The Fires Read online

  At work Jo was gathering receipts when my sleeve fell back and she saw them. “Ella, what happened?” she said, grabbing my arm and turning the burn toward her.

  “I fell against the iron,” I said, my heart like a caged mouse.

  “It looks worse than it is.” I thought she’d never believe me.

  “It looks painful,” she said. “Have you put anything on it?”

  Later in the lobby two women sat waiting for an old relative to come down from upstairs.

  “I can’t believe the Barr house is gone.”

  “I heard it was a firebug,” said the one with thin strands of hair that clung to her face like paint.

  “They call them pyromaniacs, Susan. They’re not cute.” I stood up and turned around, pretended to be checking the keys in their boxes.

  On Thursday Jo and I went to the Big Wheel for breakfast. We were drinking coffee, and when Jo went to the bathroom I heard the men talking in the booth behind us. “I think there was some-168 / RENÉ STEINKE

  one in that house. A woman. He had a lover in there.” The finely scrambled egss suddenly reminded me of the fuzz on baby chicks, and I put down my fork.

  “That house was condemned. No one could live there.”

  “No, but you could if you were desperate to meet someone.”

  My coffee cup rattled in its saucer, and when Jo came back I was already at the register, the thin paper check wavering between my fingers as I stared down at the chewing gum and mints in the glass case.

  I had to keep myself away from matches for a while, keep myself calm. Where it was easiest not to think about them was work, with Paul there to distract me. I made myself study his face, the wrinkles brooming from the corners of his eyes, the broad plush cheekbones, the faint parallel lines between his nostrils and his lips, the comma in his chin, and the sudsy stubble near his neck. His flesh began to look more substantial than anyone else’s.

  “When I was a kid,” he told me one night—the word sounded ostentatious in his mouth—“I was growing unevenly or something like that, my eardrums before everything else. For about a year every sound I heard was magnified a thousand times. At night I could hear the bugs in the weeds outside, my parents breathing in the room across the hall from mine, my brother combing his hair in the bathroom. Even the flip of a card, the click of a checker on the board, was unbearably loud. I couldn’t sleep.

  I was sure I was going to die soon, but I was too afraid to tell anyone about it.”

  I held two fingers against my mouth, knowing that fear of not being able to trust anyone but yourself.

  XI

  A s I walked back from Marietta’s the cold air had a fluted sheen. I wore the plaid wool coat she’d given me for Christmas, my gloved hands deep in the pockets as I picked my way tentatively over the ragged ice left in the furrow of plowed snow. This time of year, even in boots, it was easy to slip and fall.

  You could die that way if your head slammed back on the pavement, and they’d find you lying there on the sidewalk, arms and legs sprawled. Tonight there were lights on in most of the windows, a greenish tint to the snow.

  I walked slowly, with cramped steps, curling my toes in the thick socks inside my boots. I’d almost blurted out what I knew to Marietta. I’d been a second away from saying, “Why didn’t you tell me she was dead?” but stopped myself just as she held up a red feather and studied it. No matter what I said to her, she’d never allow the truth to stand up and breathe long enough for her to feel regret. It terrified her. She had her birds, her feather collection. She wasn’t going to kill herself as my grandfather had.

  I tracked through an untouched sheet of snow and tried to feel what lay beneath it with the soles of my boots. Was this the place with the path stones? It was always hard to remember what lay beneath snow with only a marker, a spigot, a mailbox, to direct 169

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  you. It made you realize how much you knew intuitively and how much you didn’t. I was wrong. I saw the warped wood bench and remembered this was the rough baseball field, where the boys practiced. I turned onto Washington and heard a dog bark somewhere down the block. Inside my gloves and socks, my fingers and toes stung with cold.

  I was walking toward Grace Church, where the colors in the stained glass vibrated in the gray stone. I realized I’d been wanting to go back but while the church was empty, and remembered the door was sometimes unlocked for choir practice.

  I thought I’d just go in and warm up for a minute. I went up the steps and pressed my thumb down on the handle until it clicked open.

  Closing the heavy door behind me, I stood in the dark hallway where Pastor Beck greeted people after services, took off my gloves and blew on my hands, listening for footsteps or voices.

  Moving through the dark, I bumped the table where they served coffee on Sunday mornings, and something fell over. I opened the door with a cross-shaped window and walked slowly into the sanctuary, where two lights glowed near the altar.

  The pews seemed to multiply and the ceiling expand with the smell of candle wax and old paper. The wooden cross over the altar looked worn and functional, as if it had been cut from someone’s dining-room table. The problem was that the church sometimes trained people to become only more still and solid, to use God as a fortress against the very breath of life which could change you, but I thought sometimes in hymns you could hear the desire to burn away to nothingness, to not cling to yourself so much. I edged into the third pew on the right and looked back at the balcony, where the organ pipes rippled familiarly out of the dark. I turned back around and opened a hymnal, staring at the black notes, tiny vines strung neatly on trellises.

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  No one had replaced the altar candles, and the crooked stubs made the altar look makeshift with its withered brown flowers.

  I draped my coat over the pew in front of me.

  Marietta had told me that last week they’d prayed for Hanna.

  In the other stained-glass windows there was Jesus with a shep-herd’s crook, a few sheep nuzzling in the folds of his robe. FEED

  MY LAMBS, it said. In another, Jesus poured from one jug to another, turning water into wine, and beside that one, loaves of bread and a basket of fish waited beneath Jesus’ outstretched arms.

  Miracles of feeding. In another window Jesus made the sign of the blessing over a sleeping boat of disciples. THE TRUTH SHALL

  SET YOU FREE.

  I looked at the stained-glass window depicting Shadrach, Me-shach, and Abednego in the furnace, their arms lifted into the triangle flames. For them, it had been a test of faith. Was I testing my own? Daring God to show me something? To let me get caught? I looked at the ascension window, where Jesus’ feet were sunk in purple clouds, his hands outstretched to feel the breeze through the nail holes. The apostles ohed around him, their heads craned at an awkward angle, as if they were about to fall into the field of melancholy and scrawny sheep below. The glass had been broken where one of Jesus’ feet should have been, and because there was no one in Porter who knew the old craft, they had simply replaced it with black glass. It looked infinite and empty there, like a jagged piece of night.

  I glanced down at my wrist in my lap, rolled back the bandage.

  The blisters were healing, most of them dried now, the skin brown and hard. I thought, It was an accident, it won’t happen again, I’m done with all that. I wrapped the bandage back around my wrist.

  Music chased the devil away, Luther said, and seeing my father at the organ, I believed it. Just as his rage came from nowhere, so

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  did this music he called down out of the air to make him believe in a hidden world, where God’s face, turned away from us, would one day turn back.

  The rafters lunged above me, the church suddenly huge and hollow, floating. I wanted it to take me somewhere safe. The match heads in my pocket felt like seeds, and I thought about planting roses in the new place, wherever that was, not red ones, but yel
low and pink roses, colors that didn’t ignite the eye but blended easily into skin.

  I got up, with the imprint of hard wood on my thighs, and walked up the side aisle. I ran my finger over the tracery in the window, the black outlines like soot. They were two hundred years old, brought over from Germany, and the glass looked watery, as if it would break easily. Up close the details were different: I saw Hanna’s face hidden in the turn of a path, a disciple’s cupped hand was an eye, the drape in Jesus’ robe a gathering flame he was trying to let go of.

  A fire is only energy before it gets too pure, muscle behind the clear skin of air. The rules of science and safety can only pretend to fathom this, only hint at a way to bend it under control. Silent, the warmth slowly emerges, and the worms in the soil, if it’s damp, thread away from the first blaze reflected in birds’ eyes. The edge won’t devour its middle, but teases it out and up until the flames streak blue. Only the core might eat its own flames, gobble its own like a path leading along a tame snake, then coiling up itself into a serpent about to strike.

  U pstairs a television chattered. I was in the back room facing the clean towels and sheets folded on the shelf, stacking the THE FIRES / 173

  little pink soaps in a box. Part of me was keeping an eye on the door, but it was early and there were no reservations. All day I’d lain in bed reading and nibbling on crackers. Now I watched my hands line up the pink soaps in their yellow wrappers into even lines and uniform rectangles, the waxy residue on my fingertips like the oily moisture from the insides of roses. It was odd that the soaps’ artificial rose smell, nothing like real roses, would remind me so much of them: brocaded on the bush, red, or yellow, none of them perfect, a few of them eaten by mites. Just as I finished the box, suddenly I was crying.

  I went into the bathroom and shut the door. A hiccup stabbed at my chest. I looked at the metal stall and the chrome bulge of the soap dispenser over the rust-stained sink. I hadn’t been thinking of Hanna or my grandfather. I hadn’t been guarding against grief, only mindlessly stacking soaps. As I gasped between sobs, the sick sweet smell of the bathroom cleaner made me gag, and I had to go back out behind the desk.

  I tried to look at the grain of paint in the wall, tried to hum the tune of that song about woodpeckers and moles. I didn’t know exactly what had made me cry: Hanna’s disappearance and my grandfather’s locked-up life, the fear that I would be caught, and my mother’s hold on me, tangled in a mess I hadn’t meant to coax up. I’d only been stacking soaps.

  I heard someone come in, but didn’t turn around and hoped they’d go away and come back later. Keys jangled, and then a hand touched my arm. Paul. “What’s wrong?” His voice sounded as if he were talking through a cloth.

  I held my hands over my face in a ridiculous mask. Whose tears were these? I had to say one true thing so they’d stop. “My aunt died.”

  He put his hand gently on my back. “I’m so sorry. Today?”

  I choked on this, shaking my head. “Weeks ago, no, months—”

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  My voice sounded like a metal lump dredged up with mud from a drainpipe. He put his arm around me, and my shoulders shook against him. I wasn’t going to say any more.

  Having him there made me panicked. The tears would subside and my breaths gain gravity, but only if I didn’t try to speak.

  He didn’t say anything else, though when I drew back my fingers, I saw his lips move, as if he were struggling for the right words in Polish, then translating them in his head.

  P aul had gone to boys’ schools and said he’d been painfully shy until he left Poland. “I used to be at my desk studying or taking a test, and I’d hear girls walking back from their classes, laughing and talking, and I would listen and watch them in their plaid skirts, but they might as well have been on the other side of the earth, because I couldn’t say a word to them.” He claimed to have had his first conversation with a girl his own age on the plane to Chicago, but that was hard for me to believe. “She was from Peoria, Illinois,” he said, pronouncing the s. “And as soon as we landed she ran away from me into the arms of this guy who must have been her boyfriend. I didn’t have any fashions on her, but I didn’t want to cause trouble either, so I didn’t wave good-bye.”

  “Designs, you mean,” I said.

  He’d brought me chocolate the night I told him about Hanna, about the time she’d come home and collapsed on my grandparents’ couch, how everyone gathered around her and stared rev-erently as if she’d been destined to lie there asleep for the rest of her life. Calling her name, I finally woke her, and she groggily sat up, eyes glinting in the pepper of her mascara. One by one, my grandparents and parents left the room. “It was like they preferred her dead, or asleep anyway,” I said.

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  He was standing under the chandelier reaching up to twirl it in his fingers, and the light scattered against the walls. “She was a runaway?”

  “No, not exactly. She just made the family so nervous, she finally decided it would be better to leave.”

  He stopped twirling the chandelier and pulled at a strand of glass teardrops. “What made them nervous?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I’d seen her room, touched her things, and still had to guess. “She was…eccentric. Once she drove my grandfather’s Plymouth into a ditch, and instead of calling anyone, she walked the rest of the way through the snow. She was wearing stockings, high heels, and an evening dress because she was going to a dance, but she just let the police find the car. My grandparents thought she had been kidnapped, when all the time she was dancing in the high-school gym.” He looked away from the chandelier and smiled at me. He liked her. I told him about the time she cut off all the heads of my grandfather’s roses and floated them like red lily pads in the neighborhood swimming pool, about the night when she went to the high school and wrote bawdy limericks in toothpaste on the windows of her classrooms, and about the Christmas Eve she’d wrapped blinking colored lights around her waist and figured out a way to keep them flashing with a battery as she went to the midnight service. No one had told me these stories—I’d made them up.

  Paul laughed. “Maybe you take after her. Are you up to those kind of pranks?”

  Pranks. If only I could have thought of the fires that way.

  I was so trembly during the day it was hard to eat, but at night when I was alone after work, I was starving. I ate whatever I could find in my tiny rental refrigerator, or else went down the 176 / RENÉ STEINKE

  hall to the vending machines for potato chips, peanut butter crackers, candy. It wasn’t much, but I felt fat afterward.

  Sometimes I’d undress and look in the mirror to see if it had made any difference. My stomach would curve out more than I liked, but the scars always looked the same. I’d turn around, following the currents that whipped over my buttocks up onto my back and ended in a watery, pale ripple. I’d lift my flawless right breast and stare at the scarred skin beneath it, red thorns, a cup with teeth, forked tongues. On my stomach, a horsehead with a thick mane. On my left breast, a swiveling rope, a serpent’s tail.

  Just under my collar bone, two shiny ovals like an opened locket.

  No one is more vain than a woman who has been burned. In certain moods I could lose whole hours like this, looking with a different gaze at each scar, this one ugly, this one barely noticeable, this one a tattoo, this one a smear of lipstick, this one drips of honey.

  Sometimes I’d step back in the dimness, let my eyes blur, and see myself naked without them, the outline of my breasts and hips, the flat spread of my shoulders, the length of my thighs—she was the shadow of a woman I might have been. I’d step closer, spread my dark hair around my shoulders and under my breasts.

  If I stood exactly in that pose, the locks of hair lying exactly right, most of the scars were hidden, but I would have had to paste my hair down to my skin to keep them that way.

  I persuaded myself out of these trances by singing my favorite song and nami
ng to myself the last ten new words I’d learned: incommodious, erethism. Or I told myself it was useless to think about my body—it was alive and breathing. I had all my limbs, my eyes, and ears, and teeth. To feel sorry for yourself was the ugliest thing in the world, and it was a kind of ungratefulness my father would not have forgiven.

  XII

  T hat night Paul came around to the side of the desk, unlocked the gate and slipped behind it. “Do you know why we have two percent of copper and zinc in our bodies?”

  I shook my head.

  “Billions of years ago a star exploded, and those bits of the star got in whatever live material made us. Isn’t that amazing?” He was moving his hands a lot, as if trying to swat something away so he could think. “We’re made of stardust!”

  Sometimes his enthusiasm embarrassed me.

  “It sounds like a Frank Sinatra song.”

  Paul came closer, laughing. “I keep thinking I’ll be able to see it. Look how shiny your hair is.” He lifted a strand from my shoulder and rubbed it between his fingers like a watchband or a bracelet. I heard the far-off whistle of the train. Something pounded in the base of my throat. “Sorry,” he said, pulling away his hand. “I just wanted to touch it.” He cocked his head. “Guess I’ll have another round.”

  He was taking a physics class at the college, and he liked to come into the lobby on his break and complain about the professor, who talked like a machine and put most of the students to sleep, then expected them to pass his trick exams, but Paul was 177

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  still always excited about what he’d learned. He smiled the whole time he explained the Uncertainty Principle to me. If you took a very small object, as small as an atom or an electron, and shone a light wave onto it, the photon bounced back to your eye, so you could see where the object was when the light hit it. But the photon also kicked the object away as soon as the light hit it. “So you can know where the object was,” Paul said, “but not where it is.”

  “Like trying to know a person,” I muttered.