recently, in a tragedy almost too giant for my young mind to take in, one of my
fifth-grade classmates—a boy with a sweet face and a tall Afro named Lester
McCullom, who lived around the corner from us in a town house on Seventy-
Fourth Street—had died in a fire that also killed his brother and sister, the three
of them trapped by flames in bedrooms upstairs.
Theirs was the first wake I ever attended: every kid in the neighborhood
sobbing at the funeral parlor as a Jackson 5 album played softly in the
background; the adults stunned into silence, no prayer or platitude capable of
filling the void. There were three closed caskets at the front of the room, each
one with a framed photograph of a smiling child on its lid. Mrs. McCullom, who
with her husband had managed to survive the fire by jumping out a window, sat
before them, so slumped and broken that it hurt to look in her direction.
For days afterward, the skeleton of the McCulloms’ burned-out town house
continued to hiss and cave in on itself, dying far more slowly than its young
occupants had. The smell of smoke lingered heavily in the neighborhood.
As time passed, Craig’s anxieties only grew. At school, we’d been put
through the paces of teacher-led evacuation drills, dutifully enduring lectures on
how to stop, drop, and roll. And as a result, Craig decided that we needed to step
it up on safety at home, electing himself the family fire marshal, with me as his
lieutenant, ready to clear exit pathways during drills or boss around our parents as
needed. We weren’t so much convinced we’d have a fire as we were fixated on
being ready for one. Preparation mattered. Our family was not just punctual; we
arrived early to everything, knowing that it made my dad less vulnerable, sparing
him from having to worry about finding a parking spot that didn’t require him to
walk a long way or an accessible seat in the bleachers at one of Craig’s basketball
games. The lesson being that in life you control what you can.
To this end, as kids, we ran through our escape-route possibilities, trying to
guess whether we could jump from a window to the oak tree in front of the
house or to a neighbor’s rooftop in the event of a fire. We imagined what would
happen if a grease fire broke out in the kitchen, or if an electrical fire started in
the basement, or if lightning struck from above. Craig and I had little concern
about our mom in an emergency. She was small and agile and one of those
people who, if her adrenaline got going, could probably bench-press a car off a
baby. What was harder to talk about was Dad’s disability—the obvious but
unstated truth that he couldn’t readily leap from a window like the rest of us, and
it had been years since we’d seen him run.