Playing With Matches (32 page)

“Denver Lee’s comin’,” she says, tight and pulled in, and clinging to the girl. “He be he’pin’ me.”

The time for tiptoeing is past. “I’d like to walk down, if you don’t mind. We can talk, you and I.”

She looks at me with those dark, angry eyes, through those thick, thick glasses.

“Please,” I say.

“My kitchen’s tore up. And I ain’t got nothing to say.”

“That’s okay. We’ll make a fire in the yard, a pot of coffee. I want to tell you I’m sorry for the way I treated you when we were kids. It was arrogant of me, and very wrong.”

Her face says nothing.

“Genie—when we were going to school, you and me and Claudie, I recall that reading didn’t come easy for you.
No—hear me out
.” I rush on. “That’s what I do now—I teach adults to read.”

“You think I’s worthless ’cause I can’t cipher?”

“No! Genie, you have more worth than I, more than all of us put together. I just thought—while we’re sitting, and having coffee—I mean, if you
couldn’t
, and if you
wanted
to read, I could teach you. I’d like that.”

Her chin is up. “I never had good eyes.”

The girl has a tattoo of a parrot on her neck. She squeezes Genie’s arm.

I nod. I’ll write big looping letters, and somewhere we’ll find a magnifying glass, maybe get her eyes checked.

“I know. Oh, please, please, Genie, don’t think I’m being uppity—I just wanted to do something for you. I don’t mean to sound full of myself, it’s just something I can offer. As a friend. If you’ll let me. If—if Claudie was here, and she couldn’t read well, I’d sit down with her and show her that the whole world lies on a single page. It’s just—I didn’t want this chance to pass you by.”

Lord, Lord, I’m talking too much
.

“I’ll think on it,” she says.

The pretty girl smiles and puts her arm around Genie.

“This be Chloe,” Genie says. “She Claudie’s girl.”

I feel my eyes go wide. Claudie’s girl?
Claudie’s girl?

The new baby, the orphaned Chinese boy, was to be a little brother for her. I can’t tear my eyes away. Chloe is tall and sweet-faced, drawn on and pierced through in a dozen places. She has both her arms. I love her at once.

I cannot help laughing.

“I’ll bring the coffee,” I say. “And my daughter, Luz.”

There is to be no feast after Bitsy’s funeral; there’s no one to bring food.

Thomas says, “Let’s walk back, Clea, just you and me. Luz will look after Harry. I think she’s hoping we’ll work things out.”

There is a rifle shot, then. I hear it but feel it first, in my feet. It travels upward, splitting me like an earthquake. Thomas puts an arm around me. He looks more tired than I’ve ever seen him. His eyebrows are in disarray, his glasses taped. I want to smooth down his hair.

“Clea. That girl, the one in my office—”

“Sunny.” I move away.

“Yes. It’s bad enough that I did it. I’m so sorry you saw. Did the kids see …”

“No.”

“I’ve known for a long time how sick that was, and how sad. I was just so damned empty. You had the kids, and your work—”

“You had your work too. You are—were—a respected teacher. Do they know, the others, the rest of the staff?”

Thomas shakes his head, but it’s not a
no
. He has that yet to deal with. “I made a fool of myself. Jeez, I really thought I needed her—them. For a while, they made me feel young. I was—scared,” Thomas says.

“Of what?”

“I don’t know—maybe getting old.”

This poor cemetery. So many stones have fallen over or broken, graves sunken in.

“Did it work?” I ask. “With the girls? Did they make you feel young?”

He sighs. “I couldn’t keep up. They made me older.”

We walk awhile.

“We lived in the same house, but we’ve been apart for a long time,” I say. “Even while we were finishing the paperwork on Harry.”

“Yes,” he says.

The air is so clear here, washed by the storm.

“Thomas—do you remember that little coffee shop near the beach, where we used to go?”

I do.”

“You’d bring Ruff, and we’d drink lattes and give him blueberry muffin.”

He laughs a little. “Sometimes we’d walk down and watch the
waves come in. I loved that sound. I can’t ask you to forgive me. Too damn many transgressions. God, I regret it all.”

I pinch my lips together. I know transgressions.

“The more time went by, the more separated I felt from you. I realized there are parts of you I don’t know—like this one.” He spread his hands, meaning
Here, False River
. “You kept to yourself, right from the start.”

“Yes.”

“I’m embarrassed to admit, until I saw it on our marriage license, I didn’t even know your real name was Clarice.”

“Not something I like to share. Or remember. But—you’re a professor of biology, Thomas. You dissect things. I’d think you’d be curious. You never asked me anything.”

He shakes his head. His gray hair flops. “In the lab I know what I’m going to find.”

So it is
then
—for the first time ever—I tell Thomas my story. I begin with the day I was born and give him the long version. I tell him about Uncle Cunny teaching me under the willow, about school, and Claudie. I talk about my mama and the fire. I do not tell him about Finn’s confession.

“Sometimes,” he says, “you were like two different people. Closed off to me, but then you’d go and pick up somebody off the street.”

“Closed to you because you knew me—open to them because they didn’t.”

“But we’re talking now. Maybe that’s an omen.”

“Of—”

“I don’t know. We’ll figure things out, together?” he says. “When you and the kids left, I begged the sisters to tell me where you were.”

“Which one caved?”

“Sister Anne. Clea, there’s something else too. When your book first came out, I read it and liked it well enough—but I didn’t see how it could possibly be true.”

“Your own life was sad. No family—”

“I’m really sorry.”

There’s a lot of sorry going around.

“Me too,” I say. “But being sorry isn’t enough—for us. For this.”

“I know. First things first —” He gestures timidly, as though he’s afraid of pricking my balloon. “You realize Havellion is a prison only for men.”

“It’s one of those absurd things I haven’t been able to reconcile. All this time I couldn’t come back because I was sure I’d be arrested. I was afraid of the prison.”

Maybe I was afraid I might have to say
sorry.

“You have to get that weight off your shoulders,” Thomas says. “Here’s what we’ll do—we’ll have Mr. Shiloh drive us to—where’s the courthouse, the county seat?”

“Greenfield. Oh, Thomas, what if the file’s still open, and I’m arrested and charged with her murder!”

“Enough,” Thomas says. “You need to hear it; you need to know.”

48

B
efore we go home, Ernie’s going to carry us to town.

Uncle sounds chipper, but there’s a lump in his throat. “It’ll only take half an hour.”

Or thirty years
.

Shookie comes too.

At the sheriff’s office, Ernie waits outside with Luz and Harry. Harry’s cross-legged in the dirt, drawing pictures with a stick. Uncle has given him an old army canteen, and Harry keeps it half filled with water and strapped over his shoulder and across his chest. He wore it to the funeral; he’s wearing it now. He’s in ready mode with his survival gear.

Luz’s face is full of questions. I sit on a folding chair in the sheriff’s office, looking out at her. Auntie and Shookie sit still as stone, their purses in their laps. Thomas’s hands rest lightly on my shoulders.

I hold my breath.

The sheriff, who was probably a toddler at the time of the fire, says, “Yes, ma’am, there is a file on that case. Right here in my cabinet. I know it well.”

“You’re not old enough to remember,” I say.

He grins some. “Older than I look, ma’am, and I do recall it. And I’ve had a phone call or two since you got here. Before the storm.”

“Who called you?” I say.

“ ’Fraid I can’t say.”

Thomas says, “What can you tell us?”

“Three people dead. Victims were one adult female, two males identified as guards from the Farm.”

I pinch my lips and breathe in and out.

“Pardon me for saying this, ma’am, her being your ma—but she’s a legend around here. Too damned many people hated Clarice Shine. Every lady in town and half the men—she knew everybody’s secrets. One of the dead guards’ wives had divorced him. The other had no kin, far as we could find out. Way I see it, we’re never gonna know who started that fire. Coulda been Clarice herself. State agreed. Case was closed a long time ago.”

Closed.

All my life, I have nurtured and babied and raised up this fear, twisted it every which way I could think of. I’ve kept it watchful and fast and sure-footed. And all that time, it was my own true self that made me so afraid. My guilt, my sorrow, and Millie Poole’s curse.

Just now I’d like to strangle her.

I can’t stop shaking.

Work needs to be done in my head and in my heart. How the
hell
do you shuck off a curse?

When we step outside, Uncle looks at the sky, blue and clear, and says, “Don’t you spend time being sorry about your subtracting, baby girl. You were torn in half and bleeding. You stayed alive.”

Auntie tilts her head and admits, “We had a plan. Girl, you
were stubborn and a pain in the ass. But if they went and claimed you did it, we were gonna go to the sheriff—Cunny, Ernie, Shookie, and me—and say we each started the fire our own selves.”

I stare at the gravel in the street. The broken sidewalk. I understand why Harry is silent, how his words fail him.

Uncle smiles. “We woulda confused the hell out of things. Listen,” he says, “on our way home, let’s stop by Millie Poole’s, see how she’s getting on.”

“Confuse her too,” Ernie Shiloh says.

“Not me,” says Auntie. “I had enough for one day. Take me and Shookie home.”

49

S
moke rises in wisps all up and down the river, burning trash, fires for cooking. The rest of us get out at Millicent Poole’s.

Ernie takes Auntie and Miss Shookie on home.

Right here, where Miz Millicent’s garden used to be, is where I caught Auntie’s gray goose. Now it’s hard dirt and bramble. She looks small and lost in her wig, sifting through waterweed with a stick, poking at what’s left of her place—two walls gone, some roof flown away, rooms gutted. She’s living in a tiny corner of her house. Ernie and Uncle hang a piece of plastic where one bedroom wall used to be, so she can sleep there, dry. They find her stove by the river, and drag it up, cleaning connections, checking cords, hooking it up.

“ ’Lectricity comes on, Miz Millie,” Ernie tells her, “I’ll come back to see how this ol’ stove’s makin’ out.”

She nods.

In the side yard, Reverend Ollie snaps twigs and feeds them into the fire. Even Thomas pitches in.

Miz Millicent wheezes. “I hear you’re down ’ere, teaching ’em boys to write their
memoirs
.” She makes it sound illegal. Pornographic. I see by Luz’s face that she has heard.

“Something like that. Miz Millicent—”

“I remember you, gal. Full of the devil with your backtalk. Always in need of a good whippin’, you ask me. Now you got that boy, demon’s took him too, snatched the talkin’ right out of his head.”

I inhale. “Miz Millie, you have any recollection of being a little girl yourself?”

She looks sideways. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“You were a child once. Born in innocence. As a baby, you weren’t set upon by demons, nor the devil.”

“We ain’t talkin’ about me.”

“Well, maybe we should.”

“What makes you think you know so much?”

“Because I was just a child, Miz Millie. Innocent like you. My mama didn’t want me. Every little child wants its mama.”

“I don’t—recall mine,” Millicent says, and I think—
or you don’t want to
.

“I was lost. But it was my mother—a real person—who lost me. I wasn’t touched by demons. Nor were you.”

Miz Millie’s eyes cast around and light on Luz. “So now you workin’ at the Farm.”

“Yes.”

The storm has taken its toll on more than Miz Millicent’s land. Strands of wig hair cling to her ears and her wattled neck. She turns watery eyes on me. “Don’t think for a minute those sonsabitches gonna let you inside their shaved heads.”

She sounds like Shookie. I use Ernie’s hammer and pull nails from a length of wood. “They’re a lot of men who made bad choices, Miz Millicent. No demons involved. They chose where they are.”

She makes a snorting sound. Suddenly she looks hurt and afraid.

“Truth is, they’ve got things to say, Miz Millicent, like all of us.

You got things too, I bet. Sometime, I’d be happy to listen.”

“That place down there, Clarice’s lot, it’s full of demons—”

“Well, then, I’ll work on sweeping them out. ’Cause it’s my place now. Might be nice if you’d come down and say one last prayer—”