The Fires Page 23

  “Don’t.” She jolted up. Her face slipped in a wave of darkness and heat, and when she hit me, the star of her open hand exploded on my cheek. “Oh God.” She turned and grabbed the post of the mailbox. The fire popped and crackled.

  Talk fast, I told myself. “After Dad died, you never wanted me to leave the house, but don’t you see that didn’t change anything?

  We were still alone. Together or not, we were still alone. I started with matches then because I had to do something.” A shutter creaked and toppled into the bushes. “I tried to stop, but I just kept doing it, and no one suspected because I was already burned and so quiet…. You never knew, did you?” The fire hooked around in the back of the house over the bedroom where my father had lain with blood on his mouth and we hadn’t said he was dying. He just died. “Because I was a nice girl.”

  My mother groaned and pressed her cheek against the wood 232 / RENÉ STEINKE

  post. The flames turned quick and violent and covered the house.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I’d destroyed her walls, all her rooms, and they’d fortressed her.

  “I didn’t want to—” But I couldn’t finish. The fire reddened our hands and faces—we were too close to it.

  Her voice seared through me. “You didn’t have to. Don’t tell me that. You didn’t have to do it.” Her mouth gaped open. “I didn’t raise you for—” Her limp, open hand flung out at the fire.

  The flames clacked like wood planks, and I had to shout over them. “Send me away, then.”

  She clattered the pictures of me together and pressed them to her breast. “No.” It was so hot it was hard to breathe. Her cheeks glittered. “You’re my daughter,” she said incredulously, as if there had been another one she was only now betraying.

  The air just at the edge of the fire turned liquid, blurring the sky above it. “We’re too close,” I said, taking her arm and pulling her to her feet. We hurried across the yard to the opposite side of the street. Smoke flew over us like wispy crows.

  The crowd grew to about a hundred tense faces, luminous and grateful-looking.

  At the corner, the fire truck screeched and slanted to a stop, and the firemen, beetled in their hats and coats, unwound their gray hoses and strung them toward the house. Someone must have pointed us out, because one of them, a young man with a small, tan face, came over to us. He threw a blanket over our shoulders, asked us if we were okay, and said, “Any idea how this one took?”

  His flashlight spiraled over the crowd, and I spotted Paul, craning his neck, pushing past shoulders, his frantic gaze leaping from person to person.

  My mother stood up straighter. “I thought I’d smelled gas com-THE FIRES / 233

  ing from the oven.” Another lie, but what if she had told the truth?

  The fireman said, “We’ll do our best,” nodding at us apologetically, and went back to stand at the wheel of the truck.

  The fire reflected in my mother’s stunned eyes. We watched until the flames died down, and the fragile charred boards leaned together, cinders flying off.

  XVI

  O n the other side of fire: ashy daylight and myself alone. My new apartment, bright with window light and bare, had a view of the lake. When I looked out my window on a sunny day, the water appeared ruffled and silver as a party dress; under clouds, opaque and cragged as rock.

  They called Chicago the Windy City, and I blew through it, high and low. One minute I floated through chromy streets, seeing my reflection waltz through store windows, and the next, as I watched a man with no soles on his shoes pick through garbage with a stick, this fear hit me that no, one would know if I was dead.

  I told myself my mother had lived for years with an absence.

  So had I. We knew what to do.

  Lying awake in my grandfather’s bed the night before I left, my neck stiff on the tamped down pillow, I’d listened to my grandmother’s voice amplified by the linoleum but still indecipherable and heard my mother’s sobs, which I pictured in the dark as small, wounded animals that needed care but wouldn’t be touched. I didn’t expect her to forgive me.

  All night I lay with my eyes open to my mother’s weeping, and when the curtain sheers in the window began to lighten, I got out 234

  THE FIRES / 235

  of bed and walked to the train station and stood on the platform for an hour before the commuters arrived, their suits and newspapers smelling of cigarette smoke, their talk clipped by yawns and coughs, until the first train finally pulled in.

  Watching the passing tracks and rails from the window once I was gone, it seemed it had always been just a matter of boarding a train, buying a ticket. Whenever I saw again the orange-and-yellow streamers of that fire, it pained me to think of my mother homeless and angry. Each time she lied about the cause of the fire, she’d think about what I’d done, remember how I came into her room and told her her house was burning, and she wouldn’t know yet how I’d freed her.

  The first few days I would think often of Hanna and wonder where she had eaten her first city meal, and if she had found her way easily among the crisscrossed streets, or got flustered by the thunder of the el train overhead, and if she had felt that same heady lack of direction that I did, blowing through the city.

  Quickly, though, thoughts of her submerged in the frenetic surf of the streets, and when I did think of her, her life seemed incom-plete, a sentence broken off by a burst of anger, and I no longer wanted it for myself.

  The life I had would be small and collapsible, travel-sized, so that it could be left at any moment—I decided not to open a bank account or buy any furniture and scarcely ate, not liking to walk and catch the train on a full stomach. The hunger helped fuel the buzz, this electricity radiating in my fingers and toes and the top of my head, so that a movement as simple as crossing a street or buying a pack of mints could feel deliberate and ecstatic.

  I found an apartment and a waitressing job at a café. The days passed quickly, and so much happened in each one that I didn’t want to lose or forget, so I made lists at night of what I’d seen and done. At the café, I tried to settle into the comfortable ano-236 / RENÉ STEINKE

  nymity I’d felt at the hotel, but it didn’t work. Too many of the customers asked me my name or wanted to talk, and the other waitresses invited me to crowded parties. I didn’t mind; though—it gave me a wild courage. Flirting with a blue-eyed man, I told him I’d once had a penchant for setting fires, laughing so he wouldn’t believe me. When a girl I worked with was complaining about her boyfriend, I blurted out that I was scarred, but knew how to hide it when I undressed.

  I bought a radio, and sometimes after waitressing I’d open the windows, take off my food-stained shirt and dance alone, casting shadows along the empty walls of my apartment. I cut off six inches of my hair, so it swung over my shoulders, and after a long night of fat tips took all the money to Marshall Field’s and bought a blue silk dress, which I wore walking in the city on my days off, the scars flashing when the hem flared in the wind.

  Trying on the dress at the store, I’d thought of Jo and wondered if she was married by then. She would be furious with me, but I wasn’t ready to call her yet.

  Once in a while at work, I’d see a head shaped like Paul’s, or someone walking with his bendy stride—my chest would clench, and I’d have to put down the tray of clattering plates and cups on the nearest table. If he had really walked into the restaurant, though, I wasn’t sure I’d have wanted to see him. All that time in Porter came to feel like a long, scaled, heavy tail behind me that I wanted to lop off.

  But one night in a fit of loneliness I wrote him a short note: It took three hours and seven pieces of torn-up notebook paper to say this much: I’m waitressing in Chicago now. There are two things I should have told you before I left: (1) About that banker, I never let any of the men but you see me. I was nothing to them, nor they to me.

  (2) I’d been setting fires like the ones you saw for years (please don’t tell anyone). If not knowing
these things hurt you, I’m sorry.

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  A couple of weeks later, I found a manila envelope from Paul in the mail. He’d written my name in giant block letters, as if he were afraid no one would see it otherwise. Inside the envelope there was a clipping from The Vidette Messenger: a grainy picture of the Linden Hotel and a short article saying it had been broken into by at least one thief, maybe two. One woman’s jewelry had been stolen, a pearl necklace and a diamond ring, and oddly, a salesman’s suitcase filled with screw and bolt samples. They’d broken into the front desk to get the money box, too. “The security guard on duty that night went outside to check on a loud noise he’d heard near the Dumpster. When he came back inside,” the reporter wrote, “the front desk had been pried open with what looked like an ax.” Paul had enclosed a note on the Linden Hotel notepad paper: They need me more than ever around here. Since you left, they haven’t found another full-time night clerk and I’m working double duty. It’s quiet at night here alone. They’re saying it was an accident. It wouldn’t hurt anything if you came back. Reading the note, I heard his accent, tinny and small in my head, saw his bruise-colored eyes and acrobatic hands and hoped there might be a time when I could see him again.

  I usually slept soundly during those months, exhausted from all the walking and waitressing, and comforted by my reams of lists. Sometimes I would dream that Paul, Jo, or my mother had died, and I could touch the loss of them like a ragged hole blown out of a wall, the bricks and wires and pipes cutting my hand. If I leaned through the hole to see the body though, the wall gave way, and I was falling past an endless series of balconies and windows and confetti. Only later, clearing a table, or washing clothes at a crowded Laundromat, would I remember the dream, when I was too busy to stop and take in what it meant.

  It wasn’t until the end of the summer that the attacks of vertigo began, and I’d forget what street I was on or where I’d meant to 238 / RENÉ STEINKE

  be going in the first place, or suddenly feel sure a skyscraper was about to topple over but didn’t know where to run. It was the opposite of the claustrophobia before I set a fire, more like the dissolute trance I felt afterward, watching the smoke.

  Once I got lost on the South Side, and a hulking drunk man in a fishing hat, holding his hand like a gun, tried to mug me. Another time, in the midst of the Saturday rush, I fainted into a crowd of shoppers on Michigan Avenue, and when a nice woman splashed cola on my face and I finally came to, there were foot-prints on my skirt and legs.

  In October, with the yellow leaves shimmering in the trees, and the days suddenly shorter, I finally went back. After my being so long in the city, Porter looked miniature and still, like a community of dollhouses with people and cars that moved in dreamy slow motion. Except for that, little had changed. My impatience for it depressed me. Walking down Lincoln, I saw a house built as an octagon, an actual eight-cornered roof, in one yard milk cartons someone had exquisitely cut into lanterns and strung from the trees, and a tiny angular woman wearing a purple velvet hat the size of a sombrero. My eye flew to each of these sights, for my mother’s sake.

  I stood in the wind, knocking at Marietta’s lavender door. When she answered, she smiled vaguely and gazed just past my face into the street. “How’d you get here?”

  “The train.”

  “Oh.” She still wasn’t quite looking at me, as if, since I’d left, something had happened to her eyes. When I asked if my mother was there, I heard Erma’s voice in the living room and a shuffle of cards. “Oh, no, honey.” She hadn’t often called me that before, and this honey had a coy stickiness. “She moved to one of those apartments on Union Street.” She could have been talking to the testy man who ran the dry cleaner’s or the retarded girl who THE FIRES / 239

  sometimes helped her mother at the fabric store. “I’ve got Erma and some friends here, playing pinochle, but you run over there.

  Five-E.” She looked at me straight then, with dry, blank eyes, as if to tell me I wasn’t going to get any more tears out of her.

  “You’ve been hard on your mother. She doesn’t deserve it.” Her green eyes looked the color of moss. “I told her you’d be back.”

  Walking those few blocks to Union Street, past houses with V’s of red corn husks on their doors and pillows of turned leaves next to the walkways, I counted the months since I’d left, six. The hum of Chicago and the customers’ orders and figuring up their checks and their myriad voices and faces had filled up my head, so I’d been able to put away my exile as if it were a book I might or might not read. Now the closer I came to my mother, the more real it was: mica sparking in the sidewalk, the collar of weeds around the post of the mailbox, my own worn leather shoes and my legs, hardened from the waitressing. My chest felt tight.

  Thinking of the difficulty of my return, my reasoning splintered and ran off in a hundred designs, and I had no idea what I would say. I didn’t expect her to forgive me, but hoped the vertigo attacks might subside at least, if I showed her my face.

  The apartment building had been built to look like a colonial house: tall, fluted white columns, a heavy flint roof like a giant arrow tip, black shutters nailed permanently open. Knocking at Five-E, I heard the train in the distance, its horn a nervy question.

  A girl around my age came out of the next apartment holding a carton of milk and an armful of books.

  I heard my mother’s footsteps stutter, saw the white curtains swing back, then the door opened wide. Her expression was disarrayed and inward, as if she’d been sewing. She slapped her hand against her chest. “My God, I thought we’d lost you.” Her shoulders collapsed, and she bent over, gasping.

  Her hair had grayed. “I’ve been in Chicago.”

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  “You didn’t call….” She huffed and grabbed my arm, pulled me inside with one hand and slammed the door with the other.

  The apartment was clean, but crowded and mismatched. There was a square blue chair, a rectangular yellow couch, a perfectly circular red table. My mother looked out of place and anxious against that furniture, as if she were in a bus terminal or an air-port. She wore a red sweater, and the weight she’d gained back was visible, her breasts full again, her arms rounded. A thick lock of gray hair fell out of a pin and hung on her forehead, where the lines had deepened into a large equal sign. A certain tightness had left her face, and the softness in her cheeks made her lips part youthfully.

  “Why would you do that to me?” Her voice was louder and sharper than I ever remembered hearing it. Vibrating with its force, she stood in front of me, holding out her arm in a curved gesture like a teapot handle, but I could tell she was too furious to touch me yet.

  “What else could I do?” I said. Now I felt fatigued from the miles of walking in the city and wanted to collapse on that ugly yellow couch, but my mother didn’t move.

  “After all that happened, you really thought you could just leave?” She flung up her hand. “Look at Hanna. Where did leaving get her?”

  When she folded her arms, their shape on her chest reminded me of a soldier’s breastplate, and she looked larger and more muscular than before. Was it possible she’d grown taller in my absence? Her eyes scowled at me. It was hard for me to look at them.

  “I came back,” I said feebly, but she knew I wouldn’t stay. I wanted to go over and embrace her, but didn’t move, holding the back of a wooden chair with its nautical ropy spokes.

  THE FIRES / 241

  She paced the small area over the flat red carpeting between the easy chair and the edge of the open kitchen. Her anger slit us apart, and the separation felt almost surgical, as if she’d finally got rid of some web of mucus and cartilage between us, and it was such a relief.

  “Don’t think I bought any of this ugly furniture. It came with the apartment.” The shapes were primitive, the fabric cheap, but the vivid shades countered the dimness of a room with a single back window.

  “It’s colorful,” I said.


  She shook her head and made a clicking sound with her tongue.

  She held out her open palm. “I loved that house. My kitchen, my sewing room. Your father taught you to read in that house. Every day he practiced his music there. Before—”

  Over the couch I noticed a photograph she must have taken of my father and me barefoot in the sand at the dunes, his hand resting on my shoulder, my scars carefully hidden from the sun inside long sleeves and blue jeans. My father smiled widely so his underbite showed, and his shoulders were freckled and narrow. I guessed that she had found it somewhere at Marietta’s house and put it in a frame.

  My head filled with a watery pressure. The silence was painful.

  I wanted to crawl into it, let the sharp glass edges cut me, endure the torture of being exposed to her.

  “Before the fire.” My mother cleared her throat nervously. “I was going to have the whole outside painted. I was going to gather up the last pieces of your father’s music and send it to someone who would appreciate it.” She watched her foot take a small step.

  To think I had betrayed my father’s music, the notes he’d drawn, counted, the turmoil in his head marked down in that wordless translation—this hurt me more than anything we’d lost.

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  Even in his illness, it was the one thing for which he’d had enough strength. Taking another small step, my mother swayed forward.

  But I’d saved her, hadn’t I?

  “I lost everything in that house,” she said.

  “Mother, you made yourself so weak you could hardly leave your room.” She stared at me. “You looked like you were dying.”

  She choked. Her hand wavered as she brought it up to cover her eyes. When I’d practically carried her out of the house, she’d felt like a girl in my arms.

  “And it wasn’t the only fire I set,” I said, lifting my chin, shocked at how boastful it sounded. She must have known to put the Houseman fire with this one.