Chapter 11 - The Door Adrian Didn't Fix
Evelyn was stacking chairs when Adrian arrived. She didn't greet him. She pointed to a seat by the piano and kept stacking until she had finished the row.
"You have twenty minutes," she said.
"I won't need that long."
"People say that before they disappoint me."
Wren entered from the stairwell while he was taking off his coat. Her hair had grown enough to curl at the temples. She wore a dark scarf and an old green jacket Jo had found at a church sale. Adrian looked surprised, then almost relieved, until she chose a chair across the room.
"I'm here to listen," she said. "Not to make it easier."
Evelyn sat beside her. Adrian stayed where he was.
He told them about the telephone call Celia had made a week before the fire. She'd complained that a rear door was sticking, and the landlord's handyman was refusing to come until the following month. Adrian had recently persuaded her to let his security staff help at crowded performances. He'd told her someone would inspect the door the next day.
He'd meant to send Marco's predecessor, a man named Quinn. Then an argument over two security contracts had turned ugly. Adrian spent the next week dealing with it and canceled the inspection without calling Celia back. He'd assured himself the problem was no more than an inconvenient latch. There had been other exits. He'd thought someone else would fix it eventually.
"You could have called me," Evelyn said when he finished.
"I should have."
"I might've gone over there myself. I was helping Celia with the stage curtains. I would've complained to somebody until the repair happened."
"I know."
Evelyn looked at the piano. One of its keys had yellowed much more than the others. She rubbed at the mark with her thumb.
"I spent ten years angry at an electrician whose name I didn't know," she said. "There were so many people to be angry at that I had to choose a few. I didn't put you on the list."
Adrian had expected shouting. The disappointment in her voice was harder to absorb.
"I wasn't at the building when it caught fire," he said. "I didn't start it."
"I know that."
"But I promised to make a door work and I didn't."
Evelyn nodded, once.
"I kept telling myself that the inspection wouldn't have changed anything," he continued. "The electrical fault was somewhere else. Celia was on the wrong floor. There was smoke everywhere. Even if the door worked, nobody can say who would have made it out."
"That's true," Evelyn said.
The answer startled him. He looked up.
"It's also what you've been using to sleep at night," she added. "And it doesn't excuse the promise."
Wren sat with her hands tucked under her knees. For years she'd imagined the fire as a single monstrous mistake with her own face behind it. Hearing Adrian describe a chain of neglect didn't erase her fear. It made the room larger and more crowded, full of people who'd each thought another day would be safe enough.
"When she called you," Wren asked, "did my mother sound scared?"
"Annoyed," Adrian said. "She called me a young man who could afford expensive shoes but couldn't arrange a screwdriver."
Evelyn barked out a laugh. It turned into a sob she tried to cover with her hand.
"That sounds like Celia," she said.
Adrian looked at the floor. "I was angry that she'd talk to me that way. I was busy. I had people answering to me. I thought she'd thank me for helping at all."
"You wanted her to be grateful for a repair you never made," Wren said.
"Yes."
There was nothing clever to say after that. Evelyn put the flat of her hand on the piano and remained there until the room stopped tilting.
"What happens now?" she asked.
"The detectives have my statement," Adrian answered. "I've told them they can obtain my old business records if they're relevant. I don't expect the fire investigation to reopen on one person's memory. But the family has the right to know."
"And your other business?" Wren asked.
He knew what she meant. The shooting. The nightclub contracts. The men who moved through his world like warnings other people had learned to understand.
"The police are investigating the ambush," he said. "They've asked questions about how I got those contracts. I'm answering."
"Even the questions you don't like?"
"Especially those."
Wren nodded. She didn't believe the word especially yet, but he had at least put it in a sentence where it might cost him something.
When the meeting ended, Evelyn asked Wren to help put the folding chairs away. Adrian offered to carry the heavier stack. Evelyn told him to sit down because his side still looked painful. He obeyed. It was such a small reversal of their old positions that they almost laughed.
At the stairs Wren stopped beside Adrian.
"I was angry because I thought you'd come to give us one more secret," she said. "You didn't. You came to tell us one thing you did wrong. That's different."
"Not different enough."
"Maybe not."
He waited. She wasn't finished.
"I don't know what kind of person Iris was," Wren said. "I keep meeting people who knew her. They tell me she was brave, or stubborn, or talented, or a pain in the neck. None of those people saw who I was after the fire."
"You don't have to become who they remember."
"I know. But I don't get to stop being her either."
He recognized an ending when he heard one and didn't try to improve it.
Later, as Wren and Evelyn walked toward the bus, the older woman mentioned a memorial concert they held every spring for people lost in the fire. It was usually small: the choir, a few former students, a table of grocery-store cookies, and a framed picture of Celia that somebody always managed to knock crooked.
"You could come," Evelyn said. "Not as the guest of honor. Just come."
Wren kept walking. She could hear traffic against the curb and her own shoes scuffing the sidewalk.
"Does anyone say Iris's name?" she asked.
May you like
"Every year."
Wren gripped the little bell on her zipper. "Then I'm going to have to decide what it sounds like when they say it and I'm standing there."
