How to Start a Fire Page 6

  Her beer empty, she tossed the bottle in a grocery bag brimming with others of its kind. More booze arrived, and another unfamiliar face passed her a plastic cup filled with vodka and cranberry juice.

  “Thanks,” Anna said.

  When she was halfway through her drink and feeling a warm buzz, a hand reached out from the mass of bodies and pulled her away like a rip tide. Red liquid splashed from her cup and she found herself face to face with Malcolm Davis.

  She noticed his eyebrows first, black and severe and completely at odds with his warm brown eyes. Anna also liked Malcolm’s nose, which veered just slightly to the right. (She always figured he’d gotten it from a fight but had never had her theory confirmed. Anna’s mother once described Malcolm as Jewish-looking. Later, in school, one of Anna’s classmates asked her what her type was. “Jewish,” she’d said.)

  “Come with me,” Malcolm said, brusquely ushering her out of the party.

  Silently he dragged her through the hallway, down a flight of stairs, and into the dorm room he shared with her brother. While Malcolm’s expression was an exact replica of the scowl of disappointment that Anna had come to see as normal in grownups, it looked funny on a nineteen-year-old male.

  “Your parents phoned Colin five hours ago after an exhaustive search in Boston. Where have you been?”

  “It takes a long time to get from Boston to Princeton. Did you know there are no direct trains?”

  “This isn’t funny, Anna. Nobody knew what happened to you.”

  “Ah, that’s what I forgot. I should have left a note,” Anna said, as if she had forgotten to buy a gallon of milk on her way home.

  Malcolm picked up the phone and beat numbers into the handset. Anna thought about tackling him to the floor, but she knew he’d still find a way to make contact with the furious Furys, so she raided the minifridge, uncapped a beer, and sat down on her brother’s bed.

  “Hi, Donald, it’s Malcolm. She’s here. I would drive her home myself, but I let a friend borrow my car for the weekend. Colin is on his way to Boston. Maybe he’ll call from the road so he doesn’t have to make a full trip. I’ll put her on a train tomorrow morning. Do you want to speak to her?”

  Malcolm extended the phone to Anna while trying to confiscate her beer. She shook her head no. Malcolm covered the mouthpiece and whispered, “I’ll let you have the beer if you talk to him.”

  “Hi, Dad,” Anna said. “I’m sorry about that. I just needed to get away. You know how that is.”

  Malcolm could hear Donald yelling all the way from Boston. Anna moved the phone away from her ear. When her father quieted, Anna spoke again.

  “Tell Mom I’m sorry. Tell her if she really wants to punish me, she must never invite me to lunch again.”

  With that, the phone call ended. As far as Malcolm could tell, Donald had hung up on his daughter. Anna wasn’t one to fret over future punishments. She had learned long ago that punishments would always be in her future. She took another swig of beer and smiled at Malcolm.

  “How should we celebrate?” she asked.

  “What are we celebrating?” Malcolm said.

  “My last night of freedom. After this I’ll be kept under lock and key for at least the next few months.”

  “Why do you do this, Anna? It only causes trouble for you and your family.”

  “Sometimes I just need to breathe fresh air,” Anna said.

  A stranger wouldn’t know what she was talking about, but Malcolm did. After his first visit to the Fury home, he’d described it to his stepfather as being like a smoky bar: the air was always thick, and you couldn’t see anyone too clearly.

  “Come on,” Malcolm said to Anna. “I’ll buy you an ice cream.”

  “That wasn’t what I had in mind,” Anna said.

  “Too bad.”

  It was too late for any ice cream parlors to be open, so Anna and Malcolm walked to a corner shop and studied options in the freezer case.

  “Butter rum,” Anna said.

  “You know there’s no rum to speak of in there,” Malcolm said.

  Later, after an hour of negotiations, Anna finally agreed to stay in bed on the condition that Malcolm tuck her in and read her a story. Malcolm sat on top of the covers next to Anna and opened a well-worn paperback.

  “‘The New Music,’ by Donald Barthelme. Have you heard of him?” Malcolm asked.

  “Nope.”

  “‘What did you do today?’”

  “I escaped,” Anna said.

  “Shhh, I’m reading,” Malcolm said and continued. “‘What did you do today?’

  “‘—Went to the grocery store and Xeroxed a box of English muffins, two pounds of ground veal and an apple. In flagrant violation of the Copyright Act—’”

  “This is the best story ever,” Anna said.

  “Shhh,” Malcolm hissed and continued. “‘You had your nap, I remember that—’

  “‘I had my nap.’

  “‘Lunch, I remember that, there was lunch—’”

  “There was no lunch,” Anna said, interrupting for the very last time.

  Colin Fury returned to his dorm after driving four hours in one direction, stopping for gas, making a phone call in which he discovered his sister’s whereabouts, and then driving four more hours in the other direction. It was 4:00 a.m. when he rolled his sister off his bed. She landed with a thump on the floor, which jarred her out of a deep sleep.

  “Sorry,” Anna said after she’d worked out her current situation. She realized she needed a pillow and a blanket and asked for them politely. Colin wrapped his bedding tightly around his body so that it couldn’t be stolen in the night and clutched both pillows as if they were family heirlooms and he were in a roomful of thieves. Malcolm took pity and gave Anna the blankets and one pillow from his bed after Colin was asleep.

  Later that morning, Colin drove his sister to the train station, bought her a ticket, and waited with her on the platform until the train arrived. Standing side by side, the two were unmistakably siblings. Colin just got more of the good DNA, Anna thought. Anna’s Roman nose dominated her face, but on Colin, it appeared elegant. Their eyes had the same downward slant. On Anna, they looked exacting; on Colin, mysterious. He also got better hair, darker and thicker. Just a year ago, when Anna realized she had reached her full height, she’d said to her brother, “Two of your inches. They should be mine.”

  Colin had given her twenty bucks and suggested they call it even.

  When it was time for Anna to board the train, Colin hugged his sister, mussed up her hair, and said, “For now, suck it up. In three years you’ll never have to live there again.”

  2006

  Boston, Massachusetts

  Lena stood on the threshold of Anna’s bedroom, or the bedroom that Anna had once inhabited and was now inhabiting again, though it had been redone as a guest room. Unlike the first time she’d occupied the space, the room showed little evidence of the person who lived there. The guest-room walls, set off by a flowery duvet, were painted white with pastel trim. Anna thought the white was a statement beyond a preference for white. When Anna was sixteen, while her parents spent a weekend in Vermont, she had found a shade of red like the blood from a fresh wound and painted three of her four walls with it. A wild standoff ensued, which Anna naturally won. Two years later, on the very afternoon Anna departed for college, Lena had those blood-red walls sandblasted.

  Lena no longer ventured over the threshold, Anna noticed, although she couldn’t remember when she’d first noticed it. Anna looked at the clock. It was eleven fifteen at night.

  “What are you doing tomorrow?” Lena asked.

  “I’ll start with a long nap,” Anna said. “Maybe eight hours.”

  “You should get some air. Do something outside,” her mother said.

  “Are you having a luncheon?” Anna asked.

  The last time she’d been asked to leave the house, her mother was entertaining. Anna was no longer the type of daughter a mother could sho
w off. Not that she was ever that type, but for a few years there, on paper, Anna could spark the occasional daughter-envy in the luncheon set, if you didn’t have too deep a conversation about her. But those days were long gone. Anna was now thirty-one years old, living at home, doing virtually nothing at all. Well, not exactly nothing.

  “I am having a few people over from the committee,” Lena said.

  There was always a committee. Anna never pressed her for details.

  “What time will they be arriving?”

  “Around eleven thirty.”

  “I will be long gone by then.”

  “Susan will be sorry she missed you,” Lena said, without irony. She hovered in the doorway. Lena was the sort of woman who found questions beyond the banal—Where did you get those gorgeous shoes?—rude or intrusive. But her daughter had never made any sense to her. Now more than ever. And after what happened, well, Lena had begun asking more questions because that sort of thing could not happen again. Lena wouldn’t stand for it.

  “What do you do with your days?” Lena asked.

  “I go to meetings.”

  “Besides meetings.”

  “I read. I take walks. I drink coffee. I think about what I’m going to be when I grow up.”

  “Well? Have you come to any conclusions?” Lena asked, folding her arms in a defensive posture.

  “No,” Anna said.

  “I hope this is something you’ve been discussing with Dr. Stein.”

  “Mom, he’s a psychiatrist, not a career counselor.”

  “For two hundred dollars an hour, he should be both.”

  “I can move out, if you’d like,” Anna said. She wished her quiet threat had more power. Anna’s medical school debt and dismal job prospects had left her in the red. She had some small savings from her trust fund, most of which had been blown on medical school and drugs. She had only what her parents gave her, and that left her at their mercy.

  “I don’t want you to move out, dear. But if you could keep me apprised of your schedule, I’d appreciate that.”

  “Of course,” Anna said.

  “I was once a Supreme Court justice. I made a single bad decision on, um, what was it again? Weston v. the State of Kentucky. I have since fallen from grace. Forgive my appearance. I used to wear suits designed by what’s his name,” said the man in the library.

  Anna had seen him there before. He smelled better than he looked like he’d smell, so Anna didn’t mind when he struck up a conversation.

  “I don’t know,” Anna said.

  “You know. The suit designer.”

  “There’s more than one.”

  “No. The one.”

  “Um, Hugo Boss,” Anna said, because those were the suits her brother wore.

  “Hugo who?” the fallen justice said.

  “Armani?”

  “Yes. Ar-man-i. He used to make suits just for me. I’d call him up and tell him what colors and what fabrics, and two days later, they would be on my doorstep.”

  “That’s a very fast turnaround.”

  “I believe he had help,” the justice said.

  “I’m sure he did.”

  “If you’re important, you have help.”

  “I suppose that’s true.”

  “Do you have help?”

  “No.”

  “You must not be important.”

  “I’m not,” Anna said.

  A librarian approached the table and knocked twice on the cherry-wood corner to get the justice’s attention. She raised an eyebrow, and a silent exchange passed between them. The justice got to his feet, dusted off his jacket, and adjusted the bandanna he wore around his neck as if it were a cravat.

  “Pardon me,” the justice said to Anna. “I have a meeting downtown in twenty minutes.” He glanced at the invisible watch on his bare wrist, tipped an imaginary hat, and departed.

  Other than rare conversations with Supreme Court justices, Anna’s days were differentiated only by appointments. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, meetings started at 7:00 p.m.; Tuesday and Thursday, she had Dr. Stein at 3:00 p.m. Mornings were spent in the library, the park, sometimes the museum, other times a café, where she brought a hefty book to guard herself against the other patrons. Thursday, Anna’s brother always asked her to lunch. Sometimes she said yes.

  Every Wednesday, Anna handwrote a letter to Kate. This was after her telephone and then e-mail attempts to make contact had failed. Anna recalled Kate saying once that e-mail would kill the letter, and it did. But Anna knew how much Kate preferred the older form of communication and thought that by resurrecting it, she might lure Kate back into an exchange. Anna wrote to Kate six times before she received a reply. She never knew when Kate would get the letters, since her address was a PO box in Colorado, from which her mail would be forwarded to whatever part of the country she was currently passing through. After a while Anna stopped thinking of her letters as one side of an even exchange. Things weren’t even between the two of them. Nor did they feel even between George and Anna, but communicating with George was simpler, if ultimately less satisfying.

  After leaving a few voice-mail messages that went unanswered, Anna sent George an e-mail, because she knew George didn’t hold any romantic notions about the long-lost letter.

  TO: George Leoni

  FROM: Anna Fury

  George,

  I’m sure you know enough about recovery that you could probably see this part coming. Maybe that’s why you didn’t return any of my calls. I don’t want this apology to hurt you or dredge up memories that you’d rather forget, but some things no one will forget.

  I don’t remember that night, but I know it happened because I was careless. I am more sorry for that than anything else I did, and I did so many things I regret. I’m also sorry that it took me eight years to say something. I’m not sure which is worse. There’s more, I know. But most things I can’t remember. I hope that doesn’t sound like an excuse. I own every mistake I made.

  I know this is insufficient, as apologies go. I’ve got far better apologies up my sleeve; just say the word. I’m happy to provide them for you at any time and in any form you like—in person, by telephone, theatrical performance, PowerPoint presentation. I know that nothing will ever be enough, but I can do better than this. I hope you can forgive me for some of these things.

  Love,

  Anna

  During their entire friendship, George often felt like Anna owed her an apology, but mostly for crimes so small she would have felt foolish asking for one. Anna rarely took out the trash, she never returned a CD to its case, and she always left just an inch of milk in the carton. There was something about this particular apology that was too big and sweeping for George. She began to wonder about Anna’s other transgressions, the ones she didn’t know about. She figured there were plenty. Still, Anna was certainly paying for her mistakes.

  TO: Anna Fury

  FROM: George Leoni

  A,

  Thanks for the note. It matters. But it was all a long time ago. It would be nice to try to forget.

  Here’s a picture of my oldest animal.

  G

  George included a photo of Carter, now four, hanging precariously from a tree branch. George wrote to Kate right after she responded to Anna.

  TO: Kate Smirnoff

  FROM: George Leoni

  K,

  I guess Anna is at some step of recovery that involves making amends. I think she’s really trying this time. And the apology I’ve hoped for has seemed to change over the years.

  Have you heard from her? When are you coming home? This road trip of yours, I don’t like it.

  G

  Kate no longer attempted any longhand correspondence with George, who insisted that there was no point in communicating with someone if you could not actually decipher the communication. So their exchanges were reduced to telegram-length communiqués.

  TO: George Leoni

  FROM: Kate Smirnoff

  Georg
e,

  Yes, I have heard from her. I haven’t replied yet, but I’ll get around to it. I do think this time is different.

  As for my road trip, I’ll be back when my business is done.

  Kate

  It was George’s e-mail that finally prompted Kate to respond to Anna. She was waiting for Anna to figure out the one apology that mattered, but maybe Anna would never uncover it on her own. Anna saw her life before recovery as one big error and she’d apologized for all of it. If Kate wanted a specific apology, she would have to ask.

  When Anna got the letter from Kate, it was the first time she’d heard from her in almost six months. The postmark on the envelope was Bismarck, North Dakota, and the note was written on stale stationery from a Motel 6. If Anna had one gripe about hearing from her, it was the same gripe everyone had: Kate’s unruly script made her letters as comprehensible as redacted government documents.

  Anna,

  I got your letters. And thanks. I was tthrslnfl for a while, but I’m jhkemmn now. I know it’s part of your iewrnc to kwejreoiej the past. But do we need to ojerfg? I hope you’re doing okay. And that living with your qwewq isn’t werhwje your khwevv. It would pkloij with mine. Seems like there has to be vcffhgj way. Let me know how you’re doing. How you fill your days.

  Have you heard about the hhumsltond of the wekjrlg Bkersg? I, for one, am kerqpmm. How do you go your whole life being a slwwsf and then, suddenly, you’re not a slwwsf anymore. Correction: ewjrop. What does that even mean? I see an msqqprm taking lllqwec. Five, ten years from now, when someone gets wkppmvma or wjeojroj his or her job, people will say, “He was looenowejn.” “Are you lejworjmv me?” someone will say when witnessing a kihywghf. “That was some olejpwejr, wasn’t it?” Hmm, I’m not sure about the ppajkkd of the last one, but I think you get the yurjs.

  Do you think I should write NASA?