Please Ignore Vera Dietz(54)
Author: A.S. King

When the car wash started, I thought I’d have a minute to lose myself in the loud darkness of it all. I thought I’d have a minute to work it all out—the right things to do—but I just sat and stared. I thought about those poor animals—were they going to be okay? I thought about Jenny, and wondered was she going to burn up in there, too? What happened to her to make her so crazy? Could Charlie breaking up with her really make her this mad?

As the auto wash soaped and rinsed the car, the thoughts continued. What would happen to Charlie? Would he go to jail? Would he be blamed for Jenny’s death? And what about the people in the mall? How many would die? Would he be blamed for that, too? If I told the truth, would anyone believe me? Why was I in this position anyway? How did I, after a lifetime of being safe and reasonable, end up here?

When the unit switched off, I drove out into the lot and opened my window again to the sounds of chaos unfolding down at the Pagoda Mall, and I made my choice. Charlie Kahn had screwed me over enough. I would never trust him again, and I would forget this night had ever happened. I would pretend that I was just out buying school supplies. When the story came out and he got carted off to jail for life, I wouldn’t even wave. I was done.

The clock read 7:22. Suddenly the biggest thing on my mind was how I’d lied to Dad. I was worried that if I came home with no supplies, he’d think I was sneaking around doing something bad. So I drove to a completely different mall two miles in the opposite direction from the mall that was presently on fire. Ten minutes later, I was in line at Kmart, buying three spiral notebooks, a new calculator, a pack of unsharpened pencils, and a pack of Skittles. I felt people looking at me. I think I smelled like gas.

When I got home, it was past eight and Dad was reading in the den. I went inside and straight upstairs and took a shower. When the hot water hit my hair, I smelled the gas again. I said good night to Dad from the steps and I turned off the upstairs hall light and got into my bed and under the covers. I was still in complete shock. I tasted that weird metallic adrenaline in my mouth and my skin felt cold. I listened to the frogs and the crickets and the cicadas. I blocked out two overwhelming thoughts in my head—twelve-year-old Vera talking about the suffering animals and Charlie saying, “I’m going to leave you something”—and I tried to think about something positive. Senior year. My cool job. My bright future. An hour later, I was thinking about how there was no way I would ever fall asleep … when I fell asleep.

After a restless night of helpless-animal dreams, I woke up and went downstairs to find Dad crying on the couch. I’d never seen him cry before, not even when Mom left, so this was a big deal. He told me Charlie was dead. I didn’t understand. How did this happen? How could Charlie be dead?

“I didn’t get any details yet, Veer. Mrs. Kahn just told me he passed away last night sometime.”

I was still so numb from the night before, I found it hard to even fathom the fact of it. Charlie—dead. The worst part was, I couldn’t cry. As if I believed all the vowing and promising I’d done the night before never to care about Charlie Kahn again, I just couldn’t cry.

And then, Dad told me about the fire at the Pagoda Mall. I acted shocked. He showed me the newspaper article, and I was happy to learn that no one was dead or injured, aside from the animals (though many survived, including the nasty gray parrot and a lot of the adoption center animals, thanks to the sprinkler system and the fire-retaining walls between the pet areas).

As I sat pretending to read the story while Dad watched me, my mind wandered. Now I knew that Jenny Flick was not dead. But I knew that Charlie was. I just couldn’t understand this. Even if I said something right then about everything I knew, the wrong person had died and the wrong person had lived. I couldn’t help but feel like I’d been so busy arguing with twelve-year-old Vera about saving the animals that I overlooked that I could have saved human beings. Or—maybe just one human being.

Dad and I sat together for quite some time on the couch. We didn’t say anything. A few times, Dad reached out and held my hand. It seemed harder on him then than it was on me, and he told me, “I just can’t imagine what it must be like to lose a child. Please, Vera, be careful.” We each took a shower and tried to eat breakfast, but neither of us could swallow anything. I called off work for the day, and Dad canceled the only appointment he had, which was for a haircut.

We went over to the Kahns’ to offer our sympathy. They didn’t really make eye contact, and after ten minutes of saying we were sorry and telling them we were there if they needed us, we went back home. Dad made a big pot of chili for them while I took a walk.

I went to the pagoda first, but I couldn’t fly airplanes or even sit on the rocks because it’d been ruined by the Detentionheads. I wanted to walk to the Master Oak, but that was ruined, too, with Bill Corso’s big, ugly initials. The only place to go was the tree house, which was worse than either of the others, but something was telling me I had to go, so I did.

I didn’t go inside. I just sat on the octagonal deck, with my legs swinging over the edge. I read the old bumper sticker out loud. “The more I know people, the more I love my dog.” I finally cried.

They’d found him on the front lawn. They said he was probably pushed from a car. He’d landed folded into himself, so that when Mr. Kahn came out to go to work at 6:00, he saw a mystery lump in the front yard until he got close enough to see Charlie’s shoes. The ambulance didn’t put its lights or siren on. Dad and I slept through the whole thing, which was probably for the best. Nobody knew anything for sure yet, but it looked like Charlie might have died from alcohol poisoning or asphyxiating on his own vomit. His blood alcohol level was really high, and it looked like he was involved somehow with the fire at the Pagoda Mall. That’s what the Kahns told us. As they said these things, I pretended I wasn’t hearing them. My body and brain had gone into shock overdrive, where nothing made much sense. How was this happening? How could it be possible that after all that, Charlie was dead and Jenny Flick was still alive?

The Pagoda Mall closed until Halloween, when they opened a new, improved Zimmerman’s Pet Store. Before then, the newspaper ran a few articles about the fire, with details about how the deceased Charlie’s Zippo lighter was found at the scene. Stories went around town about how Jenny had broken up with him and he was so angry, he burned down the store to kill her. People said, “Thank God it wasn’t the school he burned down,” or “That boy was trouble from the start.” The Kahns had to go through a series of police interviews and in the end, no one went to jail. But no one knew the truth, either.