The Arsonist (40 page)

Sylvia said she had started calling as soon as the relevant offices in Bowman had opened this morning. First, the community college where she’d taught. Where, yes—“Oh, fantastic!” the department chair had said—she could come back next semester, certainly to teach one course, and maybe two.

Then she called the housing office at Alfie’s college, Wadsworth, which she knew had a small number of shabbily furnished short-term-rental apartments for visiting or retired faculty.

Yes, there were two available now. One on the third floor with one bedroom, one on the ground floor with three. Sylvia said she would take the ground floor three-bedroom.

It was an hour or so later, she said, when it occurred to her to call Barbara Simms about dividing the land on the property here, to ask whether she thought Sylvia could sell perhaps two ten-acre lots up the hill behind the main house.

“With the Lord, all things are possible,” Barb had said, and gave her a price range. And just before she hung up, she had also said, according to Sylvia, “This is going to be
fun
!”

The trees outside were at their peak for color, an array that was almost overwhelming in its intensity. The sun was bright on them, and the reflected light gave the room a strange, almost-pinkish glow. Frankie
had just come back from a walk—on the road, because the leaves in the woods were so deep you couldn’t find the paths, much less the rocks or roots that might trip you on the paths.

Sylvia had been waiting for her on the porch, nervous and excited and eager to talk about her idea.

Frankie had tried not to appear as shocked as she was. Or as hurt, which she only slowly realized was part of what she was feeling. Hurt that Sylvia could so readily dispense with her support, she supposed. Although really, she’d hardly done anything except sit with Sylvia occasionally and listen to her.

But didn’t that count? Wasn’t that important?

Apparently not, for here her mother was, her face animated into its powerful attractiveness, talking about how much easier it would all be in Bowman. To find part-time care for Alfie (students for now, she thought—always out for what they could make in a couple of hours). To be able to walk to a store—divine! To walk to the library, to walk to see friends. To have colleagues again. To have neighbors close by. “I realized that more than half the reason we came up here was so that Alfie could live the kind of life he imagined for his retirement. Which makes no sense now, since that life is just beyond him.”

“Is it really?” Frankie asked.

Though she knew it was. She wasn’t even sure why she was asking the question, unless she somehow just needed time to take this in, Sylvia’s plan. Certainly she was aware that since the search-and-rescue operation, her father had taken three or four steps more deeply into his illness. He wasn’t sure where he was in the hospital—whether it was home or a school he was teaching in. He didn’t want to read anymore or, perhaps, suddenly, he couldn’t. And his face—his eyes—had that blank look all the time now.

“Oh, I think so,” Sylvia said.

“And you think this will work,” Frankie said. She was foundering, looking for anything to say.

“Work? What do you mean,
work
?”

“Okay, I don’t know. Be manageable, I guess. Not just Alfie, but financially.” It was the first time she’d asked her mother anything like this.

“Well, I’ll have to look around for a smaller apartment off campus, eventually. And we’ll need the money from the land certainly. We may actually have to do some more selling off here and there as we go along. But it’s more than one hundred fifty acres in all, even if most of it is in woods at this point. So we’ll make it. I hadn’t thought of it before we gave Liz her section, but there it is. And no one’s ever going to farm it again, that’s certain. It’s hardly a sad thing, for other people to make use of some of it.”

“No. No, it’s not sad.” Though a part of her wanted to say,
Yes, it
is
sad
. But she understood even as she had the thought that it was connected to something else. Something complicated having to do with herself, not her mother. Her sense of this farm and its land as in some deep way
her place
. She thought abruptly of the way her colleague, Sam, along with most of the other Africans she knew, considered the villages they had grown up in as their real homes, no matter where they lived at the moment, or how many years they’d lived there.

“When will you go?” she asked after a moment.

“Therein lies the rub. I guess as soon as I can manage it, packing up and getting Alfie ready. I wish I could get down there ahead of time to see the place, to fix it up, but I can’t, and that’s that.”

After a few seconds, Frankie heard herself say, “I could do that.”

“Oh, I couldn’t ask you.”

“You didn’t ask,” Frankie said. “I offered.”

Sylvia looked sharply over at her. “But what would you
do
?”

“Whatever you’d like me to do. Go down, clean it up, if it needs it. See what you’ll need. Bedding, I suppose. And kitchen things. Whatever. Do you know what it comes with?”

“No,” Sylvia said. “I think those places are all a bit of a hodgepodge, at least according to visiting faculty I’ve known. Basic furniture, and then some of what any number of people have left behind over the years.”

“Well, if it’s too dreary, I could try to cheer it up. I’m good at that. Good at making strange digs livable. I could take down a small load of stuff and then let you know what else you’d need. For the short term, anyway.”

Frankie could see that her mother wanted to say yes. “So it’s settled,”
she said to Sylvia. “I’ll go in a day or two. That way maybe you could actually just bring Alfie directly there from the hospital. Wouldn’t that be better?”

“Oh, I think much better. Much less confusing for him.” Frankie could hear it, the relief in her mother’s voice. “And then you’ll come back up here,” Sylvia said. This wasn’t inflected as a question, but Frankie understood that Sylvia was asking.

“That’s something I’ll have to figure out,” Frankie said. “Maybe once I’ve finished in Bowman, I’ll head down to New York and see if there’s something there that compels me. I’ve been putting off dealing with all that, I have to say. Work. Earning a living. Et cetera. Maybe now’s the time.”

Her mother frowned and said, “But what about … your life? Here?”

“Well, you know. I needed to make some decisions about that anyway.” She was thinking of Bud.

And now Sylvia said, “But Bud?”

This had always been the question. “I don’t know. I mean, obviously, I care for him.” She lifted her shoulders.

“I think you should come back here.” And then, maybe because Sylvia heard how assertive she’d been, she said, “If you want to, that is. Maybe you could find something to do here.”

“I’ve tried, Mother.” Though of course this wasn’t true. Sometimes, in her efforts to imagine a life here, she’d asked about one job or another—an opening at the high school, in the admissions office of the health center she’d gone to visit. But she hadn’t followed up on anything. She said, “I can’t stay here indefinitely anyway. Clark and Liz will reclaim their house eventually, for one thing.”

“But then the big house will be unused. And perhaps someone should be staying there, after all.”

Frankie laughed suddenly. “This can’t be my life, Mother, staying in empty houses to be sure they don’t get burned down. And besides, Tink Snell’s been arrested.”

“If he is indeed the arsonist. There’s plenty of dispute about
that
.”

“I know. He has his defenders. Bud among them, actually.”

“Is he? I didn’t realize that.”

“Mostly I think he feels Tink wasn’t treated fairly.”

“Ah,” Sylvia said.

They sat for a while longer, talking about the details. When Frankie would go, when Alfie would be released. What Frankie should take down.

“Well, it sounds as though this is settled,” Sylvia said at last, standing. “I’m going to go up and look around and see what needs packing, then.”

“Good.” Frankie got up, too.

At the door, Sylvia stopped. “I don’t know that I think it’s helpful to you, that way of thinking about your work.”

“What way?”

“Seeing what compels you.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“I don’t know.” Sylvia was frowning. Serious. “I guess there’s a lot that can compel you that perhaps can’t … sustain you. Sometimes those things, the things that sustain you, are more or less accidents. Off to the side of whatever you thought compelled you in the first place.”

“I’ll put that in my pipe and smoke it, Mother. Thank you very much.”

“I didn’t mean to try to sound
wise
, God knows.” Sylvia made a face.

“And yet …” Frankie was grinning, holding her hands up.

After Sylvia had gone, Frankie sat for a while, alone, at the scarred round table. So this was it, then. The kick in the ass. The push. She looked out the windows at the flaming colors. How odd that this was where it should have come from. Alfie and Sylvia. Or Sylvia, anyway, with her sudden drive to seize control of something in her own life again, and in Alfie’s life, too. Which perhaps Frankie should have foreseen, her mother had been so at a loss for a while. So not in control of anything.

And beyond that, it did make sense, in many ways. She could agree with the logic of many of Sylvia’s arguments for it. It was a surprise, but it wasn’t, finally, surprising.

Though it was interesting that it was Alfie who’d set things in motion, with his strange compulsion, whatever it was—to
head out
. To leave, to go. Perhaps to die, which is what Frankie still thought.

No one had been able to get it from him, what he’d intended. When
they asked where he was going or what he thought he was doing—Sylvia or Frankie or Liz, who had come up briefly—he couldn’t really respond. Once or twice he’d managed to say, “Home.” But it wasn’t clear to any of them what he meant by that. Did he just mean he was trying to get back to the house here in Pomeroy? Or maybe he had in mind the one they’d lived in for so long in Bowman. Or even, dreaming further back, the one he’d grown up in, in Binghamton.

Maybe none of the above.

Maybe, Frankie thought,
home
—what felt like home—was just a way of being in the world that felt
Alfie-
like to him, like being the person he’d been before the changes that were slowly turning him into someone else began. Maybe by
home
he meant the time when he felt whole, when he felt like himself. The time—and perhaps one of the places—where the world seemed to recognize him in some deep way, seemed to say,
Come in, we’ve been expecting you. Exactly you
.

And why shouldn’t he want that? Isn’t that, after all, what she wanted, too?

Bud was startled, and then angry, though he wouldn’t acknowledge that at first. “Did I miss something?” he asked, when he’d taken it in, what Sylvia’s plan was, that Frankie was part of it. “I didn’t realize there was even the possibility of something like this.”

Frankie could feel how much she’d sprung it on him. As they talked about it, she grew more defensive.

“But New York?” he said.

“Yes.” She didn’t look at him. “I need to check it out. I mean, I’ve talked about that from the start.”

“From the start of you and me, you mean?”

“I suppose.” She had known he would be angry, but she hadn’t known how far away from her that would take him.

There was a long silence. “When was that, I wonder,” he said. “I mean,
have
we, even started? I feel, actually, that you’ve had the proverbial foot out the proverbial door from the moment I met you.”

Frankie wasn’t sure what to say.

He was watching her, as though she were a stranger. “What?” he said.

“I suppose I have,” she said finally. “Had my foot out the door. In the sense that I need to find work. In the sense that step one would be New York.”

He sat back and stretched his long legs out in front of him. “So. A little more temporizing in your life. But temporizing that
slopped over
into my life, too, this time around.” He gave the words a mean emphasis.

Frankie said, “I’ve talked to you on and off about this, Bud. About not seeing a way of making my life here. About needing a life.”

He was silent.

“I never misrepresented myself.”

“Well, you did and you didn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean
this
, Frankie.” He gestured around the room. “The way we’ve been here. Together. I mean, having sex, being loving.”

“That wasn’t a misrepresentation. I felt that. I feel that.”

“But, what? It makes no difference?”

Frankie tried again to explain herself. As she talked, she realized that all along she’d been holding two opposing ideas in her head—that she’d stay; that she’d go. Without examining herself, without taking responsibility for any of it, she’d let herself drift along as if both were true. She’d involved herself here in ways that felt important to her. Necessary. Most of all, with Bud. But in other ways, too. With Alfie and his failing. With wanting to help Liz, who was so tired of being the good daughter. Maybe even the fires had drawn her in: she’d felt a part of the town, listening for noises at night, talking about who might have done it, where it had happened last, where it might happen next.

But she’d also felt that eventually she’d have to go, perhaps not back to Africa, but somewhere
out there
in the world—finally, that was who she was. How she saw herself.

She was looking at Bud, who was listening to her, listening to her intensely, gravely. Honorably. He was such an honorable, honest person. He would never not be dear to her, she felt.

She looked away. She felt tearful, suddenly. After a moment, she turned back to him and said, “I need work, Bud. I need … a life.”

“We all need work, Frankie. And there’s no dearth of work to be done, wherever you look.”

“I’ve
looked
. I’ve looked here.” He was watching her steadily. “Bud. I don’t want to argue with you.”