Total Loss: A Lifetime Erased by Fire

The fire on Isherwood Street began with an explosion. Residents of the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, DC, reported their windowpanes rattling and bed frames shaking from the blast. Cars stopped on the roads. A driver inspected his tires fearing one had inexplicably burst. Another man believed he’d overheard a sonic boom from nearby Andrews military base. But the blast site was far less conspicuous: a four-condo-unit row house whose front door now lay like shrapnel, flung a hundred feet from its original threshold. Soon, sirens crescendoed. A wild, unfurling bloom of light and heat ravaged the building. Neighbors filtered out of their homes and onto Isherwood, searching for answers, as fleets of firemen, detectives, gawkers, and news crews swarmed the scene.

I was not there to see, but when my sister, Laurie, arrived, she says she parked her car askew in the middle of the street and left the keys in the ignition. I imagine her wandering into the crowd with a sleepwalker’s gait, determined but imprecise. “I live here,” she told a police officer, who permitted her beyond the yellow tape. There, she stood before the home she owned, watching the whole thing burn to the ground.

In unit 202, Laurie’s cat, Lila, and dog, Smalls, were trapped, and could not be saved. Nor could 201’s Tenley, a sweet, lumbering Great Dane. All but one of Laurie’s neighboring condo owners could be accounted for: the man in 101, a seemingly docile single fellow known fondly in the area as an animal lover. A few bystanders claimed to have seen him enter the building an hour before the explosion.

When she could muster the words, Laurie spoke with me on the phone. By then, the flames had subsided, revealing the building’s stark, skeletal foundation. Only its brick façade remained. Smoke-rimmed windows framed squares of bright blue sky where curtains and Roman blinds once obscured private lives. Her voice sounded both fiercely present and far away. “It’s all gone,” she repeated over and over. “It’s all gone.”

I boarded a train for DC that night. Tall men in suits crowded the dining-car tables, presumably en route from New York’s Penn Station to their homes in the suburbs. They recapped the day’s closed deals and stock turns, swirled their plastic cups of Scotch on the rocks—details so ordinary as to seem surreal or unwittingly callous, now that all my sister’s worldly possessions had been obliterated. At thirty-six, Laurie purchased her two-bedroom condo after a years-long search for the soundest possible investment and savviest use of her life’s savings. Laurie liked to describe herself as “risk averse.” Government worker, retirement planner, donner of bike helmets, buckler of seat belts. At twenty-nine, I worked in a bar, and had lofty artistic ambitions, with little more to my name than a pittance-like low-interest savings account, perma-renting for the foreseeable future. And yet, my cats were alive, my favorite vintage dress hung safely in my closet.

I thought of my mother, whom we called Umma. Before I left New York for DC, she had called to coordinate travel. She’d arrive from Miami at midnight, a half hour ahead of me.

“Are you bringing anything?” I’d asked. “I should bring things…”

We both paused, the enormity of Laurie’s predicament racking into focus. She would need everything again. But what now? Snacks? Toiletries? Alcohol?

Then, my mother shouted, “Panties!”

“What?”

“Panties!” she said. “She does not have panties with her, I am sure! Please bring panties!”

I did not like hearing my mother say the word “panties.” More disturbing, though, was the utter delirium in her voice, which rattled in a fragile, desperate vibrato. Laurie had nearly worked from home that day. She was alive.

So, I bought new underwear, and stuffed those into a suitcase of goods that seemed both essential and useless: a split of red wine, sneakers, a loofah...