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I stab my fork into the salad, saying nothing.
“When the elevator was stopped on the seventh floor, you acted... unusual. Would you care to explain what happened?”
I’d noticed the way she watched me once I returned to the elevator with Rufus. I should have seen this lunch for what it really is—an attempt to understand what she had witnessed. Although I don’t necessarily need to talk about it, I find myself wanting to. Maybe because Greta wroteHeart of a Dreamer, I feel the need to repay her somehow. A story for a story. Only mine doesn’t have a happy ending.
“When I was a freshman in college, my father got laid off from the place he had worked for twenty-five years,” I begin. “After months of searching, the only job he could get was a night shift stocking shelves at an Ace Hardware three towns away. My mother worked part-time at a real estate office. To make ends meet she got another job waiting tables at a local diner on weekends. I tried to lighten their load by getting two jobs myself. Plus additional student loans. Plus a credit card I never told them about so they wouldn’t have to worry about sending me money. That kept us afloat for the better part of a year.”
But then, at the start of my sophomore year, my mother was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which spread like wildfire to her kidneys, her heart, her lungs. My mother had to quit her jobs. My father cared for her during the day while still going to work at night. I offered to leave college for a semester to help. My father refused, telling me I needed a good education to get a good job. Thatif I quit, I’d likely never return and end up just like them—two broken people in a broken town.
My mother’s medical expenses soared, even though there was no hope of remission. Everything was about keeping her comfortable until the end came. And my father’s meager health insurance plan covered only so much. The rest was up to them. So my father took out a second mortgage on the home he had just finished paying off a few years earlier.
I came home every weekend, my mother slightly smaller at every visit, as if she were shrinking right before my eyes. My father was the same way. The stress sapped his appetite until shirts hung like laundry from his clothesline arms. In the evenings, when he was getting ready for work, I’d hear him crying alone in the bathroom. Deep, guttural sobs that couldn’t be drowned out by the running sink.
We lived like that for six months. Then the final blow came. The Ace Hardware my father worked at closed its doors. There went his job and health insurance. I was at school when it happened. A sophomore on the verge of flunking out because I was too frazzled with worry and bone-deep exhaustion to focus on my studies.
“Not long after that, my parents died,” I say.
Greta gasps. A shocked, sorrowful sound.
I keep talking, too far into the tale to stop now. “There was a fire. It was the middle of the spring semester. The phone rang at five in the morning. The police. They told me there had been an accident and that both of my parents were dead.”
Later that day, Chloe drove me home, although there was nothing left of it. Our side of the duplex was a charred ruin.
“Smoke rose from the wreckage,” I tell Greta. “It was an awful throat-coating smoke I hoped I’d never smell again. But I did. Last night at the Bartholomew.”
The only thing that survived was my parents’ Toyota Camry, which had been parked as far from the house as the driveway would allow. Sitting in the driver’s seat was a ring with three keys on it. The instant I saw those keys, I knew the fire hadn’t been an accident.
One key was for the Camry itself.
The other two opened storage units at a facility a mile outside of town.
One unit contained all my belongings.
The other held all of Jane’s.
My father had emptied both of our bedrooms, which told me that even in their darkest hours, my parents still clung to a faint sliver of hope. That Jane would be found. That the two of us could muddle forward together. That things would turn out okay for us in the end.
The storage units would have been enough to tip off investigators, if the insurance policies hadn’t already. My father had purchased two in the months before the blaze.
Life insurance for him.
Fire insurance for the house.
So began the investigation that confirmed what I already knew. On the night of the fire, my father and mother shared a bottle of wine, even though she shouldn’t have been drinking with her kidneys on the verge of failure.
They also shared a pizza ordered from the very same place they went on their first date.
And a slice of chocolate cake.
And a bottle of my mother’s strongest painkillers.
Arson experts concluded the fire began in the hallway just outside my parents’ room, spurred on by lighter fluid and some balled-up newspapers. The bedroom door was closed, meaning it took some time for the fire to reach the bed where my parents were found.
They knew this because only my mother died from the overdose.
My father was killed by the smoke.
“I tried to be mad at them,” I say. “I wanted to hate them for what they did. But I couldn’t. Because even then I knew they did what they thought was right.”