How to Start a Fire

by Lisa Lutz

  James thought of her too. He also thought that maybe she was too something. He didn’t have the word for it. She looked so young and innocent, but he knew that she was harder than most people and immovable in some ways. Once, when he questioned her lack of ambition in light of her obvious intelligence, he’d received a long-winded complaint about the sickness of the American dream, the ubiquitous desire for money, recognition, and power without any true respect for the simpler things in life. When Kate went on these tirades, she thought she was invoking the spirit of her deda, but her deda didn’t mind American ambition. It was only the greed he objected to.

  And so Kate and James continued to think about each other, and James made what he believed were obvious overtures. At least, they’d worked in the past. His leg would brush against hers at the movie theater. Sometimes a quick shoulder rub. A soft kiss on the cheek, his lips waiting for an invitation. But Kate was useless that way. From a distance she could dissect the soul of a complete stranger, but there were glaring things she missed when her subject was too close.

  A few days after the driving lesson, James and Kate crossed paths in the laundry room. Kate was sitting on top of a washing machine with a book, as usual.

  “What are you reading?”

  “Your book.”

  Kate held up the book so he could see the cover. Le Carré’s Little Drummer Girl. A battered paperback at least ten years old. It was James’s book. He’d lent it to her a month ago.

  “You’re finally reading a normal book,” James said.

  “All books are normal books.”

  “You don’t seem to indulge in fiction much.”

  “I indulge in fiction all the time. I’ll be done in about twenty minutes and you can have it back.”

  James took the book from her hands, slipped a dryer sheet inside to mark the page, and put it on a high shelf.

  “Can I have your book back?” Kate asked.

  Kate was about to jump off the washing machine, but James stopped her. She would have trouble avoiding eye contact if their eyes were on the same level.

  “Do you like being alone, Kate?”

  “I don’t dislike it.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “I’m not afraid of it.”

  “Do you want me to leave you alone?”

  “I don’t know,” Kate said. What she meant was that she didn’t know how to answer the question. Being alone was easy; emotions could be regulated like operating a crane. Once you add someone else to the mix, you hand over some of the controls.

  “Let me know when you decide.”

  She decided exactly eight hours later, after watching a horror film late at night, then going to bed and being woken by the sound of a windstorm outside; tree branches lashed against her window. The wicked whirl of disturbed nature had a ghostly sound. Kate got out of bed, searched the apartment for Anna, and remembered that she was in the anatomy lab. Kate walked over to James’s apartment, knocked on the door. She entered without saying a word, took off her clothes, and crawled into bed. James didn’t have to mess with any buttons that night.

  They were the same as before. Friends and neighbors, only they also had sex and sometimes slept in the same bed. Often James had nightmares and thrashed violently in his sleep, startling Kate awake, which was like taking her into his nightmare. Once, in the predawn hours, Kate was returning from the bathroom and James shot up in bed and shouted, his hand closed into a fist, “Get the fuck out of here.”

  James had no recollection of saying what he’d said. She tried to stay the night a few more times but found herself incapable of sleep, anxiously awaiting his night terrors. When she stopped sleeping over, she thought things could remain the same. They didn’t. James no longer dropped by, and whenever Kate knocked on his door, she always seemed to be waking him from a nap.

  A few weeks later, he woke up from the nap. Really woke up. He offered Kate more driving lessons. He fixed the girls’ leaky faucet and tightened the screws on the deadbolt that were loosening. He even put insulation on their windows, which was a job for the landlord. Kate knocked on his apartment door one day and found James packing most of his belongings in boxes. She asked if he was moving and he said that he realized that he had too much stuff and was downsizing. Kate, a true minimalist, thought nothing of James’s desire to rid himself of the burden of possessions.

  Anna, however, thought something. On a number of occasions, she’d caught sight of James lugging boxes to Goodwill and trash bags down to the garbage bins. When she returned home in the early hours of the morning and passed by his apartment, she sometimes heard him rattling about inside. She knew a few things about him, had seen the bruises on Kate from his night terrors.

  Anna knocked on James’s door one evening when Kate was at the library.

  “Anna, what are you doing here?”

  “I could use a cup of coffee. Do you have any?”

  “Sure. Come in.”

  While James prepared the brew, Anna roamed his near-empty apartment and noticed an antiseptic odor—that cloying hospital smell that gets stuck in the back of your throat.

  “Can I use your restroom?” she asked.

  “Sure,” James said.

  Her presence was making him uneasy; her visit was unprecedented, the request for coffee inexplicable. He knew for a fact that Anna kept a stockpile of coffee in their pantry. They never ran out. Ever.

  Anna slipped into James’s bedroom and slid open the top drawer of his dresser. Just a few pairs of jeans, Tshirts, socks, and underwear. The second and third drawers were empty. The walls were bare except for the shadows where framed pictures had once hung. She went into his bathroom and checked the cabinets. Only the essentials remained—toothbrush, toothpaste, a shaving kit, and aspirin. Baby shampoo and a bar of soap in the shower. She flushed the toilet, ran the taps, and returned to the kitchen.

  “Are you going somewhere?” Anna asked.

  “Wasn’t planning to.”

  Anna sat down at his kitchen table.

  “What are you planning?” she asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Who is your closest relative?”

  “Why are you asking these questions?”

  “You’ve reduced your personal effects to almost nothing, which is very considerate. But still, someone is going to find the body.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Do you have a gun in here? Is that how you’re planning on doing it?”

  James tried to pour a mug of coffee, but his hand shook and he had to rest the carafe on the sink.

  “I’d like you to leave,” he said.

  “I can’t let her find you like that.”

  “She won’t.”

  “Well, somebody will.”

  “Anna, mind your own business.”

  “I’m going to drive you to the hospital and you’re going to check yourself into the psych ward and you’re going to tell them the truth. And then they’ll help you get better.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before you took him to the hospital?” Kate asked when Anna explained James’s sudden departure.

  “I didn’t know for sure until I saw his apartment,” said Anna.

  “How did I miss that?”

  “He didn’t want you to know.”

  “How did you figure it out?”

  “I don’t know,” Anna said. “I had a feeling.”

  “He was acting normal. Happy, even.”

  “Because he’d decided. He had a plan.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He admitted it, when I asked.”

  “But how did you know before,” Kate said. She was becoming agitated, angry that Anna knew more about James than she had.

  “I wouldn’t want my friends and family to have to clean up after me. And I definitely wouldn’t want them going through my stuff,” said Anna. “I would do exactly what he did.”

  Ka
te visited James just once at the Metropolitan St. Louis Psychiatric Center. He was on a cocktail of meds that dulled his senses and made him appear, like before, as if he had just woken from a nap. It seemed to Kate that James’s treatment protocol was designed to extract all emotions so that James had no urges, dangerous or otherwise.

  “Do you need anything?” Kate asked.

  They were in a sitting room with other patients roaming about, some agitated, some catatonic. Others played games or worked on art projects or sat quietly, staring out the window.

  “I don’t need anything,” said James.

  “How about a book? I bet you have a lot of time to read in here.”

  “It’s hard to concentrate,” said James.

  “Why?”

  “The medication makes me tired.”

  “Oh. Maybe they should adjust your meds.”

  “Kate?”

  “Yes?”

  “You should go.”

  2008

  Boise, Idaho

  “Where are you going, Carter?” George asked her six-year-old son, who had just tied each of his shoes with a double knot and was marching toward the front door.

  “Out,” Carter said.

  Her son had adopted the cagey manner of her third husband, Kyle. Kyle was like Anna in college, unwilling to divulge his recent or future locations. The difference was that George had a good idea of where Kyle was going and where he had been. Slowly, like she was waking up from a deep sleep, she was coming to terms with the simple fact that she would soon be divorced for the third time.

  “If you want to play outside, you can go in the backyard, and take Miller with you,” said George.

  She shoved Velcro-strap sneakers onto Miller’s feet. The boys marched toward the back door. It was early spring, and the light snow had finally melted, which meant the grass was brown and hideous, but the air was crisp and just the right temperature for running wild without overheating.

  “If you find something you want to put in your mouth, let me investigate it first. And don’t sword-fight with the tree branches. We’ve been to the emergency room two times already this year. What did I tell you about eyeballs?”

  “Mom,” Carter said, impatiently stretching the word beyond its single syllable.

  “You only get two eyeballs,” Miller chimed in. “Just two.”

  “Thank you, sweetie. Four eyeballs are walking out of this door, four eyeballs are coming back. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes. Goodbye,” Carter said, trotting outside.

  Miller followed in his wake. George watched her sons through the kitchen window. Carter climbed their giant oak tree, and Miller hopped on the tire swing and spun so fast she was relieved he hadn’t eaten lunch yet.

  George picked up the phone and dialed Kyle. She knew he wouldn’t answer and that he couldn’t listen to a voice-mail message that was longer than two brief sentences.

  “It would be great if you came home soon; I think our house is falling into a sinkhole. Take care.”

  With the divorce decision made, she felt free again, just as she had during those last few weeks with Mitch. She watched her boys through the window, feeling that familiar aching love, even though Carter had directly defied her and was flagrantly wielding his stick sword at his brother. They were growing so quickly. She tried to picture the kind of men they would become, and all she could see were variations of her husbands.

  George phoned Kate, who she knew had Thursday off from the library.

  KATE:

  Hello.

  GEORGE:

  I’m raising boys.

  KATE:

  Did you just figure that out?

  GEORGE:

  They will be men one day.

  KATE:

  That’s usually how it works.

  GEORGE:

  I’m probably getting divorced.

  KATE:

  I’m sorry to hear it.

  GEORGE:

  You’re not sorry to hear it.

  KATE:

  Well, I’m sorry that you married him. And I’m sorry you’re sad, because you’re probably sad now.

  GEORGE:

  I didn’t call to talk about that. I called about my sons.

  KATE:

  Yes. The sons that will be men.

  GEORGE:

  Right. Here’s the thing. I raised them the way I was raised, the way I would raise girls to make sure that they weren’t shackled by their gender. If I had a daughter I would encourage wildness and fearlessness, and if she scraped her knee, I’d tell her to suck it up and not to cry, just like my dad said to me. But I have boys. And they’re different. So I think I should be doing something differently, but I don’t know what. I’m responsible for what they’re going to become, the men they will be one day. It’s up to me to make sure that I don’t raise assholes. I love them, but when I look into the future, sometimes I think Carter might be just like his father, minus the chilling nature phobias. And if there is anyone who can properly be described as an asshole, it is Mitch.

  KATE:

  I can’t argue with you on that one.

  GEORGE:

  I watch Carter on the playground with girls. He looks at them as if they’re aliens, the enemy. There’s this divide, like two countries at war.

  KATE:

  Isn’t that an age thing?

  GEORGE:

  I don’t know. I feel like I’ve been at war with men for years.

  KATE:

  Those are two different wars.

  GEORGE:

  I need to raise sensitive men who like women.

  KATE:

  That’s an excellent goal.

  GEORGE:

  How do I do that?

  KATE:

  If I find a book with a blueprint, I’ll buy it for you. But I don’t have the answer off the top of my head.

  GEORGE:

  There’s dissension in the ranks. I’ll call you later.

  Outside, Miller had joined the sword fight. Carter responded to his parry with a riposte that tumbled Miller onto his back, disarming him. Carter stepped forward, asserting his dominance, and pressed his stick against Miller’s heart. George walked outside, picked up her own stick, and fenced with Carter until she had him pinned against an old metal shed. George stole Carter’s sword and threw it across the yard, then held the tip of her stick against his throat.

  “Do you accept defeat?” George said, her voice low with gravitas.

  “Yes,” Carter said, honorably.

  George threw her sword aside. “No more stick swords today. We’re going to do something completely different.”

  When George was pregnant with Miller, her mother had become convinced that the second child would be a girl because George was violently sick during the first trimester and carried the baby high during the last. Vivien had George’s old dress-up trunk delivered just a month before she gave birth. Before her weedy growth spurt, before her father became her beacon, and basketball her passion, George had done what the other girls did. The trunk carried the signature costumes of the early years of Madonna’s reign: tulle skirts and halter tops, bangles and headbands. George also came across a few of her childhood dresses, special ones that Vivien had saved. A Halloween costume or two had also found their way into the trunk.

  Her experiment involved candy and video-game bribes, but eventually Miller found himself running around the house in a flowing periwinkle-blue dress that his mother, age nine, had worn to a cousin’s wedding (he said he liked the way the satin fabric felt against his skin, and the breeze beneath him). Carter, more reluctant, wore a witch’s robe from a Halloween George couldn’t remember, and he let his mother paint his nails purple.

  And then Daddy came home.

  On the surface, Kyle had been an appropriate choice. George had met him in Boise, Idaho, on vacation with her boys. He was the guide on a river-rafting trip. A man who liked nature as much as she did. A man who scooped up spiders in the shower and released them to play their ro
le in the universal food chain. He could stare at the stars all night, sleep on the ground, and go for days bathing only in a swimming hole. He had the kind of tan that would never fade, skin that felt like rawhide—handsome now, but one day it would kill him, as Anna remarked when she first saw a photo. That was one thing that George and Kyle did well together: they would take the boys on weeklong camping trips, bathe in icy ponds and creeks, and hike for hours at a time. It was when they returned home, when Kyle faced the realities of domestic life—laundry, shopping, cleaning, chauffeuring children to and fro—that their relationship lost its luster.

  “What’s going on here?” Kyle asked as he gaped at Carter blowing on his purple nail polish, and Miller putting on a tutu. George had adorned herself with a simple pink feather boa.

  “We’re getting in touch with our feminine side,” George said.

  Kyle grunted disapprovingly.

  “I need a shower,” he said, which George always took to mean that he had just been with another woman. At some point she began to wonder what was wrong with the shower at his girlfriend’s place.

  George followed Kyle into their bedroom.

  “Where have you been?” she asked. George had come to loathe that question, having asked it so many times.

  “What difference does it make,” said Kyle, who also had a low opinion of that particular interrogative. This was his first marriage and he hadn’t quite grasped the idea that it involved a tether of some kind.

  George wasn’t going to engage in one more battle. The war was over and no one had won.

  “You should move out,” she said. “Oh, and I’m pregnant.”

  She swiftly departed; the pink boa danced in her wake. Kyle didn’t pursue her. He took his shower, and the next day he was gone.

  Two boys and the exhaustion of pregnancy quickly turned George’s nerves into sandpaper. She had managed to make only a few friendly acquaintances in Boise, mothers of her boys’ schoolmates, friends by convenience, occasional babysitters. Children as a common interest was something, but it couldn’t compensate for history, for remembering that time you dove naked into the water just as Russian tourists traversed what you’d thought was a secret trail.