The Fires (26 page)

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feet, began to pick at the sharpest pieces, and scratched them in loops in the pink linoleum floor. Her fingers were bleeding.

I bent down, looking at the blue flecks scattered among the broken pieces and blood on the floor. “He loved roses,” she said, fondly now. “He loved those
damn
roses.”

O
n my night off I took my mother to Strongbow’s Inn. There was a turkey farm behind the restaurant, and if you sat near the back, you could look out the window and watch them gobbling and jerking in the distance. I knew I could get her to eat if people were watching.

We passed through the bar, where a collection of model airplanes hung from the ceiling around an upside-down plastic Christmas tree, and we went into the brown-and-gold dining room with studded chairs that were meant to look medieval.

People tried not to stare at her skeletal frame, or that bare place on her scalp where her hair had fallen out.

A plump waitress with a waxy face came to our table, and my mother frowned when I ordered bourbon, but then her gaze smeared over the paneled wall.

She opened her menu. “I usually get Turkey Divine,” she said.

The waitress came back with my bourbon and took our orders.

My mother looked frail when she asked the waitress a question about the side dishes. The waitress smiled at her sweetly, scratching on her pad and trying not to stare.

“Mother,” I said, after the basket of rolls came, “I went to see Aunt Emily a couple of months ago. She said something about Hanna and some people down at Lake Eliza.”

She stuffed half a roll into her mouth and started chewing, lowering her eyes.

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“Hmm,” she said, still chewing. I waited for her to finish, but instead of replying, she took another bite.

“What was she talking about?”

She finished chewing and looked at me, a mournful slackness around her eyes and cheeks. She didn’t move for a second or two.

“They were some people she got mixed up with.”

“Mixed up with?”

She shrugged. “What’s the point in talking about any of that?

It was a long time ago.” I had to stop myself from agreeing with her. What did it matter, now that Hanna was dead? She had helped me to envision another life outside Porter, but in order to have that life, I had to understand why my wait for her return had been futile. My mother’s hand shook as she reached for the water glass. I drank half my glass of bourbon in one swallow.

Martin Luther said that our only hope was to wait for grace to descend on us, to ask for it and wait. I was good at waiting, but tired of it. I told my mother I needed to hear what happened.

Her face blanched. She played with the napkin in her lap.

The waitress brought our food. My mother pulled her plate close to her, cut her meat, and took a bite. For the first time in months, she looked hungry. I was so relieved to see her eating, I didn’t say anything more for a while, and we ate without talking.

I gratefully watched her mouth chew and listened to the sound of my own hollow swallows.

Then she blurted out, “She got into some trouble down at Lake Eliza. That was what started it.”

The waitress balanced a huge tray above her head, piled with platters of turkey, the bones elbowing up over carrot medallions and potatoes. When my mother wiped her mouth and paused, I asked her what kind of trouble. She began eating again rapidly, pushing a forkful of mashed potatoes into her mouth. “What kind of trouble?” I asked again.

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She swallowed the last bit of mashed potatoes and looked frantically around the table, her hands worrying her silverware.

It was as if she’d suddenly felt that she was starving and wanted to make up for all the food she hadn’t eaten. She took another bite of a roll, her eyes wide and red.

“I know she’s dead,” I said flatly. “I saw her room.” She gagged, and her eyes got bright and round, glossy. She leaned over, her lips parted. The clattering of plates and chattering around us seemed to recede into the distance. She opened her mouth, her lower lip trembling, a gargle in her throat. Her head swerved away as if she’d been slapped. I heard her choke before she vomited on the floor beside her chair. People turned away from their tables to look at us and the sullen pink-and-yellow puddle at her feet. Wiping her mouth on her napkin, she rushed off with her arm crooked over her face.

The waitress came quickly with a bucket and a mop. “Poor thing,” she said, mopping. She paused, looked at me sympathet-ically. “Is it cancer?”

I
n the car on the way home, I asked her again. Between sobs, she began to talk, and I pulled over onto a dirt road in the fields. The cornstalks rustled beside us like torn green silk.

“I don’t know,” she choked out. “All I know is what they told me.” She wiped the flats of her hands up and down her face as if her tears were a kind of salve. “She was baby-sitting. Some big house on the lake.”

The wind ruffled the corn leaves and the airy yellow crowns at the tops of the stalks. The sky looked very small, cupping us there in my car. Our bodies seemed to have grown huge and smelled strongly of hair and skin.

Her voice wavered. “The family had a baby and a much older THE FIRES / 207

boy, a stepbrother who came home with two of his friends. They were on the basketball team.” She pounded her fist in her lap and said this almost dismissively: “They had their way with Hanna.

They said she asked them to.” She looked at me, her eyes wide.

“They said she took off all her clothes and stood on the balcony calling them.” Then she turned sharply away, pressed herself against the car door, so I could barely hear her. “She lost it. Didn’t remember a thing.” After a moment, she turned back to me. Her face looked beaten, her cheeks puffy and bruised, her eyes swollen in their hollow sockets. “My father called her a whore and then broke down crying. It was the only time I saw him do that. And she just kept saying to him, I remember, ‘Why do you believe them?’ And she stuffed some things in a brown bag and left. It was awful.”

“So there wasn’t any baby?”

“A baby?” She stared at me, confused. “Oh no, thank God there wasn’t any baby.”

I looked out at the stars, all those constant lights, imagined switching them off, one by one. My scars bore into me, pressed against my bones. I wanted to spit. I wanted to get out of the car and lie down in the corn, leave her there alone. That was it? That was the reason my grandfather wouldn’t look at her?

“When I first heard the rumors going around the high school, even before this, I didn’t deny them. Can you believe that? I was so jealous of my own sister. A girl I knew said that she’d heard about Hanna in a car with a boy, and I just nodded. After she went to Emily’s and came back, and everyone was asking me about it, I didn’t deny it. I didn’t say anything. And when I got her alone, she wouldn’t say what happened either.” The corners of her mouth turned down sharply.

I started up the engine.

“It was such a long time ago, and then it just worked out that 208 / RENÉ STEINKE

she would live far from home. I missed her, but she seemed to want it that way. We never talked about it. Ever.” My mother rolled a ball of Kleenex against her eyes. “She had this secret life.”

Driving back onto the road, I glanced over at her profile; her hands grabbed at the dashboard, groping for some solace.

“Mother,” I said, my eyes aching, “what about
your
secret life.

Why won’t you eat anything?”

I stopped for the light at the intersection and turned to her. She looked into her lap. “I haven’t been hungry.” Her chin trembled as she unrolled the tissue and smoothed it.

“That’s not it,” I said.

“No.” She looked away. “It’s just—I can’t.”

“Since he died?”

She grimaced and nodded.

“You have to eat,” I said.

She squeezed back tears. “And the way you were looking for her, I was sure you were going to leave, too.”

The light was changing, and I waited a second more anyway, but then a car pulled up behind me, and I had to drive on.

She grabbed my arm. “You understand, my father loved Hanna, and he couldn’t even see her.”

“I know,” I said, turning onto Maple Street. “He couldn’t forgive himself.”

“No, he couldn’t. For letting it happen to her.”

XIV

I
’d brought Paul a postcard of the Golden Gate Bridge from my collection. He held it in his palm and stared for a long time.

“The blue’s too blue to be real,” he said. “Looks like they touched it up.” He turned it over to the yellowed side and read the scrawl of the stranger. He rubbed the picture side against his pant leg as if to polish it, get rid of fingerprints. “Thanks.” He smiled but wouldn’t look at me. “Better check those locks,” he said, moving toward the door.

I opened the side gate to the desk and sat down, swiveled in my chair a little. I checked in an old man who wore a work suit with a red carnation in the pocket, and he winked at me when I gave him his key. I couldn’t wait for Paul to come back after his next round, and I was too restless to relax. I wanted to tell him about all that had just happened, but he didn’t show any interest in talking. I went into the bathroom and combed my hair, put on some lipstick, powdered my nose. It seemed to me that my eyes were getting smaller, narrower, but I didn’t know why.

I went back to the desk and sat down, looked at the book. There were no other reservations, and Jo wouldn’t be in that night—I’d called her to tell her everything Marietta and my mother had told me, and she’d said, “Aren’t you glad you did that?”

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“Yes,” I’d said. “Definitely.” But it had left me exhausted and disappointed that it had taken me so long to find out the little I knew. I also felt as if the floor might give way at any moment and fall into another layer of secrets, and I was worried about my mother and what she might do.

Finally Paul came back. He sat in the chair with his glass of milk, but he was still quiet and nervous, jiggling his knee. The NO in the NO VACANCY sign was blinking unevenly, so I went over and unplugged it. “Have to get that fixed,” I said.

“Yes, and the walls upstairs in the hallway need repainting, too.”

I didn’t know what was wrong and hoped I hadn’t hurt him the other night. I wanted to tell him I was ready to tell him more.

I wanted to drape my arms around him, or go over to him and sit on his lap. He kept anxiously glancing out the window.

“We don’t have any more reservations. It’s going to be slow,”

I said, hoping he’d take the hint. I put my legs up on the desk and crossed them, so my skirt fell back above my knee.

He was lingering longer than he usually did. He lit a cigarette and smoked it quickly. He sat back in his chair, his knees spread, jiggling his leg, and rubbing the vinyl of the arm rest. Once he asked how many guests there were that night, but when I told him he just nodded, not saying anything more. The whole evening passed this way, with these awkward silences and formal exchanges. After work, he looked very tired, but he ran out the door without kissing me good night.

I began to worry I’d already told him too much about myself, but he’d pushed me to, hadn’t he? I hadn’t wanted to. There was a reason people kept things secret—a person had only this thin skin between himself and everything else in the world, and people needed more protection than that.

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The next day before work I washed my hair, and it was warm enough to put on a loose gauzy dress Paul had once said he liked.

All night only two people checked in, and I tried to read, despite the awkward silences between Paul and me. His cheeks looked heavy and white, and some chalky dust had settled around the hems of his pants.

At midnight I closed the guest book and locked the money bag in the drawer. Paul stalked into the lobby and collapsed in the chair, staring at his feet. “You ever go to that bar, the Paradise?”

The blood vessels embered under my skin. I grabbed a strand of hair, surprised at its softness and rubbed it between my fingers.

“Sometimes, why?”

He didn’t look up at me, but his eyes were anxious. “I went there with my cousin the other night.” The black-and-white pictures of Mr. Linden behind the glass made him look young and larval, his goofy smile stretching his face. Upstairs, someone played a hiccuping song on the radio.

I wound the silky hair in a coil around my finger and noticed its gloss.
Come over and touch my hair,
I thought.

Paul stood up and started pacing the lobby, from the trophy case to the painting of the clown. “Someone was here looking for you the other night.” His voice sounded testing, precarious, as if it might fall from a high ledge. “He was disappointed that you weren’t here. It seemed like he knew you pretty well.”

The folds in the heavy gold curtains were uneven and creased—why had I never noticed that before? The embers under my skin pricked out and turned to ash. I wasn’t going to be able to lie to him, but I still hoped this might pass. “Really? Who was he?”

The soles of Paul’s boots squeaked on the carpet, but in the room overhead the hard footsteps of a giant pounded. I would sit silently for as long as I could stand it, and maybe it would pass—it

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would turn out to be some friend of my mother’s who’d wanted to invite me to a church function, someone from the college looking for a donation.

“He didn’t say. He was here on some banking business.” He kicked the wall, and the trophies in the case wobbled. “He looked forty at least. Who was he, Ella?”

I was shaking and trying to swallow the rotten piece in my throat, but at the same instant laughter welled up in me, like the time I was running to cross the street and fell, and a car stopped just inches from my body. I’d stood up, brushed myself off, smiled and waved at the driver, and up came this painful, retching laughter from deep in my stomach. I’d almost been killed, and I couldn’t stop laughing. Now I had to pull my lips around the words and focus on the breaths I took. “I did some things—I never told anyone—” I stared at the closed door, willing it to open. The lock looked broken, as if we’d never be able to get it open again. I almost got up to try the knob. “It was before you.