The Arsonist (15 page)

He had conscientiously worked at it. He had wanted it—a home. But the conversation in the town hall tonight had made that seem suddenly a contentious issue to him, as though the fires were somehow framing a question he needed to answer for himself about whose home Pomeroy was, whose experience defined it—the chatty, self-assured summer people or the observant, perhaps resentful, year-round folks. A question about who owned the town and who merely used it. Wasn’t that what had been under discussion tonight in some way? Didn’t it have some connection to the way the meeting had evolved?

Something along those lines anyway—he wasn’t quite sure. A question that had arisen for him before, but vaguely. Not like tonight, when it seemed to have sprung so pointedly to life.

He’d have to think about it. He’d have to figure out how to come at it.

For now, he turned and went back in among his neighbors to help.

8

C
OMING HOME IN HER
parents’ car from the town meeting, Frankie was only half listening as Clark and her mother talked about the idea of arson and about which of the suggested precautions they might take. She was distracted because she had suddenly started to think of her walk on the dark road the night of the first fire. Of the car she’d seen, and the smell of smoke. Of the possible connection between the two.

Clark was talking about the riskiness of leaving their house empty, unprotected, when he and Liz went back to Massachusetts. He was so clearly worried that, on an impulse, Frankie offered to move down to their place after they were gone. She was offering for his sake and Liz’s, but even as she was speaking the words, she realized how much she wanted the move, the change, for herself.

Why?

She supposed because she was feeling aimless and oppressed at her parents’ house. Her indecisiveness about her life was open for comment there in a way it hadn’t been before Clark’s question had forced her to talk about it, and Sylvia had started to offer suggestions about her choices, clearly impatient for Frankie to make a decision one way or the other. Which was just what she had wanted the time not to have to do.

But she was feeling oppressed, too, oppressed and saddened, by the situation between her parents—her father’s strange failing, something she’d seen clearly from time to time in her days living with them, and her mother’s often irritated, sometimes seemingly almost frightened, monitoring of that. It made Frankie feel sorry for them both, but it wore on her, too, and a part of her simply wanted to flee.

“You’re sure about this?” Clark had asked in the car.

They were in the backseat, her parents in front. Frankie had to make a conscious effort to keep the eagerness out of her voice. “Yup, it’s okay. I’ll do it.”

“It’s not exactly the Ritz, the shape it’s in.”

“I’m happy to. Don’t worry about it.”

So by the time they got home, back to her parents’ house, it was decided, though over the next few days, the last days of Liz and Clark’s weeklong stay, she wavered more than once, flooded with guilt about what she thought of as
leaving
Sylvia and Alfie.

Liz didn’t help with this.

Frankie had had a long talk with her the night before she and Clark left. They’d had dinner together down at her house. Clark had gotten the Sheetrock up, and what had been one huge room was now three—two smaller bedrooms and the large room with the kitchen at one end and a sitting area at the other. They had eaten at the big table in the kitchen area, and afterward, Clark had offered to bathe the children so she and Liz could have some time alone.

They went outside onto the porch and sat in the butterfly chairs, inherited from Alfie and Sylvia. They could see the quick flitting of the bats in the twilight. Frankie had been waiting for this moment. For the first time she spoke directly with Liz about what she’d noticed of Alfie’s odd moments of failing.

Liz was ready. She had multiple anecdotes of his earlier lapses she’d stored up. She relayed them to Frankie now, embellishing them with her dark sense of humor. She described her attempts to discuss them with Alfie himself—impossible—and with Sylvia, who was more reasonable but unwilling, or perhaps too frightened, to acknowledge that they might be really serious.

“Do you think we should be doing something?” Frankie asked.

Liz didn’t know what they could do, really, but she was so glad Frankie had brought it up. “The minute you said that thing about not going back to Africa, I thought,
Yessssss!
” She made a fist and yanked it downward.
“She’s staying! I won’t have to do all this alone anymore.”
She’d often felt overwhelmed, she told Frankie now, by the sense she had of being responsible for their parents. She said that one of the reasons for her
reluctance to move to Pomeroy was that she didn’t want to be Sylvia’s “crutch.” She was frightened of getting sucked in, she said. “But if you’re here …”

“Well, I won’t be
here
,” Frankie said.

“But I mean just in the country, just in this neck of the woods.
Visiting
, for God’s sake. I’ll take a
visit
.”

After a moment’s silence, Frankie said, “Well, I don’t know how much help I could ever be with Sylvia and Alfie. I mean, you know the difficulties Sylvia and I have with each other.”

“Oh, you just have to learn not to take her so seriously,” Liz said. “Just make her laugh at herself. She enjoys it.”

“I wish I could, but that’s your MO, Liz. Not mine.”

A little while later, the children came out wearing T-shirts for bed, their skin pinked from their bath. They wanted Liz to come in and read to them.

Frankie got up, and they all said their good-nights. Before she left, she promised Liz she’d talk to Sylvia about all this, she’d try to get a sense of what Sylvia was thinking about Alfie, what she might be planning. When she turned at the road to look back, she saw Liz moving into the lighted doorway with the three children around her and felt an odd mixture of something like envy, something like remorse.

For much of her youth, Frankie had been jealous of Liz, who was outgoing and lively, surrounded always by a group of friends, even when they were new in a place, as they so often were. Frankie was the loner, the awkward older sister, though she usually had one friend, almost always someone as studious, as shy, as she was. Her real focus, though, was on the adults in her world—teachers, yes, but even more than that her parents, whose attention she was always in hopes of receiving and whose preoccupation with everything but her was painful.

Later she could understand this in a way she didn’t at the time. After all, why should they have paid attention to someone doing so well in school? Someone so orderly, so careful? Someone who didn’t complain or get in trouble? Why should they not have been more engaged with
Liz, temperamental and lively, sometimes wildly emotional, occasionally in trouble academically. Of course it would seem to a parent that Liz needed more, that Frankie needed less. The very goodness she cultivated—surely they would notice it and turn to her and praise her and conspicuously love her!—was the thing that set them free to turn to Liz. But not just to Liz, of course. Also to their work, and their colleagues and everything else that took up all their energy.

In midadolescence, though, a kind of miracle happened in Frankie’s life: from one day to the next, it seemed to her, Liz became her friend—perhaps because Liz was entering her freshman year in the high school where Frankie was a senior and knew the routines. Knew, also, older boys. In any case, suddenly Frankie felt as though she belonged somewhere, in a way she hadn’t before. As she and Liz drew closer over that year, she felt a sense of deep relaxation, of comfort. She was happy to put herself in her younger sister’s hands, to share in the kinds of adventures Liz invented. She was aware of counting on Liz to structure their lives, which Liz was glad to do. For a short while, then, Frankie was one of the high-spirited Rowley girls, and she liked how that felt.

But then she left, she went off to college. And when she came back after her first year away, she was aware of a certain distance from the role she was playing with Liz. She saw it as a role. But she did play it again for the few weeks in May and June that she was home and, yes, enjoyed it again, even while understanding, this time around, how much more Liz enjoyed it.

By the time Frankie came back again, at the end of that summer, the summer between her freshman and sophomore years of college, her family had moved for the last time—away from Chicago to Bowman, the little city in Connecticut where they would stay for the next twenty-five years or so. Liz was sixteen, with two more years to go in high school. She would have time to grow used to this new place, to think of it as home, as Frankie’s parents would. But there would be this further separation for Frankie—that she would never live there for more than a few months at a time.

She had a sense of displacement, then, from all of them and their concerns as they moved around in their new lives. Liz especially. Suddenly
the kinds of adventures Liz was inventing—sneaking out, getting stoned, meeting boys at the quarry—seemed to her, in some way that was freeing, irrelevant.

Because that summer—the summer between her freshman and sophomore years of college—she had gone to Kenya for the first time, a student with a program that offered American college kids the opportunity to live in developing countries. And in Kenya, she’d felt something like a sense of
ease
, though that was not how she could have explained it then. What she said when she got back was that it had been interesting, which it was. That the people had been warm and gracious, which they were. That the terrain was the most beautiful she’d ever seen. And all of that was true. But what she didn’t say, or didn’t really understand until much later, was that she felt at peace there. The rules, the codes for life, that had seemed so elusive to her, even within her own family, simply didn’t matter anymore. Frankie was free. Or that’s what she felt.

All this had lingered uncomfortably in her relations with Liz over the years, especially as their lives turned in such different directions—Liz, with her marriage to Clark, with the children, with her surprising gift for motherhood, domesticity; Frankie to a life away, to a commitment to her work above all, to her series of lovers. Over the years, Frankie often had the feeling that Liz, as well as her parents, was waiting for her
real
life to begin—the return home, the man, the marriage, the house, the children.

Perhaps, Frankie thought, Liz saw her tentative decision not to go back as the beginning of all this. Perhaps she imagined a kind of sisterhood—
daughterhood
—they could share if Frankie stayed. If she stayed in this neck of the woods.

The next morning, Clark made a trip up in the truck to get Frankie and her bags. Sylvia came out of the house to see him off—she’d said good-bye to Liz and the children earlier. Frankie turned around to look at her as they rumbled down the driveway. She was standing alone by the back porch, looking after the truck, her hand on the knob of the door, her body turned to go back into the house, where Alfie waited for her. Her face looked as stricken as it usually did when Frankie left for Africa at the end of a home stay.

At Clark and Liz’s house, they unloaded Frankie’s possessions. Then Clark slung the two old duffel bags he and Liz had arrived with up into the truck bed. The kids had come out when they heard the truck return, and now they clambered up into the wide front seat and the jumper seat behind it. After hugging Frankie, Liz pulled herself up, too, and they drove off, yelling, waving. Frankie waved back until the truck turned onto the road. She stood there on the porch until she couldn’t hear the noise of the engine anymore.

In the silence, the very air felt stilled, quieted. She went into the house. Inside it was cool and dim—the grayish tone of the Sheetrock Clark had put up absorbed the light. The heads of the screws and the seams between the panels were still exposed. This was going to be her project, covering them. She had insisted on this, to pay them back, she’d said, for letting her stay. A little bit each day, she told herself now, and maybe by fall—would she still be here in the fall?—it would be done. She stood there in the kitchen, momentarily immobilized. And relieved, she realized. Relieved to be alone. Relieved to have a place of her own—for a while, anyway.

The secondhand refrigerator made a low gurgle and rattled, a bit like someone clearing his throat, then turned itself off. The propane for it and for the stove hung on an outside wall. Clark had told her that he’d gotten the tank at Snell’s, that she’d have to take it in and exchange it when it was empty.

She started to move around slowly, looking at things, touching things. Six old chairs were arranged unevenly around the big dining table, whose top was round and scarred and streaked with Magic Marker colors. In the middle of the table was a bird’s nest. It had a worn piece of blue ribbon woven into it. When Frankie touched it, a bit of dirt crumbled out onto the table.