Deep-Holes, by Alice Munroe

This was in the summer, and that fall there was a dramatic fire in Toronto. Sally sat in front of her television watching coverage of the fire for a while. It was in a district that she knew, or used to know, in the days when its nineteenth-century buildings were inhabited by hippies, with their tarot cards and beads and paper flowers the size of pumpkins. Later, the vegetarian restaurants had been transformed into expensive bistros and boutiques. Now a block of those nineteenth-century buildings was being wiped out, and the newsman was bemoaning this, speaking of the people who lived in old-fashioned apartments above the shops and had now lost their homes or were being dragged out of harm’s way onto the street.

He didn’t mention the landlords of the buildings, Sally thought, who were probably getting away with substandard wiring, as well as with epidemics of cockroaches, bedbugs, not to be complained about by the deluded or the fearful poor.

She sometimes felt Alex talking in her head these days, and that was surely what was happening now. She turned off the television.

No more than ten minutes later, the phone rang. It was Savanna.

“Mom. Have you got your TV on? Did you see?”

“You mean the fire? I did have it on, but I turned it off.”

“No. Did you see—I’m looking for him right now—I saw him not five minutes ago. . . . Mom, it’s Kent. Now I can’t find him. But I saw him.”

“Is he hurt? I’m turning it on now. Was he hurt?”

“No, he was helping. He was carrying one end of a stretcher. There was a body on it—I don’t know if it was dead or just hurt. But Kent. It was him. You could even see him limping. Have you got it on now?”

“Yes.”

“O.K. I’ll calm down. I bet he went back into the building.”

“But surely they wouldn’t allow—”

“He could be a doctor, for all we know. Oh, fuck, now they’re talking to that same old guy they talked to before—his family owned some business for a hundred years. Let’s hang up and just keep our eyes on the screen. He’s sure to come in range again.”

He didn’t. The footage began to repeat itself.

Savanna phoned back. “I’m going to get to the bottom of this. I know a guy that works on the news. I can get to see that shot again. We have to find out.”

Savanna had never known her brother very well—she had been nine when he left—so what was all the fuss about? Had her father’s death made her feel the need of family? She should marry soon, Sally thought. She should have children. But she had such a stubborn streak when she set her mind on something. Her father had told her when she was ten years old that she could gnaw an idea to the bone—she ought to be a lawyer. And, from then on, that was what she had said she would be.