More evenings out. Plans with Ezra that got moved to next weekend and then to the weekend after that. A particular way she started holding her phone face down when we were all in the same room which was new, which meant something, and which I did not name because naming it meant deciding. Theo entered the picture eight months before the fire. I knew the name before I knew who it belonged to.
She mentioned it once attached to a sentence about someone helping her with something professionally. And I filed it in the part of my mind where I was keeping other things I wasn't ready to examine. He was, I would eventually learn, someone she had met at an event. Someone who offered her a particular kind of attention that she had decided she was no longer getting at home. I don't know exactly what she told him about us.
I know what she told me that he was a friend, that she needed space to figure out what she wanted, that our marriage had become something she couldn't keep being inside. The morning of the fire was a Saturday. Ezra had been at the kitchen table working on a new sketch, something architectural he'd been planning for weeks. Natasha had been in the bedroom with the door closed, which had become standard. Around 2:00 in the afternoon, she went into the backyard, and that was when I smelled the smoke.
After Ezra went inside, I walked to the fire and looked at what was in it. Most of the bag was gone. The sketch pad was gone. The photograph was gone. When Ezra came back out, he was carrying a small duffel with whatever he'd grabbed.
He walked to where the fire was dying down and looked into the bin. There was one part of the bag that hadn't fully caught the bottom panel, thick canvas partially protected by the books that had burned faster. He reached in without flinching and pulled it out. He held it for a moment. It was the shape of the bottom of a bag, charred along the edges, still warm.
I said nothing. He said nothing. He put it in the duffel. We got in the car. I drove to a strip mall parking lot, fluorescent lights not attached to anything significant.
The kind of place where you can sit in a car and not be anywhere. Ezra sat in the passenger seat holding the duffel on his lap. I called my lawyer from the car while Ezra looked out the window. My lawyer's name was Reeves, and I told her the situation in under 4 minutes. She asked if I had documentation of joint ownership of the property.
I told her I had the deed on my phone. She asked about other shared assets. I went through them, the joint bank account, the investment account, two vehicles registered in both names. She told me there was a process called a marital asset preservation order, a freeze that could be applied for in cases where a spouse had demonstrated willingness to destroy shared property. She said the fire, if documented, would be relevant.
I told her I had neighbors with cameras, and I had Ezra, who had been standing 3 ft away. She said to call her in the morning. I said I would. I looked at Ezra. He was looking at a sign for a pizza place.
He asked if we could get pizza. I said yes. He said he wanted the one with the garlic bread crust. I said I remembered. We ate in the car with the windows down.
The sun was finishing going down over the strip mall. When he was done, Ezra put the rest in the box and looked out the window and said, "Is Tasha going to be in the house tonight? " I said yes. "Is it still our house? " I told him it was still our house technically, and that it would take some time to work through, but that we were not going to lose what was ours. He thought about this. Then he said, "The drawing of Mom is gone. " I said I knew.
He said I can make another one. I didn't answer that because I didn't have to. He knew what he was saying, and I knew what he was saying, and we both understood that the offer was more for me than for him. We checked into a hotel near his school so he wouldn't have to change his bus route. Two beds, a small table, a window that faced a parking structure.
The kind of place that becomes a temporary fact of your life and then becomes later a thing you remember as one of the nights you made it through. Ezra put the charred panel from his bag on the table by the window before he got into bed. I sat at that table after the lights were out in the glow from the parking structure through the curtain, and I looked at it. That was the night I stopped trying to save the marriage. The first 3 days in the hotel had a rhythm that neither of us chose, but that we fell into anyway, the way people find rhythms in temporary places because the alternative is acknowledging that the place is temporary.
Ezra went to school. I drove him each morning and picked him up each afternoon because the bus stop was two blocks from the house and I didn't want him walking past it until we had more clarity about what the house was going to mean for us going forward. He didn't ask to go past it. I worked from the hotel table during the days. My job at the insurance company had the advantage of being portable in a way that the current situation required and I was grateful for the structure of it.