The Arsonist (2 page)

As they flew, Frankie leaned against the window and watched the plane’s winged shadow move across the steady brown and green of the
savanna below. Occasionally they passed over a village with thatched roofs, or tin roofs winking in the sunlight, and Frankie could see the rising smoke from cooking fires and people standing in the cleared spaces of red dirt, looking up, shading their eyes.

In Nairobi, she took a taxi home. She repacked her small bag quickly. Then she carried it, wheeling her larger bag, too, out to where the taxi driver waited at the gate by the guardhouse, talking in Kikuyu to Robert, the day guard. As the cab took her back to the airport, the sun set quickly, undramatically, equatorially: day, then night.

The driver helped her into the chaos of the brightly lighted airport with her large bag, and she checked it through to Boston. Then there was the long wait in uncomfortable orange plastic chairs for the plane to Amsterdam, delayed for some reason or other, as planes in and out of Nairobi often were. It was almost midnight when she finally boarded and settled into her seat. A tall blond flight attendant with thick, almost clownish makeup came by with a warmed hand towel, then with a packet containing socks, a miniature toothbrush with a tube of toothpaste, and a sleep mask. Frankie had the sense of the beginning of different rules for life, different expectations. The note of improvisation was falling away, the developed world was beginning to encircle her.

The sky outside the plane was dark, and she slept, a broken, uncomfortable sleep, alternately too hot and too cold and full of vivid, disturbing dreams she couldn’t remember when she woke. The plane was squalid as they disembarked, blankets and pillows thrown on the floor along with trash, newspapers. She saw little empty nip bottles wedged into seat-back pockets here and there.

In Amsterdam, where it was morning, the airport smelled of espresso, there were expensive first-world goods for sale in the shops, there were people at computer stations and on cell phones, there was real luggage—not boxes taped and tied, not old suitcases held together with ropes. Frankie had a two-hour wait. She wandered in and out of the duty-free shops for a while, though she didn’t buy anything. She startled herself with her reflection in a mirror in front of a perfume shop. She stopped and stepped toward it. She didn’t look particularly American—a tall woman wearing a white blouse and khaki pants, her long wavy red
hair pulled back, her pale face washed out without makeup.
A missionary from Scotland
, she thought.
A dour anthropologist from the Netherlands
. A very tired missionary or anthropologist. She went into a women’s bathroom and washed her face with the odd-smelling soap. She brushed her hair. She put on fresh eye makeup. She didn’t look very different, but she felt better.

On the flight to Boston, there was a movie, astonishing to Frankie in its stupidity and crudeness. Was this
all right
now in the States? Had she lived in Africa too long? She looked around at the others watching it with earphones in, watched as their faces changed in amusement. From time to time, she heard the ripples of light laughter sweep through the plane.

The sun was bright as they came in for the landing in Boston. There were sailboats and motorboats on the dark blue water, their wakes making curling white lines behind them. There was the familiar urban skyline off in the distance and the closer village one across from the airport, the toylike old-fashioned wooden houses seeming to look out benignly over the water at the boats and the airport activity. Frankie was struck, as she often was on the return to the States, particularly in good weather, at how pretty everything was, how fresh-looking, how clean. Tears rose to her eyes.

The bus north to New Hampshire was loading up as she arrived at its bay. There were only twenty or so scattered passengers, so Frankie had a seat to herself. She fell into it with a great sense of relaxation and relief. The driver came on board and started the engine.

The bus passed quickly through the streets around the station, and then they were on the highway. Frankie watched the sprawl around Boston fall away. She settled back for the long ride into a green that seemed vast and unused compared with Africa. She watched it rolling by, emptied, only occasionally a house, a farm, a gas station. She thought suddenly of Sam, one of her colleagues at the NGO she worked for. He had seen a photo of her family’s country house once, with the overgrown, blooming meadows stretching out forever beyond it. “What crops are you raising here?” he had asked, pointing. When Frankie said, “Nothing,” he shook his head in wonderment. “All that land and no farming.” And here
she was, she thought—back where she belonged, in the prodigal Western world of no farming. Undeniably an American after all. She felt this in some pointed way, since, for the first time in the fifteen years she’d lived in Africa and come home to visit her family in the States, she didn’t have a return ticket. She didn’t know when she was going back. Or if she was.

She leaned her head against the cool glass and dozed, then woke, then dozed again. The sun was getting lower in the afternoon sky when the bus pulled off the highway. They were approaching Winslow, and then they were there, at the little grocery-store-cum-gas-station that served as a bus stop. As they rounded the corner to the parking area behind it, Frankie saw several people waiting outside. It took her a few seconds to realize that one of them—the old woman sitting alone on a bench in front of the big glass window under a faded sign that advertised Salada tea—was her mother.

This had happened to Frankie with Sylvia before in recent years, this lag in recognition.
I must have a picture of her
, Frankie thought,
maybe at forty-five or fifty
, the same way you’re supposed to form a persistent image of yourself that stays indelibly the same, in spite of the years that pass. The wear and tear.

Wear and tear indeed. Sylvia’s face looked ravaged in repose, and yet she also still looked powerfully strong, in what was to Frankie—always had been—a slightly frightening way. The bus pulled into its spot, and Frankie watched her mother stand up from the bench. Watched her face come to life, watched as some energy, willed or not, animated it, and it became, somehow, beautiful.

Sylvia was there at the foot of the steps as Frankie stepped down from the bus. “Darling!” she cried, and threw her strong arms around Frankie.

And there was a part of Frankie that wanted it: to be held, to be taken care of, to be
mothered
. Though this was illusory, Frankie knew—mothering wasn’t a gift of her mother’s. But for the moment she welcomed the illusion, she leaned into it, into her mother’s austere, slightly lemony smell, feeling her mother’s breasts soft against her as she returned the hug.

They broke apart. The bus driver had come down the steps and was opening the luggage compartment at the side of the bus. He began pulling out bags to get at Frankie’s. When he yanked it to the ground and
deposited it in front of them, Sylvia took hold of it and tilted it toward herself.

And then made a face. “Good
Lord
, Frankie!” she said. “You’d think you were some kind of hit man, getting rid of the body.” The driver laughed as he was flinging the other bags back in. Sylvia smiled at him, pleased.

“I’ll take it then,” Frankie answered, reaching for it.

“No, no, it’s all right. I’ve got it. I’m just amazed, that’s all.” Her mother gestured to the car, the old green station wagon Frankie’s parents had driven for years, parked at the side of the lot.

“What on earth is in here?” Sylvia asked.

“Just the usual.” This was a lie. Frankie wasn’t sure why she hadn’t yet told her parents that she didn’t think she was going back. Mostly, probably, because she wasn’t absolutely certain she’d decided yet. And she didn’t know what else she wanted to do. What else she could do, really. If she were going to stay, she’d need to
do
something, and the blankness that rose in her mind when she considered this frightened her.

“Then I’m getting older,” Sylvia said. “Weaker anyway.”

“No. Not you,” Frankie answered. “No way.”

Together they heaved the duffel into the back of the car. Then each of them came around and got in. As Frankie was fastening her seat belt, she said, “No Daddy. Boohoo.”

“Boohoo, indeed. He’s mired in his own world, as ever.”

They were pulling out of the parking area onto the paved town road. Frankie looked over at her mother, at her profile. She looked her age, her hair was white, and yet the effect she made when animated was of a person undeniably, sexually, female. For as long as she could remember, Frankie had thought of womanhood as a territory her mother had staked a claim to. In order to be female herself, to be sexual, she’d felt that she needed to get away from Sylvia. Sometimes, when she’d been home awhile—too long—she thought that was the point of Africa for her.

“What world?” she asked her mother now. “I thought he’d retired from his world.”

“Oh. That’s just not going to happen, I don’t think.” Her mother shook her head, an almost-grim smile playing around her mouth. “He has
projects
” Her voice put quote marks around this.

In Frankie’s adult memory, her mother had always spoken of her father’s professional life this way, with a tone of only-slightly-veiled contempt, or disdain. It was something Frankie didn’t like in her mother, but she tried to resist that feeling now. It was too soon to give over to it. She said, “Well, good for him, I say.”

“Mm,” Sylvia said.

After a moment, Sylvia asked about the trip, and Frankie talked about it. Then about her work in south Sudan, where she had spent the last few months training and supervising the staff at the health centers her NGO was helping to set up. In turn, she asked her mother about the renovation of the farmhouse, which Sylvia explained in a depth of detail Frankie could tell she was enjoying. When they’d driven without speaking for a minute or two, Frankie said, “So, how does it feel, living here full-time?”

Sylvia tilted her head to one side. “I’m not sure. It’s been raining off and on since we got here, so Alfie and I have been more or less trapped together in the house.” She made a face. “No fun.”

Frankie had a quick sinking sensation.

Sylvia spoke again. “But right now, it’s paradise. As you see.”

Frankie turned and looked out her window. It was paradise, she thought. The afternoon sun touched everything with gold, so that the grass, the fields, every tree, all seemed an invented green, not of this world naturally. Even the air seemed golden—the light itself was speckled and glittery where it was caught slantwise by dancing motes, by miniature insect life. She sat, silent. They were passing the old familiar landmarks—the hills, the wide fields with early corn in precise, lush rows. Intermittently she could see the black river rushing by below the road, and every now and then, around a corner or on a rise, there were the mountains off in the distance, bluish in the early evening’s light haze.

They passed a tidy farmhouse and barn she remembered well. A mile or two after that, a familiar abandoned house that had gotten more derelict in the last few years. For the first time in a long time, she was relaxed, she realized. Her mother at the wheel, these old signposts. She felt herself drifting into sleep.

The road got bumpy, and Frankie opened her eyes. They’d turned off the asphalt village road onto dirt. Frankie sat up. They passed the
Louds’ farm. There was a red tractor down in their fields, moving slowly through the tall grass, a bareheaded man, shirtless, driving it. Every rise and dip in the road were known to her now. Every house they passed had a name Frankie could attach to it, faces she could call up. They went right at the fork, and a minute or two later, there it was. Home.

She corrected herself mentally. Not home. It was no more her home than the Connecticut house had been.

They turned into the driveway. “Here we go,” her mother said. She pulled up to the closed doors of the small sagging unpainted barn, attached to the house, which served as a garage in winter.

The air, when Frankie stepped out of the car, was cooler here. Was
better
, she thought, and remembered that she had always thought this, even as a child. It had been magic then, to arrive from wherever they were calling home that year. To feel the gift of some cleaner, finer life beginning. She breathed it in now. She stretched. Her mother had come around to the rear of the car and opened it, and together she and Frankie lifted the heavy bag out of the Volvo. Sylvia took the lighter bag, and Frankie followed behind her, pulling the heavy one over the resisting gravel and up the few steps to the little porch outside the kitchen.

“We’re here!” Sylvia called as she stepped inside. She crossed the kitchen and disappeared into the dining room beyond. Frankie had just gotten the bag up over the threshold and into the kitchen when her father appeared in the doorway between it and the hallway.

“Francesca,” he said with quiet satisfaction. He came forward and embraced Frankie, gently, less commandingly than her mother had. He stepped back, hands still on her shoulders, looking at her. “Frankie,” he said.

“C’est moi,”
she answered, stupidly.

Sylvia bustled back into the kitchen, and Frankie’s father’s hands dropped; he stepped away from her.

“We’ll have just a little light supper,” Sylvia was saying to Frankie, already moving on to the next step. “I know you’re ready to collapse.” And then: “Can you get that bag upstairs by yourself?” It was less a question than a directive, and Frankie felt it beginning, the irritation with her mother that was part of her life in her family.

Her father made protesting noises: “Oh no, I can do that,” but Frankie said no, no, she would, and rolled the bag across the dining room. She could see that the table was already set for dinner. Her father trailed behind her and then stopped and turned back to where Sylvia was speaking to him from the kitchen. Alone, Frankie hauled the bag up the stairs, bouncing it heavily behind her on each one.