Bridge of Sighs

stopped in the doorway, reaching inside for Edith Spinnarkle’s hand and pulling her, also sooty and naked, out onto the porch.
    What happened next surprised me even more than their nakedness. Just as the fireman was pulling her out of the house, Edith was reaching back and pulling with her other hand. I fully expected that when my father emerged, he’d be naked, too. After all, if the sisters had had their clothes incinerated, it followed that he’d likely be in the same condition, and as I remember it now across the years, I think I was more worried about the fact that he’d be naked in front of all our neighbors than about the possibility that he’d been injured in the blaze. So I was very surprised when he emerged fully clothed. His white short-sleeved shirt was black with soot, of course, but it wasn’t on fire.
    “Lou!” my mother cried, bolting past firemen who were holding everybody at a distance, and I heard my father, blinded by the smoke and trying to locate her voice by sound, then bellow, “Tessa!” Now that he was safe, the tears started streaming down my face, and it seemed like I stood there forever, alone and forgotten on the sidewalk. I saw my parents embrace at the foot of the porch steps, then lost them in the encroaching crowd.
    At this point the remaining windows of the Spinnarkle house exploded, glass raining down over the street. The entire structure was now engulfed in flame, and we were all herded to safety across the road. The firemen, cutting their losses, concentrated on trying to save the adjacent houses. As I pushed among the crowd of onlookers, I heard Edith Spinnarkle, hugging her sister close on a neighbor’s porch, cry out, “Our home! Our home, Janet! Look! It’s gone!”
    I finally located my parents one porch farther down the block. My mother was clutching my father to her as one would a big, overgrown child. He was wrapped in a blanket and shivering violently, his tears leaving tracks down his sooty cheeks. Neither seemed to notice when I climbed the steps and sat down next to them. My father looked odd, and then I realized why. His eyebrows had been singed off. “Louie,” he said, finally recognizing me and drawing me close, glad for somewhere else to look, because he couldn’t bring himself to face the blaze. “Is our house going to burn down, Tessa?” he asked.
    “No, Lou,” she assured him, though she wasn’t looking at the fire either, just at him.
    “What’ll we do?” he wanted to know.
    “It’s not going to burn down, Lou,” she said. “You saved it. If you hadn’t seen what was happening—”
    “Is the store okay?” he said, causing me to glance over at Ikey Lubin’s. Why wouldn’t the store be okay, I wondered, since it was way on the other side of the street.
    “The store’s fine, Lou. The house is fine. You saved Janet and Edith both. You saved their
lives,
Lou.”
    My father looked over at them, huddled together on the steps of the porch next door, as if to ascertain whether seeing them there was full and sufficient evidence to warrant such a conclusion. “Then why is Louie crying?” he wondered.
    “I don’t know,” my mother said, regarding me for the first time and laughing, which made me laugh, too, or rather to make some sound composed of relief and wonder and residual terror.
    In twenty minutes the Spinnarkles’ home burned to the ground, the whole neighborhood watching.
             
     
    T HE NEXT MORNING I woke up so exhausted that I wondered if I’d had a spell in my sleep, since these sometimes took the form of vivid dreams. But when I pulled back the curtain of my bedroom window, I was surprised to find myself looking at the Gunther house, which hadn’t been part of the view until now. All that remained of the Spinnarkle house was the smoldering foundation and tipping chimney. My mother was in the shower, so I dressed quickly and went outside to inspect the ruins. It had rained in the night, and soot was draining in wide streams into the sewer grate. My father was already up and over at the store, where a police car at the curb didn’t strike me as odd, given last night’s dramatic events, though something did tickle at the edges of my memory. I tried to bring it front and center, but it wouldn’t budge.
    Our own house had sustained more damage than I’d thought. The heat from the blaze had bubbled the paint along the near side, and the roof and cornice of the back porch were badly scorched. The night