Things You Save in a Fire(94)

“That’s what she’s thinking, on her sixteenth birthday, in the mud: This is how I’m going to die.

“Do I have to tell you what he does next? He pushes her face down so it’s half buried in the mud. Mud fills her nose and her mouth and her eyes as he stops laughing and gets to work. She could have suffocated in that mud, for all he noticed or cared. But she didn’t.

“She won’t remember how she got home. That part goes black. But when she finds herself outside her living room window, her dad is in there watching TV, waiting for her to get home. She waits, crouched down by the back steps, until he gives up, turns off the lights, and goes to bed.

“She thinks she might have to go to the hospital, or the school nurse, if she doesn’t stop bleeding—but it stops eventually. She won’t get sick, or pregnant. But she will never go on another date—or even want to—again. And she will never, ever tell anybody what happened to her. Not until right now. This moment. Right here. To a bitter, vicious old man.

“But you can bet the boy told people what happened. Lots of people. Except he makes up a story that ‘she begged for it.’ Guess what word he uses? Slut. Guess how many people he tells? Everybody. Anybody. And guess what the mean girls decide to scratch into the metal door of the girl’s locker with a set of keys?”

I waited then, as if DeStasio might actually take a guess.

Which he didn’t.

But I gave him a minute.

I gave us both a minute.

Then I said, “Yeah. Slut. Very cliché for high school terrorism. Been done to death.”

I kept my eyes on the distant shape of a tree out the window. Of all the people in the world to finally, finally share that buried secret with, why the hell had I chosen DeStasio?

I waited to regret it. I expected it to hit me like a head-on collision.

DeStasio was quiet a long time—so quiet, I started to wonder if he’d dozed off or something.

Finally, in a scratchy whisper, he said, “I am sorry.”

“What?” I said.

“I didn’t realize.”

I nodded.

Then DeStasio said, so softly I could barely hear him, “It was Tony I saw in that fire—my boy. It was Tony when he was about ten or eleven—the year he got a buzz cut. He was wearing his Little League cap. And the shark’s tooth necklace we got at the shore that summer. I saw him. He was right there, just on the other side of the glass. I saw him. My little boy. He was calling to me for help.”

I turned from the window to look at DeStasio. He looked frail.

He went on. “When your child calls you for help, you go. Even if you know you can’t help, you go. Even if you know he’s not really there, you go. You go, no matter what the cost.” There were tears on DeStasio’s cheeks now. “My life got away from me somehow. I lost hold of it. I lost everybody. Everything that mattered.” He closed his eyes. “Then, there he was. I couldn’t leave him there. I couldn’t let him die.”

He wasn’t looking at me, but he didn’t have to. Something about that idea—of DeStasio so desperate to save a child who was already lost—made me feel his sorrow as clearly as my own.

It’s a big deal to share your grief with other people—to give them a glimpse of the pain you carry. It connects you in a profound way. That’s why you usually only do it with friends. DeStasio and I were not friends. Mostly, we were the opposite.

But part of what made us enemies to start with was this pain he was describing now. It wasn’t just this conversation that would connect us; it was everything that had come before it. Our lives were already tangled up. But what I’d just told him, and what he was telling me in this moment—these were bedrock truths about our lives. The kind of truths that could force us to understand each other better. The kind with the raw power to change how we saw each other, and even transform all that anger into something different—something more like understanding.

Could that happen? Could DeStasio and I become friends? Could I even consider not hating someone who’d treated me so viciously?

I wasn’t sure. But I felt too much empathy for him right now to say never.

“You couldn’t leave him there,” I said, my voice as soothing as I could make it—validating his choice to put us all in danger in a way I wasn’t even really sure I agreed with. Maybe he just needed someone to understand him. “I get it,” I said.

Maybe we could both overcome all our bitterness.

Then, after a good pause, DeStasio said, “Piss off. I don’t need your approval.”

Maybe not.

Now I could see what a friendship between us would look like. Equal parts hostility and grudging acceptance. Equal parts deep understanding and pure misunderstanding. Equal knowledge that I’d saved his life, and that he’d borne witness to the worst moment of mine, and no matter what else happened, that connected us.

Of course. One conversation might have bonded us, but it sure as hell wasn’t going to shift his entire personality from crabby-old-troll to sensitive-New-Age-guy-friend.

“It’s fine. Be your bitter self,” I said. “I didn’t even come here for that, anyway.”

“What did you come here for?” he asked.

“To bring you soup,” I said with a shrug. “To find out how your collarbone was healing. To be a frigging human being.” I met his eyes. “Also, because it suddenly occurred to me that you have a painkiller addiction.”