An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (21 page)

“Please, let me explain,” I said, but she held up her hand to block my explanation.

“Thomas hurt himself,” she said. “I’m taking care of him.”

“So why don’t you ask him how he hurt himself!” I said, my voice getting high pitched and hysterical. “Why don’t you ask him right now!”

Anne Marie looked at me curiously, her eyebrows and nose moving toward each other, making the face’s own unique question mark. “OK, I’ll do that,” she said, and then closed and locked the door behind her.

I took this to mean,
I’ll ask him and then come back out and tell you what he said
. So I waited there on the slab, for a long time. Night arrived and the streetlights came on. Neighbors came home from work, and since this was Camelot, they did their very best to ignore Thomas’s car parked curbside and me sitting on the front slab. Finally I got tired of waiting. I rose from my slab and knocked on the door, and then I knocked and knocked and knocked and knocked. I was making such a racket that I wondered if even my fellow Camelotians could ignore me for much longer. But I didn’t care. Let them look at me from their bay windows; let them watch me knock. I felt strong; I could have knocked all night.

I could have knocked all night, that is, if I hadn’t heard a car pull into the driveway behind me. I stopped knocking, turned, and saw a dark green Lincoln Continental back in behind Anne Marie’s minivan. It was my father-in-law’s car; I recognized it right off because he’d always driven Lincoln Continentals and also because my father-in-law was a man of principle, and one of his most cherished principles was that you should always back into a parking space.

But it wasn’t my father-in-law who first emerged from the car: it was Katherine, my daughter. She was strapped into a backpack so large that it rose almost to the top of her head. She walked up the driveway very carefully, maybe so the backpack wouldn’t capsize her. It was like watching a young, overburdened female gringo Sherpa walking toward you, a Sherpa you loved and missed so much. “I love you,” I told her when she was close enough to hear. “I’ve missed you so much.” I gave Katherine and her backpack a hug, and they returned it, with feeling, for which I was grateful.

“Are you coming inside, Daddy?” Katherine asked. She was already adult enough to ask questions to which she already knew the answers and then to pretend not to recognize the lies those answers were.

“I’ll be in in a second,” I told her.

“OK,” she said. Katherine walked up to the door, turned and pushed on the handle, and discovered, of course, that the door was locked. She turned to give me a quick look of assessment —
You are my father
, the look seemed to say,
and your front door is locked and you cannot open it
— then reached behind her, unzipped one of the backpack’s many pockets, pulled out a set of keys, and expertly unlocked the front door. This was the most heartbreaking thing she’d done thus far — there is nothing sadder than a child with her own set of keys — and I would have cried right there, if Christian hadn’t suddenly been around my legs, tugging on them and me as though we’d fallen right into our old game, in which I was the marauding giant and he the pint-size villager determined to topple me.

“Hey, bud,” I said, holding him close to me. “Hey, guy.” I was speaking in that awkward, bluff way fathers speak to their young sons, knowing that it won’t be too long before their sons will grow up enough to tell their fathers to stop being so bluff and awkward.

“That damn car seat,” my father-in-law said. He was right in front of me; his breath smelled of coffee and the Styrofoam cup it came in. “I couldn’t get Christian out of that damn thing.” His voice had a transportational effect on Christian: he disappeared from my legs and a moment later he materialized on the slab with his sister. Both of them waved at me and then vanished into the house.

About my father-in-law: He was shorter than me and slim, wore — and as far as I know still wears — pressed khaki pants and comfortable, broken-in loafers bought in the closeout section of the L.L. Bean catalog. You’d never see him wear a shirt without a collar and he was wearing a collared shirt now, with broad red stripes and the sleeves buttoned. I’d never seen him wear jewelry except for his wedding band. His wife, Louisa, only briefly enters this story, but she figured largely in her husband’s: at extended family dinners, I often caught him looking at her, his eyes wet and grateful — grateful, I guess, to have her as his wife, and maybe to have the eyes with which to see her, too. He looked at Anne Marie, his only daughter, in much the same way. He was a good husband and father, is what I’m saying. Of course, he was a racist, too, as I mentioned earlier; it probably does no good to say that he wasn’t a racist unless the subject of race was raised, and then only some of the time. This is not to say that he wasn’t a racist, but that when I see him now, I see his racism competing with his other, better qualities. I mostly liked him, and I wanted him to like me, and he had, too, mostly, I think, until now.

“Please leave Anne Marie alone,” he said. The disappointment was heavy in his voice, pulling it down to its lowest levels. His eyes were baggy and resentful, and I felt sorry for dragging him into all this. My father-in-law had just retired after thirty-odd years of being an insurance claims investigator. He had finally paid off the mortgage on his house. His daughter had a marriage that had seemed to work; she had two kids, her own house, her own life. And now this. What a terrible thing it must be to be an aging father and grandfather and have to take on a second load of familial trouble just when you’d gotten rid of the first.

“I can’t leave her alone,” I said. “I just can’t.”

“You have to,” he said.

“You don’t want me to leave her with that” — and here I had trouble finding the right word to do justice to the specific feeling I had about this specific person — “
guy
, do you?”

“I know,” he admitted, and this gave me some hope. “He worries me. But still, Anne Marie wants you to leave her alone.”

“I can’t,” I repeated. “I love her.”

“I know you do, Sam,” he said, and I got that terrible shivery feeling you get when things are serious enough for people to use your name in conversation. “But I don’t know if she loves you anymore.”

With that, he, too, disappeared inside the house — he’d given a short knock on the door, which must have been the knuckled code, because the door opened enough to let him inside and then closed authoritatively behind him — and once again I was by myself in the driveway. I suppose if I’d been a better estranged husband and father, I would have resumed and persisted in my knocking until I’d gotten some answers, right then and there. But I wasn’t any better an estranged husband and father than I’d been a normal, complacent one. And then there was my sadness, which was huge. If sadness were a competitive event, I’d have broken the subdivisional record. Sometimes when you’re sad — as I’ll write in my arsonist’s guide — you have to sit around and wait for your sadness to turn into something else, which it surely will, sadness in this way being like coal or most sorts of larvae.

But in the meantime, at least I had these new mysteries to add to the old ones. Why had Thomas told Anne Marie the truth about my not cheating on her? What had he told her about that burn on his hand? And why didn’t these things make her get rid of Thomas and take me back? I had hopes of finding out, as a detective if not as a husband. Because maybe this is yet another thing that defines you as a detective: not that you’re especially good at
being
a detective, but that you’re so bad at everything else.

It was after seven o’clock by the time I got to my parents’ house, November dark, and darker still because a fog had settled in. It was the thick sort of fog that announces some major weather shift, the spooky sort of fog that makes you think you hear the mournful sound of hounds somewhere off in the distance. It was also the sort of fog where you don’t see your parents’ house until you’re almost on top of it, and where you almost hit your mother sprinting across the street, away from the house and toward her car. My mother must have heard the squeal of my brakes, though, because she gestured obscenely in my direction without actually looking in my direction, and then jumped in her car. Her car was parked the wrong way on the street and not in our driveway because there were already several cars in the driveway, several lining the street, too; every light seemed to be on in our house, as if it were a three-story beacon in the fog, beckoning to who knew what kind of lost sailor. I wanted to see what was going on in the house, but I also wanted to know where my mother was going in such an awful hurry, on top of wanting to know why she’d lied to me about still being an English teacher, and where she’d disappeared to the night before. And so when she peeled out of her parking spot in her green Lumina, I followed her.

I followed her closely because of the fog. I mean, I was right on top of her, my headlights much too intimate with her tail. It was probably the least inconspicuous surveillance in the history of surveilling; if I’d had a license for surveillance, it would surely have already been revoked. My mother didn’t exactly make it easy on me, either: she was driving angry, and following her in the fog was a lesson in rev and brake, rev and brake. Luckily my mother didn’t seem to notice me, and she didn’t travel far, either, just to downtown Belchertown, five miles away from our house, where she pulled up in front of one of those old, monolithic Masonic lodges that — because there are apparently a diminishing number of Masons to lodge there — now house offices, studios, community theaters, apartments. My mother hopped out of her car, clearly still worked up about something; she sprinted across the street and into the front door. My mother had a long, graceful stride, too, making her the sort of fleeting figure you might admire as she disappeared out of the fog and into an old Masonic lodge.

I followed her, but since my stride is neither long nor graceful, I was more than a few steps behind. By the time I was through the front door and into the ceramic-tiled entryway, she was nowhere to be seen. There was one door to the left of the lobby, and one to the right. Mr. Robert Frost (whose house had less than one more day left on this earth as a viable structure, as you’ll soon learn) said that taking the road less traveled made all the difference, but this was only useful if you knew which road was the one less traveled in the first place. I took the right door for no particular reason.

What I found through that door was not my mother but a large, echoing hall that no doubt had once been where the Masons inducted their young members and practiced their white magic. The hall was as big as a high school gymnasium and was sheathed entirely in dark wood: the floors were made of wide, dark-stained planks, and the walls were paneled with that same dark-stained wood, and the high, high ceilings were tongue and groove, acres of it. There were large vertical boxes the size and shape of a confessional off to the side, too, the sort of containers in which you might cast your vote or confess your sins. The only things not made of wood were a pipe organ and the elevated marble dais on which it sat. At the foot of the dais was a group of people, sitting on folding chairs arranged in a circle. They hadn’t heard me enter the room, and so I crept up to them, hoping to see whether my mother was among them.

She wasn’t, I saw that as I got closer, and I also saw that the group was composed of both men and women — maybe fifteen total — who were dressed as wizards and witches, with pointy hats and black cloaks decorated with pictures of harvest moons and magic wands and boiling cauldrons and other half-assed symbols of the occult. This frightened me for a moment, and I wondered if the Masons had reinvented themselves and gone coed and Wiccan. But then I looked more closely and noticed that each man and woman was holding a book. I recognized the book immediately. My kids each had a copy of it, even Christian, who couldn’t exactly read yet. It was one of those children’s books out of England that are so popular that somehow they aren’t considered children’s books anymore and that have, in any case, so frenzied their readers that they dress as the characters in the books dress and stand in line at midnight for the release of the latest in the series and use the word “jumper” instead of “sweater.” In fact, both Katherine and Christian for a time had, like diabetics with their insulin, refused to travel anywhere without their book; they dressed up as characters from the book for Halloween, and for the day after Halloween, too. This seemed right to me. This was the way children were supposed to act: children became obsessed, children wore costumes. But adults were another matter, were they not? Was this what love for a book did to you? Did love for a book make you act like a child again? Or was this what love did to you, period, book or no book?

Possibly. But that’s not why these men and women — my age and peers in parenting — were dressed as they were dressed, gathered as they were gathered, clutching the book they clutched. They weren’t there for the book itself (I was eavesdropping now) but to better understand their kids, to become a bigger part of their lives, the way you might listen to your kids’ hard-rock music or become addicted to their hard drugs.

“We need to support our kids,” one wizard said. He had large, elongated glasses that were in danger of becoming goggles, and a salt-and-pepper beard, which he scratched earnestly as he spoke. “If they’re reading and loving the book, then we need to read and love it, too.”

“But what if the book isn’t any good?” a witch in Tevas asked. “I have to say, I read the first chapter and didn’t much care for it.” When the witch in Tevas said this, she didn’t look anyone else in the face; she looked at her feet, which were wide and fleshy and oozing out of the sides and tops of her sandals like melted processed cheese.

“It doesn’t matter whether the book is good or not, in a sense,” the wizard said sternly. “And besides, in a sense, the book has to be good. It’s part of the
culture
.”

There was a loud hum and murmur of assent from the group, and I used it as cover for my own noise as I pivoted and walked back on the road less or more traveled, whichever one was supposed to be the wrong road, and into the hallway, where I tried the left door, which was locked. What was I supposed to do with another locked door? I knew from very recent experience that knocking on a locked door would do no good. But what else could I do? Where was the poet to tell me what to do when the door to the road less traveled was locked? Where was the poet to tell me that?