Read Online Mendocino Fire by Elizabeth Tallent - Free Book Online

that in life there was one person you got to know everything about. You get your one person, and it doesn’t really matter whether you end up living with them or not, because the way you know that person, nothing can undo or diminish it. There’s one single person out of everyone on earth who is your own private safe person, who you can talk to in your head and know what they’ll say. After we broke up, you were still my one safe person. You know? But if you can turn out to have a Republican wife and blame a run of bad luck on an evil rug, I guess I don’t know anything about anyone, not really. I’m in love and now you’ve made it so I have to distrust him. Will you tell me something, David? Tell me. Did I know you? Was I your person?”
    Because if he answered her honestly the answer would be no , because he can’t bear to hurt her, from reckless solicitude, he rubs a palm down his fly. “Suse. Do you want to do something?”
    â€œI want to do something,” she says, standing. “I want”—and, optimistically unzipping, he’s staggered by her swift backhandedblow, by the moan of protest that is neither his nor hers, causing them to turn, the ex-husband and -wife, to find their child standing in the doorway in his pajama bottoms. “Honey,” David says, “Shane,” but after a long and disbelieving gaze that pivots from mother to father and father to mother, Shane bolts. David touches his jaw and says, “He saw that. He was right there.”
    â€œDid he see what was before? The zipper?”
    â€œI don’t think so.” But he’s not sure.
    â€œDavid. Let me take him home. I need to talk to him. Let me get this.”
    He lets her get this. Edmund, discovered in the boys’ room, turns piously cooperative, as if to preserve what’s left of his family’s sanity. Jackets are tugged on, backpacks snatched up, as if the house is on fire, and Susannah is hustling both boys out the front door when they encounter Jade. The women’s voices spar in a little ecstasy of mutual dislike. David stands there, apprehensively feeling his jaw, holding his own, if barely, against an onslaught of guilt. Before it can drag him under, he sits down. Here is the rug. He straightens glasses knocked cockeyed by Susannah’s blow and trails a hand over its nap. Threads ran one way, a warp, and another, a woof. Jade slams the front door. “Okay, what’s going on?” she calls. “Why was Susannah so weird? She goes, ‘Make him put some ice on it.’” He closes his eyes to postpone her interrogation, meanwhile attending to the throbbing in his jaw.
    â€œShit!”
    Jade does the instinctive hopping step that keeps one foot from touching down, and in the second before he understands she’s in pain he thinks she is goofily performing her fear of radioactive contamination.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?”
    â€œI stepped on something. Was there glass in this rug? Oh, why didn’t we vacuum?”
    The trash can: the toxic seethe of its debris. David is half sick with guilt, driving her to the emergency room, because some shard from that roiling cauldron has driven itself into her darling foot, because he brought the thing home in order to impress her, to prove he is not merely a dutiful soldier slogging through muddy depositions but a hero capable of wresting beauty from chaos. The doctor is a sleekly handsome Indian with a tranquilizing lilt, but Jade won’t melt, and when the doctor leaves the cubicle and David explains in a low voice that the rug is behind everything that has happened, she shivers and commands, “Shut up.” The handsome doctor returns, bestowing on David a discreet frown of sympathy, an acknowledgment that Jade is not the only person suffering in this harshly illumined, far-from-soundproof cell. To explain that he’s fine, David touches his swollen jaw with two fingers, This? ,