How to Start a Fire (35 page)

Colin studied Kate’s stolid expression.

“You look tired.”

“That’s because I haven’t slept.”

“You live here?” Colin asked. It was a rhetorical question and yet there was that upturn at the end of the sentence as if he was hoping it wasn’t true.

“No. This is just my crash pad for strung-out junkies I bail out of jail.”

“It’s a closet,” Colin said scornfully.

“It’s called a studio.”

“You got any coffee?”

Kate started the kettle and scooped grounds of bulk organic espresso roast into a French press. They could hear faint sounds of Anna’s heavy breathing in the bathroom. No one said a word until Kate walked three steps back to the milk crate and handed Colin his cup.

“Black, right?”

Colin couldn’t think how she would know that, but it was correct. He took a sip.

“This is really good coffee.”

“I’m a barista, remember?”

Kate tucked herself into a corner of the room, wrapping her arms around her legs. Anna had had a fever the night before. Kate, who was famously stingy with heat, had turned it off completely.

“I found a rehab facility for her. They’ll hold off the court date until she’s out,” Colin said.

“What will she tell the hospital?” Kate asked.

“It doesn’t matter what she tells them. It’s over, Kate. She’s been on probation twice during her residency. She was caught stealing drugs from patients and writing phony scripts. Two stints in rehab already. And now she vanished for ten days and went on a heroin binge and bought drugs from an undercover cop. She has no business being a doctor. If she stays out of jail, we’ll be lucky. Trust me. I’ve looked into the matter from every angle. She will lose her medical license. She will not be able to legally practice medicine anywhere.”

“Are you going to tell her?”

“She knows, Kate. When the undercover cop identified himself, she knew it was over.”

An hour later, Anna woke in a cold sweat in the bathroom. She bent over the toilet and dry heaved for another hour. Colin waited it out while Kate went to Anna’s apartment and packed a suitcase full of clothes. Colin found a pricey and peaceful rehab facility in the Berkshires. The pamphlet boasted of daily hikes and natural surroundings. He secured Anna in the back seat of his BMW and gave her a plastic bin and strict vomiting instructions. They drove two hours, which wasn’t ideal considering the condition she was in, but he wanted her safely ensconced in the facility before Lena or Donald got wind of the news. He knew that the first few weeks, no one was allowed to make contact, and keeping his parents away from his sister was now the only thing he could do for her.

Anna freely signed the admission forms. In the past, there was always some corner of her brain that thought she was okay. She could fix it. Only now did she realize that something was wrong with her, though she couldn’t tell what.

Colin dropped by Kate’s apartment a few days later. He walked inside and sat down on the good chair without an invitation. He put a bottle of quality bourbon on the trunk/coffee table. Kate obeyed the unspoken instruction and collected two small shot glasses from the kitchen. One had cost a quarter at a thrift shop and was adorned with a four-leaf clover. The other had the letter
K
on it. It had been a gift from Anna on Kate’s twenty-first birthday, as had a bottle of Smirnoff vodka, of which Anna was the primary consumer.

Colin poured two shots. They clinked glasses and he toasted: “To rehab.”

Colin took his medicine without expression; Kate grimaced and shivered as she always did when drinking booze neat. Colin poured two more shots and took another slug.

“You hoping to join her?” Kate said.

“I just told the folks. My mother pretended she didn’t hear me, and my dad immediately got on the phone with his lawyers. He seems to think he can buy her out of this mess. He was still on the phone when I left.”

“I’m sorry,” Kate said. She sipped her drink and then took a few steps into the kitchen to collect a jar and some ginger ale. She mixed the bourbon and ginger ale in the old jelly jar.

Colin studied her with a combination of amusement and gut-twisting sadness. He had never noticed it before, but Kate had a gift for drawing out a peculiar medley of emotions. On this occasion, the combo was pity, bafflement, and reverence.

“Why do you live like an immigrant during the Great Depression?” Colin asked.

“If that were the case, I’d be sharing this room with at least three other people.”

“You know what I’m asking.”

“Some people like to spend money. Some people like to not spend it.”

“You still have that nest egg tucked away,” Colin said. At Anna’s urging, Kate had spoken to Colin about what to do with her
deda
’s money. Colin got her in touch with an old Princeton friend who was horrified that Kate’s long-term plan was a 1 percent yield savings account. She’d since invested wisely, and the money Ivan had left her had doubled.

“How did you forgive her? After what happened.”

“After
what
happened?” Kate asked.

Colin sighed and poured himself another drink. Like his mother, he sometimes preferred speaking in veiled references.
That hot summer in 1988; that horrible visitor from Europe; after the surgery.
Colin figured
what happened
was enough.

“I’ve never killed anyone, Kate. And I know what you did was justified. But I also know you enough to realize that it couldn’t have been easy to live with that.”

“It wasn’t. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. Anna got me out of there, out of that house, so I didn’t constantly have to be reminded of what I did.”

“But she’s probably the reason it happened,” Colin said.

Kate felt a chill so deep it was like stepping into an ice bath. She saw spots in front of her eyes, felt as if she might faint.

“How do you know about this?” Kate asked.

“Anna said something to me when she came home a week later. She was out of her mind—well, that’s all relative—”

“What did she tell you?” Kate asked.

“She told me that she’d blacked out that night. But she went to the police station later and saw a picture of the intruder and he looked familiar. She figured he’d followed her home and she’d left the door open, or worse, she’d invited him over. She didn’t know exactly what happened, but she knew she’d done something.”

Kate filled the jelly jar with bourbon and took a healthy gulp. She wasn’t a crier and when emotion took hold, she would fight it like a bull, but tears streamed down her face. For years she had guarded a very simple secret—
Anna forgot to lock the door—
to protect her friend from sharing the guilt. But now she understood that Anna had known much more than she ever admitted. She knew she’d made Kate a murderer and she’d never thought to tell her the truth.

Colin got down on the floor and crawled next to Kate. He put his arm around her, took the drink out of her hands, and sat silently while she cried on his two-hundred-dollar cashmere sweater.

A week later, Colin dropped by again.

“I’m fine,” Kate said when she opened the door.

“Invite me in.”

“I don’t feel like company.”

“Me neither. Invite me in.”

Kate stepped away from the door and Colin entered the apartment. When he sat in the good chair and noticed that it was warm, he finally realized that it was Kate’s chair. He thought about moving to the milk crate, but Kate had already settled on the floor.

“How are you doing?”

“Okay,” Kate said.

“Anything new?”

“Actually, yes. I was fired today. Why do I have a feeling you had something to do with it?”

“I don’t know what would give you that feeling,” Colin stiffly said. There wasn’t much heart in his protest. He wanted Kate to know that he could do that kind of thing. “What’s next for you, Kate?”

“I’ll find another job.”

“No, Kate. You’re going to leave.”

Colin got to his feet, reached into his pocket, and set the keys to his seven-year-old BMW on the trunk/coffee table.

“You know how to drive. So drive. Pack a bag and get out of here and have a life. For ten years I’ve watched you do nothing on your own. You read books in this closet, you serve coffee to people for a living, and when Anna’s sober, maybe you take a trip with her. I had the oil changed, the tires checked, and there’s a tank full of gas. Pack your bag tonight and go.”

“What if I don’t?”

“I’ll make your life very difficult.” Colin pulled a brand-new mobile phone from his pocket and wrapped Kate’s hands around it. “You’ll call me once a week and text every day so I know you’re okay. You won’t drive at night, and don’t get too friendly with strange men. There are maps in the glove compartment. Go wherever you want to go.”

“I want to stay here,” Kate said. She said it without much conviction, and she felt even less.

“No, you don’t,” Colin said, giving her apartment one last disparaging glance.

He kissed Kate on the cheek.

“Leave, Kate.”

Santa Cruz, California

“Come in,
miláèku
,” Ivan said from his office. He rolled a chair out for Kate. “Sit down.”

Kate took a seat and spun back and forth in semicircles like she had when she was a child.

“Sit still,” Ivan said, like he had when she was a child.

Kate braked with her feet and made eye contact with her
deda
. He wore his serious face, which prompted immediate concern.

“Are you sick?” Kate asked.

“Ven haf I been sick in my life?” Ivan asked, with a spark of outrage.

Kate didn’t want to contradict him, but her
deda
had had shingles just three years earlier. The rash started on the right side of his neck and traveled to his jawline. He wore a turtleneck and worked through the illness, despite uncomfortable stares from customers and employees. Ivan had also had his share of colds and flus, which also never sidelined him. He once told Kate that germs were an American invention.

“You’re doing that thing with your eyes,” Kate said.

It was a kind of hybrid between a furrow and a heavenly glance, although the glance seemed more pleading than serene. Kate remembered the first time she’d seen it. She was eight years old. In the middle of the night a man (her
deda
, she always assumed, but she never saw his face) rolled her up in blankets and put her in the back of his car. The nautical-level shock absorbers in the Cadillac had lulled Kate back to sleep. In the morning, she woke up in the guest bedroom of her
deda
’s house. She’d heard him on the phone, speaking in rushed Czech whispers and then in slow and loud English, trying to be understood. She crawled out of bed and into the kitchen and overheard Ivan say, “Ven can I see my son?”

He’d rushed the end of the call and then sunk two slices of hearty brown bread into the toaster.

“Sit down,
miláèku
.”

His eyes were rimmed in red, his voice hoarse and crackly like an old radio show replayed on the wrong equipment.

Kate had sat down on the chrome-and-pleather kitchen chair. This one didn’t spin.

“How did I get here?” Kate asked.

“I take you in the middle of the night.”

“Where are Mama and Papa?”

“They are not here.”

“Where are they?”

“There was an accident. Last night. It was very bad. Your mama and papa are with God now.”

All of Kate’s memories were categorized by whether they’d occurred before or after that moment. But all memories shift over time, like a story rewritten again and again. When she was older, the memory was dusted with suspicion. She’d always felt that there was something her grandpa wasn’t telling her. Maybe because that was the only time he’d ever mentioned God. For an hour she’d sat on his lap and cried. Ivan said, “I am your papa now. I vill take care of you.” Kate never went back to the house she’d lived in with her parents. Her clothing was gathered in a rush, her parents’ belongings either sold or donated to charity. Ivan paid a waitress named Doris three hundred dollars to take the day off and turn his guest room into the perfect domain for an eight-year-old girl. Kate returned home from school to find her new bedroom transformed into a princess’s chamber. The smell of fresh paint stung Kate’s nostrils, but it was the light pink walls that offended her senses the most. The ruffled curtains in a darker rose shade, Doris explained, were an accent, as decorators called it. Atop the twin bed was a frilly white duvet and ivory dolls with locks of tight blond curls. Kate’s unfinished-wood dresser from home had been painted white and decoupaged with butterflies and fairies. Ivan and Doris looked so pleased with themselves that Kate could only force a smile and thank them. It took Kate three years before she had the heart to tell him that she missed the bare wood of her old room and the checked flannel comforter on the bed. She had never wanted to be a princess.

Ivan had come to the United States with his wife and ten-year-old son. Two years later his wife died of cancer. Ivan was a kind father and then grandfather, but he had little interest in anything but work. He had come to this country for a better life, a life he could pass on to his child. Kate could recall very few leisure activities with her
deda
. He took her to the movie theater once. She slumped in her seat, shrinking in embarrassment, as he commented his way through
What About Bob?
The next time Ivan asked her if she wanted to see a movie, she told him she wasn’t a fan. Of movies in general. Smirnoff’s Diner was the glue that held them together. That was what they did together. They didn’t need anything else.

The tone of this conversation in her
deda
’s office was unlike anything that had previously transpired between them. Kate noticed an odd formality in Ivan’s voice, as if he were trying to calmly deliver an unfortunate piece of information.

“I haf news, Katia. I tink it good news. I hope you agree.”

“You don’t look like someone with good news,” Kate said.