The Burning Girl

by Claire Messud

  She studied the photo from the paper; she zoomed in close. Captain Clarke was small and blurry; when she zoomed in he was larger but also blurrier. A burly man grinning, with a bald head, plump cheeks, and a close graying beard. His varsity jacket pulled taut over his belly. His arms, in the photo, looked short, slightly apish, crossed awkwardly over his chest. Was this the floppy-haired guy in the flannel shirt in front of a long-ago barn? Who could say? How could it be?

  But imagine, imagine for a second what it felt like to Cassie, even the possibility—baffling, horrifying, miraculous—that the grinning Captain Clarke might be, could be, maybe, in that awful winter, couldn’t not be the man she told Peter she’d never really, in her deepest heart, believed to be dead: her father.

  Cassie didn’t tell anyone about her investigations. Convinced that Anders spied on her phone and computer and checked all her searches and hacked into her accounts, she deleted this from her laptop and thereafter Googled Captain Clarke only from the school library. She told Peter that it was amazing what you could learn about someone if you did a little digging.

  Arthur C. Burnes was forty-one years old, married since 2001 to Anna Maria Machado, thirty-six, a civil servant with the city of Bangor, working in the tax department. Cassie imagined he was a mild joker, that he liked his food. Anna Maria—Cassie decided she used both names: why else would they both be listed?—was a great cook, lots of meat in sauce, and kindly, with a little accent, maybe rolling her r’s.

  They had four kids, aged three to eleven, and they lived at 36 Spring Street in a pale-blue split-level ranch with a basketball hoop above the garage and, on the Google street view, what looked like a husky playing on the front lawn. The husky, of course, might just have been a neighborhood dog that wandered into the frame as the Google camera van drove by—a trespasser dog. Hard to say.

  Cassie found herself over the months of February and March increasingly immersed in the lives of the Burnes family of Bangor. She spent many afternoons in the school library, which would have surprised people if they’d noticed; but the one person who did notice was Lee Ann Barrocca, the school librarian, unobtrusive and old-fashioned, who didn’t want to invade Cassie’s privacy or dissuade a growing academic interest by approaching her uninvited. So Miss Barrocca just observed Cassie over her half-moon glasses from the remove of the checkout desk, and smiled privately, imagining that her beloved library was saving another student’s future, a fantasy she used to console herself whenever she discovered defaced books or obscene graffiti in the carrels.

  Cassie, meanwhile, started a notebook, stashed always in her school locker to keep it from prying eyes at home, in which she recorded the facts as she understood them: she learned the kids’ names from 2012 holiday snaps on Flickr, a series taken at the Bangor City Hall’s Christmas drive, where the two elder Burnes kids—Jason and Marisol—had helped to hand out gaudily wrapped presents from beneath the enormous glittering tree, to celebrate the season’s Toys for Tots campaign. In a later family photo from the same series—inconveniently minus Arthur Burnes—she could see all four kids: Jason, Marisol, Jennifer, and baby Brianna, a curly haired wisp in red-and-green tulle, along with their mother. Jason looked thoughtful and a bit shy, the beginnings of dark down on his lip: smart in school, a math guy most likely. Marisol was the opposite, all tooth when she smiled, and crinkly cheeks, the kind of girl who put bubbles on her i’s and exclamation points, and who actually clapped her hands when she was excited. Jennifer was hard to read—Cassie liked that, felt she was probably closest in spirit to Jennifer. Her expression was melancholy and she had dark smudges under her eyes. Anna Maria, their mother, dark-haired, plump, and small, wore her hair in a ponytail like a young girl, and a red sparkly Christmas sweater. She looked kind, but tired. Cassie imagined that when she got angry, she didn’t yell at her kids; she spoke quietly to them in a tight voice—an acceptable kind of anger.

  Cassie, she told Peter, dreamed about this woman, about these kids—her stepfamily—and from these two photographs, she fantasized entire afternoons in their company. I imagine she tried to find, in the kids’ dark-eyed faces, traces of her own features—the ears, at least? The bones? She couldn’t be sure. She couldn’t find any other photos of Arthur himself; it was true that her father had supposedly been slim rather than heavy, but people changed, and a whole lifetime—her whole lifetime—had intervened. Had Clarke Burnes played football in college, or even high school? Cassie didn’t know, couldn’t ask her mother. She never discussed her father with her mother; if there’d been glimmers when she was younger, they were long over now. The familial darkness was complete.

  Whether Cassie’s expanding family fantasy of life with the Burneses of Bangor made the situation at home worse, or whether her home life was simply doomed to deteriorate, it’s hard to say. But in those late-winter months, Cassie and her mother and Anders Shute lived on high alert, awaiting eruptions or trembling in their aftermath. We didn’t understand at the time what it was like, but Cassie told Peter, in his room that day. Cassie lost her phone privileges; Cassie was grounded; Cassie had to move her computer into the dining room and do her homework there, so that the grown-ups could see what was on her screen at any time. Cassie’s tone was disrespectful; Cassie didn’t do her chores properly; Cassie’s allowance was indefinitely suspended; the lock on Cassie’s bedroom door was removed.

  With so many problems at home, Cassie devoted more and more energy to her Bangor fantasy. This is what she told Peter, who told me. She figured out how you could get there, without a car—Greyhound to Boston from the Dunkin’ Donuts on Route 29 at 6:10 a.m., and then the express bus to Maine (first stop Portland, then on to Bangor and eventually Mount Desert). There was a youth hostel in Bangor, $29 a night for a bunk in a dorm (bring your own bedroll). The Burneses’ house looked to be only two miles from the bus station, so she figured she could walk there. Whether or not there were sidewalks, she could just walk there and climb the driveway and ring the front doorbell. You wouldn’t want to do that during the day—who’d be home besides maybe the husky, who might be no friendlier than the Aucoins’ Lottie? You’d come at dusk, the early evening, when the first stars were out and football practice had liberated Captain Clarke, aka Cap’n Crunch, to his own kids, and you’d ask—what would you ask?

  For a while, Cassie was stymied. “Are you my dad?” was too bald. “Do you know who I am?” a little aggressive. “Does the name Bev Burnes mean anything to you?” was another possibility, but who knew how that might turn out. If, indeed, Clarke Burnes was alive and not dead as Bev had always insisted, then either he’d faked his death to get away, or else they’d broken up badly. The timing wasn’t implausible—a breakup and a move to Maine; starting his math-teacher job at the high school around the time he was supposed to have quit the planet. A math teacher, so close to biology; the right age; the name; so close by, relatively speaking . . . surely this couldn’t be coincidence? How about “Have you ever gone by the name Clarke Burnes?” Or even: “Do you know a Clarke Burnes?” Maybe, she decided, she’d just have to play it by ear.

  This is what she told Peter, who told me, or mostly. I know Cassie so well it’s like they’re my own thoughts, or my own thoughts about her thoughts. Now, so much later, it almost feels like I went through it with her, even though I didn’t know until afterward.

  Cassie kept Googling the weather in Bangor, looking up photos of the downtown streets in different seasons; trying to picture what life there might be like. She told no one. She didn’t want anybody’s opinion, certain that her guardian-angel father still guided her steps, watched over her, would make sure she’d take the right path. She didn’t set her heart on flight—she was okay with keeping this relationship with Bangor in her mind, for a while—but then came the blow-up with Anders at two in the morning, and she didn’t feel, suddenly, that she had much choice but to go. The angel’s voice spoke in her ear, and said, “Baby doll, it’s now or never.”

  The irony about the fight
with Anders was that Cassie wasn’t late because she’d been partying, or fooling around with a boy. Peter said she was particularly upset about this—that Anders Shute wanted to punish even her good deeds, maybe especially those. She’d been with a girl named Alma, a new friend from the high school, talking her through her breakup with her boyfriend. Alma felt that life wasn’t worth it, and Cassie had sat in her overheated, ill-lit kitchen on the other side of town drinking Diet Coke for hours, listening and cajoling, trying to help Alma look to a better future, to see the light. Alma’s mom was an aide at an assisted-living place in Lawrence, on the night shift; and the girls were alone until Alma’s older brother Ugo came home well after one in the morning and offered Cassie a ride back to her house. By then she’d listened a long time to Alma cry and lament and then seem to pull herself together only to break down again. Cassie didn’t know Alma all that well and wasn’t even sure she liked her that much, but she was proud of her own behavior that night. She’d gone home feeling strong and patient and generous and good—and pleased too, that Ugo hadn’t hit on her, which all too many older brothers were disgustingly ready to do—until Anders loomed thinly before her in the dimly lit kitchen, waggling his long finger altogether too close to her face and condemning her as selfish and un-Christian and “beyond the pale,” and threatening to kick her out. He implied she was a slut, though he didn’t use that word exactly. And the way he looked at her—those narrowed eyes, the line of his mouth, the pulsing vein in his temple, the utter surreality that this ugly stranger behaved as though he had rights, like he was her boss, or her father—you can only take so much, she told Peter, and then you have to stick up for yourself.

  With her school backpack crammed with clothes, a hand towel, a rolled-up sheet, a box of Wheat Thins and an apple, Cassie left the house on her bike at 4:40 a.m., and arrived at the Dunkin’ Donuts by 5:10, which was still night. Nobody else was there besides the guy behind the counter, bleary and dirty-haired with wispy fluff on his chin. She ordered a large regular coffee—I can taste it, toothache sweet—and two glazed crullers, and she hunched at the back table against the wall with her hood up, peering at the odd customers who came through. I can feel the plastic table under her fingers, and hear the slight screech of the built-in chair when she swivels in it. The bus lurched into the lot right on time, in the still-dark, its lights beaming into the coffee shop; and as she climbed the steps into its hissing pneumatic maw, the money for the ticket crumpled in her fist, it occurred to her only fleetingly that she could stop, and go home, and begin the day as if this plan had never existed. Her bike was carefully hidden in the bushes at the back of the DD parking lot, chained to a sapling. She’d left a note on the kitchen counter that just said “Back in a few days.” That way, she told herself, they’d know she was okay. It didn’t mean they wouldn’t chase her—Anders Shute was that spiteful; her mother that controlling—but that was their problem, not hers. If she floated above herself, then it seemed like a strange thing she was doing, an irresponsible thing, maybe even a dangerous one; but when she stood in her skin and felt the cold greasy metal of the bus at her fingertips, and the dig of the backpack straps through her parka, and saw the sulfurous glimmer of dawn on the horizon as the car lights flashed past on Route 29 . . . in her skin, Cassie had no doubts at all, and no fear either.

  The journey to Bangor took the better part of a day. She thought everything through as she went along: she bought round-trip tickets to be sure she wouldn’t run out of money and get stuck. After the tickets, she had still almost $200, money she’d earned babysitting and helping Mrs. Aucoin tidy up their basement. She put $50 between her left sock and her shoe, so that even if she lost her wallet or, God forbid, got mugged, she wouldn’t be destitute. Before she got on the Boston bus, she remembered to turn off her cell phone—by then, even she had an iPhone, and of course her nosy mother had the Find My Phone app, and while Cassie didn’t mind them knowing she’d got on the Boston bus, putting them on the wrong scent, she didn’t want to be traced beyond that. She knew her hair was noticeable—her hair had always been a beacon, not just for me—so as soon as she got off the bus at South Station, she went to the nice bathrooms in the train station next door, where she pinned her white blondness inside a knitted beanie so you couldn’t see a single strand—“like I was Orthodox Jewish,” she told Peter, “or maybe Muslim”—and then she put on a pair of slightly damaged sunglasses from the sale bin at the CVS. She didn’t return to the bus terminal until it was almost time; she knew that runaway kids hang out in bus terminals, and that bad things can happen to them there. Careful not to look aimless, she read a magazine intently at one of the tables in the train station food court while waiting for her bus—she had several hours to kill—and made her McDonald’s fries last a very long time, waiting minutes between bites, so that she mostly ate them cold, their floury grease coating her tongue.

  When she bought the Bangor tickets, she used the machines and didn’t make eye contact with anyone, and strode purposefully to the right bay at the right time. The Maine bus, on a Saturday afternoon, had a fair number of customers, and although she’d hoped for a seat by herself, she saw it wouldn’t work out. She chose to sit next to a college-aged girl with glasses and a violin case, because of all the options, that person seemed least likely to strike up conversation. Tired of pretending to read, and unable to listen to music because she didn’t want to risk turning on her phone even with the cell service off, Cassie decided to pretend to sleep. She didn’t have to pretend for long. When the violinist got off at Portland, nobody replaced her; so Cassie slipped to the window and slept the rest of the way, her skull in its woolly cap bouncing uncomfortably against the glass, and her tailbone sore.

  From midafternoon Saturday, Cassie was in Bangor. This was the tricky part: she couldn’t get herself noticed; she couldn’t seem to be barely fifteen. Even seventeen would be okay, but not fifteen. She’d worried about this, in her weeks of planning, she told Peter, and had decided, if anybody asked, to say that she was in town to see her sick grandpa, a patient at the hospital—Anders Shute’s old hospital; what were the odds?—and that her mom was on her way too but had had to deal with a crisis at work. She’d even thought of a name—Cassie Byrd—and a way to explain it, if anybody asked: that her dad, Clarke Byrd, had died, which was why her mom’s name was different, or she preferred to go by “Byrd” as a way to remember him.

  “Pretty cool, don’t you think?” she said to Peter. “I read that it’s always best to keep your lies as close to the truth as possible. It’s harder to get caught out that way.”

  Peter said that in the moment she said this, given what she was telling him about Bev, and what Cassie firmly believed was Bev’s amazing ability to lie to her daughter over a lifetime, the need to stay close to the truth seemed not so obvious. But never mind.

  In the event, nobody official asked anything. The youth hostel occupied a sprawling Victorian house near the downtown (“Like Julia’s, but, like, five times as big,” she told Peter) and it was obviously spring break somewhere because the front hall was crowded with young backpackers—grown-ups, Cassie said, but barely. She got put in a room with three Swedish girls, two of them, Anja and Linn, as fair as she was herself. The third, Inge, small and dark with big breasts and wide blue eyes to rival Cassie’s, was the most talkative. Nineteen, speaking perfect English, they were friends from high school, taking time to travel before university. They’d come to the West Coast first and were making their way back east—just another week before they flew home; but they wanted to do some early spring hiking in Maine first.

  Cassie told them her prepared story, and when they invited her to join them for dinner she excused herself, saying she was too sad about her grandfather—he was really sick, or she wouldn’t have come alone—and that she just needed to rest. She pretended she’d already been to the hospital to see him, earlier that evening. The Swedish girls were very understanding.

  “I lost my grandpa too, about three
years ago,” Inge said. “My mother’s father, the same as you. He had no memory by then, didn’t know who I was, but I remembered so well how he’d been when I was small and we would play horsey, on his hands and knees, he’d let me ride around on his back. So sad.”

  And then: “Does your grandfather have his memory? I mean, does he know who you are?” Anja asked.

  Cassie had to decide in a hurry. “Mostly,” she said, to cover her bases. “Mostly he knows, but not always.”

  “What’s he sick with?” Linn’s turn.

  “A cancer. A bad one.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Spread. It’s spread all over. It’s in his lungs and his brain and other places too.”

  They nodded quietly and looked at the wooden floor, and then Inge got up and patted Cassie on the knee. “It’s really good that you’re here, then. He probably doesn’t have very long.” And then the three Swedish girls filed out to find some dinner, leaving Cassie alone beneath a fluorescent panel on a plastic mattress with her lone sheet and hand towel for bedding, for supper her Wheat Thins and for entertainment the tattered magazine she’d read in South Station.