Though it now seems ridiculous, the Coward once considered himself
lucky. He had inherited all his father owned, and was free to do as he
pleased. The only dark spot in his life had been Hollis, and he always
resented his father for bringing this false brother home. But Hollis, who
had recently returned to the village, was nothing to Alan anymore. Why,
Alan could pass him on the street and not even feel compelled to
acknowledge Hollis’s existence. He had, after all, far better things to think
about. His marriage, for one. Julie, the woman who had become his wife,
was said to be the sweetest girl in town. There was something peaceful
about her, as if snow had settled inside her soul. Often, she slept fourteen
hours straight, and when she woke there was a smile on her lips. Their son
took after her—Hank rarely cried as an infant, and as a toddler he put
himself to bed when he was tired, climbing into his own crib.
On the day the fire started, the Coward was out in a hammock beneath
the chestnut tree. It was Mrs. Dale’s day off, so Julie was fixing dinner,
which, like all her meals, would surely turn out to be a well-intentioned
disaster. Hank, who was three. was sitting on the floor, playing with
measuring cups. The child was there when the Coward walked through the
kitchen on his way to the yard, and he was probably still there when the
fire leapt from the rear burner of the stove, attaching itself to the curtains,
and then to the wood countertop, and finally to the pink dress that Julie
was wearing, a pretty cotton shift the Coward had bought her in Boston.
In minutes, the smoke was so thick that people standing on the steps of
the library in the village could see it; by the time the firefighters arrived,
sparks were shooting into the sky. The firefighters worked like mad that
day, desperate to stop the flames before they spread through the woods;
they were far too busy to notice Alan Murray standing at the gate, so close
to the blaze that he was covered with soot. The air was brutal, a burning,
black soup, and yet Alan had been standing there long enough to have his
eyebrows singed off. He was crying tears that were so scalding they burned
little holes in his face, the scars of which, like pinpricks or small pox, have
never faded away.
The heat and the flames had paralyzed Alan. His wife and his child
were trapped in that house, but he could no more go inside and search for
them than he could jump up and land on the moon. Ken Helm, who was
one of the volunteers, was the first to notice Alan, and it was Ken who
realized there were still people left inside. Alan was crying beside the
purple clematis, which had grown by the garden gate for as long as anyone
could remember, but had now burned to ashes, and he didn’t stop crying
when they brought Hank out. Someone had been left behind in that
burning house, and although it was Julie’s body that was taken from the
wreckage, that someone who’d been lost turned out to be Alan himself.
