The Fires Read online

  “Some kids—” was all I could say, and it came out in a squeak.

  “What did they do?” She put her hands on my shoulders and bent down. She had a panicked look, but I couldn’t reassure her.

  “What did they do? Tell me.”

  My knees went limp, but I didn’t want to fall down, so I leaned into her. She smelled of coffee. She led me gingerly into the living room. “You’re not yourself, I can tell. Why don’t you lie down and tell me about it?” But I didn’t want to lie down, because they’d taken my underwear. I shook my head.

  My father came in, and my mother said, “Some kids did something to her.”

  “Not from Grace?”

  I shook my head. “She looks hurt,” he said. “Are you cut? Did they hit you? Do you want to see the doctor?”

  “No,” I said in a voice so minuscule I was surprised he heard it. They knew how I hated going to the doctor, and what could he do now? “It’s okay,” I said.

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  “Did they tease you?” asked my father.

  I looked down at the ripples of woven rags in our carpet, feeling more and more like a girl, and it was excruciating. “Yes.”

  He went on quickly. “Just ignore them. They’re ignorant. It’s the worst thing you can do to a person, pretend that they don’t exist. Anyone who teases you deserves that.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. The panic flew off their faces.

  “Do you want me to talk to them?”

  “No.” I was terrified that they would confess, and everyone would know what had happened. About the stick. I only wanted to hide in my room. “I want to go upstairs, okay?” I’d thrown the flaring sunlight into their faces, and I was exhausted and sore.

  “If you’re sure you’re all right,” said my mother, smoothing my hair.

  When I went up to my room, I thought if only I had gone to the other school, I would have known how to stop a thing like that from happening. My parents had been wrong to try to protect me, and I wasn’t going to get caught like that ever again. I could never tell them what had been done to me. Impossible. The house would split open and crash in on us, and none of us would ever be able to speak again.

  A year later when I got my period, it took me two days to work up the courage to say to my mother in the kitchen while she was busy chopping celery, “I’m bleeding…you know.”

  She pressed once more into the celery and ran her gaze from my feet to my head and said, “Well!” I hated her then for being someone I couldn’t tell and knew it was only the beginning of a long string of secrets I’d have to protect her from.

  Later, she put a box of sanitary napkins on my bed next to a book with a pink cover and gilt-edged pages. On the inside of the

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  front cover Hanna’s name was written in a rounder script than she used now, and there was a silver chocolate wrapper tucked inside to mark the place, with the initials H.K. and R.S. scratched into it. The book kept saying I was a woman now, but I felt like a freak.

  When my mother called me down to dinner, I paused twice dizzily on the stairs, and when I got to the dining-room table my mother said, “Ella isn’t feeling well.” The bowls and plates were laid out in the center of the table like a small city, the silverware evenly lined up, and I thought of the way I learned the positions when I was first old enough to set the table: The knife was the father, the spoon the mother, the fork the wild-haired son.

  XIII

  W hat is fire made of? Not dust, breath, the devil, despondency, stars, typhoons, or rank plasma, not eglantine, lip fern, kelp, narcissus, or pepper, not from the bellies of reptiles or pig snouts, not from sluts, tomcats, or seductions, inflammation or soreness, thirst, or spasm, not moon blindness or binoculars, not hydrophobia, par-ousiamania, ignorance, spit, or bells, not prophecy, luck, gorgeous breasts, mirrors, Sanskrit, baptism, aphasia, trickery, or hope, or cicatrix.

  F or the spring, Marietta told me, she’d put special seeds in her bird feeder to attract the bird she was looking for—a kind of lark—and spent most of her time sitting on the little stone wall she’d built around it. Even when she was inside the house, she could watch from the hole she’d scraped in the purple paint on the window in the kitchen.

  “Kingfishers are like milkmen,” she said that cold spring afternoon. “They come regularly, and they like being efficient.”

  “I haven’t seen too many robins yet,” she said. “You know, they only come around if it’s an early Easter.”

  “Easter’s late this year,” I said.

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  “That’s what I mean. The robins know it.”

  I’d brought her a bouquet of the first blossoms I’d picked from the hotel’s rosebushes and wrapped in a wet paper towel. I put it on the table near her hand, and she looked down at the pink roses, frowning. “Still seeing the same old jays I saw before.”

  “Mother says hello.”

  She nodded, staring at the roses. She was wearing orange lipstick that made her complexion chalky and gray. “There’s a kind of bird called a yellow sword. That’s really the one I want to spot sometime before I die.” She gazed into the flowers as if she were trying to see something between the petals, the stems.

  “You should do something with your feather collection,” I said.

  “I bet there’s a museum that would want it.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t part with them,” she said. “They’re all I have to show for myself. This is the season for them, though,” she said.

  “When all the birds cross paths, and you can get feathers you’ve never seen before.”

  I laid my hand on her arm. Before she went off with her birds again, I would make her tell me. “What’s wrong?”

  She wrapped her fingers around the throat of a blossom.

  “What’s wrong is I haven’t seen any new birds yet.”

  “Grandma, tell me,” I said, rubbing the papery skin near her elbow.

  “Roses.” Her fingernails around the stem were yellow and ridged, clipped unusually short, and she trembled. She was giving up. A ring of sunlight through the hole in the paint hung on the Formica expectantly. She stared at the roses as if they might bite her.

  “I shouldn’t have picked them, I know, but there were so many on the bushes I didn’t think it would matter,” I said.

  “Roses,” she said in a disgusted voice.

  “I thought you liked them.”

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  “Like them? I couldn’t ever get him away from them.” They suddenly looked pink and grotesque, like bellies stripped from mice or a bouquet of ears.

  “He was pruning the bushes that night. Said he couldn’t understand why they hadn’t bloomed more. And he wouldn’t come in for dinner. He kept looking for that blackspot.” She slid her eyes away from the flowers. Red tears streaked through her pale powdered cheeks. She got up and paced the room, put her shaky hand over her mouth. She knocked a bowl from the counter, and it crashed on the floor, blueberries bouncing under the table. She swayed near the wall, and the spice rack fell, a plate shattered.

  She hugged the sides of her torso, trying to hold her body together in one piece.

  The room was uncomfortably hot, and I began to perspire under my blouse. “He wouldn’t,” I said.

  Marietta stood up, went over to the sink, and rested against it, her hunched back shaking. Something crackled in her throat. She turned quickly and glared. Her grief clawed out at me. “Don’t make me talk about that.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I said, walking toward her.

  She leaned back away from me.

  “When Hanna died, you didn’t know what he was going to do.”

  She gasped and covered her face, took one step onto the broken glass and crockery, her shoulders heaving and the broken sun from the window playing on her hair. When she pulled her hands away finally, it looked as if she was smiling hard, but with her lips pressed together tightly, her chi
n trembling. I put my hand on her bony shoulder. Something shattered in her throat again, and she said in a quavery high voice, “I can’t help it.” She sobbed as if there wasn’t any oxygen, rubbing her arms up and down her side. Slowly, she crouched over the broken pottery all around her

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  feet, began to pick at the sharpest pieces, and scratched them in loops in the pink linoleum floor. Her fingers were bleeding.

  I bent down, looking at the blue flecks scattered among the broken pieces and blood on the floor. “He loved roses,” she said, fondly now. “He loved those damn roses.”

  O n my night off I took my mother to Strongbow’s Inn. There was a turkey farm behind the restaurant, and if you sat near the back, you could look out the window and watch them gobbling and jerking in the distance. I knew I could get her to eat if people were watching.

  We passed through the bar, where a collection of model airplanes hung from the ceiling around an upside-down plastic Christmas tree, and we went into the brown-and-gold dining room with studded chairs that were meant to look medieval.

  People tried not to stare at her skeletal frame, or that bare place on her scalp where her hair had fallen out.

  A plump waitress with a waxy face came to our table, and my mother frowned when I ordered bourbon, but then her gaze smeared over the paneled wall.

  She opened her menu. “I usually get Turkey Divine,” she said.

  The waitress came back with my bourbon and took our orders.

  My mother looked frail when she asked the waitress a question about the side dishes. The waitress smiled at her sweetly, scratching on her pad and trying not to stare.

  “Mother,” I said, after the basket of rolls came, “I went to see Aunt Emily a couple of months ago. She said something about Hanna and some people down at Lake Eliza.”

  She stuffed half a roll into her mouth and started chewing, lowering her eyes.

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  “Hmm,” she said, still chewing. I waited for her to finish, but instead of replying, she took another bite.

  “What was she talking about?”

  She finished chewing and looked at me, a mournful slackness around her eyes and cheeks. She didn’t move for a second or two.

  “They were some people she got mixed up with.”

  “Mixed up with?”

  She shrugged. “What’s the point in talking about any of that?

  It was a long time ago.” I had to stop myself from agreeing with her. What did it matter, now that Hanna was dead? She had helped me to envision another life outside Porter, but in order to have that life, I had to understand why my wait for her return had been futile. My mother’s hand shook as she reached for the water glass. I drank half my glass of bourbon in one swallow.

  Martin Luther said that our only hope was to wait for grace to descend on us, to ask for it and wait. I was good at waiting, but tired of it. I told my mother I needed to hear what happened.

  Her face blanched. She played with the napkin in her lap.

  The waitress brought our food. My mother pulled her plate close to her, cut her meat, and took a bite. For the first time in months, she looked hungry. I was so relieved to see her eating, I didn’t say anything more for a while, and we ate without talking.

  I gratefully watched her mouth chew and listened to the sound of my own hollow swallows.

  Then she blurted out, “She got into some trouble down at Lake Eliza. That was what started it.”

  The waitress balanced a huge tray above her head, piled with platters of turkey, the bones elbowing up over carrot medallions and potatoes. When my mother wiped her mouth and paused, I asked her what kind of trouble. She began eating again rapidly, pushing a forkful of mashed potatoes into her mouth. “What kind of trouble?” I asked again.

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  She swallowed the last bit of mashed potatoes and looked frantically around the table, her hands worrying her silverware.

  It was as if she’d suddenly felt that she was starving and wanted to make up for all the food she hadn’t eaten. She took another bite of a roll, her eyes wide and red.

  “I know she’s dead,” I said flatly. “I saw her room.” She gagged, and her eyes got bright and round, glossy. She leaned over, her lips parted. The clattering of plates and chattering around us seemed to recede into the distance. She opened her mouth, her lower lip trembling, a gargle in her throat. Her head swerved away as if she’d been slapped. I heard her choke before she vomited on the floor beside her chair. People turned away from their tables to look at us and the sullen pink-and-yellow puddle at her feet. Wiping her mouth on her napkin, she rushed off with her arm crooked over her face.

  The waitress came quickly with a bucket and a mop. “Poor thing,” she said, mopping. She paused, looked at me sympathet-ically. “Is it cancer?”

  I n the car on the way home, I asked her again. Between sobs, she began to talk, and I pulled over onto a dirt road in the fields. The cornstalks rustled beside us like torn green silk.

  “I don’t know,” she choked out. “All I know is what they told me.” She wiped the flats of her hands up and down her face as if her tears were a kind of salve. “She was baby-sitting. Some big house on the lake.”

  The wind ruffled the corn leaves and the airy yellow crowns at the tops of the stalks. The sky looked very small, cupping us there in my car. Our bodies seemed to have grown huge and smelled strongly of hair and skin.

  Her voice wavered. “The family had a baby and a much older THE FIRES / 207

  boy, a stepbrother who came home with two of his friends. They were on the basketball team.” She pounded her fist in her lap and said this almost dismissively: “They had their way with Hanna.

  They said she asked them to.” She looked at me, her eyes wide.

  “They said she took off all her clothes and stood on the balcony calling them.” Then she turned sharply away, pressed herself against the car door, so I could barely hear her. “She lost it. Didn’t remember a thing.” After a moment, she turned back to me. Her face looked beaten, her cheeks puffy and bruised, her eyes swollen in their hollow sockets. “My father called her a whore and then broke down crying. It was the only time I saw him do that. And she just kept saying to him, I remember, ‘Why do you believe them?’ And she stuffed some things in a brown bag and left. It was awful.”

  “So there wasn’t any baby?”

  “A baby?” She stared at me, confused. “Oh no, thank God there wasn’t any baby.”

  I looked out at the stars, all those constant lights, imagined switching them off, one by one. My scars bore into me, pressed against my bones. I wanted to spit. I wanted to get out of the car and lie down in the corn, leave her there alone. That was it? That was the reason my grandfather wouldn’t look at her?

  “When I first heard the rumors going around the high school, even before this, I didn’t deny them. Can you believe that? I was so jealous of my own sister. A girl I knew said that she’d heard about Hanna in a car with a boy, and I just nodded. After she went to Emily’s and came back, and everyone was asking me about it, I didn’t deny it. I didn’t say anything. And when I got her alone, she wouldn’t say what happened either.” The corners of her mouth turned down sharply.

  I started up the engine.

  “It was such a long time ago, and then it just worked out that 208 / RENÉ STEINKE

  she would live far from home. I missed her, but she seemed to want it that way. We never talked about it. Ever.” My mother rolled a ball of Kleenex against her eyes. “She had this secret life.”

  Driving back onto the road, I glanced over at her profile; her hands grabbed at the dashboard, groping for some solace.

  “Mother,” I said, my eyes aching, “what about your secret life.

  Why won’t you eat anything?”

  I stopped for the light at the intersection and turned to her. She looked into her lap. “I haven’t been hungry.” Her chin trembled as she unrolled the tissue and smo
othed it.

  “That’s not it,” I said.

  “No.” She looked away. “It’s just—I can’t.”

  “Since he died?”

  She grimaced and nodded.

  “You have to eat,” I said.

  She squeezed back tears. “And the way you were looking for her, I was sure you were going to leave, too.”

  The light was changing, and I waited a second more anyway, but then a car pulled up behind me, and I had to drive on.

  She grabbed my arm. “You understand, my father loved Hanna, and he couldn’t even see her.”

  “I know,” I said, turning onto Maple Street. “He couldn’t forgive himself.”

  “No, he couldn’t. For letting it happen to her.”

  XIV

  I ’d brought Paul a postcard of the Golden Gate Bridge from my collection. He held it in his palm and stared for a long time.

  “The blue’s too blue to be real,” he said. “Looks like they touched it up.” He turned it over to the yellowed side and read the scrawl of the stranger. He rubbed the picture side against his pant leg as if to polish it, get rid of fingerprints. “Thanks.” He smiled but wouldn’t look at me. “Better check those locks,” he said, moving toward the door.

  I opened the side gate to the desk and sat down, swiveled in my chair a little. I checked in an old man who wore a work suit with a red carnation in the pocket, and he winked at me when I gave him his key. I couldn’t wait for Paul to come back after his next round, and I was too restless to relax. I wanted to tell him about all that had just happened, but he didn’t show any interest in talking. I went into the bathroom and combed my hair, put on some lipstick, powdered my nose. It seemed to me that my eyes were getting smaller, narrower, but I didn’t know why.

  I went back to the desk and sat down, looked at the book. There were no other reservations, and Jo wouldn’t be in that night—I’d called her to tell her everything Marietta and my mother had told me, and she’d said, “Aren’t you glad you did that?”

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