House on Fire (ARC)

by Bonnie Kistler

  He called Kip on his way to the parking garage. He was ready to leave, too, so Pete arranged to pick him up on the corner in front of Shelby’s building. A couple of emails had come in while his phone was off, and before he started the engine, he scrolled through them. Scheduling matters. Money matters. Scheduling the money matters.

  But here was a surprise: emails from Zack and Dylan. They’d been staying in touch, but always by phone, not email. Now they’d both emailed, within minutes of each other.

  He opened Dylan’s first. He’d been thinking a lot about summer break. He had a great time working for Pete last summer, but he was thinking about something different this year. He had a line on a cater-waiter gig doing summer weddings and parties. Free leftovers! he wrote and tacked on a smiley face. He hoped this wouldn’t leave Pete in a lurch.

  Zack’s email was almost word-for-word the same. They must have called each other to coordinate their messages and synchronized their watches for the moment to push SEND.

  It would leave him in a lurch, but that wasn’t what stung. Those boys were like his own, and he’d been looking forward to having them around this summer. The plan was that they’d live at home with Leigh but spend all day with Pete on the job, and he’d harbored some hope that they’d bridge the two households. Give him an excuse to drop by now and then.

  He was supposed to drop by every day, that was what he thought they’d agreed on, but he hadn’t been back since that first day. He’d brought Kip along, thinking for sure she’d go out and coax him inside and they’d all have a nice dinner together. But the plan backfired on him, royally. She stiffened up when she realized Kip was out there, thrust some fast-food coupons at Pete, and even turned away from his kiss. He made allowances at the time—he’d caught her off guard, she didn’t mean to be so frosty—but when she wouldn’t take his calls after that or answer his texts with anything more than OK, it became pretty clear that he needed to keep his distance for a while. The standoff would end, he thought, once the twins were home and working for him. He’d pick them up in the morning and drop them off at night and maybe bring along a pizza, and one of those nights, she’d tell him to come in and help them eat it. That was what he’d been counting on.

  But if the twins didn’t want to work for him, there was nothing he could do about it. They weren’t his own, Kip was, and the battle lines were drawn. Ours is the most perfectly blended family I’ve ever seen, Leigh used to boast, but they were completely separated now. Oil on top, vinegar down below.

  He exited the garage, paid the ransom at the booth, and cut across town to Shelby’s building. Kip was on the corner out front. It looked like he was being hassled by a panhandler. A white guy with dreads was up in his face, and the kid was shying away like a skittish horse. His big-time felon son.

  Pete tooted the horn, and Kip broke away from the panhandler and jumped in the passenger seat.

  “Any luck with the photos?” Pete asked as he eased back into traffic.

  “No.”

  “Too bad.” He tried not to show his disappointment. Or was that even the right word for it? Royally pissed off might be more like it, and scared shitless might come even closer. Because they couldn’t identify the priest, Pete was going to have spend more money he didn’t have hiring another expert and making a crash dummy video.

  “It gets worse,” Kip said. “I got an email from the governor’s office.”

  “Saying what?”

  He affected a pompous politician tone. “In light of recent developments, we regret that we no longer have a place for you in our summer internship program. Good luck with all your future endeavors. Fuck you very much.”

  “Hey,” Pete said, but the rebuke was mild. He knew the disappointment must hit him hard. The internship would have been a major résumé-builder for Kip, and the icing on top was that he would have spent the summer on his own in Richmond, in an apartment with the other interns. “I got an email today, too,” he said. “Two of them, in fact.” He handed over his phone.

  Kip’s face flushed as he skimmed the twins’ parallel messages. “So they’d rather wear a bow tie and pass canapés than spend any time with me.”

  “That’s not it. It’s just—they’re in a tricky situation.”

  “Yeah,” he muttered. “Join the club.”

  They were rolling past the Washington Monument, the reflecting pool, the Lincoln Memorial, the most glorious sights in the country, but Kip’s eyes were firmly fixed the other way, looking out at nothing. Pete wondered what was hitting him hardest—losing the internship or losing the twins. Despite their spats and scuffles, they got along as well as most biological brothers did, and in any case they were the only brothers he’d ever have.

  “Anyway, it all works out,” he said as they reached the end of the Mall. “You don’t have a summer job, and I don’t have any summer help. But now we both do.”

  Kip groaned. Construction gofer work didn’t quite compare to hobnobbing with politicians. “But where are we—? Are we gonna live at the site all summer?”

  “Bathroom fixtures’ll be in soon. We’ll be in the lap of luxury.”

  “Awesome.”

  “Call your mom,” Pete reminded him, and he groaned again as he scrolled through his phone for her number.

  Chapter Eighteen

  There was no right way to grieve, the Good Reverend Brooks Brothers told Leigh. But there must be a wrong way, she thought, and this had to be it. Sleeping all day, wandering the empty house all night, setting foot outside only to turn the horses out in the morning and to bring them back in at night. Speaking to almost no one.

  She’d managed to live in the world without Chrissy for more than thirty years. She’d managed for more than twenty years without Shelby, and more than forty without Peter. There was no reason why it should be so crippling to live without them now. She was her own person, an educated woman, strong and independent. She had to be more than the sum of her relationships with other people. There had to be something left of her on her own.

  She remembered spouting off once at a book group meeting, protesting that all their selected works seemed to have titles like The Watchmaker’s Daughter, The Photographer’s Wife, The Dry Cleaner’s Fiancée. Doesn’t the woman ever get to be something in her own right? she’d railed at her friends, who rolled their eyes at one another with a Here she goes again look. But it was a serious question. A woman shouldn’t be defined solely by who she was to somebody else.

  Leigh was a wife, a mother, a daughter, and a friend. At the bottom of that list she would have added lawyer. But when everything else fell away, the bottom was what was left.

  So, that was the answer. She had to work.

  Those words were her constant refrain in the weeks after Ted took off. She had to work because she had three children to feed and clothe and educate. She had a mortgage plus a construction loan plus a building contract already signed and sealed. She had to work to pay the bills.

  This time she had to work because she didn’t know what else was left of her.

  She couldn’t face the office, not yet, but every morning she forced herself to sit down at Mission Control in the kitchen and face the daily deluge of emails. She began to respond directly to clients and opposing counsel. She became more attentive to Polly’s summaries of phone messages and was able to dispatch most of them with a written reply. She put together a property settlement proposal, conducted all the negotiations in writing, and wrapped it up in the space of a week. She even managed to field a few phone calls, including one from Jenna Dietrich that Polly transferred from the office. It was placed, Polly told her, from a number marked WITHHELD.

  “Jenna!” Leigh said when the call connected.

  “Mom said to call you.” The girl sounded as sullen as a teenager caught out after curfew.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  �
�Where are you?”

  “I’m not telling. Anyone.”

  “Jenna. You know I won’t tell Hunter.”

  “He could make you tell.”

  “How? By waterboarding? Come on. I need to be able to reach you in case there’re any developments in the appeal.”

  “What developments?” the girl scoffed. “They file some papers, you file some papers, then a bunch of old men read them and decide what happens to my body. Right?”

  Leigh winced a little. That assessment wasn’t far off. “We’re going to win the appeal,” she said. “You don’t need to be afraid of that.”

  “That’s not what I’m afraid of.” Now the sullen teenager voice was dark with portent. She sounded like an actress in a movie melodrama.

  “The last thing Hunter would do is hurt you.”

  “Sure. Until the baby’s born. Then what?”

  “Are you planning to stay away until then?”

  “Maybe I’ll just stay away forever.”

  Leigh dropped her head into her hand. There was nothing she could say to talk her out of her paranoia. “Are you someplace safe?”

  “Oh, I’m safe, all right. This place I’m staying? It’s like a fucking fortress. I even got one of those Bluetooth panic buttons.”

  “Okay, good.” She’d read about those. Push a button on a key chain or a piece of jewelry, and the device automatically dialed 911, sent out a GPS signal, and transmitted the audio from the crime scene. That sounded like a good security blanket for Jenna.

  “And I’ll tell you what else.” There was a self-congratulatory smugness in Jenna’s voice. “I got a gun.”

  “Oh, no. Jenna. That’s too dangerous. You’ll end up hurting yourself.”

  “I know what I’m doing.”

  Leigh didn’t believe that at all. She sighed. “Do you have enough money?”

  “I was stockpiling cash for months before I took off. It’ll last me until the divorce comes through and I get my settlement.”

  “Well, what about medical care? You need to keep up with your obstetrical visits.”

  “I am. I found somebody else. Somebody who doesn’t know me or Hunter.”

  “Well—” She didn’t know what else she could do. “Promise you’ll call me. Every week.”

  “God, you sound like my mother.”

  Leigh flinched, and for a moment she couldn’t respond. “So I can keep you updated on the legal proceedings,” she said tightly.

  “Whatever.”

  Leigh felt so drained after that call she had to drag herself up the stairs and burrow deep into Chrissy’s comforter.

  She woke to darkness, with no clue what time it was or even what day. She’d drifted in and out of sleep and somehow lost her bearings on both the calendar and clock. She lifted her wrist and squinted at the glowing digits on her watch. It was after nine. PM, but which one? It was the weekend, she thought, but was it Saturday or Sunday? She’d forgotten to eat, she had no idea for how long, but she had a nagging sense she’d forgotten something else.

  She hauled herself off the bed and wandered through the maze of the house. A dozen chores needed to be done, but that wasn’t what nagged at her. It wasn’t until she got to the kitchen and looked out to the back garden that she remembered. She’d forgotten to feed the horses. She’d forgotten to bring them in. And if this was Sunday, she’d forgotten for more than thirty-six hours.

  She jammed her feet into her shoes and ran out the kitchen door and over the lawn to the gate. The horses’ silhouettes rose black against the dusk on the far side of the pasture, as still as statues in a midnight garden. Leigh clucked her tongue, but they wouldn’t come—punishment for her forgetfulness—so she had to go and fetch them and lead them into their stalls. They had plenty of grass in the pasture and the water trough was still half full, so they hadn’t suffered from her neglect. But it wasn’t until she grained and watered them that they deigned to acknowledge her with head-butting nuzzles against her shoulder. Goodness and Mercy paid her no mind at all. They sat on their perches up in the rafters, their eyes unblinking and glowing yellow in the dark.

  She should sell the horses. Nobody was riding them, and the expense simply couldn’t be justified. She nearly sold Licorice once before, after Ted left and the feed and veterinary bills threatened to overwhelm her. But it would have broken Chrissy’s heart, so she dawdled and delayed until along came Peter, and they didn’t have to sell him anymore, and not long after that they even added Romeo to their stable. Not to mention Shepherd. Those were the days when their household seemed capable of infinite expansion. Like those little hydrogel balls the kids used to play with. Drop them in a bowl of water and they expanded to two hundred times their size. But take them out of the water and they shriveled down to nothing. Eventually they disintegrated altogether.

  She slid the bolt on the barn door and latched the gate and headed back to the house. It was a warm night, nearly summer, though still too early in the season for the fireflies to come out. Too early in the night for the stars to come out either, and the gloom was sinking in darkly over the pasture and lawn. There was nothing but a square of light from the kitchen window to guide her way back to the house. The peepers were in the tall grass and sounded like a chorus of sleigh bells as they sang their nighttime songs. Another few degrees hotter and the crickets would be chirping, too. That was when it would be time to reverse the horses’ routine and keep them out of the heat in the barn during the day and turn them loose to graze at night.

  The path from the pasture gate to the house curved around the big weeping cherry tree in the garden. For a moment the beacon of kitchen light was extinguished behind it, and in the sudden blackness Leigh heard a noise. Or more like—felt it. She strained her ears to find it again, but all she could hear were the chorus frogs singing in the weeds and the slam of a car door in the Markhams’ driveway down the road. Still the skin crawled at the nape of her neck.

  She broke into a run around the cherry tree and across the lawn to the kitchen door. Inside, she threw the dead bolt and ran to each of the open windows and closed and locked them, too. She peered out the front window, but all she could see was her own reflection in the glass. She switched off the lights and looked again. There were no streetlamps on their road, and the only illumination came from the distant glow of other houses.

  Her hands shook as she poured herself a glass of water at the sink. If only Shep were here. If anyone were creeping around outside, anyone whose scent or sound he didn’t recognize, he’d be at the door with a growl buzzing through his whip-tense body. But Shep wasn’t here. He had to choose sides, and he chose Peter.

  She should have had the baby they talked about the first year they were married. A small child wouldn’t get to choose; it would simply be hers. But Leigh was past forty by then and their house was already overflowing with children to love and they decided no. Now, though, Peter might not have left if they had a child together. It would have been harder to split up a shared genome than it was to divide up their separate clusters of chromosomes.

  She crossed the darkened kitchen to the rear window and gazed out into the backyard, through the wispy shadow of the cherry tree and past the hazy outline of the clematis arbor and the pineapple fountain standing dry in the middle of the garden. And there, above the bench, came a tiny burst of light.

  It was only a brief flare, like someone struck a match and quickly shook it out. Almost like a firefly, except it couldn’t have been, not in May in Northern Virginia. She grabbed the phone and dialed 911. Someone was out there, she knew it.

  Stay by the phone, the dispatcher said, so Leigh kept it in her hand as she ran through the rooms, turning on all the lights. Somewhere in the house were baseball bats, lacrosse sticks, tennis rackets, and she ran to the kids’ rooms before she remembered they were all stowed out in the garage, a breezeway away from the house. She ended up arm
ing herself with a golf umbrella from the hall closet, and she was still holding it, pointy end out, when the phone rang in her hand.

  It was the 911 operator, reporting in a monotone that an officer had arrived at her address, parked down the street, and was currently approaching her rear garden on foot. She should remain inside. Leigh ran to the front windows, then the back, but all she could see was herself in the glass. It was ten minutes before the operator called again, this time to tell her the officer was approaching her front door and to please disarm any weapons.

  Leigh propped the umbrella in the corner when the doorbell rang. It was strangely comforting to hear a woman’s voice call “Police!” through the door, and even stranger to open it and see Officer Ballerina Bun on the doorstep.

  “Evening, Mrs. Huyett. I’m Officer Mateo.”

  “Yes. Yes, I remember.”

  “I conducted a search of the property, the yard and the pasture and the barn, but I didn’t find anyone out there. Would you like me to search in here?”

  “No, no, that won’t be necessary. I was in here with the doors locked when I saw him strike a match— Did you look for a match in the garden by the bench?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I couldn’t see one. And no tracks in the garden soil either that I could see.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’d be happy to take a look around inside. Just in case.”

  “Yes, all right.”

  “Is anyone else at home?”