Where the Fire Dies

When he looked his wife in the face, James wanted nothing more than to settle into her warmth. Her name was Lucille, a name she told him she had adopted shortly before they met. She was dark-haired, brown-skinned, and she had the most beautiful eyes James had ever seen. They were the shade of rain-kissed hickory, so nearly black that he swore the moon reflected off of them, the stars and the planets, too.

She was of the Abenaki, she told him, and James told her that he had been born in Ireland, that he had technically been Northern Irish from 1921. He was American now, and she was too, only one of them by choice.

“I ended up in England when I was very young,” James admitted once when they lay curled in bed. “I suppose that I’m not as Irish as I was. I don’t suppose I can ever be.”

“Sometimes I feel the same as you,” she said very softly. “Or perhaps you feel the same as me? Experiences are not as unique as they feel, are they?”

“No,” he responded. “They aren’t.”

Thirty-something years of age and greying at the temples - him, anyway, her single grey was hidden away at the back of her head - they had two and a half children. A girl of five years, Pauline, a son of two, Tomas, and a child on the way. Its name would be Jean, whenever it was born. They lived in a small house on the outskirts of a town comfortingly named Belfast. Sea salt flavored the air, and sometimes James felt so at home that it terrified him.

He had not felt at home since he was 14 years old, but sat at his desk outside their house writing a story in numbers with his daughter in his lap he was content. She walked a doll sleepily across his back, the hem of its dress tickling him through his shirt. 

“Paulie,” he said gently, reaching back to run his fingers through her thick, wavy hair. “Would you like me to carry you to your bedroom?”

“Nnh,” she said, snuggling further into his massive frame.

“Okay, baby,” he murmured, twisting to kiss her atop the head. “Just a wee bit longer.”

The horizon fanned out on all sides, the soft bristle of deep green trees and gentle hills, the ocean a serene silver plate in the distance, the sophisticated allure of metal buildings nestled within all of this like a pocket of the future. Across the tree-brushed plain was another house, small and peaceful as James and Lucille’s own.

It sat on the edge of the rugged coast, a giant’s footstep from pebbles caught between toes and seaspray nibbling the cheeks. James had visited them once per Lucille’s encouragement. Thoughtful and reserved she was in the silence of their own home, but given a reason to celebrate or the company of friends and she became a bright, bubbly sunspot, directly contrary to James’ steadfast soft-spokenness. 

They were Americans born-and-bred, they said, but they had admitted German ancestry a few drinks into the night, and confessed that their family had been into something nasty down South. It was a confession that irked Lucille for a reason she had trouble pinning. The four of them - James and Lucille and the neighbors - had a certain kinship: they had all run away for one reason or another. A new life, a better life, in the shadow of family or the shadow of sin. 

James had changed the subject at a drop.

Upon the radiance of Maine’s horizon the Meyer house sat, a fat plume of smoke curling from the chimney. Black melted into white, blended with low-hanging clouds like sand and the sea. 

He set his pen lightly upon his desk, where a stack of thick papers taunted him. Pauline grunted. Nap time had come upon the O’Dempsey household once again, leaving only the sleepless James Darrow O’Dempsey conscious. It was an idyllic life. Venturing into the house he would hear Lucille’s snores amplified by the weight of her pregnant belly, would see Tomas balled in his crib like a cat. That was the way things went. He could not complain.

Wind swept through his hair like invisible fingers, carrying with it the acrid scent of smoke. James’ heart leapt, nerves jolting through him. He suppressed them with a grunt, lifting his pen and filling the blank spaces of his page with number after number and letter after letter, until it started to resemble the code it was.

The scent of smoke grew heavier, until he could taste it thick and hot on his tongue. Just an illusion, he told himself, the pen trembling in his fingers. Just a memory.

Then Paulie coughed, not the clearing of the throat but the irritation of it, and James lifted his head first to her, then to the horizon.

The column of smoke looming over the Meyer house had tripled, seeping into and across the land like paint to snow. James jerked to his feet, rattling Pauline from her imminent slumber. She whined into his shoulder, leaning away from him with the bonelessness only children and cats could manage.

“I’m going to take you inside,” James said, injecting calm into his voice. He shoved a weight onto the papers and lurched from his desk, the strengthening scent of smoke settling in his gut like a bitter stone, fingers of black leaking from cracks in its surface to tug at his nerves, his heartstrings, the sensitive threads of his stomach.

“Nooooo,” Paulie said, yanking at the collar of his shirt.

“Yes, baby girl,” he replied, and against her flimsy protests he carried her drowsy form into he and Lucille’s bedroom, where Tomas snoozed in his crib and Lucille lay on the bed. Pauline occupied the space at her mother’s back. She stared half-lidded at James as he backed out of the room, watched him until he was gone.

Gravel marked the road from the O’Dempsey’s to the Meyer’s, the rocks white and so well-worn that they scarcely shifted as he flew over it. Dust shot from beneath his feet, less and less visible the closer to his destination he drew.

He felt the flames before he saw them, before he even heard them. Their heat rolled through the trees in great breaths, threatening to bowl him over with all the force and mercy of a raging bull. James pushed through it, his panic rising with bile at the back of his throat.

Where did you come from, James Darrow O’Dempsey? Mr. Meyer had asked once, dirty-blond hair fallen in lank strands over his eyes. What’s your secret?

I’m from the North of Ireland, James answered.

And your secret? Hell of a scar you’ve got. Burn?

He had said nothing.

When he closed his eyes he still saw him, sometimes. Fifteen years old, dark-haired and dumb as a box of bolts, but a child. There was not a man on earth that deserved the fate Edgar had suffered; to say nothing of a boy.

Mr. Meyer was not a boy, but he was flesh and bone and, furthermore, a chance at selfish redemption. 

The door crumbled when James struck it. Julian, Edgar!

Sparks burned fine holes through James’ trousers, singing the flesh and hair beneath. 

“Mr. Meyer? Mrs. Meyer?” He called. One voice answered.

“It’s just me!” Mr. Meyer called. “Help!”

Darragh? Darragh! Darragh, please, where are you?

“Stay down!” James called. His blood pounded in his head. Sweat hung heavy upon his brow. “Cover your mouth! I’m coming!”

I’m stuck, Darragh, I-

He instinctively flinched, but nothing struck him, fist or bedpost or otherwise. Meyer continued screaming, the sound weakening by the second. Damned fool would waste his lungs that way. 

James found the man moments before he collapsed, trapped behind a blinking red beam. If there were time to stifle the flames, James was not sure that he would have used it. He wrapped one hand with the cloth of his sleeve and shoved at the pillar, muscles rippling beneath the flesh of his massive frame. Embers rained upon his shoulders, charring bared flesh and fabric alike. The wood creaked dangerously, and James snapped:

“Go! You idiot! Get out of here!”

“I won’t forget this, Darrow,” Meyer said, stumbling from his opened prison like a drunk.

“You had better,” James said. 

The pillar landed upon the floor with a roar and a small explosion of ochre heat that James dodged by a scant second. Smoke in his lungs, he followed Meyer to the edge of the property, and as Meyer began speaking he continued. Step by step. Lungs throbbing. Vocal chords tattered. 

All the way back to his house and into the shower, soaking until the scent of smoke had receded from his clothes and skin and hair.

I’m stuck, Darragh, I-

Nothing had changed. Edgar was long dead, Meyer was alive, and Darragh Trase was nothing more than a runaway, a coward, a killer. 

He shed his sopping clothes onto the floor. Naked, sodden, tortured and sore, he made his way to his bedroom and his family. Lucille lay on her opposite side now, Paulie nestled into her throat. Tomas had stuck his thumb into his mouth. 

“There is this,” he said softly, the rage of heat behind his sternum cooling the longer he stood. Lucille opened one dark eye.

“There is what?” She asked, voice no more than a whisper.

“Nothing,” Darragh said at first, pulling on underwear. Then he paused, thinking better of those words. “No. Everything, actually. There’s you.”

She smiled.

"There always will be."