An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (36 page)

“I tried to,” she said, dropping her face into her red-gloved hands.

“How about the Mark Twain House?”

“I tried to,” she repeated, her voice muffled in her gloves. “I just can’t do anything right.”

“Why did you do it?”

“Because I knew this would happen,” she said, lifting her head out of her hands and looking straight at me. “I knew when you came home, Bradley would feel guilty and get rid of me and go back to your mother. I had to do something.”

“So you tried to set fire to those houses, thinking I’d get blamed for it,” I guessed.

“I can’t do anything right,” she said, weeping. Deirdre was wrong here, of course; Detective Wilson was running around trying to blame me for the fires and prove exactly how wrong Deirdre was. I hated Deirdre right then for doing what she’d done to me and my mother and father and even those homes, too. But I also empathized, because she’d tried to do these things out of love, and because she had bumbled the attempt, and I suppose this — the ability to empathize with the people we hate — is exactly the quality that makes us human beings, which makes you wonder why anybody would want to be one.

“Sam,” Deirdre said, and I could already hear the desperate pleading in the way she said my name, could hear the way her voice was sandwiched between too much hope and too much grief. I knew what Deirdre was going to ask, and I was glad, because I knew how I would respond, knew I would answer with that mean little hammer of a word, that word that gives its speaker a feeling of the purest satisfaction, always followed soon enough by a feeling of the purest regret.

“No,” I said, for my mother.

“Your father is home right now.”

“No,” I said, for myself.

“I want you to go home and tell your father to take me back. You know he loves me. You can save us. He wouldn’t have done this for all these years if he didn’t love me so much, if I weren’t the one he really loved.”

“No,” I said, for my father, even though — or because — I knew Deirdre was right.

“You can have the three thousand dollars, the money in the envelope,” she said. I could hear the last gasp in her voice, the sad whine of it. “Please, Sam.”

“No, no, no,” I told her, by which I also meant,
Revenge, revenge, revenge
.

When I said my last no, Deirdre seemed to get tired, very tired. Her arms dropped to her sides and her shoulders slumped. “No,” she repeated dully, then reached behind the bench, picked up a red plastic gasoline can, and held it up in front of her, neck high, as though it were some sort of offering. I immediately wanted to take back everything I’d just said, wanted to take back each and every no, wanted to turn each no into a yes, the way Jesus supposedly turned water into wine, a loaf of bread into food for a crowd. And why did he do that? Was it because he was worried about his people, or about himself? Was it because he didn’t know if his people could live on only bread and water, or because he didn’t know if he could live with himself if he let them?

“Deirdre,” I said, trying to be very calm, “I didn’t really mean all that.”

“Maybe you did.”

“Maybe I didn’t,” I said. “Please put down the gas can.”

“I don’t want to live without your father, Sam,” Deirdre said. “I feel so dead without him.”

“Maybe you’ll meet someone else,” I said.

“Maybe I don’t want to meet someone else,” she said, and then she raised the gas can over her head and tipped it, dumping the contents on her head, letting it run in streams down her back and front. This happened so suddenly that I didn’t have time to do or say anything. Or at least this is what I tell myself. Because after all, I’d seen the gas can, and what did I think she was going to do with it? Was what happened next because of what Deirdre did, or because of what I didn’t do? Are we defined by what we do, or by what we don’t? Wouldn’t it be better not to be defined at all?

“Good-bye, Sam,” she said. “Please forgive your father. That poor man loves you so much.” Then she pulled out a lighter, flicked it, and grabbed a clump of her hair. Deirdre was setting herself on fire, not starting at the feet the way the people at Salem did to their supposed witches, but starting with her hair. With her hair. Even now, seven years later, it’s the memory of Deirdre clutching her hair and setting it on fire — the dry
snick
of the lighter; the way Deirdre tugged on her hair, as though she were a child whose hair was being pulled by an especially mean teacher or classmate; the way burning hair makes the smell of gasoline almost welcome, like perfume; the terrible, sad, patient look on Deirdre’s face as she waited for the fire to creep up her hair toward her head, her face; the way her face screamed and then disappeared in the fire; the way I stood there, watching her do it — it’s that memory that wakes me up from a deep sleep shouting and crying, or prevents me from falling into one in the first place. If I could pick one moment, one detail I wish I couldn’t remember, it’s this one, and that is another thing I’ll put in my arsonist’s guide: detail exists not only to make us remember the things we don’t want to, but to remind us that there are some things we don’t deserve to forget.

“Deirdre, don’t!” I yelled, but who knows if she actually heard me. By then the flames had already crawled up the wick of her hair, and her hat burst into flames. And then her head was on fire, her head
was
fire, a ball of fire, and for a moment it was the only part of Deirdre on fire. The rest of her body was standing still, and her head, on fire, was cocked to the side as if she were listening to her own inner voice, except that her inner voice wasn’t asking,
What else? What else?
but instead was telling her,
Nothing, nothing
.

“Sam, do something!” I heard a voice say, but it wasn’t my voice, it wasn’t that voice inside me, it was Detective Wilson’s, who was all of a sudden right next to me. He, as I found out later, had read the note in the envelope after all and knew to show up at midnight. And he had. But I had shown up early, and so had Deirdre, and she was on fire because of it. Together, Detective Wilson and I ran toward her. Detective Wilson tackled her, and she landed with a hiss in the snow. “Give me your coat!” he yelled (he was only wearing his hooded sweatshirt). I did, and he started patting Deirdre down with it, saying soft, comforting things to her under his breath as he patted.

“This is your fucking fault, Sam,” he said to me over his shoulder. I caught a glimpse of Deirdre lying there: her red jacket had turned black, and her face had turned black, too. The only thing of hers not black and scorched were her eyes: they were white and blank and staring skyward, at the birches, at the stars, or at nothing. I looked away and then at the gas can lying next to her body. I could tell, even in the darkness, that it was one I’d helped design back when I was still a person who designed things. And then I looked away from the gas can, too, and closed my eyes. They immediately started to tear up, tears being your eyes’ way of forbidding you to look away, of forcing you to look at the world you’ve made or unmade.

“It wasn’t me,” I said, and started backing away, the way we do when we’re not brave enough to do anything else. “She set herself on fire.”

“Fuck you anyway,” Detective Wilson said, still furiously patting her through my coat. “I
saw
her do it. So what? You didn’t fucking stop her.”

“She asked me to meet her here,” I said. “She wanted me to save her and my father.”

“You could have saved her,” he said, and I realized that he had started crying, crying being that thing you do when you’ve done everything else, and then
I
started crying, crying also being that thing you do when you haven’t done enough and you’re afraid it’s too late to start.

“Is she dead?” I asked.

“You could have saved her,” Detective Wilson said, “and you didn’t.”

At that, I turned and broke into a sprint. Deirdre had wanted me to save her and I showed up too early and didn’t. But Deirdre had also wanted me to save my father. My mother was only a few blocks away, at our house, with him. I ran as fast as I could, but even so, when I got there I was too late.

You wouldn’t expect a burning house to look like a burning woman, and you’d be right: it doesn’t. There is nothing beautiful about a woman on fire, but there is plenty that is beautiful about a house burning hot and high in the dark, cold night: the way flames shoot out of the chimney like a Roman candle; the way the asphalt roof shingles sizzle and pop; the way the smoke pours and pours and pours heavenward like a message to the house’s great beyond. There is something celebratory about a house fire, which is why so many people always gather to watch it, just as there were so many people gathered to watch my parents’ house burn that night. The crowd was three or four deep, and I had to push my way through, jostling and shoving until I got to the front row, next to my mother, who was standing there, holding a forty-ounce Knickerbocker, regarding the fire thoughtfully, as though it were an especially difficult question that she was
this
close to solving.

“There you are,” she said. She offered me a sip of her beer and I took it, took more than a sip, then gave the can back to her. The wind shifted and the smoke blew toward us, and the crowd bent over, as one, until the wind shifted back and we all resumed our upright fire-watching position. There were firefighters everywhere now, looking puny and laughable with their axes and their floppy hoses. Even their helmets looked like a joke version of red next to the real red of the fire. The house was looking bigger and bigger, as though the flames were its fourth and fifth stories.

“Here I am,” I told my mother. We were surrounded by people, at least ten people within earshot, but their hearing and all their other senses were fully devoted to the fire. Something exploded in the house — the furnace, maybe — and there was a terrible shriek of something metal becoming something not. The people in the crowd shrieked in response to the house, and the house shrieked back at them, the heat stoking the noise. I wasn’t worried about anyone listening to us when they could be listening to the house. “Where’s Dad?”

“It was so easy,” my mother said. She was talking calmly, evenly, and I would have found this creepy and awful if I hadn’t been listening calmly, evenly, myself. And how could I have been so calm? you might want to know. I don’t have a good answer, not even now, seven years after the fact. Was it because of what had just happened to Deirdre? Was I thinking that nothing could be worse than Deirdre’s setting herself on fire? Was I thinking that no matter what happened to my father, it couldn’t have been as bad as what happened to Deirdre? When the worst thing happens, does it then make us calm in expectation of better things, or does it just prepare us for the next worst thing? “I dumped gasoline on the couch and lit it,” my mother said. “That’s all I needed to do.”

“Mom,” I said, “where is Dad?”

“I lit some of the curtains, too, in the dining room, just in case. But I didn’t need to. It was so easy. I didn’t expect it to be so easy.”

“Mom,” I said, “where is my dad?”

“Why wasn’t it more difficult?” my mother asked, still calm. “Shouldn’t some things be difficult?”

This was the scariest thing my mother had said thus far. She’d set our house on fire; I knew that. That wasn’t so scary. But it came so easily to her, as easily as reading a book or busing a table or drinking a beer or pretending she had a happy family — that was the scary part. My mother is the most capable person I have ever met, even more capable than Anne Marie. She could do anything she wanted, which was why she’d always scared me and still does.

“Mom,” I said, very, very slowly so that she’d understand me, so that there would be no confusion. “Dad left Deirdre to be with us. To be with you. He loves Deirdre, but he’s chosen you and me.”

“I know,” my mother said, turning away from the fire and toward me. The fire lit up the left side of her face, making it glow, while the right side looked so cold, so white in comparison. “He told me the very same thing. He said he wanted me to come home. He said he really meant it this time. He said I could believe him.” Then she turned back to the fire, her whole face glowing with the heat and the light, and I was glad, because she looked beautiful. I wanted her to look beautiful, and maybe this is what all children want: for their parents to look beautiful. And in order for them to look beautiful, you have to find ways to ignore their ugliness. It is easier to be ugly yourself than to admit to the ugliness of the people who made you; it is easier to love the people who made you if you are ugly and they are not. And it is easier to live on this earth if you love the people who made you, even if that means risking the love of the people you yourself have made. Even if.

“Sam,” said a familiar voice behind me. I didn’t have to turn around to see who it was or to know what I had to tell him. Because I could also hear another voice, not my inner voice, not the voice that said,
What else?
and not Deirdre’s voice, the one that told her,
Nothing
, but Anne Marie’s voice, telling me that it was time to take responsibility for something, for
everything
.

“It was me,” I said, not looking at Detective Wilson, still looking at my mother — who was looking at her house and her fire — still thinking about Deirdre’s burning herself to death and my doing nothing to save her. “I did it.” My mother didn’t say anything; she kept staring at the fire, as if she knew that it was making her beautiful, as if fire were the best kind of makeup.

“You set fire to your parents’ house before you went to meet Deirdre,” Detective Wilson said, helping me out. “Before you watched Deirdre burn herself to death, you set fire to your home.” I was still looking at my mother when he said this. She closed her eyes for one, two, three beats and then opened them again. For years, my mother must have hated Deirdre; for years she must have wished her dead. And now that Deirdre was dead, my mother looked no different than she had when she thought Deirdre was alive — not guilty, nor relieved, nor happy. How was this possible? How could my mother know Deirdre was dead and still look at the world as if it were the same world, at the fire as though it were the same fire? But maybe this is what happens when you hate someone for so long: the person you hate dies, but the hate stays with you, to keep you company. Maybe if I’d hated Deirdre for longer, I wouldn’t have felt so bad about not saving her.