The two men told him they’d be inside the ice cream shop ten minutes tops, but they are edging into twenty already. A wave of nausea breaks over him and passes. He hadn’t eaten before taking the pills. He feels in his jacket pocket for his cigarettes and finds the conch shell. He’d broken it off the art car earlier when they were casing the shop and the art car man had tried to tackle him in the parking lot. Knocked him back against a car hood. The man had blubbered and sobbed, making no sense. Michael punched him. Busted his lip. Chipped a tooth. One of the ice cream shop girls, tall, freckled, had come out to calm down the art car man. A Mexican-looking girl passed a bag of ice through the drive-through window for his mouth. A few random people from the parking lot bunched around them, not knowing what to do. The art car man blubbered to Michael about returning the shell to its legal and rightful owner. His teeth were flecked with blood. “Shame on you,” the freckled girl said, turning to Michael. “Shame.” Michael stammered out something about self-defense. The girl said, “Just look at what you did.” Michael shrugged. “He started it,” Michael said, feeling small. He glanced around at unfamiliar faces, felt his own flush with hatred and embarrassment. The parking lot seemed to stretch out in the twilight. The girl’s eyes burned. Standing on the curb, holding the ice pack to the art car man’s mouth, she had a kind of self-righteous grace that made Michael want to kiss her and hit her all at once.
Above the Volvo, pecan branches lace low, silvered clouds. A billboard for a radio station with a large lipstick kiss rises over the florist shop next door. Michael lights a cigarette, examines the conch shell under the lighter flame. He decides that it looks like a vagina. Its undulating pink folds. He tries to put it out of his mind, tries to concentrate on the back roads he’s memorized, the drop-off street for the car. A job well done, he hears the younger man tell him. He claps Michael on the shoulder, hands him a beer. Even the older man Michael hates is impressed. Never flinched, he says. I was dead wrong about you. The younger man gives him a look that bridges the gap between them until it hardly seems there at all. You are not a child, the look says. And then — and the change is only noticeable at the drifting edges of things — it’s not the young man at all but Michael’s dead brother, Andrew. He’s sitting on top of a picnic table near the pecan tree, a hand pressed to his face where his jaw used to be before he was shot. It’s a tender moment, Michael thinks, Andrew thinking of him while he thinks of Andrew. Blood summoning blood. Concern flickers over Andrew’s half face. Then he smiles with what he has left, smooths out the edges. Well, look at you, he says. He walks to the car, bums a cigarette from Michael. Andrew fumbles a bit to find the corner of his mouth, lights his own cigarette from Michael’s. Steps back in a kind of appraisal. Michael still remembers him like this, shambling and slouchy, in a movie antihero kind of way.
You are one doomed motherfucker, Andrew says matter-of-factly.
In the dim glow of the shop’s back door light, his fleshy opening looks like the raw insides of the conch shell. Michael is thinking of the implications of this, Andrew’s return, his own seething hatred and love for his brother’s absence, when he hears the first muffled gunshots inside the ice cream shop.
AT THE FRONT door, one of the officers tells Kate that there’s been a fire. Their breath streams in the porch light. Kate thinks of the small fire at the ice cream shop earlier, the acrid burnt sweetness. Smoke. How it is hardly worth the drive over to tell her this.
“Where are my girls?” she asks.
“Can we come inside, Ms. Ulrich?” the second officer asks, his body hunched against the cold, but also against something imminent. Something that hasn’t happened yet, she thinks, but will when it leaves his smoking mouth. She resolves not to listen.
“Who’s at the door, Kate?” her husband, Ray, the girls’ stepfather, yells from the bedroom. She can hear the jangle of Ray’s belt buckle as he lifts his pants from the foot of the bed and pulls them on. In his pockets, the keys to the ice cream shop, where he’d stopped by just after closing to pick up the night deposit. A movie, he’d said when he got back home late and crawled into bed. The girls were headed to a midnight movie after locking up at eleven. “Didn’t you ask them which movie?” Kate had said, because you always ask which one, always. Good old feckless Ray. She lay there beside him, blood drumming in her head, listening to his raspy breathing, thinking, I will go away. When the girls finally leave home, I will leave home too. Then, a little later, after she’d tried their cell phones and gotten their chirpy voice mail greetings, Kate woke startled from a dream in which her dead mother was combing her hair with an ear of corn. She couldn’t smell the girls in the house.
At the front door, the first police officer tells her something brutally quiet and small about her daughters. Something so dense that it makes everything — the cold, smoking air, the officers’ ashen faces, Ray’s raspy breathing — constrict to a singular point.
Past the officers framed in the doorway she can see the squad car outside, its headlights illuminating the cedar tree beside the driveway. In the fogged back windows, she thinks she can make out Elizabeth and Zadie, their bare feet propped on the metal grill between the seats. Cocksure, dismissive. Playing the parts assigned to them. Certain they can talk their way out of anything.
AFTER FINDING THE dead girls in the fire, Jack Dewey didn’t know what to think. At first, he seemed mostly fine, having gone to see a department-provided therapist for a few months. Bad dreams and cold sweats were nothing unusual, the therapist told him. It was a process he’d need to work through. The firefighters at his station seemed to understand his woodenness at work and offered encouragement — a few of them had been on tours in Iraq and seen bad things happen. Whole families burned. Children’s arms, legs, heads, blown off. But to Jack, this all happened in vast, incomprehensible cities and deserts, places with guttural-sounding names he’d never visit. Still, several of the firefighters made sure, on his four days off a week, to check in or invite him to play softball with some city league team that needed a sub, or to grab a beer in the evening. They had done this too after his wife died ten years before, in his second year with the department. They’d made an effort to fix him up with blind dates — usually nervous, mid-thirties friends of their wives or girlfriends, who had decided they were too old for the music clubs or didn’t like online dating sites.
But things had not gotten better after the fire — if better meant getting along with his girlfriend, Carla, and his daughter, Sam, or having a few moments of stillness in his mind. He often drank at Deep Eddy Bar until he couldn’t feel his face, and would wobble home on his bike down the expressway shoulder. This was after the DUI, when he’d fallen asleep in the car while idling in line at Mrs. Johnson’s Donuts. Now he’d occasionally glimpse himself in the bar mirror, his hands adjusting his helmet for the ride home. His head gargantuan and grotesque. Whose head and face were these? He often thought now, nearly