How to Start a Fire (39 page)

And to anyone who was visiting Donald, Alvita would offer a variation on the following: “He’s in a mood t’day. It’s best to ignore it.”

When Anna visited, he was most definitely in a mood.

“I need you to call in a prescription for Ambien. I can’t sleep. If I can’t sleep, I can’t work.”

“You’re retired, Dad. Remember?”

“I consult,” Donald said. Sometimes he did call his old colleagues and offer suggestions on the stock market. Sometimes the research was current and sound. No matter what state his mind was in, Donald always read the morning’s business section. Whether it stuck was another story. Donald could read today’s news and then pick up the phone and remark on conditions five years past.
You should consider adding some environmental funds to your portfolio. That global-warming talk isn’t going away
.

“I think it’s best if you take the meds your doctor prescribed,” Anna said.

“I’m not demanding Vicodin. Although my knee is still giving me trouble. I just need a prescription for sleeping pills, and I don’t have the energy to go in to the doctor today.”

“I can’t do that, Dad.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t write prescriptions anymore, remember?”

“What kind of doctor doesn’t write prescriptions?”

“I’m not a doctor anymore, Dad. I haven’t been for four years.”

“Why did you quit?”

“I didn’t quit. I had a problem with drugs. I lost my medical license. Four years ago.”

“You’re weak,” Donald said, his face burning red. That was the standard attack in his Rolodex. Nothing was worse than weakness. “How did I raise a drug addict?” Donald said. This was the second time Donald had learned that his daughter had been an addict and destroyed her career. It would not be the last.

Anna had seen enough shrinks to know how easy it was to blame her parents. She blamed them for many things, but not for who she had become. She took full credit for that.

“Go. I don’t want a druggie in my house,” Donald said.

“I’m clean now.”

Anna left the house and drove straight to a meeting. The following day she had a brittle lunch with her mother in a restaurant on the top floor of a department store. Lena offered to buy Anna a new outfit for work. She didn’t mention the incident at the house, although when Anna ordered French fries, she said in a warning tone, as if her daughter were stepping into heavy traffic:

“You should be careful with that.”

Then Lena nibbled at her salade niçoise for five minutes while remaining uncharacteristically mute. Even under circumstances more dire than these, Lena could usually manage polite conversation. The weather, gardens, charity organizations, other people’s failed marriages, the inedible food served at the last dinner party, the relative weight gain or weight loss in her circle of acquaintances who passed as friends.

Anna let herself enjoy the quiet and didn’t try to fill the space. She devoured her hamburger and French fries and didn’t click her eyes upward to check Lena’s expression.

After the waitress cleared the plates, Lena ordered a cup of decaf coffee, which she doctored with skim milk and fake sugar. She then spoke with more bluntness than Anna had thought she was capable of.

“Why haven’t you ever married?”

“I was busy. Medical school and drugs are very time-consuming hobbies.”

“Colin said—” Lena quit on the sentence, thinking better of it.

“What did Colin say? Go ahead.”

“He said you were in love with Malcolm. Were you?”

“Yes.”

“You still think about him?”

“All of the time.”

“Is that why you’re like this?”

“No, Mom.”

“Then why? Did we do this to you?”

“It’s not one thing. Maybe it’s nothing. Even if Malcolm lived, I might have derailed this train the exact same way. I know I didn’t turn out like you or I expected. But it’s not as bad as it looks. I’m going to be okay.”

That was the first time Anna said that and meant it.

The next morning, Kate, Anna, Colin, and Swinger Girl ate pancakes together before Kate drove Anna to the airport. As Anna was leaving, Colin gave her a wonderfully suffocating embrace. She had to wonder where he’d learned such things. Perhaps it was fatherhood. He lifted Swinger Girl out of her booster seat, spun her around, and landed her facing in the direction of the staircase.

“Shoes,” he said, knowing that she would return wearing lace-up pink Converse high-tops that finished off the superhero outfit.

Colin placed his hand on the back of Kate’s head, said, “No Sex Pistols,” and left.

Anna turned to Kate for an explanation.

“I had my iPod on random in the car. ‘God Save the Queen.’ Zooey liked it and asked me to play it again. Then she started singing it around the house. ‘God save the queen, she ain’t no human bean.’ She comes up with some really good lyrics. But Colin does not approve of my music. I don’t approve of children’s music. But he wins.”

“How long are you going to live here?” Anna asked.

“Until there’s a reason not to.”

Anna couldn’t remember a time in her life when she didn’t want more of something. Now it was a constant struggle to be satisfied with what she had. It had taken years to feel at peace when she introduced herself to someone and couldn’t tell the new acquaintance that she was a doctor. Even now, admitting her occupation sometimes embarrassed her. And yet she remembered the days when Kate would proudly announce at a party full of high achievers that she was a barista. As she grew older and older, Anna found more and more things to envy in Kate.

“Is this enough for you?” Anna asked.

“Less than this would be enough for me.”

Anna departed, and life returned to normal for Colin, Kate, and Zooey, although Colin could never assign that word to it. Every night, when he walked through the front door, a new, bizarre activity greeted him. There was the day that Zooey made cookies from scratch with her own personal recipe—inedible, of course; baking is a science, and no cookie recipe on earth calls for three packets of cherry Jell-O mix. There were forts in his living room made from blankets and chairs—a common childhood activity, but done with a grasp of military defense tactics. There were lessons on code breaking and surreptitious communications, and secret languages that would change from week to week. There were books, not just the current trends in children’s picture books but the brutal old fairy tales that had fallen out of fashion. Kate would argue that they hadn’t caused
her
any permanent damage, although Colin couldn’t be sure of that. He had failed to understand the recipe that made up Kate.

The one time Colin argued against Kate’s brand of literary entertainment was when Zooey woke from a nightmare about a witch wanting to bake her in an oven.

“People have nightmares,” Kate said.

One night Colin returned to an empty house. A few lights were still on, and the second car was in the driveway. He saw a reflection of flames in the living room window and raced into the backyard to find a campfire burning in a pit surrounded by landscaping rocks. A tent was pitched nearby, and Kate and Zooey were toasting marshmallows on twigs over the flames.

When Zooey saw her father, she jumped to her feet and ran toward him with the marshmallow stick outstretched like a lance, missing only the horse. Colin disarmed his daughter as she leaped into his arms. He took a bite out of the burned marshmallow as Zooey protested.

“That’s mine, Daddy. You can make your own.”

Colin changed clothes and returned to the campsite. Kate silently handed him a stick with a fresh marshmallow while Colin inspected the newly dug fire pit. Kate, anticipating some protest, said, “You mentioned you were going to have new sod in spring, and, since it’s almost winter, the snow will cover the hole.”

Colin let his marshmallow catch fire and then blew out the torch.

“You could have called and asked,” he said, unperturbed.

“You would have said no,” Kate said.

“True.”

Kate proffered a graham cracker and a chocolate square as a peace offering, and it was accepted.

The sky was clear. Zooey rested on her back and looked up at the stars and named the constellations for her father. “That’s Ursa Major, that’s Ursa Minor. I keep looking for Ursa Medium, but Kate said there isn’t one.”

“Why should there be an Ursa Medium?” Colin asked.

“
Ursa
means ‘bear’ in Latin, Daddy.”

“Very good. But still—”

Zooey passed the marshmallow torch to Kate, who blew it out.

“Can I have two pieces of chocolate?”

“Sure,” Kate said, breaking a square in half.

“That’s cheating.”

“You have school tomorrow,” Colin said. “Now finish up and then you need to brush your teeth for twice as long as usual.”

Zooey ran back into the house. Colin turned to Kate. “What was she talking about with the bears?”

“Goldilocks and the Three Bears. There are only two bears in the constellations. She was looking for a third.”

“Why?”

“Because we were talking about patterns in stories and life and how everything is just a variation of something that has already been.”

That got Colin thinking of patterns. Sometimes Zooey reminded him of Anna as a child, fearless and independent with so many ideas. He wondered if that pattern would repeat.

Colin followed his daughter into the house and supervised her dental hygiene, having noticed her habit of staring into space without moving the toothbrush in her mouth. Anna had done the same thing as a child.

“Circular motions, Zooey.”

Zooey obeyed her father but believed that the task was in vain. When she’d learned that she would lose all her teeth and get an entirely new set, it occurred to her that she could neglect the originals. When she asked Kate whether her assumption was correct, Kate couldn’t argue with her logic.

“Why do I brush teeth that are going to die?”

“Practice. So you know how to keep the next set alive.”

Zooey insisted that Colin read her “Rumpelstiltskin” as a bedtime story. Colin changed the ending and didn’t let Rumpelstiltskin split himself in two in a fit of rage. Instead, he saw the error of his ways.

“Daddy, you changed it.”

“There’s always more than one ending, Zooey.”

From the window Colin watched Kate tend to the fire, letting the embers burn to their final death. Then she poured a bucket of water over them and returned to the house.

Colin and Kate sat on the couch in the living room in front of the gas fireplace. Colin picked up the remote control and pressed the On button. Flames burst out of rocks, casting shadows around the room. He flicked the fireplace off and on again, for effect. “You can, however, roast them over the gas stove and eat them in front of a gas fireplace.”

“You want everything to be easy,” Kate said, getting to her feet.

She kicked his legs, which were resting on the coffee table, blocking her exit.

Colin took her hand and said, “Not everything.”

Colin understood very little about Kate, but he knew to tread cautiously. When Colin reached for Kate, she’d felt her skin flush and wanted to believe it was a delayed reaction to various fires. Colin tugged on the bottom of Kate’s shirt, pulling her toward him, waiting to see how she’d respond.

Kate straddled him on the couch and kissed him, tasting marshmallows again. She admonished herself by repeating this refrain:
This means nothing to him.
She pulled her shirt over her head and struggled out of it, wrestling with the shirt in a childish manner. Colin thought,
This means nothing to her.
They continued to disrobe, misreading each other’s minds.

Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

George and Anna threw off their clothes by the watering hole. Kate couldn’t help but stare at George’s natural breasts, which sagged slightly from the weight of time and the loss of silicone.

Anna had noticed that the implants had been removed when she met George at the airport, but she didn’t say anything until they were laid bare for observation.

“Hey, your fake boobs are gone,” Kate said enthusiastically.

“Edgar prefers things natural.”

“Huh,” Kate said, the enthusiasm entirely drained from her voice. “What do you do if you find a guy who likes big tits again? Can’t be healthy going back and forth like that.”

“I’m getting married, Kate. There isn’t going to be another guy.”

Anna jumped into the water to signal the end of the conversation.

“How did you find this place?” George asked Kate. George, Anna, and Kate, after months of planning, had found a pocket of time in June to gather for a medium-dry bachelorette weekend before George and Edgar’s August nuptials. George chose Yellowstone Park and Kate remained mum about her previous visit, although she couldn’t resist urging them toward that one private hot spring she’d found eight years earlier.

Kate guided her friends by faking a sense of the geography. She said, “Let’s go this way. I have a good feeling about this way.” And the hot spring miraculously appeared.

The trio swam for an hour and then gathered their belongings and climbed up to the road to watch the sun set in a cloudy tangle of purple and yellow. Kate ranked the sunset against a few others and it came up short, but sunsets were like pizza, she thought; they were all pretty good. (Except the kind in the frozen-food section and one that she’d had in Kansas.) George wished her boys were with her. Then she remembered Edgar. Engaged now for three months, she worried that she had to remind herself to remember him. For a brief moment, Anna thought how nice it would feel to have a cold beer in her hands. The women returned to the car and drove to the campsite.

Kate held the flashlight and timed George as she pitched their tent in the dark. Three minutes and fifty-five seconds. Each step so rote, she could have been loading a dishwasher. Before George could take on the coveted job of fire starter, Kate had collected kindling and lit a match.

Just twenty minutes after they landed at the site, the three women were warming their hands by the fire. George uncorked a bottle of wine and drank straight from the bottle. She offered it to Kate, who declined. No matter how many times Anna had told her she was fine with people drinking in her company, Kate never partook when Anna was around.