After the Fire

by J. A. Jance

  Dedication

  DEDICATION, FIRST EDITION: FOR J.J.T.J.

  If it weren’t for the rocks in its bed, the stream would have no song.

  DEDICATION, SECOND EDITION: FOR W.A.S.

  Thanks for making the second half of my life happy. It turns out there are still songs, even when there are no rocks.

  DEDICATION, THIRD EDITION: FOR ALICE.

  Thanks for bringing it home.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Preface

  A Question of Gender

  Morning

  Bitter Fruit

  Shifting Gears

  Strangers

  Choices

  Best Friends

  Misgivings

  Portrait

  Entrapment

  Idle Conversation

  Homestead Revisited

  The Rival

  Missed Connections

  Hidden Agenda

  Breakage

  Dirge

  Watershed

  Moving Out

  The Collector

  Conversation on a Front Porch

  Why?

  Insomnia

  Undying Love

  After the Fire

  Unilateral Disarmament

  Death Sentence

  Vigil

  Death After Divorce

  Missing Condolence

  Mother’s Day, 1983

  Building a Legend

  Kindred Spirit

  Fog

  Walking Wounded

  Maiden Names

  Changing Times

  Interim

  Daybreak

  Benediction

  Postscript

  About the Author

  Also by J.A. Jance

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  This book of poetry is also a book about addiction and the insidious way in which it destroys relationships. On the surface, one might think it is only about my first husband’s eventually fatal relationship with alcohol. But it is also, just as clearly, the story of my own addiction—the one that linked me to my husband and to my own unwavering determination to save him from himself, whether or not he wanted to be saved. It is a story of hurt and loss and betrayal. It is also a story of hope.

  It was 1968 when I first began writing these poems. I was a twenty-four-year-old newlywed who had written a children’s book that garnered a kind letter from an editor at a New York publishing house. The editor told me that if I was willing to make changes in the manuscript, she would consider publishing it. Thrilled, I showed the letter to my husband, expecting him to be as happy about it as I was. Instead, the letter provoked a firefight. My husband, who had been allowed into a university-level creative writing class that had been closed to me, took a dim view of the possibility that some of my work might be published.

  “There’s only going to be one writer in our family,” he told me. “And I am it.”

  The way he said the words made it clear that if I wanted to preserve our marriage, I would put my writing ambitions away and leave them there. Which is what I did—for the next fourteen years.

  In a way neither of us understood, my husband’s “one writer” statement was correct. There would be only one published writer in our family, but he wasn’t it. Although he wrote constantly, scribbling columns across page after page of graph paper, nothing that came from his hand ever made it into actual print. He was content to imitate Faulkner and Hemingway primarily by drinking too much and writing too little, but at the time he laid down the law, I was still utterly dazzled by his self-proclaimed potential.

  The one thing that separates writers from other people is that they write. From 1968 to 1973, my husband and I were teachers in Sells, Arizona, on the Tohono O’odham reservation west of Tucson. He taught high school English and Spanish while I was a K–12 librarian. We lived in a little rented house on King’s Anvil Ranch, thirty miles east of Sells near the community of Three Points. The closest neighbor and/or telephone was literally miles away.

  On those long, solitary evenings, after my husband fell asleep—No, wait. What’s surprising to me is that even all these years later, my first instinct is still to minimize how bad things were back then, but that’s how denial works. What I should have said is: On those long, solitary evenings, after my husband passed out in front of the blaring television set, there was no one for me to talk to and very little to keep me occupied. Married but essentially alone, I turned to writing poetry. Initially I thought what I was doing was art, plain and simple. Poetry offered a way of looking at ordinary objects or events and turning them into something beautiful. That’s how the poems in this book started—as “art.”

  The poetry was written over the course of several years. The various verses were jotted down on stray pieces of lined yellow paper and tossed into the strongbox that also held our birth certificates and marriage certificate. Eventually it would hold our children’s birth certificates as well. At that point in my life I was incapable of seeing that I was using poetry as a prism through which to examine what was going on in my own life. The artifice of “art” allowed me to maintain emotional distance. I could look at what was happening without ever having to come to terms with what was going on in my marriage. It spared me the harsh reality and hard work of actually doing something to change our disaster-bound direction. Looking at my poetry with the benefit of hindsight, I see how, as early as 1968, a part of me understood that my marriage was doomed, even though I was a good twelve years from admitting it or taking appropriate and necessary action.

  Eighteen months after I finally got a divorce, within a few minutes of midnight on New Year’s Eve 1982, my first husband died of chronic alcoholism at age forty-two. His death sent me back to the strongbox, looking for those important pieces of paper death requires: birth certificates for him and for our two children, along with our marriage certificate and my divorce decree. There, lurking among those official documents, I found the collection of scribbled poems. Reading through them in 1983 was like seeing my life in instant replay. I could recall where I was when I wrote each individual poem and what events had provoked it. Other people reading the poems urged me to try to publish them, and I did. After the Fire came out in 1984 under the auspices of a small Seattle-area publisher.

  In June 1985, I did one of my first poetry readings at a retreat sponsored by Widowed Information Consultation Services of King County (WICS). It was there that I met a man whose first wife had succumbed to breast cancer after seven years of debilitating illness. She died within a few minutes of midnight on New Year’s Eve 1984. Her grieving husband and I struck up a conversation based on the shared coincidence of having a spouse die on New Year’s Eve. Our similar experiences with a dying spouse led quickly to an extraordinary closeness. Six months later, to the dismay of our five adolescent children, we told them, “You’re not the Brady Bunch, but you’ll do,” and we got married. That was twenty-eight years, several weddings, six grandchildren, and many dogs ago. But it’s why I consider After the Fire to be my most important book—the one that changed the course of my life for the better.

  In the years since then, while writing and publicizing my mysteries, I’ve squeezed in a few poetry readings along the way. At readings I’ve tried to give my audience the background stories and to tell them where I was and what was going on in my life when I wrote the various poems.

  People often tell me that the poetry has touched them and that my story has spoken to them and resonated in a very personal way. They confide that many of the same things happened to them. Several have even written to say that After the Fire inspired them to make much-needed changes in their own lives.

  Several months ago,
the latest version of the book went out of print and all rights to it reverted to me. Since that time any number of people have asked when the poetry would once again be available; a version with the background stories brought current seemed to be in order.

  The poems here are, with one exception, arranged in chronological order—the way I wrote them and the way I lived them as well. I have written some poetry since 1984, but not much. For one thing, I’ve been too busy and far too happy. For me, writing poetry and being happy don’t seem to mix.

  If there’s a message in all this, I want it to be one of encouragement to those who are themselves caught up in impossible relationships. I hope the book speaks to some of those folks who have lost all hope and who believe that, for them, nothing will ever be better. Ozymandias may have said, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.” I say, “Look on mine and know things can be better.”

  A Question of Gender

  In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was caught up in the women’s movement. I read Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem. I also burned a bra, but that’s another story. At the time, it was easier for me to be mad at all men in general than it was for me to take a close look at the particular man to whom I was married.

  While I was working on the Tohono O’odham reservation, a friend and I drove more than two hundred miles after school one afternoon to hear Gloria Steinem speak. She was funny, intelligent, and witty. Throughout the talk, my friend, a Native American and the mother of five, a woman who had never lived off the reservation, laughed at all the jokes and nodded in agreement.

  When we left the hall after the speech, my friend turned to me and said, “I always thought it was because I was an Indian.”

  As we used to say back in those days, “Click!”

  A QUESTION OF GENDER

  To speak, to hear, to know

  For the first time that the problem

  Is not to be Black or White or Indian

  But to be woman, female,

  And all the other ugly epithets—

  Broad, bitch, whore—

  That go with being born

  Without a penis.

  There is strength and hope

  In knowing that the common denominator

  Is, in fact, a caprice of nature,

  A simple matter of plumbing.

  And once the knowledge that the problem

  Is not singular but is the birthright

  Of half the world’s population—

  Once that knowledge sinks in—

  What follows will make

  The shot heard round the world

  Seem a mere firecracker.

  Morning

  My husband was a beginning high school English teacher and I a school librarian. There wasn’t much money to start with, but my husband drank prodigiously, which made our financial situation even more precarious. For me, staying home and raising kids was never the same kind of option that it had been for my mother, who, it turned out, had managed to stay home and raise seven kids on even less money, but with a husband—my father—who wasn’t a drinker and who brought his paychecks home instead of cashing them at bars. Years later, on a Sunday afternoon, my five-year-old son would ask, “But, Dad, why don’t you go to a bank to cash a check?” It was a good question—one I should have been asking my husband a long time earlier.

  As a relative newlywed, I tried to imagine what it would be like to be able to stay home and look after children. Since such an existence didn’t seem to be in the cards for me, I managed to convince myself that I wouldn’t be any good at it. Besides, I was a college graduate. Wouldn’t my education be wasted if I did nothing but stay home? It was what my mother did, but she had no more than a seventh-grade education. Certainly her headstrong daughter could do better than that!

  For years I prided myself on the fact that, since my daughter was born at the beginning of Christmas vacation, I missed only three days of school due to childbirth. Forty-plus years later, I no longer see that in such a positive light.

  Are there important mother-daughter issues behind much of my early poetry? Absolutely. Those same issues are at work in some of my novels as well, but in this particular poem, the cigarette was what made all the difference. The woman in the poem and I both drink coffee, but because she smoked and I didn’t, I was able to distance myself from her. I was not the frustrated housewife and mother pictured in this poem. She and I weren’t one. Her unhappiness and mine didn’t mesh and mingle.

  Now I know otherwise.

  MORNING

  This is the time when, according to the media,

  She is supposed to settle back and relax

  Over a cigarette and a second cup of coffee,

  Receiving a much-deserved rest after bundling

  Children and husband off to school and office.

  What Madison Avenue cannot know

  Is how bleak and empty

  The day stretches out through

  The steam of that second cup of coffee,

  Filled with mindless tasks,

  Endlessly repeated.

  Is this all?

  Bitter Fruit

  In 1968 I was still smarting over my husband’s decree that I not rewrite the manuscript for my children’s book and submit it for publication. Of course, had I really been the fire-breathing feminist I thought myself to be, I would have told him to take a hike. Instead, I bowed to his wishes and put the manuscript away. (That story was eventually rewritten, and published in 1985 under the title “It’s Not Your Fault” as part of a children’s personal safety series.)

  I began writing poems on those long, solitary nights and stowing them away before I went to bed. Instinctively understanding how explosive my illicit writing was, I never showed any of my poems to my husband. Looking back, I believe that’s about the time my anger began to build, too. In this poem in particular, I can almost smell the smoke from that slow burn of resentment that would smolder for the next dozen years before finally bursting into flame.

  They say that living well is the best revenge. At the time of this writing, in the spring of 2013, my forty-fifth murder mystery has debuted at number 12 on the New York Times Best Sellers List. In 2000, the University of Arizona, where I was once denied admittance to creative writing classes on the basis of my being a “girl,” granted me an honorary doctorate of humane letters. These days, that once bitter fruit has a much sweeter taste, and there is more than enough irony to go around.

  But there is someone else’s story hidden in the background of this poem—that of a friend, a Native American woman with several small children and a ne’er-do-well husband (I could see that her husband was bad news!), who wanted to have her tubes tied but couldn’t have the procedure performed without her husband’s written permission, which he, of course, refused to grant.

  BITTER FRUIT

  It is a slow dawning,

  This realization of existence

  On a leash.

  Of making excuses

  For thoughts and actions

  That were never really executed.

  It is a slow awakening,

  This knowledge that your life

  Is a compromise

  Of other people’s

  Intentions of what shall be done

  With your flesh and bones.

  Yes, and mind too, although

  Nobody ever intimated that you

  Might be possessed

  Of one of those

  For intellect has always been

  A masculine demesne.

  But with the dawning, the realization,

  That you, a newborn Eve, have tried

  The bitter fruit

  Of knowledge,

  Can you then, content, go back

  To live the plastic lie you were before?

  No.

  Shifting Gears

  I was a girl who grew up in the 1950s. The vast majority of women from that era came complete with a panoply of mixed messages. This was a ti
me when girls who wanted to become doctors became nurses; girls who wanted to become engineers became high school geometry teachers; girls who wanted to become ministers became ministers’ wives; and girls who wanted to become writers married men who were allowed into creative writing programs that were closed to women. We saw the inequities, but for the most part we went along with the program, kept our mouths shut, and did what was expected—which is how, after being locked out of the creative writing program at the University of Arizona, I ended up being first a high school English teacher and later a school librarian.

  In the 1960s I began reading those dangerous consciousness-raising books, and eventually things did change. So, yes, I did burn a bra—a nursing bra. When you burn a bra, the whole idea is to have it blaze up in a satisfying conflagration. Due to my own ambivalence, however, I didn’t toss my bra onto the barbecue grill until after I had finished cooking dinner. By the time I got around to making my political statement, the coals had cooled down. Instead of flaming up and incinerating, my bra simply charred around the edges of the foam rubber, which pretty much detracted from the desired effect.

  At the time I was chagrined that the bra didn’t burn. In retrospect, I see that charred hulk as a reflection of the terrible dichotomy in my life—a longing to be set free of the old ways while still standing mired knee-deep in the muck.

  The old adage is still true: You can’t have your cake and eat it, too. In this case, more fittingly, it would have to be: You can’t cook dinner and burn your bra, too.

  SHIFTING GEARS

  The danger lies not as the broadcasters

  would have you believe,

  In the burning of a few extraneous and uncomfortable

  undergarments.

  It lies in the fact that women can lay down

  their weapons,

  The perfumes and fineries with which they have

  armed themselves,

  And come together in friendship to speak, console,