The Night the Dining Room Burned Down, Version B

This is version B of the same set of events. It’s like Choose Your Own Adventure, but a lot less fun. Enjoy :)

“Everything calm in your household tonight?”

The text was from my mom. 

I glanced through to the dining room where Tighe was sweeping up soot and ash.

“Well,” I typed back, “no one’s thrown up since 3am so that’s a plus.”

I didn’t mention nearly burning the house down. 

It’d had been a long week.

And it was only Wednesday.

It started on Monday morning with Tess’s water bags. Which are semi-irrelevant to the main plot, but in the end, they were *almost* useful.

While I was busy trying to get ahead in the writing course I’m taking, Tess and Lou were busy creating projects. Lots of watercolor paints and markers and notebook pages stapled together and holes punched in construction paper and rocks and twigs glued to paper. 

And the project du jour was a water bag.

Which is simply a plastic Ziploc bag filled with water and a folded paper towel tucked inside. 

She was really, irrationally proud of the prototype to the point that she wanted to make enough for everyone she knows. After several minutes of painstaking negotiations, we settled on 4 additional water bags. 

One for Tighe, one for Nate, one for Sam, and one for me.

Lou was busy sprinkling blades of grass into a bowl, so he didn’t care about such an aquatic gift. 

Later that afternoon, when Nate and Sam arrived home from school and she awarded the boys their bags of water, she wasn’t the slightest bit fazed by their confused disinterest.

In fact, the next day she insisted on making 8 additional bags of water for her friends at school.

And so by Tuesday afternoon, our kitchen countertop was dotted with all different types of bowls, each containing a bag of water and a sticky note with the lucky recipient’s name on it. 

But we can’t skip over Monday night. 

That’s important to the plot. 

In fact, probably more important than the water bags. 

On Monday night, I threw up. 

The first time was about an hour after dinner.

Then again just before I went to bed, around 10:30pm. 

And again right after midnight.

At my bedtime retching, which sounds more glamorous than it was, Tighe leaned over for his phone and canceled his 7am flight to Austin. 

I spent the remainder of the night trying not to think about food, which was making me nauseous, wondering if I had a stomach bug or food poisoning. 

By dinner time the next night, Lou was warm and lethargic and not his spry, menacing self.

A few minutes after dinner, he sat crying on my lap, turned to bury his face into my shoulder and threw up chunks and foamy froth all down my shirt, my pants, my shoes, and deep into my socks.

And so that answered that question: stomach bug.

I stripped down and he played in the tub while Tighe started a load of laundry. 

About an hour later, I started to get my appetite back and just as I had bitten into a chocolate chip cookie, Lou ran to me from the living crying. Instinctively, I knelt down, preparing to pick him up and cradle him.

But Tighe saw what was coming and tried to minimize the damage.

“No, Lou! The toilet! Get him to the toilet!”

Tighe’s panic caused Lou to panic, and so he dug his fingers into me and held on tighter.

And once again, threw up all over me. Somehow it got into my underwear this time.

We threw Lou into the tub again and gathered more laundry from around the house. The laundry never stops. Which was a real problem that night.

By bedtime, he was lethargic and weak and everyone went to bed with relative ease.

Tighe packed his bag for his rescheduled 7am flight—Wednesday, not Tuesday this time—and just as we were getting into bed, we heard thudding down the steps from the third floor. 

Uh-oh.

Tap, tap, tap on our bedroom door.

Sam, in only his boxers, was curled up in a ball on the floor outside our room.

“I threw up… in my bed… I tried to go to the bathroom, but… I couldn’t.”

Without any words, Tighe bounded up the steps, Sam crawled up after him, and I went to the linen closet to gather some clean sheets, blankets, and pillows.

We changed the sheets, started yet another load of laundry, Tighe canceled his flight again, and we all returned to our respective beds. Where we would sleep peacefully for another 20 minutes.

I should mention that our laundry room is adjacent to our master bedroom. Which, 95% of the time, is super convenient.

Except when either the washer or dryer hits a snag and alerts everyone within a mile radius of an error message with the same sense of urgency that the federal government urges us to get vaccines. 

Loud, repetitive beeps, and bright blue lights woke us up to a drainage issue in the washer. 

In fact, our washer had been doing that for several weeks now, prompting a switch to the “spin only” cycle once or twice to fully complete a load. It was a bit tedious and time-consuming, but as long as we stuck to only one load a day, it worked.

Groaning, Tighe rolled out of bed, restarted the washer, and crawled back under the covers.

A few hours later, Sam knocked again. He couldn’t get to the bathroom and had thrown up all over those fresh clean sheets. We were running out of bedding, but I threw a Star Wars sleeping bag on top of him and positioned his water where he could reach it.

The next morning, we let the boys sleep in. Nate and Tess still felt great, Sam and Lou were sleepy and weak, likely dehydrated from all the fluids they’d lost the night before.

The bigger story was the growing piles of laundry. Wash cycles were taking more than two hours to complete and suddenly the dryer was reading “Error 64. Call for service repair.”

A google search informed me that Error 64 meant a malfunction with the heating element, which would likely need to be replaced. 

There was a vomit stench permeating the house and getting more and more vicious by the second. Plus Lou had some residual diarrhea lingering in his diaper, and even a clean one didn’t solve the nostril-tingling aroma issue. Literally gut-wrenching

“It’s probably on his pants,” I announced to Tighe, checking his diaper, “but without a washer…”

I cruised the house with some Febreze and a small spray bottle of frankincense and myrrh room mister. 

It worked for Jesus, I thought to myself, clicking the cap back on and wondering if Febreze would make a good baby gift. 

But the stinkiness still penetrated the senses, so after dinner, I lit a few candles. One on the mantle and a larger, 3-wick glass jar candle from Christmastime in the dining room. Balsam fir, I think.

I was officially winning now.

Until suddenly I was losing again. 

Big time. 

As we were putting the kids to bed, we smelled smoke. 

We sprinted down the steps to discover the dining room was on fire!

Flames were climbing the wall where the candle sat and smoke was spreading around the perimeter of the ceiling. 

Like a toddler at a birthday party, Tighe blew on the flames. With his lung power. Which fanned the flames even higher!

I started clearing potentially flammable items away from the flames while he darted back and forth between the kitchen and dining room, filling pitchers with water and dumping them on the flames. I contemplated tossing one of Tess’s water bags at it. (See? Almost useful.)

Within minutes, the fire was out and we were sweeping up ash and scrubbing soot off the walls, trying to deduce exactly what happened. 

We think the glass surrounding the candle shattered, causing the wicks and the wax to spread, like lava, across the surface of the antique mahogany buffet, heating it to the point that it began to smolder and burn. 

The lava-like wax must have slid across the buffet and ignited Sam’s shoebox diorama, which was perched on the corner. 

Of course we can’t know for sure. But we know that we’re very lucky to have caught the fire before it truly got out of control. Tighe’s quick actions saved our house and saved our lives. Our hero.

I, meanwhile, saved the fruit bowl. 

The headline: stomach bug takes us down, destroys washer and dryer, and attempts to burn the house to the ground! 

Nevertheless we persisted.