Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down

by Anne Valente

  That sound, he said. Such a St. Louis sound.

  A Midwestern sound, Zola knew. A sound that had marked every year of her memory. A wave of noise as August burned off into September, then louder still as autumn deepened into October. Zola looked cicadas up once, the summer when she was eleven and they had emerged in droves. They were everywhere. On the news, in the grass, clinging to the sapling branches of trees. She’d descended into the basement cool apart from the summer humidity already swelling into June and had looked them up on the computer, where she learned that they were periodical cicadas, buried underground for so many seasons, sometimes thirteen, sometimes seventeen. That the ones hugging every leaf of her yard upstairs and out the back door were a combination of thirteen- and seventeen-year broods, a concurrence that happened only once every two hundred years and had made St. Louis a spotlight of headline news. That these were separate from singular-season cicadas that came every year, nicknamed dog-day cicadas for their annual arrival in August. Zola had listened to their hum each summer, a drone stretched through the screens of her bedroom windows, a sound that summoned the coming of fall. She had learned at eleven that each year’s brood of dog-day cicadas was first born underground, taking four years to grow and develop before emerging from the soil.

  She felt Nick’s hand on hers. The hum pressing down all around them. A sound waiting in the earth as they had entered junior high, as Caroline Black turned twelve.

  They’ll die off soon, Zola said. They’re always gone by November.

  I’ve always loved the sound, Nick said. His hand tightened around hers. A trail of lanterns led the way from the church entrance down a set of stone steps and Zola looked beyond them, to the quiet street, circles of pavement illumined by the glow of streetlamps.

  I don’t want to go home, she said. Not yet.

  Home was an emptiness. A quiet bedroom. Home was the soft terror of her mother turning in for bed, a silent house and so many dark hours.

  Then let’s stay out, Nick said.

  And do what?

  Anything. We’ll find something.

  Zola pulled a sweater from her bag. The day warm, evening descending cold. A biting chill that carried an edge, a certainty that the droning sound around them would be gone in weeks. Nick’s Honda waited at the curb. Zola’s mother hugged her goodbye when Nick promised to drive her home safe, and Zola watched as Christina’s mother looked after her daughter wistfully as Christina stepped into the backseat of Nick’s car. Matt followed. A row of oaks swayed above the car in the faint light of the streetlamps, casting speckled shadows across the hood. Zola climbed into the front seat.

  Where do you want to go? Nick asked.

  Christina shrugged in the seat behind her. Beside Christina, Matt looked out the backseat window. Nick turned on the engine and navigated a labyrinth of streets, a planned neighborhood built in the 1960s. Houses with siding. Manicured lawns. Pumpkins and gourds beginning to appear on porches. Streets Zola had driven through so many times with Christina or Matt or Nick, a neighborhood they’d cut through on their way to Christina’s house for yearbook meetings after school. Zola knew who lived in every house the car passed: Josh Weintraub, Caitlyn McMahon, Alexander Antonov. The trees swayed above the street. The low static of the radio billowed through the car, news talk of the Iraq Survey Group that Nick switched for the quiet notes of a jazz trio on community radio. KDHX 88.1. A radio station they’d grown up with, an independent stream that connected every home by filtered waves. The car moved through winding streets and past houses, so many lit squares of windows, so many families inside. And beyond the homes lay the back roads: how easily Midvale County slipped into cornfield. A once-haven for teenage drinking and stargazing, now only a reprieve from the scrutiny of reporters and the hum of FBI officials and police officers on every street. Back roads Zola knew well enough, two-lane paths connecting farmhouses and intermittent mailboxes, where they’d come so many times to sip wine coolers or escape their own homes. Back roads Zola assumed Christina knew far better, cornfields concealing the backseat of Ryan’s car. How quickly a suburb gave way to the central plains, cultivated land, and fields of crops. Dense forest edging the fields.

  Zola felt the engine drone through her body as the Honda navigated the slope of the roads. She glanced back at Matt and wondered if he too knew the contours of these roads, Tyler beside him in the passenger seat across the summer on darkened nights. Christina sat beside him, her head leaned back, her neck cupped by a small headrest. The sky a wash of immobile black through the back windshield behind her. A half-moon. Polaris. The arced slope of the Big Dipper, every star Zola’s mother pointed out on their back porch though Zola never remembered, the slats of the deck’s wood cold beneath the socks of her feet. Pinpoints of stars Zola couldn’t believe were actually moving. She couldn’t believe the earth turned at all. That the wheels of Nick’s car rolled across pavement, a softer momentum than the earth’s rotation, a velocity spinning away from a library, the sound of screaming, the halls of an empty high school. How her mother could identify a pinwheel of constellations, every sign of the zodiac. How Zola looked to the sky and saw nothing but a scattering of isolated points. Nothing she could capture on a camera’s film. She imagined her mother arriving home, a darkened house, her heels echoing through the front entryway. How she’d have driven past Alisha Trenway’s house, the lights extinguished, Alisha’s parents at their daughter’s funeral.

  Nick pulled the car off the back roads and onto a dirt path between cornfields, a flat landscape of dust marked by the tire marks of tractors. The radio fell away. In its place, the drone of crickets and wind and the singing of corn silk. Nick opened the driver’s side door, for only moments illuminating the dome light, and then Zola found herself standing beside Matt and Christina beneath the black. Nick pulled at his suit jacket, the only fabric he had to block the cold. He keyed the latch of his trunk and swung it open and Zola saw a bag of fireworks amid jumper cables and discarded soda bottles and textbooks, alongside a bottle of whiskey. Kentucky bourbon. A bottle she knew he’d bought weeks ago with a fake ID, a handle he’d hoped they would share the night of Homecoming. He pulled the bag of fireworks from the trunk and dropped them to the dust and dirt beside the car. He opened the bottle and took a drink. Zola pulled the bottle from his grasp and tilted back her head and swallowed two shots’ worth of bourbon, her face unchanged by the liquor’s burn down her throat.

  Zola knew Christina didn’t drink anymore. Not since sometime last spring when she’d stopped all at once and never said why, a party Zola barely remembered leaving on her bike but knew Christina had left with Ryan, her face etched into the grimace Zola had come to recognize as a sign that they were fighting. When Nick passed the bottle to Christina, she angled it to her mouth. The first time Zola had seen her drink in months.

  Nick opened the bag of fireworks slumped in the dirt. Sparklers. Roman candles. A single lighter. He pulled the lighter from the bag and flicked the small metal wheel and a flame sparked up and guttered near his face. As if he held a flashlight, as if they were assembled for ghost stories. No campfire. No gathered sticks. No faint scent of firewood. Only the hum of cicadas lost to the night. An indifferent moon. A dove cooing in the far trees. The soft rustle of stalks and the sour aftertaste of bourbon, a bitterness Zola held in her mouth.

  Fine night for fireworks, she whispered.

  I’ve never shot off a roman candle, Christina said.

  Tonight’s your lucky night, Nick said. He leaned toward the bag, pulled out a roman candle, placed it in Christina’s hands. Go for it, he said. Have a field day.

  She looked at him. I don’t know what to do.

  Nick held the lighter. The crickets droned. In the distance, Zola heard the faraway murmur of the highway’s hum. Nick placed his hands around Christina’s hands, her fingers tight along the candle’s cylinder. A ten-ball roman candle, markings snaked up the firework’s tube. Zola leaned beside Matt against the car’s trunk as Nick guided Chr
istina’s hands away from her body.

  There’ll be ten shots, he said. He rotated Christina’s hands up, above the cornstalks. He lit the candle and Christina held it out and pulled her other hand across her eyes and the paper tube sparked and ignited, a small hiss and then a flame.

  Zola watched the light shoot above them. Whirling spheres. How they spun away like small planets, a constellation of timed emissions. She saw Christina pull her hand away from her eyes and examine the light leaving a trail of smoke. Curled strands settling above her, a clouded haze dissipating across the sky. A popping that broke the silence of the stars. Zola counted down the flames, three bursts, then two, finally one. When the last rupture fired, Zola stood beside Matt in the wake of its stillness.

  Nick stooped to the bag and grabbed a slender box. A box he held to the moon’s light to read the packaging and unravel the plastic encasing. He pulled out a handful of sparklers and passed them around in a circle.

  For Caroline, he whispered.

  He flicked the lighter. He held the flame to the tip of each wand. Matt held his raised above his head. Christina and Nick followed. Zola extended her own until it touched theirs. She watched the slow burn down the length of each raised stick, cinders creeping toward the metal tips in their hands. She ignored their extinguishing. Watched instead how every sparkler burned against the dark. Caroline’s parents. A funeral that convinced her it couldn’t have been suicide. How Caroline’s mother could have been her own, breath upon her hair, arms wrapped tight around her shoulders. Caroline’s basement. Her childhood bedroom. A line of rectangled boxes. Zola closed her eyes and replaced it all with the elegy of a firework’s burn, an afterimage that blazed behind her eyelids when her sparkler sizzled out.

  The sharp scent of dissipated gunpowder. Charred smoke. Zola held her wand until Nick gathered each of them and threw the metal stalks into the cornfields. Christina grabbed the bottle of bourbon from the ground, its glass caked with dirt and dust, grit between her fingers Zola watched crumble and flake to the ground.

  I should get home, Zola said.

  Her mother was waiting. Her mother would pretend to sleep, her bedroom door half-closed, left just far enough ajar to know when Zola at last crept inside.

  I should get home, too, Christina said.

  The inside of the car felt stale, more brisk than the open ground of the back roads. Christina took the front seat. Matt shivered beside Zola in the backseat and she crossed her arms tight across her sweater. Beyond the car, Nick stood and watched the cornfields. Click. The first photo Zola would’ve taken if she had her camera, an archive to keep.

  NICK DROPPED CHRISTINA off first, the light of her brother’s window still illuminated in the uppermost corner of the house. Zola knew the floor plan of her house well, every room, wondered if she’d always know it well into adulthood and beyond. She watched Christina walk up the driveway, stumbling only once before she walked into the waiting mouth of her front door. Only two shots. Enough to stagger her steps if she hadn’t had a drink since spring. Nick pulled away and turned the car toward Matt’s house, Matt still in the backseat and neither of them climbing into the front.

  You can just go to Zola’s, Matt said. I’ll walk home from there.

  Nick drove them through quiet streets past so many illuminated lampposts, small lighthouses in every yard keeping watch over a spread of lawn. He turned on the radio, a soft buzzing. NewsTalk 1120: KMOX. That three more U.S. soldiers had been killed in Iraq during separate incidents. That the World Series would begin on Saturday, the New York Yankees hosting the Florida Marlins. Information Zola knew Nick cataloged, that he was listening to the radio with intention while she barely remembered that the Cardinals had finished third behind the Cubs and Astros, the National League Central the only division of baseball she ever cared to notice. The newscast switched to a brief spot on Columbus Day celebrations and protests across the nation before turning to St. Louis, to the promise of an in-depth look at Caleb Raynor after a brief commercial break. Nick turned off the radio, glanced briefly at both of them in the rearview mirror.

  When Nick turned onto Zola’s street, Alisha Trenway’s house stood silent and dark on the corner and Zola imagined her family inside, awake in their beds, the impossibility of sleep beyond lowering their daughter into the ground. She thought of Alisha’s father again, his cracked voice trembling across every raised candle at the vigil. Zola mouthed a small prayer for Alisha, only fourteen, only two years younger but still so unfathomably young. Nick pulled into Zola’s driveway, the asphalt crackling beneath the car’s tires, the lights in every window out though Zola knew her mother was still awake.

  Nick shifted the car into park. Matt reached up and squeezed Nick’s shoulder.

  You both should know, he said. My father said they didn’t find anything.

  At Caroline’s house? Nick said. You mean a cause for the fire?

  I mean they found nothing. There was nothing left. No bodies. Nothing to indicate what the hell even happened.

  Zola felt the engine idle. Felt lost. Whatever they were talking about, a continuation of some conversation she hadn’t heard.

  That’s impossible, Nick said. Fires always leave behind evidence. I looked it up today. Something always remains. That doesn’t make any sense at all.

  Does any of this? Zola heard herself say. A wave of exhaustion, her house so close.

  There has to be something left behind, Nick said. Some indication of cause.

  They’re working on it, Matt said. That’s all my dad said.

  Thanks for the fireworks, Zola interrupted, and pushed open the back door. She didn’t want to hear any more. She only wanted her bed. Matt hesitated inside the car, then climbed out behind her. They stood in the driveway until Nick’s taillights faded down the street.

  Look, I’m sorry, Matt said. I know we shouldn’t be talking about that tonight.

  Zola looked at him. Sure you want to walk? It’s at least a mile. You can borrow my bike.

  Zol, he said.

  She waited for him to speak. She watched him just long enough to see his eyes shimmering in her house’s porch light.

  Inside the school, he whispered. Please. I need to know what you saw.

  It doesn’t matter. It won’t change anything for you to know.

  Please. I can’t stop seeing what I saw. I can’t push away the image.

  Zola watched the dim pulsing of stars, constellations her mother would have known. She knew what Matt was asking. Something mutual. An unburdening to share a burden. But she didn’t want to tell him what she’d seen, didn’t want to hear it become words beyond her mouth. She’d seen crumpled figures, broken bones ripped through the thin membrane of skin. She’d seen thick stains of blood too heavy to sink into carpet. She’d seen blasted-open wounds, the inert slumping of peers who’d sat beside her at the study hall table only minutes before. She’d smelled the blood’s metal and the stench of spilled shit, the residue of gunpowder and fire and the gamey scent of her own urine. She’d seen the overturned chairs and splintered tables, the prostrate shape of Mrs. Diffenbaum, her paisley dress bunched and soaked around her waist. She’d seen only seconds, a brief moment before the police officer pulled her away from the library and out the window.

  She grasped Matt’s hand. There was nothing else she could do. She felt the rough texture of creased paper in his palm.

  I wrote about her, Matt said. A profile. I couldn’t sleep last night.

  A folded piece of notebook paper in his hand. Something Zola knew he’d carried with him all night. She held it to the streetlamp’s light. Its edges worn, its graining damp. Whatever it was, Matt had kept it close through the duration of the funeral.

  I want you to read this, Matt said. I want someone to know I saw her.

  Zola didn’t want to take it. She looked at Matt. To give it back would be to give him away forever. She pulled the piece of paper from his palm and slid it into her jacket.

  I didn’t want to start it,
Matt said. The yearbook. But I had to do something.

  Are you sure you don’t want to take my bike?

  Matt glanced up the street. I really just need to walk.

  Zola stood behind him and leaned her forehead against his back, reached her arm over his shoulder, and rested her hand against his chest.

  You’re okay, she whispered. All of us. We are okay.

  Matt said nothing and Zola felt his heart beating beneath her palm. He held on to her wrist for a moment above the fabric of his dress shirt and breastbone. Then he let go and Zola stood in her driveway and watched him walk up the street until he disappeared, lost to the trees. She stood in the October air, the neighborhood silent, the half-moon high above the street’s maples and roofs.

  Inside the house, she stripped off her clothes. She let them puddle to her bedroom floor. She starfished herself upon her bed covers and listened to her breath pulse and watched the rise and fall of her own skin as it moved with her lungs. I am here, she wanted to whisper. I am here, I am here. The house billowed silence back to her, only the refrigerator’s hum, a sound that traveled up the stairs to her bedroom.