How to Start a Fire (34 page)

Mr. Conklin, a colleague of her father’s, approached her early in the evening, holding his own glass of club soda. He didn’t have a look he had to practice before he spoke.

“Heard you got sober,” he said plainly.

“Yes,” Anna said.

“It gets easier,” he said. “Some days you don’t even think about it.”

But Conklin had been sober twenty years. Anna figured she had a long way to go. The whole night she was thinking about it. The whole night she was imagining how fun it would be to lose herself in something. Anything. But she wasn’t lost. She was so present, her skin felt the prickle of every sensation. She could feel every muscle on her face as she smiled appropriately, playing the proud sister.

Max Blackman didn’t ask how Anna was doing. When he saw her, he drew her into a bear hug, the kind of hug that you just had to go along with. Her father never hugged like that. No one in her family did. Max’s hugs took some getting used to for Anna.

Whenever she saw Max or his wife, Abigail, she always thought,
Shouldn’t they hate me?
One drunk night she’d almost asked but caught herself in time. They never blamed her.

Max loathed small talk. One of the many things about him she adored.

“I hear you’re living in a tent” was the first thing he said to her. His tone was more amused than judgmental. His eyes twinkled with delight.

“Word gets around fast,” Anna said.

“You have no idea.”

“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” Anna said in her defense.

“It sounds ideal, if you like camping.”

“I do,” Anna said.

“I think you like camping more than you like living at your parents’ house.”

“Perhaps, but that doesn’t negate my love for camping,” Anna said.

“You should have been a lawyer, not a doctor.”

“Either way, I’d still be an addict.”

“You’re stubborn.”

“Have you always known that, or is this a new observation?”

“Anna,” Max said, shaking his head with mock disappointment. “You’re a grown woman. You need a place to keep your stuff. Women have stuff. That’s one thing I know about them.”

“Don’t marginalize my gender like that.”

“I have a proposition for you,” Max said. “We have a vacation home in the wine country. Well, forget about that part. It’s in the middle of nowhere. Lots of trees, ponds, that sort of thing. Just like a campsite, only there are gamekeeper’s quarters a hundred yards from the house. It’s a nice cottage. Empty now. We could use someone to keep an eye on the place, take care of the main house. Abigail would like to have a garden, but we need someone there to maintain it. It’s a short drive from civilization. But if you’re looking for a break, I think this is a better long-term solution than living in a tent.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Anna said.

The idea appealed to her, but she wasn’t sure if the offer was too generous or if she was ready to be responsible for anything but herself.

“The cottage has a bathroom, if that sweetens the deal,” Max said jovially.

Anna laughed for the first time that night.

Max leaned in and whispered conspiratorially, “It’s also three thousand miles from your mother.”

“I’ve never gardened before,” Anna said. But she had already made her decision.

“I think you’ll like it there,” Max said. “It’s very peaceful in the country. Quieter than you could ever imagine.”

Calistoga, California

The animal that had kept her up for two weeks straight had finally shut up. When she first heard the scratching noises, she’d hunted alone at night, following the sounds behind the drywall, knocking on the spot where she imagined the creature poised, like her, with its ear against the wall, waiting. She named it Ralph and tried, briefly, to pretend it was a pet. During daylight, Anna climbed into the crawlspace and looked for signs of squatters. Abigail Blackman had told her that might happen. The raccoons, the squirrels, the coyote, they were here first; humans were the true trespassers. The Blackmans’ visits became rarer and rarer, but when they did come, Abigail could sit on her Adirondack chair and watch the squirrels scurry around for hours. She dotted her yard with bird feeders, as if trying to lure all the song sparrows from the neighbors’ property to hers. She was an ornithological Pied Piper.

As soon as Abigail and Max departed, Anna hid the bird feeders in the shack. She found their songs grating, repetitive. In summer they were her alarm clock, chirping before the crack of dawn.

“Who doesn’t love birds?” a neighbor once asked, dropping by with a holiday gift of a hummingbird feeder for the Blackmans.

Anna talked about her bird-hate only with her therapist.

“Why the fuck does everybody love birds? I get vultures. I like them; they clean up the roadkill. I feel like when they’re squawking, there’s probably a point to it. Maybe they’re alerting other vultures to new meat.”

“There’s likely a biological imperative to bird songs as well,” Dr. Goldstein said. “You’ve been talking about birds your last three sessions. I’m concerned that birds might be a stand-in for something else.”

“There’s an animal living in the walls,” Anna said.

In truth the noise had ceased a few days ago, but the smell of a small death soon became so powerful that Anna had to move out of the guesthouse and into the main house. She called an exterminator, which struck her as ironic.

“It happens all the time,” Grady, the pest specialist, said. “Once the body is desiccated, the smell will go away.”

“What do you think it was?” Anna asked. That was all she’d ever wanted to know during those two weeks it was living with her. A raccoon, a squirrel, a large rat, maybe?

“Something small enough to fit in the walls,” Grady said.

Anna had made a recording of the animal and played it for Grady. It sounded as if it were digging through the wall, trying to get to the other side.

“Busy devil,” Grady said.

“Can you tell what it is?” Anna asked.

“A small animal.”

“No kidding.”

Anna called Kate and questioned the exterminator’s qualifications.

“Seems to me he should be more informed,” Anna said. “It’s his job.”

“He’s an exterminator,” Kate said. “Not a zoologist.”

“Maybe George would know. I could play her the recording.”

“It might be time to come back to civilization,” Kate said.

Anna phoned George. They hadn’t spoken in six months.

Max and Abigail came for a visit on the heels of the Ralph incident.

“You sure you’re doing all right?” Max asked.

Anna was still catching up on sleep. Every new sound, every quiet creak in the house, was a potential new Ralph.

“I’m fine. I’m good.”

“Maybe you should get a dog.”

“No. No pets,” Anna said, thinking the Ralph episode provided a reasonable simulation of how she would respond to a pet.

“You’ve been here six months. Maybe it’s too much solitude,” Max suggested.

“It keeps me out of trouble,” Anna said.

During Max and Abigail’s visits, Anna felt best. She could pretend they were her parents. Anna and Abigail spent the afternoon in the garden. The squash blossoms were in bloom.

“Have you ever had a fried squash blossom?” Abigail asked.

“No.”

“They’re exquisite. But if you harvest the blossom, the squash won’t grow,” Abigail said. “It’s nature’s Sophie’s choice.”

Max and Abigail were having company that night. Not a single squash survived that season.

Bruno died of a heart attack at his home on Lake Huron on a Sunday. He was discovered Monday morning by his housekeeper. On Tuesday, Kyle—husband number three, as Kate always ungenerously called him—phoned Anna and Kate and informed them that the funeral would take place on Saturday. On Wednesday, George and Kyle flew to Michigan and stayed in Bruno’s home to make funeral arrangements and start packing up his personal effects.

After Mitch, George thought nothing of invading anyone’s cyber-privacy. Kyle had spotted her boundary blindness early on in their relationship and set up a password on anything that would allow for one, going so far as to use a different password for each device, which occasionally, when his memory failed him, locked him out of his own property.

It never occurred to George that there was a difference between logging into her father’s computer to access contact information for his friends and reading his e-mails. That’s where she found dozens of e-mails from Anna. The subject lines tended to reference a specific date or a visit.
Last Week. Tomorrow. Next month.
She randomly clicked on an e-mail.

TO
: Bruno Leoni

FROM
: Anna Fury

RE
: Saturday

I miss you. Is it okay to say that? Give me more warning the next time you’re in town. That wasn’t enough time.

xo,

Anna

George opened another and then another e-mail. And while there was nothing tawdry in any of them, they were clearly written between two people who shared an intimacy that ran deeper than what should exist between one’s friend and one’s father. George’s jittery agitation as she read the letters turned angry. Her tears ran hot, burning her cheeks. She was pacing the small cabin, trying to contain her ferocious energy, when the phone rang.

“Are you okay?” Kate asked. “That’s a stupid question, but you know what I mean.”

“I will be all right.”

“I just got my plane ticket. I’ll see you on Saturday.”

“Okay,” George said in a monotone.

Kate chalked up the dullness in her friend’s voice to grief.

“Has Anna called?” Kate asked.

“She left a message,” said George. “I haven’t had time to call her back.”

“Do you want me to call her?”

“I’ll take care of it,” George said.

Instead, George sent an e-mail from her father’s account.

TO
: Anna Fury

FROM
: Bruno Leoni

RE
: Funeral

May 3, 2007

Anna,

You shouldn’t come. It might be too hard on you and I don’t want you to risk a relapse.

Take care,

George

When Anna saw the e-mail from Bruno in her inbox, she took a breath so deep her chest hurt. Her heart beat as if she were running wind sprints. Explanations jumped to mind, from ghost to spam, and she calmed herself, until she looked at the subject line.
Funeral.
How would spam be that savvy? Finally she read the message. Her face flushed red and her hands balled into fists. She phoned Kate when she could finally breathe.

“George knows,” Anna said. “About me and Bruno.”

“You didn’t tell her, did you?”

“No. But she knows.”

“Are you sure?”

“She sent me a message from his e-mail account telling me not to come to the funeral.”

Kate wasn’t sure what to say, so she said nothing.

“Are you there?” Anna said.

“She knows.”

At the same time Bruno was being put into the ground, Anna had her own private wake. She went to the store, bought a bottle of his favorite Scotch, and drank it to the bottom. She spent the next day hovering over porcelain, and the following morning she started again at day one.

Boston, Massachusetts

Colin knocked on Kate’s door. She opened as his knuckle was about to make contact again.

“Where is she?” Colin asked as he entered.

“Shhh, she’s finally asleep,” Kate said, backing away from the door.

The entirety of the apartment could be seen from the threshold. It was a four-hundred-square-foot studio, sparely furnished with few personal effects. The word that popped into Colin’s head was
Dickensian.
Everything was repurposed. A trunk as a coffee table. An old door as a desktop. A milk crate as a chair.

“In the bathroom,” Kate said.

“Why is she sleeping in the bathroom?”

“Because it’s the closest place to the toilet.”

“How bad is it?”

“She’s been sick all night.”

“Why didn’t you call me sooner?”

“Because she was awake and told me not to and threatened to bolt if I did.”

“I see.”

“Have a seat,” Kate said, pointing at a thrift-store easy chair. It was Kate’s chair, unless she had guests. Then she always relinquished it and took a seat on a milk crate.