Nasya Beckman wakes to the smell of smoke. She rolls onto her side and swats clumsily at her alarm clock, as though this is the source of the disturbance, as though this is some new technology for waking heavy sleepers—the release of gas. In fact, the alarm clock is an antique, a six-inch double-bell with a little copper hammer. It was a gift from Nasya’s rabbi for her one hundred volunteer hours as a kiddush hostess, minyan attendee, and Bikur cholim coordinator. Her rabbi said he’d never seen such devotion. He said it was good to keep oneself busy following tragedy. The clock is beautiful, but it turns out there is nothing worse in this world than the sound of a six-inch double-bell struck by a little copper hammer. Nasya goes to sleep afraid of that noise, dreams about it all night, and at last wakes up to it, eyes wide and heart racing. It’s become a family joke. When the alarm sounds each morning, reverberating through the house, her husband shakes a fist in the air and yells “Jews!” at the ceiling. He’d probably ask her to chuck it if the clock didn’t draw her focus away from him. He says, “I’m lucky you blame that clock and not my snoring.” He says, “The house could be on fire and you’d blame that clock.”
The smell of smoke triggers memories that begin with childhood: fire in the kitchen of her family home. She grew up in a five-bedroom Victorian with an obstructed view of Narragansett Bay. Short summers, long winters, icicles to pick off the roof and eat like lollipops. A lemony sun setting over an ocean too cold to swim in. Her mother, a retired dance instructor with bad knees and a closet full of leotards. Her father, a jeweler and drinker and occasionally, on holidays or long weekends, a father. Here he comes, storming down the hall to her bedroom. Nasya is in there with her mother and sisters, learning how to hide from a man.
“Everybody out!” he yells through the door.
“Go away!” they yell back.
He beats on the door with an open palm. “I am not here to fight,” he says. “There is smoke in the kitchen.”
And then the smoke detector sounds, and the five of them pour out the side door and into the snow. Outside, they sit in the car and watch the kitchen fill with smoke. An electrical fire caused by the stove, says the fireman who talks to them.
“Oh my,” says Nasya’s mother.
“Electrical fires are the most dangerous of all fires,” her dad tells them.
The fireman shakes his head. “Dead wrong,” he says.
And then she remembers the day she caught Conrad, her then eight-year-old son, playing with matches outside near the bulkhead. She watched him through the bathroom window. He wasn’t any good at it. He kept breaking the matches in half, or he’d blow out the flame long before it reached his fingers. She waited a while before she stopped him. It made her nostalgic, this old-fashioned mischief. She wondered if in fifty years there would even be matches to play with. The future seemed very far away and impossible to imagine. Perhaps Conrad will live on another planet, she thought, and all his heat will come from lasers.
Nasya sits up in bed, truly awake now. She pushes her husband’s shoulder until he turns over and blinks at her.
“Do you smell that?” she asks.
He takes a long drag of the air, but she can tell he’s stuffed up. His answer won’t mean anything.
“No,” he says.
She throws the covers off of them. “Did you put batteries in the smoke detector?”
Her husband sighs. “I can’t do everything, Nasya.”
“I don’t think there’s any danger of that.”
He laughs. “I really don’t smell anything.” He never takes her seriously.
“Keep sleeping. I’ll just go check if our house is burning down.”
He shrugs and rolls over. Nasya stumbles through the darkness and follows the smell toward the spare bedroom, where the dog sleeps in a giant cardboard box that once held an expensive dog bed. He liked the box, didn’t care for the bed. The dog’s name is also Conrad. Yes, her son named the dog after himself, which is another thing. Even as a child, Nasya would never have done that—it would never have occurred to her to do it—so she assumes it must be her husband’s influence. She’s just not sure what it means. Maybe her son is a narcissist.
This would have been Henry’s room, but she never allows herself to think that way. Never allows herself to think that Henry would be five now—talking, walking, playing in the snow. His own little person. She never admits to herself that nothing has been right since he died, that her husband has grown sarcastic, that her son has grown needy and strange. She plays a part in this, she knows. Her edges are sharper than they’ve ever been, and she asks too much of Ned. She burdens him. And what can Conrad do but reflect his parents’ anxieties, their open wounds? It would be easier, probably, if he weren’t so smart for his age. There’s no way around it: smart children are creepy. These are all things she never allows herself to consider.
The room isn’t on fire, and the dog isn’t there. She thinks of Jaws, of that poor Labrador retriever who chases a stick into the ocean and never comes back.
She returns to the hallway and stops short. Smoke is wafting up the stairs from the living room. She knew it!
“Ned!” she yells. “Ned!”
He doesn’t answer. She hurries to Conrad’s bedroom and flicks the light switch. Nothing. Darkness stares back at her. She moves forward until her knees hit the bed and then she pats the mattress with her hands, feeling for the shape of her son. She can’t find him. She scolds herself for not bringing a flashlight, for not carrying a flashlight all the time, every day, just in case of fire, just in case it is dark and smoky and she can’t find someone who needs her. She says his name over and over. If she says his name, he’ll have to answer. That’s how language works.
But he doesn’t. Nasya is running back into the hallway. Her legs are slow and the hallway feels a thousand miles long. And now there’s no need for a flashlight. The fire is at the stairs, climbing them, melting the carpet. The heat hits her face and sucks the air right out of her. The wallpaper curls in on itself, shrivels up, crisps at the edges like burnt toast. This fire could really kill someone. That’s how hot it is.
She rushes back into her bedroom. Conrad is there and Ned is, too. Nasya cries with relief. She hugs Conrad, who is so smart, so resourceful (she loves that he’s smart and would never think otherwise!), who recognized the danger on his own and came to find her.
Ned is opening the window. They climb out of it and onto the roof of the porch. From there they climb to the deck, from there to the ground. Ned goes first so that he can catch Conrad if he falls. That’s their Fire Plan. By the time Nasya lands on the deck they’re already at the end of the driveway.
She goes to them. There’s her family: son, husband. Back inside is Henry’s room and possibly a three-year-old terrier. Nasya takes deep breaths. She listens to the campfire crackle of her house reducing to ash. And there it is, clear as day, reporting through the open window of the bedroom: the sound of a six-inch double bell struck by a little copper hammer. It is louder than all destruction.
Nasya’s body tenses. She takes an instinctive step forward. Ned puts his hand on her shoulder. She looks back at him. He is laughing, inexplicably, and saying something to her over the din. It is hard to understand him.
What he’s actually saying is “Jews!”
What she hears, instead, is Choose.
Jake Wolff‘s stories and essays have appeared in One Story, Bellevue Literary Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and he’s currently a PhD candidate in creative writing at Florida State University. See more at www.jakewolff.com.