AFTER FINDING THE dead girls in the fire, Jack Dewey didn’t know what to think. At first, he seemed mostly fine, having gone to see a department-provided therapist for a few months. Bad dreams and cold sweats were nothing unusual, the therapist told him. It was a process he’d need to work through. The firefighters at his station seemed to understand his woodenness at work and offered encouragement—a few of them had been on tours in Iraq and seen bad things happen. Whole families burned. Children’s arms, legs, heads, blown off. But to Jack, this all happened in vast, incomprehensible cities and deserts, places with guttural-sounding names he’d never visit. Still, several of the firefighters made sure, on his four days off a week, to check in or invite him to play softball with some city league team that needed a sub, or to grab a beer in the evening. They had done this too after his wife died ten years before, in his second year with the department. They’d made an effort to fix him up with blind dates—usually nervous, mid-thirties friends of their wives or girlfriends, who had decided they were too old for the music clubs or didn’t like online dating sites.
But things had not gotten better after the fire—if better meant getting along with his girlfriend, Carla, and his daughter, Sam, or having a few moments of stillness in his mind. He often drank at Deep Eddy Bar until he couldn’t feel his face, and would wobble home on his bike down the expressway shoulder. This was after the DUI, when he’d fallen asleep in the car while idling in line at Mrs. Johnson’s Donuts. Now he’d occasionally glimpse himself in the bar mirror, his hands adjusting his helmet for the ride home. His head gargantuan and grotesque. Whose head and face were these? He often thought now, nearly five years later, how the firefighters at his station, or even the detectives on the case who’d questioned him, thought he was drinking to forget the girls. But the truth was, the more he drank, the more stove-in he became on the outside, the more inwardly alive he felt. He doesn’t see the images of the girls’ naked burned bodies anymore, as he once did, stacked upon one another, their open opaque eyes staring at nothing. He doesn’t wake up on fire and thrash in the bed, frantically trying to rip off his burning helmet and airpack. Once he’d flung his arms so violently that he’d broken Carla’s nose. Carla, out of sheer terror, had begun to toss a quilt over him and pretend to smother the fire, and sometimes that would break the spell. He’d gone to see a therapist again after the broken nose, trying to restore some trust between them. Over the past five years, though, the dreams had become more vivid, sharper around the edges, and, to his great shame, even more real to him than memories of his dead wife. To his astonishment and confusion, in these dreams he sees, and even speaks to, the girls from the fire, as they would be now, five years later, in their early twenties, near the same age as his daughter.
“What kind of dad are you?” Jack’s daughter, Sam, said into the phone in a voice that seemed to understand exactly the kind of dad he was. He’d said some things, accused her of some things he shouldn’t have. This was four months after she’d come back home, a year and a half after the fire. She was calling him from Brackenridge Hospital to tell him she and her boyfriend had had a wreck. Sam was a little banged up—some cuts from the glass. The new boyfriend had a concussion. But when the cops and EMS crew found his pickup in the culvert, they also discovered some cellophane-wrapped hashish stuffed into the fingers of a single leather glove in the console. Now the boyfriend needed an attorney and some bail money.
“I guess I’m the kind of dad who comes when you need me,” he said on the phone, trying on a kind of casual bluster because, as she often pointed out, he was afraid of her.
Later, in the emergency room, he sat near a large tinted window and could feel the day’s heat through the glass. Another man sat nearby, cupping his limp arm at the elbow as if cradling an infant’s head. He signed in at the desk and a pregnant Hispanic nurse wearing slippers helped him navigate the maze of cubicle rooms.