An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (31 page)

Everyone, even Christian, shook their heads to indicate they didn’t care who I kissed, which, under other circumstances, might have been nice of them, might have felt liberating. Thomas helped himself to another heaping spoonful of rice. Mrs. Mirabelli lifted her veil, reached out for a platter of what appeared to be wet garbanzo beans, scooped up three beans, and then, maybe thinking of her figure, put two of them back on the platter and one in her mouth, which she gently sucked on as if it were a delicate gum ball. Christian sat there, slack jawed, towel in his hand as though ready to wipe the drool that might come from his slack jaw.

“As far as we’re concerned,” Mr. Mirabelli said, “you can kiss whoever you want, Coleslaw.”

“Except us,” Mrs. Mirabelli said.

“You can kiss anyone but us, Coleslaw,” Mr. Mirabelli said. “There are apparently
some
limits to who you can kiss, Coleslaw.”

“
Why
do you keep calling me
that name
?” I asked him. I glanced again at Christian: his towel was now somewhere out of sight, and he was still wearing that slightly bewildered look, as though things were happening in a place where he could see and hear them but not understand them.

“I don’t know what else I’m supposed to call you, Coleslaw,” Mr. Mirabelli said.

“My name,” I said. “Sam!”

“Who?” Mr. Mirabelli asked, and then looked one by one at Thomas and his wife and his grandson, and each of them in turn asked, “Who? Who? Who?” like inquisitive owls, even Christian, although I couldn’t and didn’t blame him, because what kid
doesn’t
like to make animal noises? By the time the table was through asking who “Sam” was, I was starting to wonder myself. Which, I was now understanding, was the point — that I was no longer a son-in-law to them but was only a stranger with a strange name — and as with all points, I found myself thinking fondly of the time, a few moments earlier, when I didn’t understand it.

“Where is Anne Marie?” I asked. “I need to talk to Anne Marie.”

“We were just talking about her before you got here, Coleslaw,” my father-in-law said.

“What were you saying about her?”

“That she’s tough,” Mr. Mirabelli said.

“She is,” I said, agreeing with what he’d said, but not at all liking the sound of it.

“She got some bad news today, Coleslaw,” he said, and of course I knew exactly what the bad news was and who was the one who’d given it to her. “She got some very bad news. But she’s tough. She’ll get over it. She’ll move on. She already has.”

“I’ll be right back,” I said. I walked into the kitchen, yelling, “Anne Marie! Anne Marie!” but there was nothing in there but the adobe tile and casement windows and restaurant-quality galley stove and titanium refrigerator-freezer. I walked back through the dining room and headed toward the stairs. “Anne Marie!” I yelled as I walked up the stairs, and then I yelled it again as I wandered through our bedroom, the kids’ bedrooms, the hallway bathroom, the guest room in which no guest had ever stayed, the bathroom in the hallway, back into our bedroom again. I even pulled down the ceiling door to the attic crawl space and yelled, “Anne Marie!” into that and was answered by a shower of pink insulation dust, which I guess was the house’s way of telling me,
She’s not here. Your wife is not here
.

“Where is she?” I demanded of my in-laws as I charged down the stairs and into the dining room. “She has to be here. Her van is out front. Where is she?”

“Where is who?” my father-in-law asked. Then before I could clarify, his nonchalance disappeared for a second, and he said, “It’s none of your
goddamn
business anymore.” Then he recovered, made a slight adjustment to his head wrap, and added, “Coleslaw.”

“Where is she, Thomas?” I asked, turning toward him. Thomas was no longer smiling, no longer “boola, boola’ing.” He didn’t look content, either, but nervous, as though his place at the table were in peril. Thomas shook his head gravely, lips locked, making it known that one of the big differences between him and me was that I was speaking and he was smart enough not to.

“Mrs. Mirabelli, please,” I said. She was a volunteer for most of the Catholic charitable organizations in the area, and so I hoped she would take pity and add me to her body of good works. Mrs. Mirabelli inhaled and exhaled loudly, her veil fluttering with each breath, but no words followed.

So I turned to Christian. He was all I had left in the room, in the house. The towel was on his head now, pouring down his neck and over his ears. He looked so nervous and scared and small, sitting there between his grandparents, not knowing whether to look at me or not, not knowing why he didn’t know whether to look at me or not, but knowing all along where his mother was.

“She went to see my grandma,” he told me.

“Grandma is right here,” I said.

“My other grandma,” he said. “I have another grandma?”

How to describe the way Christian said this? How to describe a five-year-old boy who finds out that he has two sets of grandparents and not just one? How to describe a boy who discovers that his father has for years and years lied about his own parents’ being dead? And how to describe a father who doesn’t once think that, in killing off his parents, he has killed his children’s grandparents in the bargain?

“Oh, Christian,” I said, “I’m sorry, bud.” And then, because as we all know, sorry isn’t good enough, I started crying just to show how sorry I really was, crying and crying and crying, all the while patting myself for a handkerchief, which I didn’t have. So Christian took the towel off his head and gave it to me, and I wiped my face with it.

“Thank you,” I told him.

“May I go watch TV?” he asked me, using the manners his grandparents or maybe TV itself had taught him, because I never had.

“You may,” I said, and then he left the room with just the towel for me to remember him by, which made me cry even harder. All this crying must have softened the Mirabellis’ hearts just a little bit, although maybe it would have been better if it hadn’t: it would be easier for me to remember them now only as the hard-hearted, costumed lunatics they appeared to be, and not as my in-laws who allowed their hard hearts to be softened by the man who had hardened them in the first place and who would soon be just another part of the past, except I’d be a part of the past they
wouldn’t
want to relive.

“Coleslaw, why don’t you sit down and eat,” my father-in-law said softly. “Things always seem a little better on a full stomach.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I said. I began to take my place at the opposite side of the table, but Mr. Mirabelli said, “You’re so far away down there. Why don’t you sit here,” and he patted the place where Christian had just been. Both elder Mirabellis moved over to make room for me.

“Are you sure?” I said.

“Yes,” Mr. Mirabelli said. “But put your son’s towel on your head.”

I put my son’s towel on my head and sat down between my in-laws, and we all ate slowly, in silence, as befitting a last supper. I wanted to ask so many questions. Why, if they were dressed this way for Anne Marie’s benefit, was she not here? What exactly had Thomas told them, and when had he told it? Had he told them about my parents, or was this another thing Mr. Mirabelli found out on his own? But it was the sort of silence that was much preferable to the words that would break it. Besides, I had the feeling that once the silence was broken, the meal would be over and I’d be asked to leave. It was my house, and once again I’d be asked to leave it, and once again I would. Some men would refuse to leave their own homes, but I wasn’t one of them. I’d given up my right to refuse, the way some criminals give up their right to remain silent.

But still, no matter how silent we were, the food eventually was eaten and the meal was over. Mrs. Mirabelli got up to clear the dishes, and Thomas helped her, leaving me and Mr. Mirabelli alone in the room.

“Mr. Mirabelli, may I ask you one question?”

“You may, Coleslaw.”

“Why are you all dressed up like this if Anne Marie isn’t even here?”

“She was here,” he said, “but then before we even sat down to eat, she said she was going over to your mother’s house. That all this” — and here he swept his hands over his costume in demonstration — “was ridiculous.”

“She said that?”

“ ‘I’m not a
child
anymore’ — those were her very words.” I could tell that this was the saddest thing that had happened yet, as far as Mr. Mirabelli was concerned. His eyes went cloudy and wet; he closed them, took off his glasses, and rubbed the bridge of his nose for a few seconds. When he put his glasses back on and opened his eyes, they were clear again. “I’m sorry you have to go, Coleslaw,” he said. “It feels like we barely got to know you, and here it is, time for you to go already.”

“I’m sorry, too,” I said.

“Everyone is sorry,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. “You should say good-bye to your son.”

“I should,” I said. I got up without saying another word, walked to the TV room. Christian was lying on the couch in front of the squawking set. He was asleep, his head halfway hidden by the crook of his arm, and I could hear his sweet breath fluttering past his lips. I loved him. I loved him so much, and I was afraid to say good-bye. You should never say good-bye to your children, not because of what it will do to them, but because of what it will do to you. So I didn’t say good-bye. Instead I took the towel off my head, spread it over him as a blanket, then kissed him softly on the forehead. He shifted and moaned in his sleep, and I turned and crept out of the room before he woke up. On my way out of the house, I passed by the dining room. Thomas wasn’t there, but Mr. and Mrs. Mirabelli were sitting at the table, drinking coffee and talking about the time in Morocco when their tour guide asked them if they’d ever tried a hookah, and they thought he’d said “hooker.” More hilarity, the sort that is years and years in the making. Mr. Mirabelli even took off his towel to hide his face, he was laughing so hard, and I took advantage of his momentary blindness to open the door and leave the Mirabellis and my house in Camelot behind.

…

THOMAS WAS OUTSIDE,
waiting for me, leaning against my van, arms crossed over his bare chest. He must have been cold: it was snowing harder now, and the runtish maples lining Hyannisport Way were bending and swaying in the howling wind. Inside, dressed the way he was, Thomas looked as though he belonged; outside, though, he looked like a man who didn’t have enough sense to wear a shirt in a snowstorm. Inside, he was mostly mute; outside, I hoped, he might answer some questions.

“Did you set fire to the Mark Twain House?” I asked him.

“No,” he said.

“I don’t believe you,” I said. “What about that burn on your hand?”

Thomas removed his hands from his armpits and showed them to me. There, on his right hand, was the burn mark: it was about the size of a quarter, red around the edges, and already starting to scab over. “I got this from the burner on your stove,” he said. “You really ought to fix that thing.”

“I already did,” I said. I knew what he was talking about. A year or two earlier, our stove’s front left burner wasn’t getting as hot as its three siblings. Anne Marie told me it didn’t matter and to leave it alone. This I did not do. I figured it would be easy to fix. I figured it was a loose wire, and so I went inside the stove and loosened and then reconnected the wire to its port, or thought I did. In fact I’d managed to rewire the stove in such a way that the rear left burner didn’t work at all, and in fact, when you turned that knob, it managed to heat the
front
left burner instead. A person who didn’t know this about the stove could easily burn himself on it. It could easily happen. I’d promised Anne Marie I would fix it, again, but I never did. I’d never gotten around to it. “So you really didn’t try to burn down the Mark Twain House?” I asked.

“No. That’s what I told your Detective Wilson, too.”

“This was before you told him I was going to New Hampshire, correct?”

“Correct,” Thomas said, his teeth starting to chatter a little. He returned his hands to the caves of his armpits, where they’d been hibernating.

“Detective Wilson believed you?”

“I had an alibi,” Thomas said, and pointed to my house. “I was here that night.”

“All night?” I asked, not really wanting the answer. My heart was about to beat its way out of my chest. I almost took my own shirt off, thinking that maybe the cold would numb the pain and persuade my heart to stay in its cavity, where it belonged.

“All night,” Thomas said.

“I don’t believe you,” I said. “You told Anne Marie that you lied about my cheating on her and she
still
let you stay all night? Why would she do that? Didn’t she want to know why you lied in the first place?”

“Of course she did,” Thomas said. “She asked me why in the hell would I lie about you, of all people.”

“Oh no,” I said.

“It was an excellent question,” Thomas admitted. “It deserved an excellent answer.”

“Oh no,” I repeated.

“So I told her I did it to get back at you for killing my parents.”

“You told her the truth,” I said.

“That I did,” said Thomas. He looked so proud of himself, as though the truth was the thing he’d never thought he’d be able to tell. “But she didn’t believe me, not at first. Even when I told her about it in detail, about the Emily Dickinson House and the fire and you going to prison, she didn’t believe me.”

“She didn’t?”

“No, she was convinced you wouldn’t have hidden those things from her. ‘Sam wouldn’t do that to me’ — that’s what she said.” Here he paused, and I watched his pride turn to confusion, as it often does. “I don’t get it. She seemed to have really loved you.”

“She still does!” I said. “She still does!”

Thomas didn’t pay any attention to this, wishful thinking being the easiest kind of thinking to ignore. “So then I told her that if she didn’t believe me, she should go talk to your parents.”

“Oh no,” I said, because if our life is just one endless song about hope and regret, then “oh no” is apparently that song’s chorus, the words we always return to.