Regret is the Punishment novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Four Minutes
Sue sits nose to nose with her lover on a one-lane road while a fire truck leans on its horn behind her, then runs home to a burning house and sees who is driving the truck.
Cyril's truck sat nose to nose with my sedan, and neither of us was going to back up.
Harbor Lane is one car wide.
Parked boats line both sides of it, so there is nowhere to pull over.
"Say it again," he said through his open window. "Say you're not doing this."
"I'm ending it, Cyril."
"Then end it with me standing here."
I gripped the steering wheel with both hands.
I had come down to his boat shed to say four sentences.
I had practiced them in the shower.
I had said two of them before he walked out and parked his truck in front of mine.
My phone buzzed on the passenger seat.
It was the number of our neighbors at the bottom of the lane.
I let it go to voicemail.
Cyril's text came through right after.
"Do not move. Let them honk. You are not going home to him tonight."
I looked up and he was holding his phone out the window, smiling.
That smile used to make my stomach drop in a good way.
Now it made me feel sick.
Behind me, a horn blasted.
It was the deep, ugly blare of something much bigger than a car.
I glanced in the mirror.
All I could see was a red grille and white light flashing off the glass.
A fire engine.
"Cyril, move your truck."
"You move yours."
The horn blared again, three long blasts.
A man was shouting from the cab, but I couldn't hear the words over the engine.
"Please," I said. "They have to get through."
"Then tell me you're leaving him."
"I can't say that."
"Then we wait."
My phone buzzed again.
It was our neighbors again.
I picked it up, and my thumb hovered over the green button.
If I answered, I would have to say out loud what I was doing here.
I put it face down on the seat.
The horn went on and on.
Somewhere above the boat masts, a gray line was climbing into the sky.
I noticed it.
Smoke.
The phone buzzed a third time, a fourth, a fifth.
"Cyril, there's a fire. Look at the sky."
He looked.
He didn't say anything for a second.
Then he said, "It's not on this street."
"Stay put," he added.
I put the car in reverse.
I should have done it at the first horn.
I should have done it before I ever came down this lane.
The sedan scraped a trailer hitch and bounced up onto the gravel shoulder.
There was still no room, so I shoved the passenger side into a rowboat and heard the plastic crack.
The engine behind me surged forward the instant I cleared a gap.
It roared past, so close the wind rocked my car.
I saw the number on its side.
Engine 4.
I had seen that number on my husband's jacket every day for nine years.
My whole body went cold.
I was out of the car before I knew I'd opened the door.
I ran.
The lane runs a quarter mile downhill, and I ran all of it in the flats I wore to the office.
The smoke was black now.
It rolled over the roofs of the neighbors' houses and the oak in front of ours.
Over our house.
Our house, with the porch swing Jerome built and the blue door I painted last spring.
The upstairs windows were orange.
Darla's window was the one on the left.
"Darla!"
I couldn't tell if I screamed it or only thought it.
Two firefighters were dragging a hose across the lawn.
My mother-in-law Wanda stood in the street in her socks, with her hands pressed to her mouth.
She turned and saw me.
I have never seen anyone look at me like that.
"Where were you, Sue?" she said. "Where were you?"
I didn't answer her.
A man in full gear went through the front door without a mask on his face, just a hood and a helmet.
I knew the way he moved.
I knew the set of his shoulders and the hitch in his left stride from an old ladder fall.
I didn't need to see his face.
But I needed it to be a mistake.
I stood on the lawn and watched the door.
It felt like an hour.
The windows upstairs went white with smoke.
Then he came back out.
He was carrying something small wrapped in a gray blanket.
He knelt on the grass and put his mouth to it, and the other firefighters closed in around him.
One of them pulled the helmet off his head.
Jerome looked up from the grass, and his eyes found mine over the heads of his crew.
He had been behind my car.
He had leaned on the horn and shouted at the selfish stranger who wouldn't move.
I watched him understand it was me.
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