On the Burning Day

Fiction by Jeff Harrell

Martin Eames is tooling down Highway 18 on his way back from Big Bear at five-thirty in the morning on October 23. He’s just tooling, man, making great time. Windows down, stereo blasting the Eagles, singing along at the top of his lungs.

“I will siiiiiing this victry sooong,” he croons, a mile and a half away from being on key.

Then the track ends and “Desperado” comes on, and you just can’t sing along to “Desperado,” man, not like this. He reaches for the stereo, and that’s when he takes his eyes off the road for a second, and then it’s a deer, man, a damn deer right in his headlights.

He jerks the wheel hard over and the deer sprints for the treeline, which is good, but as he’s trying to straighten back out Marty lets fly with a “Shit!” and the half-smoked cigarette in his mouth drops right into his crotch.

“Shit!” he yells again, torquing the wheel, car fuckin fishtailing all over the place, and slapping himself to keep his balls from catching on fire.

But it’s okay, man, it’s all okay, because he somehow manages to get the car under control and find the cigarette at the same time. “Shit!” he says one last time as he tosses the butt out the window just as the opening riff of “One of These Nights” starts to play.

His heart pounding in his ears, Marty tries to sing along but gives it up when he starts to laugh. His whole body shakes with the delayed adrenaline reaction as he giggles uncontrollably, giggles at nothing, just giggles because that’s what a body does when it comes that close to shitting itself.

And then he’s gone, eating up the highway, making great time.

The cigarette he tossed out the window, though, the one that almost set his balls on fire — that’s not gone. It’s right there where it landed, right in the middle of the road, rolling along down the hill, right down the centerline, until the road starts to bend but the butt doesn’t and it ends up in a patch of dry grass on the downhill side of the highway.

The hot Santa Ana breeze rolls down the hillside, and the ember at the tip of the cigarette starts to glow.

Mark Hall is thirty-two, rich, hung like a water buffalo, and bombed out of his fuckin mind, man. His brain’s been shot out of a cannon straight into heart of the Andromeda galaxy.

It was the Jägermeister that did it, he was pretty sure of that. It had all been pretty mellow until the Jägermeister came out. And then when it got late somebody pulled out an eight ball, probably one of the strippers, and when the mirror came around he meant to just do a little line, just a little cup-of-coffee line, but then Andre had cut him this thick, fat rail and he didn’t remember much after that.

There might have been a blow job. One of the strippers, the one with the black hair and the blue eyes and those little-boy tits. Mark remembered giving her a long and serious sales pitch about those tits, somewhere between hoovering that rail and when the table girl came back with that second bottle of Johnny Walker Blue. Maybe that’s why she polished his knob, so he’d do her tits. Stupid bitch. He would have done her tits for free.

Then again, he wasn’t entirely sure she’d been the one with her head in his lap. Or whether he’d had a head in his lap at all.

He starts to pull his pants down to check his johnson for lipstick rings, then remembers he’s slumped down in the back of a cab.

The cabbie makes the turn onto Beaumont, and then they’re sitting in front of Mark’s house and the cabbie wants sixty-three dollars. Mark hands him a C-note and stumbles out.

Tracy left the front light on for him. That was sweet of her.

He creeps into the house, his expensive Italian leather shoes making tiny tap-tap sounds as he tiptoes on the expensive Italian marble. He’ll just lay down on the couch until Tracy gets up. It shouldn’t be long now; he checks his watch. Shit, it’s nearly seven in the morning. She’ll be up soon, off to pilates and God knows what else she does with her Saturdays. He’ll say he came in early, like midnight, but that he didn’t want to wake her, so he slept on the couch. That’ll work. Then, after she goes, he’ll be able to go upstairs and get undressed without having to worry about her seeing the lipstick that may or may not be decorating his dork.

He’ll just lay down on the couch, just for a few minutes. She’ll be up soon.

The sun’s blasting in his eyes like God’s own flashlight when he wakes up. Which doesn’t make any sense, because the living room faces west. He checks his watch. It’s a quarter after one in the afternoon.

Shit.

Four years of medical school and six years of residency argue otherwise, but at this precise moment Mark would testify under oath that while he was sleeping somebody sawed off the top of his head, stuff three really pissed-off kittens inside and sewed it back on. No other explanation makes sense.

He stumbles into the kitchen, pulls a glass out of the cabinet and drops it right onto the granite countertop. It splits right down the middle into two neat pieces, neither of which is useful for holding liquid any more. He dumps the fragments into the two-hundred-dollar Restoration Hardware trash can in the pantry, slicing his left palm open along the way. He barely feels it, but blood starts to pour out, pooling in his cupped palm and dripping grotesquely onto the triple-varnished red-oak floor.

Reciting an endless mantra of profanity, Mark wraps a kitchen towel around his hand and makes his way upstairs to the master bath.

He runs the cut under the faucet — it’s really starting to sting like a motherfucker now — and thinks about whether it needs stitches. Probably not, he decides, but he’s thinking about throwing in a few subcue sutures just for the practice.

He comes out of the bathroom a few minutes later with his hand wrapped in gauze, and that’s when he sees it.

The bed’s made, which he expected. But there’s a note on the pillow. On his pillow.

Ten minutes later he’s taking a thousand miles off of his tires as he tears out of the broad, circular drive and speeds off toward the highway.

They met at a party. You know, one of those parties. A med-school party where everybody was trying so hard to seem simultaneously smarter and more relaxed than everyone else. There weren’t any drugs at all and hardly any liquor, just room after room of young, bright, ambitious, mind-numbingly egotistical people who spent all their time talking about school because none of them ever did anything else.

Mark had been about to give up on the whole scene and go home when he saw her there, across the room, standing next to the fireplace a little too close to that loser from Columbia, what was his name, Feldstein or Fielding or something like that. She had a glass of red wine in her hand and a glazed look in her eye, and in the ten seconds he stood watching her she drained that glass and excused herself to go look for a refill.

Fielding didn’t even notice when she left.

Mark found her in the kitchen reading the labels on three anemic bottles of grocery-store red. He moved in close behind her.

“These parties are unbelievable,” he whispered, just loudly enough for her to hear him.

She whipped her head around, startled, her wavy brown hair tracing an arc. She smiled at him politely for a second, then gave it up and rolled her eyes.

“Yeah,” she said. “Unbelievable.”

Mark took a wild guess and opened the drawer closest to the fridge. There was a corkscrew there. He took the bottle from her hands and started opening it.

“I mean, all these medical students, they’re such snobs,” he said as he worked the foil off with his thumbnail.

“They’re not that bad,” she said, breaking eye contact.

Mark eased the cork out and filled her glass. “No?”

She took a sip, made a face. Glanced around conspiratorially. “Okay, they’re pretty bad,” she said.

Mark took a sip from his own glass. The wine was terrible. Really, deeply terrible. “They’ve all got this holier-than-thou attitude,” he said in a low voice.

“Like they’re better than everyone else,” she said.

“Like they’re special just because they’re twenty-four and still in school,” he said.

“Seriously,” she said. “These kids have never had a real job in their lives.”

“They don’t know the first thing about the world,” he said.

“They’re so busy stuffing their heads full of facts that they never learn anything,” she said.

“And yet they’re going to make four hundred thousand dollars a year,” he said.

“I know,” she said after another sip of the awful wine. “Where’s the justice in that?”

“What do you do?” he asked her.

“Public-school guidance counselor,” she said. “The best I can possibly hope for is forty-five thousand a year, maybe, someday. I mean, it’s not like I’m doing anything important. Just molding kids’ minds.”

“Is that why you’re here?” he asked. “Trying to meet some guy who’ll make four hundred thousand a year?”

“Not if they’re all like them,” she said, nodding over her shoulder to indicate the rest of — well, everything. She took one last sip of wine, then gave up and poured her glass into the sink. “What about you?” she asked. “What do you do?”

“Oh, I’m a medical student,” he said, his eyes twinkling. “I’m going to make four hundred thousand dollars a year.”

She gaped at him for a second, trying to work out exactly which of them should be embarrassed. Mark drained his glass — the wine really was just unacceptably awful — and put it on the counter, stepping into her.

“I’m also smarter, more charming and better looking than any of those losers out there,” he said. “And I’ve got something else none of them have. So why don’t you and I get out of here, go someplace else where we can” — he ran a finger up her arm to her elbow — “get to know each other a little better.”

And she slapped him right across the face.

It happened so fast, the shock of it stopped him more than any actual pain. He took a step back, then another, bumping his ass against the dishwasher.

For her part, she seemed entirely unruffled.

“You were doing pretty well right up to that last part,” she said, turning her back to him to rinse her glass in the sink. “You were doing okay until you blew it.”

“Did you have to hit me, though?” Mark asked.

“Oh come on,” she said, shutting off the faucet and turning back to him. “It takes more than a little slap from a girl to upset a big … strong … pretty guy like you, right?”

There was a dry-erase board stuck to the front of the fridge, the kind roommates who aren’t entirely on speaking terms use to leave passive-aggressive notes to each other. This one said “Thursday: out of milk AGAIN!!” with a double underline and stars around it. There was a marker velcroed to the board.

She took the marker down, the velcro ripping softly, and pulled off the cap with her teeth. She took his hand in hers, palm up, and started to write.

“You might be a decent guy,” she said. “Or you might be an ass. I can’t tell yet. So give me a call and we’ll figure it out.”

She popped the top back on the marker, slapped it back into place on the fridge and vanished back into the party.

Mark looked at his hand. He saw a phone number written there, next to a single word.

Tracy.

It’s the middle of the afternoon on a Saturday, and traffic on the San Bernardino Freeway is still unbelievable. It’s an hour and a half from Loma Linda up to Topanga Canyon anyway, minimum, but at this rate it’s looking more like an all-day trip.

Mark’s head is splitting, he feels like he’s going to throw up and every time he tries to dial left-handed, he feels the fresh scab on his palm threaten to rip open.

He’s not having his best day ever.

And that fucking bitch isn’t answering her goddamn phone.

The third year of medical school is, in general, not a good time to enter into a romance. Young doctors-to-be are subject to grueling demands during their third years, spending a minimum of eighty and sometimes upwards of a hundred or even a hundred and twenty hours a week in the hospital.

But Mark and Tracy found time.

Not a lot of time. Just a few hours a month, really, with short phone calls every few days. But then it became short phone calls every day, and eventually they were spending three nights a week together.

Mark had never experienced anything like it. His love affairs had all been nasty, short things, full of passionate intensity that burned bright and fast and then faded away, occasionally in a fight but more often with a series of unreturned phone calls and then oblivion.

But things were different with Tracy. She never put up with any of his usual bullshit, for starters. She was immune to his charm. His carefully maintained, diligently waxed swimmer’s body went unnoticed, even when he flaunted it by coming out of the shower in just a towel or less. Every attempt to drive her crazy ended in abject failure.

But she kept coming back anyway.

Eventually Mark had to admit that something weird was going on. As near as he could tell, Tracy spent time with him not because he was smooth or because he was hot, but because she genuinely liked him.

This was uncharted territory.

That’s not to say that everything was perfect. What little time they made for each other during that first year was crammed with as much life as possible. The sex was intense. The fights were intense. Even just falling asleep together on the couch in front of the television was, somehow, intense.

So it was inevitable that, as time passed and Mark settled into the relative luxury of his fourth year, cracks began to show.

At a quarter of three, just as Mark’s Lexus is crawling past the exit to Pomona, his phone stops working entirely. He can’t make a call out to save his life, just gets the “All circuits are busy” message over and over again.

He’s still got Tracy’s note crumpled in the sweaty palm of his right hand. Phrases from it keep spinning through his head. Just need a break. Rough patch lately. Spending the weekend with Audrey. Call you on Monday.

Nine years together. Seven as husband and wife. And she’s throwing it all away. For what? Because he went to a goddamn bachelor party? They’ve had this fucking conversation a hundred times. Private practice isn’t like residency. You can’t just show up in the morning and expect clients to call. You have to go out and find business, meet people, hand out your card. And yes, he’s mostly handing his card to twenty-year-old girls. He’s a fucking plastic surgeon. There’s not a lot of demand for nose jobs or ass lifts among middle-aged men.

Tits and pussies are where the money is. He’s said that a hundred times. Breast implants and vaginoplasties, silicone and collagen. That’s what life is like for a plastic surgeon. That’s what it’s all about.

She knew it when she married him.

“I don’t know, it’s just a little weird, that’s all,” she said as she ran the last plate under the faucet and handed it to him to dry.

It was all a moot point. Mark’s residency applications had gone out two weeks earlier. He was going to be a plastic surgeon, whether she thought it was a little weird or not.

Of course, he couldn’t just come right out and say it like that.

“It’s not weird,” he said, trying the same tack he’d tried last time they had this conversation. “It’s no different from being a gynecologist.”

“That is different,” she said. “You’re talking about spending all your time judging women based on what their bodies look like.”

“It’s not like that,” he said. “I’m not there to judge them. I’m just there to give them what they want.”

“And what do they want?”

“They want to be, you know. Prettier. They want to look better.”

“And it’s your job to know what looks better?”

Yeah, it wasn’t working this time, either. “Okay, fine, but it’s not like I’m going to get personally invested.”

“How can you not?” she said, hanging up the towel and turning out the light. He followed her upstairs. “You’ll be spending your whole day making women physically perfect. Are you saying that’s not going to affect you at all?”

“It’s not just women,” Mark said lamely.

“Oh, lots of guys come in to get their tits done these days?” She spun on him, grabbing his chest and squeezing hard with both hands. “I had no idea, baby. They feel so natural.”

“You think I got this body through hard work and perseverance? Are you kidding?”

“Well I know you didn’t pay for it,” she said, still running her hands over his chest. “You’ve never earned a dime in your life.”

“That’s not true,” he said, taking her by the wrists and gently pinning her arms at her sides.

“No?”

“I had that job when I was fifteen.”

“At the frozen yogurt stand?”

“That’s the one,” he said, pulling her into him and running his lips down her neck. “The fro-yo stand paid surprisingly well. I’ve got a little nest egg saved up.”

“I know,” she said. “I’ve seen your piggy bank. You’ve got enough in there to eat ramen for a month.”

She had her head back over her shoulder now, exposing all the sensitive spots up and down her neck to him.

“It won’t always be like that, baby,” he whispered between kisses. “In a few years I’ll be making so much money we’ll never have to eat ramen again.”

“But I like ramen,” she said around a giggle that he turned into a gasp with his teeth. His hands released her wrists and came up her back, under her shirt. Her skin was cold and hot at the same time.

She put her palm on his cheek and looked into his eyes. “Are you going to be able to make women perfect all day and still be satisfied with me?”

His answer was a kiss, hot and hard, which she returned in spades.

“I’ll always be satisfied with you,” he said when the kiss broke. His hands roamed everywhere, all over her slender body. “Especially,” he whispered into her ear, “if you let me make a few improvements.”

The slap was hard, right across the shoulder, and in an instant she was out of his arms. But she was laughing, and leaving a trail of clothing on her way to the bedroom.

He followed, as happy as he’d ever been in his life.

The asshole in the Festiva is leaning on his horn, and it’s just pathetic, man. Just pathetic. Why can’t they put decent horns in cars any more? Now it’s all this high-pitched whiny shit.

Okay, okay. Jesus. Mark takes his foot off the brake and lets the Lexus roll forward another four feet.

It’s almost five o’clock, but the sky behind him is almost black. Thunderstorm coming down from the mountains or something. Which means he’s going to have to drive back through the rain. That’s gonna be the perfect ending to a perfect fucking day.

Mark gave up on the phone hours ago. His calls weren’t going through, and when they did, they just went straight to Tracy’s voicemail. She must have turned her phone off. She doesn’t want to hear from him. Well, fuck her. You don’t just walk out on six years of marriage without so much as a goodbye. You don’t walk out on six years of marriage at all, but you sure as hell don’t do it without so much as a goodbye.

After nearly four hours in the car, creeping along seventy miles of Southern California sprawl a few inches at a time, the Santa Monica Freeway finally dead-ends at 4th Street. Mark navigates the wide s-curve that leads toward the PCH and heads north past the beach toward Malibu.

All because he went to a fucking bachelor party.

Mark didn’t give a damn about weddings. Hell, he didn’t give a damn about marriage, except to the extent that it was what he had to do to get Tracy to move across the country with him. So he emptied his savings account and bought a ring and took her to the park and got down on one knee and she said yes like she’d been expecting it all along.

“It’s about damn time,” she whispered in his ear as they embraced, but she was crying when she said it so he knew he’d done okay.

Her parents paid for the wedding, which was good because Mark was broke after buying the ring and on a thirty-thousand-dollar-a-year resident’s salary he wasn’t going to be putting much in the bank any time soon. They were married in a tiny chapel in Havre de Grace, Maryland, on a beautiful Saturday in June and spent their honeymoon driving from motel to motel on their way back to their rat-hole of an apartment in Modesto, California.

Every time Mark stopped to think that he could never be happier, he found himself turning around five minutes later and realizing he was happier still.

Tracy settled into a neighborhood school and started offering career advice to ten-year-olds. And she loved it. For Mark, it was his third year of medical school all over again; a hundred hours a week at the hospital, on call every third night, never enough sleep, never enough time.

It was bliss.

Mark’s residency flew by. Three years of general surgery — more gall bladders and appendixes than he could count — followed by three years of plastics. Before he knew it, it was over, and then came the board exams, and the next minute he was a fully licensed plastic surgeon with his own DEA number to write prescriptions and the lawful authority to perform surgery in the state of California.

And then came the choices.

Private practice had always been Mark’s sole professional aspiration. Sure, some of his peers wanted to be on staff at a hospital. Some wanted to teach. That was all fine. But Mark had spent the past ten years working his ass off, and he wanted to start cashing in on some of the rewards.

Getting them turned out to be easier than he thought. The chief of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Mark’s hospital knew two young doctors down in LA who were looking to add a third partner to their practice. What started out as an interview turned into an all-night drinking binge, and by dawn Mark, Andre and Todd were laughing like long-lost brothers.

Getting Tracy a job took a little longer. The schools in LA’s better suburbs were more picky than the little neighborhood school in Modesto had been. It took her three tries to find a school that she liked and that liked her at the same time.

But then it was done. Like a whirlwind that tears everything up and then vanishes into a clear blue sky, it was done.

Six weeks later, they had a mortgage, a huge house in Loma Linda and the rest of their lives laid out in front of them on a buffet table just waiting for them to dig in.

That’s when things started to get hard.

“Don’t act like I’m the bad guy here,” she said Friday night during their regularly scheduled after-dinner fight. “I’m not even complaining!”

“Then what are you doing?” Mark demanded, way beyond the point where he should have just apologized and let the argument end.

“I’m just saying that I was hoping things would start to slow down once we got here.”

“They have slowed down! A year ago the rotation was short-staffed, I was on call every other night, getting up at four, getting home after ten … this is paradise compared to that!”

“I know, I know,” she said, scraping their half-finished dinners into Tupperware to be picked at when they woke up hungry in the middle of the night. “I told you, I’m not complaining. I just…”

“Just what?” Mark nearly shouted, his temper flaring.

“I just want better for you,” Tracy replied in a small voice.

“Better for me?” Mark asked dryly. “Or better for you?” He threw his arms wide. “Isn’t this enough for you?”

“Christ, Mark,” she said, dropping the plates in the sink with a clatter. “It’s not about the things. It’s about the stress. You work all day, you’re out every night” –

“God, I’ve told you a hundred times. I’m not doing this for fun. I’ve got to find new clients. It’s a business now.”

“I know, I know. Look,” she said in a voice that was barely above a whisper. “I love you, Mark. I’ve loved you since I met you. That’s not going to change. I need you to believe that.”

“Well, it’s a little tough to swallow that when you go on and on about how miserable you are.”

“Dammit, Mark, I’m not miserable! Neither are you! We’ve got a great life! A life most people would kill for!”

“So what’s the problem? What am I not doing right this time?”

She didn’t have anything to say to that. She just breathed a sigh of exasperation.

“Nothing, Mark. It’s fine. I’m just tired, okay?”

Mark took down a wine glass and poured it half-full from the bottle they’d opened for dinner. It was oaky and sweet and wonderful. For just a minute, he stopped to think about the first night they’d met, drinking bad wine with bad people at a bad party. She’d slapped him that night, slapped him because he’d been a jackass. He could still feel the sting on his cheek. Or maybe that was just the look on her face.

“I’m going to go take a bath,” she said finally. “Then we’ll go to bed, okay?”

Mark rolled the wine around his tongue before swallowing it. “Can’t,” he said, more tersely than he’d meant to. “Andre’s coming over in twenty minutes. There’s a bachelor party in the Hills he wants us to go to. Some guy he knows.”

Tracy’s laugh had no humor in it. “Fine,” she said. “Try not to wake me up when you get home.”

And then she was gone.

Mark stood there in the kitchen until he heard the faucet in the master bath come on. Then the doorbell rang. It was Andre. Time to go back to work.

Mark has only been to Tracy’s sister’s place once, and he barely remembers how to get there. He gets lost once on Topanga Canyon Boulevard, has to make a U-turn and double back. But eventually he finds the right turn, climbs the hill and parks the Lexus in front of the house.

He sits in the driveway for a minute, wondering what to do next. He calls again, but Tracy’s phone is still off.

Gradually it dawns on him that he’s got no choice but to walk up to the front door and knock.

The sun’s coming down now, and Audrey’s porch is in shadow as Mark mounts the steps. He pulls back the screen, but before he can knock the door opens and Tracy flies out like she’s got a rocket jammed up her ass. She nearly knocks him down.

“God, baby, I’ve been calling you all day,” she says. “I’ve been so worried. Are you okay? Are you okay?”

Mark has no idea what the hell’s going on right now. Audrey’s standing in the doorway with a concerned look on her face; Mark would swear she’s about to run up and hug him too.

“Tracy,” he says to her hair, “what the hell’s going on?”

It takes a while to sort it out. It’s probably only a few minutes, but it feels like much longer. Mark’s still got Tracy’s note in his hand. He holds it out to her. “I came to find you,” he said. “I’m not letting you throw this away.”

“Throw what away?” she asks, still half-hugging him. Her face is so close to his he has trouble focusing on her.

Mark throws a glance at Audrey, who just stands there like she doesn’t have the manners God gave a cat. Mark takes Tracy’s hand and leads her down the steps so they can have, if not privacy, at least a little buffer zone between themselves and the nearest set of ears. He puts his hand on her cheek and gives it his best shot.

“Tracy, I know, okay? I know it’s been hard. I know I’ve been working to much. I know I’ve been doing to too many parties, giving my card to too many strippers. I know, okay? But I’m not letting you just throw all this away.”

The sun’s well and properly down by this time, and Tracy’s face is just a pale blur in front of him. But it’s a pale blur wearing a very confused expression.

“Baby, what are you talking about?” she says. “Nobody’s throwing anything away. And Jesus,” she says, taking his hand in hers, feeling the gauze wrapped around it. “Did you burn your hand?”

“No, I broke a glass,” he says. “Wait, why would I have burned it?”

It hits her then, like a torrential downpour. “Oh, Mark,” she says, drawing out his name like she hasn’t in months, maybe years. “You don’t have any idea, do you?”

She leads him by the hand into Audrey’s house. The TV is on. It’s the same thing on every channel, live helicopter footage of wildfires burning out of control. Except it’s not just wildfires. There are houses down there. Streets. Neighborhoods.

The anchor’s saying something.

“According to fire officials, more than two hundred homes and twenty-seven thousand acres of the San Bernardino National Forest have been destroyed so far. The fire started in the area of Waterman Canyon sometime early this morning, and has so far spread into Rancho Cucamonga, Loma Linda and parts of San Bernardino. As many as twelve thousand homes have been evacuated so far, and the LA County Fire Department says that there’s no containment in sight.”

And there it s, right on the television, live and in living color. Their house, their whole street. In flames.

No one sleeps that night.

The next day, the news reports that the fire is contained and residents are being allowed back into their homes to salvage whatever they can.

It takes another four hours to crawl back across LA and up toward the San Gabriel Mountains toward home, but this time Tracy is in the car with him. For most of the trip they don’t talk. They said it all last night.

The streets of their neighborhood are filled with debris from the fire that consumed everything in its path the night before. It takes them a few minutes to even identify their house among the charred ruins.

There’s nothing left. Nothing but ashes.

Tracy says something, but Mark doesn’t hear.

She says it again.

“What?” he mumbles.

“I said it doesn’t matter,” she says.

He turns to look at her. Somehow she’s gotten a streak of soot smeared across her left cheek. “What doesn’t matter?” he says.

She shrugs, looks around. “All this. It doesn’t matter,” she says. “None of this matters.”

Everything they worked for. It’s gone, just vanished. Mark turned away for a second, and it just disappeared. Under the debris of the collapsed roof, Mark can see that even the marble tiles are cracked from the heat.

There’s nothing left. Nothing at all.

He feels something tugging at his elbow then. It’s Tracy. She’s somehow gotten right behind him. She pulls him around to face her, his back to the ruined house.

“Jesus, Mark,” she says, half a grin on her face. “Don’t you get it yet? It doesn’t matter. This stuff. None of it matters. Only love matters, okay?”

Love. Yeah, love. Love that made her sneak out of the house in the middle of the night with nothing but a note to say goodbye.

His house. His wife. All gone.

“Hey,” she says, but he can’t hear her. “Hey,” she repeats, but it’s no use.

So she slaps him. Hard, right across the face.

“Hey!” she shouts, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him awake.

“I’m not going anywhere, Mark,” she says, slowly, like she’s talking to one of her kids. “We’ve had a rough couple of months, okay? I thought I needed a couple days off, that’s all. All right? I wasn’t leaving you. I swear to God, I wasn’t leaving you.”

Mark doesn’t say anything. His face hurts like hell.

“God, Mark,” she says. “Don’t you get it yet? I love you, you idiot.”

And all of a sudden, Mark’s got tears in his eyes. He doesn’t know where they came from, and he doesn’t know how to send them back. He doesn’t even feel like he’s crying. Just tears welling up and falling down his cheeks.

All he says is, “Why?”

“Because I do, okay? I honestly don’t know why. I could tell you it’s because you make a lot of money, or because you’re good-looking, or for any other reason you want, but they’d all be lies. I do because I do, okay? Just believe that.”

Mark glances over his shoulder involuntarily. He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t mean to. There’s nothing back there that surprises him. But he does it anyway, because he can’t help it.

“We’ve lost everything, you know,” he says.

She smiles at him then, like sunrise over the canyon. “No,” she says. “We’ve lost hardly anything.”

And then he’s in her arms, and for just a second, he forgets what he’s standing in front of, forgets the price they’ve paid. He’s in her arms, and she’s his world, as it used to be, as it always was, as it is now once again.

“But did you have to hit me?” he asks.

She laughs, and then the two of them are laughing together. “Yes, Mark,” she says, still holding him close. “Sometimes I have to hit you, baby.”

And they laugh some more, laugh until they’re crying. And all up and down the street, their neighbors are picking through the wreckage of their consumed homes. Nobody notices the couple holding each other in tears. Nobody realizes that they’re crying not tears of sorrow for what they’ve lost, but tears of joy for what they still have.

Copyright © 2007 by Jeff Harrell. All rights reserved.