What Burns Away (12 page)

In that meadow along the river at Ferry Park, harvesting a similar spray, he looped the flowers' stems together, placing a dandelion necklace around Kara's neck and a dandelion crown upon her head.

As he called my name, Dad's voice cracked, another necklace in his hand for me.

I wanted to hug him but his sadness frightened me. I could see his pain, but he had worn it so outwardly since my mother left that I had forgotten about it and accepted his despair as typical, simply the way he was.

He circled the flowers around my neck.

I wanted to tell him that everything was going to be okay but I wasn't so sure, so I patted his back and announced, “Time to rinse.”

Behind the tables where we sat was a public restroom with cement floors and toilets barely a step above Port-a-Potties. Dad followed behind me and stopped at the sink. I filled his Styrofoam coffee cup with the slow trickle of faucet water, touching my father gently, the way you would caress a kitten, as I rinsed the dye from his hair. Once the water ran clear, I ushered Dad out of the bathroom to wring his hair out in the sun.

“I'm going to get my life back,” my father told me. His head was bent over the picnic table as I dried his head with his T-shirt. He slumped forward, his shoulders heaving.

Beyond us, Kara practiced handstands in the tall grass, and in that moment I came close to telling my father that I had set Mom's car on fire to punish her for what she had done to him. I thought it might comfort him to know I was on his side, and I knew it might free me from the horrible burden of carrying a secret. But instead I put my hand over Dad's shoulder and kept quiet.

“I have to look my best,” he whispered, gaining his composure as Kara, a dandelion princess carrying imaginary petticoats plucked between her fingers, walked back toward us.

I pulled the comb from Dad's back pocket and raked it through his hair.

“Better?” he asked my sister, turning his head from side to side.

“Better,” she told him, though his hair was as black as Darth Vader's mask.

In the car, Dad tilted the rearview mirror to examine my work. “Is it too dark?”

“No,” I lied. “It will be lighter when it dries.”

We left the park and turned back toward home, passing old tobacco sheds and fallow strawberry fields posting signs:
Pick
Your
Own
. We drove through the west end of town, alongside estates with lawns like golf courses, before we reached the Quayside Beach Association and the massive white waterfront homes there, so unlike our own, including 101 Quayside, the white mansion topped with a green tin roof, where I had discovered my mother's infidelity.

Behind it was a barn whitewashed by time, and on its pitch, an old weather vane. Shriveled white balloons from a party gone by were tied to the mailbox, and the historical marker on the lawn read, “
Captain
Thomas
Moses
House—1810
.” An old collie ran down the lane toward us as we passed. Seeing the place made my heart race, and I could feel my face flush as I looked for signs of my mother.

Dad looked at me then and said, “Imagine what it would be like to live in a place like that.”

“I can't,” I told him, which was only partly true.

Miles did not wake up when the phone calls started.

I fumbled in the dark, reaching over him and finding the receiver on the second ring. Answering in a whisper, I peeked at the video monitor to see if Jonah had stirred.

“Hello?” I said, voice full of sleep.

“Claire?”

“Yes?”

“It's Dean. Sorry to wake you. I hadn't heard back, and I'm here just a short time, so I was thinking maybe I can come back in the morning, after your husband leaves. Maybe we could talk over coffee?”

Miles rolled onto his side, then turned on his reading light. “Who is it?” he wanted to know.

Unnerved, I pushed the button on the cordless phone to end the call. “Wrong number,” I said, panicked. I held the receiver to my chest, and almost instantly it rang again.

Miles tugged the phone from my grip. “It's late,” he said into the receiver. “Who are you trying to reach?”

Fearful that Dean would ask for me, I closed my eyes and wondered how I might explain the call to my husband, curious how much he would care.

When I opened them, Miles was staring at me.

“They hung up,” he said and left the phone off the hook on his side of the bed.

• • •

Before work, Miles waited on the threshold. He waved to Jonah. “Be good,” he said to him, but looked directly at me. His eyes were the color of a lake, dark and bottomless. He was handsome in his suit and tie, his manner serene and steady, but the furrow of his brow betrayed the forced enthusiasm in his tone. “It'll get better, Claire. And I'm sorry about eating dinner in the office last night, about having to work so late. Take a nap if you can. You look tired.

“Good news is that I've collected solid evidence to give the inspector today. The resident I told you about, Dalton Robertson, was definitely in the lab the morning of the fire before he headed upstairs to the wards to round on patients. I have witnesses willing to make formal statements who saw him in the corridor by the cardiology lab moments before the sprinklers went off. The fire chief is meeting me first thing this morning to discuss next steps.”

“What a relief,” I admitted, a little annoyed by how much of the investigation Miles had taken on himself. It was yet another burden, and an unnecessary one, that took him away from us.

“Shoe!” Jonah screamed, a sneaker in hand, an offering to his dad.

Miles grabbed his keys from the hook, double-checked the contents of his lab bag, and then lifted his head up to the hallway mirror to inspect his nostrils.

As if it were an old family recipe, I could recite my husband's morning routine, my mind narrating each step like a voice-over in the opening scene of a movie. With Miles's predictability there was seldom any deviation from routine. He shut the door behind him and checked the lock twice after he left.

National Public Radio played at a whisper from the old transistor on top of our refrigerator.
The
Writer's Almanac
featured a poem by Wesley McNair, “Goodbye to the Old Life,” and although I didn't weep right then and there, I felt it coming.

Outside, the garage door grumbled open.

I lifted Jonah from his booster seat and held him tight. Rocking him in my arms longer than he liked, I listened to my husband gun his Volvo over the snowbank and around the bend. Once he was out of view from the front windows, I put the baby down and checked my Facebook account, eager to hear from Dean.

Claire,

I called too late last night. Sorry for that. I know what we share is complicated, but I swear I'm here with nothing other than your best interests in mind, and I truly believe that you and I could be a big help to each other right now.

Please call once you catch a breather.

My clock here is ticking.

1-860-555-8468.

Yours,

Dean

His persistence flattered me and I wrote him back as honestly as I could, so that for both of us, there would be no more surprises.

Dean—

I am sorry too that I haven't been able to promptly respond to your messages and phone calls to figure out a time for us to meet. To be honest, it is hard, nearly impossible, for me to say no to seeing you. But I also think it is a very dangerous and poor choice for me to be alone with you. We have so much history, and I have been so unhappy, and because of that I just can't have you here in my house. On the rare occasion Miles came home, it would be awkward for all of us.

Love,

Claire

I went about my day then, second-guessing my response, rearranging the living room furniture, and building Lego towers with my son until it was time to put him down. I loaded the dishwasher and streamed the morning news reports from Moffett Field, California, where atmospheric specialist and NASA correspondent Gillian McGowan, one of my dearest friends from graduate school, reported that the Kepler mission had discovered eleven new planetary systems hosting twenty-six confirmed planets.

Just over a month ago, Gillie came from California through Madison to lecture at UW's School of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences with Dr. Doug Hudgins, a NASA scientist we both idolized during our training.

Gillie emailed me about her arrival and we met at a local teahouse, where she divulged the new Kepler discoveries to me over steaming cups of chai, while Jonah sat in my lap scribbling over the chipper expression of Thomas the Tank Engine.

“Don't you miss the research?” Gillie asked me abruptly. She tucked her chestnut hair behind her ear and used her cloth napkin to rub a spot where my son's markers had stained the table.

“Well,” I said, kissing the back of Jonah's head, “this little guy keeps me on my toes, and Miles is gone so much that I feel like one of us should be home.” I sipped from my tea, suddenly feeling defensive about giving up the work. “Plus, to be honest, Gillie, the research was feeling a little static for me toward the end.”

She smiled gently and collected the broken crayons Jonah tossed across the table. “You're so good at being a mom. Frankly, I'd die of boredom if I were home with Caleb and Lila all day. And you were such a dedicated researcher, Claire. Now I bet you would find the field so much more exciting.” She handed me a fistful of colors. “Though it might be tough at this point to catch up on all the new data, to become, you know, current. Things have moved so fast. I mean, before this Kepler mission, when you were still working in the lab, there were, what, maybe four hundred known exoplanets?”

“Five hundred,” I said, digging in my diaper bag, searching for a sleeve of stickers to entertain Jonah, who'd already had enough. “It was five hundred total known exoplanets across the entire sky.”

“God, that seems ages ago. Since you left, Kepler has discovered something like twenty-three hundred more planet candidates, with sixty new planets confirmed.”

“Incredible,” I said, peeling a
Dora
the
Explorer
sticker from its backing. “The lab must be buzzing. And you're working with
the
Dr. Hudgins—and at NASA! That's amazing for you, Gillie.”

I could sense her attempt to contain her excitement, to protect me from injury, but her eyes shone and she bubbled over, unable to stop herself. “Everyone at the lab is electrified, and the demand for atmospheric investigators is huge, especially with all the global warming and climate changes. It's all the stuff you were doing years ago, but now people want answers, and the industry is committed to solutions. For the first time ever, there's actually money to be made.”

Gillie went on enthusiastically and I tried to ignore the jealousy welling up in my throat, understanding the implications of those 2,360 new discoveries.

Jonah pressed Dora's compadre, Diego, to my face. “Sticker!” he declared.

Smiling at my boy, I persuaded myself that motherhood remained enough for me, while estimating that these new findings, having appeared since I first wrote about Kepler five years ago, now rendered my work and my years of training nearly, if not completely, obsolete. I couldn't imagine what I could even offer to the field anymore. And in that moment, I regarded all of my previous research as a lot of hard work and time gone to waste.

Back when I first started working on global-warming investigations during graduate school, my goal had been the same as Gillie's—to one day work for NASA as an atmospheric specialist in meteorology. My motivation for ozone research and its effect on the Earth's atmosphere was driven by my fascination with chemistry, the carbon dioxide produced by combustion and the sky. But after I fell in love with Miles, his internships and medical fellowships grounded us in the Northeast and limited the available opportunities for me, and thus my career plans grew vague.

Then later, after having my first groundbreaking success at the University of Connecticut with a paper published in the esteemed journal
Science
—my article titled “The Sensitivity of Polar Ozone Depletion”—I believed I was moving closer to that goal until, with an enormous pregnant belly and a fistful of blue Mylar balloons, I took Miles's hand after my baby shower send-off party. I told myself not to cry and held my chin up, forcing a grin as I hung my lab coat on a hook.

But as my husband hoisted me into our truck, I hadn't completely understood that I would abandon my own future prospects in serious climate-change investigation to chase Miles's dreams of academic distinction in clinical cardiac medicine. Driving out of the faculty parking lot, leaning my head against the passenger window and watching my lab shrink away in the side-view mirror, I nursed my new ambition to become a loyal mother to my son, one who would never waver in that role the way my mother had with Kara and me.

But doing mindless chores while streaming Gillie's account of Kepler's findings, I couldn't squelch the yearning to be back in the lab, working with astronomers and astrophysicists fueled with the same enthusiasm as they hovered over digital images of the sky, calculating the transit timing variations of new planets orbiting uncharted stars and formulating explanations of how those systems affect Earth and our surrounding atmosphere.

I pulled up the NASA website and studied Kepler's fifty-four planet candidates in the habitable zone, a region where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface. Many of those candidates hosted moons with confirmed liquid, five of which were near Earth-sized, orbiting parent stars. For a moment I experienced that familiar flutter in my chest, the exhilaration I've always received from discovery, but that halted when the doorbell rang.

Heart thumping, I headed for the door, a big part of me hoping it was a return visit from Dean. But when I peeked between the blinds, I caught only a glimpse of the UPS man, who jogged down our drive and left his trail of footprints in the snow.

Once the brown delivery truck pulled away, I fetched the box made out to Mrs. Claire Spruce with
EXPRESS
written in red letters. Carrying it inside, I rummaged through the kitchen drawers for a steak knife to slice through the wrapping.

As Dean promised, inside I found my old track T-shirt with our high school mascot, a Connecticut Yankee, plastered across the front. Pinned to the fabric was a faded Polaroid snapshot, in which I was tanned and barefoot, wearing the logo. A silver medal from a summer race hung around my neck. Flexing a bicep, I smiled for the camera, while Dean's arm rested over my shoulder, a smoke pinched between his index finger and thumb. In the foreground, American flags and streamers waved from the porches of identical houses, Willard Street's preparation for the Independence Day parade.

Boxed up with the T-shirt was a sealed envelope inked: DO NOT BEND. Inside it, my ninth-grade report card and a laminated newsprint image of the Quayside Beach Association sign cast in the bright light of flames, beside it the burning wreckage of the barn at 101 Quayside Lane, the property Dean had bought from my mother. With the image was a yellowed article cut from the
Hartford
Courant
, dated July 6, 1986. The headline read:
Second
Arson
at
Lyme
Beaches: Police Investigate Connections between Recent Fires after Local Layoffs.

Turning over the laminated image to return it to the envelope, I found a small note taped to the back composed in the same block letters that addressed the box.

Claire,

My reasons for coming here were not just to see you, that one glance already worth the trip. But I also needed to get away. Things have been tough lately, and somehow I feel that you're the only person I can trust. Anyway, I'm leaving tomorrow night. Before I go, I want to meet in person and give you back your mother's wedding band. Figured it was too valuable to trust with the Pony Express.

1-860-555-8468.

Yours,

Dean

I headed upstairs to hide the contents of the package under a stack of old sweaters. Then said aloud, “Aren't we too old for this?”

Yet I couldn't help but wonder what exactly Dean needed from me, and instantly I was lured back into that dangerous thrill of being with a man who lives by his own moral code. Both intimidated by and attracted to that enigmatic thing living inside Dean, I responded hastily with a message, because he drew out the very impulsive thing living inside me.

Dean—

Jonah has swimming lessons this morning over at the YWCA, so I'm thinking maybe tomorrow if I can get a sitter for the morning, we could meet for coffee? I'm not sure, though. It's short notice. But I'm touched that you still trust me so deeply after all these years. We got away with a lot, you and me, and just so you know, our secrets are the ones I still keep. They have been and always will remain between only you and me.

Fondly,

Claire

Before we headed out for the morning, I fed Jonah and then dug in the front closet for his snowsuit. While we layered up, stomping our feet into snow boots, the telephone calls came again one after another. I paused, glancing at the number on the caller ID, a tightness rising in my chest, a complicated breed of anticipation. Each time a private caller held the line but left no voice mail. I phoned Miles, worried there might be other troubles at the lab, but he answered neither of his extensions at the hospital and failed to respond to any text messages.