Bonfire: A Novel

by Krysten Ritter

  It carries a memory I must have buried long ago: me and Kaycee, maybe third grade, when my mom was still alive, the first and only time I was allowed to go to the Halloween Fright Fest.

  I’d been scared out of my mind in the haunted house. Not because of all the monsters popping out in masks with chainsaws, but because Kaycee had run ahead, thinking it would be funny to pretend to disappear. I ran room to room, terrified and searching for her. There were coffins everywhere, and fake blood, and even a mannequin with blond hair hanging floppy-necked from a noose. She didn’t even have a face, just drawn-on eyes and a lipstick mouth—but in my panic, in the dark, I thought it was her.

  We took a hayride afterward. We were on the back of a wagon, just the two of us, because Kaycee’s dad had gone to get another beer out of the car. Kaycee was sulking because I hadn’t seen the point of the joke.

  I scared you, didn’t I? she kept saying. It’s a haunted house. Get it? I scared you.

  Then, suddenly, we were in the woods. In the quiet drip of the overhanging branches, paper ghosts nailed to the trees, she turned to me. “I’m not scared of dying,” she said. “Not one bit. How about you?”

  I had never actually thought about it before. My mom was dying, and that was enough to think about.

  “No,” I lied.

  She reached for my hands. “When I die, I’m going to become an angel, so I can look after you all the time.” Then she squeezed so tightly it began to hurt. “But first, I’m going to take revenge on everyone who deserves it. I’ll frighten all of them to death, one by one.”

  —

  One second, two seconds, three: I open my eyes, and the world is still there. I’m still holding the phone to my sweating cheek. Kaycee is still gone.

  “Do you think you can bring your father down here to see me?” Dr. Chun says.

  “When?” I croak out. I’m praying he says, Whenever you can make it. I’m praying he says there’s no rush. I’m praying he says, In a few weeks.

  “I’m here until seven tonight.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Dr. Chun has obviously had a lot of practice making bad news sound like just the news you were hoping for. He is quiet and patient, warm and matter-of-fact. He doesn’t stutter. He looks us in the eyes without blinking. And I believe that he cares.

  He asks whether my father has experienced mood changes, whether he’s had trouble sleeping, whether he’s shown signs of forgetfulness. Whether he’s fallen recently, or had trouble with his balance.

  He explains that often in older people, the symptoms of glioblastoma multiforme are confused for other signs of mental deterioration like Alzheimer’s.

  He explains that the tumor has likely been growing for some time.

  He tells us that the median survival rate is roughly fifteen months. But he also says, gently, that he expects, given the size and location of the tumor, that my father will have less time than that.

  He tells us that our focus now should be on my father’s quality of life, during the little quantity of it he has left, and I know, deep down, he is already dead.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  We drive home mostly in silence. I’m full of a terrible burning, a frantic urge to blow something up.

  One month. Six months. It’s hard to know. But it will be fast from here.

  My father can’t be dying. My father is indestructible. He is the rule. He is the law.

  He is all I have.

  He dozes with his head against the window. His breath smells old. Something white is crusted to the corner of his lip.

  The weather is changing. A bleak covering of clouds is rolling across the sky but the heat is still crackling, electric, and the air churning through the car vents smells like singed rubber.

  When my phone rings—Joe again—my father startles awake. I thumb it silent. Then, after a pause, turn it off entirely.

  “Who was that?” my father asks me. Catching sight of the name on the screen, he asks, “Joe? Is that your boyfriend?”

  “I don’t have a boyfriend, Dad,” I tell him, for the ninetieth time. Since I’ve been home, my father has found creative ways to work my love life into nearly every conversation. Does your boyfriend mind you work so much? Why don’t you ask your boyfriend to help you with that steering issue? I can’t tell whether he’s doing it deliberately, whether he’s making a dig, or whether he really has forgotten, over and over again, that I have no one. Joe is the closest to a functional relationship I have—and he’s gay, and mad at me more than half the time.

  “A girl needs a boyfriend,” he mutters, turning back to the window.

  I think of what Dr. Chun said, and imagine my father’s tumor like a chunk of hard metal, a residue of chemical waste.

  “Did I ever tell you how I met your mother?” My dad speaks the words to the window.

  “You did, Dad. A hundred times at least.”

  “—Back in 1980. The Reagan years.”

  “I know,” I say. Call-and-response. “And she was working the line of drunks at the soup kitchen, and you saw her from across the street.” Amen.

  “No. This was the middle of winter. She was in the kitchen, stirring the soup. Her hair was loose and I asked her what if she got some in my food and she laughed and she said we’ve got bigger problems, you and me.”

  This is nothing I’ve heard before. I wait for him to correct himself. The way the story goes, my dad saw some chewed-up alcoholic, whose hands were shaking so bad he could barely keep hold of his cup, hitting on my mom at the shelter, complimenting her hair. My dad saw what a saint she was and swooped to her rescue.

  But he goes on with this new version. “She must have seen something in me, because she put her hand on mine and told me I was gonna be all right.”

  This is backward. It was my father who, moved by a message God sent straight into his heart, crossed the street to her.

  Except that all at once I know that this story is the truth. The one I heard my whole life was the inversion. He was the alcoholic. He was the one who needed saving.

  “You know I never touched a drink again after she put her hand on me like that? That was God touching me, too. I felt it. It’s like her hand weighed fifty tons but didn’t weigh a feather.”

  I cycle through a hundred different questions, trying to land on one that makes sense. I’m sweating and freezing all at the same time, like even my body can’t tell what’s real.

  My father is the no-name, gutted drunk of his own stories.

  I don’t know what it changes, exactly, and at the same time everything feels different. I feel like I did the first time I found out that every time we played ring-around-the-rosie we were calling up a plague of cholera and miming people drowning in their own blood, chanting for the smell of their ashes. I have feared my father and hated him and, only recently, begun to pity him.

  But I have never, before this, felt sympathy for him.

  I think he might be sleeping again. His eyes are closed, and his head nods with the rhythm of the car. But then he says, “I’m not afraid to die, you know.”

  It reminds me of Kaycee.

  “And don’t say I’m not dying,” he adds, before I can. “I heard what the doctor said.”

  “There is no death,” I say. “Just God.” It’s a line he often fed me.

  He sits there, rocking, eyes closed. Like he’s listening to music I can’t hear.

  “Two Septembers ago I found a cat in the old shed. Pregnant to the point of bursting. She was in bad shape. I put a blanket on her, gave her water and some milk. The kittens came—six of them, smallest things I’d ever seen. Some of them could’ve passed for bugs, except for the fur.” He shakes his head. Still squeezing his eyes shut. “I made a little nest for them, just some cardboard and old blankets.”

  I expect him to finish but he goes silent. We’re passing into Barrens now. And even from here, from the other side of town, the smoke from Optimal’s chimneys is visible, like fingers splayed into a gesture, but
I can’t say what it means.

  “What happened to them?” I say finally.

  He opens his eyes. “Big storm came through. Overnight the temperature dropped forty degrees. There was no warning, nothing on the reports. Just a change in the wind and a freeze knocked all the leaves from the trees and made it winter overnight.” He brings a hand to the window and presses it to the glass, then pulls away to watch his prints disappear. “They were all dead by morning, every one of them, six tiny kittens and the mother, too.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, and I am, but puzzled, too: out here you get used to things dying. There are farms buzzing with flies, cows and pigs and chickens slaughtered to fill deep freezers. Deer hunted in the winter, cats killed in the road, and birds dropped from the sky.

  “I don’t know if there’s a God,” he says. We’re still moving, punching through a great big hanging picture toward nothing. “I used to think it was a plan. And even the bad things that happened, your mom getting sick, a kid getting mowed over, it was all part of the plan. But what kind of plan is there for kittens to freeze like that? They meant nothing to nobody. What kind of God would do that. Why not leave them unborn in the first place?” For a second, anger tightens his face, and he looks like the man I remember. “There’s evil in this world, Abby. You remember that. You look for it. You look so it can’t look for you.”

  The world exhales. This sounds like the father I know. Smoke unwinds against the clouds. “I’ll remember.”

  He leans back in his seat, satisfied. As we pass the clutter of tire shops and fast food outlets and new restaurants, Optimal lurches out from the distance again, an ugly sprawl between the trees.

  “Look at that,” he says. “All that smoke. Chemical spew. Disgusting.” He shakes his head. “They killed her, you know,” he goes on. “Oh, I know everyone says they didn’t. But they did. They killed her with all their filth. Poison and greed, that’s all it is.”

  Mom died right before Optimal finished construction. The day we buried her, the first bit of smoke came up from the chimneys, and I remember thinking at first it was a kind of celebration.

  “They didn’t kill her, Dad,” I say, though I’m not sure why it matters. “Mom got cancer before.”

  “I’m not talking about your mother.” He leans back in his seat and closes his eyes again. “I’m talking about that girl, the one everyone always fussed about. Kaycee Mitchell.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Only when morning comes do I realize that it must have been night. I remember drinking. My dreams were full of bright-colored bodies. Shades of blue and orange and red. There was fire. It smelled like paint.

  In my living room, a girl deformed by terror is leaning on the armchair, screaming: and then I startle up and I realize that I’m the one who screamed. The girl is Kaycee, embalmed in oil on one of her canvases. A self-portrait.

  I look around. On the table, another two stacked canvases, a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam, and cigarette butts floating in a filth of dirty liquid.

  I haven’t smoked since college. But I can taste the smoke in my mouth.

  I try to shuffle back through my memories, but all the images feel like balloons, slipping out of my grasp. I don’t remember going back to Frank Mitchell’s unit at the U-Pack but I must have: I don’t remember why and whether I was seen, whether I was careful, what on earth could have compelled me to steal the paintings and bring them home with me. I’m moved by a desperate, enormous desire to hide them, to burn them, to get them out. But they are staring back at me, refusing to be moved.

  I fall onto the couch.

  Ten years, and my dad never said a word to me about Kaycee’s disappearance. I tried to press him for information but he had little to offer: only that he turned up Kaycee’s bag down by the reservoir, half concealed by overhanging brush, and thought she must have forgotten it there after a bonfire. He expected her to come looking for it, only to learn everyone was saying she’d run off.

  Who runs off and leaves a wallet, cell phone, and driver’s license behind?

  I asked him why he didn’t go to the police, and he only shrugged. It wasn’t any of our business, he said. That girl was nothing but trouble, anyway.

  I hardly remember the drive back to my rental, then to our makeshift office. Time is moving in jump cuts again. The rest of the team is already assembled when I burst through the door, and the words are out of my mouth before I can stop them.

  “Kaycee died.”

  Joe sits very still, like the way small prey freezes at the approach of a predator. “What are you talking about?”

  “Kaycee Mitchell. She didn’t disappear. She didn’t leave town. She died,” I repeat, and as soon as I do, I’m sure it’s right. The words feel right. They feel as if I’m taking out a piece of shrapnel from my chest. “I think she died here, in Barrens. Because she was sick.” Joe’s face hasn’t changed, so I plunge on. “I think that her family was paid off to lie about it. Maybe Misha, too. Maybe even her boyfriend, Brent.”

  “Did you get any sleep last night?” Joe asks, in a way I don’t like.

  “I’m fine,” I say, because I am, I think I am, and all my memories feel like dreaming so they must be dreams. And I tell him what my father told me about finding her bag near the reservoir.

  “Abby, your dad is sick,” Joe says, very slowly, as if he’s holding a fishing line and just begging me to follow the hook. “We can’t exactly assume he’s dealing in facts. Doesn’t he have Alzheimer’s?”

  This isn’t the time to correct Joe, so I don’t. The symptoms are the same. But my father hasn’t lost his grip on the past; it’s the present that seems slippery.

  “Kaycee and her friends played an awful game in high school,” I say, ignoring his lead. “They weren’t the first ones to play. But Kaycee was the one who thought of a way to make money off of it.” Briefly, I tell him, tell the whole room, what Cora Allen told me. “Blackmail,” I finish, out of breath.

  For the first time I realize how strange I feel. But I won’t sit down; if I do, it would be like admitting that Joe is right, that the interns with their shifty glances are right, that I’m standing here babbling nonsense instead of trying to explain that I’ve finally seen the truth.

  “Sorry.” Joe rubs his forehead. “What does this have to do with the Optimal case?”

  “Blackmail,” I repeat. “Don’t you see? It was her pattern. She’d gotten a taste for it when she realized she could use the Game to get payouts from people terrified their photos would go public. But how much could she possibly have gotten? Forty, sixty bucks a pop?” I’m filling in holes as I go. “Kaycee must have heard about the case Optimal settled back in Tennessee before they moved to Barrens, and she set her sights higher. So she comes up with her little scam to pretend to be sick, maybe persuades her friends to go along with her, thinking they could go to Optimal for a payout. But she didn’t understand how serious things would get. Optimal was working its own scams, flouting environmental regulations, cutting costs, hiding money, bribing officials to look the other way. They couldn’t afford publicity. They couldn’t afford the scrutiny.”

  “So they killed her.” Joe’s face is blank.

  And here, under the painful bright lights next to crates of file folders and office supplies, I have the sudden sensation of drowning: It sounds crazy. Of course it does. But I’m right. I have to be. “Or they hired someone to do it. For all I know, they paid off her fucking father. But it fits.”

  For a moment, there’s silence. I can feel my heart jumping rhythms in my chest.

  It’s Portland who speaks up, slowly. “But the school nurse said Kaycee was really sick,” he says. “The pictures prove it.”

  “The pictures prove she was a good actress,” I snap, although once again I see Kaycee on the bathroom floor, a swirl of blood in the toilet. And then another image of Kaycee shuffles up from the past, this time from when we were kids. Kaycee’s face, shuttered like a closed door, when I confronted her about Ch
estnut. I didn’t do it, she said calmly, biting off all the edges of her words so instead they sounded like a brag. You must be really screwed up, Abby, to even think I would do it. “She was a liar. She was always a liar. Maybe she made herself sick.”

  Still, no one looks at me. Anger rises like a quick tide: I want to bury them in it.

  “I’m telling you, you didn’t know her. We were friends when we were little. She was fucked up. She killed my dog with rat poison.”

  This, finally, startles Joe into speaking. “She what?”

  “She lied about it for years, and tortured me for refusing to forgive her, and then before she died, or before she was killed, she left me proof, just so that I would know for sure.”

  Joe stands, scraping the chair back from his desk, and I run out of air and stand there panting and sweating, and I realize I’m about to cry.

  “Can we talk in private?” Joe sounds as polite as a stranger. I have no choice but to follow him, like a child.

  Outside, a blaze of heat and sun warms my face. The door swings shut behind us with a bang-snap. Across the parking lot, Sunny Jay’s is already open. I wonder if Condor’s inside. And if he is, I hope he doesn’t come out and see me like this.

  “Look.” I take a deep breath. “I know what you’re going to say. Okay?”

  “I don’t think you do.” He sounds worried. He screws up his mouth like he’s trying to digest. “You’ve been working too hard.”

  My heart drops. He doesn’t believe me. Not even a little. “Joe, this is important.” My throat is so tight I can barely choke out the words. “Kaycee Mitchell died. And everyone has been lying about it. For years.”

  But he isn’t listening. He squints into the distance. “I’ve known you a long time, Abby. You’re a friend. You know that, right? Since our very first day at CEAW, when I told you I hated your shoes. Remember?”