What Burns Away (18 page)

Jimmy was dressed in a blazer with the sleeves rolled up and had his usual pastel T-shirt underneath to go with his precisely torn jeans. He put his hand on his chest. “This shit is mint. I just took Kelly Jenkins to dinner. She couldn't keep her paws off it.”

Kelly was Dean's girlfriend before me; he had dated her when I was far too young to even think about boys. “Kelly was a sweet girl,” he told me once, “but not the brightest bulb in the shed. Not smart like you, Claire.” Despite his reassurance, I felt a twinge of jealousy at the mention of her name. Kelly was older, with hair like Kim Basinger, a cascade of blond curls falling down past her waist.

Eddie said, “Jimbo, you're going out with Dean's old girl? Isn't there some law of the brotherhood that says you can't do that shit?”

“Good thing I'm not in the brotherhood,” Jimmy said and punched Eddie's shoulder.

Eddie was one of the few black kids in town, but he was lighter skinned than Jimmy, who was Sicilian.

Eddie looked to Dean. “What room do you want with your lady?”

“Number seven, Ed. 'Cause we're getting lucky.”

Eddie smiled at me. “The stabbin' cabin.” He tossed Dean the keys.

“Let yourself in,” Dean told me. “I'll be there soon.”

For a minute I felt afraid, wondering if the guys were in on a secret I wasn't privy to, but I couldn't fathom what that secret would even be.

Family cars with inner tubes roped to the top were parked in a line along the perimeter of the property. In front of Cabin 7 there was a cat smell, but otherwise it was clean. The lock, rusted and hard to turn, led to a bed whose comforter crinkled like paper on a doctor's table when I sat down. My newly inked foot throbbed. Elevating it on a stack of pillows, I turned on MTV and watched Downtown Julie Brown count down the top ten videos.

In the big mirror across from the bed, I studied myself and teased my hair as I waited, unbuttoning my shirt lower than I usually wore it. At that very moment, Jimmy barged in. “Hello,
Mommy
,” he said.

Instantly, I grew embarrassed. “Where's Dean?” I asked, knowing Ms. Gabes would never hear me if I screamed.

“Who cares?” Jimmy said. “You got the Mac Daddy right here.” He flopped down on the bed next to me. “Gonna get some uh-uh from Dean?” He straddled me and pinned my arms down so tightly that it hurt, humping me over my jeans.

I struggled beneath him and yelled, “Get off me, Jimmy!”

He kissed me sloppily on my mouth, trying to stick his tongue between my clenched teeth. Then he rubbed his face across my chest and bit my breasts, hard, leaving my shirt wet with his spit.

“I'd do you right now if Dean weren't my best friend,” he threatened, yanking his pants low to show me his excitement, then tossing his jeans at my face and stepping into a pair of swim trunks. “Slut,” he whispered, “you love it.” Then he left, making a
V
with his middle and index fingers, sticking his tongue between them, and slamming the door.

All I wanted then was to be at the end-of-the-school-year track team sleepover party with Lauren Lombardino and my other classmates, at the party that I had lied to my father about attending.

I pulled the curtains open and watched the pool at the center of the motor court, where Jimmy made his way to the end of the diving board, bobbing on his tiptoes and smoking a cigarette, while Dean and Eddie sat with their feet dangling over the edge, beers in hand.

Shortly thereafter, Dean walked through the door. “The guys want you to jump in the pool naked. I told them no fucking way.” He handed me a can of Miller High Life.

“Jimmy's creepy. He scares me,” I admitted.

Dean pulled me close. He adjusted the pillows under my foot, examined the instep where it throbbed, and leaned me back onto the comforter with great care, tracing the nape of my neck with the back of his hand, his skin already tanned that second week of June.

“Shouldn't we go hang out with your friends?” I said.

Putting a finger to his lips, he told me, “I want to be with you.”

“I feel weird with them out there. You sure?” I whispered.

“No place I'd rather be.”

He moved his hands under my skirt to finesse my panties over my knees, holding them cautiously on each corner as if they were made of tissue paper, slipping them over one foot, then the wounded other.

I turned toward the window where I saw the sunset reflected off the pool and closed my eyes.

Dean worked a kiss from my ankle to my thighs. And as we grew frenzied, I opened my eyes to find Jimmy's toothy smirk and dark stare leering over us. Catching my glance through the windowpane, he pretended to suck an invisible dick.

“Stop,” I told Dean, pushing him away and pulling my skirt down. “Jimmy's peeking.”

“What?” Dean jumped up and threw his hands in the air. “You want me to kick your ass now?” he hollered through the glass.

Jimmy hollered back, “My bad.”

Dean ran out the door, shoved Jimmy up against the window, and yelled, “You disrespect my girl again, I'll fuck you up. Got it?”

“I
said
sorry, dude,” Jimmy told him, stumbling away as I watched.

Dean slapped the back of his head, saying as he went, “This conversation isn't over, asshole.”

Jimmy threw him the finger and bolted across the lot.

Dean returned to the room, pulled the curtain shut, and eased back down onto the bed. “Sorry,” he told me, wrapping his arms around me, seemingly guilt-stricken as he circled his hand around my waist and pulled me close. “I'll talk sense into that kid. He'll never disrespect you again.”

Dean kissed me, an apology. Then, with great care, he caressed the inside of my knees with the tips of his fingers.

“Massage?” he offered, sliding my skirt back up toward my hips.

Rolling me onto my stomach, he rubbed my neck and shoulders. On the television in front of us a gum commercial told everyone to kiss a little longer.

Dean took off his jeans. I buried my face in the pillow.

“Relax,” he whispered.

And, as I did so, the doorjamb squealed open, the knob smashing into the wall. A second later, Dean's body fell away from me. He moaned in pain, his body thudding as it hit the floor.

Startled, I rolled over.

Standing there, his hand clenched in a fist, stood my father in the Hawaiian shirt and black pants he wore to bartend at the Sound View Beach Cantina.

“Get dressed and get your ass in the car,” he told me.

Red with shame, I tugged my skirt over my knees and wiped a stream of tears on the back of my hand. I looked down at my throbbing foot, which had bled all over the mattress.

“Daddy,” I pleaded.

Dad dragged Dean outside by his hair.

Speechless, I peeked through the window where Jimmy had spied.

In the lot, my father slammed Dean against the side of his car. Uncle G sat in the passenger's seat, looking straight ahead, wearing his poker face. My father kneed my boyfriend in the gut and knocked him to the dirt.

Jimmy and Eddie were nowhere to be found.

I threw open the door of the motel room and called to my father. “Daddy, don't!”

His rage scared me.

“Please,” I whispered, “don't hurt him.”

My father kicked Dean after he was down. “Claire, I told you to get your ass in the car.”

Petrified, I walked past them both and opened the door to the backseat, certain that Dean was no longer breathing.

Uncle G said, “Apple doesn't fall far.” But I wasn't sure if the dig was directed at me or my mother, or maybe even Dean.

My father yelled, “Fucking piece of trash.” Then he called to my Uncle G. “Get the stuff.”

As I glanced into the rearview mirror, my uncle walked behind the car and swung the trunk open. Behind him to the left, Jimmy and Eddie crouched beside the pool in the shrubs, looking on. G slammed the trunk and stood beside my father, holding a can of paint, a brush, and a roll of duct tape.

Dean was in the fetal position on the ground, his lip bleeding and his shirt torn. My father knelt beside him, first tying Dean's hands with duct tape, then tearing another piece with his teeth to hog-tie his ankles.

“Don't ever fucking touch my daughter again, or I will kill you.”

“And I'll help,” G said.

While my uncle stood watch, my father cut off Dean's boxer shorts with his timeworn Army knife, always kept in his pants pocket.

Naked and shuddering, Dean begged, “No, please.”

G pried the paint open with his keys. My father dipped the brush into the can.

Dean whimpered, “I'm sorry, sir.”

Dad slathered the green bottom paint he used to cure the hull of his fishing boat across Dean's crotch, while Dean tried to fold himself in half to protect his genitals, pleading, “I'll leave her alone, I promise.”

Uncle G held his legs down and still. Dad finished, took the gallon, and chucked it across the parking lot, the paint splattering across the motel door and the hood of a parked car.

We drove off, but as I looked back, I saw Jimmy still crouched in the bush, while Eddie ran toward Dean. My tears fell into my lap and my nose ran as we drove in silence.

Dad pulled up in front of our house and said, not looking at me, “Don't ever lie to me again.”

Uncle G glanced over the seat and pointed at my tattooed foot. “Someday you're gonna look at that and wish you could take it all back.”

Thinking they were headed in behind me, I got out of the car and limped to the door, but G and my father drove away.

Home alone, I dialed Dean's number over and over. There was no answer at his house, and I wondered if I would ever see him again. I thought too of how I had forsaken Dean, and, afraid of my father's rage, how I allowed him to brutalize the very boy who had always protected me.

Too upset to sleep, I considered my bathing suit on the line in our side yard and yanked it from the clothespins. I changed in our outside shower and hobbled along the beaten path between houses to the sand beyond the glow of our porch light. In the dark, I plunged into the inky cold of the Atlantic. Swimming until I could no longer touch the bottom, the saltwater setting my inked foot on fire, I floated on my back, relying on the tide to push me in. My body grew cold enough to turn my insides numb, and once my teeth began to chatter, I kicked the water and propelled myself home.

• • •

When my mother pulled in the next morning to drop off Kara, I ran out to greet them. I could feel my mother scrutinizing me, deciding if something was wrong. “Honey,” she asked, “do you need to talk?”

“Yes,” I said. And because the apple didn't fall far, I told her everything while Kara watched the Smurfs on the small black-and-white television upstairs.

My mother did not judge me as I spoke. She did not interrupt my tears. She sat on the back deck and listened, her words sparse and practical. And when Kara appeared at the screen door, Mom gently pushed her away and shut the sliding glass door. It was clear to me then that I was being treated like an adult by my mother, the two of us on equal ground.

“Boys do stupid things sometimes,” she said, talking about Jimmy. “I'm pretty sure Dean will never allow anything like that to happen again.”

She paused, looked out over the yard to where Dad's boat sat on a trailer, and added, “The problem with bottom paint is that it's designed to keep the barnacles off a boat. The only way to get it off is with turpentine and a cloth, one inch at a time. You might need to help Dean. You can use my house. There's a bathroom on the first floor, just off the mudroom to the right. Craig and I will be out late tonight and tomorrow.”

As she shifted, a huge diamond on her hand caught the light and scattered it. Catching my worried glance, she tucked her jeweled hand under her knee, playing down her excitement for me.

She said, “The address is 101 Quayside Lane.”

“I know where your boyfriend lives.” I swallowed. “Husband. Whatever.”

She bit her lip. “Be careful not to—”

“Get pregnant?” I finished for her.

“That too,” she said. “But also be careful not to get into it with your father. He's obviously gone over the edge.” She inched close to me. “These things happen,” she said, smoothing the hair out of my eyes. “Growing up is hard sometimes.”

But I soon found out that those things
don't
happen, and never again would I understand so clearly the kind of intimacy that comes from helping someone through his shame, as I did when I bathed Dean in my mother's boyfriend's tub with a bottle of turpentine and a tiny rag.

Kneeling in the tub beside the boy whom I had given myself to, a boy who had both thrilled me and loved me, terrified me and protected me, I removed the bottom paint from his skin, leaving his penis raw and sore, touching him cautiously, and silently doing my best to dissolve his humiliation and my own.

Dean sat in the water with his hands over his face. He said, “If you were my daughter, I would've done the same thing.”

As I bathed him, I sensed a feeling unknown to me, a touch so delicate and careful that my hand itself became an instrument of lovemaking, and while I cleaned him up, I begged his forgiveness for what had been done to him. I also knew that, like things between my parents, things between Dean and me would never be the same.

Flurries scattered over Long Island Sound as Jonah and I turned down Willard Street, slowing to a stop in front of my childhood home. Parked out front, I imagined ringing the bell to find Dad there at the breakfast nook, drinking his morning coffee in a flannel robe and a pair of shearling slippers.

I exhaled, trying to expel the overwhelming ache of missing him, and as I did so, I thought of the words of the infamous cosmologist, Carl Sagan:

In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.

I slipped my hand into my coat, touched the plastic yellow lighter that I had tucked into my pocket from my luggage, and trusted it to be a token of good fortune.

From where I'd parked, the old Cape looked as dingy and forlorn to me as it did the night Kara and I let our mother and Craig Stackpole drive us away with our skirts and sweaters, scrunchies and hair bands, Kara's Barbies, and our joint teddy bear collection tossed haphazardly into four black trash bags, which we dragged like cadavers down the front steps before hefting them into the trunk of Craig's car.

Leaving that house felt like leaving my father forever, a deep-seated homesickness that has never gone away, even to this day. But there, looking at the place, I remembered every detail of that day we were forced to abandon our home.

Mom had told us, “Take just what you need, clothes and things, your toothbrushes, keepsakes. Everything else, your beds, your bedding, those things we can replace.”

Then she tossed our jelly shoes and leg warmers, our diaries and cassette tapes, into the garbage bags while her husband paced the halls with his Walkman on and his hands sunk deep into the pockets of his golf shorts.

Still I can conjure the memory of her voice that summer day, gentle and raspy from crying. “We'll get you new things,” she assured us, nodding her head fiercely, which set her dangly earrings into a metronome swing above her tanned shoulders. “We'll go shopping. We'll make it fun.”

But there was nothing fun about backing out of the driveway in that big luxury vehicle with white leather seats. It was the car against which my father's body had leaned after the gun kicked back, and for the rest of my high school years, I searched for Dad's bloodstains every time I reached for the handle, part of me wanting to find a gruesome sign of him there.

Idling so many years later beside the begrimed snowbanks with my son, I wondered, as I so often have, if our mother had been relieved in some way to have Dad gone. Unlike Kara, who grew to hate my father for his final act, I attributed my remaining sadness over his death to the decisions my mother made. It's not that I believed Mom would have chosen my father's death, but having him choose it for her meant that she would never have to battle him for custody, and that in some ways she could have her dream—her two girls under an extravagant roof with a new husband, in a completely different kind of life, a life she believed was better for us because we would no longer want for the things we needed.

My mother sold this belief to Kara and me time and time again as we grew up and headed out on our own, encouraging us to search out and embrace the help of a successful man, a partner who could provide us with the security we would need to raise families, rather than insisting we be strong and smart on our own merit and pave the way for ourselves.

“I'll buy you a new car and pay for your apartment if you stay in Connecticut and go to community college instead of going away to school” was my mother's reaction when I showed her the Women Chemists Committee letter I received my senior year of high school, announcing my scholarship to an undergraduate program in basic science.

And always I longed for something more than the simple security my mother promoted, but as I contemplated leaving Miles to return to Connecticut, to that former life there with Dean, I also never wanted Jonah to know the kind of grief I felt when I recalled my parents' divorce. Nor did I want him to know how much happiness my parents' split hijacked from us all, but reasoned that maybe if I left Miles while he was young, Jonah would never remember.

The sea smoke beyond us rose off the water and dimmed the morning with fog. The old Willard Street garage door rattled on its hinges, a stark bulb illuminating the spot where my father once parked. Searching for some sign of Dad inside, I found only a man my age, a brown bag in hand, walking to his car and slamming the door behind him. In the front window of the house, I made out a woman in a purple robe holding a little girl who waved to her daddy as they saw the man off. Any sign of my own father was gone.

K&P Forever
, I thought to myself, looking down at my mother's former wedding band stacked next to my own. I clenched the wheel tighter, my knuckles gone white.

“Fuck you, Mom,” I whispered.

Pulling away from the house, I drove toward the creek while Bruce Hornsby sang “The Way It Is” from the local radio station, and I sobbed in a way I hadn't since I first held Jonah, whose birth, for me, was somehow like losing my dad all over again. From the onset of my pregnancy, I pined for a boy who would grow into the man my father wanted to become but never got to be. But to hold my infant was to acknowledge that my father would never meet my precious son in his likeness, nor ever see me as a mother, the most substantial role of my life. That moment felt like yet another that my mother's affair had hijacked, and I grew fearful of what my own relationship with Dean might steal from my son.

I crossed the Singing Bridge and drove over the gravel roads woven through the marshlands, ambling toward the Quayside and watching my window of time to set the blaze dwindle.

Passing Sea Glass Beach, where Mom spent countless days of summer, I wondered as I always have if I could have stopped my father from taking his life by coming home early that night from the fireworks, instead of sneaking up the back stairs thirty minutes past curfew. Had I been on time, maybe we would have passed each other along the banister, and I could have asked, “Daddy, where are you going?” And he would have said, in his authoritative tone, “A better question, Claire, is where have you been?”

I've replayed that imaginary detour a thousand times. The one where instead of heading to the barn that Fourth of July, Dad instead cries on my shoulder and we sit on the back porch together under the crescent moon to look for meteor showers, singing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” over and over, as we once did, until Kara, in her My Little Pony jammies, fumbles with the screen door and herds us in for bed.

Shuddering, I cranked the heater, wary of leaving Jonah in the car despite the January chill. The temperature read below freezing, yet it was safer to leave him outside in the car to wait than to bring him inside with me. Eyeing the thermometer on the dash, I churned with guilt and dread and shame, topped with the headiest excitement, as I turned down the narrow road.

Across a street to the left of 101 Quayside Lane, blocking the view of the address, was the former Ansel Sterling estate, renovated in 1988 to become the White Sands Country Club for the Quayside Beach Association. I remember how we picnicked with our father on the docks there that day my mother remarried, watching her photo shoot with Craig from afar. Behind the tennis courts, I parked where the club's staff left their cars before punching the clock at the clubhouse office. Next to me was an orange Volvo station wagon with a bumper sticker that read “Surf or Die,” the long board tied to the roof covered in three inches of snow.

Idling, I scanned the lot and hoped to find someone there who would put a stop to everything I was about to do for Dean, for my father, for me.

But there was no one. And according to Dean, the club began brunch at 8:15 a.m., so with my 8:00 a.m. arrival, the waitstaff would be on the floor taking orders, and the cooks and dishwashers likely in the throes of the Wednesday morning rush in that breakfast spot popular with the locals in the off-season. If he had planned it right, I would not be seen by anyone.

Through a scatter of flurries, for the first time in more than twenty years, I faced the Quayside property, its imposing arrogance and hulking narcissism calling forth my old rage as I noted the single lamp on the second floor illuminating the room where my mother straddled Craig Stackpole's slim frame on top of his banker's desk. An ominous, haunted sensation washed over me then in the shadow of the place, and the despair unnerved something in my gut. I shivered. A metallic taste coated my tongue.

“Mommy needs to do a quick errand,” I told Jonah.

Procuring my son's breakfast from the diaper bag, I knew I was no better than my mother with my online flirtation and my lies to my husband about where I was, who I was with, and what I was doing. But standing there in the shadow cast by the house, I wanted that job done—not just for Dean, but also for my father—and to reclaim the parts of me still preoccupied by the torment that began there.

“Mommy needs to go inside,” I said, pointing to the address. “I will be right back. You're going to eat your muffin and look at Elmo.”

I handed Jonah a book and a giant pastry that he held with two hands.

“Milk, Mama?” he asked sweetly. He bit into the muffin and, with a mouthful of it, announced, “Big cake!”

I admired my boy. His features matched my husband's—the eyes, the nose, the cleft chin—but his coloring, that milky Irish skin, was my father's, just like my mother once said. In his face, even more so as he would grow, I could see his grandfather, the Grandpa Peter he would never know.

And there, that morning, I watched Jonah take another bite of his muffin and understood the possibility that I could go to jail, that for the second time in my life I could lose everything that mattered. But if I didn't do it then, I also knew I would never repossess those broken parts of myself, to be whole not just for myself, but for my son. Caught in a maelstrom, I questioned it all. Exhilaration. Repentance. Loss.

Then I moved forth.

“Mommy loves you,” I said to Jonah, just as my father had told Kara and me when he saw us off for the last time.

Breathing deeply, I reached for the giant canvas boat bags on the passenger seat stuffed with latex gloves, a mask, and thirty-five aerosol flea bombs divided between them, then patted my pockets to double-check that I had my accelerant and the yellow lighter, my lucky charm.

“Five minutes,” I told Jonah and pulled on my gloves. I was anxious, but Dean promised I would be able to see the car from the house.

When
the
Quayside
is
gone, I won't be haunted anymore. I'll be a more clear-headed mother
, I convinced myself. Then, I leaned over the console, squeezed my son's hand, and tucked the edges of a stroller blanket into the folds of his car seat. I tugged his hat down over his ears.

I told him, “Mommy will do better. After this, Mommy will stop being sad and we will be happy together.”

Jonah nodded his head. “Cake,” he said, offering a bite to Elmo.

I locked the door and sprinted toward the house, anxious.

At the place where the barn used to stand, I paused.

“Daddy,” I said aloud to my father's ghost, “we never saw the comet.”

Snow squeaked beneath my boots and tears blurred my eyes, but I keep running. The aerosol cans clanked together in the bags. I worried about leaving tracks, evidence, my shoe size, but when I reached the walkway to the house, I found that Dean had shoveled the stairs as he promised, heavily salting the path on his way out the door.

I smelled the ocean, the muck of low tide mingled with chimney smoke and the morning's bacon grease from the White Sands across the street.

With my gloved hand, I turned the knob on the mudroom door I'd closed behind me the day I graduated from high school. I looked back at the lot where the car was parked. My body trembled. Inside the entry, I whiffed gas seeping from the lines Dean had punctured before hightailing out of there, as we had planned. His perforation of the main lines running from the basement up through the kitchen motivated me to move quickly, to hold up my end of the promise.

I stepped across the creaking floorboards and checked the grandfather clock in the corner. The hour hand quivered with each tick of the second hand.

Like a burglar, I moved toward the granite island in the center of the kitchen. I pulled on a gas mask.

“Hurry,” I whispered to myself.

Dean had spread a thick layer of grease that coated the kitchen surfaces. It lent a slick, waxy veneer to the hardwood floors in the hallway and the stairs leading up to the second floor. I steadied myself so as not to slip, turned the gas dial on the range clockwise, turning it on, and stepped away.

Outside the window above the kitchen sink, I looked for my car flecked with flurries and worried about Jonah.

Moving fast, I tucked flea bombs into corners of the large room. Pushing their tabs to activate the propellants, I arranged eight cans total to ensure the kitchen as the epicenter of the blaze.

I checked the time—two minutes down—and slipped from the galley into the dining room.

There I pulled another set of foggers from my bag and recalled my mother leaning against the stone hearth, her long, dark hair to the middle of her back, Craig's hand on her ass at Christmas. The memory incensed me as I remembered staring at a holiday roast, its red blood pooled onto my plate fifty yards from where my father had bled to death in the barn.

My phone vibrated in my pocket, interrupting a memory I was eager to shake. I looked at my phone. A missed call from Miles, back in Wisconsin.

Shame overwhelmed me. “Keep going,” I told myself.

From the dining room, I took the stairs two at a time to the second level. At the landing, I veered into the former guest room that became mine, now Dean's office, as my breathing quickened and moistened my mask. I primed six more aerosol cans, then moved to the next bedroom, once Kara's, to position six more. In the master bath, I perforated one fogger, and I placed four additional cans in the adjoining guest room.