Authors: Rene Steinke
There were two fewer stairs because of the sinking. The hallway tilted toward the slab of light at her bedroom door. When I pushed it open, I saw her lying back on the pillows, a book in her lap, a glass of water in her hand. She stirred slightly, fumbled with the pink wool blanket, then bolted up. “What’s happened?” She sighed, staring at the torn collar of my dress.
“Get up, okay? The house is burning.” Flames nibbled the seam between the wall and floor. An orange vine wound its way up a crack, blossomed into roses. The sharp hot petals opened, red, blue, yellow.
I pulled at her arm. The petals of the roses were peeling back to black pistiled centers. I could hardly take my eyes off them.
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They multiplied and bunched together in bursts. I slid her legs off the bed, put her arm around my shoulder, and dragged her up. She felt about as heavy as two winter coats.
Outside her bedroom door, the hallway was in a haze. She coughed as I took the steps and pulled her weight onto my shoulder. She unhinged the photographs on the wall and pressed them against her, and the frames’ corners poked against my ribs.
I couldn’t see through the smoke at the bottom of the stairs, but found my way by habit into the living room. Squinting and coughing, I guided her past the couch, around the easy chair, and scraped my shin on the coffee table. Small flames pranced toward the doorway. My mother was weeping in my arms, her legs limp, and I dragged her along beside me. When we got to the entryway, fire swept up the living room rug behind us.
The handle of the front door was too hot to touch; wrapping my hand with the material of my skirt, I rattled the knob, but the wind from the fire had locked it shut. I sidled with my mother over to the front picture window, hiding her face with my elbow, and kicked at the glass until it shattered, and then I kicked at the sharp rays to make the space bigger. Forming a harness with my hands to lift her foot, I helped her through onto the porch. Stepping through the jagged space after her, I cut my arm just above the elbow on a spike of glass. We ran and stumbled down through the yard and fell into the weeds near the mailbox. When my mother saw the blood staining my dress, she took off her sweater and tamped it against my arm. “Hold it there,” she said, coughing from the smoke.
From the outside, it looked as if the house had been lit by a mass of lamps. There was watery movement in the windows, a faint shiver in the white wood walls. That furious orange light on everything: the practice organ, my girlhood bed, the sewing ma-THE FIRES / 231
chine, all the mended furniture. Flames shot out of the first-floor windows, and coming out of my drunkenness, I panicked. I hadn’t remembered to grab my father’s music books, my mother’s wedding dress, the brass bookends of rearing horses.
My mother held my arm just above the elbow, her fingertips pinching the tendons. Flames trickled through striped seams in the wood. She squeezed shut her eyes. “How did you know?”
My heart beat fast. “I had to get you out of there,” I mumbled.
She opened her eyes, pushed her lips out as if about to speak, swept a strand of hair away from her face.
Shifting my legs in the dry weeds, I tore at the frayed hem of my dress, checked the cut just over my elbow, where blood had dried into the weave of my mother’s sweater. “It started in the oven.” We’d lost everything, and I so wanted her to see how the fire wept and breathed. I wanted her to look at it. “I dropped a match.”
“Don’t.” She jolted up. Her face slipped in a wave of darkness and heat, and when she hit me, the star of her open hand exploded on my cheek. “Oh God.” She turned and grabbed the post of the mailbox. The fire popped and crackled.
Talk fast,
I told myself. “After Dad died, you never wanted me to leave the house, but don’t you see that didn’t change anything?
We were still alone. Together or not, we were still alone. I started with matches then because I had to do something.” A shutter creaked and toppled into the bushes. “I tried to stop, but I just kept doing it, and no one suspected because I was already burned and so quiet…. You never knew, did you?” The fire hooked around in the back of the house over the bedroom where my father had lain with blood on his mouth and we hadn’t said he was dying. He just died. “Because I was a nice girl.”
My mother groaned and pressed her cheek against the wood 232 / RENÉ STEINKE
post. The flames turned quick and violent and covered the house.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I’d destroyed her walls, all her rooms, and they’d fortressed her.
“I didn’t want to—” But I couldn’t finish. The fire reddened our hands and faces—we were too close to it.
Her voice seared through me. “You didn’t have to. Don’t tell me that. You didn’t have to do it.” Her mouth gaped open. “I didn’t raise you for—” Her limp, open hand flung out at the fire.
The flames clacked like wood planks, and I had to shout over them. “Send me away, then.”
She clattered the pictures of me together and pressed them to her breast. “No.” It was so hot it was hard to breathe. Her cheeks glittered. “You’re my daughter,” she said incredulously, as if there had been another one she was only now betraying.
The air just at the edge of the fire turned liquid, blurring the sky above it. “We’re too close,” I said, taking her arm and pulling her to her feet. We hurried across the yard to the opposite side of the street. Smoke flew over us like wispy crows.
The crowd grew to about a hundred tense faces, luminous and grateful-looking.
At the corner, the fire truck screeched and slanted to a stop, and the firemen, beetled in their hats and coats, unwound their gray hoses and strung them toward the house. Someone must have pointed us out, because one of them, a young man with a small, tan face, came over to us. He threw a blanket over our shoulders, asked us if we were okay, and said, “Any idea how this one took?”
His flashlight spiraled over the crowd, and I spotted Paul, craning his neck, pushing past shoulders, his frantic gaze leaping from person to person.
My mother stood up straighter. “I thought I’d smelled gas com-THE FIRES / 233
ing from the oven.” Another lie, but what if she had told the truth?
The fireman said, “We’ll do our best,” nodding at us apologetically, and went back to stand at the wheel of the truck.
The fire reflected in my mother’s stunned eyes. We watched until the flames died down, and the fragile charred boards leaned together, cinders flying off.
O
n the other side of fire: ashy daylight and myself alone. My new apartment, bright with window light and bare, had a view of the lake. When I looked out my window on a sunny day, the water appeared ruffled and silver as a party dress; under clouds, opaque and cragged as rock.
They called Chicago the Windy City, and I blew through it, high and low. One minute I floated through chromy streets, seeing my reflection waltz through store windows, and the next, as I watched a man with no soles on his shoes pick through garbage with a stick, this fear hit me that no, one would know if I was dead.
I told myself my mother had lived for years with an absence.
So had I. We knew what to do.
Lying awake in my grandfather’s bed the night before I left, my neck stiff on the tamped down pillow, I’d listened to my grandmother’s voice amplified by the linoleum but still indecipherable and heard my mother’s sobs, which I pictured in the dark as small, wounded animals that needed care but wouldn’t be touched. I didn’t expect her to forgive me.
All night I lay with my eyes open to my mother’s weeping, and when the curtain sheers in the window began to lighten, I got out 234
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of bed and walked to the train station and stood on the platform for an hour before the commuters arrived, their suits and newspapers smelling of cigarette smoke, their talk clipped by yawns and coughs, until the first train finally pulled in.
Watching the passing tracks and rails from the window once I was gone, it seemed it had always been just a matter of boarding a train, buying a ticket. Whenever I saw again the orange-and-yellow streamers of that fire, it pained me to think of my mother homeless and angry. Each time she lied about the cause of the fire, she’d think about what I’d done, remember how I came into her room and told her her house was burning, and she wouldn’t know yet how I’d freed her.
The first few days I would think often of Hanna and wonder where she had eaten her first city meal, and if she had found her way easily among the crisscrossed streets, or got flustered by the thunder of the el train overhead, and if she had felt that same heady lack of direction that I did, blowing through the city.
Quickly, though, thoughts of her submerged in the frenetic surf of the streets, and when I did think of her, her life seemed incom-plete, a sentence broken off by a burst of anger, and I no longer wanted it for myself.
The life I had would be small and collapsible, travel-sized, so that it could be left at any moment—I decided not to open a bank account or buy any furniture and scarcely ate, not liking to walk and catch the train on a full stomach. The hunger helped fuel the buzz, this electricity radiating in my fingers and toes and the top of my head, so that a movement as simple as crossing a street or buying a pack of mints could feel deliberate and ecstatic.
I found an apartment and a waitressing job at a café. The days passed quickly, and so much happened in each one that I didn’t want to lose or forget, so I made lists at night of what I’d seen and done. At the café, I tried to settle into the comfortable ano-236 / RENÉ STEINKE
nymity I’d felt at the hotel, but it didn’t work. Too many of the customers asked me my name or wanted to talk, and the other waitresses invited me to crowded parties. I didn’t mind; though—it gave me a wild courage. Flirting with a blue-eyed man, I told him I’d once had a penchant for setting fires, laughing so he wouldn’t believe me. When a girl I worked with was complaining about her boyfriend, I blurted out that I was scarred, but knew how to hide it when I undressed.
I bought a radio, and sometimes after waitressing I’d open the windows, take off my food-stained shirt and dance alone, casting shadows along the empty walls of my apartment. I cut off six inches of my hair, so it swung over my shoulders, and after a long night of fat tips took all the money to Marshall Field’s and bought a blue silk dress, which I wore walking in the city on my days off, the scars flashing when the hem flared in the wind.
Trying on the dress at the store, I’d thought of Jo and wondered if she was married by then. She would be furious with me, but I wasn’t ready to call her yet.
Once in a while at work, I’d see a head shaped like Paul’s, or someone walking with his bendy stride—my chest would clench, and I’d have to put down the tray of clattering plates and cups on the nearest table. If he had really walked into the restaurant, though, I wasn’t sure I’d have wanted to see him. All that time in Porter came to feel like a long, scaled, heavy tail behind me that I wanted to lop off.
But one night in a fit of loneliness I wrote him a short note: It took three hours and seven pieces of torn-up notebook paper to say this much:
I’m waitressing in Chicago now. There are two things
I should have told you before I left: (1) About that banker, I never let
any of the men but you see me. I was nothing to them, nor they to me.
(2) I’d been setting fires like the ones you saw for years (please don’t
tell anyone). If not knowing these things hurt you, I’m sorry.
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A couple of weeks later, I found a manila envelope from Paul in the mail. He’d written my name in giant block letters, as if he were afraid no one would see it otherwise. Inside the envelope there was a clipping from
The Vidette Messenger:
a grainy picture of the Linden Hotel and a short article saying it had been broken into by at least one thief, maybe two. One woman’s jewelry had been stolen, a pearl necklace and a diamond ring, and oddly, a salesman’s suitcase filled with screw and bolt samples. They’d broken into the front desk to get the money box, too. “The security guard on duty that night went outside to check on a loud noise he’d heard near the Dumpster. When he came back inside,” the reporter wrote, “the front desk had been pried open with what looked like an ax.” Paul had enclosed a note on the Linden Hotel notepad paper:
They need me more than ever around here. Since you
left, they haven’t found another full-time night clerk and I’m working
double duty. It’s quiet at night here alone. They’re saying it was an accident. It wouldn’t hurt anything if you came back
. Reading the note, I heard his accent, tinny and small in my head, saw his bruise-colored eyes and acrobatic hands and hoped there might be a time when I could see him again.
I usually slept soundly during those months, exhausted from all the walking and waitressing, and comforted by my reams of lists. Sometimes I would dream that Paul, Jo, or my mother had died, and I could touch the loss of them like a ragged hole blown out of a wall, the bricks and wires and pipes cutting my hand. If I leaned through the hole to see the body though, the wall gave way, and I was falling past an endless series of balconies and windows and confetti. Only later, clearing a table, or washing clothes at a crowded Laundromat, would I remember the dream, when I was too busy to stop and take in what it meant.
It wasn’t until the end of the summer that the attacks of vertigo began, and I’d forget what street I was on or where I’d meant to 238 / RENÉ STEINKE
be going in the first place, or suddenly feel sure a skyscraper was about to topple over but didn’t know where to run. It was the opposite of the claustrophobia before I set a fire, more like the dissolute trance I felt afterward, watching the smoke.
Once I got lost on the South Side, and a hulking drunk man in a fishing hat, holding his hand like a gun, tried to mug me. Another time, in the midst of the Saturday rush, I fainted into a crowd of shoppers on Michigan Avenue, and when a nice woman splashed cola on my face and I finally came to, there were foot-prints on my skirt and legs.