Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down by Anne Valente Read Free Book Online Page A

alone across the summer, the headlights of his Fiesta hatchback cutting lines through the dark and low fog. The sun gone, the heat still heavy. Beyond the movie theater’s projection booth, a summer of late-night drives,the radio droning, their speed whipping hot air through the car’s open windows. The heat had been a blanket. Thick and warm. As hot as the hood of his car once they’d parked, the engine calming down, a ghost of heat pooling beneath its surface as Matt pushed Tyler back against the metal and ran a hand beneath his shirt and held the other against his face. He opened his eyes. The warmth of the engine. How quickly it became the heat of Caroline’s blood still warm on the carpet. And Caroline’s parents. He didn’t want to think it but couldn’t stop himself: what blankness they must have returned home to as he rode through the streets safe between his parents, a home where the walls rang silent and still and where a bedroom’s emptiness pushed into them like a dagger.
    And though his eyelids sagged with the deprivation of sleep, he lay awake that night in his basement bedroom and watched a water stain at the edge of the ceiling. Caroline’s blood soaking the carpet, his clothes. Her gaze fixed. Her body slumped, a position he’d seen that her parents had been spared, a mercy. One that flamed guilt through him, spreading across his limbs like a growing fever. A strange intimacy. Something awful. Something he never should have seen. Matt watched the stain, his eyes open so they wouldn’t see her body when he closed them. He fell asleep anyway sometime after 4 A.M. when the shade of his ceiling began to grow lighter by degree, only several hours of reprieve from a world that had pulled away what grounding he knew, a world that shifted again in the morning when he awoke to the news that Caroline Black’s home had disintegrated in the night, that her parents standing bowed into one another at the vigil had gone home and closed their doors and turned off the lights and burned.

HOUSE FIRE KILLS TWO
    Parents of Slain Lewis and Clark Teen Found in Home
    SUNDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2003
    ST. LOUIS, MO—Early Sunday morning, just hours after a community-wide vigil was held at the Midvale County Public Library for the victims of Wednesday’s shooting at Lewis and Clark High School, a house fire claimed two lives within the 1300 block of Westminster Court in Midvale County. Firefighters responded at 3:38 a.m. Sunday morning and observed flames engulfing the two-story residence. The blaze, which required at least 50 fire personnel, including police officials from nearby Hamilton County, was finally extinguished around 6 a.m.
    According to police officials, the victims have been identified as Jean Black, 45, and Arthur Black, 47, the parents of Caroline Black, 16, who was killed in the Lewis and Clark shooting.
    â€œWe just can’t believe it,” said Janet Wallace, a neighbor who stood on her porch with her two toddlers as officials doused the flames. “First the school and now this. It’s inconceivable. They were all such good people, the two of them and their daughter. This week has been devastating for all of us.”
    As of sunrise this morning, firefighters and police officials were combing through the debris in search of clues. Though foul play is not suspected, investigators hope to gather a clearer picture of what caused the fire. No other residents were found in the home, and neighbors heard no signs of struggle within the house.
    â€œThe streets were silent last night, especially in light of the vigil,”said Jason Novitsky, a next-door neighbor, whose daughter is a freshman at Lewis and Clark. “We just came home and went to bed and heard nothing until the sirens came.”
    Officials say that another neighbor, David Ramos, first saw the smoke and called 911.
    â€œI couldn’t sleep,” said Ramos. “You know, with these kids