VISUAL

Breaking News reporter Tiffany Clermont sits in a chair positioned before a fireplace. Books on shelves, apparently real, adorn the wall next to the fireplace, and a video screen above it displays an image of fire consuming the Bolinas Mall buildings. A second, empty, chair is positioned across from Tiffany.

VOICE

Tiffany: Here’s the last of my interviews with the residents of the Apthorp, this one with Mackenzie Lambert.

Katherine Hart, an Apthorp resident, was killed at the time of the fire at the Bolinas Mall. Mackenzie was her friend.

Once again, my questions have been edited out to keep the focus on Mackenzie.

VISUAL

Mackenzie, sitting in the second chair in the interview room.

VOICE

MACKENZIE: Yes, I remember that day, quite clearly.

I’m amazed I didn’t kill him right there. If he fought me, I don’t think I would have had the discipline to stop, but he fell down and didn’t get up. I hit him pretty hard. It turned out he was unconscious.

His friends ran off into the brush. There were lots of yells and crashes — I don’t think they knew there was a hill. I hope they rolled all the way to the bottom. There’s lots of poison oak on that hill.

I know everyone expected me to be the one to stop him, but Isabella had told him how to find the Apthorp, so it was up to her, as I thought.

But listen to me, I’m still justifying myself. It’s hard not to, and I think about it, even now. In my worst moments, I feel like Katherine helped me, even though I didn’t help her. Doesn’t that sound terrible? It’s like saying, “Hey, you’re my friend. Why don’t you get killed so I can grow up?”

The Apthorp was so important to her, and she accepted that responsibility. She acted, and I didn’t, and I’ve had to come to terms with that. We each have a life to live. Just one. No one can take away its importance, and we have to choose what to do with it.

At least, that’s how I think of it now, but at the time I didn’t know what to do. I had lived my principles, and with what result? The world didn’t make sense to me any more.

I quit going to class, and I couldn’t be bothered to explain. After Katherine, I had nothing to say to anyone. I suppose my friends thought I was completely breaking down, and I guess they were right. That period is still very confusing to me.

But one day I was in the library, doing nothing. Probably looking out the window at the place where I practiced. And that’s another thing. I wasn’t practicing, even though that had been a focus of my life.

I was sitting there, and Anthony put a cup of tea in front of me. He didn’t say anything. He just set it down and left. I had learned about tea from a martial arts instructor, but I had stopped drinking it. And there was this cup of normalcy, sitting on the table.

I looked around. Anthony was gone, and no one else was there. I cried. Oh, it wasn’t dramatic. I didn’t sob, or anything like that, but I had never cried. It wasn’t necessary, because I was always in such control. Standards and principles, that was me, but I had lost all that, and there I was, crying over a cup of tea.

I wish I could say that was it, and I was able to get on with things. It didn’t work out that way, but I see now it was a start. It was a start.

Anthony told me later that he came back and found the empty cup.

The next time, he brought me a copy of the New York Times. I had loved reading it, but of course I wasn’t doing that any more, either. I was in the kitchen, and he came in and put a folded copy of the paper on the counter.

I just lit into him. With words, I mean. What was he thinking, intruding like that? How did he presume? Was I asking anyone for anything? I was so unfair, berating him for being nice. I think I was panting when I finished, but he just said, “I thought you might like it.” Then he left.

And the paper was there. I actually paged through it.

Time was passing, and that helps. The pains get a little less sharp, the memories blur, things look a little more possible. You don’t feel they should, but they do. I still wasn’t going anywhere or doing anything, though. If the others hadn’t kept real food in the building, I’d have eaten nothing but junk. Shopping was completely beyond me.

And then there was a day when everyone was going down to the Grape & Pint. They asked me to come, but I said no. I didn’t want to be reminded of being there with Katherine.

They left me sitting in the library, and I was looking at them through the window, gathered out front, when a voice — that’s how it seemed to me, a voice — said, “Mackenzie.” It was Anthony. He was standing in the doorway with his hand out, as though he wanted me to take it. He didn’t say anything more. He just stood there and waited.

I still don’t know why, but I got up. I didn’t take his hand, of course. That wasn’t me, certainly not the way I was then. It’s still not, now that I think of it. He’d probably like it if I did it more. He just let his hand drop, and we went outside to join the others.

And, do you know, I can’t remember how we did it. Did he go through the door first, and I followed him? Even now, that idea makes me uncomfortable. Or did he step back, and allow me to go first? He might have, because he always tries to be so polite, but I don’t think I was ready to go first. And of course the doorway was too narrow to go side by side, and that wasn’t the way it was between us then. One of us went first, but I can’t remember who. Or even why it seems important. Repressed it, I guess.

But that turned the corner for me, and that sounds so self-dramatizing, doesn’t it? The getting up, the going, the being with my friends, well, the physical has always been important to me, a result of the martial arts, I think. And there I was, walking down the hill with my friends, doing something physical. It wasn’t much, but once I was in motion, I kept going.

The next day, I started practicing again, just barely. It was so hard to do the things I should have done to save my friend. I couldn’t accept the idea that because we can’t see the future, we can be absolved from responsibility. Still don’t.

But when Anthony put those things in front of me — the tea, the newspaper, his hand — he just let me do what I would. No prodding, no well-meaning consolation. I don’t see how he knew the right thing to do, but he didn’t bear the guilt. Just the grief.

It’s strange. When he came to the Apthorp, he was incompetent and silly. The thought of being together never occurred to me. I think I would have laughed, if it had. Even now, I don’t quite know how it happened.

There was one day, though …