It was nothing compared to standing in her driveway and seeing nothing but her blackened washer and dryer shells, twisted metal from her stove vent hood, and half her chimney standing, the top part in a heap of brick where the hearth used to be. She remembered hanging stockings from the thick wood mantel every Christmas and dashed a tear from her cheek with her finger.
The loss felt like a sledgehammer to what was left of her broken heart.
The boys’ photo albums from birth to now, gone. She had the digital photos stored in the cloud, but she’d painstakingly put the albums together with other mementos. The hospital bands they wore when they were born. The ticket stubs from their first movie. The armbands from their first visit to the zoo. The pictures they colored on their first day of preschool. The colored and stained kids’ menu from breakfast with Mickey at Disneyland. The prayer card from their father’s funeral.
It killed her when they asked if all their father’s things were gone. She’d promised them she’d find everything she could.
She thought of the cuff links he wore at their wedding. She’d hoped that one day the boys would wear them when they married the person of their dreams. She’d kept his golf clubs, despite how many times she’d resented him taking off for eighteen holes of solitude and fun when she barely got an hour to herself each day. But she’d hoped her boys would give the sport a try and find some commonality with their father. She pictured them standing on the course and taking a moment to think about him every time they played.
David died so young. It wouldn’t be long before the boys lost the sharpness of their memories of him. She feared Oliver would forget him altogether.
She’d kept as much as she could of David in the house to remind them, despite how those reminders triggered her resentments and anger.
Sierra reminded herself that she didn’t need the things in the house to remember all they’d shared under that roof. The good times. The bad. She still carried them with her.
David’s sudden death left her the keeper of his memory for the boys. She tried to keep him alive for them, but the fire took everything of his, all the mementos the boys needed to help them remember their father.
His stuff may be gone, but he’d left her with suspicions and doubts about the many months leading up to his death. Those didn’t burn up in the fire. But anything that might have revealed the truth was gone.
Sierra didn’t know if she could live without knowing, but what choice did she have now?
The fire had wiped the slate clean of every possession and tie to the past. She had to rebuild from the ground up.
No home. No job. A dwindling savings account.
It had taken hours to complete her claim with the insurance company, but a payout was weeks if not months away.
Rebuilding could take years with all the government red tape. But the cost of rebuilding . . . The insurance probably wouldn’t cover it.
Added to her worries, she no longer had an income. The property management company she worked for had burned down, too, along with many of the properties they oversaw.
She faced a long journey ahead of her to figure out what to do with the home she no longer felt a connection to.
It felt like one more thing David had left for her to deal with on her own.
What am I doing here?
There’s nothing left.
But she had promised the boys she’d take back anything she could salvage. She hoped to find at least one thing for each of them. The stuffed fish David won Oliver at the fair knocking down milk jugs with a baseball wasn’t even worth consideration. Neither was Danny’s science fair certificate he was so proud of winning. The memory would have to be enough for both of them. But maybe something survived.
She walked toward the property site and slid the respirator mask she’d been given over her head to cover her nose and mouth. She didn’t want to breathe in all the soot, ash, and toxic chemicals from everything that had burned and melted.
With the layout of the house ahead of her obscured by debris and simply unrecognizable without the walls defining the space, she started at the cement porch steps that led to where her door used to be. She stepped up to what used to be the entry and surveyed the destruction with a lump in her throat, tears in her eyes, and a very heavy heart.
Nothing in the living room, kitchen, dining room, or bathrooms was worth sorting through all the wreckage to find. She visualized the house and made her way to where the boys’ rooms were located, her rubber boots crunching over the remains of what used to be their home.
She tried not to think too hard about all they’d lost. Dishes, furniture, TVs, computers, clothes—all of it could be replaced, she reminded herself. That didn’t help ease the ache in her chest or the wanting to have it all back. The baby clothes she’d saved. The crib she’d stored in the garage just in case one day they had another baby.
Not possible for them now.
But she’d liked knowing it was there if she needed it.
Just like her grandmother’s quilt wrapped in tissue and stored in a box in the hall linen closet.
With the destruction spread out before her, it seemed ridiculous to even think something survived the flames and heat.
Sierra found what she thought was Danny’s room and where his desk and bookshelf used to stand. She pulled on thick work gloves and dug into the debris, hoping to find something recognizable. Ten minutes in, her fingers brushed something hard. She picked up the disk and stared at it, not believing her eyes. The outside of the pocket watch had blackened, but when she opened it, the inside wasn’t that bad off. The glass had cracked and the clock mechanism didn’t work, but Danny would love to have it, anyway. She and David bought it for him at some downtown antique shop on their vacation up to Jamestown where they took the kids gold panning in an old abandoned ghost town turned into a tourist attraction. The kids had even made candles.
The memory along with finding the pocket watch eased her heart a bit. She had something to give to Danny besides the metal frame of what might be a Ford Mustang Hot Wheel with no tires and the paint melted completely away.
She spent ten more minutes rummaging through what was left of Danny’s room before working on Oliver’s space. She didn’t find much until she made it to where his toy box had sat below his window. There, she found a treasure that brought tears to her eyes. His marble collection had survived inside a tin that had once held Hershey’s chocolate they’d bought at the chocolate factory they’d toured in the Central Valley.
Oliver would be so happy.
She lifted a half-burnt board and found two dirty but perfectly intact plastic dinosaurs. How they didn’t melt escaped her, but she’d take the little guys back to Oliver. The mound of burnt plastic ten inches away had to be the bin that held all the others. She didn’t even bother trying to pull it apart to see if anything in the middle survived. She just moved on, brushing things this way and that hoping something else caught her eye.
Even though her thighs and ankles hurt from crouching, she moved on to her bedroom, strategic in where she looked. She started where she thought the closet used to be, hoping that even if her wooden jewelry box hadn’t survived, some of her jewelry had, especially the pieces she’d put into a metal lockbox.
Metal hangers told Sierra she was in the right place. But she didn’t find anything resembling the few pieces of jewelry she owned until she started backing up toward where the bed used to be. Her foot kicked something and the metallic thump of it hitting something else made her heart pound and hope rise. She shoved debris aside to get to the blackened rectangle with the lock still intact. She hugged the box to her chest and heard several things inside rattle. She didn’t have the key to open it, but with some tools, she hoped to bust it open and find her and David’s wedding rings, along with her pair of diamond studs, and a couple other rings and a diamond heart pendant David gave her their first Christmas as a married couple.