Page 47 of Light My Fire

By four thirty, the fog is assembling out on the channel, lying down over the water in ropes, good cover and a terrible omen or a blessing, depending which sailor you ask. I stand in the cockpit to take the spring lines off, and that's when light swings across the boatyard fence, headlights, one vehicle, fast on the gravel and then killed, and I go flat-still with a line in my hand and my heart going off like a struck bell.

Doctrine says cast off now, engine or no engine, drift out dark on the first of the ebb.

I don't move. If it's marshals, the line in my hand is the difference between arrested at the dock and gone on the water, and my body has already done the arithmetic, weight shifting to cast off, eyes finding the dark gap of the fairway. A decade of drills stands ready in my legs. Then a car door closes soft, and footsteps come down the dock boards, not boots being loud, boots being quick, a stride I'd know with my eyes closed because I've spent a month learning it across fire scenes and diners and my own floor, and every drill I own dissolves at once. Then she's there at the end of the dock, jacket open, nothing in her hands, breathing as if she ran every red light in Redwater, which I'd bet the boat she did.

“Permission to come aboard,” Dani says, and her voice cracks on the last word, and stops being a joke halfway through.

I can't speak. I put out my hand instead, and she takes it and steps down into the cockpit, and the boat dips and rights itself under her weight, taking her on like ballast it's been missing, and we stand there in the cold with our hands locked and the fog coming up the channel toward us.

“You said no.” It comes out of me rough. “You were right to say no. I've had an hour to memorize all the reasons you were right.”

“I know the reasons. I wrote them.” She doesn't let go of my hand. “I drove north with both hands on the wheel like a good citizen, and I made it four miles. Four. I kept seeing the next thirty years doing the job with my whole chest hollowed out, getting my plaque at the retirement dinner, being the woman who was sensible the night it counted. And I pulled over on the bridge approach with the city in my mirrors and I sat there and I understood that I've run into every burning building in my life except the one with me in it.” Her jaw is set and her eyes are full and level. “So here's what I know at four in the morning, Zara. I can't justify you. Not one fire, not ever, don't ask me to, I'm not coming aboard as your jury. But I am done handing you over. To Val, to the marshals, to the water, to the past, to anybody. I choose you. I kept waiting for that to feel like a collapse, but it only ever feels like a door.”

The words go through me with its whole history attached, every door I've ever stood at, and this one open to bright, warm light.

I kiss her. I take her face in both hands and I kiss her with everything I held back in the boathouse, no farewell folded into it anywhere, a kiss with years in it, and she grips the front of my coat and gives it all back. The fog slides over the dock and wraps the boat and the two of us standing in it, the city gone, the night gone, nothing in the world but her mouth and the small rocking world I get to keep.

When we break, she stays close, forehead to mine, breath ragged.

“Terms,” she says. “I have terms.”

“Name them.”

“The fires stop.” She pulls back far enough to see me, and there's no give anywhere in her. “Don't negotiate. Don't tell me they'll be smaller, or smarter, or invisible, or only ever far from here. I watched you stand in a warehouse and tell me your math was wrong exactly once, and I've done that arithmetic every night since. If you light another match, you're not the woman I gave my life up for, and I will walk off this boat in whatever harbor we're in and you will never find me. The fires stop, Zara. All the fires, forever. That's the price of me.”

I could make the old argument in my sleep. There are other cities with other Carrows, other towers of paper sitting on other buried children, and nobody else willing. I know that speech, I wrote it at twenty-one and I've delivered it to the dark for eleven years, and I open my mouth, and what comes out instead is the truth.

“When the Pinnacle burned, I stood on a roof and felt nothing.” Her hand is still fisted in my coat, and I cover it with mine. “The work was done and the room was empty, and then a stranger on the radio said cladding, and that's when it broke me open, Dani. Not the fire. The word. Eleven years and what my sister needed was never the burning, it was somebody saying the true word out loud where the city had to hear it, and Renata Cho did that with a keyboard.” Her thumb moves against my chest, once. “Natalia was twelve. She had opinions like other people have weather. And if she were standing on this dock watching me, the aunt of nobody, the keeper of her shoebox, on a boat with a woman who ran into a building for me, asking for one more fire, she'd be ashamed of me. She'd want this. Not the vengeance. This.”

“Say it.” Dani's voice is almost gone. “I need to hear the words.”

“I will never start another fire.” It comes out level, witnessed by the fog and the water and the twelve-year-old this promise belongs to. “Not here, not anywhere, not clever, not small. I'm done. The rest of my life is arson in reverse, Dani. I'll spend it keeping one firefighter warm.”

She makes a sound that's a laugh and a sob in the same breath, and kisses me again, hard and brief, sealing it.

“And you,” I say, while her forehead is still against mine, because the truth policy runs both directions. “Twelve years of running into buildings doesn't stop wanting out of your hands because you crossed a dock. Someday the manhunt cools, and the story Cho is telling outgrows the story Mercer is telling, and there'll be a morning you wake up smelling smoke that isn't there and hating me a little. When it comes, you tell me. We'll point the bow wherever the telling takes us. I'm not asking you to bury her, Dani. I'm asking you to bring her.”

“Don't promise me I can go back.” Her hands tighten over my coat. “Not tonight. Tonight I can only do this one whole thing at a time.”

“Then I'll hold the promise and you can claim it later. I'm very good at keeping paper.”

She wipes her face with the heel of her hand, the same rough pass I've watched her give soot, and looks east down the channel, where the night is starting to give at its hem.

“Then cast off,” she says. “Before I cry on your boat.”

“You're already crying on my boat.”

“Before I do it more.”

We work without talking, and she's a fast study, like everyone who rigs ladders and lines for a living. I take the helm and bring the engine in at an idle, a low mutter the fog eats whole, and the Marguerite slides out of the slip and down the fairway past the sleeping hulls, and Dani stands at the bow coiling the lines like she was born to it, and the boatyard and the roses and the boathouse where she went under for me fall away into the gray behind us.

The channel takes us. The ebb does the real work, the engine only steering, and we run dark past the grain pier, past the cold-storage roof where I stood last night deciding to be a person, under the highway bridge where her truck sat at a red light while she lied to herself, and the fog opens and closes around marker pilings like the city handing us from one secret to the next.

Neither of us says a word. She comes back to the cockpit and stands inside my arm with her back against me, her hands resting over my hand on the wheel, and we steer like that, four-handed, her hair against my jaw, her heart going under my forearm. The cold pushes us together and we let it. Her free hand finds the hem of my coat and slides under it, flat against my stomach, not asking for anything, claiming a place, and I turn my face into her neck and put my mouth on the pulse there until her breathing changes and her head tips back onto my shoulder.

We stay like that for a long stretch of channel, her body warming against mine through two coats, my thumb moving on the back of her hand at the wheel, the want banked low in both of us, a fire laid to last the night instead of taking the house, and there's nothing to say that our bodies aren't already handling. When the canal mouth opens to the south, the sky has gone from black to slate to a gray with pearl in it, and the first working boat of the morning passes us well to port, a crabber with its lights furred by fog, and the man at its wheel lifts two fingers off the spokes to us, the oldest blessing on the water, strangers wishing strangers well.

At the breakwater, Redwater shows itself one last time through a tear in the fog. The skyline stands in silhouette with the river lit gray under it, and on the south bank a thin column of smoke still leans off the Pinnacle, pale now, the fire long dead, the overhaul crews picking through my last sentence with their hooks. Her relief tour will go on without her. Somewhere north, marshals are watching a supplier's yard for a woman who will never come, and by midmorning Val Mercer will know exactly what Dani Serrano did tonight, and what she does with that knowing is the one fire I can't predict. Cho's story will be on every front step in an hour. The paper will do the rest, subpoenas and hearings and men in good suits learning the word accountable. It was never going to be me who finished it. It was always going to be the record.