What Burns Away (15 page)

Miles drove Jonah and me to the airport for our departure, and as we pulled up to the curb, he looked over the seat at our boy, then back at me.

“Claire…I know I agreed to this, but to be completely honest, I started worrying last night that a trip might not be such a good idea. Are you sure you want to go? You seem so spacey lately. The oven was on again when I got up this morning, and I had to blow out a candle in the living room. That stuff makes me nervous about you traveling alone with the baby.”

I took a deep breath. “We better head out,” I said. “And please don't worry. I'm fine, really.”

A couple parked in front of us unloaded their luggage and shared a long, passionate good-bye. Slipping his hands into the back pockets of the woman's jeans, the man snatched her back close to him every time she attempted to leave.

Inspired by them, I supposed, Miles pulled me across the console jammed with empty juice boxes and Matchbox cars and brushed a kiss over my forehead. He whispered, “And if you see your mom while you're home, don't get into it with her, okay? Keep things light.”

Of course, she had no idea I was headed east, though I'd let Miles believe a meeting between us could take place, even though I'd only spoken to my mother a handful of times in the last two decades. The first phone conversation was when I graduated from college. The second was when I got into graduate school, and the third was to announce my wedding, to which she was not invited because she refused to attend without Craig. The fourth call was to tell her I was pregnant with Jonah.

In that stretch of twenty-some-odd years, I saw my mother once, during my extended hospital stay after the birth of my son. And the only contact I'd initiated with her since was in the mass mailing forwarding our new contact information in Madison to everyone in our address book, in case she needed to reach us in some kind of emergency.

Occasionally after that, Mom sent gifts to Jonah. The enclosed letters were often addressed solely to him, occasionally to us both, always written on the same monogrammed stationery pressed with her and her husband's initials.

The last time I saw my mother, she looked well preserved, her eyebrows penciled in to set off her steel-colored eyes, and she wore a sundress that hugged her slim figure. Her giant silver bangle bracelets clanged together like cymbals as she entered the hospital room in a burst of noise after my thirty-three hours of active labor, followed by what ended in an emergency C-section that saved both Jonah and me from the unimaginable.

Mom thrust a bottle of champagne in my lap and left a perfect blot of coral lipstick on Miles's face, then, hanging over my shoulder, she rubbed her thumb along Jonah's brow, murmuring: “He looks like your father, don't you think? He has your father's fair skin and his cleft chin.”

For me, the comment took from that moment, reminding me of our collective loss at a time when I needed to be protective of my new joy. Heatedly, and retrospectively I think wrongly, I sent her away without letting her hold her grandson. Since then our correspondence has been limited to letters in which she tells Jonah where “Mimi” (which is how she refers to herself) has been traveling with Craig (whom she calls “Pop-pop”) and what types of restaurants they are enjoying in Fort Lauderdale by the Sea, where her husband bought a condo on the fourteenth floor of a giant, pink skyscraper.

When the letters from my mother arrive, if compelled to open them at all, I skim them quickly and throw them away, her loopy scrawl always a sad reminder of the long-ago note she wrote to my father, marking the change of everything.

• • •

When I boarded the plane to Connecticut, I already knew I would not see my mother or her husband. Their sale of the Quayside to Dean was something I had not shared with my husband, who believed they were living mostly in Connecticut until Craig could formally retire from the financial sector, at which point they would move to the condo in Florida to golf and sail away their golden years together. Miles never asked much about my family, so when he hefted our baggage from the car and told me not to get into things with my mother, should I see her, I said simply, “I won't. I promise.”

An airport security officer whistled his horn and instructed us to “move it along,” signaling to Miles that he could not park at the curb.

Relieved to hurry along the good-byes, I said, “See you soon,” and pushed against the January gale to curbside check-in.

“How soon?” Miles shouted over the noise of a shuttle.

“Four days—unless we decide to never come back,” I said, trying to tease.

Miles pulled Jonah from his car seat and hugged him tight. “You have to come back,” he told me. “We're in this together.”

I dragged our bags behind me, while the frigid wind whipped my hair into my eyes.

Holding him close, patting Jonah's bottom, Miles said, “I miss you already, bud.” Then, to the bulky security officer who blew a whistle as he circled our car, my husband called, “One more second, sir,” holding up his index finger, racing us toward the check-in counter.

Together, we three stormed the line and I dug the necessary documents and ID from my coat pocket. There, I discovered the yellow lighter tucked among the paperwork and quickly slipped it into our checked bags before the airline attendant tossed them onto the conveyor belt.

“Park and come inside,” I told my husband, meaning it. “Wait with us. We can grab coffee. Talk, maybe?”

He squeezed my shoulder, and his concerned face looked back at the officer who stood at the rear of our vehicle. “I feel guilty just leaving you guys here, and I do want to talk…but they need me in the ER. There's a patient on life flight headed in now.” He rubbed his chin and pulled me in for a hug one last time. “I better run,” he said. “Safe flight, okay? We'll talk more when you get home. Love you.”

He walked to the car, and a part of me believed I should chase after him. I wanted us to hold each other like we had outside his vandalized lab, to stand inside a moment together so I could explain how I was about to violate his trust and have him stop me before I went any further. I wanted to apologize for being so distracted, so absent from him, and to tell Miles I was so sorry for his losses—the data and the research—and to admit that I too was remorseful for my part in the distance between us.

Hoping he might return to Jonah and me for that imagined embrace, I called, “Miles.” He turned back to us, raised his hand in a Chief Wahoo wave, and then dropped into the front seat of his car.

“Bye-bye, Daddy,” I whispered into Jonah's ear.

“Bye-bye!” Jonah said.

I set Jonah down and he toddled ahead of me, dragging his robot backpack behind him through the sliding terminal doors. Following my son, I glanced over my shoulder to the roadway, scrutinizing the taillights of Miles's Volvo. His blinker signaled. He turned out into traffic, and inside me was a pang.

• • •

Landing at Bradley International Airport is like arriving at a Chili's restaurant with airplane access. The airport is small with just two snack kiosks, a Dunkin' Donuts, and a merchandise stand selling Hartford Whalers hockey T-shirts, even though the team left Connecticut fifteen years ago.

Having declined Dean's offer to greet us, I walked the short distance to baggage claim with Jonah and out the door into the grim fog that often accompanies a New England winter. Out along the tarmac, I watched flaggers direct a tiny Airbus backing from the gate. And there, despite all of it, I shivered with the jubilant sensation of a homecoming.

“Jonah!” I squealed. “We're here.”

We picked up the rental car Dean had arranged and headed down Interstate 91 South to the Bee and Thistle Inn, where a two-bedroom suite awaited us. Maneuvering that familiar stretch of road, I shed layers of my current self and steered us into a memory. Dizzy with pleasure the day I got my license, I had driven my first car along that very stretch—over the Baldwin Bridge, off Exit 22, and onto Route 9, the corridor of my youth.

Near the Shoreline Service Center, I slowed as we approached the corner where my father first taught me how to pump gas into Mom's station wagon and check the oil on the old Dove, long before I set it on fire or could drive myself. A few hundred yards later, I saw the tattered green awning of his old watering hole, Cherry Stones, from which Mom and I would fetch him after too many hours passed, while Kara slept in the back the way Jonah dozed off behind me in the backseat of the rental car.

I got a wobble in my belly going back to the East Coast. It was the combination of joy mixed with the dread that comes from realizing that time never holds still and that the old haunts are not always as charming as nostalgia claims.

Passing the turnoff to my childhood development, I saw a yellow sign reminding drivers to slow for pedestrians. The stick-figure person on the roadway marker had been spray-painted with a giant blue cock and balls. And beyond the sign, the houses I envied as a kid look tired and overgrown.

Moving from East Lyme to the haughtier west side of town, where my inn awaited me on its scenic ocean lot, I regarded the tidelands, where brown sea grasses swayed and the naked sumac trees stood watch over the winter that froze everything into slow motion.

At the Bee and Thistle, I did as Dean asked and registered for the room under the name Mary Tooke, the wife of Edmund Halley, discoverer of our comet and a pet name Dean once called me. “Room's under your nickname,” Dean wrote in his envelope of printed instructions. “And I paid for all of it in cash in case your husband asks questions.”

Up a creaky staircase I carried the skeleton key to a two-bedroom suite draped with too many doilies and lace curtains. The place had the musty smell of a beach property, and a newly lit fire roared for us in the hearth. A Pack 'n Play was set up already, the sheets laid smooth, so I put a sleeping Jonah down, hoping he would continue his snooze while I headed into my adjoining room for a shower, wondering exactly what it was I expected to find there.

Washing my hair, I thought about the last time I was in a hotel without Miles, nearly five years prior, before I quit my meteorology program. At an inn similar to this one near the Idaho State University campus, I'd spent a week attending a women's science convention, during which Barbara Morgan spoke to five hundred female students and faculty members at the Rendezvous Complex planetarium on the twelfth anniversary of Christa McAuliffe's death.

Barbara Morgan, runner-up for the Teacher in Space Project and later a mission specialist for NASA, had become a full-time astronaut at age fifty-five. Her hair was streaked with silver when she walked to the podium to deliver her lecture, and she took her time to adjust the microphone and pour herself a tall glass of water. Projected onto an enormous screen behind her was a slide show of the Milky Way taken from the Hubble space telescope. Looking back at the image, she cleared her throat.

“Although we've been researching for years, we've learned very little about this universe and our own atmosphere,” Morgan told us. “It's exciting to realize how much there is left to know about the sky.”

The projection transformed from an assembly of stars to an earlier image of Barbara Morgan, at age thirty-two, seated beside Christa McAuliffe, both of them in spacesuits holding helmets in their hands.

To me, it seemed unfair that she would still be cast in McAuliffe's shadow over a decade later, despite her own merits as an astronaut and scientist.

As she took a moment of silence to acknowledge Christa McAuliffe, my admiration for Barbara Morgan was replaced with tenderness, seeing that even with all her accomplishments, the astronaut would forever be wedded to the ghost of my childhood hero, never moving beyond second place.

“It's very loud, very shaky, and you're pressed back in your seat,” Professor Morgan said as she explained her first mission. “It's difficult to breathe. But I'm not scared by it anymore. In fact, I'm usually relieved that we're finally launching after that three-and-a-half-hour wait.”

She scanned the audience.

“Ladies, imagine the speed at which the launch happens by closing your eyes, picking a destination five miles away, and envisioning being there in just one second. It's 0 to 17,500 miles per hour in only eight and a half minutes. The movement is faster than a blazing fire.”

• • •

The Bee and Thistle's floorboards creaked when I tiptoed from the bathroom to the bedroom, toweling off my hair. Turning the corner to check on Jonah in the connecting room, I startled.

Dean stood quietly in the doorway.

“Jesus,” I said. “You need to stop doing that.”

Wearing a button-down shirt and khaki pants, he held out a bouquet of orange tiger lilies, my favorite flower.

“Shhh.” He held a finger to his lips. “Baby's asleep.” He pushed the blossoms into my arms. The cellophane wrapping crinkled.

Too awkward to speak, I smiled, sniffed the flowers, and carefully set them on a wingback chair by the fireplace.

Dean wrapped his arms around me. He kissed my neck once, under my ear. The gesture was intimate; the hug lasted longer than a hello. Then he kissed my lips, just a peck, and I pulled away, confused by all my unanchored emotions.

“I have the other key,” he whispered, setting it on my bedside table where he had poured us each a drink. He handed me a wineglass, took one for himself, and said, “Welcome home.”

I took a sip.

Dean sat on the bed and patted the spot beside him.

“Come,” he said. “Let's talk.”

I began poring over the images of Dean on Facebook because I wanted to learn what had become of him in the world, not because I wanted to sleep with him. Initially, I just wanted to scroll through the pictures of his wife and compare myself to her. I was curious. I wanted to see their babies—which I was sad to learn he never had—and I wanted to understand the kind of life Dean ended up with, to see if it was different from the life he might've had with me.

And because I had overheard the hushed voices of mothers in Jonah's music class and older women speaking in whispers in the locker room of the YWCA where I swam, I knew that there was a nation of women out there hunched over iPads and laptops in the evenings, searching for the boys they first gave themselves to, while their husbands worked into the night or watched the Golf Channel silently beside them in comfortable living rooms. Women like me who avoided the dangers that fed our girlhood desires, and who were finally free of worry but full of longing for that kind of passion and our youth, both of which were fleeting if they had not vanished from our lives completely.

But I never planned for those what-if fantasies to move from the virtual world to my bedside at the Bee and Thistle Inn, where Dean and I perched apprehensively on the edge of a brass bed and touched our stemmed glasses together in present time.

“Claire,” Dean said as if we were on a date, “to your return.”

The St. Christopher medal around his neck was the same one he wore at age seventeen, and strung next to it was the gold wedding band my father gave my mother in 1969, the day after he was drafted for Vietnam. After she left us, my mother set the ring on my bureau next to my ballerina jewelry box with a note she had scrawled quickly, the ink smeared by her hand:
Claire, a keepsake that you may want someday. Love, Mommy
. It fit my index finger, and before sliding it on, I looked inside the band and read the inscription,
K&P Forever
, a reminder for me that nothing promised to us was certain.

Shortly after my parents' divorce was finalized, I could no longer bear to wear the gold band. So after we made love on the beach one night, I plucked it off my finger and offered it to Dean with a different kind of vow.

“Let's never be like our parents,” I said.

“Easy promise to keep.” Then he threaded my mother's wedding band through the gold links of his chain.

As we sipped our wine, Dean noticed my eyes on the band. “I've worn it a long time,” he said and unhooked the chain. “Give me your hand.”

I did as he said, and he pressed each one of my knuckles against his lips. I closed my eyes, permitting his touch, knowing full well that it was wrong.

When his mouth reached my pinky finger, he turned my hand over and imprinted the band against the fleshy part of my palm.

I closed my fingers around it.

Dean was near enough to detect the heat of him, the pressure of his thigh against mine. My entwined emotions of desire and hesitation unnerved me, even though I'd allowed him to make the hotel reservations, his intentions made clear. And although I had not invited him to the room, his ambitions were the same ones I had entertained myself.

There, with him at my side, my allegiance grew confused. I breathed him in, that smell of his like summer rain on hot pavement, something clean and earthy, familiar and enticing. It had been a long time since I yearned for a man this way, and I knew that if I didn't move from my place next to him on the bed, Dean would kiss me again, and what would unfold from that moment would be something I couldn't stop.

With my mother's ring branding a mark in the center of my fist, I reminded myself of what I didn't want to be. It was a choice I made because of Jonah, to uphold the expectations I'd set for myself as a mother. I stood up, slid the gold band onto my left hand, stacking it beside my own wedding ring, and shook my head woefully at Dean.

“Let me dry my hair,” I told him and stepped away.

He sighed.

I moved toward the sink and watched Dean's reflection in the mirror, wondering what it would be like to make love with him here as adults, while Jonah slept in the adjoining room.

Dean gulped back his glass of wine and poured another. He called after me, “I'll keep an ear out for the little guy. Take your time.”

In the mirror I watched as his reflection pulled a slip of paper from his shirt pocket. He eyed it closely and furrowed his brow.

Closing the bathroom door, I leaned up against it and took a deep breath, trying to shed the hope that Dean would follow behind me. I envisioned us there in the dark, Dean's hands under my clothes, the scruff of his beard against my skin, the weight of him guiding us to the edge of the tub, where he would sit and draw me into his lap. I recalled his body, its topography like an old country road driven a thousand times, knowing full well where I would stop off to spend some time.

Dean was the opposite of whom I had chosen, Miles, the cautious physician and scholar, the only child of a wealthy Iron Belt family of judicious intellectuals. When I met my husband in Mystic, that fluke night with the whole of New England roaring over baseball, I didn't know what it meant to be both toggled to and overshadowed by someone else's success, someone who was far brighter and more interesting than I would ever be, and a real scientist, not some fortune-teller of the weather, as I'd come to be. I was spoiled too quickly by the security of my husband's job, because when I met him, I'd been afraid of how I might make my way in the world alone if my research fell flat, and so I chose the safety he offered.

With Dean, the connection was different, drawn from a history impaled right through the broken center of me.

Granting a wish that would never relieve my despair, Dean had doused Craig Stackpole's barn with gasoline and set the place on fire after my father's body was found there. Volunteering for the job when I was too grief-stricken and wild with rage, too impulsive and heartbroken not to be caught burning it down myself, he acted the part of Roman high priest, performing a sacred last rite. In my father's honor, Dean struck the match for me. It was July 5, 1986, the day after my father's death and the day following my mother's marriage to the banker living at 101 Quayside Lane.

• • •

In a ceremony held at the Saybrook Fish House, in a wealthy town just east of our own, my mother and Craig made their nuptials with an officiating judge and four mutual friends, before taking off on a harbor cruise.

Craig had no children, and therefore neither Kara nor I were invited to join the Fourth of July reception, but he promised my mother that after they were wed he would treat us like his own dear daughters.

“It's a grown-up affair,” Mom said when she broke news of the engagement to me following a track meet my last week of school. She was wearing a fancy shawl and large hoop earrings. She reeked of perfume, something overwhelming and musky, and I longed for the citrus-sweet simplicity of her former Jean Naté.

She went on, “You and Kara can celebrate with us later in the fall when Craig takes us all to Aruba for Thanksgiving. And, really, you'll want to be home with your dad the night of the wedding.” She looked down at her shoes, then back at me with eyes full of tears. “I have a feeling your father will need his girls.”

When the Fourth of July came, Dad asked Kara and me to pack a cooler, and we picnicked close to Craig's property on the docks of the Quayside Beach Association. From our vantage point, we looked on as a photographer arrived to snap photos of Mom's soon-to-be husband, “the Douche Bag,” where he awaited his bride in front of the house in a seersucker suit.

Hitching herself to his arm, Mom appeared in a white sundress, the skirt long and bohemian, just barely spilling onto the sand. She wore no veil and had twisted her hair into a knot ornamented with black-eyed Susans. They strolled away from our perch on the dock and moved down the beach toward the breaking water, their arms hooked, as the wedding photographer chased beside them trying to capture their laughter. In contrast to their joy, my father howled like a wounded animal as he watched, and I knew then it was the sound of something in him dying.

Dad took deep breaths and collected himself, and we drove away from the Quayside. With all the windows down and the radio blaring Steve Winwood's “Higher Love,” he sped along Route 9, taking Kara and me to Marty's Clam Shack for the chocolate cones we ate in silence.

Kara chomped the last bite of her dessert and said finally, “Daddy, are you ever gonna feel better?”

Dad smiled for my sister and slapped the table. “Yes, yes. I promise, baby. I'm going to move on and feel better.” He pulled a nip from his pocket and poured it into his plastic cup of soda. “I just need a little time,” he said. “A little time alone.”

As he spoke, I reached out and put my hand on top of his, but I couldn't bring myself to believe him.

That evening, when we got home, Dad took out his cribbage board in preparation for the night's card game and told us to hurry down to the beach. The sun had set and the bugs were eating us alive. The three of us scurried to light citronella candles on the back deck. And what I most remember was how my father collected Kara and me, backing the two of us up against his giant belly where he held us tight, spraying our arms and legs with Deep Woods Off.

“I love you,” he said. “Remember, be good and I love you.”

When I peeked at him over my shoulder, tears soaked his face.

“You girls go,” he told us, catching my worried glance. “I need some time before Rex and Uncle G get here to play cards and hustle me out of your inheritance.” He pulled a beer from a bucket of ice, holding it up high as if making a toast. “Tonight, ladies, bed by midnight and don't wake me when you come in.” He nodded to himself at what I took to be an acknowledgment of a generous curfew.

Kara ran down the beach ahead of me to meet her Brownie troop. She would spend the night at a makeshift table selling fruit punch and baked goods along the boardwalk to folks who came from neighboring towns to watch the fireworks.

I left more reluctantly.

“Daddy, you okay?” I said.

He shooed me off and took a long pull off his beer. “Honey,” he insisted, “go.”

And so I did.

But later, while the late-night news recapped Liberty Weekend in America by showing clips of President Reagan rededicating the Statue of Liberty in a blaze of light, marking its centennial as a beacon of hope in New York Harbor, I tiptoed up the front steps under a waning crescent moon, thirty minutes after our generous holiday curfew had passed.

I trod gingerly so as not to wake him, but I learned later that I could have crashed my way through the house and into every piece of furniture, for all it mattered. My father was inside Craig Stackpole's barn at 101 Quayside Lane, slumped against a vanilla-colored Mercedes, wearing one of Mom's old T-shirts, the gold cross that always hung around his neck, and a pair of Hawaiian swim trunks. Blood bubbled from his mouth and down his neck, and the back of his skull was splattered across my mother's new husband's luxury car. A Colt .45 handgun lay on the floor beside him. On the workbench a few yards away was the note:

Kat—

You're never coming home and I just can't live without you. I'm sorry for all of it. I love you. I love our girls. Promise you'll do better by them than I can.

K&P Forever.

—Peter

When the police drove up to our house early the following morning with the news, Kara was practicing her back handsprings in our front yard. She told me later that Mom rode in the front seat with her face in her hands, while Craig Stackpole sat in the back of the patrol car, directly behind her. I was still in bed when I heard Kara's scream. It was shrill and I thought she was hurt. I jumped up and ran down the stairs to find her.

Out the screen door, I saw my sister and my mother crumpled together on the lawn. Kara was kicking her feet and screaming while my mother tried to hold her. A foot away, the officer and Craig Stackpole stood watch.

As soon as I saw Kara, I knew he was gone, but I ran up to my father's room anyway. The bed was made. I felt my tongue swell, my panic snaking from my belly to my throat, as I slipped down the stairs in my stocking feet and bolted for the back deck, where I found several empty bottles and the candles burned down into flat waxy pools. The Boston Red Sox sweatshirt Dad had been wearing was tossed over the back of a chaise lounge.

Paralyzed with grief, Kara and I held each other in my twin bed that evening, my sister wearing Daddy's sweatshirt to bed, the hood pulled up over her head as she wrapped her arms around my neck. In that moment she seemed more like a toddler, the baby in my father's lap who requested
The
Tawny
Scrawny
Lion
five times in a row before Dad pulled up the rails on her twin bed and tucked her in for the night.

Kara and I had shared a room since she turned two, and I knew her bedtime patterns as well as my own—the way she rubbed her feet together to ready herself for sleep, the giant sigh she made before closing her eyes. There was a stretch of time when my sister was three, maybe four, when she woke in the evening and crawled in beside me, dragging her battered bunny across the space between our beds.

But since then, we had not held each other through the night until our father died. The night of his death—and for nearly a month after, while our mother stayed in Dad's house with us—Kara and I slept entwined until my mother later forced us all to move in with Craig, after which my sister got her own room and I never held her again.

The first night after his death, down the hall from us on Willard Street, my mother slept in our father's bed, and most of the night I could hear the muffled sound of her weeping. Craig slept downstairs, alone on the couch, after surrendering to a lost battle earlier that evening when they had begged us to go “home,” as Mom called it, to the Quayside, but neither Kara nor I had budged from our room.