She imagined Zinny, the trees towering over her, the smell of the match, a corner of the page catching fire, the orange flame eating the page, turning the white black, turning it to nothing.
Zinny, working magic.
The journal had been in the suitcase Avery’s grandmother had left her, hidden underneath the rest of the books so that she’d only found it this morning. Found it and read it straight through.
Zinny. That ferocious, courageous, liquid, shimmering girl who wrote and drew and strung snowflakes on fishing line and jumped off cliffs and invented words and loved her brother and stood by her friends.
Zinny was her mother.
Was? Is?
Did you stop being your old selves? Did they fall away? Were you always only the self you were in the present?
Or were you, every second of your life, all the selves you’d ever been? Avery hoped it was this. She wanted to meet Zinny, to meet her and to sit with her and listen to her tell the rest of the story. She wanted it so much.
Avery loved her mother. But she took care of their house and gardened and walked the dogs and worried about Avery. And she had married Avery’s father. Had there been a moment with him, too, with kites overhead and the sun straight above, a moment when love arrived whole and perfect and true? Avery could not imagine it.
She found her mother in the sunroom, sitting on the floor, her back to Avery, a sketch pad (a sketch pad!) open on the coffee table in front of her, her hair in a ponytail, her head bent. Avery saw her mother drawing, and she could not remember having seen her draw like that before, and for one flashing, dizzy second, she believed Zinny had come back, flown out of the past and alighted in Avery’s present.
Then, her mother looked over her shoulder and smiled at Avery, and she wasn’t Zinny.
But maybe she was.
“Hey, love,” said her mother.
Avery took the journal from behind her back and held it out to her mother, and her mother stretched out her hands to take it and stopped, her two hands just hovering in the air. Then, she pressed her hands to her mouth.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God.”
“It was in the suitcase,” said Avery.
“I don’t understand.”
“From Grandmother.”
Avery’s mother stood, her face full of confusion, and she walked to the sofa and sat. As Avery went to sit next to her, she glanced down at the sketch pad. Walt looking just like Walt. Noble and cute at the same time. One ear up, one ear down.
“Oh my God, Mom, that’s so good,” said Avery.
Her mother reached out and took the journal and opened it, turning pages with her pretty, long-fingered hands.
“I can’t believe she saved this,” she said. She looked at Avery, and Avery saw something in her mother’s face that broke her heart a little: surprise. Her mother hadn’t realized her own mother had cared enough to save an old journal all these years. This didn’t seem to Avery such an unusual thing for a parent to do (her own mother saved everything Avery had ever written or made), but the fact seemed to leave her mother positively awestruck. Her expression dissipated slowly, and she said, “You read it?”
Avery nodded.
“Wow,” said her mother. “Oh my.”
Her mother pressed a hand to her own cheek and then to her chest.
“So what happened?” demanded Avery, eagerly. “What happened on the missing page? What was the bad thing that happened after Gray’s dad died in the fire?”
Avery’s mother seemed to snap out of a daze. “What?”
“The torn-out pages, the ones you burned. What was on them?”
And then, before her eyes, Avery’s mother deflated, her shoulders sagging. “Oh, honey.”
“Come on, Mom, hurry up! I need to know. Just tell me.”
“I can’t.”
Stunned, Avery said, “What? Why not?”
Her mother set the journal in her lap and shut her eyes and rubbed the delicate skin under her eyes with her fingertips. When she opened her eyes again, they were sad.
“I just—can’t,” said her mother. “I’m sorry.”
Avery felt a surge of anger. “But you have to, Mom! I need to know. I can’t explain why exactly, but I need to.”
Her mother shook her head, an almost slow-motion swiveling that made Avery want to take her shoulders and shake her, snap her out of it.
“I would if I could, honey, but I can’t. And trust me, it wouldn’t do you any good to know.”
Suddenly, Avery felt angry. And as much as she wanted to know—was dying to know—the rest of the story, she understood that her anger was much bigger than that.
“You don’t get to decide that,” she said. “Why are you always trying to protect me from stuff? I’m not a baby, and I’m not stupid.”
“I—I’m not always trying to protect you,” said her mother.
“Are you kidding me? That’s all you do. Everything with dad? How you won’t even answer my questions about what he did? Or how you act like it wasn’t that bad?”
Her mother opened her mouth as if to speak but then shut it again.
“You threw him out of your room. Do you think I don’t know what that means? And guess what? He’s gone. If it wasn’t that bad, why are you getting a divorce, Mom?”
Her mother looked stunned.
“Avery! We haven’t even talked about divorce.”
“Stop lying. Obviously, you’re going to get a divorce!”
Her mother took a deep breath. “Oh. Well. Okay, yes. We will. We just haven’t said that word to each other yet, but we will get a divorce.”
“Finally.” Avery spit out the word; she felt ablaze with anger. “Finally, you tell me the truth.”
“But, listen, it’s more complicated than what he did or didn’t do and—”
“Oh, is it too complicated? Am I too stupid to understand? Am I too fragile to handle it? You always treat me like that. But I’m not, Mom. I’m way stronger than you think.”
After a long pause, her mother said, “You’re right. You and I should sit down and have an honest conversation about what happened with your dad. I should’ve done that a long time ago,” and the stark tenderness with which her mother looked at her when she said this would’ve softened Avery at any other time. But now it just made her furious.
“Yeah, well, you didn’t. And it’s not because I’m not brave enough to hear it. It’s because you weren’t brave enough to say it.”
Her mother winced.
“So tell me,” said Avery, in a hard voice. “Tell me about what was on the torn-out page.”
“Please stop asking that,” said her mother. “I can’t tell you.”
“What the hell? I can’t believe you.”
Avery yanked the journal, Zinny’s journal, hers now, off her mother’s lap. She crossed the room in three strides, but before she left, she shouted at her mother, “You know what? If Zinny met you now, she would hate you. She would think you were pathetic.”
Without waiting for a reaction, Avery stormed out of the room.
And storming felt very good to her.
Chapter Twelve
Ginny
People say fire is cleansing.
Sterilizing needles. Clearing underbrush from forests. Setting meadows ablaze so that they can be reborn. Smelting. Refining. Burning off impurities to find the gold inside.
Applying fire to steel makes it stronger.
People also say: fight fire with fire. And I’ve learned that this is more than a metaphor for revenge. A controlled burn can stop a wildfire in its tracks.
When I was eighteen and fire entered my life, all it did was ruin things.
Gray wanted his father to see him and accept him and love him for who he was, and I think his father would have, I really do, but some human monster set a fire that killed him before he had the chance, and could anything be sadder than that?
Fire is thievery and heartbreak and lost love and unleashed rage and fallin
g and broken necks and unfinished stories.
And still, there came a bleak and desperate night when I stood in the woods behind my neighborhood and lit a match and put my faith in the cleansing properties of fire, and when I walked away from those woods, my hands empty, I tried hard to believe that it had worked, that the bad had been burned away. But the bad remained. And nothing, not one thing, was cleaner.
The fire at Lucretia Mott School would be ruled an arson, but the night I burned the journal page, not even the fire marshal knew that yet. Rumors were already flying, of course. A drunk public school boy—a known troublemaker—had been seen hanging out behind the groundskeeper’s shed, where the rakes, hedge trimmers, lawn mowers, and gasoline were stored. Rumor had it that the boy was overheard making threatening remarks about Lucretia Mott; when CJ was standing in line for the snack bar, he had heard him say that all the spoiled rich LM kids made him sick. Rumor had it that there was gasoline missing from the shed, although later, the groundskeeper couldn’t declare for an absolute fact that this was true.
When we heard about the drunk boy, CJ remembered that when he was on his way back after stowing his sax in the hiding place, he’d seen what might have been that same kid run right past him toward the back door to the school, the one CJ had just come out of. As soon as he remembered, CJ went to the police and told them. But even though he was almost positive it was the same kid, CJ hadn’t been paying enough attention to make an absolutely positive identification or to recall if the boy had been carrying anything, like a can of gasoline, and even though no one could blame CJ for not remembering (it was dark; he was sneaking around himself, stowing his sax; he was eager to get back to the game to relish LM’s defeat; there was no reason at that point to be suspicious), CJ blamed himself, terribly.
Although there would never be enough evidence to arrest the drunk boy, a lot of people were sure he had done it.
But there were people in our city who knew, weeks before the fire marshal’s ruling, that the fire had been deliberately set, and who knew, too, that the drunk public school boy had not been the one to set it, and, even though I would’ve given anything—anything—to not have been one of those people, I was.
I couldn’t sleep that night.
I hadn’t seen or spoken to Gray in the five days since his father’s death. His stepmother and brother, Jimmy, had moved back into the house with him, and when Kirsten, CJ, and I knocked on the door, his stepmother hugged us and thanked us for coming and told us that Gray had barely spoken a word since that night. She told us he’d refused to see anyone.
“I know he misses you, though,” she said. “And appreciates how much you care about him. I think he’s just focused on getting through the funeral tomorrow morning. After that, I’m sure he’ll want to be with you.”
But that night, I worried—I was consumed with worry—that we had lost him forever.
On top of that, that evening, Trevor and our mother had had a fight about Trevor’s girlfriend, Melanie. Her father owned a hardware store, and Melanie had taken a year off before college to work in it, two facts that rankled my snobbish mother. She had thought they’d broken up, and then a friend of hers had seen them out together.
“Leave it to you to bypass the college girls for that piece of cheap goods,” she’d said. “That girl is beneath you.”
“Almost every night!” said Trevor, winking.
And it got worse from there. Ever since my mother had refused to pay Trevor’s tuition at the state university unless he agreed to live at home for his first year of college, Trevor had been a volcano, molten rage—maybe even hatred, although I didn’t want to believe that—seething under his surface, ready to blow at the smallest provocation. The fight about Melanie had ended as so many of their fights did: Trevor cursing and hurling threats before storming out, either slamming the door hard enough to shake the house or leaving it wide open, so that my mother had to shut it herself. By then, I was mostly taking their fights in stride, but on top of everything else that had happened, on top of my heartsick worry for Gray, the fight was one thing too many.
As I usually did when I couldn’t sleep, I left my bed and crept downstairs in the dark to the family room couch, to see if a change of scene would help, but the full moon beamed like a spotlight through the window, so I left and went to my mother’s office, a room just off the kitchen, and tried to settle in on the velvet divan, which, having been purchased purely for its decorative qualities, had cushions hard enough to bounce a penny off. Somehow, though, I fell asleep, so that I was still there when Trevor came home.
The sound of our kitchen door opening must’ve woken me. It took me a few seconds to remember where I was, and once I did, I was about to get up to see Trev, when I heard my mother’s voice say, “Trevor,” and I felt the hair on my arms stand on end. My mother could be like that scene in a movie wherein everything seems normal until you notice the moonlight glancing off the butcher’s knife in someone’s hand. She must have been waiting at the kitchen table for Trevor.
I expected Trevor to be loud and stumbling, but when he answered her, his voice was as cool, as even as hers.
“Sitting in the dark waiting to pounce,” he said. “Very dramatic.”
“It was not for your benefit. I was enjoying the quiet.”
“Well, don’t let me interrupt.”
“Wait. I have something to say to you.”
“What?”
“If you insist on having sex with that girl, I will not pay for an abortion when she gets pregnant.”
Trevor laughed. “There’s this invention called the birth control pill, Adela. Too bad you weren’t using it nine months before you had me.”
“Melanie’s father runs a hardware store, Trevor.”
“Owns. Owns a hardware store.”
“Girls like that will do whatever it takes to escape their little lives.”
“Melanie’s family’s life is ten thousand times happier than ours, and she knows it. She’s not interested in escaping.”
“We’ll see,” said my mother. “If you’re wrong, I will not acknowledge that child in any way, much less support it financially.”
“I’m going to bed.”
“Furthermore, I am putting you on notice that I am finished cleaning up your messes. From now on, I won’t lift a finger.”
“Yeah, right.” I could envision the sneer on Trevor’s face, clear as day. “Like you’d ever let my ‘messes’ dirty up your sterling reputation. I’ll do what I want and you’ll make it go away, just like always.”
“I hope, for your sake, you don’t try to test that theory. Because I am finished.”
There was a long pause, and though I wasn’t even in the room, I could feel Trevor’s anger roiling, getting ready to erupt.
But when he spoke, again, his voice was as clear and steady as before. “Well, that’s a shame, for both of us. Because it’s too late.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means I’ve already done something way worse than I’ve ever done before, and any day now, everyone will know.”
“What did you do?” When my mother said this, I could hear something that I’d almost never heard before: a ruffle in her usual implacability.
And in the awful, airless, dark red, pulse-banging, silent-scream silence that followed, I knew what my brother was going to say before I heard him say it, before he dropped that ugliness right into the center of my life.
“I set the fire.”
I wrote it down. I tore it out. I burned it.
But it stayed and became a secret.
And the secret ate like acid into everything I loved and dulled my senses and devoured my joy and dragged me into darkness and broke me off like an ice floe from my brother and my friends.
After his father died, Gray went back to school, went to classes, walked down the hallways, but really he was curling in on himself, pushing us away with all his strength, and the only right and decent thing to do was to not
let him, was to be relentless, dogged, vigilant, to keep our arms around him no matter what. And I tried. But Trevor had killed Gray’s father. How could I be Gray’s friend, knowing and not telling him that my brother had killed his father? And even though Trevor’s having committed that impossible, wretched, brutal act meant that he was not the Trevor I had loved for every second of my entire life, I still couldn’t, wouldn’t, would never rat him out.
So I abandoned Gray, my beautiful friend, when he needed me most. I pretended to be sick for all of winter break, and I was sick, but not with pneumonia. For two weeks, I barely left my room, only showered when my mother stood over me in my dark room and refused to leave. I remember standing, empty-hearted, limp, swaying a little on my feet like an underwater plant, letting the water fall on me until it went cold.
In the end, it was my mother’s anger that yanked me out of that stupor. On New Year’s Day, two days before school was scheduled to restart, I told her I wasn’t going. And she said, “This melodramatic display of grief for a man who wasn’t even related to you is making you ridiculous, Virginia. If you refuse to go back to school, if your grades drop at all, you can forget about your fancy private college in North Carolina. You will go to school here and live at home, and Trevor won’t even be here to keep you company.”
Because Trevor was gone. I don’t know if my mother had cleaned up Trevor’s mess once again or if the arson had simply gone unsolved, but no one ever came to arrest him. And within a month, Trevor had been admitted as a transfer student to a college in Atlanta that was far too prestigious for him to have gotten into without my mother’s help. When winter break ended, he was gone, and for the first time in my life, my brother’s absence was a relief.
I needed to go, too, to get as far away from home as I could. Living in that house was impossible. So I went back to school and took notes in class and did my homework. Kirsten tried to talk me back into my circle of friends more than once, and then screamed and called me a traitor and a bitch and left me alone. CJ just hated me in silence. And at the end of January, Gray, his heartbreak still so fresh, came to my house to see me. We stood on my front porch, and he said, “Where are you, Zin? Where did you go? The real you, I mean. I don’t understand what’s happening.”
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