How to Start a Fire (12 page)

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Does he get married often?”

“Yes.”

“You should get married sometime, Anna.”

“We’ll see.”

“You don’t want to be alone, do you?”

“There are worse things one can be.”

Anna took in a deep breath as she closed the door to her father’s room. She hadn’t noticed the hospital smell until she was inhaling the potpourried air of the rest of the house. Her mother sat in the enclosed porch, sipping iced tea and reading a biography of a dead woman who’d lived in more mannered times. Lena looked tired and years older than she had six months before, when Anna had seen her last. When Lena turned seventy, Anna noticed, she had surrendered to age. While she still dressed impeccably, styled her hair into an immovable upsweep, darkened her eyes, and reddened her lips, she’d stopped waging a full-scale battle with her skin. Her dermatologist remained in the Rolodex for cancer checks and unsightly rashes, but he no longer performed a quarterly tune-up of injections, lasers, and peels.

Anna liked seeing her mother’s forehead furrow again, although it seemed from the shelf of creases that her skin was trying to make up for lost time.

“You didn’t argue with him, did you?” Lena asked.

“I told him I wasn’t married, but the other thing I stayed quiet about.”

“It’s for the best,” Lena said. “Remember what happened last time?”

“I do.”

Anna found her brother in the basement, scavenging through the rubble of decaying boxes. Lena’s idea of spring cleaning involved ridding the house of memories. She’d even had her bedroom redecorated now that her husband no longer slept there. If Donald were capable of climbing stairs and finding his way to his old abode, no one could ever have convinced him he’d once slept there. Even without the rosy palette, the bedroom was aggressively feminine.

“Should I be ruthless or sentimental?” Colin asked. He was paging through a file folder of yellowed papers littered with typewriter ink and whiteout. “High school essays. Do I need this?” he asked.

“Your biographer might,” Anna said, shoving a box with her name on it out of the way and taking a seat on the stain-resistant gray rug.

Colin put the folder in a trash bag. He uncovered a photo album in the box and set it aside.

“Let me see that,” Anna said, stretching out her arms.

“No,” Colin said.

“I want to see the photo album,” she said.

“You have five boxes with your name on them and one hour until dinner. Get to work.”

“Just a quick peek,” Anna said.

“No,” Colin flatly said. “It will make you sad.”

“It’s okay to be sad,” she said.

“Deal with your own past first,” he said, pointing at a box marked
Anna.

Anna and Colin heard the distinct creak that came when someone stepped on the third stair down from the landing, and both twitched out of habit. All their adolescent vices had been nurtured in the basement.

Lena took the stairs at a cautious pace. Hand on the railing, one step at a time. She had too many friends who had broken a wrist or a hip out of sheer carelessness. She had never used a bedpan in her life and hoped to die before she had to subject herself to such an indignity.

When Lena reached the bottom step, Colin and Anna sat frozen, as if they had been caught smoking weed.

“Anna, you haven’t opened any of your boxes.”

“I was just about to get started,” Anna said.

“Anything you don’t take will get tossed. It’s shocking how much stuff a person can acquire over a lifetime, and it all means nothing.”

Lena ascended the stairs without another word. Anna and Colin both exhaled. Long ago, Anna had noticed that she breathed less when her mother was around. Sometimes, she’d even find herself lightheaded after a long interlude with Lena.

“How was Dad?” Colin asked as he studied an old swim-team medal that was slated for landfill.

“Fairly lucid, although he seemed to think he attended
my
wedding six months ago. And he said the funniest thing: ‘Does Colin get married often?’ I said, ‘Yes, yes, he does.’”

“I’m glad you were amused.”

Twenty minutes later, he had reduced his ancient swag to a single box and dusted off his hands with the satisfaction earned from a day of hard labor. Anna opened one of her boxes, which was loaded with school papers, report cards, and old letters. She closed the box and decided that she had lived more than twenty years without whatever was in that box. She could last the duration.

“Let’s get out of here,” Colin said.

“Do you think we’ll ever be down here again?” Anna asked.

“Maybe after dinner, if Mom insists on an inspection.”

“I need to show you something.”

The basement had been unfinished until Colin and Anna were adolescents. Lena’s living room was always off-limits to the children, and the den was Donald’s domain. The dining room was the dining room, and sometimes Lena simply couldn’t keep Anna and Colin contained in their bedrooms. Turning the basement into a young-adult playroom was her solution.

Anna strolled down the galley-shaped corridor to the far end of the basement, where the washer and dryer sat beneath a window providing a ground-level view of the backyard.

To the left of the washer and dryer was a crawlspace for workers, should they require access to the utility hub of the home. Anna pushed against the door with her knee and it popped open. She got down on all fours and crawled inside.

“I’ve been in there before, Anna,” Colin said, remaining on his feet.

“Get a flashlight,” Anna said, ignoring him.

A Maglite rested in a basket by the back door. Colin grabbed the flashlight and followed his sister into the crawlspace. Cobwebs hung from the beams. Anna stole the flashlight from her brother and shone it along the right-side wall. A tiny lever jutted out from the baseboard. Anna clicked the lever to the side, and another small door, about four feet high and three feet wide, clicked open. Anna swung open the tiny door and slipped inside yet another crawlspace, this one about six feet by four feet, with a ceiling just high enough for Anna to stand.

Colin, on hands and aching knees, followed his sister into the secret cavern and took a seat against the opposite wall. On the floor was the same gray basement carpet, along with a mattress from one of the outside lounge chairs that had mysteriously gone missing years ago, a sleeping bag, a wooden crate filled with books, and a night lamp adjacent to a working electrical outlet.

Anna pulled the string on the lamp, illuminating the room. The interior was painted light blue, and the walls were covered with pictures from art books and Emily Dickinson poems. Malcolm had given her the poet’s collected works when she’d turned fifteen. She’d cracked the spine only when he’d told her that you could sing “Because I could not stop for Death” to the tune of the Coke song.

“What is this place?”

“My secret room,” Anna said. She could almost smell the incense she’d burned to mask the musty odor that stuck in the basement after heavy rains.

“Someone made this for you,” Colin said. It was something between a question and a statement.

“When Mom decided to refinish the basement, there was a contractor who worked down here. He was homeless. I caught him sleeping in the utility room one morning. He asked me not to tell. I wasn’t going to. But then later, I thought how perfect it would be to have this place where I could escape in my own home. I squirreled money back then. Had something against banks. I had seven hundred and sixty dollars. His name was . . . Cesar. I told Cesar what I wanted. Electricity and a secret latch was my priority. I wanted it black. He painted it light blue. We argued over the color, but in the end, he was right. Too small a space to go dark. You wouldn’t believe the number of hours I spent in here.”

After what Lena called the legal matter, Colin had thought there was nothing left that Anna could tell him or do that would surprise him. But, once again, he was proven wrong.

“You kept this secret for twenty years?” he asked.

“If you haven’t noticed, I’m kind of good at keeping secrets,” Anna said.

Geography, family, and work were the excuses George had found for not seeing Kate and Anna for the past few years. They spoke on occasion and exchanged e-mails, but George’s simmering resentments kept the tone distant and polite. When Anna began to make amends, George was wary about inviting her old friend back into her life. But past gripes didn’t thrive under current conditions. It helped that Anna was now in an entirely unenviable position. For the first time in the relationship, George couldn’t possibly feel insecure, even about being thrice-divorced, alone, and middle-aged. But what really brought their friendship back was Anna’s persistence. At the time, she was more present and engaging than anyone else in George’s life. George’s friends in Chicago were more like acquaintances with the commonality of children. They never incensed her the way that Kate and, especially, Anna could, but they also bored her. George could complain for hours in therapy about Anna and Kate (and she did) but they had always offered something more. Jeremy once asked George to describe Kate and Anna, and she first, ungenerously, said, “They’re weird.” Then she added, “But they’re also alive. More than most people.”

After a long day of ignored alarms, meetings at the principal’s office, massive cooking spills, arguments over video games, and three hard-core negotiations over bedtime, George got a phone call from Anna at what had become her usual time, eight o’clock. George told Anna about the mouse that had escaped its cage and terrorized the housekeeper all morning. George had thought it all quite hilarious until she’d mentioned it to the mother of Miller’s classmate, who had asked what the mouse’s name was, and George said that they’d decided not to name the mice anymore since they fed them to Carter’s snakes. She was fairly certain Miller and Owen’s next playdate was canceled.

Anna suggested that George needed some time away from laundry and frozen meals and video games and mothers who didn’t understand that you can’t feed a Western rat snake a salad. George jumped at the idea and suggested they meet at her father’s cabin on Lake Huron. These days, it was mostly a rental, her father’s belongings having long since been removed. Now it contained the leftovers of previous inhabitants.

George pawned off her boys on their respective fathers. Anna took a day off, and Kate didn’t need an excuse to spend a weekend at a rustic cabin in the woods. No one would admit it, but all three women were grateful that it was winter and they could sleep in soft, warm beds. George and Kate shared the bedroom. Anna was happy sleeping on the couch in the living room.

Inside, a glowing amber fire burned in the living room, and everything smelled like pine or chocolate or marshmallows. The scents were intoxicating. Outside, snow blanketed the entire world. During the day, icicles would drip and grow; at night, they’d refreeze, and in the morning they’d start the process again. One ice dagger on a shingle had grown to almost two feet long.

“That’s the perfect murder weapon,” Kate commented when she saw it.

“I need to build a snowman,” Anna declared.

Bundled up and in hats and scarves and waterproof gloves, they all went to it. Anna rolled the base of the snowman, because she was the expert. She and Colin had perfected the craft when they were children. Muscle memory kicked in as she packed together an ambitiously large base in record time. When Anna was satisfied with it, she assigned Kate the second layer. Finally, she and George molded the head to perfection.

Kate stole a knit cap and scarf from a drawer of discarded items in the house. Two buttons extracted from what was most likely a deliberately forgotten reindeer sweater made for mismatched eyes. George thought a mushroom would be the perfect nose; Anna and Kate found it disturbing. They swapped the mushroom for a rock, against great protest. George dotted raisins across the lower region of the head to make a smile. Three grown women stood back to admire their team effort.

KATE
:      It’s missing something.

George gathered two small branches from under a tree. She stabbed one into either side of the middle snowball.

GEORGE
:      Those are arms.

ANNA
:      We would have figured it out eventually.

George took a picture with her phone and texted it to her sons. Kate knit her brow and shook her head.

KATE
:      It’s still missing something.

Kate pulled a twig from one of the snowman’s branch arms and stuck it in his mouth.

KATE
:      That’s better.

George was unconvinced that the twig improved his appearance.

Silence.