Things We Set on Fire

by Deborah Reed

  The bristles jammed against clumps of grass invading the walkway, the mowing and edging clearly past due. Wink took care of both yards and Vivvie made a mental note to knock on his door when he got home. She made another note to spare him the details about Kate.

  She halted the broom, listened for the phone, heard nothing, and in the absence of ringing felt the flimsy line connecting her to Elin, recalling the postcard she sent Vivvie years ago with a picture of Mount Hood. Living above sea level with snowcapped mountains like a Hollywood backdrop in the sky. And guess what? I married a German man. Happy. She drew a smiley face and signed it, Elin. A postcard. For a wedding announcement. To her mother.

  Two years later, Kate left with Averlee and Quincy, claiming she just had to get out, claiming there were things Vivvie was incapable of understanding. “Try me,” Vivvie had said, but Kate told her not to worry. Told her every town was in need of a good waitress. Told her she would be in touch once she settled. “Settled where?” Vivvie asked. “I’ll let you know,” Kate said, but Vivvie already sensed she never would. That evening Vivvie couldn’t seem to rise from her porch swing, entranced by the west, the direction her other daughter had taken. The skinny red bark of pines sliced up the sunset, the row of deep green treetops hovered like summits above the glow, as beautiful a sight as Vivvie would ever see, and the splendor filled her with a bottomless dread.

  A howl from inside the house, a breathless giggle, as if someone were being tickled, tingled Vivvie’s chest. Her insides buttered up as if she might laugh and cry all together.

  She fanned her blouse and swept until the end of the walkway. The hum of Wink’s truck caused her to look up, but instead of seeing Wink across the yard, Vivvie came face-to-face with a snake dangling from the pecan tree, a snake so black it was blue.

  She jerked back and cocked the broomstick, her body filled with the heat of rage. The truck door slammed and Wink crossed the yard toward her, a stuffed Roth’s Grocery bag in hand. “What the hell’s going on down there at Roth’s?” he called out. “Things are a mess when you’re off work.”

  “Get back,” she said, hoisting the broom higher.

  He followed her line of sight. “I’ll be damned. That’s an indigo,” he said. “A five-thousand-dollar fine if you swing that broom.”

  “So you’re the game warden now?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “I can’t have it this close to the house.”

  “It ain’t even full grown.”

  “And never will be.”

  “Vivvie.”

  “I can’t stand a snake,” she said, and swung as if the snake were a piñata, whipping the creature to the ground. It appeared stunned, its head lifting and falling while the rest of it spun as if searching for the ground underneath.

  Vivvie dropped the broom and ran for a trowel in the bucket of gardening tools on the porch.

  “The hell now,” Wink said.

  She rushed up on the snake as if wielding a bowie knife. One whip and the trowel’s tip made a deep sucking sound when it pinned the Indigo to the spongy grass—a fraction from splitting the thing in two.

  Wink drew an elbow to his face. “Good Christ, Vivvie.” The twisty snake ends flipped and whirled in the bloodstained grass like sidewinders in a fight.

  Sweat glued Vivvie’s blouse to her skin. “I can’t stand a snake.”

  “You could have called someone.”

  “Is that right.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “People waiting by the phone when a black snake dangles in your face?”

  “There are people who take them away. Or something,” he said.

  Vivvie crouched to inspect under her truck and porch, and even though it was too far to see, the crawlspace beneath her steps. “If there’s one there’s bound to be another.”

  “I wouldn’t advise going under there.”

  “I’m not scared.”

  “Clearly.”

  Vivvie stood. “The grass is too long.”

  Wink studied the yard. “What are you saying?”

  “The grass is too long.”

  “That’s what I heard you say, but I suspect you mean something else.”

  “Well.”

  “You think the snake showed up because the grass is too long?”

  “Your words, not mine.”

  “Besides, it was hanging from a branch in your tree. Maybe you need to trim your tree back.”

  Vivvie tipped her head to the side.

  The snake lay motionless now, flies already buzzing above it.

  Wink removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He replaced them and held up the grocery bag, his face sunburned, his pants baggy, his button-down shirt hanging at least a size too big from his skinny shoulders, reminding her of the waving, inflatable tube man outside the Ford dealership. “Like I was saying,” he said. “There were only two cashiers, one slow-poking as bad as the other. Lines backed all the way up to the baby food at one end, produce at the other.” He nodded in easterly and westerly directions.

  Vivvie studied both their yards and up into the trees.

  “How come you’re off today?” Wink asked. “Your schedule change?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You all right there, Vivvie?”

  She breathed heavily through her nose. “What do you think?”

  He was already turned, staring at her house. “Don’t look now, but you’ve got little people in your windows,” he said.

  “Ah, hell,” Vivvie said.

  “Where’d they come from?”

  “Probably saw the whole thing.”

  “The way their eyes are bugging. Yeah.”

  Time was playing tricks again—the humor in Wink’s voice, or maybe just the heat—but in that moment she missed Jackson so bad it hurt her throat.

  She wandered up to the porch swing and plopped herself down. Wink joined her, the weight of him slight, but heavy enough to start them swinging. He smelled like salty popcorn, and his shirt, line-dried and stiff, called to mind her mother’s clean sheets, her childhood with cherry taffy and colas in the heat. She’d had a tire swing, and in that same oak tree a playhouse her father built just for her. All those hours spent with her head hung out the door, gazing through the dense leaves, clouds swelling together or tearing apart in the blue. She hid from the rain up there, dreamed of becoming a teacher and a mother like her own mother, who wore pressed yellow dresses and on the weekends shared pretty drinks with her father at Jake’s Crab House down the street. Vivvie’s husband was going to be a man like her father, a man who kept her daughters laughing. A man who lived into ripe and tender old age.

  The girls were no longer at the window, no longer laughing or padding the floors. Just Vivvie and Wink swinging side by side, widow and widower gnawed by memories, though his were surely nothing like hers.

  SIX

  ELIN LAY IN THE SHADY grass next to Fluke near Rudi’s garden. She rubbed her temple and flipped, dopily, through a copy of Inside the World of Insects. Instead of her usual Parisian-style skirt and leggings, she wore loose khaki shorts, a yellow T-shirt with Keep Portland Weird on the front, and her biggest, darkest pair of sunglasses. Her migraine meds had barely begun to kick in.

  Rudi had tilled the garden in early spring and the chicken manure still tinged the rich soil, its smell rising now and then, causing Fluke’s nose to quiver and run with the breeze. Elin was determined to read through the tunnel of her one-eyed headache. It wouldn’t be the first time. She had work to do, an entire branding campaign for the new insect exhibit at the Oregon Zoo. But words kept sliding around the page, snippets about small pests scrabbling from their burrows, sucking the life out of everything. She imagined the creaky sound of grubs twisting the roots of the garden, and then a brackish gumbo of ruin in their wake. Another wave of nausea passed through her.

  She set the book on her chest and squinted at the polarized sky. Tree branches shot across the cadet-blue like veins. The medication mad
e her drowsy, and for a split second she forgot about Poppy and the call from Kate. A moment later she remembered, and it hit her even harder when it returned.

  Her mother had left three messages this morning—Call me, call me, call me, gurgling like an old percolator inside Elin’s head. Kate must have gotten hold of her, too. A goddamn reunion! Hip fucking hurray.

  Elin didn’t mean that. She cared about her little sister on some level, surely she did, surely they’d been close before their father died, if only by the logic of circumstances—all’s well until tragedy strikes! But it wasn’t as if she possessed a cache of “better times” memories as proof that she and her sister had once gotten along. All she had was a vague glimpse of a five- and four-year-old at the Strawberry Festival, faces painted by a hippie girl with a thin, cold brush. And then their mother kneeling all the way down to take Elin and Kate into her arms at the same time. They peered at one another behind their mother’s hair, Kate’s cheeks dappled in butterflies, ladybugs, and rainbows, her lips the slick, bloodred stain of berries. Elin smiled at her, and Kate smiled back, revealing a row of glossy red teeth. Elin ran her tongue across her own teeth. They would be red, too, her cheeks covered in the same colors and shapes as Kate’s, her hairline smeared with the same sweaty wisps of hair. They were mirrors of each other, and being reflected in her sister’s face had stayed with Elin, a strange and simple affection, woven of connective tissue, inborn, easy, a natural joy.

  But no matter. That was all there was. Whatever they had been to one another all those years ago was not enough to sustain them for all that came after. Elin simply couldn’t stand Kate. Not her scratchy voice, not her off-key humor, not her temper, not her arrogance over wearing secondhand clothes, not her bizarre decision to disappear, and certainly not her choice in men. When would she ever grow up? And yet Elin could never quite free herself of the guilty feeling that her sister somehow belonged to her, like a child given up for adoption, willingly abandoned by a mother who preferred never to lay eyes on her again. And in this same way the mere thought of Kate was enough to make Elin feel bad about herself.

  Elin had been annoyed by Kate’s phone call, sure, but she’d been relieved, too. Hadn’t she? To know, in the very least, that her sister was alive, and her nieces, even though she’d never laid eyes on them, were okay, too? It didn’t hurt too badly to let the truth of that in. It was just that no one could infuriate Elin the way Kate could. No one else in her life had ever made her want to throw a punch, and then actually throw one, besides Kate.

  Until now.

  “I was such a good nephew to my Tante Inge,” Rudi had whispered to Elin in bed right after Kate’s call. They’d been discussing families, though neither lived within a thousand miles of a single relative. “Coffee and Kuchen every Sunday, while listening to Tante Inge talk about her Kreislaufstoerung.” He laughed. “But I did love her, and in the end she left me a nice inheritance, which brought me to the States, and then I found you.” He kissed the tip of her nose. “Family is important. My cousin Gerti was a widow raising seven children alone and couldn’t have done it without help from aunts and uncles and grandparents. All of Gerti’s kids turned out to be a success.” Elin could see his smile in the moonlight. What exactly had been his point? That families were essential to happiness? That they saved us all from failure? He was her family. He was her happiness, his background so markedly different from hers that even after seven years he remained a constant conduit to another world, a bottomless box of discovery into a language she couldn’t speak, to politicians, pop singers, and actors she’d never heard of, to exotic meats and aged cheeses and almond sweets she’d never before tasted until Rudi brought them home from the new specialty shop in the neighborhood and shared with her the flavor of his fairytale childhood. But she’d stopped listening to his talk about family. In that moment it was nothing but a rude reminder of Kate, of her mother, of the fact that where Elin came from the good life was defined under very different terms.

  Rudi loved his siblings and his cousins—engineers, architects, dentists, and accountants, as if each relative had chosen a profession by tracing a finger down the list of career choices in a high school handout. He’d been going on about the architect and some building in Berlin, but Elin was searching for Rudi’s smile in the dark, no longer visible; she’d always loved his full red lips, the way they reminded her, oddly, yet erotically, of Ingrid Bergman’s, surrounding the most beautiful white teeth she’d ever seen. His mouth always so fresh and clean, strangely savory, and this must have been what she was imagining when she’d finally fallen asleep.

  Now she lay in the grass thinking of all the lies inside Rudi’s mouth, like a black swarm of flies feeding off his tongue.

  She massaged her forehead, propped the book back up on her chest, but couldn’t read. On their third date Rudi told her she seemed too “patrician” to come from the family she’d described, and when he said this he studied her hair and eyes, the scarf around her neck. She loved hearing him say that. It confirmed what she’d believed all along, that she didn’t belong to those people, and never had. Instead of connecting Elin with her past, Rudi had marveled at the way she’d pulled herself out of it like a diamond from the rough. She was the sparkly gem he protected with an umbrella on the street after dinner, whispering that he was falling in love with her, and she whispered the same. Maybe the rain tapping the umbrella, the steam rising from wet concrete, the fine Pinot Noir warming their blood, had all served as a setting for love, a mood mistaken for the thing itself, romancing them into believing in each other when they were really nothing more than actors caught up in a scene. Maybe one had believed and the other had not.

  Seven years they’d been married. The seven-year itch. Was Poppy Rudi’s itch? Elin searched for a clue that something had been off, revealed in increments over time, like tiny fissures, virtually unnoticeable but for the cumulative effect on the whole. All right. There was a loneliness, a silence that had crept into the bathroom after they made love, the way they no longer looked at one another beneath the vanity light, just wiped themselves clean, no laughter, no bite on the shoulder in the mirror while the shuddering was still warm, still throbbing beneath their skin.

  She sucked in a breath, nausea gaining on her. A giant pulse inside her skull burned hot and cold as frostbite.

  Maybe those fissures, that silence was nothing more than a settling in—maybe it was all just marriage, the way in which it worked.

  What did she know of marriage? It had always felt a little like playing house. Rudi practicing “husbandry” in his plastic clogs, spading up the soil, watering and pruning with that effeminate European air, which frankly, Elin didn’t care for. And did he care for her in an apron, potting daisies along the patio? On a stepladder, hanging pressed linen drapes in the long French windows? She listened with practiced patience while he spoke of BMWs and then he did the same while she spoke of articles in Adbusters magazine, and they shared more Pinot over pesto pasta as the evening breeze filled the dining room with the sweetness of honeysuckle they’d planted, together, along the length of the cedar fence.

  She recalled the odd bruises on his elbows from months ago, spotted beneath his short sleeves when his hands were submerged in the dishes at the sink. And what had he told her? “Must have happened when I tripped over a part in the service department.” She’d laughed. “Poor baby,” she’d said, kissing his cheek. Kissing him for hurting himself during bathroom trysts on the floor, his elbows grinding into grout between the tiny white tiles, his dick in Poppy’s mouth, or deep through the center of her, their red mouths suctioning one another until jerking loose, in need of air, of letting go a scream. Elin kissing his cheek for all those long hours, starting early, finishing late. “You look a little tired.” Kiss. What a diamond Poppy must be under her slate-blue jumpsuit, and beyond that, her brain chock-full of the workings of German engines. “Business is booming,” Rudi told her not long ago. “In this economy?” Elin had asked, feeling happy
for him, relieved. Kiss. “Crazy,” he said. “I know.”

  Elin rolled her head to the side, the garden a profusion of shape and color, a glutted showroom, a county fair competition. Of all the headaches she’d ever had, this one had to be the worst.

  She glanced at the page in front of her. Their mouthparts are shaped like hypodermic needles, which they use to pierce the tender plants and siphon out their juices.

  She tossed the book into the grass and peered through rows of bright round tomatoes, slick peppers, cucumbers next to the wildly open spray of rosemary, lavender, and sage. By now her migraine prescription should have fully kicked in. Topamax helps you live again. A bullshit ad campaign. The yard beyond the garden resembled a purple Easter card fade-out, the shapes of the vegetables an orgy of colorful, overlapping balls.

  She forced herself to stand, even as the ground shifted beneath her. A bubble belched free of her stomach. She tiptoed to the antiqued cabinet on the patio as if trying not to wake her own mind. Fluke followed, sniffing her ankles, then jumping back as if sensing a threat, a murderous smell to her skin. Elin lifted a trowel from the drawer. “Go,” she said, and Fluke sat in place, looking up at her, not in defiance, but because she hadn’t clarified where she meant for him to be.

  She kneeled in the shifting shade, breeze in her hair, the greens and blues and whites of the plants and flowers, the cries of jays vying for the trees, all dancing on the edge of a magenta aura like some hallucinogenic dream.

  The musky soil, the scent of Rudi’s hands, rose to her face, as she stabbed a cucumber in half. Fluke scrambled when Elin swung again. She should have known better than to get married. Women in her family didn’t have marriages. They had tragedies, mishaps, fiery connections to men and to the memories of men, one outdoing the next. Her father, killed in what should have been an avoidable hunting accident, if he’d only worn the proper vest, but instead decided to blend with the forest, merge into his very own death, leaving Elin and Kate with a resentful widow for a mother, a woman who wouldn’t know love if it crawled into her lap and licked her face. And Kate’s joke of a marriage to Neal, Neal, whose own failed-love history reverberated like an earthquake beneath Elin’s feet. The two of them a bona fide eight-point disaster. Christ. Neal was the last person she wanted to think about now. No need to go anywhere near that mess to locate her own failings in life because after all these years of believing she had left it behind, convinced herself she was immune, or rather cured of the past and its mistakes, Elin had ended up with a championship tragedy all her own.