The Fires (30 page)

In October, with the yellow leaves shimmering in the trees, and the days suddenly shorter, I finally went back. After my being so long in the city, Porter looked miniature and still, like a community of dollhouses with people and cars that moved in dreamy slow motion. Except for that, little had changed. My impatience for it depressed me. Walking down Lincoln, I saw a house built as an octagon, an actual eight-cornered roof, in one yard milk cartons someone had exquisitely cut into lanterns and strung from the trees, and a tiny angular woman wearing a purple velvet hat the size of a sombrero. My eye flew to each of these sights, for my mother’s sake.

I stood in the wind, knocking at Marietta’s lavender door. When she answered, she smiled vaguely and gazed just past my face into the street. “How’d you get here?”

“The train.”

“Oh.” She still wasn’t quite looking at me, as if, since I’d left, something had happened to her eyes. When I asked if my mother was there, I heard Erma’s voice in the living room and a shuffle of cards. “Oh, no, honey.” She hadn’t often called me that before, and this
honey
had a coy stickiness. “She moved to one of those apartments on Union Street.” She could have been talking to the testy man who ran the dry cleaner’s or the retarded girl who THE FIRES / 239

sometimes helped her mother at the fabric store. “I’ve got Erma and some friends here, playing pinochle, but you run over there.

Five-E.” She looked at me straight then, with dry, blank eyes, as if to tell me I wasn’t going to get any more tears out of her.

“You’ve been hard on your mother. She doesn’t deserve it.” Her green eyes looked the color of moss. “I told her you’d be back.”

Walking those few blocks to Union Street, past houses with V’s of red corn husks on their doors and pillows of turned leaves next to the walkways, I counted the months since I’d left, six. The hum of Chicago and the customers’ orders and figuring up their checks and their myriad voices and faces had filled up my head, so I’d been able to put away my exile as if it were a book I might or might not read. Now the closer I came to my mother, the more real it was: mica sparking in the sidewalk, the collar of weeds around the post of the mailbox, my own worn leather shoes and my legs, hardened from the waitressing. My chest felt tight.

Thinking of the difficulty of my return, my reasoning splintered and ran off in a hundred designs, and I had no idea what I would say. I didn’t expect her to forgive me, but hoped the vertigo attacks might subside at least, if I showed her my face.

The apartment building had been built to look like a colonial house: tall, fluted white columns, a heavy flint roof like a giant arrow tip, black shutters nailed permanently open. Knocking at Five-E, I heard the train in the distance, its horn a nervy question.

A girl around my age came out of the next apartment holding a carton of milk and an armful of books.

I heard my mother’s footsteps stutter, saw the white curtains swing back, then the door opened wide. Her expression was disarrayed and inward, as if she’d been sewing. She slapped her hand against her chest. “My God, I thought we’d lost you.” Her shoulders collapsed, and she bent over, gasping.

Her hair had grayed. “I’ve been in Chicago.”

240 / RENÉ STEINKE

“You didn’t call….” She huffed and grabbed my arm, pulled me inside with one hand and slammed the door with the other.

The apartment was clean, but crowded and mismatched. There was a square blue chair, a rectangular yellow couch, a perfectly circular red table. My mother looked out of place and anxious against that furniture, as if she were in a bus terminal or an air-port. She wore a red sweater, and the weight she’d gained back was visible, her breasts full again, her arms rounded. A thick lock of gray hair fell out of a pin and hung on her forehead, where the lines had deepened into a large equal sign. A certain tightness had left her face, and the softness in her cheeks made her lips part youthfully.

“Why would you do that to me?” Her voice was louder and sharper than I ever remembered hearing it. Vibrating with its force, she stood in front of me, holding out her arm in a curved gesture like a teapot handle, but I could tell she was too furious to touch me yet.

“What else could I do?” I said. Now I felt fatigued from the miles of walking in the city and wanted to collapse on that ugly yellow couch, but my mother didn’t move.

“After all that happened, you really thought you could just leave?” She flung up her hand. “Look at Hanna. Where did leaving get her?”

When she folded her arms, their shape on her chest reminded me of a soldier’s breastplate, and she looked larger and more muscular than before. Was it possible she’d grown taller in my absence? Her eyes scowled at me. It was hard for me to look at them.

“I came back,” I said feebly, but she knew I wouldn’t stay. I wanted to go over and embrace her, but didn’t move, holding the back of a wooden chair with its nautical ropy spokes.

THE FIRES / 241

She paced the small area over the flat red carpeting between the easy chair and the edge of the open kitchen. Her anger slit us apart, and the separation felt almost surgical, as if she’d finally got rid of some web of mucus and cartilage between us, and it was such a relief.

“Don’t think I bought any of this ugly furniture. It came with the apartment.” The shapes were primitive, the fabric cheap, but the vivid shades countered the dimness of a room with a single back window.

“It’s colorful,” I said.

She shook her head and made a clicking sound with her tongue.

She held out her open palm. “I loved that house. My kitchen, my sewing room. Your father taught you to read in that house. Every day he practiced his music there. Before—”

Over the couch I noticed a photograph she must have taken of my father and me barefoot in the sand at the dunes, his hand resting on my shoulder, my scars carefully hidden from the sun inside long sleeves and blue jeans. My father smiled widely so his underbite showed, and his shoulders were freckled and narrow. I guessed that she had found it somewhere at Marietta’s house and put it in a frame.

My head filled with a watery pressure. The silence was painful.

I wanted to crawl into it, let the sharp glass edges cut me, endure the torture of being exposed to her.

“Before the fire.” My mother cleared her throat nervously. “I was going to have the whole outside painted. I was going to gather up the last pieces of your father’s music and send it to someone who would appreciate it.” She watched her foot take a small step.

To think I had betrayed my father’s music, the notes he’d drawn, counted, the turmoil in his head marked down in that wordless translation—this hurt me more than anything we’d lost.

242 / RENÉ STEINKE

Even in his illness, it was the one thing for which he’d had enough strength. Taking another small step, my mother swayed forward.

But I’d saved her, hadn’t I?

“I lost everything in that house,” she said.

“Mother, you made yourself so weak you could hardly leave your room.” She stared at me. “You looked like you were dying.”

She choked. Her hand wavered as she brought it up to cover her eyes. When I’d practically carried her out of the house, she’d felt like a girl in my arms.

“And it wasn’t the only fire I set,” I said, lifting my chin, shocked at how boastful it sounded. She must have known to put the Houseman fire with this one.

She wept into her hand. “Yes.”
Fire moved as soon as you looked,
multiplied, and split off in pieces, the desire dissolved just as secretly
as it had once come and burned through.
Her head dipped heavily as she took another wavering step. “Since your father died, I’ve been afraid you’d do something———” Her mouth bunched in a frown.

The fire had to hurt her, or it would have never brought her out. I wanted her to forgive me, but not if it meant denying what I’d done.

She sniffed and fought back more tears. “You changed your hair. I clung to the back of the chair, felt a sting in my knuckles.

“I always thought your long hair was so pretty.” She wiped her eyes. I needed her to keep looking at me.

“My scars aren’t so pitiful, Mother.”

She lifted her wet face and fiercely lowered her voice. “I never said anthing about that.” I’d blamed her for this, though, for guarding the scene. Wishing so fervently that the memory fragments would vanish, she’d grown them large and distroted instead.

THE FIRES / 243

“You can’t use my scars as an excuse. You have to face this, Mother” I said.

“Face what?”

“The fires.”

She went over to the couch, leaned against its arm, and bowed her head. “You tripped on a rake,” she said. “I just looked away for a second that day, and you were gone.”

I took a few steps closer to her. “I always knew it was an accident.” The words felt foreign and carved by my lips and tongue and teeth. How could they have taken so many years to be forged into syllables, the simplest sounds for what had happened to us?

She looked at me and nodded. Something unclasped painfully in my chest. A breeze thrummed in the loose windowpanes, and the curtain pull beat against the wall. When I hugged her, it was surprising to feel the mass of her body, the brush of her hair against my cheek, and just then that room seemed more distant and strange than any place I’d ever thought of traveling to. I noticed a fuchsia silk scarf on the back of a chair and the orange curled gourds she’d arranged thoughtfully on the coffee table.

The last train was coming soon, but there would be another one in the morning. I was tired and hungry, and it occurred to me that the yellow couch might make a good enough bed, that maybe we could go out somewhere for dinner. It was almost five o’clock, but it still startled me how quickly it got dark, and the bright pieces of furniture floated up in that watery dim like rough maps of lost countries.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my editor, Betty Kelly, and my agent, Simon Green.

For their help and encouragement at various stages of the writing of this book, I’d also like to thank Peter and Kelly Steinke, Ellen Hunnicutt, Thomas Bontly, Joanne Tangorra, Richard Maxwell, Stephanie Paulsell, Rita Signorelli-Pappas, Stacy Malin, Tina Epstein, Darcey Steinke, Kim France, Charles Aaron, Ann Powers, Maria Antifonario, and Dan Green.

244

About the Author

RENÉ STEINKE was born in Richmond, Virginia, and grew up in friendswood, Texas. She holds an M.F.A from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, she teaches literature and creative writing at Queenborough Community College and lives with her husband in New York City.

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Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THE FIRES. Copyright © 1999 by René Steinke. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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• Cover Image
  
• Title Page
  
• Dedication Page
  
• Epigraph Page
  
• Contents
  
  • Chapter One
    
  • Chapter Two
    
  • Chapter Three
    
  • Chapter Four
    
  • Chapter Five
    
  • Chapter Six
    
  • Chapter Seven
    
  • Chapter Eight
    
  • Chapter Nine
    
  • Chapter Ten
    
  • Chapter Eleven
    
  • Chapter Twelve
    
  • Chapter Thirteen
    
  • Chapter Fourteen
    
  • Chapter Fifteen
    
  • Chapter Sixteen
    
  • Acknowledgments
    
  • About the Author
    
  • Copyright Notice
    
  • About the Publisher