The Fires Read online

  “Yes,” I’d said. “Definitely.” But it had left me exhausted and disappointed that it had taken me so long to find out the little I knew. I also felt as if the floor might give way at any moment and fall into another layer of secrets, and I was worried about my mother and what she might do.

  Finally Paul came back. He sat in the chair with his glass of milk, but he was still quiet and nervous, jiggling his knee. The NO in the NO VACANCY sign was blinking unevenly, so I went over and unplugged it. “Have to get that fixed,” I said.

  “Yes, and the walls upstairs in the hallway need repainting, too.”

  I didn’t know what was wrong and hoped I hadn’t hurt him the other night. I wanted to tell him I was ready to tell him more.

  I wanted to drape my arms around him, or go over to him and sit on his lap. He kept anxiously glancing out the window.

  “We don’t have any more reservations. It’s going to be slow,”

  I said, hoping he’d take the hint. I put my legs up on the desk and crossed them, so my skirt fell back above my knee.

  He was lingering longer than he usually did. He lit a cigarette and smoked it quickly. He sat back in his chair, his knees spread, jiggling his leg, and rubbing the vinyl of the arm rest. Once he asked how many guests there were that night, but when I told him he just nodded, not saying anything more. The whole evening passed this way, with these awkward silences and formal exchanges. After work, he looked very tired, but he ran out the door without kissing me good night.

  I began to worry I’d already told him too much about myself, but he’d pushed me to, hadn’t he? I hadn’t wanted to. There was a reason people kept things secret—a person had only this thin skin between himself and everything else in the world, and people needed more protection than that.

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  The next day before work I washed my hair, and it was warm enough to put on a loose gauzy dress Paul had once said he liked.

  All night only two people checked in, and I tried to read, despite the awkward silences between Paul and me. His cheeks looked heavy and white, and some chalky dust had settled around the hems of his pants.

  At midnight I closed the guest book and locked the money bag in the drawer. Paul stalked into the lobby and collapsed in the chair, staring at his feet. “You ever go to that bar, the Paradise?”

  The blood vessels embered under my skin. I grabbed a strand of hair, surprised at its softness and rubbed it between my fingers.

  “Sometimes, why?”

  He didn’t look up at me, but his eyes were anxious. “I went there with my cousin the other night.” The black-and-white pictures of Mr. Linden behind the glass made him look young and larval, his goofy smile stretching his face. Upstairs, someone played a hiccuping song on the radio.

  I wound the silky hair in a coil around my finger and noticed its gloss. Come over and touch my hair, I thought.

  Paul stood up and started pacing the lobby, from the trophy case to the painting of the clown. “Someone was here looking for you the other night.” His voice sounded testing, precarious, as if it might fall from a high ledge. “He was disappointed that you weren’t here. It seemed like he knew you pretty well.”

  The folds in the heavy gold curtains were uneven and creased—why had I never noticed that before? The embers under my skin pricked out and turned to ash. I wasn’t going to be able to lie to him, but I still hoped this might pass. “Really? Who was he?”

  The soles of Paul’s boots squeaked on the carpet, but in the room overhead the hard footsteps of a giant pounded. I would sit silently for as long as I could stand it, and maybe it would pass—it

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  would turn out to be some friend of my mother’s who’d wanted to invite me to a church function, someone from the college looking for a donation.

  “He didn’t say. He was here on some banking business.” He kicked the wall, and the trophies in the case wobbled. “He looked forty at least. Who was he, Ella?”

  I was shaking and trying to swallow the rotten piece in my throat, but at the same instant laughter welled up in me, like the time I was running to cross the street and fell, and a car stopped just inches from my body. I’d stood up, brushed myself off, smiled and waved at the driver, and up came this painful, retching laughter from deep in my stomach. I’d almost been killed, and I couldn’t stop laughing. Now I had to pull my lips around the words and focus on the breaths I took. “I did some things—I never told anyone—” I stared at the closed door, willing it to open. The lock looked broken, as if we’d never be able to get it open again. I almost got up to try the knob. “It was before you.

  I didn’t know how to—”

  He lunged across the desk and grabbed my shoulders, shook me so my head jerked back and forth. “Stupid girl.” His voice cracked, and he shook me again, but not as hard, then stopped and looked at me with red, watery eyes. “How could you?”

  I couldn’t stop feeling all those men’s hands on me. They were all touching me now at the same time, rolling each scar in their fingers like ropes. “What did you expect?”

  He pulled back, rubbing his elbow and saying something in Polish. He shook his head. He picked up his leather jacket from the coat hook and left.

  S ometimes the singing of spiders pushes back the fresh air, mud-dying it with orange light, and one or two crawl down to the THE FIRES / 213

  center of it, their thready legs lengthening in tendrils. I want them to father me away, carry my slight bones out of here. But they live only a little while. In the end they just leave their smoke webbed in the air.

  I t was an unseasonably warm spring night. I drove to Lake Eliza, parked near a house in the woods, and walked up the dirt drive toward the lake. Except for my footsteps grinding the gravel, it was very still, the woods not quite real, like dark-green felt spiked with the smell of bark and pine. The water slapped at the shore, and silver flecked the lake’s surface.

  I took off my shoes and socks, let my feet sink to my ankles in cold, wet sand. On the other shore, a thin light wavered, but it was too late for anybody to be out on the water, and all the boats were docked. I took off my blouse and skirt, draped them carefully over a tree branch, slipped off my bra and underwear.

  Laying the glowing pale nylon over my clothes, I could just see the outline of my hip, the arch of my shoulder, but if I let my eyes go out of focus, even these were gone.

  There was sand between my toes, a breeze across my breasts and sweeping my shoulders. I touched the silky place behind my knees, and the faint hairs above there on my thighs. I strummed at my rib cage, then traced the handle of my collarbone. I felt the weave of the scars on my stomach, then went lower, following skin the texture of a wet rock, and reached around to my back, the fleeced shoulder blades. It was a relief somehow to feel the scars again.

  When I started to think of Paul, I walked to the water and waded in, sank my toes into the grainy mud at the bottom of the lake, water lapping around my knees. It was a small, placid lake that smelled like cut grass. I couldn’t swim, but I wouldn’t go in 214 / RENÉ STEINKE

  too deep. I kicked the surface and watching it ripple, suddenly saw Hanna on the balcony of that house supposedly near there, singing to herself. From the Hanna I’d called up when she died, I had to strip years and makeup and guile. Her hair then was a natural light brown, her skin an even, very pale olive color, and her pink lips curved into a smirk.

  She liked one of them, I imagined, the half brother of the baby boy she was watching, and she was hoping he’d come back early from basketball practice. It was hot that day. The baby had been lethargic. From the balcony of the big house she could see across the lake, people swimming and paddling in boats. Her dress and the damp nylon slip beneath it clung to her skin. In the next room the baby slept, his tiny hands balled up next to his ears. The light breeze coming up from the lake had the same cadence as his breath.

  The air smelled of something moist and green, and it must have made her awar
e of the sweep of her cheek and something sweet under her tongue. She took off her stockings and shoes, dangled her feet through the bars in the balcony, and felt the wind sneak up under her skirt. Except for the people across the lake, no one was around. No one was ever around when she baby-sat, and the solitude gave her a dreamy feeling, as if she weren’t quite even there herself.

  She took off her dress and sat cooling herself in her slip, wispy perspiration stains clouded in her lap and between her breasts.

  Across the lake, she watched the children splash in the sparkling water. The heat crowded her, gloved each of her movements.

  There was no one around. Unharnessing the straps of the slip, she pulled it down to her waist, felt the breeze luxuriant on her neck.

  She stood up and put her hands on the balcony’s railing, examining her body. Except for her belly and hips, she was very thin and too pale. Her skin was the color of a sheet bleaching on THE FIRES / 215

  a line, and it never tanned, but only oranged. A faint blue line threaded between the top of her pelvis and her navel. Two small moles on her shoulders. Her feet were tiny, with thin heels and pink toes, pretty, she thought. She was looking down and caught herself off balance, her ankles tangled. For a moment she imagined falling into the water and then wished she had, it was so hot. She closed her eyes, swung her hair over her face, let the perspiration at the back of her neck cool in the wind.

  Someday she’d have a house like this, with so many rooms you always forgot about one of them, and when you went into it, it surprised you—not like the crowded, dark rooms at home. When she tossed back her hair, it was a second or two before she could see in the light knifing off the lake.

  There they were, walking up the drive, the stepson and two of his friends. She grabbed her dress from the balcony railing and, quickly stepping back, pulled it on over her head. She heard a motorboat zip across the lake’s surface, which seemed to be sealing something.

  She thought that when she went downstairs, pretending to be calm, she’d be able to tell whether or not they’d seen her, but she couldn’t. Their faces were as polite and opaque as they’d been at school. The stepson’s legs were deeply tanned, and he had a scab just above his knee where it looked as if he’d scraped against a dock or the rim of a boat. He was just her age, or maybe younger, and he had a sly, toothy smile. He asked about the baby. “Asleep,”

  she said.

  “Good.” He went straight to a cabinet, unlocked it with a small key, and brought out a big bottle of liquor. He poured a glass for her first, then smaller ones for the others. It was the first time she’d tasted any liquor that wasn’t Communion wine, and it chafed her throat, but she pretended to like it as much as he did.

  The year before, they’d been in an English class together, and he’d

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  ignored her except for the one time she asked to borrow a pencil and he’d squinted at her as if seeing her for the first time before he reached into his satchel. She was flattered at the way he looked at her now, how while the others were talking about a basketball game, he gazed at her and said he liked her long hair.

  After she’d sipped through two glasses, he asked her to go upstairs with him to take a look at his brother, but when they got to the top of the staircase, he put his hands on her hips and swung her toward another room instead, where there was a prim bed and a rocking chair. He pounced on the blue-ribbed bedspread.

  “Come here,” he said, grinning.

  The liquor had furred over her shyness. She sat down beside him, and he put his hand on her knee. “Has he cried much?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Neither would I, if you were looking down at me all afternoon,” he said. She liked the plumpness of his lips. “Let me see what it’s like,” he said. He lay back, made a baby face by widening his eyes innocently and rounding his mouth, and put his arms around her neck, so her face hung above him. He kissed her, and she couldn’t help thinking how he was thinner than she was, his bones pressing into her hips in a way she liked. He was talking in a slow, breathy voice, stroking her hair, the tip of her nose. It had been a long time since anyone had touched her. “You must be hot in those sleeves,” he whispered, slowly unzipping her dress. She was embarrassed by the wet stains under her arms.

  She shrugged out of the sleeves and pulled up the straps of the slip so it wasn’t so revealing and tried to smile. “I’ve always liked you,” he said. She got scared when she felt his hand travel up from her knee, and she pushed it down again. His eyes went rheumy, but his mouth was hard now, decisive. He put his hand back where it had been. She couldn’t decide if she liked this or not. She wanted to stop and think a minute, before she worried about where it

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  would go next, but she felt his fingers caterpillar up her thigh.

  The wind blew into the curtain, and she thought she could hear the baby crying.

  “I’d better get up,” she murmured, lifting her head.

  “What for?” he said.

  She lunged her torso off the bed, and the door pushed open.

  Hanna could never remember exactly what happened then. The friends stomped inside, their eyes pointed as nails. “Wait,” one of them said, unbuttoning his pants. He was quick and agitated, like an old threshing machine, and the white gluey stuff went all over her leg. She closed her eyes, thought about jumping out the window. She tried to stand up, but someone was holding back her arms.

  The other one stared at her breasts the whole time, not looking at her face until the end, when he pushed his pink rubbery thing near her mouth but missed, and she felt it graze her ear. When the stepson came back, he went quickly inside of her, his breath rushed and desperate, as if he were running away. Then they hurried out, tittering nervously. She heard the front door slam and a little later the nasal cackle of a boat starting up.

  I watched the reflections of trees calmly stretch over the water’s nervous surface and a light dangling in the water. My arms prickled with goose bumps. There was hardly any moon, just a sliver, like the lip of a glass. She had stood there, almost naked on the balcony, and how could she ever explain that? A girl didn’t just take off her dress anywhere unless she wanted to do something. She didn’t know whom to blame, those boys or herself, for forgetting where she was. It finally didn’t seem to matter.

  Everyone knew. They believed what they wanted to believe. The truth about what happened would have collapsed the houses where they lived and the town’s hopes for the next year’s basketball team. It was as dangerous as the truth about me. Not even Paul, who said he

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  loved me, could stand to hear it. I’d let myself trust him more than I should have—he’d only helped me put off what I really had to do if I was ever going to leave. Between us, I realized, was only another lie.

  I wanted to scream at Hanna: She shouldn’t have run away but instead smeared the shame back into their faces and let the light burn them. And for the way I’d tried to lose my body, as if fooling all those men could make it perfect, I raged at myself. What if it had been? How different would I be? As I went up to the tree where I’d hung my clothes, a pipe reached up from the pit of my stomach, writhed around my neck. I got dressed quickly and crouched there in the bushes to try to stop shaking. A light went on in the window of a nearby house, and I heard the scrappy whine of an animal and a toppling of tin near the garbage cans.

  W hen Marietta got another note from the landlady asking again for someone to come get “the personal effects” of Hanna, she pretended it was the first notice. She made an announcement to Pastor Beck and the ladies at church that they would hold a memorial service. The body, of course, had already been buried in some city cemetery, the arrangements made by Hanna’s friends. It was strange to hear my mother and Marietta speak so calmly about her.

  “She’s been gone a long time,” I said. “Shouldn’t we just visit the grave site?”

  Marietta w
as almost cheerful. “Henry would have wanted it.”

  The service was arranged for Friday afternoon. My mother ordered flowers, and Marietta planned the hymns. She said she didn’t want any of them to be sad, only Easter hymns. She said,

  “I couldn’t make it through if we sang anything gloomy.”

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  W hat fire shines on, it colors; what it cooks is easier to swallow.

  An arsonist comes from a family of savers, with full attics and basements, crowded rooms where nothing is ever lost, and the only way to lose something is to burn it. Potential arsonists become opium addicts or movie stars or exiles, but she had no other options—and this distraction made her faceless and ugly, not just curious, but desperate to see wounds radiantly, though she was secretive herself, no more than a black arm.

  I n my dream, Paul and I were swimming in Lake Eliza, the moon swirling with smoke, the stars sparking in the dark water. He kicked up a white spray and paddled away from me.

  I arched my back in the water, which was the temperature of sweat, and floated, looking down at my body, the scars washed in the gray moonlight, my ears humming underwater. The water pooled in the little triangle between my thighs. I closed my eyes, then felt him swim under me, his hand in the small of my back, his finger plucking at the strap of my bathing suit. I looked up again. He came up from the water, pulling my legs down from the surface. When he kissed me, I wrapped them around his waist.

  My skin burned wherever I touched him. I saw the skin on his neck turned red in the shape of my hand, and the few hairs on his chest were singed.

  I t rained the night I got drunk at the Paradise. The bartender wouldn’t look at me, even when he pushed my drink across the bar. He probably felt guilty for spreading the rumors. Who knew how many men he’d told? I drank, watching the jukebox’s 220 / RENÉ STEINKE

  pink and green lights dribbling on the floor, and I was so wobbly when I finally stood, I had to steady myself on the stool before I walked out.

  I went back to my room at the hotel and poured another bourbon. I paced the room, trying hard not to cry, paced and kicked the walls. Someone upstairs was playing an aria, and it flew like a moth around the ceiling. I took off my dress and rubbed my arms the way Paul had liked to, warming me with the friction under his fingertips. As I walked away from the window, I saw The Poetry of the Universe on the nightstand. I opened it and read the inscription again: “To Ella—with best wishes for your late night reading. Your friend, Paul.” It seemed cold and insincere in a way it hadn’t when he’d given it to me, and I’d been so happy that he could teach me something and wanted to. Under my chest, there was a hollowing, an emptying-out that slowly grew—one by one the muscles there were disappearing, next the bones, then the organs. It was a slow rip I could almost hear.