Who by Fire

Who by Fire:Chapter 44 (Audio and prose)

Note: Update: The final chapter followed by Acknowledgements

You can start reading here or anywhere, then go back. See Table of Contents. Come in the middle? Robert is the narrator who discovers after his wife Lena has died that she had a lover, Isaac. Evan is Isaac’s wife. Robert is on a search for how he lost Lena: He’s creating the story through memory, invention and a search for the truth and his role in what happened—and by stalking Isaac.

Who by Fire

I had sat next to her while she slept, while she drifted into the unconscious. I sat and waited for her to wake, to speak to me in those eloquent sentences of her dreams. I thought her breathing was shallow because she slept so deeply and then it was not present.

I have come to Iowa on the anniversary of her death.

My father sits in a wheelchair, placed near the fire I built once we’d gotten to this spot in the Loess hills that Lena loved, where she could see the patchwork of farms below, what she called an ocean of land.

I ask him, “When does grass turn to milk?”

He doesn’t answer. His eyes tear.

The only times before I’d ever seen tears in my father’s eyes were in front of the P-51 and at the bin burn.

I say to my father, “Fire.”

“Yes,” he says.

The controlled fire brings me here, through the fire, to this story that has raveled me.

She comes to me like sky after fire. I hold the urn in one hand.

She had dreamt and now I dream her dream: The water coming—the sea so high that she is afraid. It isn’t the clear water of her past dreams of sea, but the murky green Atlantic Ocean she’d seen as a child at the seashore in Ocean City, Maryland, with her parents. The sea that enters the Baltimore Harbor from the Chesapeake Bay that calls up the ocean to the edge of the city where she grew up, the sea that rises without a storm before her inexorably like a paradox, the water above the harbor’s piers and levies.

Now she hears the piano, my hands on the keys. She hears Chopin’s Waltz in A minor, the Grand Valse. She does not hear “hurry” in my hands as I move through the opening in the minor key, through the allegro in the major key. She hears me move through the close into the minor key that grieves. She hears the bell-like quality when the keys are struck from the heart. She hears me play the Valse Brillante. She knows I have risen over the story of the piece as if I began it as a young man and end it as an old man.

And she is not afraid.▵

Table of Contents

Coming next: Acknowledgements

Only Connect, all sections, and this serial novel come from my heart and soul—and ten years of research. I know the saying ‘time is money’: I couldn’t help but pursue this story. If you have already gone paid, my heart goes out to you with my thanks.

Love,