How to Start a Fire

by Lisa Lutz

  “You look ridiculous,” Malcolm said.

  “The lights are giving me a headache.”

  “Are you feeling better?”

  “I’m feeling less drunk, which has nothing to do with feeling better.”

  “Good. That was the plan.”

  “I haven’t changed my mind,” Anna said.

  “The night is young,” Malcolm said. “Drink more water.”

  That was the last thing Anna would remember from that night. No more details would ever return.

  What happened next she would learn secondhand, two days later, when she finally regained consciousness at Massachusetts General Hospital.

  The nurse found Anna awake and called her family. The first familiar face she saw was her mother’s.

  “What have you done?” her mother said.

  1997

  Santa Cruz, California

  “What have you done?” George asked Anna as she studied the assembly of beer cans on their balcony.

  “I made a castle out of beer cans,” Anna said.

  “It doesn’t look like a castle.”

  “Sure it does,” Anna said, admiring her architecture.

  “No, it doesn’t. But that’s not the point.”

  “Does there always have to be a point?” Anna said quickly. She was talking faster than usual, which was already fast.

  “Why would you make a castle out of beer cans?”

  “If I didn’t do it, who would?”

  Anna wasn’t herself, George thought, and she had been thinking that a lot lately. But now, Anna seemed so unfamiliar, George felt obligated to become acquainted with her new roommate.

  “Did you study today?” George asked.

  “I studied for six hours straight, went for a jog, took a shower, and made a castle out of beer cans. Now I’m going to study some more.”

  “You seem to have more energy than usual.”

  “I’d have to agree with you,” Anna said. “And more focus.”

  Anna went inside and wiped down the kitchen countertop with a sponge. George noticed the spotless sink, a sink that was usually mountainous with used dishes and cutlery. While George was concerned, she couldn’t ignore that this version of Anna was in some ways an improvement over the other.

  “Did you clean the kitchen?”

  “I think I did while I was trying to wrap my head around a physics problem. Physics. That’s going to be my downfall. Figuratively, not literally. Although you never know.”

  Anna sat down at the kitchen table and opened up her battered test-prep bible. It was as if George no longer existed.

  George needed to consult Kate for some answers. Kate, these days, was always easy to consult. George found her in her usual spot, downstairs in the unfinished basement. The room was outfitted with an old couch, a television, and a 1970s-style bar. There were wood beams overhead; exposed pipes lined the walls. The girls had never found mold in their many searches, but they knew it was there. It felt like the room was in a cold sweat. A single low-wattage bulb hung from the ceiling, providing just enough light so that you didn’t trip over anything on your way to the couch.

  Kate’s gaze remained fixed on the television. George sat down next to her, crowding her into the corner next to the armrest.

  “What’s going on with Anna?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Did you see what she did with those beer cans?”

  “Yep,” Kate said, eyes still on the idiotic television show.

  “Do you know why she built it?”

  “I asked. She said, ‘Castles don’t build themselves.’”

  “Something is wrong with her.”

  “She’s taking study pills,” Kate explained.

  “What are study pills?”

  “I asked her what’s in them and she said they’re just caffeine.”

  “Do you believe her?” George said.

  “I’m not sure. Have you seen how clean the kitchen is?” Kate asked.

  It briefly occurred to George that she was living with two drug addicts—only Kate’s drug was mindless television.

  “What are you watching?”

  “Separated at Birth.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Just what it sounds like. Identical twin brothers separated at birth. One is raised by hippies; the other by two type A parents, a doctor and a lawyer. Then the brothers find each other and become roommates, only their differences drive each other crazy. The same actor plays both brothers, in case you were wondering.”

  “I wasn’t,” George said. “I thought studies showed that identical twins were often quite similar, even if they were separated at birth.”

  “They both like chocolate milk and double-knot their shoelaces, but other than that, it’s an Odd Couple rip-off. Besides, what’s the point in an actor playing dual roles if both characters are exactly the same?”

  “It looks awful,” George said over a blaring laugh track.

  “It’s badly executed but in theory a good idea. I really like studies on twins. They’re the perfect control group. They should make it mandatory. All twins have to volunteer for at least one nature/nurture experiment. Of course they would be paid handsomely for their troubles, especially if something went wrong.”

  George picked up the remote and pressed the Mute button.

  “Other than contemplating ways to take away the basic human rights of identical twins, what did you do today?”

  “The usual.”

  “Don’t you think it’s about time to mix things up?”

  “I’m retired.”

  “You’re not retired.”

  “This is what retired people do.”

  “Actually, they play golf. Do you want me to book you a tee time for tomorrow? Even that would be an improvement.”

  “Need clubs,” Kate said, retrieving the remote and unmuting the sound.

  “Kate, he did you a favor. He didn’t want you to have his life.”

  “But I wanted that life.”

  “You can have a better life,” said George. “Be ambitious.”

  “That’s so American of you.”

  “Your grandfather was from the old country. Not you.”

  “Shhh, my show is on.”

  Three months earlier, Kate had graduated from college. Only one month after that, she announced her retirement. George’s forestry degree was a five-year plan, and Anna stayed in school another year to bolster her med-school applications with a chemistry minor. While Kate’s mind and body atrophied in front of the television, Anna and George went about their lives. George would on occasion remind Kate that even retired people did things. Kate argued that the point of being retired was to be free to do all of the things you couldn’t do as a working stiff. What she wanted to do, she insisted, was watch television.

  At first George and Anna had thought it was just a phase. A family member’s death, the loss of a job, graduation, and a sudden influx of cash are bound to have a ripple effect. A few weeks of idleness, maybe a month or two, was reasonable, but George didn’t see any end in sight. Kate woke up every morning, turned on the television, and stared, stopping only for a few necessary chores, bathroom breaks, food, or a summons from her roommates. When pressed about her future plans, Kate came up blank. Her future had always been mapped out. The map was still there, but the roads had all changed, leaving Kate stranded in the middle of nowhere.

  Kate liked rituals and order. Not that she was tidy, but her sense of adventure was limited to accompanying Anna when Anna’s sense of adventure struck. But Anna these days was a slave to the books, in part because she had not been enough of a slave to them during the past four years.

  “This is an easy one,” Kate said, reading from the practice test. “‘What is the most likely side effect of a sympathetic nervous system inhibitor? (A) increased pupil diameter; (B) decreased blood supply to the skin; (C) decreased heart rate; (D) auditory exclusion;’ or (E) a sudden and inexplicable need for potato chips.”


  “Can you stop adding option E?” Anna asked. “It just makes it harder to concentrate.”

  “I add option E only on the easy questions.”

  “How do you know what’s easy or not?”

  “If I know the answer, it’s easy,” Kate said.

  “You know the answer without looking at the key?” Anna said skeptically.

  “Yes.”

  “What is it?”

  “The sympathetic nervous system is basically the fight-or-flight response, the way the body responds to stress. If a drug is an inhibitor of the sympathetic nervous system, then it would have the opposite effect of stress. The answer is C, decreased heart rate, because if you’re stressed out, your heart isn’t going to slow down.”

  Anna snatched the book out of Kate’s hand. “You’re learning too much. I’m going to have to cut you off. But you’re right. That was any easy question. I would have gotten it, too, if you hadn’t mentioned potato chips.”

  “I’m hungry,” Kate said.

  “Do we have food?”

  “No.”

  Like a cosmic intervention, there was a ring at the front door.

  Neither Kate nor Anna was expecting company. Their familiarity with the random visitors in their neighborhood had hardened them to people soliciting for magazines, children selling candy, and grownups hawking religion. Anna reached into her pocket, tossed a quarter in the air, caught it, and palmed it over the back of her hand.

  “Heads or tails?”

  “Tails,” Kate said.

  The doorbell rang again, followed by a knock. Anna lifted her hand, stuffed the quarter back in her pocket, and said, “If it’s another Jehovah’s Witness, I’m calling the cops.”

  A tall, dark-haired man with a weathered but undeniably handsome face—all bone structure and blue eyes, it seemed—was standing on the porch bearing groceries. Four bags of them, which he was struggling to keep in his arms. Anna took two of the bags and shouted over her shoulder, “Free food!”

  Kate greeted the visitor by shouting his name. “Mr. Leoni! What are you doing here?”

  Mr. Leoni shook his head in mock disappointment. “Always Mr. Leoni with you. You make me feel old, Kate.”

  “Sorry, Bruno,” Kate said.

  When you’re raised by someone who arrived in this country on a boat, it takes a while to shed the old-world ways. Kate would never lose that knee-jerk respect for her elders. Anna had none of that.

  For that all-too-brief hour before George returned home, both Anna and Kate stole whatever attention they could from Bruno. Anna showed him her beer-can castle; she didn’t have to tell him it was a castle. He knew. Kate offered her assistance in the kitchen, her technique culled from hours in front of the television watching cooking shows. Bruno declared her the perfect sous-chef. As Kate was slowly and meticulously cutting onions, Bruno noticed the silence.

  “It’s so quiet in here. You’re in college. Shouldn’t your neighbors be calling the police with noise complaints?”

  “Yes,” Anna said enthusiastically. “They should.”

  She marched over to the stereo, pressed Play, and jacked up the volume, louder than it had been in months. Synthesizers shook the room. Dr. Octagon was paged.

  First patient, pull out the skull remove the cancer

  Breakin’ his back chisel necks for the answer.

  Bruno bobbed his head to the rhythm as he sweated onions in a pan.

  “What is this delightful music we’re listening to?”

  “Dr. Octagon,” said Anna. “This is my favorite album this year. I can’t stop listening to it.”

  “It’s true. She really can’t.”

  “Dr. Octagon. Very interesting,” said Bruno.

  My skin is green and silver, warhead lookin’ mean

  Astronauts get played, tough like the ukulele.

  “What kind of doctor is he?”

  “He’s an octagonecologist,” said Anna.

  “He’s a time-traveling gynecologist from the planet Jupiter,” said Kate, as if she were providing the credentials of the family physician.

  Bruno doubled over and let out the loudest laugh Anna had ever heard from a grown man.

  Earth People, New York and California

  Earth People, I was born on Jupiter.

  When George returned home an hour later, she heard music blaring, the hum of voices, and the clanking of cutlery and assumed Anna was throwing an impromptu party. She steeled herself for a fight. As George walked through the front door, Dr. Octagon was listing the ailments he treated.

  Relocated saliva glands, chimpanzee acne, and of course moose-bumps …

  “No,” George said, looking directly at the stereo as she kicked the power button with her foot. If George couldn’t play her music around Anna, Anna couldn’t play her music around George. It was only fair. Even though Anna thought she was performing a public service by trying to guide George away from the top-forty music to which her tastes bent.

  Everything quieted after that, as the chefs in the kitchen waited for George to notice the guest.

  When George saw her father, she dropped the scowl on her face, tossed her bookbag on the floor, and threw herself into his arms. Bruno picked his five-foot-ten daughter off the ground and spun her in a circle. There was a physical ease between Bruno and George that Anna found so alien it made her guts twist. George, twenty-one, could still be caught sitting on her father’s lap. Donald Fury’s equivalent would be a light pat on the head—the kind of affection you might show a dog, if you weren’t a dog person. Anna told Kate she thought it was weird, the way they were touching all the time. Secretly she wondered how she might have turned out if she’d had a father who knew how to express love.

  Kate was incapable of mislabeling her reaction to Bruno and George. When Kate watched them together, it evoked sadness so deep that it felt like a weed was taking root inside of her. She was young when her father died, but she remembered being smothered with hugs and kisses and unrestrained love. It was always her papa who read her bedtime stories. Sometimes for hours, long past her bedtime. Kate’s mother complained that he read books beyond his daughter’s reach. When he should have been reading The Cat in the Hat, he chose Aesop’s Fables and the Chronicles of Narnia.

  After Georgianna Theresa Leoni got home, Bruno’s attentions zoomed in like a telescope on his daughter, and everyone else fell out of focus. Anna immediately poured herself a goblet of wine, and Kate chopped the parsley into dust.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming, Dad?” George asked.

  “Where’s the surprise in that?” Bruno said, kissing her on the cheeks and the forehead. He took her by the shoulders and stepped back so that he could get a good look at her. “You could gain a few pounds,” he said.

  George gazed around the kitchen. “If you’re cooking, I will.”

  Bruno resumed his meal prep. George stirred the assortment of simmering sauces, tasting one at a time. There was an unspoken changing of the guard.

  Once Bruno finished preparing his culinary masterpiece, he called the girls to the table for their feast. There they sat for the next three hours eating a five-course meal, beginning with anchovies in oil on crostini, followed by stuffed tomatoes, pasta puttanesca, chicken parmigiana, and finishing with ricotta pie. Bruno named each plate with an overdone Sicilian accent. George rolled her eyes with mock embarrassment.

  Bruno tried to make everyone feel important. He asked questions and even follow-up questions. He asked about Anna’s studies and gave her a fatherly reminder about the importance of good nutrition. He gently inquired about Kate’s career inertia, and when she clumsily changed the subject to discuss a documentary on moles she’d recently watched, he convincingly feigned interest.

  “If a human baby grew at the same rate as a mole, it would be one hundred and twelve pounds by the time it was a month old,” said Kate.

  “That’s remarkable,” said Bruno.

  After the dinner party was properly ove
rnourished and saturated with red wine, Bruno turned to his daughter.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” he said.

  George and her father grabbed their coats and left.

  “I’m living with two lunatics,” George said after they had strolled a safe distance from the house. “Kate is now watching close to fourteen hours of television a day. And Anna, I don’t even know where to start. That’s not the first time she’s made a construction from our recycling bin. And her music. I hate her music.”

  “I take it you’re not a fan of the time-traveling gynecologist?”

  “If you had to listen to him on a six-hour loop, you wouldn’t be either.”

  “I suppose not. There’s something serious we need to talk about,” Bruno said.

  “What?”

  George stopped under a streetlamp and looked up at her father. The light shone directly on him. A bead of sweat stood out on his forehead, despite the cold night air.

  “Your mom and I have separated.”

  “Why?” George asked.

  “Things happen.”

  “Like what?” George said, impatiently awaiting a solid answer, something that could be written in a textbook.

  “People grow apart, George. We’ve been married twenty-five years.”

  “Did Mom meet someone?”

  “No.”

  “Did you?”

  “That’s not why we’re separating.”

  “So you did meet someone?”

  Bruno tried to reach out to his daughter; she danced to the left. “Yes, but—”

  “You had an affair?”

  “George, I’m not here to talk about that.”

  “Who was she?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Bruno took another step closer to George; she swayed to the right.

  “Of course it matters,” said George.

  “George, nothing will change between us.”

  “Are you in love with her?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you getting a divorce?”

  “Because that’s what your mother wants.”

  “Why did you do this? Why did you have sex with a woman you didn’t love?”