How to Start a Fire Read online

  Kate and Anna had met only three and a half months earlier. They were thrown together not by the careful dorm-room pairings that the housing administrators prided themselves on but simply because they were late applicants in a pond of already-paired fish.

  “I have a theory,” said Anna now. “They try to match roommates based on common interests and similar backgrounds and areas of study. But from my observation, that breeds competition. What truly matters in a congenial cohabiting situation are sleep habits, taste in music, and levels of cleanliness. Kate and I have all three in common—basically, we’re sloppy insomniacs who loathe pop music. But in everything else, we’re like night and day. See, I’m a biology major; Kate, business. I have two parents, still married. Both of Kate’s are dead. Car crash when she was eight. I’ve never held a job. Kate has worked in her grandfather’s diner since she was twelve. I grew up in Boston. Kate was raised right here in Santa Cruz. She’s never even left California. Can you believe that?”

  “We won’t be far from Oregon,” said Kate, who didn’t seem to mind having her life summarized solely in terms of how it differed from Anna’s.

  “Maybe we’ll just dip inside,” Anna said, “so you can say you’ve been there.”

  As Anna shattered the speed limit on Highway 101, the landscape turned a lusher green. Dark clouds pushed their way into the sky as headlights started to blink on. Anna interrogated her new friend with a series of seemingly random but actually premeditated questions. What song would your torturers play to drive you mad? “It’s a Small World.” How many hard-boiled eggs can you eat in one sitting? Five. (Anna was impressed; most people couldn’t answer that question.) Who would you save in a fire, Keith Richards or Pete Townshend?

  “I don’t know,” George answered, indifferent to both men.

  “The answer is Pete Townshend. A fire wouldn’t kill Keith Richards,” Anna said.

  Kate asked the pedestrian kinds of questions and learned that George was a midwestern girl, raised in Chicago. An only child. Still-married parents. Italian American father. WASPy mother. She had several male cousins who’d taught her how to fight and play basketball. She had had a four-inch growth spurt when she was thirteen and played on the boys’ team until high school. Her major: undecided.

  A few hours into the road trip, Kate posed a question that spurred a rapid-fire conversation George found hard to follow; it was like listening to actors in a 1940s radio show.

  KATE:

  Did you check the weather?

  ANNA:

  No. I thought you were going to do that.

  KATE:

  Did you tell me to do that?

  ANNA:

  No.

  KATE:

  Then why did you think I would?

  ANNA:

  Because you’re more practical than I am.

  KATE:

  It’s going to start raining soon.

  ANNA:

  You don’t know that.

  KATE:

  I do.

  ANNA:

  No, you don’t.

  Small droplets of water dotted the windshield. Then the drizzle turned to rain, forcing Anna to turn on the windshield wipers.

  KATE:

  What more proof do you need?

  ANNA:

  What’s a little rain?

  KATE:

  We can’t go camping in the rain.

  ANNA:

  Why not?

  KATE:

  You can’t start a fire in the rain.

  ANNA:

  So we won’t have a fire.

  KATE:

  If we don’t have a fire, then we don’t have s’mores.

  ANNA:

  So?

  KATE:

  Camping isn’t camping without s’mores. We can’t have other cooked food either.

  ANNA:

  We can have potato chips, beef jerky, and beer.

  KATE:

  Maybe you should slow down.

  ANNA:

  What does that sign say?

  KATE:

  Make the wipers go faster.

  ANNA:

  That’s as fast as they go.

  GEORGE:

  I think you should pull off the road.

  ANNA:

  Good idea. We’ll find a place to bunk for the night.

  KATE:

  A Motel 6 or something.

  ANNA:

  Not a Motel 6. Some place that sounds more rustic.

  KATE:

  Like what, the Rustic Inn?

  ANNA:

  It can’t be a chain motel and it has to have the word Lodge in the name.

  GEORGE:

  What was that?

  The car swerved back and forth across two lanes with a rhythmic thumping sound. Anna slowed the car, turned on her emergency blinkers, and pulled onto the shoulder of the road.

  ANNA:

  I’m not an expert, but I think we have a flat tire.

  KATE:

  I second that opinion.

  ANNA:

  Don’t worry. I’m going to take care of everything.

  GEORGE:

  Do you know how to change a tire?

  ANNA:

  No.

  GEORGE:

  I can do it. My dad showed me like a year ago.

  ANNA:

  Good to know. For future reference.

  KATE:

  Uh-oh.

  GEORGE:

  You don’t have a jack, do you?

  ANNA:

  Nope. But it wouldn’t do us any good anyway.

  GEORGE:

  Why not?

  ANNA:

  A jack is useful only if you have a spare tire.

  GEORGE:

  You don’t have a spare?

  KATE:

  She used to.

  ANNA:

  I took it out a while back. Wanted to see if I got better mileage without the extra weight.

  GEORGE:

  Oh my God.

  ANNA:

  Relax. Everything is under control.

  Anna donned a yellow rain slicker that she found under a waffle iron in the trunk. George didn’t ask about the waffle iron—or the toolbox, or the snowshoes, or any of the other items that together easily exceeded the weight of a spare tire. Several minutes elapsed as Anna attempted to flag down passing vehicles, only to be drenched by their splash. Eventually, a Ford truck pulled over a little way up the road.

  Anna ran the fifty-yard dash to the truck. Kate and George watched her gesture to whoever was sitting in the passenger seat. An objective observer would have thought the tale she was weaving was far more complicated than a simple flat tire. Then Anna turned around to face her travel companions, gave the thumbs-up sign, and casually walked back to the VW.

  Anna opened the car door. “Just grab your coats and whatever you need for the night. They’ll drop us in town. We’ll get the car fixed in the morning. Oh, and Kate, you’re a foreign exchange student from the former Yugoslavia.”

  Anna insisted on buying Charlie Ames and Greg Wilkes, Humboldt County loggers and longtime residents, dinner for their trouble. At least that’s what she said, but really it was to prolong Kate’s impersonation of an Eastern European exchange student. Charlie and Greg had never met anyone from a country that no longer existed. They were intrigued. They also wanted to present their country in a flattering light, and they tried to include Kate in all conversation.

  “So, Katia, how are you liking your visit so far?” Charlie asked, enunciating each syllable with careful precision.

  “Oh, America iz very nice,” said Kate in a perfect Czech accent. That was the only accent Kate could do; she figured the men wouldn’t know the difference.

  “And where were you headed before your tire blew?”

  “Avenue of the Giants,” Anna said. “That’s all we came for. Katia and I have been pen pals for almost ten years now. She read about the giant redwoods in school. Heard there was a tree you could drive your car through and jus
t had to see it. Isn’t that true, Katia?”

  “Yes,” Kate said. “I have grrret luf fur de big trees.”

  George dropped her napkin under the table and searched for it until she could get her laughter under control. This took a long time and made Charlie and Greg either suspicious or uncomfortable, which broke up Kate, who covered for her sudden, inexplicable laughter by picking up a saltshaker and saying, “Look, iz so funny. We don’ haf in my country.”

  Anna, however, was the master of her invented game. She never cracked, not during the meal or the ten-mile drive to the Redwood Lodge or even when she retold her invented tale to the motel clerk.

  “I just feel terrible. This is her first time in America and we get a flat tire.”

  In room 15 of the Redwood Lodge—which looked about as rustic as a Motel 6, with the exception of the faux-pine finish on the dresser—George and Anna passed a bottle of cheap whiskey back and forth, repeating their favorite Katia quotes of the night.

  “My home is no more der and dat make me sad.”

  “Who doesn’t vant to dance on Stalin’s grafe?”

  “In my country, lipstick is fur whores and men who vant to be vomen.”

  “Television is de best ting about your country. And Pop-Tarts.”

  “Americans are wasteful. Ve can feed a family fur a week on a pot of borscht.”

  George was awed by Kate’s ability to play Anna’s game. What George didn’t know was that Kate was always playing Anna’s games. Maybe that was why she wasn’t laughing.

  The rain never relented. The tent was never pitched. The following morning, Anna had her car towed to a gas station, where the tire was replaced. Kate insisted that Anna also purchase a spare, knowing that money was not an object. A stranger wouldn’t have guessed that Anna was a rich girl, mostly because Anna was hell-bent on avoiding that label.

  After taking a vote, the women decided to continue their rain-soaked adventure. They drove through the Avenue of the Giants, the massive trees looming above. George had never seen anything more beautiful. Kate studied her map, trying to pinpoint the location of the Stratosphere Giant, currently the tallest tree in the world—although that statistic was debatable, since not all trees had been measured.

  Despite the weather, Kate demanded they go on a hike. It was then she and Anna learned that George was on the track team as well as the basketball team. Her pace was brutal. George was so awestruck that she barely noticed her companions huffing and puffing in her wake. Kate struggled to match George’s speed while offering morsels of information she had gathered over the past few months.

  “The oldest coastal redwood is over two thousand years old. Can you imagine that?”

  “Which one is it?” George asked.

  Kate looked around. “Don’t know,” she said. “But many are at least six hundred years old. Take your pick.”

  George stopped in her tracks and craned her neck to try to see the top of a tree. As she continued along the trail, she found a white anomaly among the green brush.

  “What is this?” George asked.

  “It’s an albino redwood. A mutant,” Kate said. “They can’t manufacture chlorophyll, so they’re white. They survive as parasites, linking their root system with normal trees and getting nutrients from them. They can grow to only about sixty feet. But aren’t they cool?”

  “They’re amazing,” George said.

  Kate’s obsession had been sated. She had seen in real life what she had only read about in books. But it seemed she’d passed her obsession on to George, as if it were a physical object that could be handed off.

  Anna liked the trees and all. She didn’t mind the hike, but her internal experience was far milder than the other girls’. Anna slowly caught up with George and Kate, pulled out a joint, and lit up, smoking among the greenery.

  “How can you smoke in a place so beautiful?” George asked.

  “It makes it more beautiful,” Anna said.

  They stayed in the Redwood Lodge one more night and made s’mores on their camping stove in their room, which meant flattening them on a skillet. Kate shook her head in disappointment; this was not how it was done. She missed the smell of burned marshmallow and wanted the musty, used odor of the motel room to disappear. Anna lit a joint, even though George pointed at the No Smoking sign.

  “That only refers to cigarettes,” Anna said.

  The scent of marijuana overpowered the various odors of past occupants that seemed layered in the room. Anna passed the joint to Kate, who lately, after months of rejecting the offer, had found herself giving in now and again. She took a drag and suffered a brutal coughing fit.

  George shook her head in the manner of people who don’t partake.

  Kate said, when she could speak again, “It will make the s’mores taste better.”

  George, being the guest, was served first. The chocolate and marshmallow dripped onto her fingers, stinging them with their heat. She took a bite and thought, Why does it need to taste better?

  The next day, Anna drove thirty minutes north on the 101 and crossed the Oregon border.

  “Welcome to Oregon,” Anna said, as if she were a representative of the state. “You have now officially been to two states,” she said to Kate. “How do you feel?”

  “I think I like Oregon. It’s definitely my second-favorite state,” Kate said.

  “Excellent,” said Anna as she began looking for an exit so that they could start their journey home.

  After forty-eight hours of constant chatter, the trio drifted into silence. It wasn’t the tense silence of those who’d had their fill of one another, just an unspoken sparing of words. They knew when to speak and when to stop.

  “I’m hungry,” George announced as the mileage signs to Santa Cruz dipped into double digits.

  “I know a place,” Kate said.

  An hour later, they were sitting in Smirnoff’s Diner on Church Street, devouring an assortment of pies and French fries. Ivan, Kate’s grandfather, guardian, and the owner of the establishment, approached the table and scoffed dramatically at the victuals selected from his very own menu. Had he taken their order instead of Louise, he would have insisted on the turkey dinner or meatloaf or something that had been a square meal back in his day.

  He kissed his granddaughter on the cheek and then turned to Anna.

  “Are you behayfing yussef?” he said as he bent down to kiss her forehead.

  “Always,” Anna said, insincerely.

  “Meet George,” said Kate. “She’s our new friend.”

  “Is gut to make new frens,” Ivan said.

  George noted that Ivan’s accent was an exact replica of the one Kate used with the loggers.

  He shook George’s hand. “George, you say?”

  “Short for Georgianna,” she said.

  “I call you Georgianna,” Ivan said.

  “Okay,” George said.

  “Why did you order dis junk?” Ivan asked.

  “We were hungry,” Anna said, not exactly answering the question.

  “I bring you someting with protein,” Ivan said, still staring at the table and the young women around it.

  “I’m a vegetarian now,” Anna said.

  “You ate hamburger here last veek,” Ivan said.

  “That was last week,” Anna said. “Things change.”

  Ivan turned to George and gestured in the direction of Anna. “Watch out for dis one. She’s got the devil in her.”

  Ivan winked at Anna, but he wasn’t joking. Not exactly. He patted his granddaughter on the head and said, “I get back to the bookkeepings. I see you Monday.”

  Anna explained more of Kate’s story to George: Kate had been raised by her grandfather from the age of eight. She’d lived with him until she was eighteen, when he insisted that she move into the dormitory, even though she was going to college only a few miles from his residence. She still worked at the diner three days a week for pocket money.

  What Anna didn’t mention to Georg
e was that Kate planned on taking over the diner. Anna didn’t mention it because she couldn’t fathom anyone wanting something so ordinary out of life. Kate had tried to explain it to her. It wasn’t just about the familiarity of the diner and how it tied her to her family. She wanted something that was hers completely. A tiny kingdom to rule as a benevolent dictator. She didn’t have Anna’s gift for becoming a dictator in any situation.

  Anna pulled up in front of Stevenson College. As George slipped out into the soft, drizzly air, Anna said, “Let’s do this again sometime. And when I say this, I mean something completely different.”

  Not knowing what that something might be, George said, “That sounds fun.”

  “Don’t be a stranger,” Kate said.

  2011

  San Francisco, California

  “Who are you, Anna Fury?”

  “I have no idea,” Anna said.

  “Tell me something about yourself,” Jeff Fisher said, squinting earnestly. Jeff had various go-to expressions for a set list of situations. He reserved the squint for probing for personal details. The squint came in handy on dates. At least, dates with women who couldn’t see the squint for what it was—a schooled expression, formed with intent.

  “What do you want to know?” Anna said.

  “What makes you tick? That’s what I want to know.”

  “I think it might be my watch.”

  It had been six months since Anna was hired as a paralegal for Jeff Fisher, an intellectual property litigator. Jeff was the golden-haired boy of the office, an ex–fraternity president with plastic good looks and a suspiciously even tan. Jeff was accustomed to women responding to him—a quick laugh at one of his playground jokes, a smile in reaction to his Crest-white grin. Anna hid her growing distaste for him behind a veil of professionalism. She was respectful and prompt, giving Jeff no cause for complaint. But the smile he would demand on occasion—with the not-so-subtle “How about a smile today, Anna?”—would be answered with a broad, fake grin that she would drop the moment she turned away.

  Matthew Bloom, Jeff’s colleague, had more of a detective’s eye and saw something else. Everything about Anna spoke of extreme discipline. Her collars were always starched, her skirts neatly pressed and appropriately conservative, and yet Matthew was convinced it was a disguise. She arrived exactly fifteen minutes early for work every single day, her face flushed—he suspected from an early-morning run. She participated in minimal chitchat, made almost no personal calls, typed well below average with hands that, he’d noted, were ringless. She left work at exactly 6:00. She made it clear that overtime didn’t interest her and would agree to it only under extreme duress.