The Fires (19 page)

I got up, went into the bathroom. The tiles lining the wall and floor were the colors of dinner mints, and a scent of vinegar and roses lingered around the tub. I tried to overlook a bottle of henna and a bottle of peroxide on the lid of the toilet because not knowing the color of hair distorted the face I’d just settled on. I picked up a bra from the floor, elastic flailing around my wrist, and smelled her talc and lemon scent in the nylon. I opened the med-THE FIRES / 147

icine cabinet and looked in the shelves: aspirin, lip balm, creams and oils in almost-empty tubes with dirty caps. She’d worked in a stationer’s. I focused on this fact. What friends found her? They should have contacted me. Didn’t they know I was her favorite niece, that she would have wanted me to know?

After I slammed the door of the medicine cabinet, my face in the mirror looked strange, the dull whites of my eyes cracked with red, my lips laced with chapped skin, a thin red sickle on the side of my nose where I’d scratched myself during the night.

It meant Hanna had never mentioned me, or talked about home only as a place she was glad to have left. I opened the cabinet again, just enough to grab a lipstick, and drew a cross through my reflection. Something dark and ropy chafed inside my chest.

I went out of the bathroom and studied the objects on the bureau: a tarnished key, a tin ashtray, a Kleenex flecked with mascara.

I opened the drawers, rifled through her tangled stockings and lingerie, her pastel sweaters and socks. I found only one photograph, a picture of Hanna and my mother when they were girls, but it was blurred from her turning her head so that Hanna seemed to have two noses. I riffled through some bills and papers, a few letters addressed to people I didn’t know, and found a letter from my mother. There was some news about my grandparents, my mother’s friends at church and then this:
Ella’s taking some time off from college before she decides what she
wants to do, though I have a suspicion she’ll go back to teaching. You’re
right about her. She’s a shy girl. I hate to think of her living around
people who don’t understand her. The other day she told me she was
having trouble sleeping, and I can’t help thinking it’s because she’s
given up going to church. She says it reminds her of Louis. I don’t to
want to upset her, but I can’t help thinking church would help. I may
ask Pastor Beck to talk to her.

There was more news about the weather and then:
Come visit
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in June. And I’ll mention to Ella your invitation.
But Hanna hadn’t come, and my mother hadn’t passed on the invitation, whatever it had been. It was like her to think church was the answer for something she couldn’t answer herself. What had she been so afraid of?

There was a dress stuffed into the bottom drawer like something put away to be mended. I shook it out. It was a blue silk dress with a chiffon scarf around the neck and tiny pebblelike buttons down the back. I held it up to my shoulders, then on an impulse slipped off my skirt and sweater. In the bureau mirror the scars looked pink, like very pale satin ribbons tied up all around me, binding my arms to my sides, the tops of my legs together. I didn’t move for a few minutes, looking at them.

Finally I stepped into the dress and buttoned as many of the buttons as I could reach. A scar trailed down from one sleeve.

The dress was out of fashion, and a little too long, but it suited me. I smoothed the wrinkles around my waist, and my breasts pressed up against the tight darts in the bodice.

Here was the invitation: I could live in this room, wear her clothes, get a job at the stationer’s, and begin to write in a little, gilt-edged book. There were novels to read in the closet and boxes of photographs or buttons pushed under the bed. I turned, admired the curvy profile of the dress, the fine blue sheen. I’d dye my hair and read movie magazines, I’d listen to jazz. I’d eat in restaurants and never go back to Porter. Then I remembered. The landlady had sent the letter to Marietta in August, the month my grandfather had died. He must have known about it when he took the arsenic.

The delicate buttons popped off as I pulled the dress up over my head. I had matches in my purse. If the house had been empty, I would have set the room on fire. Still in my stockings and bra, I took the dress into the bathroom, shoved aside the shower cur-THE FIRES / 149

tain, and dumped the dress in the tub. I struck a match to the hem and watched the flame waver before the skirt kicked up orange. The bodice and sleeves jerked, then slumped over to the side. The silk turned a coffee-stained blue, then blackened in a coast and shrank under this fire that splashed the edges of the porcelain.
What was fire anyway, what was it made of?
It lapped the bowl of white and the chrome faucet.
Grief
, I thought.
Grief
. Sitting there on the edge of the tub, I watched the flames burn up into the tile.

I finally had to turn the tap all the way up to drown them and scrubbed the ruined edges of the tub with a washcloth. Washing the soot from my hands, I tried to calm down so I could wipe my eyes and go downstairs and thank the woman, tell her someone would be there soon to pay for the damage from my dropped cigarette and to get Hanna’s things.

On the way back to Porter, straining to see in the highway dark, I beat at the steering wheel. He must have heard the news not long before he went into his bedroom. How long before, I didn’t know. A week? An hour? He’d been writing to her and then erased most of what he’d written. “I’m not saying it’s your fault, but you should have come back. Love,” “I’m not a real father, after what I put you through. Love,” Not. Your. Love.

Near Plymouth, I hit the wheel so hard the car swerved onto the shoulder, spitting up gravel behind me. I had to stop, because I was trembling. I thought about dropping matches in the gas tank and watching the car explode from the field. They’d assume I was dead, and then I could walk away. I could go anywhere. I could leave, just as Hanna had always said to me. But I’d wasted all my matches on the dress.

The fields around me were flat and still, ragged and drifting.

When I finally felt steady enough to drive again, I pulled onto the road, waiting for pale lights to comb up in the distance.

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A
flame is a briny syrup that catches in the teeth and lingers more
than a day. You can smell it on people’s breath unless they’ve
rinsed their mouth with alcohol or lemons. There’s always the one taste,
but a thousand forms: the bubbling orange foam, more air than substance; the spiked red tongues that slip under doors and in cracks; the
gorgeous pinks and purples that rise with chemicals in a fire that
shimmers like glass or oil; the bark made of gold that constantly peels
away to itself; the massive fires like mountains, barely moving. Each
one has its own face, its own clapping voices.

T
hat week I got a postcard from Cornell, and I wrote him a quick, terse note telling him Hanna had died. I didn’t think he’d write again. She was the only link between us, the real reason we’d come together in the first place. Marietta had gone to visit Emily, my mother told me. “She said she kept touching things, and she had the same twitch just before all that business with the windows.” Had Marietta gone to tell her, I wondered, or had Emily known all along and only told me what she could?

People made up all kinds of things to get by—diets, prayers, and regimens; animals in the stars—all these arks in a flooded world. Even if that thing had holes in it, if you clung to it, it helped you float along.

Marietta hired someone to put up a hurricane fence around her yard and to paint all the windows lavender. So that no one could surprise her, she hung ribbons of bells from every doorknob in the house. She talked more about the birds she’d seen at her feeder, and the feathers she’d collected lay in bowls around the house, waiting to be mounted under glass. The walls were filling up with them. She said her heart was fine, remarkably better, and whenever she checked, it was beating regularly, not skipping the way it used to. And she couldn’t stop smiling. In a housedress she

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swung around the room with her duster, so frantic I thought she might hurt herself.

“Henry was never well. He wasn’t lazy, he just couldn’t get out of bed sometimes. He was too skinny, don’t you think?” She looked at me. I couldn’t see any dust, but she swished over every surface with the fury of someone on a search. I looked at the pile of
Reader’s Digests
in the corner. “But he was gentler than the rest.

That’s why I married him.” She stood in front of an opaque window, ran her index finger over the sill. Lavender, a color that made you want to sleep for hours and hours, days, even.

“Isn’t it a little dark in here for you?” I asked. I hadn’t told her that I’d gone to Indianapolis.

“I think she’ll be back soon,” she said, and her optimism knocked over anything that might shake it, seemed to trample the framed pictures of my parents’ wedding and my mother’s graduation.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“If she knows how much we want to see her…” She narrowed her eyes and came closer to me. I hated it, but told myself it didn’t matter. So what if she lied? Hanna had been more of a wish than a person to her for a long time.

M
y mother was so thin she couldn’t get out of bed. She was making her body into neat angles like wire bent into an absurd shape: a coat hanger, an egg cup. It looked as if her teeth had grown; she couldn’t quite close her lips. She said she was sick, and when I brought her a plate of dry saltine crackers, I remembered giving the same meal to my father at the end.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice hollow.

She’s known all along
, I said to myself.
That’s why she’s been doing
this to herself. It’s too much for her to hold in.
She couldn’t 152 / RENÉ STEINKE

have told me, any more than she could have told me about the fire she’d watched me fall into. She felt too guilty. She thought she should have been able to see that Hanna’s death would be too much for my grandfather to withstand, that if she had said the right thing, been a better daughter, he wouldn’t have done it.

The room was dusty and cold. Outside, an ocean of snow and a white sky that looked unreal until you got used to it, the world as a clean cotton sheet. The heater sputtered on, and there was an unpleasant grating in the pipes. She must have known by now that there was something wrong with me. I couldn’t put the words together—they scattered in my head like glass thrown against a wall—but I wanted to tell her I’d set fires and seduced men, all because she’d taught me to be such a good liar.

“I’ll finish your dress as soon as I feel better,” she said. She wanted me to look like her, to wear simple, practical clothes, to stay in Porter and go back to teaching first grade. She would in-cinerate me with safety.

X

P
aul set a plate down on the desk in front of me, a tangle of noodles with a pink meaty gravy poured on top. “I thought you might be hungry,” he said. The steaming plate smelled of dill and pepper. “It’s Stroganoff. My aunt used to make it.” He nudged it closer to me.

“You can cook?” I picked up the fork.

“I broke the rules,” he said. “They’ll probably notice some things missing tomorrow.” His hooded eyes looked even deeper-set, a dark blue the color of bruises. “I couldn’t find any celery, though. It’s better with celery.” He pulled the vinyl chair up to the desk and sat down across from me. I wound the fork in the noodles, and he watched me take a bite. “What do you think?”

It had a strange sour-milk taste that I liked. “You didn’t make any for yourself?”

He shook his head. “I was concentrating. Is it good?”

“Delicious.”

“You don’t look well lately,” he said.

I took another bite. The meat was heavy and tender and weighed pleasantly in my stomach. Then I took two more bites and pushed the plate over to him. “Have some.”

“Has something happened?” He looked at me, and when he 153

154 / RENÉ STEINKE

could tell I wasn’t going to answer, he put a forkful into his mouth and smacked his lips. “Needs celery.” He got up and walked inside the gate behind the desk to the closet and came back with a bottle of bourbon and two thin plastic cups.

The bourbon calmed me, and I sank down in my chair. His accent was so familiar to me now, I knew how to read the low hollows and peaks in his voice.

Two small boys were running up and down the stairs, counting them and making a slurping sound with their lips every third one.

“What is it about what they’re doing that’s so fun?” Paul smiled. “They know, I guess.” Watching them, he said, “When I was that age, I climbed trees. No one understood.”

“Lots of boys climb trees,” I said.

“Yes, but I was always in a tree, as much as possible. I ate my lunch up there,” he said, laughing. “I would have never come down if it weren’t for the problem of sleeping. One time I fell out and hurt my neck. As soon as the doctor put on the brace, I went right back up in that tree. My mother couldn’t stop me.” He shook his head and smiled in that way he often did, waiting for me to reply.

It came out awkwardly, as if I meant to tell him about a practical joke, but said this instead: “When I was three, someone was burning leaves and I fell into the fire.” His smile closed up, and I wished I hadn’t said anything, but knew why I had—I could tell he liked me, and I wanted to make sure to head off any disappointment right there. “I have scars from it on my arms and legs and across here.” I drew a loop around my torso and back. “Most people don’t know,” I said, trying to make my voice go light again, “unless they went to school with me.”

He didn’t smile. He had an intent face I couldn’t interpret, as if he were figuring a math problem in his head. “Children can be nasty,” he said.

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I looked down at my shoe. “I didn’t mean that. Everyone gets teased.”