What Burns Away (23 page)

My heart panged. And to steady the tremble in my knees, I sat on a log beside him, the ground still frozen beneath my feet, the snow glistening. I hugged my arms around my chest to fend off the bluster and withhold my hurt, remembering the ivory dress I wore on our wedding day, the eyelet fabric that fit slim and spilled out into a train, the baby's breath in my hair, and how Miles beamed as I stepped toward him under a gazebo on the village green.

I said, “How can I make things right?”

Miles stared straight ahead. Brought his glass back to his lips. I couldn't help but notice his absent wedding band and wondered if maybe I should leave him alone. But I also felt deserving of his anger, whatever form it might take, and so I stayed. Waiting.

From him, there was only silence.

“Miles?” I said.

He reached between us into a slouched canvas bag and lifted another album into his lap. He tapped his naked ring finger on the word
HOME
typed in gold across the book's center.

I set my hand on his wrist. “Honey,” I said. “Don't.”

But he pitched it underhanded into the flames. Hot embers spattered at our feet.

“Don't leave me,” I whispered.

And as the cinders cooled from orange to ash, burning up with our wedding album were the pictures of our home renovations in Mystic, the before-and-after shots Miles had meticulously captured with his Nikon in early-morning sunlight, images he had developed himself after the reconstruction was done. The photo book was a gift he made for me the first Christmas in our newly restored house.

At the epicenter of the flames, the album seemed to go liquid. The smoke billowed, black.

I reached for my husband.

He shirked.

The fumes were toxic; the flames went blue-hot.

“I'm sorry,” I muttered.

With his face twisted into a grimace, Miles tossed the last of his drink toward the glare. Then he stood and, walking away from me, boomed, “Shame on you, Claire.”

• • •

These past two days, nothing is certain. Miles's address of me wavers with a constant swing of emotions—a pat on my knee this morning in bed, then a moment later, a stern glance in my direction.

Outside, the place where the photo books burned looks like a rabbit hole in the snow, and I think about Alice falling down the dark center of it, chasing after the White Rabbit into that troubled and peculiar Wonderland.

At the breakfast table, I warily join my husband and son, where I unfold the Sunday paper to read the forecast, hoping for a thaw.

Miles makes coffee.

Jonah dips a paintbrush into a watercolor palate.

The one hundred forty days of snow cover we've had this winter are tallied in the
Wisconsin
State
Journal
, the calculation in agreement with Punxsutawney Phil's prediction that we should be in our last stretch of a long, brutal winter. I remind myself that this kind of early April freeze is a metaphor, the frozen snow protecting and insulating the grasses and seeded grains beneath it while they await better weather for their bloom.

Jonah taps his brush on the edge of a glass.

“Pretty,” I tell him of his work.

Miles sets a steaming mug in front of me, and I echo the mantra Anna keeps tacked to her clinic door in an attempt to steady the race of my heart every time my husband stands close to me: “Live in the present. Be in the now.” Because to do otherwise means worrying about the future or hating myself for the past, both of which send me spinning with fear and guilt and sadness.

Of course to “be in the now” also means to live where the consequences are, while in the meantime I attempt to forgive myself enough to go forward and be a good mother to sweet Jonah, who happily paints three tiny rainbows beside me.

“For Mama, Dada, and Jonah,” he says. He arcs red, green, yellow, and blue across the white paper as I have taught him.

Miles flips the pancakes. Then comes close again to study his son's work. He tousles Jonah's hair and whispers, “Artiste.”

Next week, our big boy will be eighteen months old. And since he will be old enough, Miles has encouraged me to enroll Jonah at the university day care, reassuring me that it's an amazing place. Once Jonah starts “school,” as we're calling it, I'll begin a new job as an environmental consultant for Midwestern Energy Manufacturers, who face ozone compliance issues. Miles found the posting and said it was not an option, that I
had
to apply. After three interviews and a few follow-up phone calls, I was shocked to be offered the position. It'll be my first employment since my pregnancy, and starting it, I'll be scared to death.

The fear is not just about how I'll need to work double time to make up for knowledge not gained during my eighteen-month sabbatical at home, or about leaving Jonah in the care of someone else, although those concerns make my thoughts spin:
What
if
there's an emergency? What if Jonah doesn't nap? How will we all get out the door in the morning? What if I misread the printouts from the spectrometers?

But even if all those worries come to pass, taking the position means accepting that I will never be a NASA correspondent like my friend Gillian, acknowledging that for me it's a girlhood dream passed by. And with that acceptance, I also can't keep from wondering if Miles pushed me into the job so that I can become financially and emotionally independent—so that he can eventually leave me on my own.

This morning I struggle to stay hopeful, knowing that in time these answers will reveal themselves. Until then, I'm toiling through things with Anna to see what work I have left to do on myself, on our marriage, hoping Miles will continue to slog it out with me—hoping to get more clarity about what I learned and what I can still change.

On the table, Miles sets out the breakfast plates.

I breathe deeply. I sip from my mug. “Can I help?” I ask.

Miles shakes his head no and lays a platter of pancakes in the center of the table, and as he leans forward, Jonah smiles and paints a splotch of blue on his daddy's nose. Proud of himself, our little boy reaches out and wraps his arms around us both.

• • •

In meteorology, dark matter is a term used to describe all that appears to be missing from the universe, things there but unseen. The existence of dark matter is inferred only from the gravitational pull it asserts upon observed objects. No doubt, I'll always feel the pull of what I can no longer perceive—my dead father, the demolished Quayside, perhaps even Dean.

But I also understand now that Miles could never have saved me from the pull of that dark matter, nor the loneliness the past imparted to me. During that brutal time in our marriage—the move, the isolation—through all of it, I was weak and strong-armed by the force of a history that was, quite simply, stronger than me.

So like the little girl in the Khoisan legend, I tossed red-hot embers from my fist, but in my version of the story, what I illuminated was that dark matter from my past. I do believe I learned from the flames at Quayside and all that brought me there, that I was vulnerable to those childhood holdovers like we all are, and that to linger in their wrongs means to blight the life out ahead.

I can only hope that one day Miles will trust me again. And, God willing, if I am given that second chance, I want to be, for all of us, the mother and the wife and the scientist he loved—one I hope he still does. What I learned from all of it is that maintaining the wellness of my son, my husband, and myself—who we three are together, with respect for who and what we sometimes need to be independent of one another, not losing ourselves inside each other's ambitions or affections—is what counts most. And I do believe now that no matter how strong the pull of the past, I can persevere in the present and do my small part to restore the wounded sky, righting the troubles instigated long ago when that old comet Halley went passing by.

1. We see Claire depicted as vulnerable throughout much of the novel—not just as a new mother and homesick wife, but also as a person who bears the weight of her past. What strengths do you see emerging out of Claire's vulnerability?

2. In what ways do you see Claire's guilt over her father's death manifesting itself in the plotline of the novel?

3. Is Claire ever able to see Dean for who he really is, or do you think people always fall victim to seeing the most redeeming qualities in their former lovers?

4. This novel demonstrates how influential the virtual world is, not just in Claire's life, but also in Dean's ability to find her. How are relationships affected by our constant use of social media and virtual communication?

5. Claire is very clearly the central character of this book, but is she the character you feel most connected to? Why or why not? What other characters do you find most compelling?

6. At the end of the novel, we are led to believe there may be a possible resolution between Claire and Miles. Do you think this is the best thing for them? Or do you think they would be better off on their own?

7. This novel plays with the intersection of the present and the past. How hard is it for the characters in this novel—Claire, her mother, her sister, even Dean—to evaluate people from their past?

8. Many marriages are changed with the arrival of children. Do you think having a child changed Claire's expectations for her marriage to Miles? If so, in what ways?

9. Miles is obviously the breadwinner in the story, so Claire stays home to raise her son. Do you think the stakes of their marriage would have been different if Miles were the one to surrender his career to raise Jonah?

10. In the final chapter, Claire has resolved herself to “living a life without fire.” What is she talking about here?

11. When Jonah goes missing in the story, we realize that everything is at stake for Claire. How does that scene influence our feelings toward her as a mother?

12. In this novel, motherhood and professionalism are clearly in conflict with each other. In what ways is Claire's plight universal?

13. How does Claire's father's infidelity affect Claire's understanding of her mother and herself?

14. Do you think there is hope for Claire and Kara sustaining a relationship? Do you have a sense that they will ever be closer, like they were as children?

15. If you were Claire, would you have been able to light the match at the Quayside? What was her ultimate motivation? Do you believe Claire will be able to put her haunting to rest now that the Quayside is gone?

In
What Burns Away
, which character do you feel most connected to, and why?

The story is Claire's story, of course. She is the one we have the most access to—her loneliness, her loss, and her confused identity. Initially, when I first wrote the book, I found myself most deeply connected to her and the ever-changing world of new motherhood, its required self-sacrifice. And because I too was still in that place, coming to terms with having a young son and what it meant to put a teaching and writing career on the back burner, I found myself identifying most closely with Claire and her sense of isolation. But, through the process of revision, I've grown deep affection for Miles, who is so focused on providing for his family that he nearly loses them altogether. Throughout the rewrite, I lingered most in scenes with him, most especially the one after his lab has burned, where we see Miles, perhaps for the first time, as vulnerable as Claire. Understanding how Miles is made powerless during that crisis, I've become tender toward him, especially in those moments where his professional polish and impenetrable drive crack. Once things go undone in the lab, and later when he comes searching for Claire and Jonah in Connecticut, I worked hard to reveal Miles's tender underbelly and his emotional responsiveness so readers understand that he too is struggling. And finally, at the close of the book, Miles undergoes what I feel is a real reversal. There beside a fire of his own making, burning their wedding albums, it's my hope that the reader will note the subtle parallels between him and Claire's father—men aching to reclaim broken marriages they, too, have failed to nurture, maybe realizing belatedly their own role in the relationships' unraveling. But for Miles, it is not yet too late.

What was your inspiration for writing
What Burns Away
?

For most of my adulthood, while I was perusing a writing life, I also worked full-time as inner city schoolteacher—first in the South Bronx, then in San Jose, California's Eastside Union District, followed by downtown Boston. I had many complicated students who came through my classroom doors, including three teenage arsonists, one of whom was a fourteen-year-old girl, who, aside from loving fire, was also, like me, infatuated with the sky. Although this young woman was deeply troubled, having survived a traumatic childhood, losing her parents to addiction and bouncing between foster homes before she struck the match that would take her out of my charter school and back into a juvenile detention center, we spent afternoons bent over star charts and reading the legends of Halley's comet, working on her research paper, awed by all of it, together. I always wondered about that young woman after she was gone, imagined where she might be and how I could have saved her somehow. I also wondered who it was she might become. So there's a bit of that student in Claire, along with a bit of my own family. My maternal grandfather, Jim Horan, who died tragically in a car wreck shortly before my birth, had been a Hartford firefighter. Despite his absence during my upbringing, his work was what my mother and her four brothers most often talked about around our holiday tables. Often, those discussions led to the legendary Hartford Circus Fire of 1944 and Grandpa Jim's understanding of the fire science that led to the devastation there.

What advice would you give to aspiring fiction writers?

Touch it every day—just a sentence or a word. Take a walk with your story, think about it as you rock your baby to sleep, do everything you can to hold on to the thread of your story, because once you drop it, it's hard to find again in all the chaos of everyday life. I say this because there was a long stretch of time when I wondered if I would ever finish Claire's story, juggling teaching responsibilities, then orchestrating my own cross-country move, all with a very busy and often missing husband and a young child in tow. But I'd say too, if nothing else, scribble new notes daily in whatever handful of time you can find. Along the way, I wasn't getting a lot of encouragement for my writing, but there always remained a part of me that needed Claire to stay afloat, to have something all my own, and for me, her story and her voice had become real. It sounds hokey, but I really did want to know what it was she was supposed to teach me, so I keep returning to the narrative to find out. I think aspiring writers need to take those simple steps. Some days it's literally writing one word or one sentence, on better days it is one paragraph, and later, all of it comes rushing out in pages. And most important, of course, is that while writing, you must read—obsessively. By this, I mean reading like a writer, studying the crafting of a book, wondering about the choices the author made, and considering all the ways the story was constructed.

Did you do any particular research about arson to write this book?

I always thought I didn't like science. It was not my strong suit in school. But as a kid I liked to set fires, small ones out behind the local drugstore, bonfires on the beach, and at home, even now, when someone lights a candle, I can't keep my fingers out of the wax. I knew there was a science to fire, a chemistry about it, but none of that science really spoke to me until I found Michael Faraday's old lectures from the Royal Institution of London. And, really, I just loved reading them. I thought the experiments were dazzling, and I performed a few at home. I loved that trick of dipping arsenic into a flame and watching it go blue; for me, so much of that chemistry felt new, even though I learned some of it in school. So, yes, I started to research fire science, learning how fires behave, studying how they move through enclosed rooms. Then, in my backyard, while my son napped and my neighbors mowed their lawns here in Madison, Wisconsin, I lit Ping-Pong balls on fire and made flamethrowers with aerosol cans. I studied combustion so I could understand Claire's draw to those flames.

Why did you choose to set the novel in two different settings? Do you see a particular contrast between the East Coast and the Midwest?

I'm a New England girl, and although I have lived all over the country, there's been very little of my life, until recent years, that I have spent without an ocean. When my husband and I moved to Madison three years ago, I thought, “There's a lake. It's water. It's all the same.” But what I learned that first winter was how different weather patterns move across bodies of water, how the snow on a lake lasts longer and drifts in ways I have only ever associated with sand, whereas it's the wind off an ocean that delivers a nor'easter, with snow that melts quick and floods to cause coastal erosion. To me it was noting these differences in those two kinds of unforgiving winters that make both the Midwest and New England equally spectacular in the severity of their storms. The commonality, of course, is the desolation of those long winters, that kind of beauty you have to search for—a cardinal in the underbrush or the ice coating naked birch branches. I suppose too that it was my interest in those weather patterns that ultimately led to my choosing atmospheric chemistry as Claire's career.

Your main character Claire is, at times, a seemingly unreliable narrator. Did you find her character hard to write, and why did you choose to depict her this way?

I think an unreliable narrator is especially useful when developing a story in which the characters' work/life balance is all off. Claire is a more unhinged version of how I think many new mothers feel after the birth of their first child, especially older moms like myself, who had lives that were once defined by their careers. Then—
wham!
—there she is at home, doing the hard work of rearing a child, mostly in isolation. The balance is off for Claire and Miles once they become parents, and thus, I wanted Claire to reflect that imbalance, taking those normal unanchored emotions to an extreme and to become the kind of unreliable narrator I have always found alluring in fiction.

What do you love most about writing?

What I love most about writing is not knowing where I am going. When we were kids, my parents would take my sister, Kristen, and me on what they called a “mystery ride” in our old wood-paneled station wagon. We never knew where we would end up, but often there would be ice cream. I loved those drives the same way I love writing—how you can be on a road you vaguely recognize, unsure of your final destination, until the very end. I was really lucky to find my wonderful agent, Jennifer Gates, and her copilot at the time, Lana Popovic, who took a ride with me on this book.
What
Burns
Away
was in an early draft when I first sent it to Jen, and I felt like by the end of our revision process together, and again after we got my editor Shana Drehs in the car, we were all four arriving at the close of the novel and that journey together. The editing is
really
rewarding for me, as much so as the conception of a story. So even when it means cutting away scenes, or letting my characters fail despite my desire to protect them (which was hard for me with Claire), I love that process, that journey through the narrative, getting to the end and writing the whole work over again, informed. Because so much of writing is done alone, getting feedback from smart readers and working out the story's flaws, for me, is where the magic really starts to happens. That journey through the revision process is my greatest pleasure as a writer.

What relevance do you see socioeconomics having in the novel and, in particular, Claire's story?

Claire's crossing from a blue-collar world into a more privileged one is relative because she fails to assimilate anywhere. Through her narrative, we learn that Claire was the first person in her family to attend college, and we understand that there was little push from her mother to do so. Therefore, the professional identity she created for herself was of her own drive. Writing her, I understood too that although Claire longs for the past and that old house on Willard Street, she is no longer a part of that world. Gone from her in all ways, Dean remains the only true representative of that place, drawing Claire to him because not only is she ostracized culturally and regionally from her history, but also because she fails to find a sense of belonging in her husband's privileged world of medicine. It is that play on socioeconomics that furthers Claire's isolation and ropes her into Dean's scheme.

How do you see Claire's virtual affair working toward or against her as a catalyst for change?

Claire is so caught up in what is behind her that I worked hard to emphasize her disillusionment with what is in front of her. My hope was to leave Claire susceptible to the kind of seemingly “safe” virtual affair she embarks upon. Thus, it seemed only logical to make Claire's first exchanges with Dean virtual to make it plausible that she would indulge the flirtation. Of course, she mistakenly believes that an online affair is both private and risk-free, allowing the exchange to grow more and more intimate until she falls victim to the dream of living another life, like her mother did, like Emma Bovary after La Vaubyessard ball. It was very hard for me to let Claire eventually fall prey to an
actual
affair. In the earlier drafts of the book, I kept stopping her short before anything unfolded physically between her and Dean. But ultimately, as I revised and worked through the edits, I felt that a virtual affair alone was not consequential enough to push Claire toward a reversal. So, I put her and Dean in a room alone together just to see what would happen. And once I set them there inside the inn, entangled with the memory of who they were, wanting each other but also wanting to reclaim their youth, I simply could not apply the brakes. I believe too that Claire's betrayal of her husband, and most especially of herself, was one of the most emotional parts of this writing. To let your narrator fall and know she may not recover is a hard thing to do when you are emotionally invested in the character. Yet, I do see Claire's failure to stay faithful to the marriage as part of what forces her to look inward and reclaim herself, and as the thing that finally sets her free of the past's hold on her.

Self-forgiveness and atonement are major themes in this novel. Who do you believe has done the most genuine atoning in this story? Who has the biggest sin to forgive?

The mother-daughter relationship between Claire and Kat is especially interesting to me in terms of forgiveness. How they reach for each other after all those years of hurt, Claire having carried a sense of responsibility for her father's death, then learning that the history between her parents was more complicated than she ever could have imagined. But what was most incredible about writing a dually troubled love story (Kat and Peter, Claire and Miles) is examining all the different types of love and the angles that love can manifest, alongside the remedies for heartache, forgiveness being one. For me it is Claire who does the most damage in this story—her anger is often misdirected, both toward her mother and her husband, and her facts are skewed, yet it is also she who is forced to make the greatest reparations toward self-forgiveness. I set out to render Claire's marriage to Miles as a sort of destroyed fairy tale, which is why I love the cover so much—that image of a storybook set safe in a shadow box with matchsticks. And as Claire embarks down a path of moral ruin, unable to appreciate the realities of her life, becoming full of nostalgic fancy after reconnecting with Dean, she grows only further discontented with her domestic monotony. Claire is unable to accept her current situation and attempts to escape it through deception. This, of course, only brings her further harm, ultimately risking the marriage altogether and jeopardizing the well-being of their beloved Jonah. For these things, it is Claire alone who must atone. And it is Miles who must forgive her if they are to step from the wreckage and build again.

In the novel, we find many quotes that deal with the sky, most especially Halley's comet, and in the opening chapter you write: “Nineteen eighty-six was the occasion of Halley's comet…and it seemed everything that happened that year was caused by the sky.” Can you discuss why you chose to use the comet's pass as a literary device?