“Then shame on them. Their loss. But I will.”
“All these years and no one ever figured out who set that fire,” he said.
“I guess probably they never will now.”
“Sometimes, I wonder how hard they actually looked,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Remember what I said about drunk kids looking for a bathroom?”
“Yes.”
“It wasn’t totally hypothetical. The line for the restroom was crazy long, even after halftime had been over for a while, and I had the brilliant idea that I might go find one inside the school. So I went walking around the perimeter of the building, searching for a way in, when I saw this girl running out of a door at the back of the school.”
“A girl? What did she look like?”
“I didn’t see her face. She had her hood up, and it was dark. But she was thin and wearing white pants. It spooked me, seeing her. So I went back to the stadium and got in line for the restroom. I told the police about her when they questioned me.”
“I never heard about a girl. I was pretty depressed and out of it once I thought Trevor had done it. But I think I would’ve remembered hearing that the cops were looking for a girl.”
“No, you’re right. I never heard anything about it, either. My dad even called them a while later to see if they’d found out anything about her, but they blew him off. Said that lead went nowhere. But he didn’t get the sense that they’d taken me seriously.”
A thought struck me. “Oh no.”
“What?”
“After Trevor told my mom, I’m sure she did what she always did: made his problem disappear. I wonder if she heard about that lead and convinced someone to let it go. Trevor’s not a girl, obviously, but it would’ve been like her not to have wanted to take any chances that it might have been Trev you’d seen.”
“Well, I guess we’ll never know whether she did that or not. But it doesn’t matter now.”
Before I left, I kissed Daniel and said, “I’ll make sure everyone I care about knows you didn’t set that fire.”
“Even if you can’t convince them, it’s nice of you to try. Thank you.”
I turned around to open the front door, then turned back.
“Oh, listen,” I said.
“I’m listening.”
“I almost love you, too. In case you were wondering.”
“Me? Are you kidding?” he said. “Why would I wonder about that?”
Daniel grinned and I kissed his grin and leaned down and planted a kiss on the warm, blond curve of Mose’s head and left.
If it is possible to walk on air while driving a car, that’s what I did all the way home from Daniel’s house. I’d made light of the task of convincing my friends and family that Daniel had not—could not have, for love or money or rage or sorrow—set the Lucretia Mott school fire or any other, but I knew it wouldn’t be easy. Still, I had kept faith with a person who deserved it; I had trusted my own instincts; and I was one slender centimeter away from true love, so it seemed like a good afternoon to give myself over to joy. And then, just as I pulled into my driveway, Gray called. He hadn’t waited a week or a year. I’d talked to him at ten that morning, and it was two thirty in the afternoon. I held my phone in my hand and listened to it ring, and for a few trills, I pondered whether it was a good sign or a terrible sign that it had taken Gray less than five hours to absorb all I’d told him and call me back, and then I decided to just answer.
“Hey, Gray,” I said.
“It’s crazy how your voice sounds just like your voice.”
“Yours, too,” I said. “Which is also crazy.”
“I talked to Kirsten and CJ.”
“You did?”
“And we were hoping you would come to my house for dinner tonight.”
“Oh!” It came out as a squeak.
“Unless—I know it’s last minute, so we can also do it—”
“No, no. Tonight is fine. Wonderful, actually. I need to check in with Avery. She seemed a little quiet last night and then again this morning before school. She’ll probably be fine with my going, but I should talk to her first.”
“Why don’t you bring her?”
“Really?”
“Sure. I’d love that.”
“So I guess that means you guys aren’t planning to rake me over the coals too hard?”
“What? Like we wouldn’t do that in front of your kid?”
“Probably you wouldn’t.”
“Well, Kirsten is pretty miffed that you didn’t tell her first.”
“It took a lot of self-restraint, to be honest, but I thought you should hear it from me, and Kirsten—”
“Would’ve had a hard time keeping it to herself.”
“Yes. She wouldn’t have spilled, but it would have taken a Herculean effort,” I said.
“And why put her through that?” said Gray.
Zinny and Gray, talking about our friend Kirsten, finishing each other’s sentences. It took my breath away.
“What about CJ?”
“CJ is not quite—there,” said Gray.
“I understand. I can’t say I blame him. He’s always been so loyal to you.”
“Yeah, but mostly I think it’s that he’s gotten used to being mad at you. He never was all that great with change.”
“That’s true. But oh, how I adored that kid. When he got excited about something? He was, I don’t know, the Gulf Stream or el Niño. A force of nature.”
“El Niño,” said Gray, and I could tell he was smiling. “That fits.”
“At Kirsten’s party, he looked like an eleven-year-old wearing his dad’s suit.”
“He may actually be reverse aging. It’s eerie. You’ll come, then? Tonight? Is seven okay?”
“Yes. Thank you for inviting me. And for not never speaking to me again.”
There was a silence.
Gray cleared his throat and said, “Before we’re with the others, can I say something?”
“Sure.”
“I can’t have you thinking you’re the only one who wishes you’d handled things differently twenty years ago or that you’re the only one who needs forgiving.”
“Oh.”
Looking out my car window, I noticed for the first time knobs of leaf buds studding the branches of the trees bordering our driveway and emerald spikes bunched in the mulch in our side yard.
“I guess I have been thinking that,” I said.
“Well, can you stop? Because the way you were, after the fire, it was a pretty drastic change.”
“I know, I know, and I’m sorry.”
“No, I don’t mean that. We should’ve realized something was really wrong. Kirsten says that she sees now that you were depressed, and even though we might not have understood that completely back then, we should have reached out. Instead, we just got mad.”
“You’d just lost your dad, Gray.”
“I know. But still.”
“There’s no ‘but still.’ I know your day-to-day must have been so rough. You were just getting through. No one could’ve expected you to take care of someone else.”
“Maybe not. But before then—”
“Before when? Before the fire?”
“I don’t know quite how to say this.”
“You don’t have to,” I said. “Whatever it is, it’s okay.”
“It’s not, though. Look, I don’t want to say that I regret our being a couple because you were my best friend. Being with you made me smarter and better and happier. In so many ways, I loved you and loved being your boyfriend.”
“Thank you.”
“But I got into the relationship under false pretenses. I knew I was gay. I didn’t want to believe it, and I hoped it would change, but deep down, I knew. You were so good to me. You trusted me. And I hurt you.”
“You were in a really hard situation,” I said.
“What I did was still wrong. I’m sorry.”
“It’s
okay. I mean it.” And I found, as I said it, that I did mean it.
“Thank you. See you tonight?”
“Yes.”
Gray’s husband, Evan, answered the door. He greeted Avery, whom he’d charmed within an inch of her life at Kirsten’s engagement party, with a luminous smile and a hug, but even before he’d fully turned to face me, I could feel it: razor-edged, unyielding, protective. A fierce, fearless, gatekeeper kind of love, a variety I recognized because I loved Avery exactly that way. Once upon a time, it’s how I’d loved Gray and Trevor and Kirsten and CJ and everyone.
“Thank you for having us,” I said to Evan. “I can only imagine what you must think of me.”
If I’d hoped to disarm Evan with my directness, it hadn’t worked. Not a muscle in his smooth, high-cheekboned face moved.
“After your vanishing act, he never stopped missing you. Not for two decades. Did you know that?” he said, evenly.
“I missed him, too,” I said. “And I regretted what I did. I would have given anything to go back and undo that vanishing act.”
Evan was short and compact and dashing, with shiny black curls and blazing black eyes. After a stony second, his expression softened, just a little.
“You know what? If I were judged exclusively by the mistakes I made when I was eighteen, I’d be in real trouble,” he said. “At least, you’re here now.”
“I’ll do better from now on,” I said. “I promise.”
“Let’s hope so,” said Evan, then he tipped his head sideways, toward the interior of the house, where I could hear Kirsten’s crazy crow-caw of a laugh burst through the fabric of conversation and music. “Come on in. And welcome.”
After we were seated and had filled our plates from the platters heaped with fragrant shredded chicken, thin ribbons of steak, glossy roasted peppers and onions, crumbled white cheese, and half-moons of sliced avocado, a paralyzing awkwardness fell upon us. We sat and applied salsas and squeezed lime wedges and forked up food and swaddled it in tortillas (folding with great concentration, as if our lives depended on it) and listened to Thelonious Monk beat out wisdom and sorrow on piano keys and tried not to chew too loudly, and just before—seconds before—we all would’ve crawled under the table or run screaming from the room, Kirsten saved us. She worked her signature brand of miracle: turning—not water into wine—but slow, dull, sucking quicksand into champagne.
She held court, launching into a long, funny, effervescent, starry-gold flood of chatter about her wedding, her dress, the buttons on her dress, the hem of her dress, the exact lowness of the neckline of her dress, her veil, her bouquet, and, at the end, slipped in what had to be the most enchanting description of canapés in the entire history of describing canapés. When we were all laughing and joining in and when the air of the dining room seemed to be filled with inaudible birdsong and invisible iridescent bubbles, she stopped short and said, “Not to be wildly insensitive, but don’t you think it’s about time we addressed the elephant in the room?”
And maybe because Avery was in a state of bewitchment after all Kirsten’s spun-gold talk and believed that anything might be possible or maybe because she was too young to be familiar with the idiom “elephant in the room,” she began to look around the dining room, presumably in search of an actual elephant. When her roaming and quizzical gaze finally settled on me, I said, “She means what was on the torn-out journal page and how it wasn’t true after all.”
“Oh, that,” said Avery. “Uncle Trev and the fire.”
Kirsten said, “That, yes. And I have a few remarks to make about it, if no one minds.”
“Oh boy,” mumbled CJ.
“Okay with me,” said Gray.
“You’ll make them anyway, even if we do mind, right?” I said.
Kirsten raised her pretty shoulders in a conciliatory shrug and said, “Still, it seemed polite to add ‘if no one minds.’”
“Go ahead,” I said.
“First, Zin, you could have told me. Back then. You could have told me what you overheard Trevor tell Adela. I wouldn’t have turned him in to the cops. I wouldn’t even have told Gray and CJ, although I would have struggled with that, struggled mightily. You know how I do.”
“I do,” I said.
“Nevertheless, I wouldn’t have breathed a word to anyone. And it might have helped you to tell me. I know it would’ve helped me to know,” said Kirsten.
“Yes, you would’ve kept it a secret for sure. But it wasn’t just that I didn’t want to get Trevor in trouble. I wanted it not to have happened at all, and I had this idea that, if I never told a soul, if I tried with all my might to pretend it didn’t happen, it would go away.”
Avery said, solemnly, “She wrote it down in her journal and tore out the page and went into the woods and burned it.”
“Magical thinking,” said Gray. “I’ve done my share of that.”
“It didn’t work, though, did it, Ginny?” said CJ, caustically.
“No,” I said.
Kirsten darted a warning look at CJ. “On to my second remark, which is: this explains a lot. Obviously, it explains how you changed and checked out and retreated into yourself.”
“Not really,” muttered CJ.
“I couldn’t tell you guys,” I said. “And I was horrified at how my family, my own brother, had caused so much pain and destruction. I felt guilty that he’d done that and guilty that I had to keep it from you all, and I just ended up living inside that guilt all the time.”
“It isolated you,” said Gray.
“Yes. And it made me feel hopeless there for a while.”
“I’m sorry,” said Kirsten, “I wish you hadn’t had to go through that alone.” She touched her fingers to her lips and blew me a kiss.
“But,” she continued, “it explains other things, too. Like Trevor leaving. I just thought he’d had another blowup with your mom about something, but then he never came back. Did she not let him? Or did he not want to?”
“Both,” I said.
“Also, it explains Harris,” said Kirsten.
I glanced at Avery, who said, “It’s okay.”
“What happened,” said Kirsten. “How everything went crazy and fell apart. I can see how that would lead you to Harris.”
I said, “Boundaries can be good. The straight and narrow can be good. Harris was kind and steady and knew the value of boundaries.”
“It sounds like he made you feel safe,” said Gray.
“He did. We weren’t a good match, not really. But by the time I woke up to that fact, we were married and had Avery.” I smiled at my daughter. “My gorgeous, smart, sleepless, funny girl.”
“Thanks, Mom,” said Avery, blushing and fiddling with her napkin.
“Okay,” broke in CJ. “But none of that changes the fact that you let Gray down. His dad died and you just turned your back on him like you’d never even been friends.”
“CJ,” said Gray.
“No,” I said. “He’s right. Somehow, the thing with Trevor just flattened me. I shouldn’t have let it. I’d always felt so fearless and strong, and then, I just—sank. But I’ve thought over and over again for all these years that there had to have been a moment when I could’ve rallied, turned it around, and I missed it. So, yes, CJ, I should’ve fought harder to be there for Gray and for all of you. I’ll never stop being sorry.”
CJ looked taken aback, as if he hadn’t expected me to admit I’d done wrong, and then his expression shifted into one I recognized: CJ processing, his eyes narrowed, his lips tucked in, his jaw muscles twitching ever so slightly. I used to love watching CJ process.
“Maybe you should, though,” said Gray. “It seems like it could be time for all of us to stop being sorry and move on.”
I thought about that, what it would be like to let go of the regret I’d been harboring for all of my adult life. I wasn’t sure I knew how, but it seemed like a useful skill to try to learn.
Evan had been quiet all evening, but now he said, “The
four of you have been carrying around all this stuff—grief and grievances and secrets—for so many years, and all the time, there’s been some person out there carrying around the true story of who set that fire.”
“That kid,” said CJ. “The public school guy people saw drinking behind the shed. Everyone knew he did it. Well, I guess not you, Ginny, since you thought it was Trevor. But everyone else knew.”
“They never arrested him,” said Gray.
“Yeah, but he did it,” said CJ. “I saw him, remember? He ran by me. He must have been on his way to set the fire.”
Kirsten looked at CJ with surprise and said, “Back then, you weren’t so sure it was him.”
CJ flushed. “Not a hundred percent sure. Not sure enough for the cops. But he was a troubled guy. Everyone knew it. He was drunk and making threats against our school. If you want to know what happened go ask Daniel York.”
“Oh, that was his name,” said Kirsten. “I’d forgotten.”
“Mom,” said Avery.
“I know,” I told her.
“What?” said Kirsten. “No secrets allowed.”
“Ha,” said CJ. “That’s funny.”
I cleared my throat. “Here we go,” I said to Avery, who gave me her best “you can do this” smile.
“He didn’t do it,” I said. “I know him. And by that I mean not just that I’ve met him but that I truly know him. I know his heart, Daniel York’s heart. He is the best person I’ve ever met, and he didn’t set that fire.”
No one moved, and I heard Kirsten gasp.
“Not the dog park guy?” she said.
“Yes. I didn’t know until the night of your engagement party,” I said. “He came over after everyone was gone, but then Trevor stopped by unexpectedly and recognized him. But he didn’t do it.”
“Wait,” said CJ. “You’re saying you’re involved with this guy?”
“I am,” I said. “Very.”
“Perfect,” said CJ. “That’s just perfect.”
“Listen, all those years ago, I didn’t trust my instincts. I heard Trevor tell my mother he’d done this horrific thing, and my first thought was ‘No. No way.’ I knew he didn’t do it, but then, I wavered and doubted and rationalized and second-guessed, all in the name of facing the truth. And the truth turned out to be a lie. I know Daniel didn’t set the fire. Trust me on that.”
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