“They’ll help circulate her blood. We don’t want a clot.” He goes around the end of the bed and I follow to watch him shine his flashlight on the plastic bag of urine attached to the bottom of her bed tucked up and out of sight. It looks full, but I don’t know what the normal rate is supposed to be. I don’t know how long it’s taken for her body to produce this. “Is that okay?” I whisper, and he says, “Looks fine.” He speaks in a normal voice.
A tall metal rack stands sentinel, an array of hooks holding up dangling bags of fluid, plastic loops braiding and twisting and reaching across the top of Arden’s bed to her. The sheet slides down her shoulders, her hospital gown untied and lying across her body. Here’s another precious piece of real estate, a few inches of clavicle, the smooth skin stretched across her chest beneath thick pads of gauze covering her throat, from which an ugly worm of a tube pokes. The nurse shines the flashlight across my daughter’s body to show me. “That’s a drain. Don’t worry. She can’t feel it.” Arrayed on each side are discs taped in place to sense the rise and fall of her heart, working away silently.
He pats my arm. “I’ll be back in thirty minutes. Let me know if you need anything.”
“Okay. Thank you.”
He reaches up to slide the curtain across the glass wall and Arden and I are alone. All I can see of my daughter is the ghostly rounded shape of her bandaged head and the sheet covering her. I wait for the shadows to sort themselves out and carefully reach again for the skin on the inside of her arm, just enough for the tips of my four fingers to line up, the fine hairs I know are palest blond, the soft rise of a narrow vein, the reassuring warmth of her skin. The small purple-and-green butterfly, wings open, seeking freedom. Fighting for it.
I should be worrying about the fire. I should be demanding to know how it happened, demanding to know how all the safeguards failed, leaving my daughter barely clinging to life, but all I can think of is She’s here. She’s in this room with me right this moment. I can see and touch her, and that’s all that matters.
Rustling behind me. It’s Theo, letting himself quietly into the room. “How is she?” he whispers.
“Talk to her.” I’m so glad to see him. He brings warmth into the room, solidity. “She needs to know you’re here.”
“Hey, sweetheart. Hey, Arden Garden.” His voice is forced and unnatural, and tears sting my eyes. “Daddy’s here,” I say to compensate, in a chirpy voice I instantly regret. We are all going to have to practice speaking normally. I inhale and try again. “Guess what today is. Our anniversary. Can you believe it?”
I tell her about the homecoming kids and how the server had to break up a mashed-potato food fight. I pretend this is a regular conversation and that we are at home, in our kitchen, just the two of us. I tell her about the twins, and how Oliver took his ant farm to school and, miracle of all miracles, not one ant escaped. I tell her Rory’s sleeping in the room next door, and that she’ll be okay, too. What I don’t tell her is that this might not be true, and that the doctors are all wearing grim expressions. I don’t tell her I’m sick with fear.
Later, in the cafeteria, while the nurses are changing Arden’s bandages and the Foley bag, I cry against Theo’s shirt. “How did this happen?” I’m blubbering. I’m barely making sense. There had been fire alarms and smoke detectors, rules about appliances. No candles. Cooking in the kitchens. “How did this happen?” My hands are fists, gathering up the material of his shirt. Over and over, I see my daughter cartwheeling through the air, arms and legs outspread. The ground had been hard. It had been unforgiving as it rushed to meet her. “Why Arden? Why Rory?” Why us?
Theo rubs his hands up and down my back. “I don’t know,” he murmurs, and it only makes the images in my head spin faster. Arden on the ledge. Arden in the air. Arden on the ground. I have to know that bad things don’t just randomly happen. “I have to know,” I insist, and the next day, I do.
—
“How is she?” my mother asks on the phone.
I’m in the ICU family lounge. The window offers a rain-smeared view of slanted utilitarian rooftops and concrete. The windowsill is wide and stacked with cardboard boxes of jigsaw puzzles in faded colors. A ruffled paperback of sudoku puzzles sits on the round table, a pen lying across its magenta cover. I’ll be right back, the owner seems to have said, but it’s been there for hours—overnight? A bulletin board offers celestial help, a suicide hotline, coupons for a local dry cleaner, and a missing poster for a dark-eyed girl staring unhappily at the camera.
“The same,” I tell my mother. We’ve talked twice already during the course of the night—or has it been three times? I have nothing new to share. We’re in a holding pattern; all we can do is wait to see if the extra fluid in Arden’s skull starts to drain. She could make a complete recovery. I have made Dr. Morris admit this. It’s possible, the doctor had said. Anything is possible.
Arden’s surrounded by love. She’s floating in it.
All night, I watched the machines in my daughter’s room pump and drip and measure and squeeze; I stared at the shadows of the rise and fall of her body, and finally when I couldn’t stand it any longer, I dragged my chair closer, lowered the molded plastic railing, and laid my forehead on the mattress beside her. This is as close as I can get to actually holding her.
Liz had called first thing this morning. I’m so sorry. I know you’re busy, but do you want me to open the restaurant tonight? I’d had to stop and think. What day is it? Saturday, our biggest night. But beyond scraping up this basic fact, my mind wouldn’t work. I couldn’t think. I don’t know, I’d told her. If you think you can handle it, go ahead. Her answering hesitation had thrummed over the line.
“I think you should move her to D.C.,” my mom says. “The hospitals here are excellent.”
“I talked to Christine.” The prevalence of twins in our family led my sister to focus on what happens when twins don’t separate in utero. When I found out I was pregnant with twins, Christine insisted I get an ultrasound. We all held our breath until she’d read it and confirmed the boys were okay. “She says it’s too risky to move Arden right now.” Christine had gotten on the phone with Dr. Morris and reported back that she was fucking awesome, and Arden and Rory were in excellent hands. If Arden’s burns had been more extensive, had covered thirty percent of her body, Christine said she might have suggested otherwise. What’s thirty percent? An arm and a leg? A torso? “She says to keep Arden here.”
“All right. If Christine says so. When is she getting here?”
“She has that operation, remember?” I told Christine that there was no point in her coming now, and she made me promise to keep her in the loop. I told her I’d keep her so much in the loop she’d feel strangled, and she’d let out her breath. “I told her to wait until it was over. It’s not like being here would change anything.”
“She could give you moral support.”
“She is. Plus I have you and Theo.”
Mom sighs. “How’s Rory? Is she any better?”
“She’s about to go into surgery. They’re fixing her leg.”
“What about Vince and Gabrielle? How are they doing?” She stumbles over Gabrielle’s name. Mom’s never mastered the French pronunciation. Such a pretty girl, she’d murmured, meeting Gabrielle at my wedding all those years ago. Mom had gotten tipsy, and her eyes were moist. She’d patted my cheek, whispered, You picked the right brother. As if there had been calculation on my part. Mom hadn’t been certain I was doing the right thing marrying Theo. She’d worried I was only acting on rebound.
It’s not as if Vince and I had broken up. We’d never even dated. But the night before he’d left for France twenty years ago, Vince had murmured in my ear, surprising me. Come with me. We’ll get married, master puff pastry together. I’d leaned away and stared at him. Just think about it, he’d urged.
But he didn’t repeat the offer when he sobered up. So I stayed home, and two weeks later, his older brother, Theo, walked into the res
taurant where I was sous chef. After the initial shock of familiarity—Theo and Vince looked so much alike; their voices had the same timbre and resonance; they squared their shoulders the same way and tilted their heads to the right when they were thinking something through—I began to tease out the deeper and more meaningful differences between them.
Vince was restless, always looking for the next adrenaline rush. Theo was calm and purposeful. He looked at me; he listened. He made me laugh. With Vince I felt that I was always auditioning for his admiration, but with Theo I could just be the real, flawed me: impulsive, impatient, sometimes irritable. He carved out this warm, lovely space where I felt safe, where I felt found, where I felt treasured. And the first time Theo put his hand around my wrist to lead me across a crowded room, my entire body tingled with recognition. All I could think of at that moment was how much I wanted his hands to touch the rest of me.
“They’re hanging in there,” I evade, though Vince and I haven’t spoken. Not really. While the doctors were talking to us the night before in the hallway outside our daughters’ rooms, I had felt Vince watching me. But I couldn’t look back. Even now, I can’t jump the canyon between us. I can’t pretend we’re okay.
I hear the wind blow past the phone, muted shouts in the background. My mother’s calling from the soccer field. “How’s the game going?” I need to hear about the boys, and how their lives are staying on happy tracks.
Last night’s storm breezed through D.C. but stalled along the Maryland shore, directly overhead. Earlier, I’d heard thunder booming. I hate rain—I always have—but I’m glad it’s my mother and my boys getting a brief spate of sunshine now before the storm rolls back in. After the game, my mother will take them to lunch and then to Janey’s birthday party, which I’d forgotten but was the first thing Henry reminded my mother about when he woke up. They will come home, happy and tired, to walk Percy and then sprawl on the floor of the family room playing with LEGO while my mom assembles dinner. A good day, and I’d been looking forward to it, but now I can’t remember the woman I’d been just twenty-six hours before, scooping dog food into a bowl and eyeing the weather report on TV, worrying about a few inches of rain and pending soccer plans.
“I’m not sure,” she says. “It’s kind of hard to tell when someone’s made a goal. And they talked me into ice cream for breakfast. I hope you don’t mind. They were so upset about Arden. But I drew the line at sprinkles.”
“That’s right, Mom. You’re the boss.” Framed prints in hideous pastel colors hang on the hospital walls. Once Arden gets out of here we will bring her paintings over and hang them on all the walls. It will be a way of thanking the doctors and nurses for saving our child. It will be a way of supporting the other families who find themselves in the cheerless place where we are now.
“Dad called, by the way,” I tell her. What can I do, Princess? he’d asked. He hasn’t called me that in years. It makes me suspect everything.
“Are you letting him visit?”
I sigh. I have no energy to manage this, either. “No. And not Mary Beth, either.” Which is really what she wants to know.
The door opens and people come in. Theo, Vince, Gabrielle, and a man I’ve never seen before in a dark suit, a tie folded crisply, round gold-framed glasses. Someone from the university, I decide. Someone with answers? “I have to go, Mom,” I say, and we hang up. “How’s Rory?” I ask Gabrielle, and she answers, “There was a delay. She should be going into surgery soon.”
“This is my wife,” Theo says. “Natalie Falcone. Natalie, this is Detective Gallagher.”
A police officer. I’m instantly wary, though I’ve done nothing wrong. I stand and shake the officer’s hand. “Who’s with Arden?” I ask Theo. This is the first of the rules that I have made with myself. Someone always has to be here with Arden, and preferably in the chair beside her bed, until she comes home.
“She’s okay,” Theo replies, which only means She’s the same.
“I just have a few questions, ma’am,” Detective Gallagher says. “It won’t take long.” Questions? I thought he was here to give us answers. I must look worried, because he adds, “Talking to the family is standard procedure in a fatal fire.”
A fatal fire. That’s what this is, not merely one that blistered my daughter’s skin, smacked her head against the wooden picnic bench beneath her window, broke her bones, and yanked her into a hushed space hovering between life and death. A violence that tightens my throat and makes it hard to breathe. My daughter will be okay—I tell myself this over and over—but Hunter will not. How will I tell her, when she wakes up?
Theo and I sit on the vinyl-covered couch against the wall. Vince and Gabrielle choose the one adjacent. Detective Gallagher picks up a chair and positions it to face us. There is a smooth economy to his movements that warns me to pay attention. Vince is on the other side of Theo, sitting safely back and out of view, but his knees protrude and I see he’s wearing his khaki pants, the ones with the ghostly outline of his wallet worn into the hip pocket and the torn belt loop. Don’t you dare go out front in those, I’d chide, and he’d merely grin, go into the office, and reemerge fifteen minutes later, clean-shaven, dressed immaculately in fresh khakis and a crisp chef’s jacket. I’d pat his cheek and wink.
“The fire marshal’s released a preliminary report,” Detective Gallagher begins. “We haven’t released this to the media, and I’d like you to keep it to yourselves for now.”
“Of course.” Theo nods, finding my hand, as Gabrielle says, “What? What does he know?”
“He found traces of accelerant in your daughters’ room. He’s ruling this an arson, pending further investigation.”
“In our daughters’ room?” Theo says.
“The fire marshal believes it was the point of origin.”
Point of origin. It sounds like a horror flick, not this. Not my life. Not Arden’s. “Someone started a fire in their room?” Were they asleep? How did they let it happen?
“Is he sure it’s arson?” Vince says. “I mean, kids keep all kinds of crap in their rooms. Nail-polish remover, hairspray, cigarette lighters.”
“Rubbing alcohol.” I’d packed the first-aid kit myself and stowed it under Arden’s bunk bed.
“There’s a difference between a flammable liquid,” Detective Gallagher says, “and one that’s used as an accelerant and is intended to spread a fire quickly. We found accelerant everywhere in your daughters’ dorm room, the walls, the ceiling, the floor. The lab’s analyzing samples now. We should know exactly what was used shortly.”
“You’re saying someone wanted to hurt our children?” It’s crazy. It’s impossible. “They’re just kids.” Two eighteen-year-olds who spent this past summer watching One Tree Hill and eating gummy worms. Gabrielle has her fingertips against her mouth, her eyes blank and stunned. I look to Theo. I want him to agree, to argue that this is all an insane mistake, but his face registers nothing. He’s processing, thinking. “How can we help?” he asks instead.
“Well, arson’s an unusual way to hurt someone. Often, it’s directed at property, but we don’t think that’s the case here. We believe this was a revenge fire, someone settling a grudge.”
“Revenge for what?” Vince sounds bewildered. “These are good girls. What sort of grudge?”
“Did either of them mention any trouble on campus? Maybe some kids the girls have had run-ins with?”
“Rory doesn’t have run-ins,” Vince says. “She gets along with everyone.”
It’s true. Rory’s always been surrounded by a laughing group of kids. They swarm to her. She’s never been afraid to put herself out there and speak her mind. It makes her the unquestioned leader, but it has a price. Back when the girls were in seventh grade, Arden had told me how Rory was being picked on. Don’t you dare tell Aunt Gabrielle, my daughter had ordered. It’ll only make things worse. And then more recently, Rory isn’t who you think she is. Her voice had been freighted with meaning and I’d stopped what I was do
ing to give her my full attention. What does that mean? I’d asked, but she’d just shrugged.
“It’s a big campus,” Detective Gallagher says.
“Rory would have told us if there’d been a problem,” Vince insists.
Detective Gallagher looks to me, light reflecting off the lenses of his glasses.
I shake my head. “Arden never mentioned anything.” But the fact is that Arden has confided so little in me since starting college. The food here is disgusting. I have to memorize like fifty works of art. The girls in the room next door play Taylor Swift too loud.
“Think. It could be something minor. An argument.”
I look to Theo, who says, “She didn’t say anything to me, either.”
“It’s possible someone from town got into the building,” Detective Gallagher says. “We’re reviewing the student access-card records, but there’s always the chance that someone let a nonstudent into the building. They’re not supposed to, of course, but they still do it.”
“Are you talking about drugs?” Vince asks, and I’m shocked at this, but of course he’d wonder. I should have thought of it, too. He’d just gotten there before me. “You think this is drug-related?”
“Did the girls experiment?”
It’s a softball question lobbed gently. I wait for Vince to volunteer that I’d once caught the dishwasher selling Rory weed, but he remains silent. I rub my temples. I’m searching, scrabbling for meaning. I’m turning over all the rocks. None of this makes any sense.
“No,” Theo says. “Arden didn’t do drugs. Natalie and I would have known.”
Theo’s always saying that his biggest challenge isn’t getting his students into the best schools, but making sure they stayed sober long enough to graduate. Drugs were rampant, despite his best efforts. He watched Arden closely, and I know he worried about Rory. His conviction now is reassuring, but I am remembering the time I phoned Arden and she answered giggling. Wait, who’s this? Arden always checks caller ID. She always composes herself before saying Hello? I push the pebble back into place: Rory isn’t a drug user and neither is my daughter. Her grades are too important to her and she has her feet firmly on the ground. Arden doesn’t take risks. My daughter’s a careful child.