The Arsonist (21 page)

When she turned back to him, her eyes seemed immense. She said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. You must think I’m so … holier than thou. And that’s not what I mean.”

“I don’t think that.” She didn’t respond. “But on the other hand, maybe you should mean it. Compared to what you’ve done in your life, what I’ve done is … self-indulgent.”

“Don’t, Bud. You’re embarrassing me.”

“Why? I’m being serious.”

“But you shouldn’t be. I told you, my motivations were, they
are
, really complicated. For everything I did, there were all kinds of … satisfactions.” They rode in silence for several minutes. They had turned onto the dirt road that led up to her parents’ house, her sister’s house. Bud was aware of the noise of the tires. “Here’s an example,” she said, turning to him. “When I met you at the tea and you asked me where I was from, and I said, ‘Africa,’ you were impressed:
‘Africa!
’ ” Her voice was amazed, imitating his surprise. “I got to dazzle you with how cool I am, that sneaky pleasure.”

“Yes, indeed.”

“But,
enjoying
that.”

“Yeah. Unforgivably sinful.”

She looked at him for a long moment. Then she said in a low voice, “Give me something here, Bud.”

“Okay. Sure. I get it. I get how much fun it is being cool. Amazing people. Sure. But I don’t see what’s so evil about finding some pleasure in that.”

“Well,” she said.

“We’re coming at this from different places,” he answered.

“I’ll say.”

“All right, I’ll make my confession, then.”

“Speaking of churchgoing.”

“Yes. And speaking of secret, shameful pleasures.”

She sat up. “Okay, what?”

“When I first realized that the fires were likely arson, I was happy.”

“Happy!”

“Right.”

“Happy, why?”

“Why not? I yam what I yam, a newspaper guy, and it’s a good story. I’ve had other papers picking it up from the AP, the stuff I’m doing right now, and the worse it gets, the longer it lasts, the more that kind of stuff will happen. Christ, if it gets really bad, some prize committee may sit up and take notice.”

“And that’s what you want?”

“Of course that’s what I want. That’s the game.” He looked over and thought he saw a pinch of disapproval around her mouth. “Okay, and then I don’t want it, too.” He turned his smiling face back to the road. “But there
is
a sneaky pleasure in all that. That’s all I’m saying.”

She sat, looking at him, her hair dancing. “Well,” she said.

“Yes, well.”

“Here’s to sneaky pleasures, then. I guess we both indulge.”

They were pulling into the driveway. “Guilty, as charged,” he said.

10

S
YLVIA WAS AWAKE
—she had heard something, some small noise. The red numerals on the clock glowed 4:37. Light was seeping in around the edges of the dark shades. Alfie was lying next to her, deeply asleep. She lay still and listened, hard, to all the noises of the world outside as they greeted the day. She could hear birdsong. The air itself began to stir, and the trees, responding, made a gentle sibilance as they shook their leaves, like a long exhaled breath. There was nothing beyond that.

Alfie muttered something in his sleep.

What was it she’d heard? Footfall?

Oh, come on. Not likely.

Probably a shift in the old house or the tiny stir of a mouse.

Nothing, in other words.

She was getting as bad as everyone else.

Everyone but Alfie. She looked over at him. More and more since they’d moved up here, he had been having sleep disturbances, but they were sui generis. He’d go to bed at eight or nine, exhausted, but then he’d get up, sometimes for several hours, in the middle of the night. It made him slow to wake in the morning. Often he had a nap in the afternoon, too, and she found she looked forward to that as much as she’d looked forward to the children’s naps when they were small.

She remembered those nap times now: she had smoked then, and she could call up with pleasure the expansive feeling of luxury as she lit the first cigarette in the house’s afternoon stillness and turned, at last, to her own work. To rereading whatever story or novel she was teaching in her class or to the papers she needed to mark up and grade—even that was a chore she welcomed as a retreat from the mindlessness of her daily rounds with the girls.

Here, it was in the mornings, the mornings she woke before Alfie, when she had that same feeling, that feeling of letting go of an obligation, a duty. The feeling of claiming herself again. She’d been aware of it especially since the girls had left, Liz back to her life in Massachusetts with Clark, Frankie down to Liz’s to house-sit.

She’d been thinking a good deal about the girls the last week or so. It was shocking to her, but it always was true, how ready she was for them to be gone, after being so impatient to see them beforehand. And now that they
were
gone, how much she missed them again.

She got up. She picked up her robe from the foot of the bed and crossed to the door. Just as she reached to shut it behind her as quietly as she could, Alfie stirred. “Without that,” he said.

She pulled the door to. She went into the bathroom and stood for a moment, taking it in. Every time she entered this transformed room, she found satisfaction in its design.
Simple, plain
, was what she had asked the builder for, and that’s what she’d gotten. The floor was painted wood, and there was wood wainscoting. She’d found an old claw-foot tub at the salvage place in Whitehall, and Al—the builder—had gotten a pedestal sink for her.

As she brushed her teeth, the cool air blew in on her from the open window next to the sink. Too cool. It had been so warm when they went to bed that she’d left the windows open, feeling a little nervous but also vaguely defiant as she remembered Loren Spader’s suggestions about closing the house up at night. Now she shut her lips around the stem of the toothbrush and turned to lower the window—stopping as she did, her hands on the frame, to look at the light of the sun touching the tops of the trees at the bottom of the meadow, changing the tone of their green with its golden, warm light. The sky beyond the hills was a deep, cloudless azure. Something stirred on the ground in the meadow, brown and quick. A marten, most likely. She imagined its mean little face.

And then she remembered: today was the day of Alfie’s appointment with Dr. Thibodeau. She rinsed her mouth and went into the kitchen.

It was still deep in shadow, but Sylvia didn’t turn the lights on. She liked the natural light, the underwater quality to it. If Alfie had been awake, the old Alfie, he’d be complaining. “It’s as dark as a coal mine in here.” He’d flick the switch, without asking her: “Let there be light!”

She shut the window over the sink now, too, and filled the kettle with water, put it down gently, quietly, on the stove to heat. While she set up the clear glass carafe with its filter and scooped in the darkly fragrant granules of coffee, she was thinking of her own visit to Dr. Thibodeau the first week up here. The younger woman had been soft-spoken, sympathetic, and Sylvia had been instantly drawn to her.

Alfie wouldn’t like it, she knew—the idea of his doctor being a woman. Sylvia had discovered only slowly over the years how deep the feeling ran in him that women were inferior to men in most ways. It didn’t hold for any of the women he actually knew—her, his daughters, his students—but it came up at odd moments as an underlying belief, which the particular women he knew were the clear exceptions to. So he would be irritated at her choice.

Too bad
, she thought.
I’m the one who counts now, the one who needs to be able to talk to the doctor, to feel understood, and as though I understand
.

What Alfie would like, on the other hand, was that Dr. Thibodeau was pretty, pretty in a slightly plump, slightly unkempt way—short and brunette and slow-moving, but with hazel-brown eyes that seemed intensely focused on you as you spoke, that seemed part of the way she listened. They could do some simple tests, she had said to Sylvia, looking at her earnestly with those soft eyes, tests that would tell a lot about his cognitive functioning. They wouldn’t be definitive, though—Sylvia understood that?

Oh, yes, she said. She’d read all about it, books she’d hidden from Alfie, though he noticed less and less what she was doing unless it got in the way of some plan or project of his. She knew the tests were always provisional, that they couldn’t really tell, in the absence of other symptoms, what was causing the dementia. For that, they needed to look at the brain; and to look at the brain, the patient needed to be dead.

They had scheduled the appointment, though Sylvia hadn’t bothered to tell Alfie about it, since he’d only forget and she’d have to tell him again. And yet again, probably. No, she’d tell him when he got up today, after he’d had his coffee. Soon enough.

She had disliked Alfie’s doctor in Bowman—a chilly, pompous Freud look-alike, down to the goatee and the rimless glasses. The one time she’d
approached him on her own to express her concern about Alfie—she’d called to try to make an appointment to see him—he’d refused to talk to her about anything on the phone or even to see her without Alfie present.
Alfie
was his patient. If he, Alfie, was willing to have her come in
with
him, fine. Otherwise, no. “I’m sure you understand,” he’d said in his forbidding, professional voice.

“Yes,” she’d said politely, though she’d been furious. But she’d turned much of that anger on herself. How stupid of her to have sought any understanding from this martinet, this doctor-puppet. She’d decided she’d put the whole issue off until they came up here and then start over with a new doctor. Someone who would talk to her. Someone she liked.

Sylvia took her coffee into the living room and sat down on the couch, swinging her legs up and tucking her cold feet under her robe. From here she could see the top of Liz’s chimney rising behind the knoll at the bottom of the meadow. She wondered how Frankie was doing, alone down there.

Frankie. Who looked suddenly older this time around. Not sadder-but-wiser older, though that too, but
older
older. Physically. But maybe it was the sadder-but-wiser stuff—this man she’d been involved with—that was aging her. Or maybe it was just the passage of time. She was, after all, forty-three now.

Frankie. Sylvia had a sudden clear memory of her as a child. Remembered holding her head between her own hands and tilting it down degree by degree as she kissed first Frankie’s chin, then her lips, then her nose, then her eyes and forehead, and then the top of her silky head—Frankie’s mouth open in delight, laughing. Where was that? She was so little, it must have been in Chicago still, in the basement apartment on Fifty-Sixth Street, before Liz was born. She remembered Frankie’s warm hands on her own face as she woke one morning, the little girl having climbed into bed with them in the middle of the night. Frankie’s eyes, so light, were already open, waiting for Sylvia’s to open, too, and when they did, in response to the warm, dough-smelling touch of Frankie’s hands, Frankie said, “Mumma,” her breath warm on Sylvia’s face, her neat little wide-spaced teeth exposed in a delighted smile.

It was that she missed, she thought—the sense of owning, being
owned, by their flesh. Now, much as she loved her daughters most of the time, they were really just people she knew. And it was not really them that she missed when they were gone, she thought suddenly. It was the children of her imagination, those small children who had so much
belonged
to her. Not the adults, with their work, with their busy lives.

Sylvia had visited Frankie in Africa for the first time only a few years earlier. It had surprised her, the version of Frankie she saw there, so competent, so comfortable and relaxed. But perhaps this is always the way it is with your children, she had thought, when you see them whole, in their own worlds, where they seem so different from the partial versions that arrive for a visit, that reenter the family and take up again at least some aspects of their old roles, their old family status.

She had asked to see Frankie’s work—she wanted to understand what compelled her to stay in Africa. Frankie took her along to a feeding station for refugees, one she’d helped to set up months earlier, now being run by locals under the supervision of a nurse from her NGO. They went by plane the first leg of the way, a small prop plane that held six people. It flew low over the open terrain, the grassland and the strangely shaped trees below. They were buffeted dangerously, it seemed to Sylvia, by every breeze. But the others on the plane, the pilots and Frankie’s two colleagues, seemed not to notice—they kept talking, yelling to one another to be heard, laughing—so Sylvia tried to ignore her own fears.

They landed near a village of mostly mud huts with conical, thickly thatched roofs—though there were also a few shops of rusty corrugated metal along the dirt road. These shops were open, with produce and what looked like secondhand goods laid out on the counters.