An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (28 page)

And I was remembering and dreaming all this in the bar, too. I was so deep in my dream that the song ended with a crash of drums and a shudder of bass and a screech of guitar, and still I danced in the middle of the crowd. People were staring at me. I didn’t blame them one bit and would have stared, too. I drank down my shot of bourbon, as though that would make them stop staring. It didn’t. I looked around for help, to see if there was someone around who could come to my rescue.

There was: a woman to my right, holding a lit joint. I hadn’t noticed her before that moment, and I’ve never seen her since. She was exactly my height. Her eyes were dark brown and they were squinting at me in bemusement, or maybe from the joint’s smoke. She wasn’t wearing earrings and for that matter had no holes in her lobes in which to put them. Her hair was straight and black and about ready to come out of her ponytail, although you could tell she would be as beautiful with her hair down as up, and that hair didn’t matter much to her and was just something that happened to be on top of her head. Other than these details, I know nothing about her, not even her name, although I think about her all the time, the way you do about people and things that change your life forever — although I doubt she thinks about me, which is the way life works, which is why I’m sure Noah couldn’t ever stop thinking about his Flood, but once the water receded, I’m sure it didn’t once think about him.

“You look like you could use this,” she said, and then put the joint up to my mouth. I took a drag: it was my first drag ever, tasted like dirt, and made me cough but otherwise had no effect on me that the bourbon hadn’t already had. Then the band started another song, one I recognized from high school: it was Skynyrd, the band doing its best to replicate the famous three-guitar attack with only two guitars. I didn’t dance this time, though, so I didn’t dream or remember — not about my parents or Anne Marie or the kids, everyone whom I loved and for whom I was put on this planet. How does this happen? Why don’t we always have someone on hand to say,
Don’t! Cut it out! Run out into the snow and throw yourself into a drift until your capacity to hurt and be bad is frozen out of you!
Why don’t we have
that
kind of voice, a voice that tells us not,
What else? What else?
but
Stop! Desist! You are about to do harm!
But even if we had this voice, would we listen to it? What is it that makes us deaf to all the warnings? Is it need? Is it need that makes us so deaf, that fills us up to our ears so that we can’t listen to our better impulses? Is it that we are so full of need, or so full of ourselves?

I wasn’t thinking of any of this at the time. I wasn’t even thinking about Anne Marie and Thomas, wasn’t even lying to myself about being a victim with rights rather than a victimizer with no rights at all. All I was thinking was that there was a beautiful woman standing next to me, smiling at me even, her smile making the bad band sound not so awfully bad, and she had two cheeks and I wanted to kiss the one nearest to me. I leaned over and kissed her cheek, and then she turned her lips toward mine, and so I kissed them, too, with feeling, and when the kissing didn’t seem to be enough anymore, we groped, enthusiastically and without regard to anyone else in the bar, as though our hands were made invisible on contact. All of this went on for a long time. I know this because eventually my lips began to get tired and there was considerable hooting and clapping that didn’t seem intended for the band. I glanced up to see who was making all this noise and saw my father-in-law, Mr. Mirabelli, standing directly behind the woman. And a few feet behind him, I saw my mother. Neither of them was hooting or clapping. Both of them were looking directly at me in huge disappointment, as though the bar were a museum and I were a famous painting that they’d paid too much to see.

“Mom!” I yelled, breaking the lip-lock. “Mr. Mirabelli!” This surprised the woman almost as much as my mother and father-in-law had surprised me.

“What did you just call me?” the woman asked. She backed up a little and also turned my body, so that my back was to my mother and father-in-law, although the woman still held on to my biceps. She had quite a grip, too, a grip that reminded me of Anne Marie’s at our wedding those many years ago, which makes me wonder if all women have this grip, this grip being the thing that keeps a woman steady while she’s deciding whether to hold on to or let go of the man she’s hitched to.

“Wait,” I said. I tried to break her grip and simultaneously twirl us around so that I could face my mother and father-in-law again, and the resulting motion no doubt came off as something violent, because the woman said, “What the
hell
do you think you’re doing?” She asked this question loudly, several times — the band had finished the song and were watching us, as we’d become the real attraction — and then she disappeared and several guys took her place, guys who I think were either related to the woman or wanted to be, all of them wanting to know if I had a
problem
. Peter and his friends had noticed what was going on, and they came over and asked these guys if
they
had a problem. All this took a while to straighten out, since each of us had so many problems, and by the time it was, my mother and Mr. Mirabelli were nowhere to be seen. I ran out into the parking lot; they weren’t there, either, and there was no sign of her Lumina or his Continental. But as I walked through the parking lot, I passed by my van, and there, on the windshield underneath one of the wipers, was a bar napkin. On it were the words “I think I know you.” I took this to be my mother’s note (the handwriting was familiar in its loops and slants), although what the words meant exactly, I didn’t know. There was so much I didn’t know. How had my mother and father-in-law known where I was? Who had told them I was driving to New Hampshire? Was it my father? Had one or both of them been involved with the phone call? Did they know each other?
How
did they know each other? Had they driven there separately, or together? Did my mother know I’d told my wife, my in-laws, too, that she and my father were dead? Did Mr. Mirabelli know now that they weren’t? Were she and Mr. Mirabelli talking right now about the woman I’d kissed and the wife I’d betrayed? Why would they follow me to the bar and then leave before saying anything to me? And what was that note supposed to mean? Why did my mother
think
she knew me? I was her son, was I not? Why would she need to
think
about
that?

These were all questions I couldn’t answer or at least didn’t want to, and as a detective you learn, sooner or later, to stop asking yourself these sorts of questions and start asking questions that you actually
can
answer. So I asked myself:
What time is it?
Then I looked at my watch: it was twenty minutes after midnight, and that meant I was already late.

I was late but not entirely stupid. I didn’t drive all the way to the Robert Frost Place, didn’t park in the parking lot as I’d done earlier. Like a real detective might do, I pulled off the road about a quarter of a mile from the house, into a slot in the snowbank that the snowplows must have used as a turnaround, parked my van there, and sneaked up to the house. This cost me some more time, of course, and by the time I got there, the bond analysts had already set fire to the Robert Frost Place and were standing in the parking lot watching the house burn. Their Saab was next to them with its engine on. The parking lot was ringed by white pines, and I hid behind one of them, close enough to hear what the bond analysts were saying.

“He’s not going to show up, is he?” one of the Ryans said, referring, I was pretty sure, to me. It was the first time I’d heard him speak. “What good is this if he doesn’t show up?”

“He’s missing one hell of a fire,” Morgan said, and then I knew why they’d called me: to show me that they could set fire to a writer’s home in New England without my help. They wanted me to be a witness. The bond analysts had always been like this: during their memoir-writing sessions in prison, they were always so eager to show one another how beautifully they’d written about the bad things they’d done. “One hell of a fire,” Morgan repeated.

“Who cares how good the fire is if he’s not here to see it?” the other Ryan said. Tigue and G-off were leaning against the Saab, staring silently at the fire, as though it had taken their voices and given those voices to the Ryans.

“Shut up,” Morgan said. “Trust me. He’ll be sorry.” He held up an envelope and then placed it in the middle of the parking lot, which had been plowed and was mostly clear of snow. With that, they piled into their Saab and drove away from the fire. As they pulled out of the parking lot, the Robert Frost Place’s second story collapsed onto the first. I wondered momentarily if the Writer-in-Residence was still inside the house, drinking bourbon, but there were no cars in the parking lot, and I heard no screams. I found out later on that the Writer-in-Residence was not in residence at all but was staying at a nearby bed-and-breakfast. The Writer-in-Residence had gotten lucky, the way Thomas Coleman’s poor parents had not.

I got a little lucky myself that night, or thought I did. I walked over to where Morgan had placed the envelope in the snow. Sure enough, it was Peter’s letter to me, written those six years earlier, asking me to do what the bond analysts themselves had just done. I read the letter right there, in the light of the fire, learned exactly why Peter had wanted me to do what the bond analysts had done themselves. Morgan had no doubt left the letter there to be found by the police or fire department and thereby to incriminate me, whereas he could have saved himself the trouble and just trusted that I would eventually incriminate myself. I put the letter in my pocket.

That accomplished, I stood there for a while, watching the fire. It was beautiful — huge and crackling, and with more sparks and explosions than the Fourth of July, which is further proof that fire is the most impressive of the four elements — much more beautiful than the house itself had been. Although the house and the fire had a lot in common: a fire was a thing you created and admired, the way the person who’d built the house must have admired it, too. But no matter how beautiful the fire was, it wasn’t particularly helpful and that saddened me: I knew now that the bond analysts had called me (or at least one of them had), and I also knew that they had burned the Robert Frost Place, and so those questions were answered. But those answers didn’t bring me any closer to knowing who had tried to burn down the Edward Bellamy House or the Mark Twain House. What good was answering one question when you couldn’t answer the others?

I heard the crunch of tires on snow, and so I turned away from the fire and crept back to my van. Before I got too close to it, I could hear an engine running, could see headlights boring through the night and bouncing off the snow, and so I slipped behind another white pine, white pines being as plentiful in New Hampshire as Volvos were in Amherst. It was another Lumina, and at first I thought it was my mother, but as it passed by, I could see Detective Wilson, hunched over the steering wheel, hauling ass in the direction of the burning Robert Frost Place, no doubt in search of his own answers to his own questions. When he was out of sight, I ran to my van and then headed back to Amherst. Because sometimes a detective shouldn’t try to answer the tough questions, being not so tough himself. Sometimes it’s better to let someone else answer them for you.

I remember the day my father left us. It was a Saturday. I remember this because I didn’t have to go to school that day and so was witness to the aftermath. My mother and I watched, side by side, from our living room’s bay window as my father backed out of the driveway in his Chevy Monte Carlo. It was October, late, and the trees were missing their leaves, their bony branches waving good-bye to my father and his car. The trees knew he was leaving, too, and when he did, it was as though he pulled my mother’s face with him. The face of the pretty, modest woman I’d known as “Mother” stretched out as she watched my father pull away from the curb, and when he was out of sight, it snapped back. Now the face was harder, the blue eyes sharper, the mouth tighter, with a little smirk at the corners. This new mother of mine was less pretty but more beautiful than my old mother, which is to say, I guess, that prettiness is something to like and beauty is something to be scared of, and I was scared of it, and her. My mother walked around the house, picking up magazines, records, coasters, couch cushions, and framed family pictures, staring at them as if not believing they were actually hers, and then tossing them aside. That scared me, too.

“You’re hungry,” she finally said, turning suddenly toward me, as if just then remembering that though my father was gone, I was not. She was right: it was lunchtime, and I was hungry. “I’ll cook something,” she said, then retreated to the kitchen. I remained in the living room, picking up the things she’d scattered and in general staying out of her way, until I smelled something burning in the kitchen and went to see what it was.

The smell came from open-faced broiled cheese and tomato sandwiches, my favorite thing to eat for lunch. My mother had burned them to something resembling bread-shaped coal. She had rescued the sandwiches from the broiler, but too late, and was waving a towel over the charred mess and laughing, too loud and hysterically, and that also was scary. She was singing over and over, “She loved to cook, but not like this,” as if it were a lyric to a song, a popular one I should have known but didn’t. I said to my mother, “I don’t know that song.” Then, for some reason, thinking I’d let her down by not knowing the song, I said, “I’m sorry,” and started crying.

This calmed my mother down, other people’s hysteria being a well-known cure for your own. She stopped singing, made me another broiled cheese and tomato sandwich, and paid attention and didn’t burn it this time. While I ate, my mother told me the first of her stories about the Emily Dickinson House, which, as everyone knows, I accidentally burned, just like my mother accidentally burned that sandwich.