Burning Down the House (24 page)

Please, try.

I don't think I can manage it. I actually hate myself more now than ever. And you, I hate you too, she said looking up quickly from downcast eyes. I hate both of us. I hate us both so much that I want to die, she whispered.

He was quiet for a while.

Don't say that, he said.

I can't change.

We have to.

How do we change? she said.

I don't know, he said.

I think you do, she said. I think maybe you already have.

After he left she stood for a long time in the kitchen. Boiling water, watching the flame, pouring the tea, breathing the steam. A ceremony. Fire and water. The elements. She was like a creature emerging from hibernation, hungry for the simple things. It was a blue spring day, sun piercing the window, reaching out to her. Why was she even drinking hot tea? Because she was cold, always cold. Even on this summer morning of shocking yet everyday beauty—the trees on the roof terrace of the building across the street swaying, touching the cerulean like paintbrushes making loveliness come alive—she wanted fire, steam, heat. Would she always, always feel cold? Ian's love for Poppy, illicit, unnatural, hit her as a betrayal. A chill in her bones like a wind rattling the frame of her being. An unlit candle behind her eyes. She turned on the oven thinking that she might cook something but knowing perfectly well that she would not.

A minor vibration. An invitation. A valve. The oven waiting. Her watching. Watching herself, mortified.

P
ATRIZIA RECEIVED
the call from Poppy while at the reproductive endocrinologist's office. She was having some blood work done. Checking hormones. She answered the phone with one hand while the other stuck out to the side, arm straight on the armrest, tourniquet tightened, bright red filling the tube like fresh paint being poured. She listened only half attentively, part of her watching the nature program playing on the far wall across the room, baby penguins, baby elephants, baby lions, a part of her focusing on her breath to take her mind off of the puncture, part of her noticing the slight bump in the abdomen of the nurse and wondering if the nurse was pregnant and then part of her managing her jealousy, her sinking hopes, her calculation of how old the nurse must be—probably thirty tops—and then silently wishing her luck while not knowing, really, if the nurse was actually pregnant. All this transpired while she listened to Poppy haltingly explain that she would be spending the night, and probably the weekend, at her friend's house and that's where she'd been yesterday and she was so sorry she hadn't called but only e-mailed earlier to explain.

Which friend? Patrizia asked, with vigor. She was trying to assume a more disciplinarian demeanor after having completely overlooked last night's indiscretion.

Jas…Jasmine, Poppy said. Jasmine Carpenter.

Carpenter? Who's that?

She's new this year. She's been over to the house but I don't think you've met her.

Where does she live?

In Brooklyn. Far.

What neighborhood? Patrizia asked, rolling her sleeve back down.

Yeah, she's new, Poppy said. She's brilliant. A math genius. I've got to go. I have a class.

Poppy, I asked you what neighborhood.

Patrizia was ushered into a dimly lit examination room. As the door closed and she prepared to undress from the waist down and put her feet in the stirrups for a sonogram, she said: Text me later with Jasmine's number. Steve will want to know where you are. Poppy, will you please remember to do that?

They'd already made Poppy end the call and taken back her phone.

She forgets how she got here. Already the elevated subway ride, the burning fires on the plains, are less than a memory, have receded into irretrievable negative space. She forgets how she got from the station to this corpse of a house, its innards in ruins, wires falling, swinging from the ceiling, boards loose, a black mold metastasizing along the wall. That the world goes on in a place like this is incomprehensible. Then it isn't. It is more than possible. Now she knows a new pain, can't tell if it is a return of many old pains or something actually new, but it seems new, a never-before-experienced desire to die purely as a way out.

If Steve were here he would see his empire—so crafted, so controlled—attacked at its most damaging and personally hurtful point. A sleek animal shot in its soft eye.

A man reaches out in the dark and takes hold of her hair and grabs her as if she were on a leash. He walks her into the middle of the black space and swings her down on a damp mat. Several bodies have materialized in the room. One kneels behind her with his knees pressing on her hair and tightening around her head. Another's eyes dart and swim in the gloom like round white fish as he grabs one arm and a leg. Another looms, towering, and spits out that they are not going to do anything to her now, as if this were not doing anything. She screams until someone covers her mouth. She bites the hand. It flies off for a moment and in that instant they smash something against her tongue, far back, toward her throat, cover her lips again, and tell her to swallow. The men's voices have been rising and rising in crude excitement until they seemed not human but beings made of lava, corrugated metal, and dried blood. An unruly race of degenerates. Clubs dangling off their joints instead of limbs. Wretched wolves as big as ragged bears but not animal, instead mechanical. Their movements as if programmed by the sickest hack. Wild robots, abducted from the living, stripped of feeling and turned against life.

To enter into the deepest fears, to enter the house of the dead, is not really a matter of confrontation. It is a matter of holding on, grasping slippery walls in the dark, waving arms in the blackness, stumbling, finding a fallen wire, a thread of meaning. Surrounding that thread is an emptiness stretching outward, and upward, in every direction.

In that emptiness is the place beyond fear, beyond hope, where the last thought tries to rise and goes to die. Its charred and broken feathers whisper down.

S
TEVE HAS ALWAYS
been the first one to wake, if he sleeps at all. This morning he hoists himself up, a beast rising, lumbers to the bathroom, his legs spindly in proportion to his massive torso, folds of Roman emperor flesh cascading as he moves. As he gets ready he is still half asleep, dreaming, he was dreaming about Poppy, days when she was little and he would wake up early with her. She might even have had the distinction in those days, over ten years ago, of getting up before him. He would peek into her room, find her playing, watch her unnoticed, wonder at the intricate games and the fantastical drawings. Was she working through the loss? Would she ever be okay? He asked these questions because he had loved his sister, and now his niece-turned-daughter, wildly, uncharacteristically, in a way that made no sense to him but which he could not deny. Poppy's long little-girl hair fell to the floor as she sat and sang. Eventually she noticed him, did not stop singing, and they went to the kitchen together.

In those days he might make the two of them breakfast. In those days he would lift her up onto the counter, her nightgown puffing out around her knees as she elevated, sailed, in his arms.

He finishes dressing. Patrizia is still asleep. The boys are asleep. Neva's door is closed. He knots his tie as he roams the hallways, finds himself in front of Poppy's door. It is ajar. He imagines if he pushes it open he might find her sitting on the floor, singing. Or stretched out on the bed, drawing. One light turned on in the dim room. Her thoughtful face intent, her big eyes narrowed, concentrating. Her little-girl self preserved, not ghostly but immortal.

At the same time as the door swings open from his push, several images flash across his mind. Her cherry-red nose on the plane back from London when he told her she could not come to work for him yet. Her name printed in the documents he had had Ian sign that day in his office. Memories of attempting to protect her. Had they been misguided? More controlling than loving? He didn't know. Couldn't know. Those questions lay outside the bounds of his personality.

The room was empty.

Although the questions lay outside his ability to ask them, they did exist, somewhere, in his unconscious, in his deepest recesses of feeling, in his body.

The bed had not been slept in.

She might have slept at a friend's.

But this had been a school night.

Of course she was practically finished with school, no college to go to next year; he brushed aside his disappointment.

The room was empty. It felt especially empty.

What was that sensation? A nausea, an ache in his shoulders, a wave of sickening remorse.

It was wrong that the room was empty. Wrong that she was gone.

The nausea blossomed as he rode down in the elevator. It bloomed up from his stomach to his chest, his neck, throughout his head, growing in lurches and grotesque fast-motion spurts of evolution, becoming different species of plant, of toxic flower. The ride down seemed uncomfortably long. As the flowers twisted and wrapped around his skull he noticed that the dull throbbing ache in his shoulders had become a verifiable anguish, a shooting prismatic cutting as if from a sharp diamond, a mineral slicing. He grabbed his head with his hand, as if he were trying to extract the guilt, the pain, by removing his face. He had done what he had thought was right but it was not enough. Or perhaps it had not been right. And he knew, instinctively, that he had pushed her away. Farther than away, he suspected. Somewhere he did not want to consider. He felt the sick logic of his life click into place. His hand fell limp at his side as the elevator doors opened, and he walked, much to his surprise, several steps.

Seized by a feeling, a question, and an answer all at once: “It's so cold. What am I doing? This is it.” A reflection in the shape of a candle glanced off a mirror. The candle's flame elongated, flared brighter than ever, lit up everything, shrunk, grew dim, and then returned to the hard silver of the mirror. A heavy door slowly swung shut, cutting off the warm wind and leaving only an air-conditioned chill.

Steve died in the lobby in the doorman's arms. By the time the ambulance arrived it was over. While it happened, Neva was dropping off the boys. Patrizia was back in an examination room, dressing. Jonathan, Miranda, and Alix rushed to the hospital, meeting Patrizia and Neva there, but they were all too late.

Later, back at the apartment, everyone assembled except Poppy. No one could find her. The school had no record of Poppy's arrival that morning. Patrizia's assistant was trying all the numbers listed in the school directory. She couldn't find a Jasmine Carpenter in Brooklyn. Maybe Patrizia had misheard the name. Poppy wasn't picking up or answering texts. In the hectic disorganization of death, shock, grief, and stupor, a slow-moving confusion dictated the tone of events, settled on everything like a blowing ash. Individuals enacted their roles with no understanding of their meaning. People's concern for Poppy surfaced and then sank, repeatedly, throughout the day. Amid all the upheaval and arrangements her absence was not forgotten, but overlooked.

No one knew that Steve had thought of her, would have been thinking of her had he been alive.

A haze clouded the proceedings although the day was sunny. Objects that stood out took on absurd significance, all out of proportion to their actual importance. On the way to pick up the boys from school, Neva felt she could see every leaf distinctly on every tree. The metal clip in Patrizia's hair threw off bullets of sunlight as she hurried a bit ahead of Neva on the sidewalk. Patrizia had come with her, to tell the boys herself, sitting them on a park bench not far from school, hugging them and then nodding to Neva to help her get them home. Back in the apartment, Neva noticed Felix's pants, crumpled on the floor of his room, and she thought the folded forlorn softness was a dog and she would never forget it, imprinted on her brain like a real memory. A blue dog, whimpering, on the rug. As she held Felix, and rocked him, she looked at the dog. Patrizia was contending with Roman, who had locked himself in the bathroom.

Sitting next to Felix on his bed, Neva felt the glide of wheels beneath her. She would go on. She kept a constant vigil in her mind to go on. Nothing felt final, only endless.

I'm going to miss Dad, said Felix.

Of course, said Patrizia, who had just walked into the room, taking his hand.

We all will, said Neva. And we will never forget him.

Felix lay his head down in Neva's lap.

Remnants blew through her mind. The singed debris that drifts on the wind after a ruinous catastrophe. She stood in memory in his study that was empty now. Where once she'd watched him handling the sharp glass trophies, the deal totems, on his desk, holding them lightly in his enormous hand. Where she'd placed her fingers on his back when he'd stood with his hands on his knees, coughing, with weeping eyes. The amber light pierced her memory. My heart, my heart. Her eyes did not weep.

Miranda walked slowly down a hallway to use the restroom. Her ballooning belly preceded her, covered in a thin black tunic that fluttered around her thighs. The hot breeze through an open window, insisting on summer. Jonathan, uncharacteristically gallant, asked her every now and then if she needed anything. His face was pinched, and for the first time in his life he looked confused, thought Alix. He kept walking from the living room to the library to the kitchen, wandering around the huge apartment, pressing numbers into his phone and hanging up, checking messages which she didn't entirely believe existed. He could not inhabit the world without their father. She could, but Jonathan would flounder. She stepped out onto a balcony to get some air, to breathe in the city fumes, to check her messages, and realized that she had not told Ian. He deserved to know.

When she heard his voice she started crying.

It's a nightmare, she said, as she explained. We're all in the apartment together for some reason. Really a nightmare.

It must be, he said.

I hate to admit it, but I wish you were here with me.

I wish that too.

Apparently, Dad left instructions in a safe in his study. He wants to be cremated. I keep picturing his ashes blowing around and rising up into a gigantic gray version of him telling us that we're doing this all wrong. He scared me.

I know. He could be scary.

She kept crying.

He was even scarier in my mind though. Why was that?

People are not just who they are. They are histories, feelings, mistakes, what we imagine them to be.

Thank you for saying that and not just saying he was a monster.

They were quiet. Cars honked from below. Ian said:

Can I ask: How is Poppy handling it?

Poppy isn't here, Alix said, wiping her face with a tissue-thin scarf, sliding it up underneath her sunglasses.

Isn't there? Where is she?

We can't reach her. She was at a friend's house and isn't picking up or answering.

Well, who's out there looking for her?

Patrizia's assistant is on it.

On it? What the hell is she doing?

She's making calls.

Has she called the police?

Ian, don't get hysterical. You're like an overprotective father.

No, you guys are crazy. You've abandoned her. As usual.

Hey, that's not fair. We're a medicated, barely functioning disaster here. Just trying to make it through this.

That's what you always say.

Fuck you. My father just died.

Maybe it will force you to grow up. Where is Neva? Is she with the boys? Can you put her on? Put her on.

Alix got Neva and Ian explained how to trace Poppy's cell phone. He knew it had a locator app. They traced it to someplace in New Jersey. The phone had been on a winding itinerary, from way out in Queens, to Brooklyn, to Staten Island, and the last spot they could locate was in New Jersey. He told her they should call the police.

You do that, Neva said. And I'll go myself.

What? he said. That's not a good idea.

She quietly ended the call.

She did not want to alarm Patrizia, Felix, or Roman. She calmly explained that she had news from Poppy and that she would go and collect her. Felix lifted his head, bleary. He said: Yes, please, get Poppy. Patrizia asked: How will you do that? And then turned her attention to something else, and Neva left the apartment and went to the garage. She knew the attendant.

She held the keys and sat in the driver's seat. She said out loud: I will never forget you. She started the car.

Would you save her if you could? Go back to the worst moment and rescue the foundling you, the orphan, the girl? Of course you would. For you, to know and to act are the same thing. For you to go on, to continue, means to save her and, by saving her, save yourself, save them all. For you the whole world exists on top of that mountain, clouds turning, fire sparking, voices low. Go back to that moment and the clouds reverse their course, the fire quiets, the voices stop.

It begins with a child.