Burn
Friday February 13, 2026
Before taking Desmond to swim class on Wednesday, I wrote about 500 words on the Super Bowl. Then our house burned down. Suddenly, my petty judgments about the people you meet at the Super Bowl seem so petty.
Everybody’s okay. Goose was released from the vet hospital last night after 24 hours of oxygen treatments and monitoring. We’re all together at my mom’s house for the time being.
Man, where do I even begin with this?
I didn’t look at my phone until I had finished changing Des and myself after class, but when I did, I had more notifications than I could sift through from Lindsay and our neighbor, Linda Camberlain. I rushed out of the swimming center without saying goodbye to Shauna (sorry, Shauna!), trying to get a hold of Lindsay. When I finally got through, she was sobbing. “Monkey, our house is on fire.”
I told her I’d be home in 20 minutes and hung up. Then I called her back, deciding it was better to stay on the line. Honestly, I didn’t think it could possibly be that bad. I figured the fajitas in the Crockpot were burning. Lindsay said there was a ton of smoke, but them’s a spicy fajitas. Somehow, when she said the firefighters were cutting through the roof with a chainsaw, it sounded like they were playing a silly game of “get in any way but the front door.”
The whole street was smoky when I got back. There were five fire engines in front of our house, and the neighborhood had turned onto the street to watch the show. Lindsay came out of Paul and Jean McAndrews’ house to take a sleeping Des inside. Three random people walking down the street asked what was happening. I told them my house was burning. They said, “Oh my God, what happened?” I said, “I have no idea, I’m watching my house burning, I don’t want to be interrogated right now.”
The next four hours or so still don’t feel real. I was some other person walking my dog on the street, and just happened to stumble across five fire trucks in front of somebody’s house. These were somebody else’s neighbors hugging me and offering me support for something that didn’t concern me. It was perfectly natural for Lindsay’s teacher friends, my mom, and my brother to sit in this neighbor’s living room I’d never been in, periodically entertaining firefighters and insurance adjusters. It was an elaborate role play and, in my coping little delusion, I had everything under control. We’d just play a little longer, and then we’d all go home, eat the garlic noodles that Lindsay meal prepped for lunch this week, and watch figure skating while Des napped off all this social activity. The fire chief asking if our guest bedroom was a garage probably should have tipped me off that it wasn’t great, but even after Lindsay and the crew gave the McAndrews their home back and moved to Erin and Jay London’s, I sat in the car waiting for her to feed Des so we could go in and pack a bag. I thought it’d be a couple of weeks to air out the smoke and repair the walls.
About an hour later, our public adjuster, Dan Davison, called me and strongly suggested Lindsay not come back. “I know what my wife would say, but at least give her the option not to see it. It’s bad. It’s… it’s bad.”
Lindsay has at least one thing in common with Dan’s wife.
One of the firefighters was nice enough to give us a guided tour of the building that used to be our home. He cautioned us to step carefully. Me, especially, since I was still in slides, socks that a firefighter had brought outside for me, and freeballing in sweatpants since I didn’t want to put underwear on when I was still wet from the pool. (You gotta change fast when you’ve got a pissed off baby that just came out of the water and doesn’t want to go home.)
It’s hard to say what the man’s bigger concerns for our feet were: the broken glass, invisible in the black wreckage; the soot that continues to cling to our clothes and fingers; the wooden and plaster splinters of the house’s insides; or the countless shards of objects we knew and forgot, now immolated into dust.
He talked us through how the fire likely happened (although the official report is pending an inspection today). They found our slow cooker on the floor. The cabinets had burned, and the countertops had mostly melted by the time they controlled the fire enough to get into the kitchen, so it’s impossible to say if the fire started before or after the slow cooker was on the floor. But most likely, the slow cooker’s outlet sparked, caught something, and nobody was there to put it out. He speculated that it first climbed up the wall adjacent to the closet by the front door before catching the cabinets and sundries on the counter.
From there, it spread. We close the doors when we’re not home because Goose enjoys opening them and then getting stuck in rooms because he can only get in, but he doesn’t know how to get out. It’s a real pain in the ass. So, we close them. That likely saved the house from going up completely. The guest room, right off the kitchen, took a while to catch because the door had to burn first. The firefighter suggested the fire flashed once it finally got through that door, cooking the absolute bejesus out of that room, such that the Peloton burned to a crisp and Lindsay’s computer monitor literally melted. The other end of the fire made its way through the living room and to the other side of the house before being met by three more doors. It made it through the bathroom, but was subdued before it could burn down the nursery and bedroom doors. Terrifying hypotheticals abound.
But for the thin layer of soot on everything, you almost couldn’t tell from the bedrooms that there was a fire in the house. Soot is incredibly carcinogenic, especially to an infant, so we were forced to say farewell to our entire wardrobes, our mattresses, furniture, books — anything porous that, without close examination, looked completely intact. A small mercy: Most of our personal electronics (computers, chargers, Kindles, JBL speaker) were as far from the fire as they could get and were spared. We made it out with a trunkload of electronics, pictures, jewelry, cash, and a few other sentimental items.
It’s funny to be moving back to Hingham like this. We did the exact same thing seven and a half years ago — packed up our lives into a car and moved into my mom’s place while we looked for a new place to live. With Desmond so young, it feels eerily like a complete renewal. I think that’s why I’m oddly at peace with this whole thing. Someday, we’ll attend functions where small talk is expected, nebulously refer to things lost “in the fire,” and become oddly distant until people just leave us alone. It’s a decent currency to have.
We grew to love this house a lot, but there’s no denying it has been an anxiety-fueling nightmare.
There was the sewage the night we moved in that turned into a ten-month insurance battle to wind up another $20k in the hole, but with a new basement and new plumbing. There was the complete rewiring of the house because electricians all think other electricians’ work sucks. (LOOKS LIKE SOMEBODY SUCKS THE WORST.) There was the first time it almost burned down because some idiot electrician didn’t properly seal an exterior outlet. There was the appointment basement flooding whenever it rained until we replaced the bulkhead. There was the broken sump pump and 2am fire brigade bailing into the basement toilet before we patched the holes in the foundation. There was the near-constant freezing pipes that seemed to have a sick enjoyment of causing us just a little tension without ever actually bursting. There was the whole heat pump debacle. At any given point, there were 5 to 10 things I wanted to fix or improve.
The greatest irony is that for all the trouble water gave us, fire is the thing that did us in.
When I finally joined Lindsay and the crew at the Londons, I had a second to breathe. Word had gotten out, so I had more than 20 texts. That gave reality a chance to set in. I went on Instagram, and the first three stories were friends sharing the GoFundMe that MJ Cantoni had whipped up in the McAndrews’ living room. (She asked how much to ask for; I let Dan answer because I didn’t feel comfortable asking anyone for money.) When I clicked through, there was already more than $10,000, and I found myself on the brink. I got out of one car, got into the backseat behind Lindsay in the other, and waited until she got off the phone with her mom before finally losing it.
I’m really not emotional about the stuff. I loved the house. We lost some really special things, but all the stuff is replaceable, and fire can’t burn memories. I’m not excited to be living in temporary housing for a year or more, but it’s really not the end of the world. We’re all alive.
What I can’t stop crying about is how overwhelming the support has been. The supportive texts, the gifts, the mobilization, the random acts of kindness… it’s profoundly moving and almost uncomfortable how much people have put their own lives on hold to help us pick up ours. I’m a tremendously cynical person, but I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this experience is fundamentally changing me as a person and how I see the world. I don’t think Lindsay or I have ever received such enormous kindness and love. Has anyone? I deflect compliments about a good hair day. I’m not equipped to handle this.
What I continue to feel, and what I think may be making me so emotionally overloaded and confused, is overwhelming gratitude. I’ve never been shy to admit how privileged a life I’ve had, but this is different than being a straight middle-class white guy. It’s the privilege of a community that I always intellectually knew was “there” but has lifted us in such a way I don’t know how to repay or even rationalize. I’m not going to diminish all this extraordinary kindness by saying we don’t feel worthy of it, as true as that may be, but I don’t know how we could ever possibly thank everyone enough. I’m trying to avoid naming too many individuals because, honestly, there are so friggin’ many people who have shown up for us in such extraordinary ways that I don’t want to inadvertently slight anyone, and I should probably sleep eventually.
So, let me say this. I often want for more. I’m ambitious. I’m proud. I want to give my family everything. Right now, we have next to nothing. I didn’t have a single fucking pair of underwear until about 9:30 last night. But these days have made me itemize how superlatively fortunate we are.
Our lives: I’ve toyed with the idea that if I hadn’t gone to swim class, I could have stopped the fire. Lindsay and I promised each other we wouldn’t do the “what if” thing, so I’ll just be thankful nobody was hurt, let alone killed.
Nanit Baby Monitor / Lindsay: I will never endorse a product more. While I was in the pool, the Nanit alerted Lindsay that there was a sound and motion by the camera. Knowing that seemed weird, she opened the app while driving from school to a meeting. The car speakers started blaring with our smoke alarms, and she could see smoke on the monitor. She abandoned the meeting and drove home. About 20 minutes later, the Ring camera captures her calling 911 as she opens the door for Goose to run out in a cloud of black smoke. We have no idea exactly how long Goose was sitting in that smoke and cowering from the fire, but if Lindsay had gone to that meeting and let me deal with the smoke detectors when I got home, I would have had to drag an unconscious dog from a fire or die trying. Without question, Lindsay saved our dog’s life.
Goose: It hurts me beyond reason to think about how horrified this poor dog must have been alone in that fire. We don’t know exactly when it started, but he was alone in a burning house for at least 20 minutes, and probably closer to 30. But he was such a good boy. He went to the door, which is in an alcove that was probably as protected as it got from the smoke, and he waited, trusting someone would help him. Lindsay, thank Nanit, did. His trot out of the house is less one of terror and more of impatience, like “What took you so long?” We anthropomorphize animals a lot, so I think we both expected him to be changed by the ordeal. It’s a miracle he’s alive, let alone the same chipper, annoyingly loving dog he’s always been.
You: We’re not shopping at Goodwill or Saver’s to pull our lives back together. The physical donations and support for us, Des, and Goose have allowed us to live in relative normalcy over the past couple of days. We can bathe, we’re clothed, we’re housed, we’re fed… Hell, Jay London’s clothes fit me better than mine did. Not everyone who suffers setbacks receives this kind of hand up, and it is not lost on me that our friends, neighbors, coworkers, and families are all at the center of a Venn Diagram of people we will literally walk through fire for. Every single one of you is truly special. My misanthropic ass didn’t believe kindness like this existed. This love is a privilege in itself, having people so willing and eager to help us.
GoFundMe: I wasn’t comfortable accepting money from people. If I wasn’t so preoccupied, I might have fought MJ on the GoFundMe. But after spending almost $3,000 in the first 24 hours on socks, underwear, shoes, baby items, food, vet bills, and some other miscellaneous basics, it’s almost alarming how necessary and appreciated this money is going to be. The generosity is breaking me. I’ve seen gifts from high school people I haven’t spoken to in decades, past co-workers and bosses, and complete strangers. Virtually the entire Revere school district chipped in. We owe all of you so much. I’ll never fart in front of you again.
The Lady at Target: Lindsay started sobbing at Target. We joked about her tears in the checkout line, and the woman in front of us said something to the effect of, “Lots of people cry at Target.” We told her about the house and laughed it off. Before we were done checking out, she reappeared with a gift card. She had loaded up her cart, went straight to guest services, and bought a $100 card to help us with our purchase. The kindness of strangers is definitely something I had doubts about. On our way out, we saw her at Starbucks, and I gave her a Starbucks gift card we’d received after the fire and told her we weren’t coffee drinkers. I think it’s okay to lie to pay a kindness forward. (Or back.)
Dan Davison: One fun thing about having a cursed home is that you have a public adjuster on call. In our case, Dan actually called us. Somehow, he heard about the fire, dispatched a guy to check it out, and that guy came up to me as I was literally picking up Goose’s shit with his phone held out, saying, “Nick, I have Dan Davison for you,” like this was my office and I let my dog shit in it. Dan arrived about 20 minutes after that, helping us navigate the fucking VULTURES who swoop in after a tragedy and beginning our home insurance claim. He got us out of a signed board-up contract with some toothless asshole wearing fire department gear who couldn’t pronounce the word “carcinogen” and said he was with the Melrose FD. Apparently, it’s common practice for these boarding companies to show up after a fire, tell you they’re the official company or whatnot, and then bill your insurance for like $50,000 to eat up your insurance entitlement. Maybe it’s more obvious to you than it was to me, but if you ever have a house fire, don’t sign anything until you hire a public adjuster.
Des: Desmond is thriving in this new world of living at Granny Nanny’s, being passed around by friends, and staying awake well beyond his normal wake windows. He’s been such a happy little monkey, and one of the surprising emotions of this whole thing is the tremendous swell of pride I feel for how incredibly well this little child has adapted to his entire world being ripped out from under him.
Well, I’m sobbing again.
Love,
Nick, Lindsay, Desmond, and Goose