What Burns Away (22 page)

At an intersection in Niantic, I slowed. The Amtrak train made its way south over the platform toward the bridge. To Jonah's delight, we were waylaid at the only crossing in town.

“Choo-choo!” he shouted, headphones still on.

As the first car passed, an engineer held up his hand like the greeting of an Indian chief.

Jonah's giggles clipped at the tension between my mother and me.

Passenger cars scuttled past.

“Claire,” Mom said, “I thought you knew.”

The snow picked up, and with a head full of misgivings, I turned on the radio for the forecast. On AM radio, a voice I grew up listening to on car rides with my father broadcast the evening report.

“And tonight, along coastal regions, winds will be out of the northeast, lows in the twenties with an eighty percent chance of sleet. Highs tomorrow morning are estimated to reach thirty, under clear skies. And up next, in other late-breaking local news, as the housing market continues to go up in smoke, insurance fraud officials say more area homes are going up with it, as property owners turn to fraud as a means to cope with the economic crisis, both locally and around the nation.

“Here in Connecticut, forty-three-year-old Dean D'Alessio of East Lyme pleaded no contest to arson charges this afternoon after his five-thousand-five-hundred square-foot property burned to the ground subsequent to becoming yet another victim of depreciated home values. More on this story with AM 1080's Diane Smith, after these messages.”

The station broke to commercials.

Warning lights beamed from the tracks. Our faces—my mother's, Jonah's, and mine—glowed red, and I felt as if I was again cast in flames.

The caboose rumbled past.

My mother said, “Dean took the blame.”

“Protecting me,” I told her. “Like he promised.”

The gates blocking our path ascended.

Jonah shouted, “Bye-bye.”

We bobbled over the rails and I was overcome with a complicated sense of relief and heartache, knowing that Dean had set me free—unscathed—while recognizing that few truths, if any, were exactly what they seemed.

Reaching behind my seat, I clutched my son's small foot, my devotion to him my only certainty, and I pondered the strength of a mother's love—what we sacrificed for it, what it kept us from, what it empowered us to do—and I forgave my own mother for everything.

• • •

At the hotel's parking garage, before we stepped out into the cold, Mom and I tucked our shared secrets away and made promises.

She said, “If you're not too tired, if Miles doesn't have plans, we could have dinner tonight, or maybe coffee with your sister before you head out. I think maybe we need more time.” She waited. “I could visit alone sometime too.”

I hugged her.

“It's gonna be okay?” I whispered the question into her scarf.

“I hope everything will be,” she whispered back. “Miles loves you.”

I tasted Mom's perfume, the dense bawdy musk of it, and told her, “Thank you for coming.”

She held my face in her cold hands, rested her forehead on mine, and said, “I love you. You are my daughter. And all we can do is learn from our mistakes.” Then she gestured behind us with her chin to Jonah. “And I love that little boy of yours too. Like you girls did for me, he will teach you what you need.”

As Mom and I walked toward Miles, who was pacing along the hotel entrance, Jonah ran out ahead to greet him. Kara beeped from the hotel turnabout where she was parked, talking into her cell phone. I considered the weight of secrets—my father's, my own. I thought about how Dad's betrayal surely poisoned his heart and how revealing that must have broken my mother's, mutual wounds that would never heal.

Mom and I looked over at Kara.

My sister yelled from the open window of her car. “Mom, I really need to get the kids. Luke is stuck at the office.” She pointed to her watch and blew me a kiss good-bye. “Claire, please be in touch. Come back. Stay with us. Mom, we've
got
to go.”

Mom held me by my shoulders and stared into my eyes. “I love you, and I want to help you get your head straight. Whatever you need,” she told me. Then she squeezed me tight.

She was slight under her heavy coat, all bones. And backing away, she took off her scarf and looped it around my neck. “Better color on you.” There were tears in her eyes. “Take care of yourself and your boys.” She tossed me a final kiss and mouthed
good-bye
.

Miles greeted me with a quick peck on my cheek, Jonah in his arms. And the two of them reeled me back into a complicated reunion that was mine with which to contend.

“You were gone a while,” he said. “How did that go?”

“Good,” I told him.

“Good?”
he repeated and set Jonah down.

“I'm ready to accept her as she is.”

“I'm glad,” Miles said.

The three of us walked through the hotel lobby, Miles and I racing after Jonah as he picked up speed.

The hallway dead-ended at the elevator doors.

Miles picked Jonah up so he could push the elevator button. Then, in his daddy's arms, the little guy squeezed his father's nose.

Miles yelled, “Honk,” and the two of them busted up laughing at their old joke.

In the elevator we were alone. Jonah smacked at every button to illuminate it on the panel, but when the doors opened on the third floor, Miles stepped out, held his hand against the opening to let us pass, and told me, “I'm glad you feel like you can accept your mother. Maybe you can accept me too? Forgive me a little. Teach me what you need?” He pulled the hotel key card from the back pocket of his jeans to confirm our room number, then continued, “Maybe, Claire, you can help me bring back that silly, sweet woman who used to love me? I miss her so much. I miss you.”

“I'd like that,” I said.

Inside the room, the bed was turned down and containers of takeout Miles had brought up from the hotel restaurant while he waited for us sat on the desk in the corner. On the television, an animated movie that Miles had chosen for Jonah played, with the volume muted. His gestures were sweet and made the onus of what I'd done even more unbearable.

Miles unzipped Jonah's coat, then he helped me ease out of my parka. I imagined the lighter tumbling from my jacket pocket onto the floor and the questions that would be asked, so I took the coat from my husband to double-check the empty pocket linings, making certain that bit of evidence had been tossed with the rest of it in the Dumpster behind the inn.

“Dinner?” Miles offered, opening up plastic bowls of pasta and salad. He buttered slices of bread.

Silently, we sat together and shared bites, all three of us eating from the same fork.

Drained, I kicked off my shoes and crawled across the white sheets. Miles followed me, nestling Jonah between us. We huddled together.

“Sweetie,” Miles said, resting one hand on Jonah and one hand on me, “I'll do whatever it takes.”

“I'm sorry I ran off,” I apologized again. “I'm sorry I lied to you.” Exhausted and ashamed, I fell asleep before I could offer him anything more.

Back in snow-covered Wisconsin, as I sat across from my husband with Jonah in my lap, Miles said, “I'm so glad you're home.” Then he, a better partner than I have been, promised, “I'm not letting you give up on us yet.”

Forgiveness is not a practice I have mastered, but I believed that when Miles came searching for me in Connecticut, he was determined to fix what was broken, to forgive me for lies he knew not the extent of, and that in his own quirky way he wanted me for keeps. I pardoned his part in what was missing between us, but harder for me was exonerating myself from the secrets I hadn't yet shared with Miles, those betrayals I made privately with Dean.

And I'll probably never forgive myself for my father's death, even if the reasons for it came from a more complicated reality, a truth revealed to me perhaps only because I took the risk of going east with Dean. And yet, despite those festering wounds that fed my father's brokenness, I'll always wonder if I might've stopped him, had I made curfew the night he took his life—always feeling part owner of his suicide.

In light of it all, home with my own family somehow intact, the Quayside gone, I hoped Miles would decide to grant me a second chance to have what I'd yearned for as a girl—a life where maybe no one gets exactly what they need, but one where we all get to have each other.

Pushing my soup bowl aside, I told my husband, “I'll do better.”

“You
are
doing better,” he said.

“
We
can do better,” I reiterated. “We still need more laughter. More intimacy. Some bigger connection to each other.”

Miles lit a candle on the kitchen table. “You mean romance?” he said, raising an eyebrow, part teasing, part serious. He set the flame between my wineglass and Jonah's sippy cup, next to the stack of unopened mail.

Seated beside us, Jonah scribbled on an envelope with a crayon.

I sipped from my drink and beheld the flicker cast from the wick.

“I hear you,” Miles said. “More togetherness. More fun. Got it.” Then he jumped up, opened the freezer, and added, “And we all need more
ice
cream
!”

Jonah clapped his hands.

I told him, “None for me.”

And while Jonah and Miles delighted in eating chocolate gelato straight from the pint, I thumbed through a pile of glossy magazines and medical journals.

Scrolling the table of contents in the latest issue of
Astronomy
Magazine
, I noted a brief article on Alpha Centaurids' meteors, in which the author noted:

This shower will stream six to ten meteors per hour along Alpha Centauri, the brightest star in the constellation Centaurus, named for Greek mythology's half man, half horse, the beast who dominates this part of the sky and denotes all that is wild, savage, and lustful.

Miles blew his nose into a dish towel.

“Lustful,” I whispered, eyeing my husband.

I chucked the magazine into the recycling bin. Then, as I sorted the remaining junk mail from the bills, I came across an envelope with the return address of 61 Willard Street, East Lyme, CT 06333.

An uneasy flutter rose in my chest. I slipped the letter into my lap. Trying to keep the shrillness from my voice, I asked my husband, “Should I take Jonah up for bed, or do you want to?”

Miles tossed spoons into the sink. “I've got it,” he said and lifted Jonah, with his sticky face and a fistful of crayons, up from the table. Our little guy rested his tired head against his father's chest and waved, “Night night, Mama.”

With slow, deliberate steps, Miles ascended the stairs and rubbed the small of Jonah's back. Awaiting their slip beyond the banister, I kept the letter tucked between my knees, where it seemed to radiate heat. Once I heard the water running and Miles singing, “Brush, brush, brush your teeth,” I tore the envelope open.

Dean's script was composed in blue ink on yellow-lined paper jaggedly torn from a legal pad. There was a doodle of waves in the margin above which he had drawn a star, streaming across a cloudless sky.

Dearest Claire,

I tried to respond to your last message but it seems I'm blocked from your contacts. I don't dare call now that I'm under investigation, so figured the safest bet was to bust out the old pen and paper to reassure you that I've fully protected you from things here.

Following this note, I'm sad to say I won't contact you again. I have to let you go. I realize that now. It hurts to admit this, but I know you want to give Jonah a life neither of us got to have. I'll confess, though, that seeing you made me feel a whole lot of regret and desire, also some warmth that you look so in love with that kid. I'd be lying if I didn't tell you that it made me wonder what a life with you would've been like, what our son might have looked like, who he would have grown up to be, what I gave away. It's too late to second-guess those things, I suppose.

But the point of me telling you this is that me seeking you out was never about the fire alone. As I watched you, things evolved into this hope that we might set the world on fire together, somehow. That matters not so much, I know, because you'll sacrifice what you need to be there for your family. It's honorable, Claire. In fact, it's one of the things I love about you the most.

On this end, nothing is entirely clear.

My attorney thinks that since the Home Depot's records verify my purchase of accelerants, I could get five years of probation and, worst-case scenario, a charge for negligence with fines for property damage, potentially serving six months to a year, tops. But he claims arson is the hardest crime to peg, even with prints, which they don't have. And because those products cause these types of problems all the time, pretty fucking flammable, we're arguing their usage in my home the obvious culprit for the damage, all of it an innocent, albeit foolish, accident.

Regardless, the place is gone. Be free of it.

And should that last message you sent mean I'm wrong about anything I've said here, you know where to find me, at my mom's place on Willard Street. I'd happily open the door.

Forever yours.

Dean

I set the letter down and regarded the gift Dean's devotion granted me—the repossession of my life in Madison, a protected secret, something I could hide forever, if I chose. But I knew that my return to Miles wasn't as simple as Dean signing off. I was branded too by the burden of those choices I'd quietly made. So much had happened. I had fallen for his scheme, and I had fallen for Dean. I'd believed in the seduction enough to commit a felony. And even if those confidences were never exposed to anyone, vaulted in the place of kept secrets, I knew I'd live with the emotional consequences forever.

Through the baby monitor, Miles's voice narrated
Goodnight
Moon
to Jonah upstairs in the nursery. His speech was a comfort: “Good night stars, good night air, good night noises everywhere.”

“He's a good man. Hang on to him, Claire,” my mother had said about Miles, now that there was a different kind of secret between her and me. She encouraged me to resurrect my marriage and to figure out what Miles and I had to do to rebuild.

I pressed Dean's letter to my lips, then held it over the candle at the center of my kitchen table and pushed the stationery into the flame. The yellow notebook paper curled back, the envelope charred into dust, and while it all burned away, I remembered Michael Faraday's closing words from
The
Chemical
History
of
a
Candle, Lecture VI
:

Now I must take you to a very interesting part of our subject—to the relation between the combustion of a candle and that living kind of combustion which goes on within us. In every one of us there is a living process of combustion going on very similar to that of a candle, and I must try to make that plain to you. For it is not merely true in a poetical sense—the relation of the life of man to a taper—and if you will follow, I think I can make this clear.

Fanning the air with his dish towel, Miles descended the stairs just as carefully as he had gone up them. He asked, “What's going on down here?”

“Firebug,” I said. Between my index finger and thumb, I held the last corner of the envelope. The table in front of me was speckled with ash.

My husband carried our wineglasses to the sink and returned to sponge off the surface where I sat. Removing the candle from the table's center, he held it out before us, like a lantern, and took my hand to lead us through the dark.

Our shadows fell across living room, down the hall, and into the playroom, where he knelt in front of the blanket fort I had built for Jonah. Crawling beneath the draped bedspreads and flannel sheets, he waved at me to follow him.

Inside, he rested the candle on a plastic bin of Legos and inched us toward a stack of throw pillows and the dozen or so teddy bears lined up against them. Leaning me back, setting a stuffed dolphin under my head, he pulled off each one of my slippers and socks. He worked his hands over my toes and massaged the instep of my foot, where my tattoo of the comet had long ago faded into a bit of blue, like a bruise.

With his hand ascending my legs, Miles kneaded my calf and my thighs; he caressed my belly, moved his hands over my breasts, and then up over my shoulders. Straddling my waist, coming up onto his knees, he pushed me down and kissed my lips, my ears, my neck, and my face. He kissed me like he meant it, with an unusual urgency, like a man whose future was at stake.

“Start over with me?” he whispered.

And as we fumbled with each other's buttons in the soft, expiring candlelight, I felt the good fortune of the familiar.

“Okay,” I said. “For Jonah.”

“For all of us,” he said. “Promise me?”

I considered how life
can
exist without flames, how the oceans prove this, and guessed that planets beyond our own someday would too. I lay there, while Miles searched for me, waiting for my pledge to commit to our marriage again. I rationalized how fire, that kind of fire I had with Dean, was not something needed for survival, but more a chemistry affixed to our own human behavior, to desire. Then, I considered burning—how when a blaze is snuffed by wind or by rain, humans still flourish. How in the wild prairies, when conditions change and the rains dry out, combustion rekindles and new flames sometimes burn again.

My eyes followed the subtle movements of Miles's silhouette along the blanketed ceiling of our makeshift fortress. “Yes,” I said finally. “I'll start over with you. But first there's a lot I have to tell you. Some things I'm ashamed of. Bad things I've done.”

He ran his hands through my hair. “Okay. I want to hear it, Claire. But whatever it is that's happened, we'll get through it.”

I wasn't sure we could get through it, and even twelve weeks from that moment of tenderness, it still feels uncertain. But there, under the blankets with Miles, I tallied the lies I'd told, the bad choices I'd made, including the fire in Miles's lab, something I was ultimately responsible for, and I grew anxious, knowing that without the truth, there was no way we could continue.

My tension mounted as I fumbled for the words to explain myself, to confess to my husband. Instead, I thought of the quote I'd impulsively messaged to Dean before I boarded the plane back to Madison:

Like a comet, our dust casts an infinite trail, leaving and returning still.

It was my hint at possibility, that maybe someday, somewhere I would find Dean again, and also an indirect attempt to express that he was not to blame for everything. But the second I sent it, I was embarrassed and ashamed, knowing that those were the last words I would ever say to him.

And so, when Miles kissed me after my confessions were made, I succumbed to him, recognizing and remembering the security of our love, imagining we might find a way to reconstruct a life together, one that would remain uninterrupted from then on. The hope for that better life and the promise of rekindling the simmer between us made it possible to commit to that risky business of beginning again.

• • •

But starting over is no easy feat and even our counselor, Anna, has admitted that as much as what happened at the Quayside set me free from my history—from Dean—it also has left me captive to the guilt that hollows out my insides and bangs panic into my chest, keeping my moods toggled to the spectrum of Miles's clemency or grief. And over the past twelve weeks since my return home, the misgivings I've caused Miles have not mended but spewed into something septic.

His belief that he could forgive me
everything
failed to take into account that the “everything” I disclosed was a more convoluted and complicated betrayal than he could've anticipated. So despite making love in that makeshift tent through tears, while Miles whispered “How could you?” and “No, no, I want you to tell me” and “Of course I'll forgive you,” I found him, nearly three months later, out in the snow, drinking Scotch and stoking a fire of his own.

• • •

Late this past Friday I startled to the sound of a dog barking, to find the bed empty beside me and, out the window, the curling tail of drifting smoke. Tiptoeing, I headed downstairs, where the back porch was lit and Miles sat outside, bundled in the late March cold, the never-ending Wisconsin winter still upon us.

I slid the glass doors open and called, “What are you doing out there?”

Miles did not answer.

Smoke billowed up from a fire before him.

“Honey?” I said.

He shook his head.

I stepped into my boots.

He sipped from a tumbler. And I approached.

The fire flashed orange and blue, and Miles stoked it with a stick as I came closer.

Kneeling beside him, I followed my husband's stare to the center of the blaze, where the white cover of our wedding photo album charred black, its plastic coating shrinking back, while the flames crackled and hissed.