The Arsonist: A novel

by Sue Miller

  In the silence, the very air felt stilled, quieted. She went into the house. Inside it was cool and dim—the grayish tone of the Sheetrock Clark had put up absorbed the light. The heads of the screws and the seams between the panels were still exposed. This was going to be her project, covering them. She had insisted on this, to pay them back, she’d said, for letting her stay. A little bit each day, she told herself now, and maybe by fall—would she still be here in the fall?—it would be done. She stood there in the kitchen, momentarily immobilized. And relieved, she realized. Relieved to be alone. Relieved to have a place of her own—for a while, anyway.

  The secondhand refrigerator made a low gurgle and rattled, a bit like someone clearing his throat, then turned itself off. The propane for it and for the stove hung on an outside wall. Clark had told her that he’d gotten the tank at Snell’s, that she’d have to take it in and exchange it when it was empty.

  She started to move around slowly, looking at things, touching things. Six old chairs were arranged unevenly around the big dining table, whose top was round and scarred and streaked with Magic Marker colors. In the middle of the table was a bird’s nest. It had a worn piece of blue ribbon woven into it. When Frankie touched it, a bit of dirt crumbled out onto the table.

  At the other end of the long main room, two wicker chairs sat companionably by the woodstove, their faded blue cushions flattened by long use. There was a worn trunk set between them, and on this were little heaps of other things the children must have found and held dear: a pile of acorns, some drying flowers, a greenish glass bottle, a heap of smooth, white stones. The whole place smelled of the lumber Clark had built it with, a smell both fresh and slightly chemical.

  Frankie rolled her big suitcase into Liz and Clark’s room. The only furniture in here was a mattress on the floor and a cast-off bureau from Alfie and Sylvia’s house, repainted now a bright, pale turquoise. Frankie saw that Liz had left a set of sheets and a faded quilt on the bed. Crawling around on top of it awkwardly, she made it up for herself. Then she unpacked her suitcase for the second time in this visit home, putting her summer clothes away in the drawers Liz had cleared out for her in the dresser, leaving the few cold-weather things at the bottom of the suitcase and rolling it into the closet.

  When she was done, she went outside with a pair of scissors to cut some meadow flowers—purplish joe-pye weed, blue cornflowers, the flat, delicate fretwork of Queen Anne’s lace. A hawk circled high above in the cloudless blue sky, tilting now this way, now that, riding the currents of air, watching the field for a motion smaller than hers. She had a sense of timelessness then, something like déjà vu. She belonged here, she felt suddenly, moving in this familiar field, cutting the flowers that had grown here, wild, for a century.

  The sun was hot on her head and shoulders as she walked through the tall grasses, snipping. She was glad to come back into the cool of the house once she had a sizable bouquet. She ran some tap water into one of Liz’s clear-glass Mason jars and arranged the flowers in it. She set the jar and its drooping bouquet on the trunk by the chairs. She went into the bedroom and got the book she’d borrowed from her parents’ shelves—The Portrait of a Lady. She sat in one of the chairs and started to read. She heard the refrigerator grumble back on, she heard the sawing of the crickets in the heat outside. Slowly she lost herself in the words about another kind of countryside—tamed, green, shadowy. About another kind of expatriate.

  The next day dawned sunny and bright again. Frankie woke on the mattress on the floor with the light streaming in. The window was open, and the manic early-morning energy of the birds was startlingly loud. She lay there for a while, taking pleasure in looking at the room from this angle—the expanses of gray Sheetrock, the old bureau, immense from down here. The world she could see outside the windows from her vantage—treetops, sky—was blue, green, white. Finally she rolled over and stood up to begin the day, her first day alone in America.

  She made some coffee and scrounged a breakfast from what Liz and Clark had left—granola and an apple, the last one left in a bowl Liz had kept on the counter in the kitchen. She would have to go to town for supplies today, which would mean borrowing her parents’ car. She sat in the shade of the porch to eat.

  When she was through, she went inside and surveyed the shelves and the refrigerator to get an idea of what she’d need. She made a list. She’d go to Snell’s, she decided. She knew everything cost more there, but she wasn’t sure she was ready for the supermarket. Snell’s was small, familiar, manageable—a baby step. And then she’d go to the library. There were no books at Liz’s house except a few for the children, and there was no television. If she was to be solitary, she would need a regular supply of books.

  She got herself ready for town. Then she took the meadow route up to her parents’ house, circling the pond slowly, watching the frogs jumping in. The ripples lapped outward from their entry points, lifting the algal smell into the warm, still air. She’d been swimming regularly this past week, sometimes with Clark and Liz and the children. They’d all worked on the algae with the big net, but it seemed a never-ending task.

  Her mother came to the kitchen door, alone. She was dressed, wearing one of her men’s shirts and blue jeans, but her white hair was still disorderly, and her face was drawn, her eyes deeply shadowed. Alfie was still asleep, she said in a low, whispery voice. And yes, it was all right to borrow the car—she had nothing particular planned for the day.

  Suddenly Frankie was imagining her mother’s day, the void, the nothing particular. Except, for Alfie, the very particular Alfie. She felt a surge of sympathy for Sylvia.

  Her mother had turned away and sat down at the kitchen table. She was writing a list of a few things she wanted Frankie to pick up for her.

  “Can you read this?” she said, handing her list to Frankie, her large, clear, almost-printed writing.

  “Yes,” Frankie said. Sylvia gestured at the keys, on a hook by the door, and Frankie lifted them on her way out.

  She drove down the long, swooping hills, coasting much of the way to Snell’s. At the last minute, though, she decided she’d go to the farm stand first.

  It was about fifteen miles away, some on the two-lane, some back on a dirt road for a stretch. There were only two other cars parked outside the stand—it was still early. The double doors to the shedlike structure were thrown open. Pastel phlox and bright daylilies stood in galvanized buckets in a row by the door. Inside, the vegetables and fruits were set out in mismatched baskets on the counters and tables. The place smelled wonderfully of dirt and basil and the sweetness of the pies the owners baked and sold.

  The only tomatoes they had were hothouse, hard as apples, so Frankie chose cherry tomatoes. She put garlic into her basket, too, and lettuce, and onions and potatoes. She brought all this to the table with the cash register, and the weather-worn youngish woman with lean, ropy arms emerging from her T-shirt helped her unpack it. She rang things up and put them into a brown paper bag. Her skin was almost the same shade of brown as the bag, Frankie noted—walnut-colored and deeply creased. Frankie guessed she was about her own age. There was dirt under her fingernails. She thought about how it would be to live such a life. Gardening, running a farm stand.

  This was a game she had seemed to be unable to resist playing over the last week and a half. Practically everyone she’d encountered since she arrived had raised another possibility for her. On the drive back to Pomeroy with the produce in the backseat, she considered some of the alternatives she’d briefly entertained. Could she run the town library? Could she tend gardens for the summer people? Could she teach in the local school? Work for the little publishing house Jack Churchill ran? Each had seemed briefly inviting, until the next one came along.

  At Snell’s she got Sylvia’s items and then her own—milk, bread, more granola, coffee. She was third in line at the register, which was being run by Mrs. Snell. The woman whose groceries she was ringing up was more vaguely familiar—a summer residen
t, Frankie was pretty sure, judging by her clothes. Jeans, but money jeans, with a tailored linen blouse over them and small pearl earrings Frankie suspected were the real thing. She was buying three bottles of wine. “I thought I had wine,” she said to the couple next to her, also familiar to Frankie, but not familiar enough for her to remember their names. Year-round Pomeroy people, at any rate. “And then I looked on the shelf and realized that that was in Connecticut, that I had absolutely not a drop here!” She rolled her eyes and shook her head at her own foolishness, and they and Mrs. Snell laughed with her.

  But as soon as she was out the door and the waiting couple started setting out their groceries to be rung up, the woman said to Mrs. Snell with heavy sarcasm, “That must be just so awful, having two houses to have to keep track of.”

  “Lord knows I’ve got trouble enough with just the one,” Mrs. Snell said, her hand in constant motion.

  This was a nice neutrality, Frankie thought. And then she considered the Snells briefly, how neutrality was probably a necessity for them here. They would always be called on to straddle the worlds, to have allies, and probably even friends, in both camps.

  When it came time to ring Frankie up, Mrs. Snell was cordial. “Now, you’re Frankie, I think,” she said. She was a lean, handsome woman with gray hair and dark, nearly black eyes that were so alert they almost seemed to be snapping.

  Frankie said yes.

  She shook her head. “It about kills me that I can remember you when you were so little.” And without a break in the rhythm of sliding the groceries down the slick wooden counter with one hand and ringing them up with the other, she said, “You tell Sylvia I said hello, will you?”

  By the time Frankie got back to Liz’s, after picking up some library books and returning her parents’ car, the day had changed, had become cloudy and cheerless. A good day to work.

  She had a quick lunch, and then she changed into her oldest blue jeans and a T-shirt. She got the equipment out of the closet off the kitchen and started on her project. First she cut off a strip of the mesh Sheetrock tape. She pressed the strip down smoothly in place over one of the open seams in the living room. Clark had showed her how to do this—this and applying the joint compound.

  She repeated the process with the tape over and over. When she was finished, she stood in the middle of the room and looked around at the gray walls, now striped regularly with the tape’s lighter color. The effect was of some strange, muted wallpaper.

  She went out to the porch and pried open one of the five-gallon buckets of joint compound sitting there. She dug into it with a putty knife, scooped up a large glop, and dropped it onto the hawk Clark had bought for this job. She liked the wet, muddy smell of the compound. Back inside the house, she began to spread the goop over the mesh and over the heads of the sunken Sheetrock screws. There was a pleasant rhythm to this, she discovered—the slapping of the goop onto the hawk she held in her left hand, the slow, careful smoothing of it onto the walls, feathering it out into nothingness with the wider taping knife.

  She let her mind wander while she worked. Liz and Clark. The fires, and the question of arson. Her parents. Memories of Africa. The lightstruck grasses of the savanna, with its occasional acacia tree. The hustle of Nairobi. The smell of diesel and cookstoves in the air. She thought of the little African girl who’d also been waiting in the Nairobi airport for the plane to Amsterdam ten days ago. She’d been dancing in the waiting area as though in front of an audience—well, Frankie was her audience, and the little girl knew that: she kept smiling shyly at Frankie. Her dancing was both sexual and not. That is, it would have been sexual if a sexual person were doing it, but since she wasn’t, it wasn’t. It seemed, simply, joyous. It made Frankie both happy and somehow sad to watch her.

  Frankie had seen her again briefly in the Amsterdam airport, and she was transformed. Her skin actually seemed paler. She looked, along with her parents, tired and frightened—robbed of some aspect of herself that had been alive, had been dancing, in Africa. Which was, Frankie realized now, the way she felt, too. Diminished. Flattened. White.

  Late in the afternoon, she stopped. Her hands and arms were aching. On the porch, she scraped the leftover compound off the hawk back into the bucket—half empty now—and then went around to the side of the house to wash off the tools under the spigot there. She felt a few drops of rain land on her bare arms and looked up. The sky was a uniform grayish white, with shreds of a darker gray wisping fast across it.

  She went back in to clean herself up. She had just finished washing the little crusts of dried goop from her face and hands and arms in the bathroom when she heard slow, hesitant footsteps on the porch.

  She froze. It felt as though her heart shifted in her chest. She willed her breathing to be even as she hung her towel carefully on the hook next to the sink, as she stepped into the big room. A man stood at the open door, a dark shape behind the screen. Even as she drew her breath sharply in, she recognized the shadowy outline: her father.

  “Daddy!” she said, her relief caught in her voice. She stepped across the kitchen and opened the screen door to let him in. But when she stood facing him, the opened screen door at her side, he was unmoving, looking at her in what seemed like puzzlement. His appearance was a bit derelict. His shirt was unironed, and he’d missed a few spots shaving.

  “Come in, come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly.” She gestured theatrically. This didn’t help, apparently: he did step in, but he stopped just inside the door, looking around as though he were unfamiliar with the place.

  And then she thought that probably, in a sense, he was. The last time he’d seen it was before Clark got the Sheetrock up, she was pretty sure. It looked so different now that it might be confusing to him.

  In any case, she kept talking, she would have said anything to keep the sense of friendly chatter going, to give him time.

  Time for what?

  To remember her? It was the first time this idea had occurred to her, that he might not recognize her, and it struck her how far she’d come in her thinking about her father since her arrival. The many small things she’d noticed and talked about with Liz: his absenteeism in any group larger than two, which was to say any group. His repetitive returning to the few things that compelled him—the prize he was reading for, the fires, the situation of each of his children. His confusion, his occasional lostness. Most of all, the way he looked a good deal of the time, the frequent deadness behind his eyes.

  She got him inside, seated at the table. She got him to consent to tea. While she set the kettle on the stove, while she struck a match and lit the burner, while she lifted down the glass jar of tea bags from the open shelf, she kept up a running stream of talk. Jabber, really—just anything that came to her. What she’d been doing all day, pointing out the whitish patches of drying joint compound. The news she’d heard on the radio. The possibility of rain. He was watching her cautiously throughout, nodding sometimes.

  When she came to sit with him to wait for the water to boil, there was a little silence. He was frowning at her, as though something about her was confusing or disturbing to him. He leaned forward, almost squinting. He said, “Did you … make me come here?”

  This seemed so absurd that she couldn’t help laughing. “With my magical powers, you mean?”

  His eyes widened. “Do you …? Are you …?”

  “No, no, no. I’m just teasing, Dad. I don’t have any powers. None.” He didn’t look reassured, and she made her voice gentle. “Maybe you just wanted to see me,” she said. “Maybe you came just for a visit.”

  His face relaxed. “Yes. That must have been it.” He looked up at her, smiling. “Maybe I thought I’d like some tea.”

  “Well, let me take care of that. Easily done.” She stood and busied herself setting up a little tray, poking around on the shelves and in the lower cupboards, assembling cups, saucers, milk, sugar. Two spoons, two old, faded cloth napkins from a wicker basket on one of the shelves. The t
eakettle whistled, and she poured water over the bags, then carried the tray to the table. Ceremoniously she set things out for him, for herself. She poured the tea and sat down. As she added the purling milk into her cup, she noted that he was putting spoonful after spoonful of sugar into his. She decided not to say anything.

  As one, they raised their cups, they sipped. Too hot, she thought. Goldilocks. He set his down, too, and sat back and looked around again. Then he smiled at her. He said, “Sometimes I get … confused. You may have noticed.”

  Frankie took a deep breath, she was so surprised, so unready for this admission. But she wanted to be steady for him. She said, “I have, Dad. Yes.”

  “I think it’s something to do with my … memory.”

  “Probably it’s not quite as good as it used to be.”

  “Well, whose is?” He said this jauntily, cheerfully.

  “So true,” she said.

  They were silent for a minute. She felt the air stir and looked out the windows at the dark sky over the rising meadow.

  He cleared his throat, as if to call her back. “But mine is getting rapidly worse,” he said.

  “Yes, I think that is true.” She looked back at him. In spite of his appearance, he was there, she could see it in his eyes.

  “I think it’s likely I have Alzheimer’s disease,” he said. “You know what that is, don’t you?”

  “I do.”

  “It was a fascinating story. I read it.” He was almost smiling.

  “What story?”

  “Oh, one of the books. The books for the … the prize. The prize I’m working on.”

  “The Harper Prize.”

  “That’s right. A fine book, explaining it, how the brain is slowly more or less strangled. It would seem.”