Read Online Call If You Need Me by Raymond Carver - Free Book Online

the people were dressed up and wearing topcoats, but there were a few people in nightclothes wearing heavy coats that they’d obviously put on in a hurry. Two fire engines were parked down the street. One of them satin our front yard, and the other was in Mary Rice’s driveway.
    I gave the officer my name and said that we lived there, where the big truck was parked—“They’re in front of our house!” Dotty screamed—and the officer said we should park our car.
    “What happened?” I said.
    “I guess one of those space heaters caught on fire. That’s what somebody said, anyway. A couple of kids were in there. Three kids, counting the baby-sitter. She got out. The kids didn’t make it, I don’t guess. Smoke inhalation.”
    We started walking down the street toward our house. Dotty walked close to me and held my arm. “Oh my God,” she said.
    Up close to Mary Rice’s house, under the lights thrown up by the fire trucks, I could see a man standing on the roof holding a fire hose. But only a trickle of water came out of it now. The bedroom window was broken out, and in the bedroom I could see a man moving around in the room carrying something that could have been an ax. Then a man walked out the front door with something in his arms, and I saw it was those kids’ dog. And I felt terrible then.
    A mobile TV unit from one of the local stations was there, and a man was operating a camera that he held over his shoulder. Neighbors huddled around. The engines in the trucks were running, and now and then voices came over speakers from inside the trucks. But none of the people watching were saying anything. I looked at them, and then I recognized Rosemary, who was standing with her mother and father with her mouth open. Then they brought the children down on stretchers, the firemen, big fellows wearing boots and coats and hats, men who looked indestructible and as if they could live another hundred years. They came outside, one on either end of the stretchers, carrying the children.
    “Oh no,” said the people who stood watching. And then again, “Oh no. No,” someone cried.
    They laid the stretchers on the ground. A man in a suit and wool cap stepped up and listened with a stethoscope fora heartbeat on each of the children, and then nodded to the ambulance attendants, who stepped forward to pick up the stretchers.
    At that moment a little car drove up and Mary Rice jumped out of the passenger side. She ran toward the men who were about to put the stretchers into the ambulance. “Put them down!” she yelled. “Put them down!”
    And the attendants stopped what they were doing and put the stretchers down and then stood back. Mary Rice stood over her children and howled—yes, there’s no other word. People stepped back and then they moved forward again as she dropped to her knees in the snow beside the stretchers and put her hands on the face of one child and then the other.
    The man in the suit with the stethoscope stepped forward and kneeled beside Mary Rice. Another man—it might have been the fire chief or else the assistant fire chief—signaled the attendants and then stepped up to Mary Rice and helped her up and put his arm around her shoulders. The man in the suit stood on the other side of her, but he didn’t touch her. The person who’d driven her home now walked up close to see what was going on, but he was only a scared-looking kid, a busboy or a dishwasher. He had no right to be there to witness Mary Rice’s grief and he knew it. He stood back away from people, keeping his eyes on the stretchers as the men put them into the back of the ambulance.
    “No!” Mary Rice said and jumped toward the back of the ambulance as the stretchers were being put in.
    I went up to her then—no one else was doing anything—and took her arm and said, “Mary, Mary Rice.”
    She whirled on me and said, “I don’t know you, what do you
want
?” She brought her hand back and slapped me in the face. Then she got