Things We Set on Fire

by Deborah Reed

  She’d removed her shoes at the door, following Averlee and Quincy’s lead, the shiny cinnamon floors deserving respect, and now the bare soles of Elin’s feet gently stuck to the polish; the wood creaked when she stepped room to room, brushing objects with her fingers in passing. A white cereal bowl, a palm-sized ochre-painted wooden top, a tarnished handheld mirror—pieces of her sister’s life pulling together like clouds, painting an expansive, foreboding scene.

  The furnishings—wood, wool, Shaker-style elegance, everywhere a tidiness that gave Elin an uneasy jolt, stinging her with a new kind of shock. Nothing, down to the smell of rosemary in the windowsill, appeared the way she’d imagined—some version of chaos in a two-room bedlam apartment on the east side of town, Kate living off tips and little else. But here was a lustrous cedar-shingled cottage filled with bright white walls and sheer lemon drapes. Handmade quilted throws on the sofa back, a small sheepskin tossed over a royal-blue cotton chair, a grey wool rug in the center of the room, where Elin demanded Fluke stay to keep his claws off the gleaming fir floors. An aesthetic created with intention. With simplicity and grace. This was no accidental life thrown together, no last-minute ditch to make the best of running away. Kate’s home was put together, step by careful step, with the deliberateness of love.

  How had she done it? Where had she found the courage in the shape she was in? Elin searched for a single sign of Neal—razor, shoes, firehouse gadgets, his lock knife, seat-belt cutter, voltage detector—but there was no trace of him, or any man, in the house.

  Mrs. Pearl had followed them to the door the morning they arrived with the medical transport team, holding it open as if she lived there, her face clearly pained as they wheeled Kate past on a gurney. Mrs. Pearl had rented the house to Kate, she said, unfurnished. This past year the lawn and all Kate’s shopping and care were done by the local ALS foundation—the center—and with that in mind Mrs. Pearl looked at Elin and her mother above her glasses, a judgment cast against their lack of involvement in Kate’s life. Elin restrained herself from saying, “This was not our fault,” the glare from Mrs. Pearl aimed mostly at her mother, until Elin stepped forward and caught it like a sword to the chest. “Thank you for everything,” Elin had said. “We’ll take it from here.” She stopped short of pushing her out the door.

  Books lined the shelves on either side of Kate’s tall bed, the headboard behind her made of long pine planks as if pulled from a saloon. Stacks of worn notebooks filled a shelf to the right, and Elin guessed that Kate would have been forced to stop writing in them long ago.

  She lay in the middle of snowy-white bedding, her shrunken body propped against half a dozen pillows. If not for the strain and guzzle of her breath, her dark waxen hair spilling and swirling into so much white gave the appearance of a child falling into a snow bank, readying to make an angel but instead falling asleep.

  Now that Elin understood that this was where Kate had been hiding—not so much hiding as living, not so much living as plodding toward her death—she stood at the foot of this tiny woman’s bed, held in place by an emanating, delicate innocence. Her sister was a stranger whose life had existed outside of Elin’s understanding, hidden from her affections, an outsider with a warmth and affection all her own, uncloaked inside this house, broadcast in everything around her, the faces of her daughters the most staggering display.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  NANCY, WHOSE LAST NAME ELIN immediately forgot upon hearing, was a fiftysomething, rosy-faced hospice nurse with the tall awkwardness of a teenager. She read news magazines in the chair in front of Kate’s notebooks, and every now and then gave her full attention to Kate’s pulse. “You’ll know she’s close when her energy shifts,” Nancy said. “That’s not mumbo jumbo talk. That’s what happens right before they pass.”

  She hadn’t meant to be coarse. Elin understood this. Guiding the living and the dying toward the other side was complicated work. What a thing to do.

  “Thank you,” Elin said.

  “And the coloring,” Nancy added. “The blotchiness of the hands.”

  Elin slid her hands into the back pockets of her jeans and nodded at the window, at another summer storm gathering to the west. The air conditioner ran nonstop, the house cool and comfortable, and yet Elin had the urge to open the window. She couldn’t explain why this was, nor did she understand her reluctance to act on it. A superstition? An old wives’ tale of opening windows—or was it keeping them closed? Birds flying in and out of windows, flouting death. What did it matter? They were beyond bad luck here.

  She had spent most of the day alone with Kate, or with Nancy near the bed, but now here was her mother—whose avoidance had been noted—inserting herself in front of Elin, and wedging open the window. A pressure, like that of a slit tire, released from the room. An earthy scent of far-off rain seeped past the screen. This seemed to be all her mother came to do. She was nearly out of the room again when Nancy called to her. “It’s likely they can hear everything we say up until the last moment. Good to keep that in mind.”

  Her mother froze in the doorway.

  Memories, like trick candles igniting long after Elin had snuffed them out. “I saw the dog’s head the day Dad died,” Elin had said, a teenager then, an adolescent enraged over something trivial and since forgotten, but the mention of the dog as clear as if she’d spoken the words now in Kate’s room. “You rinsed it off with the hose,” she’d said.

  Her mother had ceased drying her hands at the sink and sat across the table from her. “Funny you would remember that. You were so young. But you’re right. He got into a fight with a snake.”

  “Must have bit him hard.”

  “I guess it did.”

  “Is that why he was covered in blood?”

  Her mother returned to the sink. “Yep. Stuck his nose in a snake hole and got bit.” She leaned hip to hip, shifted the soap to the opposite side of the sink. “That’s what happens when you stick your nose where it doesn’t belong,” she said.

  Elin had stood near the table, staring at the outline of her mother’s shoulders at the sink, and then she walked out of the house, fists at her sides, a light rain ticking her face. She wanted only to keep moving, the weight of their conversation at her back, the air she cut through thick and moist as a swamp, birds screeching in the green-leaved walls all around her. The impact of what Elin had said, what she’d meant by it, scratched at the surface, but she would not allow it all the way in. Ten minutes later the rain had swelled, pelting her arms and chest with a burning, stinging chill, and she did not care. She gripped the hem of her tank top, pulled and twisted, nervously wrung it as she wandered in flip-flops, taking streets she’d never been down, miles from her home. She didn’t know where she was, all the houses unfamiliar, the yards between them sparse, dogs yapping at her from behind windows, and somewhere someone practicing a French horn.

  She turned for home after an hour. There was nowhere else to go. Teeth chattering, lightning striking all around her. The accusation. The horror inside it. She knew what she saw, understood it was bad, but what was she accusing her mother of? Say it. Say it out loud! Rain dribbled into her mouth and she could not utter a word, not then, not ever, not even when she’d said it to her sister when they were younger did she believe it was really true. Her mother killing her father would not solidify into a fact inside her head, could not come full circle as a truth. And why should it? What reason could she have had to do such a thing? If there had been fights between them Elin had no memory of it. If he had been mean to any of them she had no memory of that either, not so much as a single raised voice. And in all the years since his death her mother never said a word against him. But none of that mattered anyway, because if her mother was going to claim the dog had killed a snake that day, that their father was accidentally killed by some hunter, well then, that was the story, so where was Elin to go with her suspicions? The police?

  The porch light was on and the door unlocked when she arrived home. Her mother’s b
edroom door was closed but a light shined underneath. Elin’s ankles were coated with mud, and her head was starting to bite, all the way down the right side of her face.

  Kate was off somewhere, her absence always a comfort, a relief to Elin’s head as if a high-pitched ringing had stopped after days of badgering. Elin shucked her wet clothes into a sopping pile on the carpet between their beds. She didn’t care. She didn’t care what her mother had to say about that. She was shivering, crawling naked under the blankets, filthy feet and all, when her mother appeared in the doorway.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  Elin nodded, and then, “My head is starting again.”

  Her mother walked away and returned with a hot water bottle, a glass of water, and a pain pill.

  The only thing Elin remembered after that was waking in the middle of the night and sensing Kate asleep in the dark across from her, the wet clothes gone from the floor, the glass of unfinished water on the nightstand where her mother had left it.

  Now here was her mother in the doorway, her back to Elin, shoulders tensed in the way she’d been at the sink that day. She hadn’t said anything wrong in front of Kate, hadn’t said anything at all, and surely that was Nancy’s point: that her mother understand there would be no second chance. Whatever needed saying, whatever Kate needed to hear, had to be done while there was still time.

  Her mother dropped her hand and continued into the kitchen.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  VIVVIE HAD LOST HER VOICE. The ability to speak was still there. She wasn’t sick, not like that. She just couldn’t locate the words to release the cluster of emotion caught in her throat. So she busied her hands, food taking the form of remedy, of support for the living, for looking after the girls.

  She fried chicken, baked potatoes, tossed a salad with carrots and apples, thinking of what kids ate these days compared with what they should be eating. She thought about the harried or blank-faced mothers emptying their carts onto her conveyor belt, Vivvie’s whole adult life given to this exchange, the unceasing beep of a scanner the soundtrack of her days, cash in, cash out of hands, the drawer, boxes and bottles stuffed into bags, have a nice day the only thing separating her life from a factory worker’s. It was over now. She would not return to Roth’s, would never again stand behind a register. She was done with that life. Just as Kate would never shop for her daughters again, never bathe them, never make another daily decision about their lives. Those things would be left to others, and right now Vivvie controlled a salad with apples and carrots.

  But she’d also enticed her granddaughters with a box of cake mix, jiggling it like a small threat that if they didn’t eat their dinner they wouldn’t get the cupcakes. They agreed to clean their plates. Of course they did. She’d set the box on the counter and wondered what the hell difference it made, and how cruel she was, demanding anything of these children on the eve of becoming orphans.

  If a palm reader had told her last week that her life would change completely within seven days, Vivvie could not have dreamed a world of this scale. Her imagination would have captured a lottery win, a new car, even an all-expenses-paid weekend trip to the beach would have been a stretch, but never could she have imagined this.

  The day had passed like a slow dream filled with dim rooms she didn’t recognize, with people she knew who no longer resembled themselves, and all the while a constant pressure like a physical force funneled her forward, prodding her to do the right thing. What was the right thing? It became increasingly difficult to catch a waking breath in that house, as if a droning compression were forcing the oxygen outward, sealing it inside the white paint. It was nearly intolerable by the time she’d opened the window in Kate’s room, sensing that was the source. An old wives’ tale—the dying needing a portal to escape, the long-dead arriving to guide them away.

  Vivvie didn’t believe a word of that stuff but she’d opened the window anyway and felt a whole lot better for having done it, until Nancy said the thing about last chances for the dying to hear what needed to be said. Saying the wrong thing and not being able to take it back would be a lot worse, but Vivvie didn’t say that, or anything else. Instead she returned to the kitchen in deep, careful consideration over what she wanted to say and if that was the same as what she should say and if either was what Kate needed to hear. But then Nancy was following her with that achy-looking walk, her burden doubled and clear, days spent in unfamiliar chairs, waiting for someone to die.

  “She’s awfully close now,” Nancy whispered near the stove that Vivvie was preheating for the cupcakes. “I’d be surprised if she lasts through morning.”

  Vivvie nodded at the gas burners, and then she was in motion again, wiping the fridge, taking out the butter. She gripped the oven handle and dropped her head, hiding her face, hiding the tears that would not come. When she looked behind her, Nancy had already slipped away.

  Now Vivvie had gone outside to the tree swings, and, sitting sideways in one, her feet up in the other, she smoked a cigarette with such need it was hard to believe she’d just smoked one ten minutes before. How dare fate bring her daughter home for just one day, this child, this baby she had grown inside her, spewed and billowed into life after twelve violent hours of labor. “Uncommon for a second child,” the doctor had said, just short of worry. “A hesitant beauty,” he’d called her when she finally arrived, her cheeks scorched red from screaming. “And disappointed in the world already.” He laughed.

  They’d shared the same blood, the same source of life, and yet Kate’s tiny body had already contained the poison now killing her, Jackson’s DNA inside Vivvie and Kate at once, an invisible illness Vivvie had so carefully nurtured into being.

  As helpless as someone tied to a tree. That was how Vivvie felt, like someone waiting on a firing squad. Helpless as the time Kate ran off into the woods and Vivvie had called after her for two excruciating hours, anger and panic raging, bargaining and threatening in her mind and out-loud bursts as Elin trailed in silence behind her. Then came the sound of smacking in the same moment Vivvie spotted a red shirt in the fork of an oak. Kate covered in mosquitoes, swatting her arms, legs, and face. Vivvie fell to her knees, useless buckling bones, soft as paper, and down she went, pretending in front of Elin that she’d tripped. When she came to her feet she held her heart, so knotted, so beaten and battered she feared it would give out before reaching home, and both of her girls would be left there, swallowed by the woods in the dark.

  Kate’s face against the leaves, the sky beyond—she’d never looked more like Jackson than in that moment, and less than a mile from where he died. Vivvie grabbed Kate’s ankle and tore her from the tree. Kate walloped the ground, a single grunt shoving the air from her chest, her eyes enormous in disbelief, her mouth open, no tears, just a panic-stricken child at her feet, and still Vivvie wanted to beat her into the ground. She screamed instead, an animal’s rage filling the forest, howling with fists against the side of the tree.

  Elin backed away down the trail, nearly forgotten until Vivvie pulled Kate to her feet by her hair, and Elin rushed forward, arms out as if to save Kate from their monster of a mother. But one look from Vivvie stopped her in her tracks.

  By the time they’d stumbled free of the woods, the air was so black they might have fallen into the sky, the ground unsteady beneath Vivvie’s feet. The only light an acre away in the dim glow from the bathroom shining down the hall. What if Vivvie had taken her girls into her arms right then, right there where a bonfire once burned, where their father had remembered how deeply he’d loved their mother by a river?

  Kate refused to explain why she ran into the woods that day, but Vivvie had always suspected it had something to do with Elin. Kate was in some way protecting her sister, an occasion so rare and fragile that Vivvie would not allow herself to even think on it for fear of needing to get to the bottom of it, and thereby severing the flimsy cable binding one to the other.

  Just one of so many regrets. Vivvie should have t
ried to understand, let the rope fray through her bloody hands if it meant that she might have somehow relieved Kate of her misery, interrupted her deep-seated desire to escape, to try, repeatedly, to return to the mysterious place from which she came.

  Kate seemed to have been intuiting the inevitability of this day all along, trying to head it off by losing herself in the ocean, and in the forest where her father died, and in the bathroom with a razor blade, the kitchen with pills that had brought her all the way to death’s door but had not fully opened it, not yet, but very, very soon. Kate was about to walk out for all of eternity, no matter the wishing, the bargaining with God, no matter the bigger picture of reason, this was now going to happen. Tomorrow she’d be gone, the day after that, too. Another death, another set of young daughters left in its wake.

  Vivvie dropped her feet to the grass and smoked and smoked. She wished she could speak about these things with Elin. Vivvie had told her own mother most anything, her mother more like a friend, offering laughter instead of advice in the years just before she died. Why did everything have to go unspoken between Vivvie and Elin? Unspoken but not unaware. Why did they feel the need to play this game of fool you/fool me that neither was winning or would ever win?

  If things were different Vivvie would ask Elin why she never spoke her husband’s name, never called him on her cell, even now, with all this going on, not one sentence about him, nothing to show she even had a husband aside from the ring on her finger. She was her mother’s daughter. The great pretender. And it made Vivvie sick.

  She blew smoke up into the tree and shook her head at all the thoughts she was having, at the strange, dusty feeling in her chest and eyes as if a dry heat had absorbed her spit, her tears, her spirit parched as kindling. Every drag heaved into one’s lungs made life that much shorter. Wasn’t that what they said now? Pictures of black lungs in doctors’ offices. Every cigarette another hour or day or year erased from Vivvie’s life, clear cold facts that never made her quit.