Fire Exit

On one particularly bad day, Louise does not recognize Charles. Having recently deduced that her neighbor might be fleecing her out of small amounts of money, Charles is especially worried about his mother, and he feels her decline particularly acutely. Although she does not know that he is her son, she asks if they are going out to eat. He decides that it would do her good to get out of the house and agrees to take her to a restaurant that, although long closed, she remembers vividly. On the way there, she grows even more confused and becomes agitated. She screams at Charles, not understanding who he is, and tries to jump out of the moving vehicle. He brings her home and waits until she has calmed down to help her out of the truck. On her way inside, she asks him to ask her son (she still does not recognize Charles) why Charles didn’t accompany Fredrick on the day he died. She notes that Fredrick’s death was a terrible shock to Charles and that it caused him to begin drinking. Charles thinks about his family history and realizes that someday when he tells it to Elizabeth, he will need to include everything, even the story of Fredrick’s death.

On the day Fredrick died, Charles declined to accompany him out hunting because he knew that Mary was in the hospital giving birth to Elizabeth. He was waiting, watching her house, and hoping to catch a glimpse of his young daughter coming home. Charles knew that his mother worried about Fredrick despite his good health and preferred him to hunt in the company of at least one other person. Nevertheless, he is unsure what other choice he could have made. When Charles told Fredrick that he was unable to go with him, Fredrick asked Charles to lie to Louise and tell her that he would accompany Fredrick on the trip. Although he knew that it was wrong to do so, Charles agreed. 

Fredrick didn’t return home as scheduled, and Louise showed up at Charles’s house. She was livid to find out that he hadn’t gone with his stepfather and insisted that the two drive out to Fredrick’s hunting camp. Charles was too drunk to drive, so Louise navigated their way out into the woods. Fredrick wasn’t in the small cabin, and Charles walked back to town to get the police. They found a moose carcass out in the snow but not Fredrick. Louise told Charles that she didn’t blame him, and Charles told Louise that it was Fredrick’s idea to lie. He did not feel that he could share the story of Elizabeth’s birth with Louise because Mary insisted that no one should know that Charles was really her father. Fredrick’s death drove a wedge between Louise and Charles and caused a marked increase in Charles’s drinking. Periodically, he would try to get sober, but it would be years before he would finally join AA.

Louise’s memory continues to deteriorate, and her doctor suggests moving her to a memory care facility. Charles is not ready to take that step, and the doctor mentions that some of his patients with dementia do better when they have something to care for. He suggests a doll, and Charles gives his mother the stuffed elephant that he once tried to give to Elizabeth. 

Charles takes Louise to an appointment one day and passes out while standing up. The doctor questions him about anxiety and panic, and Charles reveals that he has a family history of mental health conditions. Louise has always lived with severe depression, and Fredrick often cared for her while, for weeks on end, she was bedridden and barely ate. The doctor asks if Louise still experiences depression, and Charles admits that she often does, but only when her memory is good. When she does not remember the past, she does not sink into depression. Charles is more struck by this observation than the doctor, and he wonders what it means. The doctor suggests ECT (electroconvulsive therapy), and Charles balks at the idea.

Bobby continues to help Charles care for his mother, and Charles cannot help but notice how much more interest Bobby has in Louise than he does in his own parents. When Bobby reluctantly leaves to visit his mother and father, if only for a week, Charles reflects on parent-child relationships. He recalls Gizos’s last visit, which was decades ago now. By that time, Gizos was married to his husband, Dave, and the couple adopted a boy, also Indigenous. Charles was jealous of Gizos for having a child and felt further alienated from his friend when Gizos began to talk about the boy’s parentage. Their son was Coeur d’Alene, and Gizos fretted that he would lose his culture: Gizos is Penobscot, and his husband Lakota. Charles, although raised by an Indigenous man, was not himself Indigenous and felt shut out of Gizos’s definition of what it meant to claim Indigenous culture as one’s own. At that time, Gizos’s father, Lenno, was newly released from prison for manslaughter. The two still had a strained relationship, and Charles speculated that Lenno, disapproving of his son’s sexual orientation, abused him verbally and emotionally, if no longer physically.

Louise continues to decline, and as she does, she is increasingly focused on the stuffed elephant. Just as her doctors predicted, Louise seems to benefit from taking care of something. The seriousness with which she approaches parenting the elephant at first strikes Charles as funny. He struggles not to laugh as she berates him for his lack of interest in the stuffed creature’s feeding and bedtime schedules. One day, when Louise is particularly upset with Charles for not helping her, she shakes her head and says, “[N]o wonder I leave you” (122). Mulling her cryptic statement over later that evening, he realizes that she must have been talking about his biological father, the man who was out of Charles’s life before Charles could form any memories of him. He reflects on how unhappy their time together must have been and how many secrets about this man she must be keeping, even after the passage of so much time. 

After a full day of caring for Louise, Charles returns home to see Roger and Mary moving furniture back into their house. It is Elizabeth’s, so she is clearly moving home. Charles worries about his daughter and fears that something terrible must have happened to cause her to move back in with her parents as an adult.

After Elizabeth moves home, Charles spends an increasing amount of time watching her house from his windows. He begins to receive mysterious phone calls that, according to caller ID, come from a series of out-of-state motels, each one closer to Charles’s home. Bobby returns from visiting his family and informs Charles that his father died. He also tells Charles that he confronted one of Louise’s neighbors, a man who Charles was sure broke into Louise’s home to steal something. The confrontation turned violent, and the police showed up.