Fragments of Ash

by Katy Regnery

  The walls are butter yellow, and the trim is bright white in the late-morning sunlight. Dark wood floors gleam beneath red-patterned Persian throw rugs of various sizes, and attractive pieces of country furniture are artfully placed around the living room. In a large brass vase on the coffee table there is a red silk flower arrangement that is so lifelike, I am almost tricked into believing it’s real.

  “I love it,” I say.

  “Well, thanks, love. I renovated and decorated it myself.” Jock chuckles. “It’s old, but special, right?”

  Yes. “How old is it?”

  “My great-grandfather bought the land in 1919, when he returned from World War I. He was a banker in New York City, but he married his sweetheart when he returned home, and she wanted a summer place. Nothing grand. Just something out of the city where she could cool off in the summer. Everyone else headed for the Catskills across the river, but my old gramp wanted something different. He chose Vermont instead.”

  “And the house?” I ask, still frozen in the doorway.

  “A Sears, Roebuck Vallonia bungalow that he bought from a catalog,” said Jock. “It was a popular model in California back in the 1920s. Gramp saw one outside of Sacramento where he was stationed during the war.”

  “He bought the house . . . from a catalog?”

  “Mm-hm. Filled out a mail-order form. Sent in a money order. Found some local men to take care of the construction. Voilà.”

  “Amazing,” I say, looking around the eclectic front room that spans the width of the old house.

  “It was a popular model for young couples because it was one-floor living until children came along. Living room, dining room, kitchen, bath, and bedroom all on the first floor. And upstairs the layout allowed for three bedrooms or a big, open space for storage.”

  I slide my eyes to Jock, eyebrows raised. “What did your great-grandparents opt for?”

  “The three bedrooms,” he confirms with a grin. “My great-aunt Charlotte, my other great-aunt, Mary, and my grandfather, George, all grew up here.”

  “Your father too?” I ask, gingerly touching a fur blanket folded carefully on the back of a cream couch decorated with bright red peonies.

  “Mm-hm. He bought it from my grandfather for twenty dollars in 1968.”

  “Only twenty dollars?”

  “Family deal.”

  “And you?”

  “I inherited it when my dad passed. Did a lot of renovations. Gigi and I lived here for a while, but it’s pretty isolated. Almost an hour to Burlington, where our second gallery is located, and a lot longer in the snow.”

  “Not to mention, there are no good martinis out here in the sticks,” lamented Gus. “Not even a little ol’ country bar. You have to drive to Shelburne to get a drinky-drink.”

  I shake my head at Gus before grinning at Jock. “So, including you, four generations of Sourises have lived here.”

  “Actually,” says Jock, his cheeks coloring just a touch, “four generations of Mishkins. I was born Jonathan Mishkin.”

  “Mishkin?”

  “It means ‘mouse’ in Russian.”

  “And Souris?”

  “‘Mouse’ in French,” he says with a self-deprecating chuckle.

  “P.C. wanted to be sophisticated in his wasted youth,” says Gus, staring adoringly at his handsome boyfriend.

  Jock clears his throat. “Come upstairs. I’ll show you where you’ll be staying.”

  We walk through the large front room to a doorway leading to a curved staircase up to the second floor. The upstairs landing is painted white and has been converted into a lovely sitting area. A plush aqua and white striped couch sits invitingly in front of a working fireplace, with a coffee table in the middle of the room, and pristine, sheepskin rug on the floor.

  I can barely admire the charm of the small space before Jock ducks through a dark wood door and leads me into a robin’s-egg-blue bedroom with white portrait molding on the walls, several windows framed with gauzy white curtains, and a big white bed, positioned like a cloud, in the center of the room.

  “Heaven?” I whisper.

  Jock shrugs, his expression pleased. “I think so.”

  “Me too,” says Gus wistfully, and I’m wondering if he’s rethinking their move to town.

  “It’s yours,” Jock tells me. “Behind the sitting room is your own bathroom too.”

  Tears prick my eyes as my gaze lands on the matted prints of angels, framed in white, adorning the walls. “It’s beautiful.”

  “You deserve it,” whispers Gus, placing an arm around my shoulders. “Rest here, li’l Ash. We’ll help you figure out the rest.”

  I spin, burying my face in Gus’s neck and bawling like a baby.

  I know this is only temporary.

  I know that this is not my house, my room, my sacred space.

  I know that my housemate, short of hating my guts, does not want me there.

  But after a lifetime of wandering, it finally feels as though I am home.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Julian

  Beautiful.

  Without a doubt, without any caveats or clauses or reservations, she’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life.

  Ever.

  Which is a massive fucking problem.

  Her bright blue eyes, all hurt and wide and vulnerable, and her pillowed lips, perfect for every debauched thing I want to do to them, promise nothing but trouble. And it pisses me off because I moved here to escape that particular brand of chaos.

  I do not want her here.

  But I am a tenant at Jock Souris’s house, and I read my agreement five times before signing it. There was nothing in it prohibiting him renting vacant parts of his property to other tenants, and in fact, there was something about him and his partner having exclusive use of the second floor at any time without notice. So if he wants to let someone stay here, I really don’t have the right to say anything.

  Fuck.

  I need to start thinking about getting my own fucking place so I don’t have to worry about shit like this.

  “An adult,” I scoff, sitting on a paint-splattered stool at my workbench and staring at the little figurine I’d been firing before Jock knocked on the barn door. I look at it objectively for a second before releasing the clamp and letting the figurine fall from the tiny metal platform to the wooden table, where the cooled glass splinters.

  I’m not good at the small stuff yet. Not nearly as good as my dad anyway.

  My father, Luc Ducharmes, born in France and apprenticed to Baccarat straight out of secondary school, was a master glassblower. After ten years of working with the finest crystal in the world, his skills earned him a work visa to the United States, crafting a special collection for Simon Pearce over in Quechee, Vermont, where he met my mom.

  And for a while? We were happy there—Dad, Mom, me, and my little sister, Noelle. Until we weren’t. Until my mom wasn’t. Until she left for greener pastures and destroyed our little family.

  So, yeah. That was fun.

  Bruno looks up at me and whines. How the hell he knows the difference between glass that breaks by accident and glass I break on purpose, I’ll never know.

  I slide off the stool and stare down at him.

  “Sorry, boy.”

  His deep brown, sorrowful eyes look at up me for a thoughtful moment before he turns to the barn door and barks once before looking back at me.

  You’re so beautiful, you sweet, sweet girl. Her feminine voice echoes in my head like crystal wind chimes on a breezy day, and it makes me scowl.

  “If anyone should have been offended,” I tell my dog, “it was you. How could she mistake such a masculine specimen of hunting perfection for a girl?”

  Bruno vocalizes softly, a cross between a complaint and a question, and I realize I said one of his favorite words: hunt.

  “Nah, buddy. Not today,” I say, gesturing to his bed in the corner of the barn. “Go lie down. I’ll take you for a . . .” If I say
walk, he’ll go crazy, so I skip the word and finish with: “. . . in a little bit.”

  Bruno lumbers over to his bed and lies down with a soft huff, those all-seeing hound eyes watching me as he settles himself in a tight circle.

  I’ve had Bruno for a year, since I left Washington, DC, on the worst day of my life and drove up here to Vermont to start over. I stopped in Middlebury to get some gas and a sandwich when I saw a notice on the service station bulletin board about a one-day pet adoption event two streets over.

  His owner had been shot in a hunting accident, leaving three-year-old redbone coonhound Bruno without a home. I looked at him, he looked at me, and I guess you could say we chose each other right then and there. Two sorry bastards who’d been dealt unlucky hands. Not like our luck could get any worse together.

  I adopted him on the spot, loaded him in the passenger seat of my overpacked car, and kept driving north on Route 7 until I reached Shelburne.

  With my dad gone and my mom remarried to a guy in Florida, the only person I had to return to was my sister, Noelle, who is four years younger than me and a junior at Saint Michael’s College up near Burlington. It’s been good to live closer to her this past year—to see her on any random weekend she feels like driving down and visiting.

  God knows I would do anything for that kid.

  And woe to the prick who makes her cry because he will be dealt with swiftly and mercilessly.

  I put on my left glove and sweep the broken pieces of glass on my workbench into a metal collection bin filled with other jagged pieces. Then I sit down on the stool again, staring out the dusty window at the green meadow behind the barn.

  I like Jock Souris. I truly do.

  I grew up in Vermont, where pretty much anything goes, so renting a house from a gay man and his partner is a nonissue for me. Besides, at one point in each of our lives, both Jock and I worked for Uncle Sam, so we have that in common. But he told me very little about the chick he dumped on my doorstep. Just that she’s a “friend of the family” and “needs a place to stay” for a while.

  Now, there is the fact that I’m living here rent free for as long as she stays. That should make me happy, right? Wrong. I am not happy about this new development. I have no interest in sharing the house I’ve grown to love with some girl I don’t know.

  I picture her face—her beautiful fucking face—and the way she stared at me with those wide eyes and her lips slightly parted. Those lips. Angelina Jolie lips. Scarlett Johansson lips. Liv fucking Tyler from the “Crazy” video lips. Except this chick doesn’t look like Liv. She’s got blonde hair and a perfect pout like Alicia Silverstone. I remember the beginning of that video when our girl, Alicia, climbs out a bathroom window in her Catholic school uniform, her skirt riding up to show her black lace panties . . . makes me feel dirty as fuck, but I feel my cock twitch when I imagine the waif upstairs in nothing but black lace panties.

  Fuck my life.

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  Because, yeah, I was yelling at Jock, but she was standing behind him, and I didn’t miss the tight lines of her teenage body under a pair of new jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. Her rounded tits strained just a little against the fabric of her top. Not enough to be dirty. Just enough to hate her. Because no guy alive—least of all me—has a right to want someone like her. Or sure, we can want her, but we’ll never have her. Not in a million years.

  She looked to be about Noelle’s age—somewhere between eighteen and twenty, and ridiculously young to suddenly arrive alone in the middle of nowhere, put up in an old farmhouse by a couple of aging queens.

  How in the fuck is this her best option?

  Who is she?

  And what exactly is her deal?

  I grimace because the headlines of her story—the easy parts—start materializing as I think about what little I know about her. I didn’t do all that training for nothing. Plus, I have good instincts. I could practically smell it on her—the fear, the desperation, the way she wouldn’t meet my eyes except to insist that she was an adult.

  God, what a joke. If she’s an adult, I’m a French poodle.

  It was Jock’s boyfriend, Gus, who gave away the most important part of her story.

  She has nowhere else to go.

  And then something else occurs to me, and I wonder, Is she in hiding?

  This girl—what’s her name? Amber? Audrey?—is in trouble. Big trouble. The kind of trouble that gets other people in hot water when they were just trying to live their lives and mind their own business. And she’s been dumped on my doorstep. Literally.

  Not my business. Not my problem.

  I take off my glove and hang it and its mate on a nail over my workbench. I never fired up the oven today, and after this morning’s shit bomb of irritating developments, I don’t have the patience to work on figurines anymore.

  I put my hands on my hips and frown.

  Nowhere else to go?

  How is that even possible?

  My mom left when I was twelve and Noelle was eight, and my dad died eight years later, when I was a junior at Granite State College and Noelle was a junior in high school. No way my mother was interested in disrupting her new life to take care of us, so I left my room at the dorm and came home to live in Quechee with my sister. I looked after Noelle, commuting to college for my final two years instead of living on campus. I got Noelle up for high school every day and made sure she had money for lunch before I got in my car and headed to class. I signed her permission slips and helped her buy a prom dress. I didn’t start my FLETA training down in Georgia until Noelle had started her freshman year at Saint Michael’s.

  This girl over in the house doesn’t have a mother? A father? A sibling? A grandparent? Someone? That doesn’t seem possible to me. It doesn’t make sense. It seems suspicious and puts me even more on edge.

  While I’ve been sitting here thinking about my new and extremely unwanted housemate, I’ve been toying with a piece of blue glass—a solid tube about twenty centimeters long and half a centimeter in diameter. That it’s approximately the same color as her eyes is a fact I try to ignore as I turn on the torch in front of me and pull a pair of safety glasses from a hook to my right.

  Holding the tube in the fire, I twist the glass back and forth, watching it melt, creating a blob at the end. When I have a nice rounded marble, I press it against a cool metal slab, flattening it a little at the end of the tubing. Before it cools, I press the flattened blob against a few small white crystal pieces still lying on the metal from a previous project. They’re picked up by the hot glass, and I heat them again. I do the same with a few granules of green, and now my flat blue blob is embedded with flecks of white and green. I hold it up to the flame again, twisting it into a blob again, watching as it transforms back into a smooth sphere, with white and green flecks of melted color trapped inside the light blue glass marble.

  I turn off the torch, clip my marble with glass scissors before it cools, and then, as gently as possible, clasp it with tweezers and dunk it into a metal cup of water.

  When I lift it out, I have a perfect marble, about the same diameter as a quarter; and when I hold it up to the light, it’s like I’m looking at a tiny, distorted version of the world.

  Huffing softly, I whistle at Bruno, putting the marble in my pocket and closing the barn door behind me as we head back to the pasture for a long walk in the woods.

  ***

  Ashley

  From the window of my new bedroom, I see Julian and his dog leave the barn, locking the door before slipping around the side, back toward the meadow.

  I don’t have much to unpack, but I hold a folded T-shirt tight to my chest as I watch them go.

  The sunlight glints off his golden hair, which brushes his shoulders, and he reaches up and binds it into a short ponytail. His strides are long and even, and I can see a strip of tan skin between the waist of his jeans and the hem of his T-shirt with each sure step.

  “Whew,” I murmur, reaching up to
fan my face as the duo disappear into the woods at the property line. Even though I can’t see them anymore, I linger at the window, as if hoping for one last glimpse.

  Finally turning back to the bureau between the two windows, I add the shirt I’m holding to the one in the drawer. Before we left New Paltz, Father Joseph handed me a plastic bag from Target that contained three pairs of size four jeans; a three-pack of T-shirts in white, black, and gray; a three-pack of white camisoles; a three-pack of white cotton underwear; a three-pack of white socks; and a pair of simple white tennis shoes. I found his Mets cap in the bottom of the bag when I used the train lavatory to change out of my school uniform, and his unexpected kindness made me cry. It was the hat he wore whenever the juniors played the seniors in softball. All the girls would tease him about being Coach Joseph instead of Father Joseph, which he accepted with good-natured chuckles. I will cherish it above all things. I need to remind Gus to get it back from the cleaner’s for me ASAP.

  I close the dresser drawer and sit down on the edge of the bed. With the window cracked open, fresh scents of the countryside breeze into my room: dark soil, fresh-cut grass, sweet flowers, and lighter, perhaps farther away, manure. I stop picking them apart and let them blend together seamlessly, inhaling until my lungs are full.

  Rest here, li’l Ash. We’ll help you figure out the rest.

  I lie back on the bed, looking up at the white ceiling fan, and realize there are clouds painted on the ceiling. A tear rolls from the corner of my eye as I muster a smile. Heaven. I pull my legs onto the bed and let my tired eyes drift closed.

  When I wake up, the sun is shining straight through my windows, lower in the sky, but twice as hot as before, and a new smell joins the others from before: fire. But not just fire. I blink, sitting up slowly on the bed. Charred wood. The tang of burning metal? Or, no. Probably glass. I stand up, walking across white-painted floorboards to the window and look out at the barn, where I expect to see smoke, but there isn’t any. My lips twitch with curiosity, and I’m tempted to go downstairs and tiptoe across the gravel driveway to peek into the barn, but Julian’s furious words echo in my head: Stay out of my way.