The Arsonist (42 page)

O
N THE DRIVE DOWN
, Frankie had been full of anxious self-questioning about what she was doing, so it was a relief to be here, to busy herself unloading the car, carrying in Sylvia’s boxes of dishes and books, of bedding, of appliances and lamps and scatter rugs.

The apartment was on the first floor of what once must have been an enormous and graceless single-family home. There was a central common hall with a staircase in the middle. The apartment formed an awkward U around this hall—you had to pass through each room, the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, to get around to the bedrooms, though the last two bedrooms had a short hallway they came off more privately.

The place was old-fashioned but not awful, though most of the furniture was dark and stiff, as though it had been used in the reception areas or offices around Wadsworth before it found its way here. Besides the ugly furniture and some dishes and pots and pans in the kitchen, there wasn’t much provided in the way of furnishings.

She went to the mall at the edge of town. The store there was immense. Into her outsize cart she put throw pillows for the furniture, a straw rug for the living room. Bedspreads. A shower curtain and rings. A broom and a dustpan and brush. Cleaning equipment and supplies. White lampshades. Posters. A hammer and nails and tacks and picture hangers and lightbulbs.

At the apartment, she carried her boxes and bags in, dumping everything into the living room. She went around the U to the last bedroom, which was at the front of the house, across the hall from the living room. She made up one of the two twin beds there. The sheets were ones Sylvia had sent down, and as she lifted them and they belled out and slowly
sank onto the beds, they smelled familiar, like home. She lay awake on the narrow bed for a long time. She heard several other tenants come in—the door banged shut behind them, and they went up the stairs in the central hall, talking, laughing. The light from a streetlight fell into the uncurtained room. She’d gotten used to the darkness, the stillness, of the woods around Liz’s.

That wasn’t it, of course. She’d gotten used to Bud.

She let herself think of him. Of his voice, of the nutty, sweet smell of his flesh. Of his long legs, the thighs so muscular and shapely, of his kneeling between her legs, looking down so intently at their bodies coming together. Of his hands turning her, lifting her, sliding her this way or that on the mattress on the floor.

Let’s be friends
, Bud had said, and sounded as if he meant it. As if he were relinquishing her.

So quickly.

But hadn’t she relinquished him? As soon as Sylvia asked her to make the choice she’d known was waiting, she gave him up, didn’t she? Hadn’t she?

But how could she not? She couldn’t stay. She couldn’t make Bud her life. She had to have a
life
, after all.

In the ugly purplish light, she tried to quiet her thoughts, her thoughts of him. She focused on something else. Anything. Her mornings in Pomeroy, reading by the woodstove. The way the meadow changed over the summer, yellowed in the fall. The brilliant pink of the maple outside the kitchen window at Liz’s house, the sound and smell of rain in the bending, wind-lashed trees. Bud, smiling at her. Turned away from her, crying out in sex. Lying next to her under the shimmering sky of the northern lights. Bud, saying, “Aren’t
you
something?”

She spent the next morning cleaning and fixing things up, hanging curtains and posters, making the bed for Sylvia and Alfie, setting out towels. She was aware of herself as a daughter, doing these things for Sylvia and Alfie that she hadn’t done before, that she’d left it to Liz to do, for years and years.

In the early afternoon, she shopped, at the grocery store this time, for
staples and for the ingredients for dinner—a lamb stew and a salad. She bought Alfie’s favorite ice cream, Heath Bar Crunch, for dessert.

It was getting dark by the time they arrived. Frankie had parked her car on the street so they could have the space that went with the apartment. When she saw the Volvo turn into the driveway, she got up and went outside.

Sylvia was already by the car’s passenger door, bending down into the space to free Alfie from his seat belt. His hands rose uselessly into the air in front of him while Sylvia worked the latch. When she stepped back, Frankie saw her father—pale, groggy, absent-looking, his mouth hung open, his eyes heavy-lidded and lifeless.

Sylvia noticed her. “Oh, hello, dear,” she said. “Here, can you help?”

Sylvia got Alfie to turn in the seat so his feet were on the pavement. Then she and Frankie, one on each side, helped him stand. Together they walked him slowly in, up the porch steps, into the carpeted hall, and then into the apartment. His body, pressed to Frankie’s side, was trembling and unsteady.

“Where’s the bathroom?” Sylvia asked.

Frankie pointed. “On the left, first real door down that way.” She watched as they moved slowly through the shotgun rooms, as they turned into the bathroom together, as the door shut behind them.

She went out to the car to start to carry things in. When she came back with the first of the boxes, Sylvia called to her from deep in the apartment. She went back around the U and found her in the first bedroom, the one with the queen-size bed she’d made up for them. Alfie was sitting on it.

Sylvia came to the doorway. “I’m just going to get him into bed,” Sylvia said. “He’s exhausted.”

“Don’t you want any supper first?”

“We stopped for a snack along the way,” she said. “Twice, actually. I needed the breaks.” She rolled her eyes. “Thank God for drive-through windows.”

“Okay, I’ll just keep unloading, then.”

“If you could get his suitcase,” Sylvia said. “The striped one. That and mine are all we really need tonight.”

“Okay,” Frankie said.

On the way back through the kitchen, she turned the heat off under the stew. And after she’d brought the two suitcases in to Sylvia, she kept working, small loads each time, setting them all down in the living room.

Until Sylvia met her at the front door. “That’s enough, Frankie. Come in and sit with me for a while before I collapse, too.”

Frankie followed her mother in and set down this last load, a box of what seemed to be desk items. The other boxes were arrayed around the edges of the room and made it seem smaller than it was. Sylvia sank back on the couch with a dramatic exclamation, and Frankie sat in one of the uncomfortable maroon leather side chairs with wood trim, of which there was what seemed to be a set scattered throughout the apartment. Sylvia had taken her shoes off and was in her stocking feet—gray socks. She swung her legs up and tucked her feet under her. She looked more citified than she had in Pomeroy, Frankie thought—the pressed khaki pants and the earrings. In her hand she had a glass filled with ice and a clear liquid—gin, Frankie assumed, and then, yes, she saw the bottle on the end table by the couch.

Sylvia saw Frankie’s glance and waggled the glass in her direction. “Want any?” she said.

Frankie shook her head. “Alfie’s asleep?” she asked.

Sylvia nodded. “May he sleep through the night,” she said. “I’m exhausted, too.” She drank and set the glass down.

They talked then, for a while, aimlessly, it seemed to Frankie. About the apartment. About what Alfie’s doctors had said. About Sylvia’s job.

“So you’ll go on working?” Frankie asked.

“As much as I can, as long as I can. I don’t think retirement is for me.”

After a moment, Frankie said quietly, “What if Alfie died?”

Sylvia didn’t flinch. “What if he did?”

“Might you retire then? Move back to Pomeroy?”

Sylvia pondered it, her chin lifted. “Possibly.”

They sat for a long moment, and then Frankie said, “Would you think of remarriage, ever?”

Sylvia jerked her head back in mock alarm. “Good Lord! Where did that come from?”

“It’s just a theoretical question.”

“Well.” She sat quietly a moment. Then she said, “Even in theory I haven’t done a good-enough job in this marriage to give me much confidence about launching into another, ever.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Wouldn’t say what?”

“That you haven’t done a good job in this marriage.”

“Wouldn’t you? Well, you’re being kind, then.”

Frankie sat, looking at her mother. “Maybe somebody could come along one day and sweep you off your feet.”

Her lips firmed into a grim smile. “That couldn’t happen to me.”

“Why not?”

“Because. Because I’m too afraid.”

“Afraid!” This was the last word she would have used to describe her mother. “Afraid of what?”

The line between her eyebrows deepened for a long moment. Then she said, “Just, that when you’re my age, it’s really hard not to be, in some way you’re never in control of,
absurd
. And it’s worst when you’re happy, when you forget yourself. So you don’t, you don’t let that happen.”

“Because you’re afraid of
that
? Of seeming foolish?” Frankie couldn’t make sense of this in light of her understanding of Sylvia, of Sylvia’s life.

“We’re all afraid of something, my dear. You, too.”

“What do you think I’m afraid of?”

“Oh, Frankie, you know perfectly well.” She sounded impatient. “You yourself said you hold back from life.”

“When did I say that?”

Sylvia held her finger up, her eyebrows raised.
“Unavailable,”
she said. “That’s what you said.”

After a few seconds, Frankie nodded, acknowledging her memory of that discussion with her mother, that feeling about herself.

“Which struck me,” Sylvia said, “because you’ve given yourself so utterly to your work.”

Frankie sighed. “It is a paradox, I suppose. Or a mystery, anyway.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s not so mysterious, really.”

“No?”

“No. It seems to me that you chose work that asked so much of you that you … just didn’t have time for all this other, messy stuff. All these demands that seem so unreasonable sometimes. Or just boring. Or I don’t know. Trivial. Your life made all this relationship stuff seem … dispensable. And maybe it is. Maybe people can live perfectly happily that way.”

“Well, I hardly think it’s a recipe for
perfect
happiness,” Frankie said.

“Happily
enough
, anyway.” She poured some more gin into her glass. “Sometimes I think it’s just that you didn’t have kids. Because kids—you have to give over to them utterly.”

“I did that. In my work.” She knew her voice sounded defensive. She felt defensive. And she was confused by this turn. When had Sylvia given over to her kids? To Frankie?

“No, I mean, for
good
. And not to thousands of children. That’s an abstraction, really. To one child. Or two, or three. Whose pain you feel as yours, whose … broken heart, say, is your broken heart. Whose diminishment is your diminishment.” She leaned back against one of the bright, patterned pillows Frankie had bought for her. “I mean, look at me now, even with Alfie. Alfie’s an adult. And it’s true that in some ways I did give over to him. I mean, the way he ran our lives, the way he … controlled them, really. With his needs, his passions.” She laughed quickly. “His ever-changing passions. And now I have a good deal of, I guess, compassion for him in his situation. But it’s nothing,
nothing
, compared to what I’d feel if it were one of you girls.” She drank and set her glass down next to the bottle.

“And I still worry about both of you. Probably less about you than Liz, but that’s because I’ve known so little of your life. Until, maybe, this summer.”

“You think you know my life now?”

“I know what I see.”

“Which is?”

She seemed to take a deep breath—Frankie saw her bosom rise slowly and fall. “That you have … too many choices.” She made a face. “You can live anywhere.” Her arm swept in an inclusive half circle: the world. “You can have … men. You can work wherever you choose. It’s all so open,
there are so many options for you, that you don’t make use of what’s right in front of your nose.”

After a long moment, Frankie asked, “Are you talking about Bud?”

“Not just about Bud, but yes.”

“He’s a womanizer, Mother.” She was teasing her mother, trying to lighten the tone, trying not to be talking about this. “He’s been married two times.”

“Phht! All that means is he’s tried.”

“And failed. Twice.”

“He
tried
,” Sylvia said fiercely.

Frankie was startled by all this. Startled that Sylvia was speaking so directly and with such urgency. Such anger.

And even more startled that now her mother was standing up. “I’m going to have to go to bed,” Sylvia said. “My God! I’ve had it.” She walked to the doorway to the dining room. With a hand on its frame, she turned back partway. “Thank you, again, Frankie. For all you’ve done.”

“I’m happy to have helped.”

“Good.”

She watched as Sylvia walked back through the dining room. She heard her in the kitchen, rinsing out her glass, and then she moved farther back, and Frankie didn’t hear her anymore.

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