How to Start a Fire

by Lisa Lutz

  “Not me,” Anna said. “Let Kate play. She’s a human lie detector.”

  Kate felt like a performing monkey. Her audition was a poker game with Anna, Malcolm, Colin, and some guy named Jack. Jack was famous in Colin’s circle of poker buddies for not having any tells, kind of like Lena’s Botox face. As far as Anna was concerned, Jack was about as dead as a person who was technically alive could be. And he wasn’t the still-waters-run-deep kind of reserved. You actually got the feeling that there was nothing more than a puddle there.

  Three hours in and Kate and Jack were the last players standing in the practice game. Unlike Jack, Kate had dozens of tells vying for attention. One of her tricks was to roll them out in random sequences, like drawing a name from a hat. The lip bite, the furrowed brow, the tongue click, the squint, the half cough, the gaping yawn, the shoulder twitch. Even Kate didn’t know if she had any real tells anymore. Flat Jack gave Kate nothing to read, so she read only his game. In the end, it came down to luck. In her hand she held a jack and queen; the flop came seven, four, ten. Both players checked, and the turn was an ace.

  “All in,” Kate said, shoving her pot of peanuts to the center of the table.

  Jack called. The river was a king.

  While Anna, Colin, and Malcolm discussed strategy for the evening, Kate retired to the corner with a book. Malcolm glanced over curiously.

  “What are you reading there, Kate?”

  Kate held up the book. Malcolm read the title, adding a question mark to the end.

  “The Fluxion Debate?”

  “Is that a science fiction novel?” Colin asked.

  “I wish,” Anna said, having already gotten an earful about its contents.

  “No, it’s about Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz’s war over who invented calculus.”

  “Can I see that?” Malcolm asked, extending his hand.

  Kate reluctantly passed him the book. Malcolm took a seat on the floor next to Kate.

  “Newton called calculus the fluxion method, right?” Malcolm said.

  “Right,” Kate said.

  “Didn’t Newton send a letter to Leibniz with an anagram expressing the fundamental theory of calculus, and then after that, Leibniz claimed to have invented calculus?”

  “No,” Kate said with a long sigh, stealing back her book. “I mean, yes. Newton sent the stupid anagram letter because he was a paranoid asshole. Here’s the thing: It’s perfectly possible that two men discovered calculus at the very same time. But Newton was buried like a king, and Leibniz, who was an all-around great thinker whose philosophies have made major contributions to modern geology, psychology, computer science—he was buried like a pauper.”

  “So you’re on Team Leibniz, I see,” Malcolm said.

  “She always goes for the underdog,” Anna said.

  “What’s the point in rooting for a winner?” said Malcolm.

  Kate decided she liked Malcolm. He was different. He stayed put on the floor, continuing to read Kate’s book over her shoulder. Anna watched them out of the corner of her eye, wondering what it was about Kate that drew Malcolm’s attention. Maybe Malcolm, too, liked the underdog.

  The buy-in for the game was one grand. Kate tried to make a run for it when she heard the price, but Colin chased after her and clumsily abused the only information he had to persuade her.

  “Think of it this way. Bradford Marsh is Isaac Newton. You, you’re Gottfried Leibniz.”

  Kate found no logic in Colin’s argument, but there was an undeniable charge in the air and she didn’t feel like being the person to neutralize it. Besides, it wasn’t her money.

  “How old is this chick?” Bradford Marsh said after introductions were made. Two of his fraternity brothers, Jameson Walsh and Patrick Reed—both ringers for Bradford—were already seated at the table, doling out chips.

  “I’m twenty,” Kate said.

  “You look like you’re twelve.”

  “I look like I’m sixteen,” Kate said. A fair assessment.

  “Would you like some candy, little girl?” Patrick or Jameson said.

  “If you have any,” Kate answered.

  “You’re serious about this?” Bradford said to Colin.

  “They have the money. They want to play. You’re not scared of some little girls, are you?” said Colin.

  “Deal,” Bradford said.

  Anna went out first, her impulsiveness and love of the bluff getting the better of her. Colin shook his head in disappointment. “You need discipline, Anna.”

  Over time, Kate got a clear sense of the men she was playing. Jameson wasn’t as bad as he first seemed. Kate noted that he had a southern drawl that he tried to hide through hard Yankee edges in his voice. He regarded her with curiosity, not disdain. Patrick seemed vacant, harmless. But Bradford needed to lose. She felt a visceral distaste for him. Containing it, she knew, would mess with her game, so she let it spill out whenever the urge hit.

  “I see you and I’ll raise you two hundred,” Bradford said.

  Malcolm and Patrick folded. Kate had a feeling Colin had a decent hand. She sat with two tens.

  “He’s bluffing,” she said.

  Bradford chuckled casually, but his eyes narrowed.

  “You sure about that, sweetheart?”

  “I’m pretty sure,” Kate said. “Check.” She tossed her chips in the pot.

  “Check,” Colin said, adding to the pot.

  Bradford looked at his hand one more time and tossed his cards face-down on the table.

  “Cunt,” he whispered.

  “What did you say?” Malcolm said, getting to his feet.

  Then Colin stood. Then Bradford and Jameson and Patrick stood, only because everyone else was standing. Even Anna got up. Kate stayed put.

  “He said cunt,” said Kate. “Now, if you could all sit down again, that would be great. Because I’d like to finish this game. It’s way past my bedtime.”

  Anna had always thought of Kate as buttoned up and restrained, but in sharp relief to the roomful of testosterone, with her towers of chips piled high in front of her, Anna saw, Kate had a stunning coolness. Unlike Anna, Kate could control her urges; she wasn’t in a constant battle with herself. Her discipline gave her power. Days later, it occurred to Anna that Kate had orchestrated the near brawl to knock her opponents off balance.

  Three hands later, Bradford went all in on a pair of fives with Colin holding two kings. A third king came on the turn, cementing Bradford’s fate. Bradford threw his cards on the table and looked Kate over one more time.

  “Why don’t we call it a night,” Bradford said. “You two can duke it out later.”

  Kate collected her winnings as swiftly as possible. Obligatory but strained handshakes followed. As she was leaving, Kate approached Bradford and offered him her hand.

  “Good game,” she said, perhaps a little too cheerfully.

  Bradford accepted her hand, gripped it a little too hard. He drew her close to him and whispered in her ear, “I’d like to fuck that smile off your face.”

  “Is that generally your goal when fucking?” Kate said.

  Malcolm quickly ushered her out of the apartment. Outside, the temperature had drifted below twenty. The chill only energized the winning crowd. Malcolm and Colin hoisted Kate onto their shoulders and sang a song that Anna had never heard before, taught to Malcolm by his granddad, who often sang it for his grandmother Kathleen.

  K-K-K-Katy, beautiful Katy,

  You’re the only g-g-g-girl that I adore;

  When the m-m-m-moon shines,

  Over the cowshed,

  I’ll be waiting at the k-k-k-kitchen door.

  The song was so cheesy, it made Anna cringe, but watching Kate on Malcolm’s and Colin’s shoulders, celebrated and admired for all the things she wasn’t, Anna felt an envy so deep it shamed her.

  2004

  Boston, Massachusetts

  Drenched in a cold sweat, Anna changed her pajamas for the third time in the last eight
hours. She yanked off the sheets, threw some towels on the couch, and wrapped herself in a bathrobe until she overheated again.

  The vomiting had eased up, at least. Nothing was left. The first time she got clean she was in a clinic, mainlined with sedatives and antiemetics. It wasn’t pretty, but it wasn’t as ugly as this. She’d been dodging bullets, slipping up and getting clean and playing Russian roulette with drug tests. She told herself this would be the last time. It felt like her body was in a brawl with itself, or like she was being punched in the gut by an invisible fist. Sometimes she welcomed the sickness because it shoved away the shame. Another twenty-four hours and she’d go back to work. Maybe this was the last time.

  The phone had been ringing, but Anna thought the ringing was paracusia. She often had auditory hallucinations of telephones, doorbells, and alarm clocks, especially during half sleep. On her way back to bed, she saw that her message light was blinking. She pressed the button and heard George’s voice, soft and clear, on the other end.

  “It’s me. Please call me back. I need your help.”

  Anna rested another hour or two. The phone rang again. She was close to the machine and heard the message in real time.

  “I tried you at work. He’s gone. I don’t know what to do.”

  A baby was crying in the background.

  Anna sat up on the couch, sipped a glass of water, gagged, and made the call.

  ANNA:

  George, it’s me.

  GEORGE:

  Where were you?

  ANNA:

  I had a long shift. I was sleeping. Didn’t hear the machine.

  GEORGE:

  My mom’s out of the country.

  ANNA:

  Did something happen?

  GEORGE:

  If I tell my dad, he’ll kill him.

  ANNA:

  What happened?

  GEORGE:

  Can you come here? I know you have to work. Just for the weekend.

  ANNA:

  Have you called Kate?

  GEORGE:

  I need you. Not her.

  ANNA:

  What happened?

  GEORGE:

  I kicked him out.

  ANNA:

  What did he do?

  GEORGE:

  He fucked the babysitter. She was fifteen. In the guest room. I called the cops. He was arrested. I need help. Miller and Carter. It’s too much.

  ANNA:

  It would probably be a lot easier for Kate to get her shifts covered.

  GEORGE:

  Not her. I need you.

  As soon as Anna hung up the phone, she placed another call.

  “It’s me. I need something. Willing to trade. How soon can you get here? See you then.”

  Anna ransacked her closet and found a single Valium trapped in the seam of an old pea coat. She snatched her suitcase off the top shelf and began packing in a desultory haze. An hour later, the doorbell rang. At the door stood a guy wearing a cashmere sweater over an oxford shirt; his hair was boyish and straight, and his bangs flopped over his eyes. He looked like a prep-school kid who’d refused a much-needed trim.

  He reminded Anna of one of Colin’s old college buddies. He was the same type—privileged, Ivy League. Maybe a guy whose trust fund had run out but who’d found a new way to survive. Only the glassiness in his eyes and the grayish pallor of his skin gave him away.

  “What do you need?” Grant asked.

  “Heroin and coke. Enough for a week. Any Oxy if you have it.” Anna never used the sly nicknames for the serious stuff. As if she weren’t really part of that world if she didn’t speak its language.

  “No Oxy,” Grant said. “I got the street drugs. It’s the scripts I need.”

  Anna unlocked her prescription pad from her desk drawer. “I need legitimate names, and I’ll have to postdate some of these so they’re not all written today.”

  They haggled for an hour over dosage and pills per script.

  “Schedule two and three prescriptions are carefully monitored. I can’t write more than a thirty-day supply, and there are no refills on schedule two drugs. Prescribing a high dose to someone without a history of chronic pain could be a red flag. I lose my license, and you lose me.”

  “I never really had you,” Grant said, winking. “Until now.”

  Two hours until her flight to Chicago, and Anna was contemplating ways to disguise heroin to pass through security. Terrorism had put drugs on the back burner, but it was still a risky undertaking. She figured she could get needles from a pharmacy in Evanston. She found a vial that held powdered vitamin C and swapped it out for the H. She tossed into her Dopp kit a mess of skin care and cosmetics and perfume as camouflage. The cocaine she put in tinfoil that she folded up like a giant gum wrapper and slipped into her reading-glasses case. If caught, she had no plausible deniability. But she wouldn’t get caught.

  Men had devastated George before and likely would again. But Anna found the sight of her, clothed in pajama bottoms and a sweatshirt spattered with things that erupt from an infant, her hair matted down into a greasy sheen, unsettling. George had always managed effortless beauty, even after a weeklong camping trip. Anna used to think it was one of the most despicable things about her. But her beauty was now camouflaged by life. Her belly was still swollen from giving birth, but her face was drawn from crying and not eating. Her eyes, rimmed in red, stood out against the hollow shadows beneath. A crease from her last nap drew a long slice across her face. She appeared years older than the last time Anna had seen her. The baby was crying in her arms, tracing more worry lines on George’s already worried brow.

  Anna had snorted a line of cocaine in the bathroom stall in O’Hare Airport. She left a message for Kate while she was waiting for a cab.

  “It’s me. I’m in Chicago. What I want to know is why I’m here and not you. I’m on probation and in the middle of residency. Your only responsibility in life is to serve people coffee,” Anna said, and she disconnected the call.

  It was forty-five minutes in a cab to George’s stately Colonial home in Evanston. White and pristine, gated and groomed, belying the chaos inside. Anna dropped her bags in the foyer and washed her hands in the powder-room sink, a ritual she would never quit, before she found George in the den. She kissed her friend on the cheek and took the baby. Miller. Anna had tried to talk her out of it. Last names as first names were always a pet peeve.

  Anna walked into the kitchen. The sink was piled high with dishes, the floor covered with coffee stains and crumbs. Cereal boxes, spent milk cartons, and empty soup cans crowded the counter.

  “Don’t you have a housekeeper?” Anna asked.

  “I fired her,” said George. “She knew what was going on.”

  “Who paid her?”

  “Jeremy.”

  “She thought she was going to lose her job. And you don’t know what she knew. Give me her number.”

  George reluctantly scribbled the digits on a scrap of paper. Anna called from the landline. It went to voice mail. She phoned again from her cell phone, and Gloria picked up. Anna explained all the things that needed explaining and threw in the hormone excuse, sealing the deal. Gloria would get a pay jump and resume her duties that day. Anna returned to the den, where George was doing her best to make a permanent ass mark in the couch.

  “Take a shower,” Anna said.

  “I can’t,” George said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t want to look at myself naked.”

  “Then don’t look. I do that all the time.”

  Anna gave Miller a bath in the downstairs bathroom and found a onesie in the nursery. She had done a pediatrics rotation, but caring for babies still put her on edge; she touched them as if dismantling a bomb.

  When George resurfaced from the shower, scrubbed raw with a shower brush, as if she could clean away more than dead skin and dirt, Anna put the baby back in her arms.

  “Where’s Carter?” Anna asked, remembering that G
eorge had another child.

  George stared blankly at Anna.

  “Where’s Carter?” Anna said again.

  “He’s next door with the neighbor’s kids. I told them I had the flu and didn’t want Carter to get it.”

  “It’s time to get him,” Anna said.

  “Will you go over there?” George asked.

  “And say what? ‘Hey, you got some toddler named Carter over here, I’ll be taking him.’”

  “I’ll call them and give them a full description of you.”

  “You can walk next door, George.”

  While George collected her firstborn at the neighbor’s house, Anna put the baby in the bassinet and snorted a line of cocaine in the bathroom. She then washed the tower of dishes in the kitchen sink. She emptied the swelling trash bin and collected the recycling. She threw a load of baby clothes and rags in the washing machine.

  “You work fast,” George said when she reentered her home.

  Carter was cradling something in his hands. He’d take a peek every few seconds to check on it.

  “This is your auntie Anna,” George said.

  “Hi, Carter,” Anna said. “You don’t remember me. I haven’t seen you since you were a baby.”

  “Anna got you that ant farm for your last birthday. Do you remember?” said George.

  Carter smiled and nodded his head.

  “What have you got there?” Anna asked, crouching down.

  Carter opened his palm and revealed an earthworm he had just captured from the neighbor’s yard.

  “Does he have a name?” Anna asked.

  Carter shook his head. Anna had heard many stories of Carter eating small creatures, and while Carter’s mother found it amusing, mostly because it tortured Carter’s father, Anna thought it might eventually brand him as a weirdo.

  “You should name him,” Anna said. She figured anthropomorphizing the worm would make Carter less inclined to swallow it.

  “It took like two weeks to name his goldfish,” George said.

  “Are they still of this world?” Anna asked.

  “He doesn’t like seafood.”

  “I like the name Ralph,” Anna said.

  “You don’t like the name Ralph.”

  “I like it for a worm, not a person.”