a catalogue of smoke detectors

hope as a green light

daughter’s first finger painting, jan ‘23

I once set off the smoke detector and had to call my neighbor to bring over a ladder.  Carl was out of town and I couldn’t reach to turn the damn thing off.  It blared its urgent blast until my neighbor came through the front door, ladder in tow, and she so nonchalantly climbed up and took it down from the ceiling and gave it to me.  I held the ugly yellowing disc in my hand.  I thanked her, embarrassed.  I’d already opened the sliding glass door that led to the backyard, seared steak smoke wafting outside like a cartoon plume rising into the air and forming columns.  I left the door open while I ate and flies came on in, circled around my plate, my head, and flew just out of reach anytime I tried to smack one with a kitchen towel.

This ordeal prompted me to remove all the smoke alarms.  I stood on chairs and dismantled each one, popping it off the wall, a high-pitched sad beep emanating from its body.  I stuck them in the closet of my husband’s office and then I forgot about it forever. 

Forever, until we moved to Tennessee and got charged for the missing smoke alarms. 

*

I was pretending that I still lived in Los Angeles so I could continue seeing my therapist via Tele Health.  I really loved her.  She was the best therapist I’ve ever had.  Our intake appointment was three hours long.  There was a designated bathroom break.  She was so smart.  Her hair was bleached blonde and toned golden yellow.  Whenever we made a breakthrough in my therapy, she’d say, “Maybe…just maybe…” before the amazing idea was stated that would change my life. 

So it was in the Sonder on 21^st street that I continued lying to her.  She didn’t notice that I was in a different bed with different pillows behind me.  She didn’t catch on that it took me an extra moment to figure out time change when we were scheduling our appointments, or that the light was different, or that anything had changed at all whatsoever.  I was able to get my medication transferred to a local CVS, but I wasn’t technically allowed to have mental health treatment in another state.  It didn’t seem fair, so I made it fair.

Until our building’s fire alarm malfunctioned at 3am one night.  Everyone had to evacuate in the middle of the night.  We were all in our pajamas.  I took my laptop with me because you never know.  Carl took his camera.  It was thirty minutes until the fire department showed up and cleared everyone to go back inside.  But the malfunction continued for another few days.  At random, the alarm would sound.  People didn’t even go outside anymore.  We all knew it was a false alarm.

I had therapy one day and the alarm went off.  How does one cover for that?  I shut my laptop screen and plugged my ears.  I logged back in once the alarm stopped and told my therapist that it was my own smoke detector in my own house that went off.  “You should get someone to fix that,” she said.  “They’ll go off at random.  It can be quite scary.”

*

plumed basilisk at the nashville zoo, february ‘24

At another Sonder, cattycorner to our original Sonder, we stayed in a one-bedroom while we looked for a more permanent place to live.  I signed a contract to teach and had to hold off on giving administration the mailing address.  I only had one suitcase worth of clothes with me.  The rest of it was in storage in Los Angeles.

This Sonder was nicer than the previous Sonder.  It was in the same building as an Urgent Care, and it comforted me to know that people were being helped all the time right below us.  We didn’t even have state health insurance yet, and so it was an Urgent Care that wouldn’t even accept me as a patient.  But I was somehow comforted by its proximity.

I enjoyed this Sonder.  It had a balcony with a view of the city.  It was across the street from our favorite movie theater.  It was quieter, more private.  Except for the smoke detector.

One night I heard a noise, a dull, rhythmic beep.  I could not for the life of me figure out where it was coming from, but I couldn’t sleep.  I made Carl turn on all the lights and search with me for this mysterious noise.

“I think I know,” he said after a while and got a chair from the dining room and stood on it to inspect the smoke detector.  “The battery’s dying.”

“Can you deactivate it?”

Carl tried to deactivate the smoke detector, which involved him getting his pliers out and using a flashlight to inspect the smoke detector’s innards.  But the thing was hardwired to the ceiling and couldn’t be easily removed and turned off.

“I’d have to cut one of the wires,” he said and I told him to cut the fucking wire.  “It might be connected to the whole building,” he said and I told him I did not care.

Carl dismantled the smoke detector.  I sometimes feel it’s impossible to love Carl more than I possibly already do, but when he held the smoke detector in his hand like a giant Oreo cookie, I was so happy to be there in that transient place of a living space, my heart almost exploded.

The next day, the building sent out a message to all the occupants on the fourth and fifth floors that there had been some kind of electrical shortage that triggered the smoke detectors.  Someone would be coming around that afternoon to fix them.  Carl was out all day at work.  I stayed home and taught virtual classes on my laptop sitting at the kitchen counter.  I didn’t have a plan for what I would say to this person who would 100% see that we had ripped the smoke detector apart and rendered it useless all because of…my madness?

I answered the door for the maintenance woman.  She was pregnant.  She didn’t have a ladder, but she used the same chair Carl used to get herself up close to the ceiling.  I pleaded with her to let me go up there, but she said it was against company policy.  I told her about what happened, the truth, that we heard the noise and I couldn’t take it and that it all seemed so silly now and how much would we owe for breaking the thing and if it was even fixable.  She said she understood.  She said she wouldn’t report it because she could fix it.  She really didn’t seem phased at all, but my anxiety grew as she stood on that chair and worked a screwdriver into the body of the detector.

I was pregnant while she stood there on the chair fixing the smoke detector that we broke.  I didn’t know it yet, but there was a baby growing inside of me too.  I’d felt mildly fluish the past few days, but had attributed it to the summer heat.  It was July.  Every day was boiling hot. 

We talked while she worked, my anxiety never letting up until she descended from the chair and made it back down safely.  And then I realized all the other apartments she’d have to go into, all those alarms gone off the rails and her climbing up to fix them.  The alarm angel, I deemed her in my head.

She gave me her personal number in case of a future issue, but by the end of the month, we were out of the Sonder and moved into a rental.  Her baby must be eighteen months old by now.  Her number is still in my phone. 

*

There’s a lone smoke detector in our bedroom.  It lives right above the door to our room.  When the baby first arrived, she slept in a bassinet in our bedroom.  We woke almost every hour to feed her, change her, rock her.  The smoke detector’s green eye met mine while I waited for sleep to come.  I used to stare at the light for comfort, the light like a lifeguard sitting ashore while I leapt through waves in the sea.

Now, our daughter is in a crib in her nursery.  The baby monitor light glows green when she makes noise.  It turns orange when the noise grows, and then red when it’s urgently at its loudest. 

When I see the green light of the smoke detector, I can’t help but think of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby—the green light forever illuminated at the end of Daisy’s dock, a symbol of Gatsby’s undying love.

And that’s how I feel when I stare at the green light of the smoke detector in our room.  I feel that all-encompassing, eternally ignited flame for our child.  I looked to the green light each time I heard her cry and knew getting up out of bed was imminent.  I searched for the light in the dark when I anticipated her waking and needing me.  I held it in my gaze and prayed to it, bargained with it, begged. 

Every night the light was staring back at me.  It watched over me the way that no one else could.  That’s the thing about becoming a parent—no one is going to come save you when you need to be saved.  You have to save yourself.  There is no calling out and receiving an answer.  There is nothing to take away the pain, the way you wish for a moment of peace in all the chaos.  The madness is omnipresent.  It doesn’t leave. 

At the start of each day, a new little life needs you and you go to it without hesitation.  You love this life more than your own.  You can arch your body in sun salutations and cry in the bathroom with all the lights off.  You can study all the websites and blogs and visit the doctor an infinite number of times, but still, it is you and it is you and the baby and it is you and this baby forever and you have to learn how to be okay when you are not okay. 

But for the brief time that I bask in the glow of the green light, I am bathed in hope.

pin oak at sevier park, april ‘24

*

I race to Publix to pick up antibiotics for my daughter.  Another ear infection.  Another illness that can kiss my ass.  Another week of feeling subhuman, wishing I could go to Target and drink coffee like a normal person, yet knowing that my life isn’t about me anymore.  When my life was about me, I also felt subhuman.  But being a mother who has been to Publix three times in one day to pick up various medications and other items for her sick baby is a special kind of loneliness that only another mother can recognize.

When I head downstairs to the parking garage, I pass by the elevators and hear an alarm.  One of the elevators is broken down and its alarm malfunctions.  The doors are open, the cabin inside is dark, but a high-pitched beat pulses. 

I balance the Publix bags in one hand, along with my phone, my keys.  I wear the same Lululemon crossbody bag that 90% of women in Nashville own.  My hair started in a bun on top of my head this morning and has now slunk down and bobs against the back of my neck.  I want so badly to get home, to help Carl with bath time and the baby’s last bottle of the night and with giving her this medicine that will hopefully work its magic and she’ll be better in the morning.

The day has been absolute hell.  Later, over fried chicken and Coca Cola, I’ll tell Carl that no one knows real pain until they have children.  There is no real hardship until you have to care for another life, one you created, one that you love so much you’d die for. 

I stand in the parking garage and catch my breath.  It’s not a smoke alarm, but it’s akin to it, almost like the two could be in conversation, the two calling out to each other over space and time. The elevator’s malfunctioning noise is annoying, but it’s not my problem.  I don’t have to live with it all night.  It’ll be fixed the next time I come back to Publix, which will probably be very soon. 

But as it blares its own rhythm, it sounds like despair.  It sounds like my insanity.  It sounds like my baby’s cries.  It sounds like every mother pleading when, when, when?  It sounds like minutes churning into hours.  It sounds like days ricocheting into years. 

It sounds like life.

—

Thank you to Bullshit Lit for publishing “Bummer” in their online features!

Check out my interview with Alex Alberto on Entwined: Essays on Polyamory and Creating Home for Write or Die. We chat about unconventional love stories, how words evolve, and where I even get a little sidetracked on Inspector Gadget.

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