What Burns Away (9 page)

• • •

I've never told my husband about the fire I set in my mother's car. Dean was the only person who ever knew. Although I'd like to think that Miles and I could tell each other anything, we can't. Or at least I can't. I learned the hard way to keep my secrets after I divulged my mother's infidelity to Miles in the early months of our courtship. That character flaw became something he referenced anytime her name came up, pressing on a wound that would never heal, reminding me of the danger in sharing old confidences.

In a moment of tenderness, I came close to telling Miles about the car fire only once. It was before Jonah. We had been camping at Maho Bay in the U.S. Virgin Islands, celebrating the completion of his doctoral program in medicine. We were alone on the beach, our skin branded by the sun after a day of snorkeling. Drinking rum from the bottle, we sat with our faces illuminated by a bonfire we had built together.

Miles threw his hand over my shoulder. “What is it about fire?” he wanted to know.

With our eyes open, we made love there on the sand. But Miles's gaze remained on the blaze, and in his eyes I watched the reflection of light flicker. I wanted to tell him then how I got away with it, how I kindled the car with newspapers and struck the match, but I didn't because Miles had always possessed a righteousness, a belief in order and laws typical of the son of a judge. Disclosing my crime would mean opening myself up to questions that, if answered, would reveal a part of myself that made even me uneasy. So I tucked that part of my story deep in the corner pocket of myself.

• • •

But I did tell Dean how the fire trucks pulled onto Willard Street just seconds after I slipped back into my bed, faking sleep, before my parents came to get us.

“My father cried,” I explained in a whisper. “And he pulled at my mother's shirt so hard, trying to hold her, that we heard the fabric tear as she moved away from him. When the officers came to the door, he finally let go.”

“I remember that fire,” Dean said. “It was in the
Hartford
Courant
. The article was all about how your dad was out of work, walking the picket line at Colt, and how he was the victim of vandalism. They blamed it on the changes in the neighborhood after Pratt and Whitney moved south. My mom was all worried about her property value.” He moved my hair off my shoulders. “It wasn't a bunch of thugs from New London after all. It was you.”

“Me,” I confessed to Dean. “To punish my mother.”

When the cops arrived at the scene, they questioned my parents on the stoop while it snowed and snowed. Kara sat in my lap and we watched them from the living room. It was the last time I saw my mother touch my father, her fingers on his shoulder as the officers drove up. They were both afraid and Dad grabbed her, tried to keep her in his grip, but she pulled away from him, even as he begged her “Please” and “Don't” and “Wait.”

Despite the fire, Mom left the next day. She had packed just one bag and set it in the hallway the night before, the same rose-colored suitcase she took on their honeymoon weekend to see the Statue of Liberty, before Dad left for Vietnam. Other than her luggage, everything else stayed behind with us, even Mom's sea glass.

As a girl, I blamed myself for my parents' divorce, always wondering if giving Dad that letter might've made a difference in his behavior, if he might've been softer, more attentive in time to save things. Perhaps, if he'd been given a chance to read it, he would have pleaded with her to reconsider the split. And although it was never my intention, as an adult I've come to understand that by confiscating my mother's note and setting fire to her car with it, I made things far worse for Dad, who was caught completely off guard when she left.

Without her own vehicle, Mom was no longer able to move herself into her lover's house. Instead, that next morning, “the Douche Bag,” as my father later named him, fetched her in a Mercedes the color of banana cream pie. Together they backed out of the driveway into the fog while Dad leaned in the door frame, watching, and the yellow crime scene tape billowed along the edges of our front lawn.

Soon after Mom left, I abandoned my ownership of the arson, exiling it so far away from me that it was as if the story belonged to a stranger, something I overheard in a restaurant, maybe. But once Dean resurfaced, that summer returned to me with a fury—that intensity, the loss, the fire, the heat, all of it.

Dear Claire,

Since you've agreed there is nothing that can't be shared between us, I need to tell you a few things. First is that you're right. The house at Quayside is haunted. For me, haunted mostly by you.

Right after we closed on the place, Heather wanted to move in, make it our home. Who wouldn't? The view is goddamn breathtaking. But I couldn't bring myself to live here with her in a place where I felt your presence. So, I nabbed another property on the marsh. Insisted that the Quayside offered more as a rental for the bigwig insurance execs at Aetna than it offered us as a home.

Second thing, it wasn't until Heather and I split, over a year ago, that I moved in. I just haven't brought myself to update my relationship status on Facebook. Too depressing, which is why I haven't mentioned it yet. The story is real tragic—like they all are, right? Heather jumped ship. A year later she's engaged. But when she left, she went big. Took our cash, her jewelry, had a moving company come when I was at work. Basically, stripped the house of all the antiques and art, all the other shit she had bought, and moved in with her chiropractor. The guy was like twenty-five years old, and supposedly he begged her to have his baby.

My guess is she tried to break it off and he wanted to keep fucking her so he told her what she wanted to hear. The affair had been going on about a year. Of course he conveniently made his play on her thirty-fifth birthday, following a conversation she and I had, in which I told her I wasn't sure that at forty-three years old and knee deep in debt was the best time for me to start a family.

Big mess. Lawyer said not to fight her on the marsh property because it's all in her name, advised I take Quayside and walk. Start over on my own. Whole thing makes me sick. But who knows, maybe one day we'll both be living back on the beach together, the way it should have been all along.

Then again, maybe not. With all the sadness living inside these walls, I can only imagine you felt frightened here as a kid.

And, you could call me, some night. Actually, please call: 1-860-555-8468.

I'm lonely too. Let's not let each other be lonesome anymore.

Yours,

Dean

Once I acquired Dean's number, all I could think about was dialing it, and by the following morning, I had committed the digits to memory. Jonah went down for his morning nap as usual, and I reached for the phone, pressing the eleven digits. But after the first ring, I told myself, “Don't,” apprehensive about where the call could lead, and hung up.

In an attempt to keep my mind occupied, I washed the breakfast dishes and let the water run over my hands. I envisioned Long Island Sound, my hand cutting through its cold waters over the side of the weather-beaten Cape Dory sailboat, which had been sold along with the house and most of our belongings.

In Connecticut, before Miles took the job at the University of Wisconsin, I could watch Niantic Bay from my kitchen window, the old wooden docks groaning as the tides went out. But out the window of our rental house, we had only a view of the Target at Hilldale Mall, the department store's bull's-eye emblem marking the spot of everything gone missing.

Interrupting my daydreams of home, the phone rang and the machine picked up just as I found the receiver and answered the call.

“Still there?” I asked over the recording.

But the line fell silent, followed by the drone of a dropped call.

I considered Miles ringing to check in and thank me for delivering his pager; he always managed to leave something behind in his mad dash out the door. But by the time Jonah and I tailed him to the lab that morning, before our 10:00 a.m. story time at the library, my husband was already scrubbed in on a case with a patient.

I tried to call back on both Miles's cell and at the hospital's cardiology lab, but each line went straight to voice mail. Then, before I set the phone back to charge, I impulsively dialed Dean, hanging up after one ring for the second time that morning.

“You're pathetic,” I told myself.

Taking a longer morning nap than usual, Jonah slept to midday and I further busied myself with endless chores, pushing away thoughts of Dean by folding baskets of tiny jeans and onesies, unloading the dishwasher, and leafing through a cookbook to figure out something for dinner. As I sanitized baby bottles and vacuumed Cheerios from under the high chair, I eyed the computer and tried to convince myself, “Let it be.”

In the basement, I pulled clean bedding from the dryer, hauled it back up to the playroom, and folded it while it was warm, but once I got to the fitted sheets that make me crazy, I stopped and the phone rang again.

Wishfully, I anticipated Dean pulling my 608 area code exchange off his caller ID and returning a call to me. I recollected the low rasp of his voice and answered.

“Hello?”

There was a pause.

My heart pounded, a flutter rising from my chest into my throat and blushing face.

“Hello?” I said again.

“Can you hear me?” my husband shouted.

“Miles,” I said, falling into a chair, disappointed.

“Jesus, honey, I've been trying to reach you all morning.” There was panic in his tone. “The lines here keep cutting out.”

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“My lab,” he shouted. “There was a fire.”

Behind him I heard the sirens and the low voices of men asking questions.

“My research,” he said despairingly. “Everything could've been lost.”

Miles continued to speak into the receiver but I couldn't quite connect his words. I stood up, pacing from room to room, turning off the radio and looking for my shoes.

“You want me to come over there?” I asked, peering out into the endlessly falling snow. “Jonah is still napping, but I could wake him.”

“Please. And grab the blue external hard drive off my desk. I want to back up all my work. I want to make sure that nothing else is lost.”

“Okay,” I said, opening his office door and shuffling through the mess of papers and folders to find the external hard drive. I took a deep breath to steady myself. “The police? Are they with you?”

Miles cleared his throat. “The Madison Fire Department responded to the call at 10:15 this morning. It came from Clyde on the maintenance crew. My research, the files, the data from our experiments, all of it would've been wiped out if the sprinkler systems hadn't kicked on and scared off the perpetrator.”

“Jesus. That's right after we stopped by to drop off your pager on our way to the library. We just missed it.”

“Do you understand how bad this could have been, Claire? People could have been injured, or worse. My laptop's been here every night. I've just been trying to keep the peace at home—I know how much you hate the time suck of the research, the lab, the job. I didn't want you mad at me. But everything I've done here could have gone up in smoke.”

Trying not to scream about how much work he
continued
to bring home regardless, I said, “It's awful. I'm sorry,” while my own anxiety rose.

Miles corrected himself. “It's not your fault, honey. I'm just really upset. The point of origin, from what they have so far, was right outside my office door, on the back outer side of the lab. The arsonist came in through the security doors. They used amateur stuff—gasoline, from what they can tell.”

I asked, “Do they have any idea who might have done it?”

“No. Not a clue. But I was thinking—do you remember that one resident I told you about, Dalton, the one with the impulse control issues? I found him gambling online during rounds last month. The guy clearly has some screws loose, but I don't think he's a felon. The animal rights activists have always threatened to try to shut the wet lab down. But really, it could have been anyone. It's horrible. I never thought… I just cannot believe something like this could happen.”

“Of course not. That's so scary.” I pushed Jonah's bedroom door open to wake him and whispered to Miles, “Hang in there. We're on our way.”

In my arms Jonah's body was warm with sleep, his eyes groggy. I lifted him from the crib and said, “Daddy needs us.”

• • •

Inside the School of Medicine, housed in the belly of the university hospital, Miles sat on the floor of the inner stairwell and hugged his knees to his chest, his white coat on the floor beside him, his tie loose and unraveled around his neck. Next to him stood a thin, tidy man in a crisp suit, anxiously drumming his fingers on his lapel, while a barrel-shaped firefighter expounded on the findings.

“No doubt this was an incendiary fire. Arsonist used straight petrol and a rag, basic Molotov cocktail, sign of a rookie. And from what I can make of the alligatoring—the way the wood is charred along the walls inside the lab—it was unsophisticated accelerants all the way around. Lucky for us, the culprit was hasty. Had the perpetrator used the oxygen flow in that back hall, this place holds enough chemicals to go up like a firecracker. Dudes who are big-time arsonists, who plot it out, the professionals making big-gun fires—they go more for your petroleum distillates, benzenes, and xylene isomers to get a flashover and bigger, more destructive flames. Best thing to do now is follow up on any leads from your staff, Dr. Bancroft. You should know that arson is about the hardest crime to link to a person, but we'll do our best.”

The lean, angular man in the suit nodded and shook my husband's hand. “I'll be in touch.”

While I waited for them to finish a more hushed conversation, I thought about fire and how it can all be reduced to the basic science of combustion undoing the chemistry that photosynthesis brings together. Even as a teenager, I was fascinated by the simplicity of the reaction that leaves nothing but water behind.

That behavior of the fire triangle—fuel, oxygen, heat—was first explained to me in the classic experiment from
The
Chemical
History
of
a
Candle, Lecture III: Products
—
Water
from
the
Combustion
, the one I memorized the summer before college, replicating Faraday's proof in my mother's kitchen by taking a cold drinking glass and placing it over the flame. The glass grew damp, as Faraday explained: “immediately H
2
O was produced by the taper in appreciable quantity.”

In the corridor of Miles's lab, the firefighter droned on to Miles, but I knew that hydrogen and its changing forms would give the important details of the investigation away. And I recognized how heat removed the hydrogen and oxygen molecules from the walls of the lab to produce water vapors no different from those that source the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, a thousand miles too far away.

Finally, when he saw us awaiting him, Miles rushed over and clutched me tight, Jonah snug between us.

“Love you,” he said. “Thanks for coming.”

“What else can I do?” I whispered.

He shook his head. “I don't know.”

The three of us stood huddled together for a long time. And with Jonah between us, Miles and I shared the kind of touch we hadn't had in months, full of mutual need.

Interrupted by men in latex gloves scurrying through the double doors, Miles ushered us aside. I inhaled the smell of charred paper and melted plastic and peered nervously through a swinging door, behind which the real damage lay. Officers wound the police tape along the hall, and droves of impotent campus security circled the corridors with walkie-talkies, trying to stay out of the investigators' way.

I handed my husband the jump drive. “Want to get out of here and grab lunch?” I offered. “Take a breather with me and the little guy?”

He shook his head. “You guys head home. I need to go upstairs and round on patients, then I'll need to spend some time sending out emails to all the residents and fellows, see if anyone in the department might've seen anything suspicious.”

“Tell me how to help,” I pleaded, slipping my hand around his waist.

Miles dismissed my offer. “Just take care of Jonah.”

“It could have been a lot worse,” I acknowledged.

He nodded and sipped water from a paper cup. “I'll try my best to get home before Jonah goes down.” He stroked our son's cheek with the back of his hand. “Okay, buddy?”

• • •

Back home, Jonah and I went through the daily routine: first lunch, then clean up and play. We ran to the bank and the dry cleaner, the grocery store and the pharmacy. Strolling store aisles, I was hunting for a gift to cheer Miles, when I stumbled across two stuffed pugs perched side by side on the pharmacy shelves.

I yelped with delight and an elderly woman sucking on mints and perusing birthday cards glanced up at me with a finger to her lips, hushing me as if I'd woken her from slumber.

Holding the stuffed animals, I remembered Pansy and Sebastian, our former neighbors' dogs, racing fully costumed down our stretch of shore, and I laughed out loud, squeezing the plush replicas to my chest—the ideal present for Miles, to lift his spirits when he needed me again.

Back home, I wrote out a card and arranged the stuffed pugs on the counter, sticking a couple of makeshift bumblebee antennas on one, a flower headband on the other, for my husband to find when he got home. I hoped the gesture would comfort him, an inside joke to remind him that I did understand, and that for him and our new life, I wanted to be necessary.

Dear Miles—

Things could be so much worse. We could be as crazy as Ned and Sheila Whitaker! Hang in there, and hang on to me. I'm here and I love you.

OX

Claire

A few hours later, back at the sink, I peeled potatoes for dinner, while Jonah pushed trains and built cities along the kitchen floor. Stopping every once in a while, he wrapped his arms around my legs or fiddled with my bare toes before demanding my attention for a quick squeeze.

After an early supper, we bundled up for a walk, both of us dressed like Eskimos, and headed down the footpath in the dark. Over the hills, I pulled Jonah in a sled toward the snow-covered golf course.

The swish of my ski pants was the only noise over the still blanket of the fresh snow.

“Look,” I told Jonah when we crested the hill. Stopping to lift him from his seat, I pointed to the crescent moon in the dark, sapphire sky.

“There's Orion,” I told him. We followed his belt with my gloved index finger and then found the open star cluster Pleiades to the right.

“Seven Sisters,” I said and wondered about Kara, my only sibling, counting out the nearly two decades that had passed since we last spoke more than the occasional words required in holiday card greetings. I hoped she was happy at home in Connecticut with her family, a short drive from where we grew up. But I couldn't help wondering if she'd ever been desperate out there in the world, like me.

By bath time, Miles was still not home. Pushing Jonah's boats over the sudsy waters, I tried to recall a night when Miles had knelt there beside me and we bathed Jonah together, during what was, for me, the sweetest part of the night. But my calculations came up empty, and I recognized how separate our lives had become since he took the job. Miles's and my paths were running parallel, with no foreseeable point of intersection.

Toweling off Jonah's sturdy frame, I focused on what was in front of me and kissed all the sweet baby creases on his ankles and wrists, zerberting his belly, pinching his juicy little thighs. Jonah screeched with glee.

I laughed too, even though what I felt beside him, as I so often do, was the bittersweet pang of motherhood—that joy of watching Jonah grow, paired with the grief of noting his babyhood zipping past. And there, kneeling beside the tub, aware that I was parenting my boy alone, I was certain that for Miles and me, there would be no future babies unless I could change things somehow. For our family it would likely be just Miles and his work, and Jonah and me.

Once I put my son to bed, I became beset by isolation and called my husband, beckoning him home, hoping to offer some comfort, thinking that maybe today we could support each other and that I could take on a real role in things.