How to Start a Fire (5 page)

“Nick Charles. Really?” she asked.

“My sister’s name is Nora.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Were you teased in high school?” Anna asked.

“Only by teachers,” Nick said as Anna examined the dog bite.

“I would have teased you.”

She treated Nick’s wound and gave him a tetanus shot, and he returned a few days later with flowers and asked her out. It was considered highly unethical for physicians to date patients, and she told him so. Two weeks later, when the wound was a ghost of its former self, he was waiting outside the hospital after Anna’s shift (and he couldn’t have learned her schedule without dedicated effort). He asked her out again, this time adding that he was no longer anyone’s patient. She asked about the girlfriend and the dog. He had dumped both shortly after the bite. He reminded her that life was short. Anna didn’t particularly like this ploy, the constant allusions to 9/11 by people who hadn’t been touched by it at all. But Anna liked his name and so she said yes, although whenever anyone asked how they’d met, she’d say they began chatting at the local farmers’ market (even though she couldn’t remember the last time she’d bought fresh produce). The appeal of Nick Charles was simple: he was nice and he wasn’t a doctor or a lawyer, which somehow seemed important, at least in terms of disappointing her mother. Nick Charles did something with computers, but Anna never asked enough questions to really understand his career. (If Kate had met him, she would have found out that he worked on a compiling team that transformed source code into another programming language, and then she’d be able to explain what that meant.)

Nick didn’t mind Anna’s lack of interest in his job. Most people, other than his colleagues, lacked interest in it. After they’d been dating for six months, Nick thought they should move in together, but Anna put him off. He couldn’t understand, since she had a two-bedroom apartment and was hardly ever home.

Anna had never felt right about leaving Kate behind. She couldn’t leave her in Santa Cruz after what happened, but then, after she’d dragged her to St. Louis, she didn’t want to leave her in St. Louis, because it was St. Louis. Kate was twenty-seven, alone in the Midwest with just a handful of friends, or acquaintances, depending on how you looked at it. She was on a career track to become the manager of a coffeehouse. Anna couldn’t help but feel responsible. That extra room in Anna’s apartment was for Kate. She wasn’t taking in anyone else.

TO
: Anna

FROM
: Kate

RE
: Bloodletting

I don’t know what it is, but modern medicine holds no interest for me. I talked to George the other day on the phone. Well, sort of talked to her. Carter was crying and she put the phone down for five minutes. Once she did it for ten, so I decided that five minutes was my absolute maximum hold time. She should play music or something.

I’ve thought about it. But I really like it here. I’d miss the City Museum. I like the slides a lot and I know the layout. Plus, I have a car now, and I hear it’s really, really hard to park in Boston. As you recall, parallel parking is my weak spot.

Kate

Kate couldn’t refuse once she’d heard the details of the offer: an all-expenses-paid trip to New York City with free rein for Kate to prove that Mitch was the louse she’d always said he was. The visit was entirely undercover. George booked the flight and a hotel room just around the corner from her apartment. When Mitch was convincingly alibied in his office, George and Kate roamed a chilly late-fall Manhattan. When his whereabouts were less certain, Kate tailed him like a private detective. She wore an old pea coat and skullcap as a disguise, though she doubted he would recognize her in any case. He’d hardly seemed to register her presence the few times they’d met.

On a Wednesday afternoon when Mitch was supposedly at a business lunch, Kate followed him from his office to his mistress’s apartment at Eighty-Second and Fifth. Kate snapped photos of the duo with a tiny digital camera as they emerged from the woman’s apartment, walked down the street hand in hand, and kissed on the corner while they waited for the light to change. She followed him again the next day to establish a pattern. Mitch emerged from his office at lunch and took a taxi to his gym at Lexington and Sixty-Third. Kate sat on a bench reading the newspaper, watching the most well-dressed people she had ever seen in her life enter and exit the sports club, until Mitch emerged an hour and a half later with a different woman, a shockingly underweight but well-toned brunette, on his arm. She followed them six blocks and one avenue to the Four Seasons hotel. Snapped a photo of the couple entering the grand revolving doors. It looked like a shot from a magazine spread.

Kate transferred the images to George’s computer and played the slide show. She was surprised by George’s stillness as she took inventory of her husband’s infidelities. George sighed once, turned off the computer, and retreated to the kitchen.

“That was just two days, so there may be more,” Kate said.

“I’m sure,” George said.

“What are you going to do?” Kate asked.

“I’m going to have a drink.”

“After the drink?”

“I’m going to do what needs to be done,” George said.

The next time Mitch returned home after an unexplained and long absence, George didn’t ask him where he had been. She greeted him politely, like the person working the counter at an airline. Within five minutes of Mitch’s return, George left with a simple “Mrs. Klinger is with Carter; I’ll be back.” Two hours later, George came home, sweaty from a pickup basketball game at the gym. She was a member of a different kind of gym than Mitch’s. She acknowledged Mitch with an atypical grunt, walked into the kitchen, and foraged through the refrigerator, savoring the blast of cold air. George chugged straight from a gallon of milk. A string of white liquid trailed a line down her chin to her neck. She wiped it away on the sleeve of her sweatshirt. She cracked open a bag of potato chips, lay down on the couch, and turned on the television. She found the channel that played all of those nature programs that were like horror films for her husband. Mitch watched his wife as if she were a 3-D hologram at a science museum. He circled her on the couch, noted her shoes resting on a white throw pillow, and watched crumbs of potato chips spill onto her sweatshirt as she stared in a daze at the television.

“Don’t you want to take a shower?” Mitch asked.

“Not right now.”

“Do you mind taking off your shoes?”

George kicked her shoes off and onto the floor.

“What should we do about dinner?”

“Sorry, I’ve been bogarting the chips,” George said, tossing the bag in Mitch’s general direction. The bag fell at his feet.

Mrs. Klinger surfaced from Carter’s bedroom, wearing her coat and clutching her handbag.

“He’s asleep,” she whispered.

George walked her to the door.

“Thank you, Mrs. Klinger. See you Monday?”

“Yes, dear,” she said.

After George shut the door, she sniffed her armpit and said, “I guess I’ll take that shower now.”

George spotted a daddy longlegs crawling along the edge of the tub. Her shower ritual often involved the dispatching of any creatures that had found their way into the apartment. Spiders were a particular problem. Mitch had once knocked himself unconscious when he’d tripped over the tub trying to escape a brown house spider. This time, though, George relocated the spider to the glass on the sink. She took a shower, reached for the razor out of habit, then changed her mind. She had a moment more blissful than any she could remember in the entire marriage when she realized that now that it was over, she could do exactly what she wanted. Nothing mattered anymore. Of course George knew that divorce and attorneys and moving out of the apartment and fighting were inevitable, but she decided she’d live in this state of I-don’t-give-a-fuck for a little while longer. Long enough to enjoy it.