An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (33 page)

“What a coincidence,” I said.

“It’s not a coincidence,” Anne Marie said, and then before I could ask her what she meant, she threw her spent cigarette in the snow and said, “You’ll have to ask her yourself.”

“OK.”

“Your mother’s a good woman, Sam,” she told me. “She deserves better than your father.”

“I know.”

“She deserves better than you, too.”

“I know that,” I said. For the first time, I was thinking of what I’d done to my mother and not what I thought she’d done to me. She deserved a better son than me, a better
person
than me. This is another way you know you’ve become a grown-ass man, when you realize — too late, too late — that you’re not worthy of the woman who made you one. Of the
women
who made you one.

“Your mother is afraid that you set fire to those writers’ houses,” Anne Marie said, and then she named them: the Bellamy and Twain houses. She didn’t mention the Robert Frost Place. This probably meant my mother had stopped following me after she’d seen me kissing the woman in the bar, which was too bad: if she’d followed me to the Robert Frost Place, then she’d have known I didn’t torch it, and she’d also have seen who did. “She’s worried about you.”

“I didn’t set fire to any writer’s house,” I said.

“Except for the one,” Anne Marie said.

“And that was an accident,” I said.

“I don’t want to hear it,” she said.

“A woman set fire to the Bellamy and Twain houses,” I went on.

“What woman?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure Thomas has an idea.”

“Sam …,” Anne Marie said. I could hear the exasperation in her voice, so beautiful and familiar, but sad, too, like hearing church bells right before your funeral. I should have stopped talking right then, but I didn’t, and my words were like the snow, which kept falling and falling even though too much of it had fallen already.

“And then the bond analysts burned down the Robert Frost Place.”

“The what? And
who
?” Anne Marie said, and then before I could answer, she said, “Forget it. I don’t want to hear about any fucking
bond analysts
. I don’t want to hear about anything anymore.”

“But Anne Marie,” I said, “it’s true.”

“Oh, Sam,” Anne Marie said. “Why don’t you take some responsibility for once?”

“For burning down those houses?”

“For
everything
,” she said. Then she turned around and walked through the snow back to Thomas’s Jeep. I didn’t chase after her, didn’t call out to her, didn’t tell her to come back, come back. Talking had gotten me into nothing but trouble. Maybe the best way to get Anne Marie to come back was just to stand there in the snow and not say anything and wait for her. It worked, too. She spun her wheels in the snow, did a ragged three-point turn, and pointed the Jeep in my direction.
Come back to me
, I said in my head.
Come back to me
. And she did. Anne Marie pulled up right next to me, reached across the front seat, rolled down the passenger side window, and said, “You’re going to go see your mother, aren’t you?”

I admitted that I probably was.

“Then you should go home and change first,” she said. “Shower, too. You look terrible, Sam. You don’t smell so good, either.” And then she rolled up the window and drove away.

As everyone knows, you can’t go home again. That famous book told us so, even if it took way too many pages to do it. But what
that
book didn’t tell us, and mine will, is that you can’t go home again even to change your clothes and shower before meeting your mother at the Student Prince, because if you do, you’ll find Detective Wilson sitting at your dining room table, waiting for you. He was baggy eyed and armed with another large coffee, the way I was baggy eyed and armed with another large beer, which is just further proof that all men are but slight variations on the very same theme.

“You don’t seem surprised to see me,” he said.

“I’m not,” I said. Because I wasn’t: after all, there had been so many non-Pulsifers showing up at my home the last few days that I’d have to expand the definition of
home
to include people who didn’t actually live there, in addition to the people who were supposed to live there but didn’t. “I’m not surprised at all,” I told him. I raised my bagged beer in toast, then sat down across the table from him. Between us was a bulky manila envelope that I figured was mail for one of my parents.

“You’ve been busy, Sam,” Detective Wilson said. He took several envelopes out of his jacket pocket, withdrew pieces of paper from each envelope, and then spread them on the dining room table, covering the manila envelope. The pieces of paper and the envelope looked dirty, torn, abused, and I was pretty sure I knew what they were without reading them, even though I did read them, if for no other reason than to buy myself a little time. They were the rest of my father’s missing letters, from people who wanted me to burn down these writers’ houses: Edith Wharton’s, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, as well as a replica log cabin at Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond. The letter writers had gotten what they wanted, too: someone had burned down all those houses the night before, one after the other, and someone had then left the pertinent letter near the place where the house had just been. Detective Wilson told me this as I pretended to read the letters. I knew the bond analysts had done the burning, of course — I could picture their route south from New Hampshire and east toward Boston as they burned, could hear Morgan saying,
He’ll be sorry
, as he produced and planted the letters. I should have told Detective Wilson about the bond analysts; I should have produced Morgan’s book and the postcards and then explained their reasons for burning these houses and framing me. Then I would have gone on and admitted to Detective Wilson that I didn’t know any of the bond analysts’ last names except for Morgan’s, nor did I know exactly where in Boston they lived. But Anne Marie hadn’t wanted to hear about the bond analysts, and I could imagine Detective Wilson reacting the same way, could imagine him agreeing with the Writer-in-Residence: he would clearly think the whole thing was a cheap trick, and that the bond analysts didn’t sound like real people. So instead of telling him the whole truth, I told the simplest part of it — “It wasn’t me” — and then slid the letters back toward him.

“Yes, it was,” Detective Wilson said. He put the letters back in their envelopes and returned them to his coat pocket. I looked down at the table where the letters had just been. There was that manila envelope. I looked at it rather than at Detective Wilson and noticed what I hadn’t before: in the upper left-hand corner, in official letterhead style, it read: “Wesley Mincher, English Department, Heiden College, Hartford, CT 06106.” There was no postmark on the envelope, no proper mailing address, either, but there was, in the middle of the envelope, in big block letters so you couldn’t miss it, my name: “SAM.” I looked back at Detective Wilson, and while I was doing so, I reached down and turned over the envelope so that my name was facing the table and not me or him.

“No,” I said, “it wasn’t.”

“Of course it was, Sam,” he said, and then patted his coat pocket where the envelopes were, the incriminating letters inside them.

“If it were me,” I said, “then why would I leave the letters behind?”

It was clear that Detective Wilson hadn’t thought about this, hadn’t thought about the evidence except that it existed and that it proved what he wanted it to prove, evidence — as I’ll put in my arsonist’s guide — being just a more concrete form of wishful thinking. “Because you wanted to get caught,” he said weakly. He hit his coat pocket, but harder this time, as though punishing the letters for letting him down.

“Why would I want to get caught?”

“Maybe you left the letters by accident,” he said.

It made me feel so good to hear someone else say “accident” that I nearly forget about all of my own, which is why I then had another one. An accident, that is. “Come on. You can do better than that. I burned down five houses and then
accidentally
left letters at all of them?”

“I only named four houses,” Detective Wilson, recouping quickly.

“Oh,” I said.

“But you’re right. There
was
a fifth house torched last night.” I knew which one it was and so didn’t bother to listen to him say it. I did, however, think of Peter Le Clair’s letter in my pocket, could hear it calling to its siblings in Detective Wilson’s pocket across the table. “I didn’t find a letter there. But I know it was you who burned that house, too. Do you want to know how I know?”

“No,” I said. After all, I knew everything Detective Wilson was going to tell me, knew what Thomas Coleman had told him, knew that he’d driven to New Hampshire to find me. What I didn’t know was what was in the manila envelope, and how it got on my table in the first place, and whether Detective Wilson had already looked inside.

“Are you listening to me?” Detective Wilson asked.

“No,” I said. “Should I have been?”

“Yes,” Detective Wilson went on. “I was telling you how your Thomas Coleman called me and said you were about to burn down the Robert Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire.”

“How did he know that?” I asked him.

“That’s not important,” he said, and when Detective Wilson said that, I was sure he didn’t know the answer, “not important” being just one of the things we call that which we don’t know. “What are you smiling at?”

“I’m not smiling,” I said, although I was. Clearly Detective Wilson hadn’t followed me to New Hampshire, which had been my big fear; clearly he hadn’t seen me at the Robert Frost Place, at the bar, at the fire. And since he didn’t have the letter, he clearly didn’t know it was Peter who’d written to me, Peter being one of the other people who’d say with certainty that I’d burned down the Robert Frost Place. That was what I was smiling at, even though I said to Detective Wilson, “I’m not smiling.”

“Ever since you came back to your parents’ house,” Detective Wilson said, “there’s been trouble.”

“That’s true.”

“You should never have come back,” he said. Detective Wilson said other things after that, but once again I wasn’t listening to them. I was thinking about what he’d just said —
You should never have come back
— and how Deirdre had said the very same thing earlier that day. As every detective knows, the rhetoric of crime and the rhetoric of crime solving are the very same, and if Detective Wilson were trying to solve the crimes, did that mean that Deirdre had committed one of them? Had she been the one who’d burned the Edward Bellamy House, or tried to, or the Mark Twain House, or tried to, or both? Was she the other woman my father told me I should be looking for? Was she the other woman, twice over? Suddenly I had a hunch —
hunch
, I discovered, being exactly the wrong word, because once I’d had the hunch, I suddenly found myself sitting ramrod straight, with perfect military bearing, not hunched at all.

“What?” Detective Wilson said. “Why are you sitting like that?”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Is there anything else you need to say to me?”

“It would be better if you’d just confess right now, Sam,” he said, consumed by a sigh that came from somewhere deep within him and drifted out his nostrils. “It just would be much, much better.”

“For whom?” I asked.

“For
everyone
,” he said, raising his voice now, raising your voice being the thing you do when you don’t know what else to do with it. “Just tell the
truth
.”

“It will make you feel better, dude,” I said.

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said. I was remembering, of course, the bond analysts and their theories about the memoirs they’d never written and how the one they
had
written hadn’t made them feel better and wasn’t their truth at all, or my father’s, either, and how maybe the search for the truth was as pointless as looking for it to make you feel better. “I have to shower,” I told him. “Are we about done?”

“So you’re not going to confess,” Detective Wilson said. “So you’re going to make this difficult. What the
fuck
are you smiling at?” But then he got up and stormed out of the house before I could tell him that I was smiling about my mother. When I was a boy, she would make me read all those books and then ask me questions, these tough questions about what the book might or might not mean, and I’d always say, “You’re making this difficult,” and she’d always tell me what I would have told Detective Wilson if he’d still been in the house: “It
already
is difficult.”

There was still the matter of the manila envelope. I turned it over and opened it. It was heavy and bulging, and I was pretty sure I’d find Wesley Mincher’s three thousand dollars inside. I did — three rubber-banded groups of one-hundred-dollar bills. But there was also something else in the envelope: a handwritten note saying, “Meet me at the Emily Dickinson House at midnight.” The handwriting wasn’t familiar. It wasn’t my father’s from the grocery list, wasn’t my mother’s from the postcards, either. I looked at my watch: it was half past five o’clock. Plenty of time for me to shower, change, drive down to the Student Prince, and then meet someone — and I had that hunch as to who it was — at midnight at the Emily Dickinson House, or at least where it used to be. I put the money and the note back in the envelope, finished my beer, went upstairs, and made myself a more presentable Sam Pulsifer. Then I went downstairs, grabbed another beer out of the fridge, walked out the front door, climbed into my van, and headed toward the Student Prince and my mother, not realizing I would see my parents’ house only one more time, which would be the last time anyone ever saw it.