House on Fire (ARC)

by Bonnie Kistler

  “Okay, stop!” Leigh laughed.

  “So exactly how are you seeing him?”

  Leigh knew she was teasing her, but she tried to answer anyway. Her relationship with Stephen was more than simple friendship, but the extra dimension was hard to define. It wasn’t priest-penitent, not exactly. She didn’t confess everything to him, and he never preached at her and certainly didn’t grant her absolution. Sometimes she thought of it as a therapist-patient relationship, but Stephen confided too much about his own struggles for that to be accurate.

  “It’s like we’re in AA,” she said finally. “And he’s my sponsor.”

  “Huh. So what is it you’re addicted to?”

  Grief was the obvious answer, but she was spared speaking it as their plates arrived. She changed the subject, to the new man in Shelby’s life. He was a complete departure from her usual type. He was black, for one thing, and older than she was, and as a senior cabinet official, he had an even more distinguished career. “So what’s he like?” Leigh asked. “More Denzel Washington or Idris Elba?”

  Shelby pretended to deliberate. “Morgan Freeman,” she said finally.

  Leigh sputtered a laugh, and Shelby joined in until they sounded nearly as raucous as the reunion table of young people across the room.

  That party was starting to break up. They were all on their feet and going through an exchange of elaborate good-byes around the table. One of the young women turned to one of the men and presented her cheek for a peck, but he grabbed hold of her instead and bent her backward like the iconic sailor and nurse in Times Square on V-J Day. He dipped her so low the girl’s wheat-blond ponytail swept the floor. Everyone laughed, and she joined in good-naturedly, straightened her dress, and headed for the door.

  A beat too late Leigh recognized her. She jumped up from the table and ran for the door and burst out on the pavement as the ponytail fluttered around the corner at the end of the block. By the time she reached the corner, Emily Whitman was out of sight.

  Shelby came up behind her. “What the hell was that about?”

  Leigh struggled to catch her breath. “I thought I recognized somebody.”

  “Who?”

  She searched the skyline of all the familiar Foggy Bottom landmarks. The Kennedy Center was nearby. George Washington University, the World Bank, the State Department, and the notorious Watergate hotel complex. The mysterious minister of disinformation could have disappeared into any of those buildings. “Oh, nobody important,” she said finally. “Shall we go back and pay the check?”

  “Already taken care of,” Shelby said and linked arms with Leigh for their walk back to work.

  Leigh received a call that afternoon from someone named Deborah confirming her appointment with Dr. Alfarsi the next day.

  “You have the wrong number,” she said and started to hang up.

  “Wait—isn’t this Leigh Huyett?”

  “Yes, but I’m not a patient of your practice.”

  “I was told—” Some papers rustled on the other end of the line. “Oh. This is Devra from Dr. Alfarsi’s office calling to confirm your appointment.”

  “Oh!” Leigh took down the address the woman recited. “Yes, tomorrow at nine thirty. I’ll be there.”

  Dr. Alfarsi was a gynecologist, and his office was in a brick town house shrouded in tangled vines of ivy on a quiet, tree-lined street in Alexandria. Leigh announced herself at the reception desk and was immediately ushered down a wainscoted hallway and into a small examining room. The walls of the room were hung with posters illustrating the development of a fetus from blastocyst to zygote to full-term infant. “Have a seat,” the nurse said. “The doctor will be right with you.”

  The doctor meaning Devra, but the subterfuge was so much like a real doctor’s visit that Leigh wouldn’t have been surprised if they gave her a paper gown and made her put her feet in the stirrups. The examination table took up most of the room, but there were two chairs, and she took one of them and pulled out her notes. She’d done some further work on the Virginia domicile issue and had a list of questions for Devra to complete the analysis. One of them she could cross off already. Receiving her medical care in Alexandria would be one point on the Virginia side of the scale.

  The door opened again, and Devra swept in. Gracefully, as if in a dance, she removed her abaya. Beneath it she wore a sleeveless, full-skirted dress with elephants embroidered in gold thread around the hemline. Her hair was styled differently today, in a sleek French twist, and she had dark circles under her eyes that her elaborate makeup failed to conceal.

  She held out both hands to Leigh. “Thank you for meeting me here. I was afraid my Saturdays at Saks were becoming too regular. Hassan”—she nodded in the direction of the waiting room—“could become suspicious.”

  “He may already be,” Leigh said.

  Devra’s brow furrowed as Leigh told her about Emily Whitman and her threats. “I don’t understand. Why should this woman care about such a thing?”

  “She must work for your husband. He must suspect that you’ve been meeting with me.”

  Devra’s eyes went wide and fearful.

  “I took the liberty of getting this for you.” Leigh handed her a prepaid, disposable phone. “My numbers are programmed in. Office, home, and mobile. Whenever you need to talk to me, call me on this.”

  Devra took it gingerly. “I don’t know if this is possible. There are people . . .”

  “Take it in the bathroom,” Leigh suggested, remembering a hundred different spy movies. “Turn the shower on.”

  Devra still looked doubtful. Leigh wondered if she’d never used a mobile phone or if her doubts went deeper. “That is, if you’ve decided to go forward?”

  “I have.” Devra straightened. “I wish to file immediately in Virginia on grounds of adultery.”

  She’d gotten ahead of herself on both points, and Leigh hurried to rein her in. Virginia jurisdiction was still uncertain, she told her—they needed to examine the domicile issue more closely. And a claim of adultery wasn’t certain either.

  “But you told me—” Devra sounded betrayed. “You told me his second and third marriages would not be recognized by your courts.”

  “That’s correct, but he could assert a defense known as condonation. If you continued to have sexual relations with him after you knew about the other wives, then you’re considered to have condoned his adultery. So the crucial question is, when did you learn of his subsequent marriages?”

  Her erect carriage collapsed. “I attended the weddings,” she said helplessly. She looked up from her bowed shoulders. “So I am lost?”

  “In Virginia, there’s still the alternative of no-fault divorce. You mentioned you have a country home there?”

  “Yes.”

  Leigh took out her notes. “What’s the address there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Her head came up. “You don’t know your address?”

  “How would I know it?” A defensive tone crept into the sheikha’s voice. “Someone else drives me there. Someone else handles the mail. Why should I concern myself?”

  “Well, if you could move there and live apart from your husband for a year—”

  She sighed as if she were trying once again to explain something to a slow pupil. “This is impossible. He would not allow it.”

  Leigh forged ahead. “There’s another alternative. In the District, you’ll recall, separation from bed and board can suffice. You could continue living with your husband but sever all sexual relations—”

  “This is even more impossible!” Devra looked appalled. “A wife may not refuse sex! My husband would—” She broke off with a hand to her heaving chest.

  “He would—what? Would he hurt you?”

  “I have never given him cause. But a husband has that right.”

  Another idea sta
rted to take shape in Leigh’s mind. “You’re afraid he might exercise it?”

  “Of course I’m afraid. But it’s more than that. It would be a sin for me to refuse him. The angels would curse me!”

  Leigh nodded but it was only the first part that interested her, her admission of fear. “Another fault ground is cruelty.”

  “No. He has never once struck me.”

  “The law requires only that you have a reasonable apprehension of bodily harm.”

  “It feels dishonest to claim such a thing.” Devra’s black eyes stared unfocused into the middle distance, as hazy as if she were looking through the veiled slit in her niqab.

  Leigh followed her gaze to the posters on the wall, and a half-dozen embryonic children gazed back at her. “You can leave him, you can refuse sex, or you can sue for divorce on the basis of cruelty. I’m afraid I don’t see another alternative.”

  “Except to stay with him.” Devra stood up so abruptly that the elephant embroidery on her dress swayed like a swinging trunk. “I must reflect further on these things.”

  Leigh rose to her feet. “Of course.”

  Devra rewrapped her abaya and opened the door a crack. “Someone will contact you.” She peered out into the hallway. “Please wait here until we’ve gone.”

  Leigh waited ten minutes before she left, though it probably didn’t matter anymore. She wasn’t sure she’d ever hear from Devra again, on the prepaid phone or otherwise. In the rules of their world, Devra’s ability to divorce would always be defeated by the sheikh’s unwillingness to let her leave him.

  Though maybe it wasn’t cultural, she reflected on the drive back to the office. Maybe it was simply that some husbands held on tighter than others.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Two weeks into summer Kip mutinied. “I’m done with all that,” he announced from his cot Sunday morning. This was his version of taking a stand: lying flat on his back. “I’m not going.”

  “You damn well are,” Pete said, because he had to, not because it would make any difference. Short of dragging the kid out of bed and wrestling him into the truck, there was no way he could force him to spend the day with his mother. He was eighteen now, a theoretical adult, and all the carefully negotiated and sometimes hard-fought visitation protocols were out the window. Kip didn’t have to visit anybody he didn’t want to anymore.

  “What’re you gonna do, stuck here all day?”

  He scrunched up his pillow and flopped over. “Catch up on my z’s.”

  Fair enough. He’d been working long days for the past two weeks. It was hard for Pete to believe the Millers could have so much clutter—they must be major-league hoarders—but Kip seemed to like the work. He tore out to the Jag every morning when Yana arrived to pick him up, and he staggered back every night looking wrung out but happy, the way a guy should look after a good day’s physical labor.

  “Suit yourself,” Pete said, but he gritted out the words to show he was still pissed.

  Karen answered the door and looked past him to the driveway, smiling her tentative smile at the truck until she saw that Kip wasn’t in it. Her eyes filled with tears.

  Pete leaned in and spoke in a low voice. “Call him. It’s not you he’s avoiding.”

  She blinked and looked away.

  “Daddy!” Mia squealed as she pranced down the stairs in her party dress, and he caught her up in his arms and gave her a twirl.

  Pete didn’t have to come up with any ideas for today’s outing. It was already ordained: she had a birthday party to attend. He drove her to her friend’s house on the far side of the school district and followed behind as she skipped to the front door clutching her gift like the ticket to admission. “Hello, Mia!” the friend’s mom cried out in a voice like a circus ringleader. “Hurry! Come see what’s out back!” She prised the gift from Mia’s hands and waved her inside, then stepped aside to hold the door open for Pete. “Come in, Mia’s daddy!” she cried at the same volume. “The men are in the man cave! The game’s already started!”

  Ten years ago a birthday party meant a free afternoon. He’d drop Kip off and get some work done or run some errands. These days it seemed the parents were expected to stay. Calliope music was playing, and through the rear-facing windows of the house he saw that the backyard was set up like a carnival, with food stalls and game booths and bouncy houses. A dozen children were streaking from one attraction to another as a dozen women stood in little chatting knots to watch them. In the shade of an oak tree in the corner of a yard stood a pony with a daisy-chain halter, his head hung low like a boxer steeling himself for the next round.

  “Go on down.”

  The woman flung open a door, and the unmistakable roar of a stadium crowd came up from the basement. Pete followed the organ music downstairs and around a corner to the glow of a giant TV. The game was up on the screen—Orioles versus the Padres today—and three men sprawled in leather recliners in front of it. One of them squeaked upright to shake Pete’s hand and introduce himself along with the other two guys, who thrust out their hands without rising. The host handed Pete a beer and waved him into the fourth recliner.

  Maybe times had changed for the better, Pete thought as he pushed back and watched his legs elevate before him. He popped the tab on his beer and took a cold swallow. This was as relaxed as he’d felt in two months. Sunday afternoon, kicking back and watching the game, no pressure to make conversation, just good ol’ silent male companionship. Mostly silent, anyway. The other two guys were divorced dads, too, and between their intermittent play-by-plays, they exchanged a few commiserating quips about visitation hassles. And all four men exchanged their job titles like business cards passed around a Japanese conference table. IT, for one. Government for another. Government IT for the third. “Construction,” Pete said when his own turn arrived. “Ah. Real work,” the host dad said, while the other two gave approving nods.

  It was a respite to spend time away from St. Alban, with people who didn’t know anything about Kip or Chrissy or what their family was going through. Nobody was looking at him funny, wondering what it must be like, watching for him to crack under the pressure. Here he was just an ordinary dad with an ordinary kid. He finished his beer, dipped a few chips, and let himself relax. The Orioles were three up when his eyelids drooped to half-mast and the stadium sounds faded to a peaceful drone.

  “Mr., uh—Mia’s daddy?” the lady ringleader shouted from the top of the stairs. “Could you come up a sec?”

  He lurched out of the recliner and trotted up the stairs. “What’s up?”

  The woman made a sad-clown face. “Mia’s not having very much fun, I’m afraid.”

  He followed her outside into the whirling dervish of the carnival kids. It took a minute for him to pick out his own. She was huddled under the cake table, behind the flapping skirt of a pink paper tablecloth, her face hidden against her knees.

  “Hey, sweetie, what’s going on?” His knees creaked as he squatted beside her.

  She shook her head without lifting it.

  “She’s afraid of the pony.” A little girl stood behind him with her hands on her tiny hips. “We’re supposed to take turns riding him, but she won’t do it.”

  “Is that right?” he said to Mia. “Well, you don’t have to ride if you don’t want to.”

  “But it’s part of the party,” the other child insisted.

  “There’s other parts you can do. Do you want to come out and do some of those?”

  Mia shook her head against her knees. “I wanna go home,” she whispered.

  He reached for her under the table and she came into his arms and buried her face in his shoulder as he cracked his knees straight again. “I guess we better go,” he said to the hostess.

  “I’m so sorry! I never would have guessed she’d be so scared. I mean, he’s only twelve hands high!”

  “Thank
you for having her,” he said and bore his sobbing child out to the street.

  She calmed down after they were in the truck and he promised her ice cream. It was a bad reflex on his part, he knew, consoling her with ice cream every time she got upset. But it was a relief to see the tears subside, and even better to see a smile flicker over her face as she put tongue to chocolate cone.

  “Mia—honey—I know you don’t like horses, and that’s fine. Lots of people don’t. I don’t much like cats.”

  “Even Goodness and Mercy?”

  “All of them. So I avoid them, and it’s fine for you to avoid horses and ponies, too. But here’s the thing. You don’t need to be afraid of them. You just say no thank you and do something else.”

  “I was afraid they’d laugh at me.”

  “So what if they do? You just laugh back. You don’t need to be afraid of those kids. You don’t need to be afraid of anything. I’m always going to protect you and keep you safe.”

  She stared at him while a drip of melted ice cream trickled down her hand and puddled on the table. “You’re not always there.”

  Neither was any dad, but Pete’s noncustodial guilt still made him flinch at the reminder. “But somebody’s always there. Mommy and Gary. Or Grandma, or your teachers. Right? You’re never alone. All of us are there to keep you safe. That’s our job.”

  She considered that as she licked a trail up her hand. “For how long?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Until I’m twelve, or fifteen, or how old?”

  “Forever.”

  Her stare turned suddenly accusing. “Chrissy was fourteen and nobody kept her safe.”

  Fuck. Why did he not see that coming. His mind churned for a response. “Well, that was because something was wrong in her brain—”

  “Kip’s eighteen, and he’s not safe. He might have to go to jail! Gary says—”

  “No.” Goddam that Gary March. “He’s wrong. Kip’s not going to jail.”