Rekindled

I found the books in the attic, childhood favorites of mine safely clustered inside an old moving box. Now my daughter lies next to me on the couch, reading stories of sweet escape as I did so many years before. Watching her turn a faded page, I tell her how happy I am to share this part of my past with her. I don’t tell her of a time it didn’t seem possible this moment could exist, before the fire and all that it helped to heal.

The fire started innocently, as most do. The union of a weed-eater, filled with gasoline when it should have been empty, and a child’s battery-operated car, turned on when it should have been off, sparked a flame that grew hot enough to blow a hole out the side of a moving van traveling up Interstate 5 in northern San Diego. That the weed-eater and the toy car did not belong to us, but to another family sharing space on the van, did not matter. The fire passionately consumed all that it could. The smoke took care of the rest.

I drove into the San Diego sideyard of the moving van company on that chilly October afternoon more than a decade ago. My husband had moved to Chicago that summer to start a new job, and I had stayed behind to sell our condo during the start of a housing market downturn. Escrow finally closed, and the moving-van driver had picked up our belongings a few days earlier--the last remaining obstacle to starting a new life in a city that wasn’t home to either of us. But instead of joining my husband in Chicago, I moved in with my bewildered parents.

“Everything’s fine,” I assured them, telling myself that this was just a temporary situation while I settled some things at my job. But the time apart had created ripples of uncertainty in a marriage young enough to be secure only on the surface. A mild flirtation at my job suddenly had threatened to become something more. The casual visits my husband made to the neighborhood bar also had become more frequent, often followed by a late-night phone call in which little was said but much was meant.

Now I walked among our acrid possessions spread out in the sideyard, some obviously destroyed and others deceptively so. The soft green cushion of the wicker chair, where we had spent Saturday afternoons curled up in each other’s arms, was contorted into a stiff mass of black, its foam insides pushed outward. The dresser from our bedroom set looked as new as when we had picked it out as a freshly married couple, until it revealed its charred back flapping like tar paper.

But it was the paper imprint of our lives that was the most damaged. Love notes written while dating and favorite books shared with each other, all permeated with smoke they would never fully release. The insurance agent, who had swooped in shortly after the fire to assess blame and limit payment, somehow calculated a cash value for the books by measuring the length of each box. Then he dumped the books in an oversized trash bin set up just for us.

I numbly sorted through our belongings, waving away the smoke that now existed only in my senses. My father, who had come to help me while my husband made his way here, was perhaps more stunned than I was. In the seven times my family moved around the world during his military career, including to Europe and Asia, the only mishap was when a section of a teak wall unit did not arrive, forcing him to arrange the unit in a different configuration.

My husband joined me the next day in the sideyard, and we cataloged the remains of our life together. Neither of us said much, and I recognized the shock on his face as he tried to grasp all that had gone wrong.

In the middle of the day, we stopped to rest. The sun warmed us as fighter jets from nearby Miramar echoed the chaos around us. I looked at the sooty face of the man I had vowed to spend the rest of my life with, and I thought about not what had been taken by the fire but what had been spared: In a moment of premonition, I had pulled our wedding video and album out of the box right before the movers put it in the van.

I took my husband’s hand and held it for a long time. A silk ficus tree that once graced our living room quietly watched us, its wires scorched and exposed.

I moved to Chicago not long after, as the gloom of winter dawned. Starting over with nothing, eating dinners on the floor of our apartment, we slowly rebuilt a life together. We bought an old Prairie-style house with a large oak tree in the backyard, and filled the house with new furniture. Our daughter was conceived there one chilly October afternoon, while the oak tree shed its dying leaves and neighbors around us started early fires in their fireplaces.

When the relentless gray days finally threatened my sanity, we packed up and moved back to California. This time, I shipped seven boxes of photos and paper memories ahead of the moving van. I sent them on different days in case fire, too, caught up with them.

Now our daughter lies next to me, old enough to read a book from the one box not measured and assigned a cash value on that fateful day so many years ago. Only an act of omission by the movers, who had overlooked this box as it rested on a closet shelf, prevented these books from joining the others in the van. Now they are one of the few smoke-free possessions my husband and I have from our past, tangible remembrances that do not have to be kept separate in sealed, clear bags, like our love notes from long ago.

She finishes reading and gets up from the couch to get another book. I think of the fire that replays itself in the shadows of my memories, and of all that was nearly destroyed. Then I go help her find an adventure from my old box of books, one where she can lose herself in that world before making her way back to ours.