Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down

by Anne Valente

  Then the library.

  Zola stood to the side of the dance floor, her Pentax camera in her hands. Christina beside her, neither of them speaking. Zola taking photographs intermittently, an archive of what celebration should have meant. Photographs she would review that Sunday night, her mother on the back porch watching constellations. Samuel Winters sock-hopping with Dolores Fremont. Lindsey Cho and Adam Hunter standing in line for professional photographs. The Homecoming Court. Beth Zimmerman smiling faintly when her name wasn’t announced, a relief at last to stay beyond a spotlight. Lauren Kirkland and Daniel Brown, first dance as Homecoming king and queen.

  Zola didn’t step onto the dance floor once.

  She’d offered nothing in Nick’s kitchen but the names of those who’d shared her academic lab. Connor Distler. Jessica Wendling. Alexander Chen. All of them beside her at the library’s long oak table. We knew Caleb entered the library’s double doors and shot at them first, the table so close to the hallway entrance, all of them crouching beneath it and Zola hidden in the stacks only yards away. A Graphic History of Oceanic Biology. Green vellum. Amygdala. Cortex. Memory. Peers who had shared pop-quiz tips with her across so many hours of academic lab, who had shared mnemonic devices for math equations and earbuds for Billboard Top 40 listening and snacks of dried apricots. We knew Caleb aimed at a group of seniors gathered around Mr. Eckstein to learn capstone-project research: Ilya Litvin. Georgia Tarkington. Greg Alexander. Carolina Olson. Constance Bellamy. Jake Berger. Jackson Pavey. Their names a cascade of flames, homes Zola knew from inside Timber Creek’s gymnasium would burn within days.

  Christina stood beside her drinking fruit punch, the taste too sweet on her tongue.

  We knew Lewis and Clark’s gymnasium downstairs was where Caleb moved last, where Ryan hid in the boys’ bathroom while Christina curled beneath the desk of her French class upstairs. A seniors-only gym class, boys pressing themselves into the wet humidity of a locker room’s shower stalls. Dan Zeller. Sebastian Holmes. Will Isholt. Sam Scott. All of them gone, a mental image Christina closed her eyes to kill as we mapped the last of Caleb’s path that Friday afternoon at Nick’s kitchen table.

  She scanned the dance floor. Ryan at home. The picture frame and his window splintered to pieces. He would leave for college. He would never speak to her again. She would leave the movement of his body above hers and the tangled sheets of his bed to nothing but the faded scar of memory, to photographs in a drawer, to a life she couldn’t imagine she had once lived. Memory as swim partner. The blue of a pool. Memory as girl scalpeling through the water. Memory as orgasm, a tendriled wave billowing through the steam of a bath. Memory as losing the rough texture of a boy’s tongue skating across her skin, the sound of her own shoes running far and fast from his car.

  We knew the last name: Caleb Raynor. The last home to burn. We knew no motive, a self-inflicted wound inside the gymnasium of Lewis and Clark High, a separate gym we blinked away from the dance floor of Timber Creek.

  We knew a path. Nothing else. We knew nothing more than Matt’s father in the end. We knew a trail of gunfire. We knew the human body, as best as we could. We knew a path of grief but nothing of its mechanics. Of how it knew when to ignite.

  We know how we held one another inside the heat of a gymnasium.

  We know how even as we wished to move as far away from ourselves as we could we wanted to keep this, even still, all of us in the same walls and the same town and the same blaze of our youth and our grief before we germinated upward and out, before we left the shells of who we were and became something else entirely. We looked at one another across the gym, beyond the punch bowl, from the sidelines of a dance floor. We felt our chests torch us from the inside. We knew it was not the swelter of a gym.

  We know we loved one another.

  We knew only that the body knows when to burn.

  WE MADE A book, by year’s end. We archived what we could.

  We assembled our photographs, our profiles. We submitted work that made up the 289 pages of the 2003–2004 Lewis and Clark High School yearbook, a record of action shots and smiles and sanitized silhouettes of those we lost, a witness to nothing at all that could tell us what we were.

  We grew up. We grew away from ourselves. We fanned out across the country to distant colleges then to internships and big cities and to office jobs we hated, jobs we could disappear into and forget.

  We come home infrequently.

  Our parents visit, or we speak to them by phone. We hold the receiver to our ears and imagine them in our childhood homes, our former porches and closed-in kitchens and bay windows looking out on front yards that once held the scent of smoke and the air-blown remnants of ash and before we hang up we can still hear the soft rattle of their breath on the line, a faint beating back that remains only to hear ours.

  We keep an archive, a dusted book. A record of our making that we still open, not for memory but for a question without reply. At night, when we can’t sleep, we retrace our history over every newspaper we kept. We feel a palpitation. A roil we know as dormant, latent always inside us. We scour the headlines and the fine print, all of it yellowing and tattered. We search for answers in photographs of our school, of the homes, of the guns and ammunition used. We run our hands across the glossed pages of our once-selves, across pictures and profiles. We keep searching. We understand now how Matt’s father shut himself off, a valve closed. We know there is nothing, no answer, but even still we can’t stop ourselves from seeking. We search for confirmation. Something.

  We search for some shred of evidence to explain this.

  We imagine all of those parents and their silent homes before the flames burst and left nothing but ash. We sit in our basements alone knowing what inimitable dark overcame them. We light our own candles, votives too late, a scent of fire that burns back a vigil, a Midwestern sky. We huddle in the quiet of our basements after our partners and children have fallen asleep and we think of them curled into the bedrooms above us, their beating blood, the cadence of their lungs. How their breath rises. How it falls. How we pray that it never stops. How we’re cloaked inside new lives that have taken us to coasts and mountains and so far away from Missouri plains we once knew but how sometimes even still we can’t keep ourselves from a familiar ache, from the soft knife of home.

  How there are pockets of memory within our bodies that light up when we pass back through our former streets. Upon the routes we took to school. Past the empty lot where Lewis and Clark was eventually demolished. How the maps of our brains blaze upon the swing set of our first kiss. Upon the abandoned pool where we climbed the fence and swam beneath a star-speckled St. Louis sky and smoked our first cigarette. Upon a full moon. A waving poplar. The sound of soft wind through corn husks. How we know the backs of our knuckles, their creases of skin, but can’t begin to understand our own cells and what they contain. How we know memory bears weight, every image an ounce. How we’ve learned to move away, to move on. How when we return home memory erases us, tells us time and distance mean nothing at all.

  How we carry this with us, a schematic. Not a school but an entire town. How sometimes when we’re home we drive the back roads, streets we still know like a diagram of our own veins. How the back roads have become highways, every cornfield bisected and diminished, but the land long and flat and tasting still of whiskey and the salt of someone else’s skin.

  How our brains deceive us because they must.

  How they tell us the past is something we’ve discarded. How we drive the length of roads we once thought stretched for miles to the edge of the Midwest and we think of our parents, our once-classmates, our lovers and children up through the floorboards, so close, above the piled boxes of our basements. How we know the earth as unsound. Vulnerable. Always on the edge of bonfiring. How our homes are exposed, no safer than the houses that once lined the tree-drenched streets of our neighborhoods.

  How we would burn them down if the world made us.

  How we
would feel a flame tell us it is time.

  How a spark would climb the ladder of our throats and jump the tip of our tongues. How it would catch the curtains. The bedspread. The nightstand lampshade. The wires of the walls. How we know only enough of our own cells to know they speak a language we can’t hear. How our atoms slacken and slide out of tune. How they slip past one another, the slightest of friction. How they whisper insurrection. How they articulate in flame what we leave behind.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THANK YOU TO this novel’s earliest readers, Michael Griffith and Matt Bell, for your encouragement, feedback, and unwavering support. Thank you also to Chris Bachelder and Jim Schiff for invaluable feedback, and for so much kindness and guidance.

  Thank you to Kerry D’Agostino, a wonderful person and tireless champion of this book—thank you for believing in this novel and in me. Thank you to Margaux Weisman for so carefully reading, editing, and supporting this book, and for so keenly understanding my vision for it. I am beyond lucky to work with both of you. Thank you to the entire team at William Morrow and HarperCollins for your dedicated work on this book.

  Thank you to Lindsey Kurz, Julia Koets, Rochelle Hurt, and Steven Stanley (Go Orangers)—you couldn’t have known it, but through the dark of writing this book you were four points of the brightest kind of light.

  Thank you to the generous support of the University of Cincinnati, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference where the first chapter of this novel was workshopped, and to Emily Nemens for excerpting the first chapter in The Southern Review. Thank you to Leslie Jill Patterson for publishing the short story in Iron Horse Literary Review that eventually became this novel. Thank you to the Denver Post for their archive of the Columbine shooting, which shaped my understanding of mass tragedy and its scale within a community. Thank you to the Public Library of Cincinnati for providing a multiplicity of textbooks on crime scene and fire investigation. Thank you to the inspiration of my colleagues and students at Santa Fe University of Art and Design.

  Thank you to St. Louis, my home and my heart.

  Thank you always and forever to my parents, Michael and Maureen Valente, to my sister, Michelle, and to Jeff, Noa, and Salem. If there is understanding of family and what it means to love in these pages, it is because of you.

  And to Josh Finnell, the very earliest reader, for seeing me through every step of the journey this book had to take—thank you for following me through the dark.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ANNE VALENTE’S first short-story collection, By Light We Knew Our Names, won the Dzanc Books Short Story Prize. Her fiction appears in One Story, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and the Chicago Tribune, and her essays appear in The Believer and the Washington Post. Originally from St. Louis, she is a faculty member in the Creative Writing Department at Santa Fe University of Art and Design.

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  COPYRIGHT

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  OUR HEARTS WILL BURN US DOWN. Copyright © 2016 by Anne Valente. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  Illustrations by Nick Springer and Noah Springer, copyright © 2016 Springer Cartographics LLC.

  EPub Edition October 2016 ISBN 9780062429131

  ISBN 978-0-06-242911-7

  16 17 18 19 20 RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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