My husband Jacob bought Andrew the sneakers on a Saturday in September, three weeks before the fire. I remember the afternoon clearly, the way you remember the last ordinary things, with a sharpness that only comes later, once ordinary has become impossible. Jacob had taken our son to the sporting goods store on Millfield Road, just the two of them, and they had come home with the shoes in a white box and with the particular satisfied energy of males who have completed a successful errand together. Andrew wore them out of the box. He wore them to dinner. He wore them the next morning to church, and Jacob had given me a look across the pew that said yes I know and also I am not going to say anything, and I had looked back at him and thought about how much I loved that look specifically, how much of our marriage lived in small exchanges like that one. I had no idea I was already in the last weeks of having it to look back at.
Jacob was a firefighter. He had been a firefighter for eleven years when he died, and before that he had wanted to be one for as long as anyone in his family could remember. His mother told me once that he had drawn pictures of fire trucks before he could spell his own name. He was not a man who arrived at his calling the way some people do, through process of elimination and the slow narrowing of options. He knew from the beginning what he was for, and he was exactly that for every year I knew him, and I think that certainty of purpose was the thing I loved most about him, the way it made the air around him feel steady even when nothing else was.
The night of the fire, the call came in around eleven. A house on Carver Street, the old Merritt place, which had been converted to a rental and had electrical problems the landlord had been meaning to address for two years. Jacob went with his crew, and by the time they arrived the second floor was already involved. They got the family out. A couple in their thirties, two teenagers, a small girl named Laura who was eight years old and who had been asleep in the back bedroom when the smoke detector finally reached her. The teenagers got themselves out. The parents were in the front rooms. Laura was the one who needed bringing.
