Those Who Favor Fire (50 page)

Angela took out a cigarette and held it in her trembling hand. “Name one.”

But Rachel couldn’t. Everything she loved about Belle Haven was changing. “I can’t,” she said. “I don’t know why, but I can’t imagine leaving. It seems wrong.” She put her hands over her face again. They were filthy. There was powdery grime in her hair and on her clothes. “I can’t explain it.”

“I think I can,” Angela said. The sight of Rachel so confused and unhappy made Angela sorry for what she was about to say. She was tempted to put her arms around her friend, but there were some things more important than comfort.

Rachel lowered her hands.

“I’ve been watching you for a long time now, Rachel. I used to worry about you when you were a kid. You were so … 
selfless
. You never took a step out of line. I used to think you were going to explode. I remember hoping you would.”

“Hoping I would explode.”

“Yes.” Angela shrugged. “Most people would say
bloom
, I guess. Come of age. But the way you tamped yourself down all the time, I figured you weren’t likely to do anything so gradual. I figured it would come all at once. An explosion. But I was wrong.”

Rachel waited. She knew there was more.

“You went off to college instead. Which I thought was a good thing at the time. I figured you’d grow out of your”—she searched for
the right word—“your self-control. Throw out the script you’d written for yourself.” She put the cigarette back in its pack.

“College was good for you, Rachel. Anybody could see that. You’d come home so relaxed. And confident. That’s when we became friends, you know.”

Rachel frowned. “I thought we’d always been friends.”

“Uh-uh. You were always my friend, but I wasn’t always yours. You were way too tense for me, like you might break if you weren’t careful.”

Rachel looked like she was going to cry. “Is there a point to all this, Angela? Because if there isn’t, I think I’d like to stop talking for a while. The doctor should let us in to see Rusty soon.”

Angela took out the cigarette again. She held it between her fingers. “The point is that it would have been better if you’d exploded. Being a later bloomer would have been okay, too, if you’d been able to finish what you’d started. But you had a couple of lousy experiences at school, right around when your parents got killed … and you stopped.” She tapped the end of the cigarette against her wrist. “You’d opened up to the point where you started to take some chances and put yourself first. But you were only halfway there, Rachel. The place where you stopped wasn’t where you were meant to end up. You went from being a mouse to a lion. If you’d kept going, I’m sure you would have found your place somewhere in between the two. Somewhere less deliberate. Less … calculated. Where you weren’t always
reacting
to something, or someone. But you
stopped
.”

“What are you talking about?” Rachel didn’t know how much more of this she could take. “You sound like a goddamned shrink. I know I tried too hard when I was a kid. You think I don’t know that? I know I was naïve. Jesus, Angela, I’m not stupid.” She thought of Rusty somewhere down the hall, what it had done to him to lose his father. What surviving Mary Beth would do to him now. “Everybody reacts to everything,” she said. “Everybody. Including me. Christ, look at Joe. How come you’re not having this little talk with him?” Rachel waited for Angela to pick up this new thread. Follow this new road. But she didn’t. So Rachel continued on down the one she knew best. “Everybody changes as they grow up. Which is all I did. What’s wrong with that? Why try so hard to be … to live up to everyone’s expectations when nothing around me came close to living up to mine? Except Belle Haven. That was the only thing that didn’t let
me down. I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t been able to come home after everything went so wrong.”

“You would have gone on!” Angela cried, holding out her arms and letting them fall at her sides. “You would have survived. That’s what people
do
.” She almost said, “That’s what
I
did.” But this wasn’t about her.

“I did go on. I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Yeah, you’re here all right. But you’re not telling the whole story, Rachel.
Why
are you still here? That’s what I don’t understand.”

Rachel felt like she was hearing an echo of herself asking Joe the same question so many months earlier.

“Fine. Then you tell me where I should have gone. According to you, I’ve still got a long way to go before I’m entitled to make up my own mind about where and how I live. I’ve got to finish
blooming
first. So tell me. Where should I have gone? Where should I go now?”

“Shit, Rachel, I don’t know. I’m not saying you should do what I or anyone else thinks you should do. That’s what got you in this mess in the first place.” She pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead. “I know this is going to sound terrible, and I’m not sure I ought to be saying it, but even though your parents dying was a horrible thing, and it wasn’t something you would ever have asked for, it gave you a freedom that you really
needed
. You—”

“Jesus God, Angela!” Rachel flinched as if she’d been singed. “My parents were everything to me. You think their death was something I should be thankful for?”

“No, Rachel, of course I don’t. But I don’t think it was something you should feel guilty about either.”

“I don’t feel guilty about it!”

“Then why, when you were finally coming into your own, did you quit school and come back home instead? Why haven’t you ever taken advantage of your freedom, whether you asked for it or not? Why are you acting now like it’s your duty to stay where you are, even if it means risking everything else, including Joe, including Rusty—” She bit her lip. Rachel had not asked them to stay in Belle Haven. It wasn’t her fault that Rusty had nearly died. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You weren’t the one who risked Rusty by staying here. I was.”

But Rachel knew she had played a part. She began to weep. Her tears mixed with the ash on her face. Her hands left black smudges across her cheeks. “I’m so confused, Angela. I miss them so much.”

“I know, baby. I know.” She stroked Rachel’s hair away from her face. “You don’t want to leave them, do you?”

Rachel pictured her parents’ ashes dissolving in the water of the creek. She told Angela that she had not buried them in Belle Haven after all.

“Then what is it?”

“What is what?”

“What is so important that you can’t leave it behind?”

Rachel grabbed her head in both hands. “I don’t know. I wish I did, but I don’t.” She dropped her hands. There was a streak of dried blood on one of her palms. She closed her eyes. “Joe said something to me once. He said it wasn’t the
place
that was important but what it meant to us. He said we should be able to take with us whatever mattered most about the places we loved.” She opened her eyes. “And that makes sense to me. It really does. But if that’s true, why am I so afraid to leave?”

Angela looked at Rachel and, for the first time since her son had gone nearly to his death, began to cry.

“Maybe because by staying here you’ve been honoring your parents, immortalizing them, insisting that your life here with them was always perfect. Somewhere along the way, you’ve convinced yourself that running away from Belle Haven means confessing to all the people you love, and who love you, and who have known you since you were a child that you might have been far happier somewhere else.”

When the doctor called to her, Angela ran down the hall and into the room where they were dressing Rusty’s burns. For the rest of her life, Rachel would wish that she had not followed. But she did, for staying alone in the too bright hallway that still rang with Angela’s words seemed worse by far.

“It was so terrible. So terrible,” Rusty was saying when Rachel walked into the room. Angela was leaning over the table where he lay, stroking the hair away from his face. “I was hanging on to some tree roots. There’s a great big oak right there where we went through. I was hanging on to those roots with my face pressed into a hollow spot between them, and the dirt was coming down over my head and it was awfully hot and all I could hear was a sound like the wind howling down below me and there was screaming from up above.
And it all happened so fast that at first I didn’t realize that something was hanging on to my leg, and then I could feel that it was Mary Beth. I could feel her hands slipping down my leg and grabbing at my shoe. And I was trying to pull us up out of the hole. And then somebody grabbed my wrist and I thought I was going to be torn in half.” He stopped and opened his eyes, turned to look at his mother. “And then she let go of my foot and I started to come up out of the hole. I could feel the dirt sucking down under my feet as she let go and slipped away. Do you think she was dead already?”

Angela thought for a moment that he sounded like a much younger boy asking the kind of impossible question that little children always ask. Why is the sky blue? What am I going to be like when I grow up? Did you know that some people get old and die?

“I’m sure that she was, Rusty,” was all she said, laying her fingers on his lips.

But Rachel was not so sure.

She was still thinking pretty clearly when she left the room, remembered to call Ed Zingham to come over to the hospital to drive Angela and Rusty home, her truck too small to give Rusty room to lie down. But as she pulled up alongside her house, she realized that she could not remember driving home, not at all. When she took her hands off the wheel, they began to shake, and her legs, when she put her feet down on the ground, nearly gave way.

The sight of her house in the evening sunlight sickened her, hurt her eyes, so she walked around it and through her backyard, straight into the woods and up the gently sloping hill toward the tree house.

Joe was sitting on the little deck, his legs hanging over the edge, carving a small nugget of wood, when Rachel came out of the trees into the clearing below with signs of fire on her face and hands.

She opened her mouth, and a croupy sound came out, as if she had swallowed acid. She tried again but managed only a louder sound, much the same, and Joe dropped the knife in his hand, let the half-done swallow fall into the leaves below, nearly falling out of the tree himself in his haste to reach her.

She could not climb to the tree house, so he gentled her down to
the leaves and sat down beside her, cradling her in his arms, holding her head tight against the side of his neck. Her whole body was limp and cold, though he could feel her shake minutely with every breath, and her fingers sometimes jerked as if she had fallen into an unsettled sleep.

Something terrible had happened. When Rachel finally managed to say a word, it was “Rusty,” and Joe’s arms tightened around her so she could barely breathe. “He’s all right,” she managed, realizing she had to tell him now, as quickly as possible, what had happened.

When she had finished, Joe stood up and began to walk around the clearing, panting. Then he took her by her hands and pulled her to her feet.

“Do I have to say it?” he asked her.

“No,” she said. “I’m leaving.” She picked a leaf off her sleeve. “Maybe I’ll be able to come back someday. Maybe they’ll find an excuse to tear my house down, even if I don’t sell it to them, since I won’t. I won’t do that. But it will be my land still, and maybe, up here on the hill, the house will be all right after all.”

That she could be thinking about a house now, when Mary Beth Sanderson was somewhere down below their feet, made Joe sadder than nearly anything she’d ever done. But when he looked into her eyes, he realized that although she was talking about her house, saying the words that he was hearing, she was not thinking about what she would take with her or when she might return. She was thinking about the feel of a hand on her ankle and the feeling as that hand let go. She felt, in her mouth, in her nose, packed against the fragile globes of her opened eyes, the hot, gritty dirt that had claimed Mary Beth and carried her away.

“Say it,” he said through his teeth, prodding her as if she had a boil that needed lancing.

“Say what?” she moaned.

“Say it!” he yelled.

She beat her hands against her hips. “All right!” she wailed. “Rusty wouldn’t still be here, except for me. There’s no other reason. Just that: because I’m still here. And if he hadn’t been here, and been with Mary Beth … if he hadn’t thrown a ball right to that exact spot, they might all have gotten out of here. And Mary Beth wouldn’t be dead. But she’s dead. She was only a little girl, and she’s dead for no good reason.”

Joe could barely understand her, but he knew better than anyone what she was saying.

“Everyone in this town is a part of your life,” he said. “And in some way, even some very small way, you are involved when they die.”

She looked up at him, remembering. “Maybe that’s been true until now,” she said. “But not anymore. Not like this. I can’t live this way. Nobody ought to live this way.”

When they got to Rachel’s house, their arms full of whatever they thought Rusty would have wanted them to take from the tree house and the small wooden trunk that Joe could not bring himself to leave behind, they found Ed Zingham sitting on a stump in the backyard, waiting for them.

“Angela and Rusty are inside the house,” he said. “I’m going to take them up to the farm as soon as Angela gets their stuff together. While I’m there I thought I might have a look at that spare house, if that’s all right with you, Joe.”

“Good,” Joe said. “I was hoping you would. Here.” He reached into his pocket and handed Ed a key ring. “It’s yours if you want it. Let me know what you decide.”

Ed looked at the key in his palm. “Mendelson was here a couple of minutes ago,” he said. “Seems he arrived over at the Sandersons’ just after you left there, Rachel. Took in that machine they use when they’re probing. Turns out the hole goes down about three hundred feet, registered three hundred fifty degrees, eleven hundred parts per million carbon monoxide. He thought Rusty might want to know what he’d survived.” He looked up. “But I wouldn’t let him near the boy.”