The Fires Read online

  I could take him to my old apartment building and point to the burned place in the ground where the shack had stood, go with him to the Housemans’ and show him how I had started that fire, then take him to the ruins of the Barr house, where I’d burned myself. “I did these things,” I might say. Then again, another, weaker part of me longed to pretend none of it had ever happened.

  I had just turned on the temperamental NO VACANCY sign in the window, and Paul walked into the lobby, at the end of his midnight round, his face flushed and his eyes bright. “Your mother’s so skinny. Is she sick?”

  I went back around behind the desk and pulled the guest book into the drawer. “How did you know that was her?”

  He stood just outside the desk’s gate and pushed it open to come behind the desk and stand beside me. I thought he’d seen her when she brought me a loaf of raisin bread, but I hadn’t introduced them. “It was her then. She has your mouth.”

  I picked up a rag and began to dust out the key boxes. Paul opened a drawer, took out a flask he kept there, and poured us each a plastic cup of bourbon. “That was her sister, not your father’s, right?”

  “That’s right.” I slid the rag into a back corner. “But she hadn’t THE FIRES / 189

  seen her in seven years.” The last part came out impulsively, and I wanted to take it back.

  His own family was so far away, it was easier to act as if mine were just as distant. He wrote lots of letters to Poland, even to the uncle—Paul said it proved to himself that he had forgiven him but also left him the means to remind him of what he’d done, if he ever needed to. “Why not?” he said.

  “I don’t know. I told you. She just left.” I stopped dusting and took a sip from the cup. The bourbon tasted like gasoline.

  “Because?”

  Whenever Paul and I slept together, I felt sapped and fragile, dried up and sensitive to wind like a twig, something that would light and burn too easily, and I felt that way now, too. I sat down in my wheeled chair and rolled myself back to the wall. “It was the best thing for everyone.” My face pocked with the first sting of alcohol. I was afraid for him to know any more. I saw the way the muscles in his face would go limp, and I’d have to repeat what I’d said because he wouldn’t believe it at first, and I imagined his affection for me draining through the sieve of what I’d said.

  He heaved himself up to sit on the desk. “To leave your family?

  But you pay a price for that.” He finished the bourbon in his cup and poured himself a half inch more. He could drink a lot more than I could before he ever acted drunk. “Or somebody does.”

  Thinking of my grandfather, I gulped down the bourbon, and it scalded my throat. “Ever since her father died, my mother won’t eat. She says she’s eating, but she’s not. A couple of months ago, she even fainted and broke her ankle.” That should be enough, I thought.

  His forehead knotted into two clumps. “How long ago did he die? You should take her to the doctor.” His question felt like an invasion, and I pulled my jacket closed in the front.

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  “She’s not sick.” Somehow I had assumed he understood how much I had to protect, and now his reckless questions sounded disingenuous and cruel.

  I let out a long sigh, stalling for time. “She’s angry, but she doesn’t want anyone to see it, and it’s coming out anyway.” Like some perversely reversed hidden pregnancy.

  “But why is she angry?”

  I pushed the back of the chair into the wall, felt the metal scrape against the wood molding. He was pressing me too hard, but something in me wanted to give in. “My grandfather took some arsenic.”

  His head punched back, and his eyes widened. The chandelier lights twinkled over the dirty walls. It was different from when I told Jo because there was more at stake, but also stranger because he seemed to be pulling it out of me, this huge splinter no one else had noticed. “Look, they didn’t even tell me Hanna was dead.

  I had to find out for myself. After he died, I went on a pointless search for her.”

  He looked confused. “But how could they keep those things secret?”

  I got up and went to the end of the desk to pour myself more bourbon, resenting him. “Believe me, they’ve had lots of practice.”

  As I drank, his eyes steadied on me. My mouth felt coated and aged. I had to get away. “So have I. Don’t think you know everything about me.” I could tell by his anxious eyes how baffled he was by my anger. He was waiting for the smile or the joke that would bridge us back to making fun of Mr. Linden or planning our day off.

  “Wait.” He pulled my arm and turned me around. His accent got more distinct, even though his voice trembled. “Whatever else, you don’t have to say now.”

  “And what if I won’t ever?”

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  “Then—” He didn’t finish, but loosened his grip. He leaned back against the desk and slumped over his folded arms. I went up the stairs and looked down at the curve of his back, the line of his pale neck just above his blue collar, where I’d held my hand the night before.

  T he next day at work, I saw Paul talking to the girl who worked as a housekeeper on the weekends, and the way he’d bounced up on his toes and smoothed the back of his hair when he said something about the third floor made me jealous. After a moment, shaking the pink rabbit’s foot on her keychain, she left, and Paul came over to the desk.

  I said I was sorry, that I didn’t know what had come over me.

  “It’s all right,” he said, a little too quickly, grinning. We went into the cafeteria. “You hungry?” He opened the large refrigerator.

  There were pies, blocks of cheese, and slabs of meat on the metal shelves. I wasn’t.

  He let go of it and let the door suck closed. “Come over here.”

  He pulled my hand. A pot clanged to the floor, and it felt as if things would go on banging and crashing, but they didn’t. There was a large burlap sack leaned against the wall, and he dragged another one over beside it. “Sit down.”

  He crouched so his head was even with mine. He smelled like grapefruits and salt. “Wait right there,” he said. I slid my shoes against the grainy floor, closed my eyes. He stopped in front of me. His breath swayed in the air between us, and he jangled the keys in his pockets. Then he was beside me, unbuttoning my blouse, leaning us back into the sacks, so we made a hollow in them. There were rapid footsteps on the staircase, grand ballroom music from the radio in the lobby.

  My body disappeared, then swelled again in the dark. The flour 192 / RENÉ STEINKE

  rose up in a fine powder around us. I was thinking how I wanted to make him shudder. I wanted him to lose his sense of balance somehow, to break his poise, that polite formality. And then something bulged in my throat. I pulled away, and he leaned toward me. “What’s wrong?”

  I sobbed into my hands. He touched my shoulder. When I looked up, the dark air muddied, and the lines of his face wobbled.

  “Do you want to tell me why your grandfather did it?”

  “No,” I said. I might have let myself speculate about what had finally made him give up, if in that floury dark my voice hadn’t sounded so fake and posed, if the fires hadn’t flickered inside me, waiting to be found out.

  T he moon bounced ahead of us as we walked fast down Maple Street, daffodils and tulips nosing their way out of the furred darkness. It was finally getting warmer, and we wore light jackets, no boots or gloves. We’d been silent for a few minutes, just walking, when Paul said, “When am I going to meet your mother?”

  We passed a mailbox with an eager-looking plastic Easter bunny perched on top of it. “Why do you want to?”

  He shrugged as we moved under a tree dotted with buds whose branches arched over the street. “I would have thought you’d want that.”

  Feeling very thirsty, I touched my throat and swallowed. “There are other things I want to do more—go to Paris, see that gangster movie in Merrilville.”

  He didn’t l
augh, his chin sharp against the dark. "Hasn’t she asked about me?”

  “No.” I tried to grab his hand, but he floundered away. “We don’t talk about that sort of thing.”

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  It was windy, and he turned up the collar of his bomber jacket.

  “I want to meet her.”

  We turned onto Locust. I thought of my mother wringing her hands in her lap, her knuckles rubbed red. “But why?” I tried to make him laugh again. “Do you think you need to ask her permission?”

  I had to skip to catch up with him, and when he stopped walking and threw up his arms, I almost tripped. “What do you think she’s going to do, for God’s sake?” For some reason, I’d thought I’d hidden this fear from him: that her knowing about us would make it too real, jinx our chances somehow.

  “Let’s just wait, all right?”

  We started walking again, slowly. “Why? What are you ashamed of?” His fine hair blew back in a sheaf.

  “Nothing—I just don’t want her to think we’re serious.”

  We stood at the corner, in a wash of streetlight. He pushed his hands into his jacket pockets. “Aren’t we?”

  I swallowed air to stop the flutter in my throat. I still didn’t quite believe that he wouldn’t one day get up from the bed where we lay and leave through the dark, as if he’d never known me.

  “Are we?” I said. “I still want to go somewhere though, leave.”

  He looked down at the toes of his boots. “You’ve been saying that since we met—I know. But it hasn’t stopped me from falling for you.” He smiled with one side of his mouth. The skin on his neck was red where the leather collar had rubbed against it.

  It was hard for me to stand still there, the street seeming to swell up in a rich glittering black. I had to limit this, keep the street flattened somehow beneath us. “I’m just the first American,”

  I said, squeezing his elbow through his jacket.

  He looked down at me with his mouth open, as if he’d noticed something about my face for the first time, then kissed me on the forehead and said, “You’re a strange one, anyway.”

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  Holding hands, we walked past the corner to Oak Street, past trees with tiny green flowers and a yard with a languorous sprinkler moving like a large, glass-feathered fan. “Soon it’ll be warm enough for the dunes,” I said.

  We passed a big white house with a blue door, where one of my teachers had lived before she moved to La Porte. Paul kicked a bottle cap down the street, a delicate scrape and ping.

  We were in front of the playground. I closed my eyes. I was happy, and in the next second terrified. My knees buckled. Paul grabbed me around the waist. “Are you sick?” Even with my eyes closed, I still saw: The canvas straps of the swings drooped from the chains. The wire hurricane fence that checkered the grass. The picnic table squatted under the big tree.

  “Let’s just go to your room, okay?” We kept walking, and I didn’t look back.

  A t work Paul found me staring into the wood paneling, trying not to see distorted faces in the grain of it, trying to see countries, animals, vegetables.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  “Nothing.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Was it what I said the other night? I always do things too hasty.” Whenever he was embarrassed, his English turned stilted.

  “It’s not that.”

  He took my silence as a cut. “Let me know when you’ll be talking to me again, okay?”

  I was too frozen to say anything else, and he slammed the lobby door when he went out to check the grounds. I heard his boots THE FIRES / 195

  crunching in the gravel and stared down at the fibers in the red carpet, at the tongues and black laces crisscrossing my shoes.

  I’d tried to drink enough bourbon to put me to sleep, but it only prickled in my skin and made me restless. I felt the insomnia coming, but methodically put on my nightgown, brushed my teeth, pinned back my hair, and lay down under the covers. As soon as I closed my eyes, I saw it again.

  I’d put that day in a box and buried it, grateful to forget what it had felt like not to be a girl but a tree standing beside a girl, or a pole or a swing. Paul had pushed back the soil and dug it up.

  On Oak Street, walking home, the blond-haired girl skipping toward me. Kristina. She went to the other school. I was eleven, and I knew her from Marietta’s block.

  There were two other girls with her, one with raggedly cut dark hair and a smudge on her cheek, and a plump girl, whose belly showed under her sweater, and two boys also, one with a buzz cut and a yo-yo that he spun around his hand, and another with large freckles the color of pennies. “Where are you going?”

  said Kristina. As they got closer, they walked toward me as if they’d been looking for me all afternoon.

  “Home.”

  “Not yet,” Kristina said, catching the eyes of the boy and girl on either side of her. They stood in front of me on the sidewalk, grinning. The girl with the ragged hair fanned out her skirt a little, and the boy with the yo-yo suddenly swung his head back behind him as if he’d heard someone calling him. The plump girl tugged her sweater down over her stomach, where her pants were fastened with a safety pin. “We want to see your scars,” she said.

  All the organs inside me turned silver and began to chime frantically. “I’m in a hurry, please,” I said. You could hear the chiming in my voice, and why the please?

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  “But we want to see,” said the plump girl. She was tall, too, and her arms were as big as my legs. She grabbed me and pressed her sharp fingernails through my blouse.

  The boy with the buzz cut gripped my other arm, and they dragged me through the gate into the playground. In those days no one but my parents and the doctor had ever seen the scars. I shouted and tried to dig in my heels, but they scraped and stuttered along the sidewalk as they pulled me. When we stopped at the merry-go-round, I was out of breath, and they stood in a circle around me.

  “How come we’ve never seen you at school?” The dark-haired girl, whose hair looked chopped by a knife, actually sounded friendly. I thought they would let me go.

  “That’s because I go to Grace.”

  “Not next year, though. Next year you’ll have to go to junior high,” said the boy with the buzz cut. “They put your head in the toilet if they don’t like you.”

  A few of them giggled, and I thought they would let me go.

  Kristina edged herself in front of the other girl. “Is it true that your mother burned you?”

  “No,” I said, and turned a little in the circle and tried to read their expressions, but all of their eyes were moving, not looking at my face. I thought if they saw how afraid I was they would let me go, but they were different from the kids at Grace, louder and less fearful.

  “Let’s just look,” said the plump girl, stepping close, so my eyes reached her armpit. Someone pulled back my arms so tightly my shoulder sockets hurt. Kristina pulled up my dress and held the hem around my ears, so I could just see the top half of her face, but I looked up at the sky, egg blue, framed by trees.

  “Ew,” said the dark girl, rubbing her rough hand on my torso.

  “It looks like when you burn the milk.”

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  “Don’t touch it,” said the plump girl.

  “I dare you to touch it,” said one of the boys. Someone pulled off my underwear, lifted my feet through the holes, and threw it into the grass. The wind blew against my skin, and my feet were sweating so much in my shoes that my socks felt burning and wet. I almost fell over when I tried to kick, because someone had grabbed my ankles, too. I pushed my eyes up at the sky, thinking of the hymn my father played that sounded like the army marching, with the words about shields and swords.

  Someone knelt down, and I could feel hot breath on my thigh, a clammy finger poking there. “It’s melted,” he said, laughing
.

  A stick rubbed up along the scars.

  “Monster legs,” said one of the girls, giggling. I caught Kristina’s gaze just above the green hem of my dress, but she quickly looked away. “Hurry up,” she said. “My arms are tired.”

  Make them stop, I thought. The boy stuck the stick up into me, and I screamed. The pain shot up my spine. Stop. He twisted it once, and I felt something run down my leg.

  “You’re peeing,” said one of the boys. He yanked out the stick, and the nub scraped hard. A piece of bark stayed in me. Pain darted between my thighs and up my back, but I gathered it up and pushed it over there; in the sunlight on their faces I barely saw through the weave of my dress. I watched the sunlight beat against them, twist their cheeks and dissolve their eyes and rub off their mouths. Something liquid trickled down my leg again.

  “You’re not going to tell anyone you showed us your scars, are you,” said the freckled boy. “Because we could tell them all about it.”

  “Stand there,” said the plump girl. “Just stand there until we say when.” I caught Kristina’s eye again, but she didn’t look away, and her mouth curved in apology. I could see the rest of them only through the cotton of my dress, but I heard their shoes beat 198 / RENÉ STEINKE

  against the hard mud when they ran. Then Kristina dropped the hem of my dress, and I watched the S of her thin, pale-blue back as she scurried through the trees. Up the street, a door slammed.

  I smoothed down the pleats of my dress. Stood there. I couldn’t move. I was that tree there. That swing. The mesh of the fence. I was definitely not a girl. A pain flew into me like a bat with sharp claws, but I looked at the sky, and it went away. I wasn’t a girl, but jaunty green grass, a four-leaf clover, and I stood there until it began to get dark.

  It was painful when I walked, the splayed steps I took so small it took me a long time to walk three blocks home. When I came inside the door, my mother stood in the entryway. “Where were you?” Her mouth opened and shut and trembled when she saw me. There was a little dried blood still on my leg that I’d thought I’d wiped off.