“Took the basement room,” he rushed out. “It was the nicest one, if you can believe it. Had its own entrance. And a bathroom, so she wouldn’t have to share.”
Layla made a noise. A knowing sound.The basement room.
“Michael’s graduation was later. End of May, but he was going to come home after. I figured, for however long he had at home, he could stay there, too, with Sara Beth. That would be good. Better than staying with Fitz and Paula.”
One thing I love about you, Griffy, Sara Beth had said,is that you stay committed to pissing Fitz and Paula off.
He’d laughed, playfully pushing her away from the microwave, which she’d bent to peek into, trying to see what he was heating up, to decide whether she’d want to share—steal—it. The kitchen light above them was flickering temperamentally like it always did in that house, especially when any appliance was running. He’d said,I don’t stay committed. I don’t even have totrypissing them off, and she’d laughed, too, because both of them knew it was true.
He could hear Sara Beth’s laugh, still. Could call it up easily. But he realized now that he couldn’t remember Emily’s, and he’d probably heard it more than once in the last few days. He thought that was not good of him, not to remember. He would probably never have occasion to hear it again, though at least shewouldlaugh again. Someday.
He would do this next part quick. Brutally quick.
“The fire was the third week of May. The middle of the night.Just me and Sara Beth in the house that weekend. Electrical. It started in the basement.”
The basement room, he bet Layla was thinking, but he was thinking more about that word,started. It made the whole thing seem slow. A little spark, a smoldering maybe, until there was a point ofcatching, a point of spreading.
But it hadn’t been like that. In that house—a shithole, a hazard, everything old, already rotted, not up to code—it had not been astarting. It started and ended at the same time, that’s how it seemed. A conflagration, an explosion. To this day, Griffin could not say if he smelled smoke first, or if the fire was alreadythere, coming up through the floor, too fast-moving to bother with a warning odor.
They said she probably didn’t suffer, Michael told him, one of those days after, Griffin in the bed paralyzed with pain, every kind of pain, pain he knew would never leave him, worse for the way Michael came every day, sitting and sitting, talking to Griffin as though he had not once considered being angry.They said it was very quick.
“I couldn’t have saved her that night,” Griffin said now. “I know that. I—I did try to get to her. I got out of my window and went around to her entrance.”
The T-shirt he’d been sleeping in balled haphazardly over his left hand, a desperate, meaningless effort to spare himself pain. He had notknownpain. He had opened that door andbecomefire. He could not remember anything after that, for days and days.
But he’d known, even as it consumed one whole side of him, blasting him backward into the night, that Sara Beth was gone. He’d known that before everything inside him—his body, his brain—went black.
“But I could have saved her before. Never letting her move in.Not giving her that room. I could have. That’s why—Paula and Fitz.”
He figured he didn’t need to complete that thought. She’d seen Paula and Fitz with him. It didn’t matter, really, that they’d both once cared about him, too, or at least they’d seemed to. When he was younger, sweet-faced and lonely, when he probably seemed like a pleasant, harmless charity case. It didn’t matter that well before the fire—middle school, probably—they’d started to sour on him, to see him as a bad influence, to look scornfully down on his mother, as though they’d run out of patience for the fact that she hadn’t yet managed to bootstrap herself out of being poor, or maybe for the fact that Griffin hadn’t turned his back on her in favor of them.
“And Michael?” Layla said softly.
Even with two words, he knew what she was asking.
He shook his head. He’d heard people use this expression, that their eyesburnedwith tears. But he would not say that.
He would not say that’s how it felt at all.
“Michael never blamed me. He has always stood…he has always sat beside me. For forever.”
It felt over for him then. A breaking. He bent himself forward in the chair, set his elbows on his thighs and his head in his hands, knowing it felt all wrong, pain and parts of him all out of proportion, exactly like one of those sculptures in the museum garden.
He was thinking,I can’t believe I did it. I can’t believe I did this to Michael. My best friend.
Or maybe—he wouldn’t ever be sure—maybe he said it through the wet catch in his throat, maybe he said it to the floor between his spread knees.
Because before he knew it, Layla was there. Not touching him, but kneeling before him. He could see her pale, beautiful handsresting on her thighs, waiting. He thought,Get up from there, the first command he’d ever given her, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it. He stared at her hands, blurry through his wet vision, grateful when—after he didn’t know how long—they started to come back into focus.
“Griffin,” she finally said, and then one of her hands lifted. She set it so gently on his right leg, curving her fingers around his calf, her thumb resting on his shin. “You did the right thing.”
“I told him,” he said, embarrassed at the sound of his voice, but not so embarrassed that he didn’t keep going. “Tonight, in his room. After we got back from getting your perfume. I told him if he didn’t tell her, I would.”
“That was good,” she said, so soft—god, she must be such a good fucking doctor, and this was humiliating, for her to talk to him this way.
Five minutes, and it would get more humiliating. He would be insensate with the pain coming. She would see it all. He was going to let her. Hewantedto let her. He deserved it.
“Then tell her,” he said now. “That’s what Michael said to me, before he left the room.Then tell her.”
