Should Have Known Better

Fire

I never really believed in God. Not a god. Not “the God” that you probably believe in. I know that must sound peculiar coming from a preacher’s daughter. But, you know, I just never had a reason to honestly think someone or something other than myself would show up to save me when the whole universe was crashing in and burning me to bits. And that’s what God is—what you really say He is—a savior. Some big hand to hold you together when you’re a pile of hot ash. And I’d been there before. My son has autism. Mild autism. When he was three years old, he stopped saying, “Mama.” Just stopped one day and then a man with a gray beard in a white jacket told me that he had a disease I could hardly pronounce. There was no cure. There was no cause. They couldn’t say where it came from. “It came from me,” I cried and sobbed in the bathtub with my hands resting over my vagina. The water was boiling all around me and turning to lava, scorching me alive. I didn’t think any god would come then. And no god came. I got myself out of that fire. I fought to save my son. I was the only one there.

That wasn’t the god the good Reverend Herbert George II talked about on the pulpit every Sunday at First Salvation Church of God in southwest Atlanta. No. Sitting there in the first row beside my mother in one of her lavender suits with sparkly lilac rhinestones around the collar, I listened as my father talked about a god who saved and fixed and came “just in the nick of time”! That “on time” god. Right?

I always knew it was a lie. It couldn’t be true.

Nothing my daddy ever said was true.

The good Reverend Herbert George II killed my mother every day. But “Thou shall not kill”? God should’ve put something more direct in that chapter of his good book. Like don’t kick your wife so hard in the stomach that she can’t have any more babies.

There was no God.

I didn’t expect it. I didn’t see.

But that’s just all what I believed then, how I understood things before I’d been on the earth for thirty-three years and ended up locked in a bathroom, once again, blaming myself for losing everything I loved.

I was so angry, the fire within me was burning up, the world crashing in.

I was about to kill somebody.

Either myself. Or my husband. Or my best friend. Or maybe, all of us.

And not figuratively. Seriously. The gun was on the floor; I was running out of the energy to save myself.

I cried. I felt like no one would ever hear me, but I cried out for the name I’d heard my mother scream so many times. My God. The heat in me boiled out of my mouth so fast that I lurched forward to my knees.

“God,” I cried. “God, help me!”

1

The second fire started on a regular day.

Summer was coming and the teenagers in the library were getting restless. The new Georgia heat was making people crazy. Not to mention it was Friday, and that brought with it a particular kind of recklessness.

“And get this, girl.” Sharika, my coworker at the triple-wide barn-sized library flicked her pink and yellow airbrushed fingernail tips in my face for some kind of dramatic buildup. “She up and killed herself. Just did. Shot herself in the head . . . or maybe the stomach.” The air conditioner clicked on and hummed, making her get louder. “In the stomach!”

She paused and looked at me for a second, her dark brown face in a tight frown beneath the harsh halogen lights that hung over the help desk. She was thirty, short, and probably fifty pounds overweight, but you’d never know it by how she carried herself, switching and always with one hand on a poked-out hip. She was funny in a way that women like her just could be. The kind where her high self-esteem was to hide low self-esteem. But smart. She could recite classes in the Dewey decimal system like poems. Had

a quick temper though.

“Isn’t that some shit? She killed herself,” she said and a hand went to her hip.

Behind her, I could see a cheerleader and her boyfriend padding rather suspiciously down the hallway toward the bathroom.

I nodded at Sharika and made a mental note to look after them in a few minutes. When I’d selected library science as my major in graduate school, I never imagined I’d end up chasing hot teens out of the slender bathroom stalls of a tiny satellite library. But then again, I don’t really recall what I did imagine I’d be doing here.

“Now that’s a damn shame. Killed herself over that man. Fuck that!” Sharika went on. “Won’t catch me killing myself over some fool. I have too much to live for.”

“Shssh!” I warned, elbowing her. “Somebody might hear you up here cursing.”

She rolled her eyes and looked around the half-full, square-shaped reading room where we were both librarians. Four long, wooden tables, which had been donated to our location when the main library downtown underwent renovations, made a large square in the middle of our dwindling and aged stacks of books. It was 3:33 in the afternoon and, besides us, the only other adults in the library were Mrs. Harris from the seniors romance book reading club and Mr. Lawrence, the neighborhood misfit. For hours, we watched as the hot teens took turns trying to sneak off to the bathroom and back stacks for secret rendezvous, Mr. Lawrence pretended to look for jobs in an upside-down, week-old newspaper that no longer carried a classifieds section, and Mrs. Harris faked reading Their Eyes Were Watching God as she secretly spied on Mr. Lawrence.

“You don’t think these two old folks cuss?” Sharika shot, her backwoods Augusta drawl purposely positioned to bite at every syllable she uttered. “Please, they could and would cuss both of us under a bus. Don’t sleep on old people! They’ll cut you first and cuss you last!”

Sharika giggled at her joke and I couldn’t help but smile. She was crazy, but so right. Reverend Herbert George II had had a way with words, too, especially when he’d had some drinks in him.

“But really.” Sharika swiveled her seat around to mine. “I just feel so bad for her. Why would she do that? Kill herself for some man? They were divorced already. It was time to move on.”

“How long were they married?”

“Twenty years.”

“And you said there was another woman?”

“Yeah, apparently he’d just gotten engaged to some tramp . . . some whore. And how she found out: stumbling on their wedding registry at Target?!? At Target?”

“Why did she look up his name?” I asked the obvious question, trying to seem a little concerned with Sharika’s tale. Every day with her had a new story. And sometimes it was hard to tell if the story was based on real life or a book. She told both just the same. And if you missed a step, she’d happily start right back up again. It was important to feign some kind of attention.

“You’re missing the point,” she announced.

“Which is?”

“Which is that there’s no reason to kill yourself for a man. I don’t care who he married or who he left you for. There’s just no reason. Life goes on. Shit, she could’ve found a better man . . . and the way things are going today, she might’ve been able to get a better woman!” She pulled a few wispy strands of her blond bangs from her eyes, and I considered for the third time that day that maybe someday someone who really loved Sharika would tell her that blond just didn’t work for her. My skin is two shades lighter than hers and the most diversity I see in hair dye is jet black and just black. She calls me a “Plain Jane,” but at least I’m not a grown woman walking around with blond bangs. I wear my hair cut at the ears and curled under: early Michelle Obama style. I know it gets . . . regular . . . but it’s functional. And my husband couldn’t care less about things like that.

“Is this one of your friends?” I got up from my seat at the mock mahogany counter and placed a stack of returned movies on Sharika’s reshelf cart.

“Dawn, I told you this is from the book I read last night,” Sharika answered. “Have you been listening to me? God, I just feel so sorry for the woman. Like for feeling so down that she thought the only way out was suicide. That’s awful. And how did everybody miss it? Her friends? Her family? No one knew she was about to put a gun to her head? I’ve never been that caught up and I don’t plan on getting there either.”

“Oh, come on! You’re speaking like a single woman who’s never been in love,” I said. “After having been married for twelve years, I can kind of understand her—the character. This woman wasn’t just caught up. She was in love and she lost it. That can be devastating for anyone. I don’t support suicide, but nothing will make you contemplate catching the first bus out of here like heartbreak. I know that. Ask any of those fools jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.”

I slid the last book from our return bin onto Sharika’s cart and she jumped up from her seat to tug it away.