked and parted to the side and this early in the morning he always smells nauseatingly like Old Spice. He chucks his bag into the front and it smacks off the passengers door, then he whacks you on the back and hoists himself up into the driver’s seat.

Ah, the seat’s nice and warm, just the way I like it.

He’s moving his head in close, examining the gauges and writing down numbers and readings on a clipboard.

Damn, son, you only go eighteen miles last night? What’d you fall asleep in a lot somewhere?

Al’s not really paying much attention to your sour reaction because his head is craned to the side as an ancient pair of bifocals on a lanyard slides down his nose. You stifle the urge to slam the door on his skinny little legs that are still planted on the running board, then remember that Chloe is around here somewhere and you don’t want anyone to see her in a filthy nightgown looking like an escaped mental patient, so you hit the hollow side of the door twice and turn away scanning the lot for her. There’s a flutter of white movement across the street in the employee lot and you go that way until Al yells out from the ambulance.

Hey boy, ain’t these yours?

He’s leaning out the door with the sandwich bag of candy twisting in the grip of his hand and you think about running back to get it but then remember what somebody told you.

No, you keep them, I don’t need them anymore.

To be continued...