The Quarterback Next Door novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Next Door

The Hollander house burns; Cade runs in for the beagle and comes out burned; Joanne says he stays in Demi's room.

"Call 911," Cade said.

He said it so calmly that for a second I just stared at him.

Then my hands started moving.

I grabbed my phone off the counter and pushed through the screen door onto the back porch.

The fire was bigger from out here.

It had climbed the side of the Hollanders' garage and found the old wooden siding.

It rolled up toward the roof with a sound.

"911, what's your emergency?"

"There's a house fire," I said.

"Fourteen Alder Street, Brantley, and it's the house next to mine, number sixteen."

"It's spreading to the roof."

"Is anyone inside?"

I turned.

Cade was already off our porch and running across the side yard.

"Cade!"

He didn't slow down.

"Ma'am, is anyone inside the house?"

"I don't know," I said, and my voice came out thin.

"His dog."

"His dog might be."

"Stay where you are, ma'am. Units are on the way."

I dropped the phone in my pocket with the call still open.

I did not stay where I was.

I ran after him with my bare feet slapping the cold grass.

The heat hit me ten feet from the house, a dry slap against my face.

The front door stood open.

Cade had kicked it, or it had burst, and gray smoke poured out over the porch light.

He stood in the doorway with his arm over his mouth.

"Come on, buddy!" he yelled.

Nothing answered.

"Cade, no!"

I got my fingers into the back of his jacket.

He tried to pull away.

"He sleeps in the kitchen."

"The firefighters will get him."

"They're six minutes out. He'll be dead in two."

He turned his face to me, and his eyes were wet from the smoke and something else.

"He was my mom's dog," he said.

"She left him with me."

"Demi, let go."

I held on for another second.

I knew that look.

It was the same face he'd worn when he was eleven, standing on this lawn with his father's hand on his shoulder, watching a car pull away from the curb for the last time.

I let go.

"Stay low," I said.

"Two minutes. Then I'm calling the firefighters in myself."

He nodded once and disappeared into the smoke.

I counted.

I stood on the Hollanders' lawn with my fists pressed to my stomach and counted out loud, because counting was the only thing I could do.

At forty, the front windows began to glow.

At sixty, glass cracked somewhere inside, a sharp bright sound.

At seventy-five, I started to scream his name.

"Cade! Cade!"

Neighbors came out in their pajamas.

A man from across the street shouted something about a hose.

A woman grabbed my shoulders and said "Honey, honey, stay back," and I shook her off.

At ninety, the smoke at the door thinned for a second.

A shape came through it, bent over, coughing.

Cade fell down the porch steps onto one knee.

He had something wrapped in his jacket, and the something was wriggling.

The beagle's head popped out and sneezed.

I laughed once, a wet, awful sound, and then I was on my knees beside them with my hands on his face.

"You idiot," I said.

"You complete and utter idiot."

"I got him," Cade croaked.

He tried to hand me the dog, and his palms were red and shiny.

Blisters were already rising on both of them.

"Your hands."

"It's fine."

"It is not fine, Cade."

"I grabbed the door handle on the way out," he said, as if that explained it.

"It was hot."

The fire trucks came around the corner with their sirens wailing, and blue and red light washed over his face.

The firefighters took over fast.

One of them led Cade to the back of an ambulance, and another knelt to look at the dog.

I stood on the grass in my socks and watched the roof of the house he had grown up in collapse in on itself.

It took less than ten minutes.

When it was over, the garage was a black frame and the kitchen was open to the sky.

The paramedic wrapped Cade's hands in white gauze up to the wrists.

I sat beside him on the bumper with the beagle in my lap.

We didn't talk.

At some point my shoulder ended up against his, and neither of us moved it.

"Dad's in Nevada," he said finally.

"I called him. He's turning around, but it's two days."

"He left the work light on in the garage this morning. He told me twice to turn it off, and I forgot."

"It's not your fault."

"I forgot."

"Cade."

I turned to face him.

"It is not your fault."

His chin trembled, once.

A car pulled up behind the ambulance, a gray sedan with its headlights still on and the driver's door already open.

My mother got out in her blue scrubs, her ID badge swinging, her hair half out of its clip.

She had come straight from the hospital.

Someone must have called her.

She looked at the ruined house, and at me in my socks, and at the boy beside me with white bandages to his elbows.

Then she crossed the lawn, put one hand on the back of his head, and kissed his hair.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay, baby. You're coming home with us."

"Mrs. Eastwick, I can't."

"I have a spare room."

She looked at me, and I looked at her.

"No, I don't," my mother corrected herself.

"I have an attic."

"Demi, you're sharing."

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