What I Had Before I Had You by Cornwell Sarah

Author:Cornwell, Sarah [Cornwell, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

10

THE OFFICIAL POLICE reports will say that the fire at the Emerald started around ten P.M., that the probable cause was bad wiring, and that it was purely accidental. If you ask any cop in Ocean Vista, though, he’ll say that the actual cause was my mother, who showed up grease-stained and filthy at the fire department, rang the bell for service, and rode in the fire truck back to the blaze. “I was cleaning,” she said. “Is cleaning a crime?”

I am at Pam’s when it happens. Kandy has begged off due to some family obligation, and Pam and I are lying on her bed on our elbows, talking over reruns of I Love Lucy on her little rabbit-ears TV. There is a knock on Pam’s window, and she tumbles over to open it, revealing that public school girl with all the piercings. Does she often come by?

“Hey.” The girl’s face is sweaty. “Hey. The Emerald’s fucking burning down. Right fucking now. Come on.”

We fly out the back door, Pam’s mother calling after us, “Girls? Girls?,” and we don’t stop—Pam knows where to cut through backyards to get there the fastest. Her house is much closer to the water than mine is, so we just run for it, almost as if the Emerald is a friend in peril whom we must save. We stop to pick up the public school girl when she trips over uneven sidewalk, and we laugh, punchy with excitement.

We approach the Emerald from the rear, and there is already a crowd gathered to watch in that scrubby field. The fire truck is parked up close, firemen yelling to one another and reeling out a yellow hose flat as Scotch tape. The windows on the sixth floor glow, and there is a crackling, rumbling sound that we might attribute to a heavy vehicle on gravel far away if we couldn’t see that the loudest noises correspond to bursts of flame through the windows of the honeymoon suite. The fire lights the field to an uncanny gold, and outside its reach, the darkness deepens. Pam and I stand close together and watch, exclaiming sometimes over debris falling from the high windows, or the incredible power of the stream of water that the firemen send through the window of the honeymoon suite, that same window we swung out of only weeks ago.

It takes the firemen half an hour to tame the fire. It is more contained than it first appeared. From our vantage point on the ground, the fifth floor seems to be charred, but the fourth looks all right, and the building stands. What a miracle, people whisper in the field, that this never happened with all those teenagers inside. Later, after they investigate, they will tell us that the Emerald is full of death-trap wiring: old ungrounded power outlets and dangling ends of copper wire. It could have burst into flame at any moment, unaided. The toys have all melted out of the paint and the paint escaped skyward in toxic fumes.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.