What Burns Away (8 page)

Dean pointed to his watch when he saw me. “You're early,” he said. “I'm glad.” He walked toward me across the frozen ground and wrapped his arms around my neck, whispering, “I've been thinking about you all day.”

We stood like that, holding each other until I shivered.

“It's bitter,” he said and escorted me to the passenger side of the pickup.

In the cab, Dean played Dream Academy on the tape deck and began to kiss my face and neck, pulling me out from my layers of clothes. The windows fogged with the heat of our breath. The tape clicked over to the B side. Dean slid one hand inside my jeans. The other tugged his belt from its buckle.

“Wait,” I said.

Dean touched my face. “Don't be afraid.”

My eyes filled with tears, but I was no longer sure who I was crying for.

“Trust me?” he asked.

I nodded and disappeared inside myself as Dean leaned me across the bench seat. His mouth made its way down my chest.

I wondered where my mother was.

Resting a warm hand on my belly, Dean slid the fabric of my panties to the side.

“Open your legs,” he whispered.

When I didn't respond, he did it for me.

I held my breath until his mouth found its way back to my neck and lips.

He pressed his forehead against mine. Our noses touched. His mouth tasted of coffee and smoke, and he buried his hands in my hair. I surrendered then and closed my eyes, envisioning the rocket split in two, my mother's coat hung from the end of the telescope, the man dropping his robe to the floor, Mom's green boots, her turtleneck over her head. And I saw flames for the first time—red, orange, and blue.

Barely touching me, Dean made half-moons with his thumbs on the lobes of my ears and lured me into a spell. With his fingers and tongue, he stirred my need for him until it turned urgent.

He whispered, “I'll be careful.”

Against a moment of pain, my mind went blank.

Then the tape ended, the music silenced, and the strange day vanished with it.

In a way that felt safe, like possession or love, Dean took my face in his hands and stared into my eyes. “My girl,” he whispered. He smiled reassuringly and smoothed my hair off my forehead, before starting the whole process over again.

Thinking back on it now after all that happened over the past twelve weeks, I believe Dean understood all those years ago that some part of me would forever belong to him, because for me, sex would never again be that forbidden or dangerous or new.

• • •

That night of the
Challenger
explosion, as I lay sleepless in my twin bed beside Kara, who snored lightly from beneath her covers, restless images of my mother circled my mind. I could not shake the vision of her hanging her parka from the end of that telescope, the naked man draped in his robe like a king, or Mom's bare back as she pulled her turtleneck over her head.

Unable to sleep, I padded out our front door in my coat and slippers to my mother's station wagon, which we had nicknamed the Dove, parked in the street along the curb. I swear it was beckoning to me to stop her.

It was unlocked, as always, so I climbed inside. Gray upholstery drooped from the ceiling, fabric that flapped in the wind like the wings of a bird whenever we drove the car with the windows down.

The old 1973 Chevy was in constant need of repair. Dad often put it on blocks to work on it himself, but watching him do so caused all of us alarm. My father's body was not as strong as it had been the year before, when he was still working as an engraver at Colt Firearms, and my mother seized every occasion she could find to remind him of this fact.

Something about going on strike had caused his midsection to grow softer, not fat exactly, but rounded at the waistline, more like a woman's belly than a man's, while my mother grew slimmer and slimmer with her Richard Simmons exercise tapes and the pink cans of Tab she took along for her walks to Sea Glass Beach.

The interior of the Dove contained parts that I had learned would be easy to ignite: carpets, seat foam, soft plastic along the dash—the highly flammable materials we had learned about in Mr. Barnet's chemistry unit on combustibles. And the paper cups and newspapers stacked on Mom's passenger's seat made for perfect kindling.

Before I struck the match, I sat inside the car in my pajamas, rummaging through the glove box, where I discovered a picture of Mom and Dad before Kara and I were born. In the snapshot Mom wore an A-line minidress and held their goofy Scottie dog, Holiday, in her lap, while Dad, who looked like a little boy with his crew cut and Army uniform, leaned in for a smooch.

I studied the picture before putting it back, wondering how she could leave my father, whom she had moved in with before they were married, when she was still seventeen. It was unfathomable to me then that my own mother could actually walk into another house, a completely different kind of life, and take off her clothes for that silver-haired man.

But, looking back, I remember Mom talking about different kinds of lives, lives out of our reach, lives she envied, wanting them for herself and our family. Those notions were divulged to all of us when my parents fought, most often over the money we never had, or when my mother came home from a double shift still in her starched, white nursing uniform to find a messy house and my father and his friends watching television or shuffling a deck of cards.

Her message to Dad was always the same: “I worked forty-eight hours straight and I come home to this,” punctuating her assault by reminding my father of all his failed promises. “When we got married you said you'd take care of us, Pete. You promised I'd be able to stay home and raise my kids.” Sometimes Dad would reach for her; other times he would grow heated, frustrated by his inability to grant her that life. But no matter how he responded, Mom headed straight out the door for her walk, and I had discovered where she went to seek comfort.

Wadding up sections from the
Hartford
Courant
on the Dove's passenger seat, the same newspaper that had announced my parents' courthouse wedding after my father was called to the draft in 1969, I balled up every last bit of the Sunday edition into kindling, the ink marking my hands black.

What I knew from Mr. Barnet was that fire needed two things to burn: oxygen and fuel. My fuel sources were the paper and the lighter fluid I'd lifted from Dad's Weber grill on our front porch, next to the silk daisies he left outside all year long. Under the grill's dome, he kept both the butane and a long-handled grill lighter inside a plastic bag. I squirted the lighter fluid like a water gun, dousing the paper and the interior. Then, climbing into the backseat, I rolled down the windows on each side of car so that oxygen could nourish the flames.

Once the prep was done, I slammed the doors and waited for someone to stop me.

I imagined my father on the front stoop, calling my name and asking me, “Just what in the Christ are you doing out here, Claire?”

But when I turned to the house, it stared back like an unlit jack-o'-lantern.

“Stop me, long-haired star,” I called to Halley's comet.

I thought if nothing else, my summons might wake up my parents or Kara, and they would come outside and we could find a way to make things better for all of us.

But the house stayed dark and the sky did not answer. I did not see the comet that night. I cannot blame it for starting my fire, and I cannot credit it for stopping me.

From above, only Orion winked back, his club in hand, protecting us from Taurus, the bull, in heaven.

I put the letter snatched from my father's dresser into the car with the last of the coupon inserts from the Sunday circulars and triggered the lighter with my thumb. Not wanting my mother's words to be true, I ignited the letter first, then the loose fabric of the car's interior. The heat flamed up against my hands and my face, while the rage welled in my heart. I shut the door and walked swiftly toward the house in slippers soaked by the snow.

There was a hush, a moment of peace as I walked off. Then I heard the whoosh of the fire gulping the oxygen and that furious, glorious rush of flames.

I approached the front door, and reflected back at me from the bay window of our house were flashes. They crested over the car like waves, oranges and blues, reds, a sliver of green. They lapped at the sides of the vehicle and reached over the hood. Witnessing it, a kind of warmth spread through me. It moved from my heart, up my neck, out my arms, down to my frozen toes. The awe caught in my throat. I giggled. I remember covering my mouth with both hands, tiptoeing into the foyer, and shutting the door, pausing to behold that miraculous thing, the same combustion that allows flight, and I counted: “Three, two, one, liftoff.”

I crept up the stairs and slipped back into bed next to Kara, shutting my eyes and feigning sleep when she stirred.

There was a minute, maybe two, before the sound of fireworks, followed by an explosion that roused everyone else inside.

My father ran down the hall, shouting to my mother who slept on the couch. “Kat! Jesus Christ, it's your car! It's on fire!”

She yelled back. “Get the kids!”

They scrambled, my mother running up the stairs, my father coming down the hall, colliding at the top of the landing. One of them gasped.

“Girls!” my father hollered.

I sprang from my bed, turning the corner behind Kara to find my parents watching the flames from the window.

And, there, despite all the distance between them and the letter Mom had written, my parents held each other, proving the lesson Mr. Barnet had imparted:

“Fires possess an ultimate, unlimited kind of power.”

Even before reconnecting with Dean, I sometimes dreamed about the Quayside, that view from the windowsill where he and I last made love, carrying with it a dark reminder of all that had been poached from my childhood the minute my mother opened the door and stepped inside the place. Those consequences of my mother's affair kept me inside my own marriage, one I became ambivalent about after the move, and even before, when I started to question it shortly after the birth of our son.

Miles tried to make things right. I don't blame him, really. He sensed my slipping from the present a few weeks after arriving in Madison, believing I was falling into a transitional depression. That's what he told my counselor, that he thought it was something he could fix if he had more time to pitch in around the house.

And I wish, of course, that the answers were as basic as Miles making his own coffee and rinsing his mug when he finished, or managing the mountain of trash in his office and clearing away the bowls encrusted with food strewn across his desk. Those were the chores generally left for me after he headed for the hospital to perform acts of God, while I stayed behind to tidy the mess. And sure, I resented those things at times, but the trouble was deeper, old trouble all mine.

When he came home late one night to find me tearful, a box of faded snapshots of the Quayside scattered across the floor, he said, “Maybe the drive was too much,” blaming the nineteen hours in the overstuffed car four months prior and the 1,100 miles we'd crossed with our screaming baby as the shortest days of winter set in.

In some ways, he was right. With each tick of the odometer, I slipped further from our axis, allowing a magnetic field to form between us, replacing the powerful attraction I once felt for Miles with resistance to the change.

Our first night in the rental house, the start of the fall term for Miles's academic responsibilities for the Department of Medicine, began with a fight. We were tired and weary from the nineteen-hour drive, a race through the night to meet the movers, who were already unloading our things when we arrived.

I held Jonah in my arms as I entered the narrow quarters Miles had rented for us, a place he had found during his recruitment and that I had not seen. Inside, it was stark and angular. The stairwells had tight, sharp corners, not a banister to be found. Each wall was paneled in dark wood, aside from the front room made entirely of windows. The bedrooms had cast-iron balconies with no railings, the worst kind of situation for our new walker, Jonah, still unsteady on his feet. And each room hosted a beautiful open-concept fireplace with no glass around the hood to contain the flames.

Although beautiful, the place was not a family house. It felt, as I walked through it, like a house Miles had chosen for himself, a hasty self-serving choice made for its proximity to the hospital, ignoring Jonah's safety and my own comfort. This disregard was reminiscent of my husband's lack of consideration for my career when he pushed for a relocation I had already expressed apprehension about. The work of motherhood and the priorities of our family seemed to be afterthoughts to Miles, swept up with ambitions, and I was enraged by that.

“Isn't it great?” Miles asked.

I cut open a box of dishes. And lifted them toward the cabinets I'd lined with paper. “You've got to be kidding me.” I paused.

Miles grinned ear to ear. “I love it. And it's so close to the lab. Super convenient.”

Heat ran through me. My face flushed. And something in me, something I had been holding tight, snapped. I tossed plates and saucers to the ground, where they broke into shards.

From the Pack 'n Play beside me, Jonah erupted into tears.

I screamed at Miles. “Did you think about anyone other than yourself for even one second before you dragged us here?” And what I couldn't tell him in that moment, because I was too angry, was that I was desperately afraid.

• • •

I was thirty-two years old when I was first drawn to my husband. My third glass of white wine was empty as Miles and I stood in a mass of people in Boston Red Sox caps watching the playoffs, all eyes holding fast to the flat screens lining the bar, while Jason Varitek stepped to the plate, working his way toward erasing an eighty-six-year curse.

Miles, who was one year my senior, stood out from the crowd in his Cleveland Indians T-shirt, which announced his dedication to the Rust Belt team and the hometown he had left behind. With his serene green eyes and full lips, dressed in the tattered vintage crewneck tee beneath an open dress shirt with monogrammed sleeves, he presented himself as an attractive combination of awkward and refined.

“An Indians fan,
reall
y
?” I said as I moved past him to get a closer view of the game.

He looked right at me and raised his hand in the greeting of Chief Wahoo. Fumbling through his pants pockets, he placed a guitar pick, a fistful of ketchup packets, his Ohio driver's license, and one marmalade jelly packet on the bar, then bought my drink with a wad of wrinkled singles held together by a paper clip.

I held up my glass for a toast. “Go Sox,” I said.

“Sometimes I steal things,” he told me, “to hang on to the important moments.” Then he touched his snifter, a keepsake he would later pocket, to my wineglass.

“To the Sox. To meeting you.”

For a split second his fingertips grazed the fleshy center of my palm, and he gave me a nod as if we were in it together.

During the game's eighth inning, Carl Crawford and Aubrey Huff scored two runs, setting the Red Sox up for a 4–9 loss. I hissed along with the crowd before Miles swept me off to the wharf.

We cut through cobblestone alleys toward Mystic's waterfront port, where all the buildings leaned against each other, exhausted by their old age. The willows that lined our path had yellowed with the September frost, and the gaslights set between them drew moths out from the dark. We walked to where the streets ended and the docks began, the tide gently frothing and a low fog rising off the ocean.

Ambling through the village, Miles held my wrist, not my hand, and anyone who saw us would have thought I was being dragged. Yet I submitted willingly to the childishness of the gesture, which endeared me to him immediately.

“Want my hand?” I offered in an almost-shout over a tugboat horn.

“I'm taking your pulse,” Miles announced.

Then, through the open doors of the pubs lining Main Street came the collective grumble of a wanton Red Sox nation. And, as if inspired by their groan, Miles pulled me into his coat and we stood looking over the water, our backs to the noise.

He did not kiss me but whispered instead, his lips barely touching my ear, “Nervous girl.”

“No, no.” I corrected him. “Excited girl.”

He let go of my wrist and guided my fingers to his neck, where I felt his pulse racing and the world receding around us. I breathed deeply, smelled the salt in the air, and asked the same question: “Nervous man?”

He whispered, “Maybe.”

And in that moment, staring out over the flat waters of the Atlantic, dark and slick as obsidian, I knew somehow that the two of us would run off into the unknown together.

“Beautiful night,” I said.

“But no wind,” he added. “Otherwise, I'd take you out in my old dory right now. But without a motor, we might be set adrift.”

It didn't sound so bad. “Let's swim,” I said, buzzed by the wine.

Feeling enchanted by the mild autumn night, I tugged on his arm, moving us further down the wharf, growing eager for the possibility brewing between us. I pointed to a spot above the horizon and below the quarter moon.

“Sea smoke,” I told him. “The ocean is warmer than the air. Probably the warmest, calmest waters we'll see until summer.”

I pulled off my coat and laid it across the creaking dock, then slid off my sandals and wiggled out of my jeans.

Miles watched me.

“You're insane!” he said, meaning it as a compliment.

And shortly thereafter he was tossing his own coat onto the wharf, shrugging out of his shirt, and pulling his Cleveland Indians T-shirt over his head. “So we're really gonna do this?”

His body was lean and chiseled in those days, the physique of a runner or a swimmer, maybe, some sinewy sort of Iron Man. And in the dark, his smile was bright.

Then I took him by the wrist. And as I heaved Miles toward the end of the plank, wearing only my tank top, bra, and panties, he was heavier than he appeared. Unable to budge him further, I stood on my tippy-toes and shouted: “Ready? One, two, three!”

Headfirst into the water with my best swan dive, my body plummeted through the calm. I held my breath through the momentary shock of the cold and opened my eyes, watching the bubbles and silver light as I crested to the water's surface.

Standing shirtless in just a pair of jeans, Miles watched me bob.

“No way!” he shouted.

I let out a shriek. “It's only cold for a second!”

Miles took several slow paces backward, his head held low like a scolded puppy, and as soon as I believed he had decided against it, he dropped his jeans, stepped from them, then ran as fast as he could, cannonballing into the bay.

A foot away from me, he came up for air.

“You're nuts, you know that?” he called out with such open admiration that it made me laugh too, delighted at myself.

We swam toward each other, treading water and giggling like kids, holding on to one another and finally kissing until Miles's teeth began to chatter.

“Let's get warm,” he said, initiating our return.

I hurried up the slick rungs of the wharf first.

Close behind, Miles spotted me, keeping his hand on my hip.

Still giggling and hopping to ward off the chill, we dried our dimpled skin on our coats and shimmed our damp bodies into our jeans. Dressed, we stood for a moment, beholding one another. He grinned. “I like you,” he said, and all I could think about was that kiss. I wanted more of it, of him. Then driven by an intense attraction, I took his hand.

“Come home with me,” I told him.

Both of us ran, shoes in our hands, winding through the cobblestone streets against the breeze, until we reached the door of my apartment, where I turned the key.

I glanced over my shoulder at Miles.

“You were right,” I admitted. “Nervous girl.” I wasn't so sure I was prepared for what would unfold, but I wanted it nonetheless.

Miles smiled his wide, bright grin and said confidently, “You should be.”

And there we began.

• • •

But Miles, I've come learn, is not as vulnerable as me. I'm still the nervous, needier one, and my husband has come to view that wariness as an unattractive insecurity.

Although our relocation was exhausting and hard, it was “just a move,” as Miles likes to remind me now. “Not even all the way across the country, just half.” And, yes, he is right. People do it all the time, people with much harder lives than our own.

And I should feel thankful that our son pulled through the pneumonia he had the week after we arrived in Wisconsin, where my mother's letter waited, in which she wrote to Jonah: “Moving is tough, my sweet, sweet boy. But what's a little loneliness, my dear,” even though I am quite certain she has never allowed herself to be lonely.

Simply, the moment our boxes of packed dishes hit the floor, I couldn't stop the sadness. Maybe it was the adjustment to the lack of lithium in the air. Being too far from the ocean has always messed with my head, which is why for nearly forty years of my life I'd avoided living in the middle, the great oceanless expanse of it, keeping a tight hold on the coast. And it was a bad time for us to be here, arriving in mid-September during the onset of shorter days, soon to be trapped by the coming winter, feeling like foreigners in our own country, and just as I was beginning to feel a part of the world after my clunky initiation into motherhood.

Maybe I didn't want to start over again because I didn't know who to start over as. The former outrageous blond girl I remember was unrecognizable in the murky-haired stranger with puffy eyes who looked back at me from the mirror. Maybe because Dean remembered who I had been, I was compelled by him and those old powers he had over me.

Having grown up with four sisters, and being the youngest and only son born to an Irish Catholic mother, Dean admitted to me that back in high school, his sisters had blessed him with insider information about girls. It was the Fourth of July, we had been dating seven months, and as we sat in the bed of his pickup truck, sharing swigs from a bottle of Miller High Life, he told me, “You know, I used every secret my sisters whispered to each other about boys to my full advantage with you.”

I took the bottle from his hands and peeled the label back. We leaned against the cab, counting fireflies. “I don't have those kinds of secrets,” I said. “But after I caught my mom in a lie, I set her car on fire.”

Dean seemed neither shocked nor amazed. He simply held me as if he understood the motive.

Over his shoulder, I watched Roman candles flaring up into the sky.

“We all have secrets,” he said, his face buried in my hair. “I bet when we're old, we'll have a lot more skeletons in the closet. I've got a few fires I'd like to set myself. If I knew where my father lived, his house would go first.”

We sat silent for a moment. Maybe it was then that we first considered making a fire together, mutually imagining how the scene would play out. Then Dean jumped from the bed of the truck onto the gravel road and walked toward the creek. He lit a smoke. Something told me not to follow.

Above us I located Scorpius set off by Antares, the sixteenth brightest star in the sky. I considered what other secrets I would have to keep and, like the scorpion battling Orion, I wondered what battles I would fight.

When I turned back toward the water, Dean had stripped out of his jeans, down to his boxer shorts, and was wading into the stream.