What Burns Away (20 page)

“You might,” Dean said gently, “and I'd take you both.”

He squinted against the morning light coming through the window and held out a hand, reaching for me. “You can't go back there, Claire. I saw it with my own eyes, you sitting alone in that front room two nights in a row, eating dinner alone in your pajamas, drinking all that wine by yourself. That's no kind of life. Especially not for you.”

Fear, cold trickles of it like ice water, roiled through me. “What do you mean? What do you mean, you saw me?”

Dean stepped nearer to Jonah and me.

“In Madison. I watched you. I was there a couple days before I rang your bell. And most of the time we were chatting on Facebook, I was parked right outside your window.”

I shook my head, staggered, wanting to believe that Dean had come to Wisconsin to support me, like he always had, to see who we might be together again. My speech stuttered. I asked, “Did—so did you know when you came that you wanted…this? That you wanted me to set fire to the house?”

“I did.” Acknowledging the expression on my face, he came closer still. “But don't take that the wrong way, Claire. I was also curious about your life. And so I scoped it out for a couple of days, to see how interested you'd be in getting out of there, before I asked you to do this crazy thing. A payback for me.”

Dean and I were again close enough to kiss, yet all I felt was deceived. He rubbed the knuckles of his hand along my face and grabbed my free hand. I clutched Jonah tighter with the other.

“The truth is,” he told me, “I got hung up on you. I'd pictured your life so differently—this woman married to a doctor, a perfect little family. I didn't believe you could be as lonely as you said. But then I saw it with my own eyes, even worse than you let on, fucking
heartbreaking
to watch a woman I loved be overlooked and wasted. I had to take action, do
something
.

“I wanted to make things better for you there, Claire, but it didn't work. Miles still ignored you after the lab fire. You said it yourself. And then I knew the right thing to do was get you home with me, and that if we burned down the Quayside and got in the clear financially, you and me—Jonah—we'd all get everything we needed.”

Gasping for breath, I was so struck with revulsion that I struggled to gain my composure.

Dean remained calm, sucked air through his teeth, and cuffed the sleeves of his shirt. “You told me that you dreamed about that lab exploding, Claire. Remember? Said you dreamed about some scientist getting a formula wrong and taking the place down.”

Deeply disturbed, I finally recognized that Dean's dark side had run riot, his reality had skewed since I last knew him. I whispered, “And so you did it?”

“Only when I knew no one was there, that no one would be hurt. I did it for you.” He looked at me tenderly. “And now you've done the same for me.”

I turned my back on him, wracked with tremors. Hating myself for what I had done, all of it clear then how Dean had staked out my life and burned down my husband's lab, hoodwinking me to come back home and commit a felony. And it was even worse than that, I know now. The sickening grasp of it still floods me sometimes when I realize how I played the pawn in Dean's design, his agenda for the arson made without my knowledge, his seduction a form of trickery to gain my participation in a crime he had already staged. And for the first time, I was afraid of him. Terrified, even.

He grabbed my arm. “Wait, Claire.”

I wrenched it away, set a tearful Jonah on the bed, and snatched the hotel phone from the nightstand, preparing to call for help.

“Get out!” I said.

“You're overreacting,” he said softly. “That's all behind us now.”

“I could go to
jail
,” I screamed.

He shook his head and backed toward the door. “If questions were asked, if it ever came to that, I would take the fall to protect you. You know that, Claire.”

Jonah continued to weep, calling, “Mama, up.”

“Out,” I demanded. “Please leave.”

He moved toward the doorway and said, “Thank you. For everything.” And as he backed through it, he blew me a kiss.

Nauseated, I bolted the lock behind him. My head fell against the door and I bowed with remorse over what I had done. I lifted Jonah from the bed and sobbed with him as I carried him into the bathroom. In the mirror I examined our reflections under the fluorescent lights, noticing the singed ends of my hair and the soot on my chin.

Jonah's eyes were draped with heavy lids and he nuzzled his face against my neck, blinking his eyes and catching his breath.

“I'm sorry,” I whispered to my son. “Mommy is so sorry.”

I kissed his face. I kissed his hands. I took each big toe and brought it to my lips. I exhaled and considered Miles. I wondered how he could ever again trust a mother who let her son go missing, a wife who slept with another man, a woman who had loved fire since her youth.

I hated myself, and with no belief I could ever deserve forgiveness, I wept, muttering, “Stay calm.”

“Calm,” Jonah repeated. He patted my face.

Forcing deep, slow breaths, I stripped us both down for a shower and washed the residue of pesticides off my skin. Through the steam, I watched Jonah blink water from his eyes, and while we clung to each other under the warm spray, I cried for my father, I cried for my crime, I cried for all I was ashamed to be capable of—knowing there would be a reckoning for the lies I told Miles, and that it was coming fast.

The next day, after I packed our things, I looked out over the Atlantic from the inn one last time and touched the window seat where I believed that Dean and I had reclaimed each other, or so I thought at the time, hollowed now by my understanding of the trick it all had been. As we headed out to the airport, I contemplated cruising through Mystic with Jonah to steady myself, thinking that seeing the house Miles and I had reconstructed might help me to regain some footing in reality.

But as I traveled east, driving along the waterfront, I feared that seeing the place might only make me more distraught. I abandoned the visit altogether, looping around in a Dunkin' Donuts parking lot. I detoured instead to Marty's Clam Shack, a place my father loved to go, raving about their shrimp boats and clam cakes every time we went.

It was deserted except for a few locals eating chowder from steaming bread bowls while one of the two employees attempted to keep the winter chill at bay by lining the windows and doors with plastic wrap.

Paranoid about the fire and disgusted with myself, I pulled Jonah from his snowsuit. I chose a spot in the far corner of the room and eased him into a high chair bellied up at the end of a yellow picnic table, where we swayed with the dock upon which the restaurant floated. A cold breeze rose through the cracks in the floorboards, nullifying the meager efforts to keep the place warm, while outside seagulls landed on the roof of the take-out window. From where we sat, the view framed by Millstone Nuclear Power Station and the Niantic River Bridge, Jonah and I could make out a long line of silver passenger cars as they rattled their way from New York City to the New London station.

Above our heads, faded buoys and dragnets trapped plastic lobsters, and just beyond the restaurant's bay window, waves crested over Black Point's breakwater, besieged by the tide. Dark cumulonimbus clouds hovered over the ocean, and I knew they meant thunderstorms, which in the winter in New England come in the form of sleet or freezing rain. I wondered if our flight out would be delayed, and if one day I might return again to find some peace in the fact that the Quayside was gone.

In my father's honor, I ordered his favorite plate for Jonah and me to share: the Captain's Platter of fried fish and fries, something I would never usually consider, and waited for our number to be called.

“For Grandpa Peter,” I told Jonah, envisioning Dad hauling the entire vat of tartar sauce to our table and scooping an embarrassing heap of it onto his paper plate. This he did on countless summer nights when he brought Kara and me there for an early supper, hoping to beat the droves of summertime tourists who swarmed the place for boiled lobsters and ears of sweet corn.

Over the microphone, a teenaged girl in a hat that looked like a paper airplane called our order into the empty room.

Failing to steady the anxious warble in my belly, I carried the red baskets of fried fish to our table and showed Jonah how to use the “dip,” as he called Dad's favorite condiment. I drenched a piece of fried haddock in the tartar sauce and broke it into tiny pieces with a plastic fork.

Jonah's face grew bright with recognition. He clapped his hands together.

“You like it?” I said. “Yummies? Can you say
tar-tar
sauce?”

“Dada!” Jonah screamed.

In that instant there was a tap on my shoulder and a gasp as I turned to face an elderly woman who resembled my mother. Standing beside her were Miles and my sister, Kara's hand resting on my husband's shoulder.

“Oh my God,” I said.

With only a glance at me, Miles went to Jonah and lifted him from his seat.

“No!” Jonah screamed. “Down.”

Kara, more glamorous than I remembered, frowned at me. “So you were here, and you didn't even call?”

“Easy,” my mother told her.

Mom's hair was cut into an angular bob gone almost completely silver. A fuchsia pashmina was draped over her shoulders. “We've all been worried sick about you, honey,” she said.

Miles finally turned to me, more lost than I'd ever seen him. “Claire,
why
are you here exactly? What's going on?”

I watched my husband bounce with Jonah, who settled into his daddy's embrace, and told him, “I'm fine. I just—I wanted some time alone. To get away. To come home.” Sounding defensive, I repeated, “Really, I'm fine.”

Miles looked down at his feet and took a deep breath through his nose. He wore the Cleveland Browns ski cap I kept tossing into the Goodwill pile, and as he shook his head in disagreement, the orange pom-pom bobbed from side to side, an indicator of his skepticism.

Kara patted his shoulder and looked out over the ocean.

I turned to my mother, the only one person who stared at me directly.

“I had to come back to figure some things out,” I told her, my voice rising with alarm. “I would have called. But, I needed time.”

Mom forced a smile and straightened the posture of her slight frame. “We're all just glad we found you both safe.”

Weighted down by her winter coat, my mother seemed frail in comparison to the version of her I remembered from sixteen months prior, the last time I saw her on the day Jonah was born. For a moment, I wondered if she was sick, or if she noticed the same yardstick of time as she studied my face.

“I knew she would be here,” Kara said to my husband, talking as if I were in another room. “Mom saw a quote about missing home on Claire's Facebook feed, and, well, this was her dad's favorite place.”

“Our dad,” I said. Then I asked my mother, “How could you see that? I declined your friend request. And why are you here? Why aren't you in Florida?”

“Privacy settings,” Kara murmured. “And we're glad she helped us find you. Miles called, worried sick.”

“I wasn't spying, honey, really. Just concerned is all. It's been too long.” My mother wrapped her arms around me and held me so tightly that I could barely breathe. In her hair I smelled the cold and the hint of a woodstove. She exhaled.

Kara turned toward us, another great beauty like my mother, with a stunning mane of dark hair. “Mom and I were really worried about you after Dad died, Claire. Then all these years of silence, your withdrawal from us. We should have reached out a long time ago. Whatever's going on now, I feel like it's our fault too.”

I underwent a jolt of panic when Kara said this and I broke from Mom's embrace, registering that the reason my mother was not in Florida had everything to do with me.

I searched Miles's face for a sign of what would come next and grew further paranoid, my own guilt eating away at my resolve. I peered out the window and scanned the lot for medics ready to haul me off to the crazy house, fire investigators with questions, or maybe even Dean coming to condemn me.

But outside there was only the russet sea grass left over from a season past, the sward bent by the gusts blown in off the ocean, and alongside it, stark rows of birch trees standing at attention.

We were the only distraction from the desolation of winter in that seaside town. There were no signs of emergency vehicles, no officers waiting to post blame, just the awkwardness of the five of us situated around the yellow picnic table, staring at baskets of fried fish and the oversized vat of tartar sauce.

Miles told Jonah, “Missed you, bud.” Then he looked at me. “It's true. We're all just relieved to see your face.”

Dark circles shadowed Miles's bloodshot eyes, the same look of exhaustion he got after his nights on call. And although he generally kept his reactions turned inward, which made reading his emotions something like turning an auger through a thick layer of ice, I saw the fissures in his calm as Miles paced beside my mother and sister. I saw the tension in his jaw and the anxious shift of weight from one foot to another that marked his concern. I worried about how much he already knew.

Jonah covered his father's eyes. “Dada! Peek-a-boo!”

Wanting to be part of their playful diversion, I told my husband plainly, “I'm sorry I lied to you.”

“There's nothing you can't tell me, Claire. Nothing.”

Outside, storm clouds stirred above the whitecaps.

Forewarned by the ominous sky, I thought back to the night Miles and I met, not a single cloud over the quarter moon, and how we kept buoyant, treading calm and flat waters. But there on that floating dock upon which the restaurant sat, all I felt was a kind of sinking.

Shocked to encounter my mom and sister in the company of my husband, I told him, “I know this whole thing must look crazy to you, but I'm okay.” But as soon as I uttered the words, I realized how unwell I sounded.

My mother interrupted by kissing Jonah's cheek and saying, “Such a big, beautiful boy.” Jonah played shy and Mom continued to pretend our reunion was some sort of planned lunch date, not an awkward unearthing of my whereabouts.

“Sit,” she ordered the group, taking a seat on the picnic bench.

Kara, Miles, and Jonah did as they were told.

I continued to stand.

Mom said, “Kara, tell your sister how you have been.”

Kara refused to play along. Blinking back tears, she wringed her long, slender fingers around a pair of leather gloves. “I hate that I never hear from you, Claire. Then this. Whatever this even is.”

Mom cut her off. “Kara is headed to Key West with Craig, her three girls, and me. Her husband, Luke, travels a lot for business, so we try to take Kara when we go someplace special.”

I nodded vaguely. Miles studied me and took Jonah's small hand in his fist.

Sleigh bells on the clam shack door rang, and an old man in a winter cap came through, ushering in a gust that sent our paper cups and plates across the floor. Miles, with Jonah in his arms, and Kara in her high-heeled boots chased after them, leaving Mom and me alone.

Mom murmured, “Miles called me before you left for Connecticut. He told me he wasn't sure it was a good time for us to meet. I, of course, had no idea what he was talking about, but I didn't want to make waves or get you in any kind of trouble, so I immediately booked my own flight and arranged to stay with Kara at her house in Essex, since it's only six miles away from where I imagined you'd be. And ever since my arrival, I've been driving up and down Route 9 like a crazy person, scouting out all the places where I thought I might find you. Guessed you were missing your father.”

“I miss him every day,” I told her.

Mom put her arm around me. “I carry my own guilt about his death, honey. I miss him too. Every day I blame myself.”

“Do you?” I asked.

“I do.” She squeezed my hand and paused, choosing her words. “And, honey, one other thing before Miles comes back. He called me a second time, saying that Jonah had gone missing. He had a lot of questions, but I shared only that we hadn't yet connected. He loves you and is very concerned. We all are. Anyway, I came to help, but I have to admit I'm worried too.”

She slipped the front page of the
Hartford
Courant
from her purse, unfolding the newsprint to reveal a five-by-seven color photo of 101 Quayside, the image of the house cast in orange flames.

Mom set an article from the
Hartford
Courant
on the table in front of me and said, “It's gone.”

I read the headline and a guilt-ridden flush came over my face.

Blast Levels Quayside Beach Historic Home

January
12, 2012

A fire yesterday morning at 101 Quayside Lane that injured three firefighters, one seriously, is under investigation with the Connecticut State Fire Marshal. Members of that office reported a gas explosion that destroyed the historic four-story home, said William McMahon, East Lyme's code enforcement officer.

The 5,500-square-foot historic property has lost $530,000 in value since the housing market crashed, and East Lyme police have stated that this fire may be the bizarre last chapter in a divorce battle over who would end up owning the depreciated building.

“There was a bang followed by a loud sizzle, and then everything shook. We ran to the porch, thinking the explosion was a gunshot,” said Clyde Reynolds Parker, a 67-year-old neighbor and president of the Quayside Beach Association. “That house has suffered nothing but bad luck. A suicide in the barn followed by another fire in July 1986, and now this. We're just relieved no one is dead.”

Late yesterday evening, owner Dean D'Alessio was taken in for questioning after Mario DeVito, the Hartford Police Department's deputy commissioner for public information, said that an unusual number of accelerants had been found on the premises.

Neither D'Alessio nor his estranged wife could be found for comments.