What Burns Away (21 page)

“I think Claire and I need a little more time together,” Mom told Miles and Kara when they returned to the table with coffees and a hot cocoa for Jonah.

Kara sat, looped her arm around Mom's waist, and rested her head on our mother's shoulder for a quick hug. Their eyes were the exact dark hue of ash, their bee-stung lips glossed like race cars. As long as I can remember, my sister and mother have shared a beauty at different ends of the timeline.

“Take as much time as you need,” Kara told Mom. “I'll help Miles get Jonah into his snowsuit and collect his things.”

The newspaper article was tucked under my arm, and the heat I felt holding it was like the warmth of the fire itself. Standing there beside my mother, I suspected that all my lies were transparent.

Miles collected my winter hat and gloves and scarf. “Some water, babe?” He rubbed my neck and handed me a cup.

I gulped the drink back.

With his brow furrowed, Miles took my hand and his thumb lingered on my pulse. Discreetly attempting to get a read on me, he looked into my eyes with a gentle nod.

Tucking Jonah's Matchbox cars into the diaper bag, Kara told him, “That Jonah is so stinking cute. And I agree that they should
not
fly home without you.”

Miles set my wrist back into my lap and told me, “Maybe you should ride back to the hotel with your mother now, so you can talk. I'll rebook your flights so we can be together on the plane. I'm not letting you or Jonah out of my sight.”

Kara bit her lip and scanned the room as if the answers were hung on the walls amid the series of watercolor seascapes. “If there's anything Luke and I can do, we're happy to help. You're all welcome to our guest room if you don't want to stay at the hotel. I'd love more time with your little cutie.”

I nodded and said, “Thanks.”

Watching Kara direct Miles's search for Jonah's lost mitten, I could believe that my sister was an attentive mother to her three girls, and I felt the guilt of having denied Jonah an aunt and cousins out of my own distaste for Craig, who had legally adopted Kara as his daughter once I left his house for college.

Admiring my son's industrious stacking of cups, Kara murmured, “I miss this age.”

“It's the best age,” I agreed, smiling my best sane-person smile, keeping my hands folded to stop their trembling and wondering how long it would be before my family uncovered my crime.

Miles kissed my cheek and put Jonah in my lap. “You've got the car seat, Claire, so the little man should ride with you and your mom. Kara can drop me at the hotel and take your mom back to her place when you meet up with us there. That way, you'll have a little time alone in the car with your mother. Tonight, you'll rest. I'll take care of you.” He gave Jonah and me a long, tight squeeze before joining Kara, who stood off in a corner and whispered into her cell phone.

Chewing the cuticles of my free hand, I held Jonah close and scanned out the window again for police cars. Mom wound her scarf around her neck, took the newspaper from my arm, and tossed it into her bag. “Let's skedaddle,” she insisted.

Departing, Miles and Kara strolled a few paces ahead of us, their hands tucked into their pockets. They talked about the kids.

“I'd like them to know each other,” Miles said. “For Jonah to have cousins and really develop a relationship with them.”

Kara stopped to wait for Mom, Jonah, and me.

“Claire,” she said, “it makes me sad, all this distance between us.” She gestured to Jonah, who squirmed in my arms. “Look what I'm missing. You're my only sister. He's my only nephew.”

I set Jonah down beside us. He held on to my leg then pulled the keys from my pocket to play. “I know,” I said. “I'd like to meet your kids too. So much time has gone by.”

Kara held up her phone. A picture of her three daughters, all wearing pink T-shirts, lit the screen. The one in the middle, her smallest girl with the biggest grin, was lacking a tooth.

“They would love Jonah,” Kara said. “I know you'd prefer not to see Craig, but he is really good to Mom and my girls.” She shook her head, aware of the mistake in mentioning his name. “Anyway, we could make arrangements for a visit, maybe take a vacation together—just you and me, Miles and Luke, Mom and the kids. It would be good for everyone.”

Abruptly, Kara hugged me, her hold so tight that it cracked my back, our first embrace since her wedding, over a decade ago, the last time I saw her. And as we clung to each other, I smelled the musky oil in her hair, the vanilla of her perfume, and I couldn't stop the tears that streaked my face as I squeezed her back.

Miles said, “We can discuss some more definitive plans after the dust settles.”

When Kara let go, she wiped her own eyes, then mine. Mom moved between us, her girls, and looped her arms around our waists. “Claire, I hope you know that Craig would also like to see you, like your sister said, maybe get to know you a little better and meet our grandson.”

“You know, Mom, I've always felt like you and Kara just replaced Dad,” I said, the old resentments welling.

“You need to let go of that, honey,” Mom said softly as she stroked my hair. “Is that why you came home? To seek some kind of retribution?”

I took Jonah's hand and started toward the exit. “I don't know why I came. I just want to forget all of it.”

Together the five of us walked the rest of the way to our cars in silence. Then Kara called, “Claire, I'll drop Miles at the hotel, wait for Mom, then I need to scoot. Get my kids off the bus. Maybe you two can figure out a time when we can all get together.”

Reaching my sister's black sedan, my husband held the door open for her as she climbed into the driver's side. She looked back and shouted, “Take care of yourself, please.”

Miles walked around to the passenger's side of her car and called to Jonah, “See you in a few, little buddy. And make sure your mommy drives safe.”

Jonah waved at his daddy.

Miles and Kara drove off.

Across the lot, I lowered Jonah into his car seat and handed him the earbuds for his portable DVD player. While I struggled to fasten his lap belt, Mom opened the back passenger's door and said, “Let me help you.”

Checking the latch on Jonah's belt, our hands fumbled with the buckle and Mom took my wrist, her grip tight as a tourniquet.

I looked at her. “Got it,” I said.

She didn't let go. “That fire, Claire?”

I stared at her, the skin around her eyes like crumpled crepe paper, soft and creased. But I remembered her much younger, my age, that morning the
Challenger
split in two, her ponytail swinging behind her, her green boots crossing the creek, her white coat hung from the end of the telescope, and how after discovering her, I allowed Dean to pull me from my clothes. How Dream Academy played in the tape deck, and how then, my insides aflame, I bloomed with a rage that never left me alone.

She whispered it again, a statement this time: “You burned down the Quayside.”

On her nose, small beads of sweat formed despite the cold. She scrutinized my expression over the top of the car, waiting for me to bite my lip and give myself away. My guilt became a copper taste in my mouth and a drone in my head. I slammed Jonah's door closed, dropped into the driver's seat, and turned the key.

As she got in, Mom pulled a slip of paper off the passenger's seat and handed it to me. “Need this?”

The scrap was Dean's mislaid note, its message brief:
I've got your boy. Meet us where we started.

Rattled, I crumpled it up and stuffed it under my seat.

Behind us, Jonah watched the screen of his DVD player and hummed “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” twisting his fingers up the spout.

Looking over the leaden horizon, I clenched the wheel and calculated the atmospheric instability of a storm clustering along the squall lines, while eerie cumulonimbus clouds obscured the last of the sunlight.

Mom rested her hand over mine. “That fire?” she said again.

Savage and unexpected, my sobs welled up, irrepressible.

Impervious, Mom kept hold of my hand. She let me weep.

My speech ragged in between my gasps for breath, I told my mother the truth, as I always have. “I wanted that place gone a long time ago, Mom.”

She squeezed my fingers and didn't say a word.

“What you did there. With him. With Craig. It killed Daddy. So, yes,” I admitted, “I burned it down. I burned it down with Dean.”

Mom's composure remained unchanged. “I know Dean,” she said. And looking at some far-off marker she asked, “And all those years ago, my car on Willard Street?”

Seagulls circled over us and guffawed like hecklers.

“And your car,” I confessed.

Mom remained the shatterproof survivor of torment. Her grip on my hand did not loosen; her voice did not falter. She asked, “And the barn? And Miles's lab?”

I knew even those acts of arson were of my own design, my fantasies actualized by Dean.

“Pretty much. Yes,” I said, owning them all.

Mom said simply, “Okay, then.”

A bad kind of flutter welled from my gut.

Jonah, still watching his movies, kicked my seat.

“We better get to the hotel,” Mom advised. “Before Miles worries.”

“Please don't tell him,” I pleaded.

“Never,” she said. “But did you buy anything incriminating with a credit card? Anything linked to your name or address? There are cameras at every checkout these days.”

“Dean bought it all,” I explained. “I was in the car. And all our plans, the blueprints, and receipts, I'm pretty sure they were destroyed by the fire.”

The buttons of my mother's duster were undone, her fuchsia scarf looped around her neck. She continued without judgment on her face and presented something like gratitude for me having confided in her.

“That's a terrible burden to carry alone,” she said.

I put my head against the steering wheel and cried anew.

Mom wrapped her arms around me and whispered, “We'll get you better. There are good people who can give you the right guidance or medicine, if you need it.” Then, with her free hand, she guided my chin and forced me to face her. “And, Claire, honey, I'm so sorry you lost your father.” Her eyes flooded with tears, and the pencil lining them smudged. “He loved you. Think of how much you love Jonah. He loved you that much. Maybe more.”

She kept me there a minute in her grasp, pushed my own tears away with her thumb, and went on. “You know by now, honey, that marriage is hard. Even under the best of circumstances, it's work to keep it together, to ride out the storms. Your dad and I were so young when we started. And those were such strange times.”

Her voice cracked, but she caught herself and cleared her throat.

“We were babies, Claire. Your dad was nineteen. I was seventeen when I moved in with him, only eighteen when we married. Young and foolish. And we tried; we really did. But Peter was so haunted after his affair, blamed it all on being drunk and careless. Then he drank because of his guilt, because of hurting me. And I wasn't attempting any sort of tit for tat. It wasn't like that. I met Craig, I liked him, and I didn't know how to leave your dad. I did it poorly, I know. But after his betrayal, and with all the drinking and the layoffs and his inability to hold a job, I felt entitled to another kind of life. And I wanted a better life for you and Kara too.”

I looked at her, confused. “What do you mean,
his
affair?” I wiped my face on the sleeve of my coat. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Mom shut her eyes and bit her lower lip, the same pained expression I'd adopted as my own.

I moved closer to her ear, even though Jonah couldn't hear me, and whispered, “You're trying to tell me
Dad
cheated?”

She shook her head, her eyes still shut, and said, “I assumed you knew. I thought Uncle G, or certainly Rex, told you before you went off to college. Rex mentioned it to Kara years ago now.”

I searched the rearview for Jonah to ground myself, my sense of home and my father's identity slipping from my reach.

“I don't believe you,” I told her.

Then the tears that fell were hers, soaking her cheeks and pooling in the corners of her lips.

“You don't have to believe me,” she said. “But it was a couple months after you were born. I demanded to know what was going on—why your father was so quiet, so detached. I threatened to leave back then over it. That was when he told me. He broke down and admitted everything. It was just a fling, he said, some woman at a bar. He said they were both drunk, a one-night stand. He begged forgiveness. Told me he was certain he would die if he lost me over it. If he lost you.”

Mom looked up at the sky and blinked hard. And paused. “He never forgave himself for my hurt. And, I guess, I could never forgive him, either.”

I said nothing but felt the confidence I had in who, and what, I believed my father to be rupture into brutal reality. The sanctity of my last childhood hero was lost, but this time lost not to space or progress or adventure, but to temptation—a kind of betrayal I had thought Dad only victim to, not capable of, not realizing his imperfections, that he was a liar and a cheat, just like my mother.

Just like me.

I contemplated how I had surrendered a relationship with my own mother over half-truths, always blaming my father's broken heart solely on her, never once considering that maybe Dad had hurt her first.

I shifted the car into drive, attempting to understand how I had been so single-minded to assume the sole catalyst of my mother's affair, carrying my adolescent reasoning into adulthood.

Mom opened the passenger's window and angled her face into the wind. Her silver hair shot up toward the sky and her fuchsia scarf flapped across the dash, the only color in the winter twilight.