An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

by Brock Clarke

  “You don’t recognize my name, do you?” he said, and he was right in that. There was nothing, no bells or whistles; right then my memory was a happy, empty, echoing place.

  “Well, I do recognize the name Thomas,” I said, trying to be polite. “But then again, it’s a pretty common name.” Which it was, and I meant this seriously, but he took it as sarcasm. I could tell by the way his jaw started working double time. He was an angry man, all right, and maybe that’s why he was so skinny: chewing so hard on his anger that he didn’t have the time or the energy or the appetite to chew on anything else.

  “Thomas Coleman,” he finally said. “My parents were Linda and David Coleman. You killed them in the Emily Dickinson House fire.”

  “Oh!” I said, since I didn’t know what else to say, and then, because this suddenly seemed like a more formal occasion, I put my shirt on. Once I was fully clothed, and out of nervousness, I went into a flurry of greeting: I shook his hand—I went out and grabbed it this time, there was no stopping me—slapped his back, asked, “How are you? So good to see you. How’ve you been?” and so on. All of this may seem horribly inappropriate, but what should I have done? There is no etiquette book for this sort of thing; I was writing it as I stood there. Besides, Thomas didn’t seem to think that I’d been so inappropriate—maybe after you’ve accidentally killed someone’s parents, every other offense is minor by comparison. His face even seemed to get a little color when I asked him if he wanted a drink—beer, juice, I told Thomas he could have whatever he wanted—although it may have been the glow off my own face illuminating his pockmarks. I really was giving off some heat and light; I probably could have powered the whole subdivision if there’d been a blackout.

  “Do you recognize my name now?” he asked. “Do you recognize my parents’ names?”

  “Sort of,” I said, even though I didn’t, not really, and even at the trial I tried hard not to know their names, as my future seemed a lot more likely a prospect if I forgot the details of my past. “I don’t really remember the whole thing all that well,” I told him, which as I’ve mentioned is a talent of mine and was true besides. Even now, with Thomas in front of me, the fire and the smoke and his parents’ burning bodies were so far away they seemed like someone else’s problem, which is awfully mean to say and in that way perfectly consistent with most true things.

  “Sort of?” he repeated. A little more color crept into Thomas’s face when he said this, and I could already see I was doing his health some good, and if this kept up I might even get him to eat something. “Sort of? Don’t you feel even a little bit bad about killing my parents?”

  “It was an accident,” I said. Thomas drew himself up at this and made a face, and in his defense I could see how he didn’t believe me: because if you said over and over again about the fire you’d set and the people you’d killed, “It was an accident,” it sounded as though you were whining, and if it sounded as though you were whining, it also sounded as though it wasn’t an accident, and then it didn’t matter whether it really was an accident or not. If you said about something terrible you’d done, “It was an accident,” you sounded like a coward and a liar, both. I sympathized with Thomas completely. But still, the truth is the truth is the truth. “It was an accident,” I said again, again.

  “There’s no such thing as an accident,” Thomas said.

  “Wow, it’s funny you say that,” I told him. Anne Marie had said the same thing many a time: in our life together I’d ruined more than one surprise party and leaned over backward and broken more than a few of our neighbors’ cherished heirloom chairs and told far too many ethnic jokes in the company of someone of that same ethnicity, and after each of these unconscious, unpremeditated bumblings, Anne Marie accused me of doing it intentionally. “This wasn’t an accident,” she’d say. “You did it on purpose.” And I always told her, “I didn’t! I don’t!” And she’d say, “There is no such thing as an accident.” And I’d say, “There is, there is!” But maybe there wasn’t. I could see what she was talking about, and Thomas, too.

  “I miss my parents so much,” Thomas said. “It’s been twenty years since you killed them, and I still miss them so fucking much.”

  “Oh, I know you do,” I told him. I was feeling empathy for him deep down in my gut, and his missing his parents made me miss mine, too, and in a way we were both orphans and in the same boat. “Hey, listen,” I said, “are you sure you don’t want a drink or something?” Because I was still thirsty from the lawn mowing, and besides, I was really starting to feel close to him and in his debt for doing what I’d done to his parents and his life, and would have gotten him anything he wanted.

  “No,” he said. And then: “Do you know what they did to me in school?”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Who? When did this happen? What school?” Because I need to know the specifics of a story if I’m going to care, I mean really care, about it. As a child I could never feel much for the three little pigs and their houses because I didn’t know whether the houses—straw, brick, or otherwise—were in a town or a city or a village, or whether that municipality had a name, and without one I just couldn’t bring myself to care.

  “This was at Williston Country Day,” Thomas said, “right after you killed my parents.” He said this slowly, as if I were somewhat slow myself and so I would get it all down and understand, which I appreciated. “The other kids, students, friends even, they made fun of my parents.”

  “You’re kidding me,” I said. “That’s awful, Thomas. Those were no friends.”

  “They were. They made fun of the way my parents died, you know, in bed.” He stumbled over these last words and was obviously still in a lot of pain and haunted by it, the poor guy.

  “For a long time,” he went on, “I was ashamed of them, hated them because of what they were doing when you killed them.”

  “That’s understandable.”

  “There was a girl in my class whose parents died in a car wreck,” he said. “They were both decapitated. I was jealous of her. For a long time, I wished my parents had died like that.”

  “Totally understandable,” I said.

  “For a long time,” he said, sucking in a big, wet breath, “I wanted to kill myself.”

  “Don’t say that, Thomas, don’t even think it,” I said. Again, I would have done anything for the guy. If he’d brought out the razor blades to slit his wrists, I would have ripped my shirt into bandages; if he’d had pills and swallowed them, I would have pumped his stomach, even without the proper know-how or medical equipment. I wanted to save him just like I wanted to save myself, I suppose. In this way I was like the mirror who wanted to save the guy looking into it and thus save the mirror image, too. It was a complicated emotional response, all right, and I’m not sure I understood it myself, which was how I knew it was complicated.

  “And when I didn’t want to kill myself,” Thomas said, looking at me from underneath his eyebrows, which were blond and thin, like his hair, “I wanted to kill you.”

  “Well,” I said, because I didn’t have a response to this except to say that I was glad he hadn’t. Killed me, that is.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, although he said this in a deep, dark tone of voice that belied his skinniness and suggested that maybe I should worry. “My shrink talked me out of killing you.”

  “You have a shrink?”

  “I’ve had a bunch.” Thomas said this as if he were weary of his sadness, as if grief were a Halloween costume he still had on after the holiday and wanted to take off but couldn’t, and suddenly I had a very clear vision of his life, which I had helped make for him just as surely as I had helped make my own. I could see him going from shrink to shrink, and except for those shrinks and his grief and his awful past, he was all alone in the world. I doubted he had his own wife and kids waiting for him at home, and then I thought of Anne Marie and the kids, out there on their normal Saturday errands and then picking apples at a self-pick apple orchard, or petting
domesticated wild animals at a petting zoo, or being read to at some library’s reading hour, and it occurred to me that the world didn’t need to be so big for just the four of us. I missed them badly and would have gotten in my minivan—we had two of them—and joined them at the petting zoo, for instance, except the minivan was low on gas and I didn’t know where the petting zoo was.

  “Anyway,” Thomas said, shaking his head as if just waking up and trying to clear his head of a dream, “that’s why I’m here. My shrink said I should find you and ask you to apologize. For killing my parents.”

  “Oh, I do, I do apologize,” I said. “I’m so sorry.” And I really was sorry and at the same time so happy that there was something I could do for Thomas after all these years. It is a rare thing, to be allowed to apologize for something so horrible and final. It was like Abel coming back from the dead and giving his brother Cain the chance to apologize for killing him. “Oh, I’m so sorry for killing your parents,” I said, and I was so full of penitence that I got down on my knees in a begging position. “I truly am sorry—it was an awful thing and changed too many lives and I wish it had never happened.”

  Thomas had his head down as I gave him my apology. After I was done, he kept it down as if waiting for more or contemplating what he had already been given. Finally he raised his head and gave me a look that was grim and I knew meant trouble. “So that was your apology?” he asked. “That’s it?”

  “Yes,” I said, and then I said, “Sorry,” for good measure.

  “That was an awful apology,” Thomas said. His eyes looked about ready to pop out of his head and he clenched his fists: he was really steaming, there was no doubt about it. Thomas looked exactly like those people you see on TV, those people whose loved ones have been killed and who then get to speak to their killers in court, and who say the things to the killers that they think they need and want to say in order to get on with the rest of their lives and achieve some piece of mind, et cetera, only to find out that the words don’t mean anything and aren’t even theirs, really, and so end up feeling more desperate and grief stricken and angry after they’ve spoken than they had before. Thomas looked an awful lot like that. “You’re not sorry at all,” he said.

  “I am, I am,” I said, and I was but didn’t know what else I could do to convince him, because that’s the trouble with being sorry: it’s much easier to convince people you really aren’t than you really are.

  “You dick,” he said.

  “Hey, now,” I said. “No need for that.”

  “You fucking dick,” Thomas said. He moved forward a little, and for a second I thought he was going to jump me, but he didn’t, maybe because he saw or smelled the dried sweat from my lawn mowing, or maybe because I was bigger than he was and had about fifty pounds on him. Thomas didn’t know that he probably could have roughed me up, and without getting even a little bit dirty: I could feel the old passivity coming on, could hear my heart beating, Hit me, hit me, I deserve it and won’t fight back, so hit me. But Thomas couldn’t hear my heart, which is just one of the reasons I am happy to have one. Instead he took a step back, and his face took a step back, too, and began to look contemplative but still furious.

  “I wonder how many of your neighbors know that you’re a murderer and an arsonist,” he said. “I wonder if your friends know. Your co-workers.”

  “Well …,” I said.

  “I bet you haven’t even told your family,” he said, and when he said this, the world suddenly became blurry and squiggly lined as though I were seeing it through extreme heat, and now I couldn’t recognize it, the world, and be sure that it was still mine.

  “I know you’re not sorry about killing my parents,” Thomas said. “But you will be.”

  And then he left: he turned, walked down my driveway, got into the black Jeep parked at the curb, and drove away. After he’d left, my heart slowed down a bit and my head cleared and I could hear the low roar of my neighbors’ mowers. I knew that no one had seen Thomas, or if they had, the neighbors wouldn’t have thought anything strange about his visit or even paid attention to it. The week before, my across-the-cul-de-sac neighbor’s estranged wife started banging on his door at three in the morning, screaming and threatening to cut off his vital parts with her grandfather’s Civil War saber, and he called the police on her and all in all they made a racket, but it was a distant, vague-sounding racket and we just thought someone had left their TV on too loud, until we read about it in the paper the next day. Our unspoken motto in Camelot was “Live and let live,” as long as you lived with your shirt on. Now that Thomas was gone it looked and sounded like a normal Saturday in Camelot. It was as though none of what had happened, had happened.

  But it had. The past comes back once and then it keeps coming back and coming back, not just one part of the past but all of it, the forgotten crowd of your life breaks out of the gallery and comes rushing at you, and there is no sense in hiding from the crowd, it will find you; it’s your crowd, you’re the only one it’s looking for.

  Anne Marie and the kids wouldn’t be back until three o’clock. It was two now. That would give me enough time to take a long walk and try to work up the nerve to tell my family the truth about my past. I knew that was what I finally had to do: tell the truth. And how did I know that?

  3

  Because of my mother: she could tell a story, and the stories she told, once my father left us, were always about the Emily Dickinson House. For instance, there was the story she told me when I was eight, a story about a boy and a girl, always nice enough, never too much older or younger than I was. They held hands and raced on foot and yelled sarcastic, innuendo-ridden taunts at each other, things that they’d heard or seen at the movies or on television or from their friends, who’d heard them in the same places and who’d changed them and made them their own.

  They were good kids, this boy and girl: they went over to each other’s houses after school, on weekends and national holidays; they gave each other cards on birthdays and talked on the phone for hours. And one day when they walked past the Emily Dickinson House, the back door was open, which was unusual, and so they decided to check it out. As they crossed the threshold, as my mother told it, the door slammed behind them and the big house hummed like the warming up of an oversize garbage disposal. There were screams, faint but distinct, and when my mother finished the story I would let out a long, sour breath and whine, “But it’s so unfair.” And my mother would nod and say, “Emily Dickinson’s House is like the last hole of a miniature golf course. Like the ball on that final hole, the children go in and then the game waits for someone else.” Which was an unfortunate analogy, because my mother and I did a lot of miniature golfing together at this time.

  So my mother had her story (a story that never made either of us very happy, by the way), but now I was going to have mine, and it would be true. I would tell Anne Marie and the kids the truth about me and the Emily Dickinson House and how I’d burned it to the ground and killed those poor Colemans. I had lied for too long. Now that Thomas Coleman had shown up and threatened to spill the beans, I knew I should tell my family the truth while the truth might still do me a little bit of good and while I was somewhat in control of it. And maybe the truth would make me happy. This was what the bond analysts had told one another during their memoir-brainstorming sessions: “Just tell the truth, dude” (this was the way they talked: like surfers outfitted by Brooks Brothers). “You’ll feel better afterward.” It seemed a simple matter of cause and effect, which was the kind of thing I, as a packaging scientist, could understand and appreciate. But it would be tough, I knew that. On my walk out of Camelot, across Route 116, and around and around the parking lot of the gardening-supply superstore (I would have walked on the sidewalks along 116 or in Camelot, except there weren’t any), I was picturing my little bambinos’ faces as I tried to explain that Daddy was a murderer and an arsonist, not to mention a long-term liar, and that weakened my resolve a little. But that was OK, because I k
new I was right to do what I was going to do, and I had surplus resolve and could stand to lose some of it.

  And then I walked back into Camelot, into my driveway, and lost some more of the resolve. Anne Marie’s minivan was parked there. Like Camelot and the house and the children and Anne Marie herself, the van was well maintained and I loved it and them so much, could feel my love growing and growing, could feel my heart wanting to get bigger and bigger until it was so full of love that it would explode all over the place and make a mess and I would die and not care. I went around the house and through the back door and into the kitchen, the floor covered with gleaming adobe tile. I had no idea what adobe tile meant, exactly, except that I thought it had to do with Indians and clay and earth, and none of that seemed to have anything to do with what was on my kitchen floor. That floor and its name were mysterious and inexplicable, like love itself, and my heart continued to grow, testing the limits of its chambers. I bent to kiss the floor, put my lips right on the cool, cool tile. You are mine. That was my very thought, to the tile. You are mine, and I love you. But would the tile still love me back after I told it the truth about my past? I could feel the tile shrink from my lips at the very thought. Would my family not do the same? How could they not? Oh, I was afraid, not of one thing, but of everything, even though I’d been full of courage and determination not a minute earlier. I was even afraid of the adobe tile, wanted to get away from it as fast as possible before it rejected me completely. I wiped my lip prints off the tile and got up from my hands and knees just as my daughter, Katherine, walked into the kitchen.

  Katherine was eight now, tall and bony, the kind of girl her mother had been—the kind of girl who in adolescence lived in overalls as she made her trip from tomboyishness to beauty. She’d learned from some television show or her friends to greet people not in the conventional fashion but by saying, “Hey-low,” and she said it now, to me, in the kitchen, and I wanted to say back, Oh, dear heart, my first born, I have to tell you something, and you might hate me for it, but even if you do, will you at least promise to never say “Hey-low” again? Instead, I asked, “Where’s your mother?”