"See? There are the angel wings."
She gestured to two white marks stretching out from either side of the back door where the fire bit the house.
They woke to smoke. Within five minutes, they were all outside and there was no going back in. Not for the twenty-five years of original scores written by her musician husband. Not for photos or flowers or mementos. The windows exploded as their neighbors banged on the house, yelling for them to get out.
She told us the story as we picked our way through the gutted house, stepping gingerly over caution tape pasted over holes showing us the basement below. I tried not to look down, my arm curling protectively around my daughter as she, too, avoided seeing how little floor it takes to hold up a person.
The woman showed us the path of the fire, how it darkened the beams on either side of the untouched bookshelf housing her husband's musical scores, the wood still white and the only stick of furniture left in the house. It reminded me of the story I heard in my twenties of a woman who'd come upon my grandfather after his fatal car wreck and laid her hands on his chest and told him it was okay to go right before he died. That feeling of a record scratching somewhere out beyond Saturn, out where things get decided, far from us.
We'd come at the request of a friend, who told us about the fire and asked us to come help transplant the flowers from the side of the house to the back so they wouldn't be lost in the rebuild. The fire was set by kids playing a prank that went way out of hand. Not an accident.
The fact that everyone inside the house lived is nothing less than a miracle.
We were there for two hours, a little piece of a glorious fall Sunday afternoon. We started out mostly strangers, a group cobbled together from my friend's various social circles. I found myself discussing parenting with one of the other moms as we dug up hostas from a sidewalk we'd never seen before.
The woman showed us her wedding dress that had somehow received only smoke damage despite the line of fire on all sides. She said she wasn't that sentimental about her dress, but there was no logic behind why it was spared except for God just showing off.
I asked about the kids. I think it will be hardest for them.
She was giving one of the beds to someone else who was starting over with nothing. Starting over with nothing is the story I heard from a new acquaintance a few weeks ago at lunch, a woman who told me about her old house with a marble floor a short jaunt from New York City, how quickly it had been lost in the collapse. How she'd been on the trading floor that day.
You hear a lot of stories about what was lost, but not as many about what was spared. I was touched by the hope and faith in the voice of the woman whose house stood before me, a black shell of what it had been. A house I've probably driven past hundreds of times, located as it was in my old neighborhood. Her life and mine probably never would have intersected, but it did, and because it did, my family and I saw the power of acknowledging what was spared. We transplanted twenty or so plants out of the path of the machinery that will rebuild the family's house from the bottom up. My daughter played in a treehouse outgrown by the woman's adult children and black like the main house with smoke damage. As we pushed our wheelbarrow in the narrow gap between city houses, the broken glass from the windows sparkled like mosaics in the dirt, like they'd been put there on purpose.
Transplanting the flowers let us focus on what was spared. My new friend told me her favorite grandmother's name was Rita. As we prepared to leave, I passed out bottled water that we bought weeks before even though we never buy bottled water, and people I'd never met before nodded their thanks.
We left happy that we'd come and aware of how differently that story could have ended.
The winner of my Rafflecopter giveaway is Rachel Spring! Congratulations, Rachel! I will be in touch! Thanks to everyone who participated in the YA Scavenger Hunt. I thought it was really fun.