Chapter 35: The Phone Call

Amazing how you can think you have some great plan, and you’re confidently reeling it in, but you have no awareness something’s sneaking up behind you in the boat, and suddenly everything skids sideways and you’re drowning instead of fishing, and as the murky lake water fills your lungs, your last thought as you dwindle out of existence… what the hell just happened…

A woman frantically rushes up the center aisle.

In addition to serving at Pastor Almost’s church, we have also taken on a side gig at a Lutheran church in town. They are in the midst of a search for a worship pastor and we have been hired interim to lead their Wednesday night contemporary service. We are rehearsing the evening’s litany of songs with their team when she reaches the front and tells DH he has a phone call in the church office. DH looks at me, totally bewildered. Who would even know we are here? Why wouldn’t they call his cell phone? Weird.

He exits for a couple of minutes, and I am chatting and goofing off with the worship team members, I have been enjoying this little gig, and it is interesting to me to see the differences in a Lutheran contemporary church as opposed to my usual AG setting. I was raised Catholic and Lutheranism to me is similar except less statues, saints, songs about Mary, and, of course, guilt. Yeahh, I know the doctrine goes deeper than that, but I’m writing this for entertainment and am under no obligation to explain transubstantiation or Purgatory. I’ll let some other author comb through these things and endlessly debate doctrine with those who are into that, I would rather swim through rusty needles, not my gig, no doctrinal emails, please.

DH rushes back in, and delivers five rather significant words.

“Our house is on fire.”

WHAT??!

And thank GOD we have our kids with us, we scoop them up and toss them in our relative cars, and do the fastest five-mile drive in the history of mankind, flying down the highway not giving any care whatsoever as to how many cops we may sail right past doing 90. I am trying to be positive and encouraging to my daughter, and minimizing the situation to myself, maybe it’s not that bad, maybe it’s just the garage, or a minor part of the kitchen, or just a small part of the house, maybe it was put out quickly…

But we see a pillar of black smoke billowing up into the sky before we even pull into our neighborhood…and the smell, oh my God the smell is not what you would expect…it’s a chemical smell, random whatever going up in a plume of toxic stench. Whatever the hell kind of chemistry happens when a house burns, it has a very distinctive odor I will never forget.

Our cul-de-sac is crammed with emergency vehicles, my daughter is crying now because it’s obvious to anyone with two eyes and half a brain that this is no minor kitchen oopsie fire and now she’s worried about the cat, and we jump out and run past squad cars and firetrucks to what’s left of our house.

It is the tail end of the fire. Smoke pours out underneath the eaves of the misshapen roof, there’s absolutely nothing but a burning heap where the attached garage is supposed to be, and we stare dumbly at the whole smoldering mess.

Now what?

The fire chief is talking to us, they have already contacted the Red Cross and they will be here soon.

Pastor Almost is quickly on the scene, and we are extremely grateful for the support, but honestly we are all just standing there watching the house smoldering as they tear down sections to get to the areas that are still burning.

And water… soooo much water. I never realized how much gets destroyed by water while putting out a fire. We watch massive amounts of water being dumped into our house. The fire department is amazing and manages to get in after the main blaze is out and cover the computers in the basement recording studio with a tarp, thus saving 20 years worth of recorded material. DH has been a recording engineer ever since college and has a massive library from a huge variety of bands and businesses, including my two albums and everything else I’ve ever recorded.

The fire chief informs us what should have been totally obvious, we absolutely will NOT be staying here, there is no power, it’s not safe, duh lady, this was a major house fire, shit’s gonna get weird for a while, buckle up.

My daughter finds the cat who miraculously escaped, we still have no idea how, nine lives, right? She stops crying. The Red Cross arrives and gives her a teddy bear. She goes back to play on the swingset and watch the firemen pull down the eaves, digging out hot spots. My son watches with us, being a bit older. Ridiculous thoughts race…how are we going to sleep here tonight? Isn’t the rain going to fall right into the house now? Unrealistic scenarios play through my head, we’re in denial as to the gravity of this situation and the state of the house.

A while later, could have been minutes or hours, time has lost all meaning…they finally have it completely out and we are allowed to briefly enter the shell that was once a house.

The garage is totally gone, even the concrete foundation has giant craters in it from the heat. Days later, the fire investigator will come and inform us that the fire started here, an electrical mishap evidenced by a pile of molten copper in the corner. We are asked repeatedly if there was some kind of charger plugged in, there was not, but this is how I find out chargers can sometimes start house fires, heyyy good to know since only the all of us have like thirty of them plugged in at any given moment.

The walls are still standing, but there are huge gaping holes in the roof where the fire burned through, and the ceiling is collapsed. We enter what was once the living room, now buried under a foot and a half of waterlogged burnt insulation. My beloved irreplaceable original model Charles Walter piano is destroyed. Our Ikea furniture looks interesting, the waterlogged pressboard expands and explodes, so the furniture looks like a larger caricature of itself. We now live in the Far Side. The bedrooms are on the opposite end and are less affected, and we are able to grab some smoke-stench clothing, though the fire chief wants us out quickly, it’s not considered very safe. The denial is weird, I’m still feeling like, okay, you mean for sure we aren’t staying here? Shouldn’t we just be camping out on the floor? We don’t know this yet, but we won’t be staying here for almost five months.

The Red Cross puts us up in a hotel for a few days, and we sit on the beds and talk endlessly to the insurance company, cancel appointments, and figure out what the hell we are going to do. The house is deemed a near total loss, and is unliveable. The insurance company juggles us to a different hotel for two weeks, and we are now living out of plastic bins.

All thoughts of escaping my marriage exit my mind. No freaking way will I toss a divorce on top of a house fire for my kids to sort out. The house is destroyed enough that we could have actually taken a check and walked away, but we both think this is too jarring for our son and daughter, and opt to rebuild, keeping the situation as stable as possible for them. The irony is, of course, this could have been the easiest divorce ever, split the check and be done, but the level of trauma to the kids…well, there’s just no way I could do that to them.

The adjuster comes and Monica the Zombie paws through the wreckage with her, there’s no power so it’s very dim, and it’s drizzling and dreary and very strangely raining inside the house, which made me feel like I’m in Silent Hill waiting to be the next victim. Very creepy feeling. You could film a thriller in this place right now. Perfect horror set.

After a few weeks in the hotel, we are displaced for four months in a rental, it is an insane flurry of builder calls and meetings, insurance calls, collecting receipts for everything… when you have a house fire, they want you to replace everything as quickly as possible. The house is gutted until all that remains is three exterior walls. No roof, no interior walls. In retrospect, we would have been much better off had we taken off of work for a good deal of the summer to figure this out, but we don’t have any experience with house fires, and keep working, while simultaneously redesigning and picking out everything for the entire house. The insurance company wants you to do all of this as quickly as possible, and we are under the gun, not only rebuilding but replacing every last thing inside, every fork, barrette, paperclip, towel, pencil. It’s four and a half months of insanity.

Our community, though, is wonderful! They take an offering at church, they take an offering at my workplace, random people send us money to help us out. People volunteer to help us put things back together. I am still moved to this day by the generosity and thoughtfulness of those around us while we were in the midst of this.

The builders are doing an amazing job as well. The house is coming back together beautifully.

But as the house is going up, I am starting to crumble…