It was early in the morning of what was, for me, a rare snow day, when our neighbor accidentally started a fire. I’d been lazing around at home with my ex in a cozy scene of such domestic idyll that its memory could still warm me today if I allowed it to. Oblivious to the staggering kick in the balls that fate would soon deliver, we read and talked in the living room, the patio blinds open to a shimmering blanket of snow. And then we heard a smoke detector.
At first we thought nothing of it. The noise was coming from upstairs and it sounded like neighbors had tended to whatever went awry — someone said something like “We took care of it.” We never saw or smelled smoke and there wasn’t any panic from our fellow snowed-in residents, but the sonic assault of the smoke detector continued, which activated the sprinklers in their apartment and ours. It was completely surreal.
The exact sequence of events is hazy now, but we carried our laptops — our most expensive indoor possessions at the time — to the car, which was parked within spitting distance of the front door. Next we grabbed the small safe that contained our birth certificates, Social Security cards and other important documents. Then we put our old, ailing cat in her carrier and Lorraine, the elderly woman across the hall, kept her warm until we were ready to leave.
Three fire trucks responded to the call — it was a large building — but the blaze was already extinguished. Had the neighbors aired out their apartment or silenced the alarm, the sprinklers wouldn’t have activated. The building’s head of maintenance pulled up in his pickup and anxiously asked if we had renters insurance. He said the fire-starters didn’t. There were no vacancies at the complex, but a lease was expiring the next week. Once they’d cleaned and repainted the unit, it was ours, but in the meantime we had to arrange our own temporary housing.
When we relayed that to Lorraine, she narrowed her eyes — she wasn’t fond of the family that lived above us. They kept odd hours and she considered the husband unfriendly. “I think he does some sort of shift work,” she said, and he confronted landscapers in the past when his sleep was interrupted. She didn’t know that it was his custom to buy a frozen Tombstone pizza on Fridays, along with the cheapest 18 or 24-packs of beer sold at the budget grocer behind our complex. The detritus of his weekend binges often traveled from their balcony to our patio.
A few weeks earlier his wife had locked him out of their apartment late at night. He banged a few times on the door and asked to be let in, but it hadn’t been particularly Stanley Kowalski-esque; there were no signs he was abusive. A pre-teen seemed to live there part-time, quiet and well-behaved. Something about the wife had been ‘off’ in recent weeks, though I couldn’t identify it. It was easier to spot in the parking lot that morning, as she approached us to say “I’m so sorry.” Her eyes were simultaneously anguished and vacant. Later we learned it wasn’t because of the fire.
The Red Cross showed up with gift cards for the upstairs neighbors and nothing for us, even though our apartment was also uninhabitable. A fireman found us and said they moved as many salvageable belongings into our bedroom as they could, because the sprinklers hadn’t gone off there. He warned that our bedroom furniture had been damaged in the process and that the couch might have to be thrown out. I’d purchased it all from Crate & Barrel six or seven months earlier. It was the ‘dream’ furniture I’d spent years saving up for, that I expected to use for decades to come.
In retrospect, wanting something that much and working so hard to attain it, only for it to be swiftly screwed up by forces beyond our control, seemed like a perfect metaphor for adulthood. At the time I was a little incredulous that, in a blind panic, my partner had thrown a blanket over a kitchen counter instead of the couch. Her reasoning was that the Rocky-themed birthday card she’d given me days earlier had been on the counter and she wanted to protect it. The blanket got wet, of course, and the card was ruined, while the couch survived with some visible damage. If I had the morning to do over again, I wouldn’t give a damn about the couch, but I would’ve saved the card.*
After the firemen left, contractors and remediation crews descended to gut our apartment. The neighbors’ kitchen and living room had been destroyed, mostly by water, following a breakfast misadventure that supposedly involved bacon. Our living room, dining area and hallway (encompassing parts of the kitchen and bathroom) were soaked. We were advised to remove our clothing from the bedroom closet within 24 hours or it would be lost to mold. Then we were given a few minutes to collect anything else we urgently needed before the walls were stripped to the studs and the floors to concrete.
In a state of shock, we drove to Target to buy supplies for our cat. Then we went to my parents’ house, already aggrieved that my mom couldn’t contain her excitement when I called to ask if we could stay there — she plainly regarded our jarring displacement as a fun opportunity for a sleepover. Later that evening, we went to the drugstore to have some time alone. We returned with Ben & Jerry’s, which we ate on a thin, lumpy mattress in the guest room while watching Over the Top, Sylvester Stallone’s arm-wrestling opus, on a laptop. The Italian Stallion’s worst movies always brought us spiritual succor.
A couple months later, we returned to our apartment, but something had changed. Now I felt internally wired even when I was physically exhausted. It wasn’t just because of the fire. On a trip to the complex to grab something or meet with the remediation crew, we came harrowingly close to getting t-boned by a motorist who blew a red light. My ex would’ve taken the impact. Instinctively and to my lasting surprise, I pulled off a bit of Lethal Weapon stunt driving that barely averted disaster.** Each night, I had the same sickening feelings before falling asleep: fear of my partner being alone and scared during the fire if I hadn’t had a snow day, and terror as a speeding truck barreled toward her.
Though I was glad to finally be back home, I felt edgy whenever I glanced at the ceiling sprinklers. My ex was a grudge-holder par excellence and it made me uneasy that she continued to speak hatefully of our former neighbors — they wouldn’t be returning — even after we learned why the wife had seemed so haunted and empty. In the weeks after the fire, the complex manager called to update us about something and lowered her voice as she asked “Did you know about her kid?”
Our neighbor had an older child, barely an adult, who lived elsewhere and had recently gone missing. As soon as I heard that, any residual anger I might have felt over our displacement disappeared, and I regretted that I’d been too dazed to do anything more than nod when she apologized in the snow. Had I known what she was going through, I would’ve said, “No, it’s OK. We’re sorry.” My ex scowled at my softness and said “I don’t forgive her.” She held firm to that even after our neighbor’s kid was found murdered.
The closeness my ex and I felt in the months leading up to the destruction of our apartment is impossible to describe. We were still in our first year of cohabitation and lived like newlyweds — at least until we were forced by circumstance to awkwardly bunk just a few feet away from my parents’ bedroom. A silly relationship challenge we’d undertaken at the end of November had been such a success in December that we’d continued it into the new year, and she took it as a personal insult when I found it difficult to immediately recapture the mood in our temporary apartment.
Stressful events like that fiasco are meaningful tests of a relationship’s strength. While I was scarred by the fear of losing my ex or failing to protect her, she was unmoored after deciding my newfound distraction meant I was no longer attracted to her. Her experience of the fire as an unpardonable transgression that irreparably damaged our lives was at odds with my belief that it was an unfortunate accident and only a minor inconvenience compared to our neighbor’s unending maternal anguish. When we broke up years later, echoes of those conflicts were still there, nestled within different arguments.
It’s probably that more than anything else — the abrupt, injurious conclusion of such an idyllic, formative stage of our lives — that sets me on edge when smoke or carbon monoxide detectors beep, chirp and wail. Each noise is a piercing reminder of how little control we have over anything, and how quickly we can lose what we love and value most.
* Maybe the funniest destruction to occur that day was of the Patricia Highsmith biography I was reading. My ex was glad that it was ruined; she didn’t like that I’d said Highsmith, whose personality was rancid, was surprisingly cute on its cover.
** I’m undoubtedly giving myself too much credit. Yes, it was the only time in my life I actually displayed quick reflexes, but the car being a sporty subcompact is probably what saved our bacon.