The Arsonist (18 page)

“Oh, God, Frankie, don’t be sorry. It’s just the way it is, isn’t it? You’re his confidante”—she pronounced it in a very French way—“and I’m his warden. And he’s my prisoner.” She laughed quickly. “Unless it’s the other way around: that I’m
his
prisoner.” She smiled at Frankie, a grim
smile. “Either way, it’s no fun, standing guard. Asking him where he’s going every time he leaves.”

Frankie didn’t know what to say. Finally, she offered, “We’re all standing guard, these days.” She shrugged. “It reminds me of Africa, actually. We’re not quite at the razor-wire stage, but one or two more fires and maybe we’ll get there.” She sipped at her drink. Then thought of a change of subject: “Oh, Dad told me there was another fire?”

“There was. The Averys’ place. They came home from a party, I guess, and the house was just about gone. The firemen got there with not much to do.”

“Oh! So they were
living
there.”

“Yes. They’d been up about a week.”

“Jesus.”

“What?”

“Well, this is different, don’t you think? I mean, this is really different.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that before, the other houses that burned were empty. Really empty. No one was living in them. It wasn’t only that they were … unoccupied for the evening, like this one. They were still closed up for the season. So this seems scarier. As if he’s no longer being so … 
careful
, I guess you’d have to say. It makes you think that someone might actually be at home next time. Someone could get hurt.”

“ ‘Next time,’ ” Sylvia said, looking out the window and then back at Frankie. “I suppose it
will
just go on. After all, why stop now?”

After a moment, Frankie said, “I suppose the other possibility is that he’ll be scared off by how defensive everyone is getting, by the alarm systems and the locks and whatnot.”

“Maybe,” Sylvia said. “Are you at all frightened, down at Liz’s, all alone?”

“No,” Frankie said. And then she remembered. “Well, that’s not quite true. I had a little moment of panic when I heard Daddy on the porch, actually. And even for a few seconds when I saw him. Before I recognized him.”

“Nothing like in Africa, though.”

“No.” And it was—nothing like. Still, she had the impulse to defend
Africa, to say,
I wasn’t truly scared there
. But she knew how much being white, being privileged, being an expat, had kept her from needing to feel fear.

They sat in silence for a moment or two. Frankie was aware of the sound of the rain outside in the trees, and of its soft drumming on the roof.

“So,” Sylvia said, “you’re not sure if you’re going back.” Her eyes were suddenly keen on Frankie.

“No.”

“No, you’re not going?”

“No, I’m not sure.”

“Are you just, what?” She lifted her hand. “Tired of it? Worn out?”

“I am tired. Yes. Not so much of it, but tired. Really, really tired.” She had another swig of the gin.

“Was there someone? Someone you were involved with? There?”

“Why do you ask?”

“You seem …” Sylvia frowned. “Sad, in some deep way, I suppose. Not just tired. Sad.”

“I
am
sad.” Frankie tried smiling at her.

“Then it’s over? Whatever? This other person?”

“Oh, it was over before it began.”

“Oh!” She sounded startled. “Was he … is he, married?”

“No. Or he is, but he and his wife don’t live together. They haven’t, for a long time. She’s in England, anyway. But that’s not the point.”

“Are there children?”

“They’re grown. More or less. He doesn’t see them often.”

“So, he is available, after a fashion.”

“No.” Frankie laughed quickly. “No, he’s not. Available is exactly what he’s not. Or I couldn’t have him, anyway. He wouldn’t …” She drew her breath in sharply. She found herself unable to breathe normally. She realized she was afraid of weeping in front of her mother. But not for Philip, she knew that. For all of it, for everything she couldn’t have in Africa.

Once, in her last days supervising a clinic in Sudan, she had been reviewing the protocols with the staff. There was one nurse whose skills
she was sure of, a woman in her twenties she had deputized, though she knew this was disrespectful of the older women. “Esther will remind you of all this when I leave,” she had said to the group.

One of the older women had spoken then, her voice flat and bitter with anger. “When you go, you will be
gone
.”

And she had felt it then, again, the way she was forever a
mzungu
, the way she lived in a different element from them, the way she was always—to them, to herself—
going
. Because nothing there was hers, it couldn’t be hers.

“He wouldn’t …?” Her mother’s voice was gentle, and it called her back.

He
had wept, she was remembering. Philip. He had come and knelt by her chair on the rooftop terrace in Lamu and leaned his head against her bare arm. His breathing had thickened unevenly. She felt his tears on her flesh, and she was startled, unsure of where his sorrow came from, what it meant. She was aware of some sense of obligation to him in that moment, and the simultaneous realization that she might actually be relieved when he was gone. She felt that as a possibility even as she turned to him, reached for him: along with the sadness came the eagerness for solitude.

Now, with her mother, she expelled her breath sharply. “Just, he
wouldn’t
, I guess. Nor, in fact, would I.” She smiled, what she supposed was a bitter smile. Tired, yes, her mother was right. But as much tired of herself as of anything else. “There was, I guess you’d call it, a built-in impossibility. Neither of us was … 
home
, after all. Neither could, really, beckon the other, into his life, in any sense. ‘What life?’ might have been the operative question. Though I suppose even that wouldn’t have mattered if we’d felt something … Oh, I don’t know.”

“It’s always a mystery, isn’t it?” Sylvia was looking out the window. She’d sat back away from the light, and her face was wistful, Frankie would have said. Almost beautiful.

Frankie was too surprised to speak for a moment. A gift, from her mother. An invitation. “What is?” she said.

“Oh, how anyone musters the will, or the courage, or the foolhardiness, to imagine a lasting thing. And then why that turns out so well for
some people and so badly for others.” She shrugged. Outside, the rain was suddenly heavier.

“A refill?” she said. She held up her glass, empty but for the ice cubes and the shredded lime wedge.

“I guess not,” Frankie said. She held up hers, still half full.

“Ah, I should start supper anyway,” said her mother. “You’ll stay?”

And not even thinking about whether she was hungry, she said yes.

Alfie had napped instead of reading, and he seemed refreshed at dinner. They talked about Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, about marital fidelity, about the hypocrisy in Washington. They talked about the raging success of the movie about the
Titanic
, and then about the event itself, the actual sinking. Alfie, not surprisingly, knew a good deal about it.

It was almost dark when Frankie left. The rain had stopped for the time being. Her mother had loaned her a flashlight, and she walked home on the dirt road, jolting on each step down the hill, the little circle of light skittering and dancing on the wet gravel ahead of her. She thought once more of her walk in the dark her first night home. It seemed, yes, a real possibility that she’d seen the arsonist. His car, anyway. She’d need to decide what to do about that, if there was anything to do.

When she turned off into Clark and Liz’s driveway, the house loomed, a dark shape in the field. Then she saw it: a light flickering inside. She stopped short, her heart suddenly pounding. She stood there for perhaps ten seconds, remembering that she hadn’t locked the door when she left, the first time this had occurred to her.

The light in the house had vanished when she froze, and now, as she moved again, the light moved, too—and she realized, with a kind of ecstasy of relief, that she was seeing the reflection of her own flashlight in the dark panes of glass. She moved the light beam back and forth, and the light in the house moved, too, from window to window. She drew a deep, sighing breath.

Even so, she approached the house nervously. She opened the door and waited on the threshold for a moment or two before she entered the kitchen, listening to the stillness, running the flashlight around the
room. The sudden groan of the refrigerator coming on startled her. She switched the flashlight off.

She came in and shut the door behind her, turned to slide the bolt into place. She looked up and was startled for a half second to see a movement in front of her, a shift—before she recalled that there was a small mirror on the wall next to the door, a mirror that had a little shelf for keys below it. She leaned forward to look more closely at the face—her own face, transformed by the dark: the glint of her eyes, evil-looking in the surrounding blackness, her grim mouth. A stranger. She was remembering suddenly that she had done this as a child sometimes, looked at her reflection in a mirror in the dark, perhaps to scare herself with her transformation. Or maybe not so much to scare herself as to wonder at it, at the sense of herself as an
other
in the world, the sense of seeing herself unfamiliarly, as perhaps others saw her.

Her hand found the light switch and she flicked it up.

And there she was. The same face she’d seen thousands and thousands of times, looking back at her, not a stranger, not frightening or
other
. So familiar that she couldn’t really know how she looked.

She thought of her father. She wondered if he saw himself as a stranger sometimes when he looked into a mirror. As an intruder in the house. She’d read about that as a symptom of Alzheimer’s, and there was some fancy, Oliver Sacks–y name for it, the failure to recognize yourself in a mirror, in life. This must be the kind of thing that was beginning to happen to him, this misunderstanding of reality. Like seeing a fire when it wasn’t there, when it was just a reflection of light in a glass pane; like seeing a stranger when you looked at yourself in a mirror. But he wouldn’t have the ability she had to figure things out, to correct himself, to reassure himself.

When she was finished in the bathroom, she went into the bedroom and undressed in the dark there. The sheets were cold against her naked flesh, and she huddled into herself. Slowly the room began to emerge as her eyes adjusted to the darkness and to the shades of black contained within it—the two slightly paler rectangles where the windows were, the darker darkness that signaled the bureau, the different tones in the different planes of the walls. She was aware of the stillness of the world
around her and, slowly, as with the blackness, the emerging variety of quiet noises within that stillness: the air stirring, the leaves responding, the drops shaking from them as though it were raining anew.

Then she was in Kenya, hearing the feral dogs howling, the music and faint shouting of some distant, celebrating neighbors, the conversation of the guard with someone walking by, the creak of her wooden bed when she shifted in it. In this complicated stillness and darkness of memory and the present, she lay and waited for sleep.

9

W
HAT LUCK
! H
ERE SHE WAS
, the Pre-Raphaelite, parking outside Snell’s just as he was setting the groceries he’d bought into the passenger seat of his car, having to awkwardly slide a bunch of crap—papers, wrappers, tapes—onto the floor with his elbow as he did this.

“Hey,” he called over, straightening up, turning in her direction.

“Hey, yourself.” She came around the car that was parked between them. She was smiling, wearing baggy shorts and a man’s denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up above the elbows. There were freckles decorating all those long white limbs.

He leaned back against his car, facing her. He was aware of this as a way he might hold her here for a minute or two. Or longer. “How are you doing, in our regrettably exciting new world?” he asked.

“You’re speaking of the fires.”

“The
arson
, we suspect. Don’t you read the paper? And if not, why not?”

She smiled. Another thing he liked about her, the gap between her two front teeth.

She raised her finger. “Actually, this reminds me that I wanted to get the paper. Subscribe, that is.”

“Very easily done.”

“But here’s my problem: I don’t have a mailbox.”

“But I can just put two of them into your parents’.”

“No. The thing is, I’m living at my sister’s house now. Just down the road from my parents.”

“Ah, the new house in the field.”

“That’s it.”

“I’ve watched it go up. It looks nice. Better than nice.”

“It is. But it doesn’t have a mailbox yet. I suppose it won’t until they move up here, and God knows when that will be.”

“Then I’ll bring it to your door.” He made a foppishly elegant gesture, a half bow.