He ignored this. “Look, I know you’re paranoid about fire. I get it. I understand, okay? God, Jamie’s stepdad gave us a lecture already. All about some disgusting corpse he found at a fire once that they’d never solved, which I didn’t really need to hear. I get it. I’m not some pyromaniac.”
The image of Buddy’s body before my eyes. My mouth went dry and I felt my breath quicken. Never solved.
That night, I woke in a sweat, dreaming of Buddy on fire. He stumbled out of his chair, flames licking his arms and hair, and bellowed my name. I sat up, gasping, my throat burning for water.
* * *
I fretted through Christmas, watching Hattie and Elliot constantly, but kept my worries to myself. Winter, that season of shutting doors and drapes, of keeping secrets tight, and yet I felt a growing sense of the potential crack in the foundation, where something might get in or out.
In February, a letter came home from school. There had been a few small fires in the children’s playground. Someone or some people had started them inside the playhouse, the only dry part of the park that was mostly covered in snow. It could not be used until it was repaired. If parents knew anything about the incident, which the school was taking very seriously, they were to contact the administration.
We were shoveling the driveway. Elliot was at Jameson’s house. Hattie mostly stood smoking with her hands on the handle of the shovel.
“I saw that letter from Elliot’s school,” Hattie said.
“Yeah. Pretty upsetting. They were talking about it at the daycare.” I had thought of little else; my fears and nightmares were crossing into my daily life. I hated that Hattie was looking through the mail, but said nothing about it.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What?” I stammered. “I don’t know. I didn’t think to.”
She nodded.
“He used to love that playhouse when he was in kindergarten,” I said. “I remember having to drag him out of there after school sometimes.”
I thought of little Elliot, his black curly hair under a newsboy hat, hiding in a little house. And Hattie, too, in those days, when she was hiding in our house. The shovels scraped against the packed snow. It had been a cold winter, but this was the first snow we’d really gotten. I marveled that the fire could have caught at all, in these elements.
“Who would do something like that?”
“Kids, I guess.”
Hattie laughed. “They think they’re all different, but they’re all the same. We were the same.” She stood, breathing heavily, leaning on her shovel. “It wasn’t El and his friends, you don’t think?”
“I hope not.” And yet. I knew. Something tickled the hair on my neck. These moments, when Hattie and I tried to parent together, both jockeying for position, trying to act like we weren’t. I rejected her question, assuming I knew him better. But there was something there, and I thought of the day Iain Moore had come by. I pushed it away, hoping it would pass, impotent in the face of this thing—fire.
Hattie, for her part, mostly deferred to me on issues around Elliot. Since she had moved back in, she had quieted. She drank a little less, and she dangled our secret in the open more infrequently. But there was still a way about her, the sense of only just holding it together. If she was tired, if she was drunk, it came out: the sneers and the snarls, the quips and judgments. Today she was managing it well, though, and she looked at me thoughtfully.
“Didn’t you say he’d been getting into trouble lately? And”—a twitch of a smile—“he still loves fire, doesn’t he?”
“Hattie.” I stood facing her. “Iain Moore, the detective …” I watched her face and suddenly she was listening carefully. “He’s Jamie’s stepdad. He—he came here one day. Told me about a fire the boys had tried to start—just a small thing, like a campfire,” I rushed, while she stared at me. “But he—Iain—told Elliot about a fire he’d been called to once.” I swallowed. “Where a person had died. He even told him what the body had looked like.” I loosened, showed her my vulnerability. “Hattie, he said it hadn’t been solved.” My voice cracked. “I’m afraid.”
She stood stock still for a moment and then shook, almost like shaking me off. Inhaled her cigarette. Stood taller. Looked away.
“Yeah. I would be too, if I were you.”
* * *
That night, long after Hattie had gone to bed, I wandered into her room. She had been sleeping in our mother’s old room, the largest bedroom. She looked so small there. I watched her, her chest heaving like a child’s, her mouth open slightly, her hair thrown around her in a net. My heart swelled with memory and love, with the weight of our lives, and I carefully lay down beside her, feeling the rhythm of her breath. Her face was turned to mine. I swept a stray hair off her cheek. She closed her mouth and swallowed, smacked her lips like a baby. What happened to us, Hattie? What if I’d never known you? I thought of how easy it was to snuff out a life—as easy as a pillow over a mouth—but how hard it was to move on afterward. I cried, silently, then. And while the tears rolled between us, I curled my hand into hers, my Hattie, and I fell asleep.
28
It was a dry and quiet spring, and then a scorched, rainless summer. The years were passing, and while part of me felt grateful for pulling it all off, I was left with a deep worry, a sadness. School let out and time opened up. Summer left me with a thirst, a loneliness: Elliot was pulling away, becoming uninterested in our life, our home. I busied myself with outdoor projects while Hattie sat on the patio and watched me. I felt like I was under glass, hot and suffocated, but desperate to keep my family close. I was irritable, jittery, easily startled. I hadn’t been sleeping well; my mind, day and night, felt filled with smoke. Elliot often asked to go to friends’ houses, and I felt like I was losing him. He was surly and distant; he’d become a stranger. Jameson visited semi-regularly to check in. He wanted us to keep an eye on Elliot, knowing that there was mischief afoot that had less to do with experimentation and more to do with trouble and danger.
St. Margaret’s was beset by a fear of fires. The town itself was a tinderbox. There was a fire ban for campfires. The whole place could go up with a spark, it felt like. A series of small fires were started—garbage dumpsters and rubbish piles—but no one knew what was accidental or deliberate. There were occasionally larger, more dangerous fires in sheds or bushes. People were frightened; the town chatter bubbled over at the market and school with talk of “the fires.” The local paper was plastered with photos of burnt-out piles of ash.
I didn’t want to believe it was him. I knew that it was.
“Have you asked him, Penny?” Hattie asked, pouring herself a large glass of wine one afternoon. Her hair piled on top of her head, wet tendrils hanging down in the heat.
“He flat-out denies it. And I believe him,” I said stiffly.
She nodded, sipping. Then said quietly, “He could get hurt, Pen. You know how dangerous—”
“Of course I do,” I snapped. I looked at her and she held my gaze. It was all I could do to stop from bursting into tears. I swallowed, pushed it down. “I’m keeping an eye on him, Hattie.”
“I’m sure you are,” she murmured, turning away, heading to the backyard, where she spent the better part of the afternoon flipping through magazines while I moved around her, keeping house. Keeping my house.
Jameson called after a couple weeks and told me that he was worried. He was, he said, refusing to let Elliot go out with his friends while he stayed there, but Elliot was becoming hostile. I sympathized with Jameson, told him he was doing the right thing, but I continued to watch as Elliot came and went with growing independence. He had changed so much. He was becoming taller and more sinewy, growing into an eleven-year-old, losing his baby fat. He was transforming before my eyes, his childhood in his wake like a pile of broken toys.
“El, I want to talk to you about what’s going on in town,” I got up the nerve to say to him one day while he wolfed down food at the table. “The fires.”
>
He slammed his hands down on the table, exasperated, in a way that made me jump. “Penny, not again! This has nothing to do with me, I swear!” He looked up at me, saw my surprise, and softened. He bent his head. “Okay?”
Anything. Of course, okay. I would have done anything to keep holding his hand, to keep him close for a little longer. And to do this, I was gullible, permissive. Go, go out, I trust you. Hattie watching from a doorway as I waved goodbye. Elliot walking to Jamie’s house, hands thrust in his pockets.
“What about Iain?” Hattie said. “Think he’s just ignoring this, too?” She was drinking more. Filling her cups with smugness. Her smiles were crooked. She was enjoying this but was worried, too, I could tell. Not my problem, she often said, except that it was. She and I both knew that. It was a problem that was growing, and swelling, and threatening to pop.
Iain Moore, detective about town, it turned out, was not ignoring anything. And one day, late in the afternoon, he arrived at the front door. I almost didn’t hear the knock, it was so faint. I was so unused to people visiting. But then Hattie was there, pulling the door open, like so many years ago.
“Iain!” she trilled, tucking a hair behind her ear.
His face was impassive. “Hello, Hattie. Can I come in?”
“Of course, please.” She stood aside, faltering at his briskness.
I had watched from around the doorway and now tried to put a smile on my face.
“Hello, Iain.” I went into the room where he sat, and so much was suddenly the same. Hattie and I, in the two chairs, facing him. Except that he was no longer the nervous young man. He was sure of himself. He avoided Hattie’s eager smile and looked right at me.
“Penny”—here he nodded at Hattie—“Hattie. I’m here about Elliot. I’m concerned that he’s getting into trouble.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small brown leather jewelry box. I recognized it immediately. He opened it towards me, and my mother’s emerald earrings winked up at me. Hattie and I exchanged a look.
“Where did you find those?” Hattie asked.
“A local pawnshop called me about a kid trying to sell them there. The shop had taken down Elliot’s name in case. Are these yours?”
I inhaled sharply. “They were our mother’s.”
Iain’s voice softened. “I told them I knew the kid, and that it was a misunderstanding. But,” he handed me the box, “this isn’t good. Curiosity, mischief maybe, but it never ends well when it starts out that way. Seen it a thousand times.”
I nodded.
He continued, “Jamie told me, Penny, that Elliot continued to want to make trouble long after I put a stop to Jamie’s involvement. After you and I spoke. The fires in town are pointing in one direction.”
Hattie leapt to the defensive. “What, doesn’t the fact that the two of them are inseparable suggest they are both getting into something?” she quipped, her mouth turned up into a slight smile.
“Elliot hasn’t been to our house in a long time, actually. I forbade Jamie to see him a while back.”
I felt a fool, but still said, “But he goes over there all the time.”
Iain shook his head. “No. Sorry, Penny, he doesn’t. And I just wanted to warn you that the police department is handing the recent fires over to an arson specialist.”
A cold feeling ran down my arms, and I felt Hattie’s eyes on me. I felt her fear pass between our chairs. All these years later.
“I wouldn’t want to have to bring in a kid. Especially one from a troubled background—” Here Hattie blew out her cheeks. “I like Elliot. But it’s headed that way if these fires don’t stop.” He looked hard at us both. “I don’t have to tell you what a fire can do.”
He took a deep breath. “I’ve never really felt right about your house fire, Penny. I, well—I have wondered for a long time if there was something I missed. It was one of my first cases, and I was young. I didn’t do right by you, I know I didn’t.”
We two sisters, in that moment, sat still like two foxes at a hunt, and time stopped. Hold on, Hattie, just hold on.
“I dunno,” he said, sounding less sure of himself, “I had my suspicions about Buddy’s friend, that Mac Williams. He turned into a proper criminal down the line, and I just never felt right that I hadn’t pursued things more thoroughly at the time. I had been distracted.” A look to Hattie. “So, I think I’ll pass that file onto her also—the arson specialist, that is.”
I nodded dumbly, and Hattie cleared her throat as though there was anything she could do.
Iain stood up.
“Well. That’s all I had to say.” He nodded to me, ignored Hattie completely, and turned, closing the door behind him when he left.
* * *
And from then on, the two of us in the house, the threads of our secrets snapping, we began to panic, to snipe at each other. We were worried for Elliot, for ourselves, for the past and the future. Time was marked by arguments and drinking. It was the other side of the coin of our summers past: days and nights no longer stretched out in the lazy beauty of the sun, but closed in on us like a trap.
I grounded Elliot, demanded he stay within my sights, but he was like living with a slippery wild thing, and sometimes he would leave in spite of my protests, saying he was going to Jameson’s, slamming the door behind him in a way that was a relief and a damnation at once.
Hattie was coming undone. Drinking more, falling into her familiar tracks and traps, dropping dangerous hints and veiled threats. The pressure was undoing us both and I feared it was going to burn right out of her. I couldn’t trust her anymore to understand the importance of our secrets, of the fire, of Elliot’s birth. She scoffed at me whenever I tried to tell her to keep her voice down.
We lost track of when Elliot was home, so tied up we were in our own scraps, me trying to wrestle fate to do my bidding, Hattie allowing us to be its plaything. I avoided leaving the house, afraid of the town, afraid the smell of smoke would get into my head, drive me mad. Hattie crashed about, reclaiming the house by leaving pieces of herself everywhere. It felt smaller, messier, like a war bunker, like a shelter that turns into a bomb.
29
Evening. We paced the main floor, exchanging swipes. Elliot was at the library, working on a school project.
“Well, you’ve done it now, Hattie.” I slammed a cupboard shut. All the slammed cupboards, I thought. Existing only for the furious emphasis of all the women who had lived in this house.
“Oh, God, what now, Penny?”
“Everything! You are a menace. You did all this—all that fire talk! You think you’re so sly, but you’re like a bull in a china shop. Don’t you realize how serious this is? How much there is to lose?”
She spread her arms. “All this, right? Your hard-earned life.” She laughed derisively. “I would hate to be the one to sully it, but sister, this is yours now.”
She shook her head and went back upstairs. The silence in the house was a blessing, a curse, a gift, and a threat. The sun was setting.
I called Jameson and asked him to come over. It was urgent, I said.
I heard his car and went out to the back deck, wringing my hands. I remembered when it was good. When he was such a welcome sight. I called out to him, and he came in the open gate.
“Penny? What is it?”
Hattie appeared in the doorway, her hair a mess, her eyes impassive, waiting.
“Ah. The other excellent parent,” she said.
“I just think we need to talk about what to do, about Elliot,” I said before Jameson could respond.
“Now? Why, what’s happened now?”
There was a strong summer wind kicking up, the sky was uncharacteristically dark. The leaves were rustling loudly, a rosebush that should have been trimmed scratching against the windows. I shuddered against the noise of it, despite the warmth. My collarbone was aching from that old break, as it often does before a storm.
“Nothing. I—I’m sorry. I just—I am afraid something bad is goin
g to happen.” I don’t know what prevented me from being more frank about Elliot. I was afraid Jameson would judge me, afraid, ironically, that he’d find me untrustworthy.
Hattie walked slowly outside. She was spoiling for a fight, her hair whipping around in a frenzy. I wished then that I had left well enough alone. But I never learn.
“Something?” she said, “You think ‘something’ is going to happen?”
“You okay, Hattie?” Jameson asked, cocking his head to the side.
“Never better. Now that you two are here to save the day together.” She plopped herself in a deck chair and smiled at him. A memory flickered in my mind, of the three of us, all those summers ago.
“Elliot is getting into trouble, and I’m afraid he’s going to get hurt,” I said.
“I’ve talked to him,” said Jameson. “I think he gets it.”
“Yeah, you guys really have a handle on things, don’t you,” muttered Hattie.
“Shut up, Hattie,” I said.
“What, am I wrong? You mean, you two—‘Mom and Dad’—you don’t have it under control? Wow,” she said, “parenting really is a bitch.”
“Someone is,” I said.
I could hear the gate creaking, and the trees sounded like waves as they bent against the wind. Blustering leaves and broken branches on the driveway.
Jameson put up his hand. “Look. Yes, he’s having a little trouble staying on the straight and narrow, but maybe we have all had a hand in that, Hattie, not just me and Penny. All the change he’s had to adapt to? It’s got to be confusing for him, not being sure who he’s supposed to listen to, who his parents are.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I dunno. I think, maybe, it’s time for him to know the truth. About us. About who his birth mother is. Someone’s going to let it slip in this town, and it should be us who tells him.”
“The ‘truth’?” Hattie scoffed. “What a novel idea, ‘the truth.’ I’ll leave that one to the real parents, I guess. The biological parents. Step down. Abdicate, my throne.” She grinned nastily. “Leave it to the prom king and queen.”
Sister of Mine Page 19
