The Burning Girl

by Claire Messud

  Cassie and I went exploring on foot, which meant downtown, mostly. Until we made our way to the quarry and the old asylum. Downtown has a row of great old buildings, redbrick Victorian style, with apartments above the shops. I always wondered who lives in them. Many of the shopfronts don’t last long—Royston is the kind of small town that people escape to from Boston or Portland, bringing their small children and their fantasies, only to find that village life isn’t as simple as they’d expected. They set up a sparkly jewelry shop or a cute café with cows painted on the walls and frilly curtains, and stick it out through a year or even two, through bitter, lean winters when nobody’s on the street; but sooner or later they shut up shop and head back where they came from. There are the long-timers too, the Adamian Pharmacy, and Mahoney’s Irish Pub, and Bell’s Dry Goods, run by crabby Mildred Bell, older than my grandmother and with a wart on her chin like a witch. Bell’s, a crazy, cluttered place, sells, among other things, Christmas sweaters embroidered with reindeers or elves. They protect their never-changing display windows with yellow-tinted cellophane. When I was little, I liked it for the toy section, which includes a line of plastic bins containing stuff I could afford with my pocket money—Japanese erasers and Hello Kitty notepads, glow-in-the-dark Super Balls and hair clips in the shape of plaster hamburgers or cupcakes. Mrs. Bell must have a weakness for stuffed animals too, because they have a big wicker bin filled with the softest ones, not just bears but owls and giraffes and a great selection of pigs in particular. Cassie and I liked to go into Bell’s that August to visit the stuffed animals, and because I felt bad about her hand and her hard time, I sneaked back on my own and bought her the littlest pig, palest pink, that she’d already named Hubert. I hid him for a surprise, but only for a day because when we were back in the shop and she saw he was missing, she wailed.

  After Mrs. Bell’s shop, and the Rite Aid where we liked best the aisle of trial-sized items and the nail polishes (although Cassie wasn’t allowed to wear nail polish and I didn’t want to), there weren’t that many places in Royston for kids to go. We ambled over to the kiddie playground out Market Street past the high school, with the rainbow roundabout and the bank of swings, but that summer they were rebuilding the slide and the climbing structure, leaving only stumps, and besides, the other kids in the park were little, under five, accompanied by mothers or grandmas, and it was somehow more depressing than staying home.

  Seeing as we couldn’t play tennis or basketball, the high school wasn’t fun; and besides, a loudmouthed eighth grader named Beckett hung out there with his friends, including the boy I had a crush on, Peter Oundle. He’d been at our school always, and when we were smaller we’d all played together at recess—tag, and four square, and touch football. Now, though, he hung out with Beckett, two years ahead of us and the leader of a gang, long-limbed, quick-footed boys with sneering mouths. Peter Oundle, only a year ahead of Cassie and me, had always felt different, the kind of boy who’d offer his hand to help you up when you fell. Skinny, pointy-nosed, but handsome: reddish-brown curls, long lashes.

  The boys played pickup basketball games for hours. One or two of them wolf-whistled when we passed, and one afternoon Beckett called out to me, “Hey, Curly, what are those huge pimples on your front?” which made the other boys guffaw and me flush with shame. Cassie shouted back, “Envious, are you, Beckett? ’Cause I see you got your hair long, like a girl.”

  “Aw, fuck you too,” Beckett shouted, and turned his back; but like he was embarrassed, I thought.

  “I’d hug you right here,” I said to Cassie, “but that would just prove to him that we’re gay.”

  “Who cares?” Cassie said. “I’d marry you over him any day.”

  We’d walked on and were passing the playground when Peter Oundle caught up to us. His curls were slick with sweat, his bony chest heaving under his mesh tank (Celtics, number 9). He touched me on the shoulder, and it burned. I was sure my face was red.

  “Hey.” He stood a second.

  “What do you want?” Cassie sounded disgusted.

  “I just wanted to apologize.”

  “What?” she said again.

  “Beckett can seem like an asshole sometimes.”

  “No kidding.”

  “But he’s not so bad. It was a joke.”

  “Not funny.” Cassie glared at Peter like he’d said it himself.

  “It’s okay.” I smiled. “I’ll survive. Thanks for coming over.”

  Peter nodded, and turned to run back to the game; but he looked back over his shoulder as he went, and smiled outright. At me, I thought, then: he came over for me.

  “Shame he’s turned into one of them,” Cassie said as we set off again.

  “He’s not so bad.”

  She snorted, as if to say, You wish. She knew I liked him.

  The quarry was where the older kids partied in the summer, and where we went swimming occasionally with our parents and their friends who belonged. It was about a mile west of Royston off a little county road, down a dirt track between two private houses. Abandoned over a hundred years ago, the old quarry is filled with glorious rare gray-green water, a color out of an old oil painting. In some lights, the great boulders gleam gold, but the word that comes to mind is “tawny,” like a lion. The quarry itself is lion-colored, which is why the Royston Town Hall—built in the 1870s with its stones—is lion-colored also.

  Strictly speaking, the quarry is a private pool. It belongs to the local Land Association, a group of trustees who bought up a bunch of acreage between Cape Ann and the New Hampshire border, and run it as a kind of nature charity. You’re supposed to have a membership. Halfway along the dirt road, a chain hangs across it; but there’s no lock on the chain, and if you’re biking or walking you can slip around it. There’s no lifeguard or caretaker, except Rudy, who also takes care of the cemetery: he drives over every so often unannounced in his dark orange pickup with his one-eyed German shepherd, Bessie, to make sure nothing crazy is going on. He’s not a bad guy, Rudy, though he looks a little scary. He doesn’t have all his teeth and his cheeks cave in on themselves as if his mouth were a pull-string. And Bessie—well, people are scared of German shepherds, and she’s a surprising sight because one eye is milky and reflects the light.

  That first afternoon, we saw him on the main road, headed into town as we headed out. We were on the gravel verge, and he made a showy loop to the other side of the road as he passed us, and raised his hand in an old-fashioned country wave and nodded our way. A toothpick, or an unlit cigarette, stuck up out of his mouth, and his greasy cap was on backward, wings of hair poking out below. Bessie had her head half out the window on the passenger side, tongue lolling, eating the breeze. The sight made us laugh: “Dog joy,” Cassie said. “Wish we could get us some.”

  We wanted to walk out to the quarry simply to fill the time. We couldn’t swim, or Cassie couldn’t, on account of her hand; but it seemed the place to explore, not least because we knew one of the trails through the woods from the quarry led to the old asylum. Cassie thought that was the coolest thing: if we could find our way to the asylum, who knew what we’d discover? She had some idea there’d be treasure—something hidden or left behind, something we couldn’t imagine until it was revealed.

  “Maybe someone’s even living there,” she suggested, raising her eyebrows and smiling. “Somebody everybody thinks is gone.”

  “That seems like a reason not to go looking.”

  “Wimp.”

  “I’m not. Besides, if anybody was living there, we’d know about it.”

  “How?”

  “That close to town? You don’t just get away with stuff like that.”

  “So, we could pretend to live there. Like, for the afternoon.”

  We didn’t play pretend games anymore because we were too grown-up, but secretly we missed them. A stage as big as an asylum seemed perfect: we could disappear into the woods to a secret hidey hole, and suddenly it would be okay to behave as though we were
ten again, and she was a World War II Resistance fighter and I’d parachuted in from England on a secret mission; or we were the only two survivors after the apocalypse and had to live off nuts and berries and rainwater.

  The woods around Royston are great for those kinds of games. There are clearings in the trees, and huge slabs of rock like tables, fallen logs to serve as benches, rocky overhangs underneath which you can build a little camp that will stay dry in all but the heaviest rainfall. They’re not impenetrable, not a Hansel and Gretel forest, but a forest where the sunlight falls green and dappled to the soft, piney ground, where surprising toadstools sprout in clumps—flat red plates or piled cream ruffles, tiny yellow shiny bulbs, almost slick—and invisible birds call to one another in the high branches overhead. Sometimes you catch the bright flash of a red-winged blackbird or a cardinal, and upon occasion, at the quarry itself, a misguided preening egret teetering on its precarious pins, stretching its great wings and arching its prehistoric neck to glare at you from a bald, glittering eye.

  On that first day we tramped out to the quarry, we saw such an egret. We called her Nancy, because the name made us laugh, and whenever we saw another after that, wherever it was, we waved and shouted, “Hey, Nancy, good to see you!” We felt like she was a good omen, a sign for us.

  Cassie took off her sneakers and socks and dangled her feet in the water, while I fussed about whether she’d get her dressed hand wet in a puddle at the water’s edge, until she told me to shut up. It had been a hot walk, even under the trees, and I was tempted to strip off and plunge in, even for a minute, to make the swelling in my fingers and ankles go down. (Some people swell in the heat, and some people don’t. Needless to say, Cassie didn’t.) But I’d made myself the promise that I wouldn’t, so I too sat on the hot stone and dabbled my puffy feet, listening to the cicadas scream and wishing for more. It had taken almost an hour to get there from my house, and it would take as long to get back, and we hadn’t brought so much as a bottle of water.

  As Nancy spread her wings and tucked her legs, lifting off like an airplane with barely a splash, Cassie threw back her head and narrowed her eyes. “It’s good here,” she said.

  “Even better when we can swim.”

  “It’s so deep, isn’t it?”

  The water, in its gray-green-ness, was intensely clear; and yet you couldn’t see the bottom. “What do you think is down there?”

  “Stone, of course. It’s a quarry.”

  “Ghosts, though? Do you think there are ghosts?” We both knew the story of the teenager who’d drowned there, long before we were born. Back in the 1980s. A bunch of kids had come skinny-dipping at night, drunk or high or both, and this boy had dived in headfirst and hit his head on a rock and never come up again. The kids were so rowdy that they didn’t even notice he wasn’t with them until it was time to go home. And the police couldn’t find his body until the next day. In Royston, we all knew that story from very young, although we knew it like a myth, not like a fact. We didn’t know his name or anything. It was why there was a big sign at the parking lot that said NO DIVING.

  “Ghosts?” Cassie squinted at me in the bright sun. “Don’t tell me you believe in ghosts.”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t.”

  “Of course I don’t.”

  “What about your dad, then?”

  Cassie shook her head and was quiet for a minute. “That’s not ghosts. That’s angels. It’s totally different. And it’s not some stupid joke.” She pulled her feet out of the water and turned her back to me, crossing her legs and hanging her head like a turtle tucking in on itself.

  “I wasn’t—I didn’t mean . . . Cass . . . I’m sorry, okay?”

  She didn’t turn around straightaway. When she did, she had a funny set to her mouth. I thought she was angry with me, and only afterward did it occur to me that she was trying not to cry. “It’s time to head back, don’t you think?” she said. “Didn’t your mom promise grilled cheese?”

  “And milkshakes. Chocolate.”

  CASSIE’S FATHER was as much a myth as the drowned boy. Not in the sense that he might not be real, but in the sense that she’d never actually known him. Or rather, that she couldn’t remember him. Except his face: she said she had a memory of him leaning over her crib, his blue eyes, and of feeling safe held in the crook of his arm—infant memories, dark around the edges like an old photograph, but indelible. He had chosen her name, Cassandra, because he thought it was the most beautiful. And her bird bones came from his side, and her aptitude for math, or so Bev had told her. Her love of onion rings. Her stick-out ears.

  My father is so present in my life that I don’t really even look at him. Not properly. I love him, fiercely, but in some way I barely see him. He makes bad puns and my mother and I groan. He gets angry about my gear cluttering up the front hall, and I roll my eyes. I know his face so well that I can’t tell when it’s changing—my mother pointed out the other day that more than half his hair is gray now: when did that happen? How could I not have noticed? He said that’s what family is for: the people who love you see you in the best light, as you want to be seen. He made out it wasn’t just because I hadn’t been looking.

  Whereas for Cassie, it was as if her father stood behind a thick black curtain with a few tiny holes in it. She had to get up close to those pinpricks and peer through, trying to glean her father’s overall shape from the little she could glimpse.

  Bev had told her the story a thousand times, about how he died. They were living in a farmhouse about forty minutes northwest of Boston when Cassie was born, and Bev, though she’d finished her coursework, hadn’t yet qualified as a nurse. Cassie’s father, whose name was Clarke—“Clarke Burnes, that’s a good name, right?” Cassie whispered, whenever we talked about it, like he was a movie star, like Clark Gable or Harrison Ford—worked two jobs so they’d have enough money until Bev could start working too. He was a biology teacher at the junior high in Belmont, Massachusetts (we looked it up on Google Earth, once, just to see the building), and then three nights a week he worked as a bartender at a pub in Brighton, which, as Bev explained to Cassie, and Cassie to me, is basically in Boston. Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays—Cassie even knew which days. Late on a Friday night, when he was driving home from Boston in bad weather, a February night when Cassie was just eleven months old, another car came across the median and hit him head-on. A drunk driver. Bev would tell how she’d fallen asleep and woken at four in the morning with Cassie cozy in the bed beside her, and no Clarke. He hadn’t come home, and he didn’t answer his cell phone. She wasn’t a worrier, so her first thought was that he’d stayed over in Boston at a friend’s, which he sometimes did, and she felt annoyed, because it was going to be Saturday and they’d had plans and now everything would be late. She went back to sleep feeling annoyed at Clarke and she woke up again around seven still feeling annoyed and then at 7:30 the police called and she found out that Clarke was dead. All the years since, Bev had told my mother, and my mother had told me, she’d felt guilty about being annoyed, about not thinking the best of him, when of course he would have been home if he could have been—he’d been on his way.

  Clarke Burnes was like an angel for Cassie. She believed that he watched over her and kept her safe. She had dreams where they were together, always good dreams, where they toasted marshmallows or rode bikes, or where he tucked her into bed at night and she’d memorize his face, the face she remembered from when she was a baby in her crib. When she was eight, she’d heard his voice in her head—she’d known it was his voice, somehow—telling her not to go out onto the ice on Long Pond in January. She was walking the Audubon loop with her mother but had run on ahead and wanted desperately to go sliding; and as she was about to jump off the bank, the voice said, Stay with me, baby doll. Stay here on the shore. That’s what Cassie said: he’d called her “baby doll,” and just hearing the words made her feel safe. He was with her; she was never alone. Which was totally different from some cartoon phantom haun
ting the quarry. “Sometimes,” she once told me, “I’m totally sure he’s alive. Not just in my mind, but really out there. Like he’s just around the corner, waiting for me, for real. Because I can feel him so close by, you know? Like he’s with me. Angels,” she’d whispered fiercely, “are real.”

  I’d seen his picture: Cassie kept it in a plastic baggie in her underwear drawer, and sometimes slept with it under her pillow. It was strange to me that there weren’t pictures of him all over their house, pictures of him and Bev together, or him holding Cassie as a baby, but Cassie explained that her mother’s grief had been so intense and so deep that for a long time she couldn’t bear to look at photos of Clarke, and had hidden them all. They didn’t even have a grave to visit, because he’d been cremated, and Bev told Cassie about their winter trip to the seashore, Cassie not even walking yet, to scatter his ashes in the Atlantic. Flecks had blown back in their faces, Bev told Cassie, and probably they’d swallowed a few. It wasn’t disgusting, she said, it was a miracle of nature, that he was always inside them.

  Miraculously, that one photo had survived, tucked into the back of the family Bible, where Cassie had found it when she was about seven: she was using the Bible to build a racing run for Matchbox cars and it had fallen out. They’d never spoken about it, although her mother had surely seen it in her underwear drawer—Cassie wasn’t trying to hide it.

  In truth, it was hard to tell exactly what Clarke Burnes looked like: the photo was from a long time ago and blurry, taken in front of what looked like a barn on a gray fall day. The man in the picture had a square face and floppy blondish hair over one eye, and his hands were stuffed in his jeans pockets. He’d been moving a bit when the shutter snapped, so you couldn’t even tell that his eyes were blue (Bev had told Cassie they were); and you couldn’t really describe his expression: like he was on the verge of something, in between moments rather than in one. He wore a blue T-shirt with a peace sign on it, and over top a red-and-black plaid flannel shirt. The shirt always seemed to me the most definite thing in the photograph, the only thing you could be absolutely certain you’d recognize, which was strange because it looked like a million other plaid flannel shirts. In the fall, in tiny Royston, you might see half a dozen of those shirts on any given day. I never said that to Cassie—why would I? It wasn’t what she needed to hear. So instead when we looked at the photo together, we’d try to pick out which of his features she’d inherited, which blurry bits she carried around in her body.