The Arsonist (35 page)

“So it seems like … small talk.”

“I guess so.”

He had stopped, completely, and lain back, his forearm lifted to rest on his forehead.

She felt he was hurt. She hadn’t meant to hurt him. “I’m sure you know what I mean,” she said. She ran her hand over the flesh of his shoulder. “I’m always aware of it, coming back to the States. That the
scale
of things, of people’s preoccupations, seems small. You must feel that. I mean, you used to write about national politics.”

“Ah. Well. You want to know about
small
, then yeah, let’s talk about national politics. It’s all strategic. None of it’s big.”

They didn’t speak for a minute. She let her hand fall.

Then he said, “Look. Frankie. I get it. You were doing work that felt important to you.”

“If sometimes futile.”

“If sometimes futile. And you were with people who weren’t fretting about house fires or signs of memory loss in their fathers. Or whether they had enough money to pay the mortgage. And I’m sure that did feel more like asking the big questions.” He nodded several times. “Yes. Living large, morally, philosophically.
What then must we do?
” he said in his hoarse voice. “And my God, I admire that. I wish I’d lived that way, ever.”

After a long moment, he said, “Although I might have felt some of that the first couple of years in Washington,” he said. “But I’m at peace with what I’m doing now. And I even think, deluded as I may be, that I get to ask the odd big question.”

He turned on his side again and propped his head up once more. “And I don’t mean to suggest that asking those questions is a privilege, exactly, but let me just say that someone, somewhere, is always worrying about the small stuff. The children’s grades, the Alzheimer’s symptoms, what’s for dinner. The
money
, for God’s sake, in a strictly small-town way.

“But chatting with you.” He shook his head. “Chatting with you here, that’s got nothing to do with that. I’m chatting with you because I fucking care about you.” He reached over and brushed his fingers lightly across her breasts. She could feel her nipples tighten.

“You know how you said nothing was permanent for you there?” he asked.

“Yes. That I was temporizing.”

“Okay. Just … I’m saying I’m interested in permanence. I mean, with you, whatever that means. I want exactly this. Sex. Chatting. Every now and then maybe the consideration of something really immense. Whatever
that
means.”

“Are you angry, Bud? I didn’t mean to make you angry.”

“I’m not.” He was quiet for a moment. “Not really. I’m mostly just … perplexed. About how to get to you.”

“You’ve already gotten to me.”

“That’s not what I mean, you know that. It’s just, we keep coming around to this, as you’ve pointed out to me more than once. The question of what’s going on between us. What it is, I guess. So I’m just saying it now. I won’t say it again.” He lay back down. “Over to you, Frankie,” he said, gently. “You figure it out. And when you do, let me know.”

She was quiet a long time. “That’s a big responsibility.”

“Oh.” He shook his head on the pillow, and then he grinned suddenly. “Teensy.”

17

“W
HAT DO YOU MEAN, HE’S GONE
?”

Her mother said, “Just, if he’s not down there with you, I’ve no idea where he is.”

Frankie was standing in the kitchen, still half asleep; her mother’s call had waked her, her mother’s question—
Is Alfie down there with you?
—had made no sense, and this made no sense, either. “Well. What do you mean? He wasn’t there when you got up?”

“Yes, exactly. So where is he? Where can he be?” There was a frantic note in her mother’s voice.

Frankie tried to make her own voice reassuring. “He can’t be far.” The floor was cold under her feet. “The car is there, right?”

“Yes.”

“So maybe he got up and just went for a walk.”

Sylvia said nothing.

“He’s gone for a walk by himself before.” Frankie sat down and pulled her feet up on the chair. “Hasn’t he?”

Sylvia made an odd noise, a sigh, a strange, pained expelling of air. “Well, the thing is,” she said finally, “I think he might have left in the night.”

“What do you mean?” She wanted coffee.

“Well, he got up in the night, as he often does, and, I just … slept through. I heard him, but then I went back to sleep and I didn’t wake again. Usually I do, but I didn’t. I just didn’t this time.” She sounded near tears, suddenly.

Frankie said, “That doesn’t mean he’s been out all that time, Mother. He probably waited until dawn, until it was light, and then went out.
He wouldn’t go in the dark, would he?” Though it was actually still not fully light now. At least not in Liz’s house, which sat in a little gully. The kitchen was deeply shadowed. “How long have you been up?”

“About an hour. I thought … well, I hoped, pretty much that, what you said. So I waited, thinking,
Okay, he’ll be back
. And then I thought, well, maybe he’d gone down to see you, and I called.”

“Okay. Look. I’ll get dressed and I’ll be right up. I’ll come up by the field, in case he’s somewhere between us, in case he came that way and fell or something. And you stay there, in case he comes home.”

“He’s not coming home.”

“He might. I’ll be right there.”

Frankie had been lying in bed when the phone rang, lying there running through the strange, disjointed series of images, yearnings, that had constituted her life for the last several weeks. Now she moved quickly, pulling on jeans, a turtleneck, and a heavy sweater, warm socks, her hiking sneakers. She brushed her hair, her teeth.

When she stepped outside, she realized the air still held the night’s chill, so she went back quickly and got her jacket.

Her breath plumed as she hiked up the rise into the weak sunlight and then walked quickly back down through the blackberry canes, slowing as she came to the pond. Alfie wasn’t there, wasn’t drowned, and it was only as she felt the relief of this that she understood how much she’d been pushing away the imagining of it—his face, his form, under the still, clear, brownish water.

Now she started to call his name across the field, turning one way and then another as she walked: “Aal-fie! Aaal-fie!” And hearing back only birdsong, the brushing of the dying, dry grasses against her legs.

Her mother was on the porch, waiting for her; Frankie could see her from halfway up the meadow, her arms tightly crossed, her shoulders hunched against the cold. As Frankie came up the porch steps, her mother stepped forward and held the screen door open for her. Her face was set, haggard. “So,” she said.

“Yeah,” Frankie answered. Together they went into the house. The heat was on—Frankie could hear the new furnace in the basement, and the air inside smelled of it, and felt dry.

“Do you want coffee?” Sylvia asked. “I was going to make some. I hadn’t got around to it yet.” Sylvia was bundled up in an oversize sweater. She had large, puffy slippers on her feet that made a sliding noise as she walked around.

“Yes, let’s have coffee. And then we should figure out what we ought to be doing.” Frankie followed her into the kitchen and sat at the table. As Sylvia moved from the sink to the stove to the cupboard, setting things up, Frankie had her go over again, in closer detail, the events of the night.

Nothing had been unusual. He got up about midnight, which was typical. He moved around the bedroom for a bit—dressing, Sylvia thought, or gathering his clothes to dress out in the kitchen.

A light had gone on somewhere down the hall. It was very faint at the bedroom door, just a slight lifting of the blackness there, so she assumed he was in the living room, reading, and she relaxed. “Usually when he reads, that’s a good thing,” she said. “He’s up for a few hours and then he comes back to bed. It’s when he’s agitated, when he keeps moving around, that I worry. Sometimes then I get up. Or just lie there, more or less monitoring him.” She was at the stove, pouring the water into the glass carafe.

“But you went back to sleep this time,” Frankie said.

“Yes, I thought everything was okay.” She poured more water in, waited, poured again. They were both quiet, and the only sound for a minute or two was the dribble of the coffee into the lower part of the carafe. When it slowed, then stopped, Sylvia poured the coffee into their cups and brought them over to the table, then went back for the little china milk pitcher. They sat opposite each other.

The sunlight had climbed over the hill behind the house and reached into the room by now, lying in warming squares over the table, the refinished floor. Frankie put her hand into the light on the tabletop, feeling the slow warmth on her skin. She was thinking of Bud, she realized. She was thinking of calling him, telling him about her father, and there was part of her that was aware of the pleasure this thought brought her, the thought of his being
in
this with her—in the midst of all this worry!—a thought that contained momentarily all of her sexual feelings for him, her yearning. How strange.

She must have made a little noise, because Sylvia set her cup down and said, “What?”

“Oh,” Frankie said. “Just, I think we should give him, maybe, an hour.”

“You think we should wait that long?” Sylvia’s face was lit harshly by the horizontal sunlight.

“Well, if he went to the beaver dam, or around Hurd’s Pond, for instance, it would take him that long to get back.”

“But I’m not sure he’s capable of getting back.”

“But those are all paths he hikes a couple of times a week.”

She shook her head. “Not this summer,” she said firmly. “He hasn’t wanted to go anywhere this summer. We went to the beaver dam with the children once or twice, and down to Liz and Clark’s two or three times. And there was that one time he came down alone to see you. But that’s it.”

They sat for a long moment. Then Frankie said, “Okay, I’ll go out and look.”

“But where will you go?”

“I’ll go to those places. Hurd’s Pond and the beaver dam. That’ll put me on the road for a bit of it, too.”

Sylvia was silent.

Frankie said, “And why don’t you call around to the neighbors up and down the road and see if anyone’s seen him?”

“But it’s so
early
,” Sylvia said.

“It’s an emergency,” Frankie said firmly. “Call.”

While her mother was looking for the phone book, Frankie finished her coffee. Then she headed out, about a half mile up the road first, to where the path to the beaver dam turned off. She moved back and forth from sun to shade along the road, grateful always for the warmth when it was the sun’s turn. She was calling intermittently, her voice a lonely sound amid the cheerful morning noises of the birds.

The path through the woods to the beaver dam was shady, and the widening pond they’d made was in deep shade, the backed-up water black and still. There was no sign of Alfie, though Frankie couldn’t imagine what a sign would be. She stood by the pond turning around slowly, calling his name in every direction, and then she started back.

As she drew near the house, she had a sense of the futility of what she was doing. He could be anywhere. He could be frightened of her voice, somehow. She could have passed him, if that were the case. Or if he were distracted somehow. Or if he’d fallen and hit his head.

But she went on. She hiked down the meadow and on the wide path through the woods to Hurd’s Pond, where there was no sign of him, either.

The sun was fully up, glorious on the fall leaves, by the time she got back to the house. She came in through the front porch again.

Sylvia was in the living room, looking out. “Nothing?” she asked.

Frankie shook her head.

“And no one else has seen him, either,” Sylvia said.

“We need some help, I think.” Frankie sat down opposite her.

After a moment, Sylvia said, “Davey Swann, I suppose.”

“Yes. He’ll have organized the odd search party before, I imagine.” You read about it every now and then in the paper—usually hikers lost off a trail in the mountains, injured or caught in sudden bad weather. Or a child wandering off. “Not Loren, certainly,” Frankie said.

“Good Lord, no. I hope we can avoid him entirely.” Sylvia got up and went into the kitchen, where the wall phone hung by the back door.

Frankie followed her and poured herself more coffee as she listened to her mother’s voice speaking to Davey. She sounded calmer than she had talking to Frankie—even slightly amused at what she called, to Davey, her “pickle.” “Well, I’m not sure how long,” she said. “He wasn’t around when I got up, and that was sixish.”

After a moment, she seemed to be agreeing with him about possible places Alfie might have been going. And then she said, “Though it may be none of the above. He’s been diagnosed with a kind of Alzheimer’s disease, you know, sort of midstage, I guess, so he may not really remember where it is he’s headed.”

This led to a long silence on her part, some noises of agreement, and finally the end of the conversation.

“He’s coming up,” she said as she came back to the table. “They’ll start with a group of people searching, I guess the same men who respond to fires.”