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Inescapable by Ann P. Murray

My younger brother had lived in the house since he was eight, first with his five siblings, and as they married off one by one, he lived with my parents, then my father, and finally alone. It was a big house, three stories, six bedrooms, giant wooden beams in the living room, a turning staircase you could hoot down to a sister from the third floor to the first, and a garden filled with roses, lilies of the valley, and a real, brick barbecue. It had closets under the eaves for us to play Nancy Drew when we were younger, and when we grew older, acoustics that allowed us to sing out Beatles records at the top of our lungs. Showers, weddings, graduations, christenings, holidays – their memories papered the walls and beckoned from the rooms.

When my father died, Tommy decided to stay. A typical bachelor, he decorated in his own fashion and to his siblings’ frustration with extra computers, packing boxes from stereo equipment scattered about, and numerous but unnecessary state-of-the-art gadgets. Again typically, he gave the house only cursory housekeeping attention, causing me to dub it the Munster House. Still, we all visited, reminisced, and found comfort in our childhood home.

That night in February 1996, temperatures lingered well below freezing, just a week or so after the blizzard which dropped some 30 inches of snow in the area. Tom proudly told me the day before that he had shoveled off the last remnants of ice and snow from his driveway. At 10:00, there were no signs of the events about to occur. Our neighbors drove up their driveway about 10:10, and from inside their bright, warm kitchen they happened to glance across the driveway toward our house. The downstairs was dark and silent. As they put away their belongings, they were startled by a tremendous blast coming from our home. They looked out again, and to their horror saw our kitchen windows had blown out, and flames were leaping from them.

I imagine Tommy was asleep at the time, tired from an early, busy day. He directed computer systems for a large center city corporation and was a natural in the technology so to speak, having learned about computers before colleges offered courses in the field. His knowledge was always attained through self-inspiration, even in childhood, whether in astronomy, dinosaurs, music, James Bond, the Bible, or most recently, the Dead Sea scrolls. Throughout his life he had been a resource of enriching but often unsolicited facts in many subjects. In third grade he raised his hand to be called upon during a telling of the story of Christ’s birth. When the nun said, “Yes, Thomas,” he stood and carefully explained how the star of Bethlehem was actually misrepresented astronomically. He patiently explained its scientific and apparently non-Biblical meaning. At the dinner table that night, he told this story, and the family was aghast at the little heretic spouting off, but my father calmly asked what the nun had said when Tommy finished. My brother looked down at his dinner, took another forkful, and, nonplussed, replied, “She said, ‘Sit down, Thomas!’”

While he could have worked a regular nine to five schedule, true to his somewhat eccentric nature, he chose to work his hours from about 5:00 A.M. to about 3:00 – no traffic, you see. His normal pattern was to come home early, eat dinner, and retire to his room to tinker with his beloved computers. By 10:00 that night, I am sure he slept.

He usually slept soundly. As a kid, I loved when my mother would send me to awaken him. I delighted in yelling his name once or twice, sort of like a police officer who calls out “Stop!” twice before he shoots. Then I would grab him under both arms and stand him up. Gleefully, I watched his rubberized legs trying to make contact with the floor while his body was still in the REM sleep cycle. Oh the perverse pleasures of childhood!

Probably that night in his sleep he felt the encroaching warmth slowly enveloping him, but my guess was that the blast was his first inkling of a problem. I imagine the scenario thus: He sat bolt upright in his bed, no doubt inhaling some smoke. Later I could see one side of the mattress had been more protected from the soot, outlining a spot where he had lain. He then threw back his covers and headed for the bedroom door. As children, he and my younger sister had often gone over their fire escape route – go out across the wide square second floor hallway, through the bathroom window onto the kitchen roof, and then take a jump of about nine feet into the back garden. His heart must have been pounding as he began his escape, and in his excitement and the darkness from the smoke, he banged his right forehead against the half-opened door. Later, a bruise stood as proof of his collision. As he entered the hallway, he had to have been amazed at the forces of the nature of fire. The fire chief later explained that during a fire, a tornado emanates from the flame-fed winds, and this whirlwind spiraled up the turning, twisting stairway we so often played on as kids. Loose papers and light objects were caught up in the funnel and tossed about in chaos. Like any tornado, it was accompanied by a thunderous, freight train sound. Despite his dire circumstances, the scientist in him surely must have paused in awe of the mighty force he encountered. I can almost guess his stunned thought; “This is unbelievable!” However, a glance toward the bathroom escape route revealed a sheet of flames spreading from the kitchen below, which had been the first area to be engulfed. His escape route was blocked.

Here I often compose a different ending for myself. For months later I would go over this ending in the darkness of night when I could not sleep. In this ending, unlike the ordinary mortal, Tommy was not dazed and disoriented from the smoke he was surely inhaling, so he thought clearly as his hero from his teenaged days, James Bond, would have done. He sized up the situation, returned to his room, and upon realizing his plight and the short time span he had to work in, picked up his computer, threw it through the bedroom window, and jumped out two stories to the front lawn. There relieved neighbors who had been frantically screaming his name, entreating him to get out, surrounded him, protecting him from the icy cold as they awaited the ambulance. The firemen tell us a jump like that can break one’s legs, but, as they pointed out, that’s better than dying in the fire, right?

But no matter how many times I go over that ending, it never will be true. The reality is that if he tried to get back to his room, we will never know. However, had he, he would then as likely as not have recalled that he recently caulked shut his bedroom’s old, drafty windows to keep out the cold. Disoriented from smoke, as ordinary mortals really are, he probably was at first indecisive but then followed the childhood-rehearsed drill to the bathroom exit. Of course, he could not jump through the flames in the bathroom. The window of opportunity when caught in a fire is barely minutes, and there is no room for a mistake. He turned to leave the bathroom, took a few steps, then fell down and back on the bathroom floor. It was there the firemen found his body.

The next day I stood with the fire chief in the dining room. The windows of the house for the most part had been blown out, and the temperature inside the house was bitter cold. I shivered as he gathered data from me. I looked past him into the charred living room and noticed a palm print against the sloped ceiling of the stairwell as it made a turn. I pointed it out, and together the fireman and I gazed at the handprint, trying to understand. Finally I realized that one of the two firemen who carried him out had steadied himself there for the turn by putting one hand up against the sloped ceiling. Overcome momentarily by a knife-like pain from the stark reality of that image, I turned away to shield myself from the reality of what had occurred. My glance rested on the starting point of the fire in the dining room – a space heater which ignited a buffet. The fire chief continued to talk, but my mind wandered as I saw myself standing in that same spot years earlier when Tommy was eight and I was fourteen. We were going to Sunday mass, and my job each week was to wet and comb his hair in a pompadour, the style of the day. He would screw up his face and cover his eyes with his hands as I worked on him. He combined patience, forbearance, and resignation to boot, just waiting for the inevitable and inescapable.

For weeks after the fire, I would torture myself with images I could not erase. The fire department said the heat had gone up to 1000 degrees, and according the hospital, my brother had a huge blister on the back of his head to attest to his time on the baking, tiled bathroom floor. Later, occasionally, when I was cooking and I reached into the oven, I would allow my hand to linger, as if to inflict some of his pain on myself. At night I would stumble around in the dark when I awoke, testing to see how I would have handled his circumstances as he tried to find an exit. In my darkest moments I would blame him for not getting out.

I then thought again of how he had fussed as a little boy when I combed his hair but had learned to tolerate what he could not change. Now I must do the same.