How to Start a Fire

by Lisa Lutz

  “What do you do with all your free time?”

  “Stuff,” Kate said.

  Shayne drained his coffee and poured himself another cup. He searched the refrigerator and began plucking out items and placing them on the counter. After he was done, he turned to Kate and said, “Mind if I make breakfast?”

  She did. Especially since every food item he had chosen came from Kate’s fist-tight budget.

  “Excuse me,” she said, and she ducked into her room and dialed Anna’s pager. While she waited for her to call, she put on a pair of old blue jeans and threw a sweater over her pajama top. When Anna didn’t respond right away, Kate returned to the kitchen.

  “I just remembered I have a doctor’s appointment,” Kate said. “I have to go.”

  “Okay,” Shayne said, setting the plate on the table and taking a seat.

  “So maybe I can put that in a container and you can take it to go.”

  “Or I’ll just eat it here.”

  “I bet you can finish that in like five minutes,” Kate said, rocking on the heels of her slippers. She noticed her footwear and returned to her bedroom for a pair of sneakers.

  “I was thinking of taking a shower after this,” Shayne said when she came back.

  “I don’t mean to be rude. But I have to lock up.”

  “No worries. I can lock up myself when I leave.”

  “Oh,” Kate said.

  Shayne flipped open the newspaper and consumed his egg-and-bacon breakfast like a suited family man in a vintage film.

  “Um. Well, goodbye.”

  Kate’s hand hovered over the doorknob for a spell as she tried to concoct another plan. But she was at a loss. She opened the door and closed it behind her. She strolled down the hall and found a corner on the stairwell, where she tucked herself out of view. As soon as Shayne left, she could return. She opened her library book on Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans and tried to focus on the text.

  “Can I help you?”

  Kate lurched awake like a car screeching to a sudden stop.

  “I didn’t mean to startle you,” the man with a hook for a right hand said.

  Kate looked at the man as she gathered herself. She must have nodded off on the stairwell. The man stood in front of apartment 3B. Cans of paint and brushes waited at his feet.

  “Do you live here?” the man asked.

  “Yes,” Kate said. “Not in the stairwell. Just in the building. 3E.”

  “I’m James Lazar. Your neighbor. 3B.”

  “Kate … Smirnoff.”

  “Like the vodka?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you locked out?”

  “No. I, um, there’s someone in my apartment. I’m waiting for him to leave.”

  “Your boyfriend?”

  “No. I don’t know him. I have a first name, but that’s it.”

  “There’s a strange man in your apartment?” James asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Have you called the police?”

  “My friend invited him over. But she’s not home. I don’t think it’s a police matter.”

  “Did you ask him to leave?” James asked.

  “I strongly suggested he leave. He didn’t pick up on the subtext.”

  “Men kind of like direct communication.”

  “Good to know.”

  “Do you want me to ask him to leave?”

  “If you think it will get a better result,” Kate said skeptically.

  James walked down the hall with Kate on his heels. When he reached the door of 3E, Kate passed him the key. James opened the door and found Shayne sprawled on the couch with the television playing backup to his hiccupped snoring. James picked up the newspaper and smacked Shayne’s legs with it.

  “Buddy, wake up.”

  Shayne slowly came to. “What’s up?”

  “It’s checkout time. Get your shoes and go.”

  Kate closely studied James’s technique. No hesitation. Clear, concise language that was not open to interpretation. She also noted that while Shayne appeared disgruntled, there was no danger in the situation. He responded predictably.

  “Whatever, dude,” Shayne said as he slipped on his shoes and ambled out the door.

  An hour later, Kate, wearing her grandfather’s old dress shirt and some battered denims, knocked on the door of 3B.

  James opened it, wiping his beige-paint-streaked hand on his shirt. Plastic tarps covered his living room from one end to the next. Paint fumes traveled into the hallway.

  “Hi, Kate.”

  “I noticed you were painting today,” she said.

  “How’d you figure that out?” James asked.

  “Deductive reasoning and now direct observation,” she said.

  “I’m impressed.”

  “I thought maybe you could use a hand,” Kate said. And then she realized what she’d said. “Sorry. That came out wrong.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I brought a paintbrush,” Kate said, holding up an old synthetic wall brush containing the memory of a blood-red kitchen backsplash. Anna’s idea.

  “You want to help me paint?” James asked. When he smiled, Kate noticed that his two front teeth looked like they were at odds with each other. Almost like an old-fashioned boxing photo. Only they were teeth.

  “It seemed like the neighborly thing to do, and I owe you.”

  “It’s not necessary,” James said.

  Some offers were merely gestures. James had learned this distinction after his accident. It was a shift in the eyes that usually gave it away, the person searching for an exit. Kate’s offer was not a gesture. She entered his apartment without invitation.

  “Why don’t I start on the baseboards, since I’m short?”

  James poured a layer of paint into a pan and passed Kate a trim brush.

  “I know what I’m doing,” Kate said. “In case you were worried.”

  “I wasn’t,” James said.

  Kate and James painted for three hours. Since moving to St. Louis, Kate hadn’t made any new friends. She liked chatting with the woman at the library, and there was a homeless man she talked to sometimes at Black Forest Park, and she really liked a docent at the City Museum. But Anna was her only real friend in St. Louis, and Anna was always absent. Friendships had never come that easily to Kate. She refused to cover unpleasant silences and yet would share her opinions at the most inappropriate moments. This was what Anna had always liked about her—there was no subtext. Anna never had to read meaning into Kate’s words, which meant she could trust her. But even Anna had to admit that Kate asked too many questions. They grew in Kate’s mind like weeds.

  During what James would later describe as a friendly interrogation, Kate culled the following information:

  James was recently divorced. He had one daughter, who lived with his ex-wife two miles away in Creve Coeur. He was an electrician by trade but was currently reconsidering his options. He had a sister, Mary, recently diagnosed with MS. He rode his bike everywhere. He had a special prosthetic for gripping the handlebars. He wore the hook because when he met someone new, he wanted the person to know right away so he could dispense with the awkwardness of discovery. He wanted to see whether someone avoided eye contact or swelled with pity. James had been in the military some years ago, was a veteran of the Gulf War; the irony was that he’d lost his hand riding a motorcycle a week after his return. A drunk driver.

  There was a zigzag rhythm to Kate’s inquiries, like the sharp sierras of a lie-detector readout. James eventually managed to sneak in one question of his own.

  “What brought you to St. Louis?”

  “I was abducted,” Kate said.

  James thought Kate was joking, but it was practically the truth. No one used any other word to describe the event. Anna was moving to St. Louis for medical school and wanted Kate to move with her. Anna devised a shockingly manipulative and well-laid plan to make that happen. Despite aiding in the abduction, George didn’t necessarily be
lieve that Anna’s company was the best option for Kate. But it was superior to Kate’s remaining alone in Santa Cruz in that house.

  “You moved to St. Louis against your will?” James asked.

  “As a matter of fact, yes,” said Kate. “My roommate abducted all of my things and so I had to follow my stuff.”

  “Are you staying here against your will?”

  “No. But I’d never have moved if left to my own devices.”

  “So maybe your roommate did you a favor.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. I finished the baseboards. Can I start prepping the windows?” Kate asked.

  “Uh, sure. Don’t you have someplace to be?”

  “No.”

  Kate shoved the window open and scraped buckling paint from another era off the pane.

  “Were you left-handed or right-handed?” Kate asked.

  “I was left-handed. Still am,” James said, flashing his good hand.

  “That was a lucky break,” Kate said. “Only ten percent of the world’s population is left-handed.”

  James was glad she didn’t try to put some God-was-looking-out-for-you spin on it like everyone else.

  “You ask a lot of questions, Kate.”

  “I have a lot of questions.”

  “You should have been a cop.”

  “I don’t know about that. But I should have been something.”

  Kate sat at her kitchen table sipping coffee and reading the paper. A shirtless male entered the room, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

  “Morning,” the shirtless male said.

  “Morning,” Kate said.

  “Any coffee?” the shirtless male asked, even though the aroma wafted through the room.

  “This isn’t a B & B,” Kate said. “This is a shitty, rundown motel on the side of the highway. There is no continental breakfast, and it’s checkout time.”

  1990

  Boston, Massachusetts

  “Anna, it’s time to leave,” Lena Fury, wearing a Jackie Onassis suit with the requisite pearls, said as she knocked on her daughter’s bedroom door.

  While she waited for Anna to surface, Lena checked herself in the hallway mirror. Her highlighted blond hair was in an elegant upsweep, revealing her long ballerina neck—one of her more attractive features, although she had never been a dancer. Lena’s face was perfectly proportioned. That was a compliment she’d received from a plastic surgeon a week ago as they’d discussed options for stopping time. People used to tell her she was beautiful. Now she was told she was perfectly proportioned. She obsessed over her skin and every new mark of age that seemed to surface overnight. Her evening ritual involved a gentle face scrub, a prescription retinol cream, and a moisturizer with ingredients that, one day, would be deemed hazardous to the water supply.

  Lena knocked on the door again, thinking about whether she could blame the permanent equal sign between her brows on her fifteen-year-old daughter.

  “For God’s sake, Anna, open up.”

  Anna had a lock on her door. Every time Lena and Donald had it removed, Anna would install it again. She’d checked out a DIY book at the library and purchased a two-dollar screwdriver. Lena lost so many fights with Anna that she had to choose her battles carefully, since they were almost invariably followed by defeats. Lena reached for the knob and it turned, to her surprise. The bed was made and the room was empty. Lena hurried downstairs.

  “Where’s Anna?” Lena asked her husband.

  “Probably still sleeping,” Donald said, eyes on his newspaper.

  “I just checked her room. She’s not there.”

  “We have many rooms,” Donald said. “Perhaps she’s in one of the others.”

  “Martha,” Lena said to the Fury housekeeper, “can you check her usual haunts and remind her that she was supposed to be ready by eleven and dressed appropriately?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Martha said, a tiny smirk passing over her face.

  Donald chuckled to himself, eyes still focused on the newsprint.

  “Something funny?” Lena asked.

  “With Anna, you can’t use words that are open to interpretation.”

  “Excuse me?” Lena said.

  Donald finally tore his eyes away from the headlines.

  “Remember when you forced Anna to take ballet class? You bought her pink tights and a tutu and when it was time to leave, you ordered her upstairs and told her to dress appropriately.”

  “I don’t remember,” Lena said.

  She did remember, vaguely, but it had been an event that so alarmed her sensibilities, she refused to let herself think of it too often. Besides, it was years ago.

  “She wore her field hockey uniform,” Donald said. “When you reprimanded her for her inappropriate attire, she reminded you that you had said, ‘Dress appropriately,’ but you never specified for what occasion.”

  Lena joined Martha on her manhunt. Thirty minutes later, when the entire Fury house and grounds had been inspected, the obvious conclusion was drawn.

  “She’s not here,” Martha said.

  Not even a flash of panic interrupted Lena’s determined poise. She was disappointed, but mostly in herself. She should have known that Anna wouldn’t go quietly to lunch.

  Anna had attended her first ladies’ lunch when she was ten. Her powder-blue dress was overstarched, puff sleeved, and trimmed with lace. Her dainty, pristine white anklets were in sharp relief to the spatter of scabs and bruises on her shins and knees. Everything itched, Anna remembered, and there was nothing to draw her attention away from her stiff, ridiculous outfit. Lunch was a poached fish that was so bland it was hard to imagine it was ever a living creature. The conversations were muted and meaningless. How could clothing be the topic of three hours of discussion when the goal of the gathering was to raise money for impoverished inner-city schools? Anna’s mind wandered into adventures that didn’t require good posture. She imagined being a hobo. In her closet was a bindle made from an old blanket and her field hockey stick. She even had train schedules hidden on the underside of her desk. She stashed extra cash in a smelly sneaker—a place she knew her mother would never look. Anna had always lived like a convict, even as a child, perpetually preparing for her next breakout.

  She had escaped a few times before but was invariably caught, wearing rags, carrying her bindle, strolling down her quiet Beacon Hill street, where a child in hobo gear could not go unnoticed. A neighbor would call. A BMW or Mercedes would pull up next to her, and some adult would tell her to get into the car. When she refused, a litany of threats would follow. Eventually, one of them would induce cooperation.

  At fifteen, Anna had planned a more sophisticated escape. She stuffed her school bag with a change of clothes, a toothbrush (no toothpaste, since she assumed that where she was going, she’d find it in abundance), and a few pairs of underwear. She had enough cash on hand for a proper vacation, which was how she saw the whole thing. She’d climbed out of her window at 8:00 a.m. after calling a cab from the phone line in her father’s office. The cab took her to the train station. She bought a ticket, boarded the train, and read Salinger’s Nine Stories, a gift from her brother last Christmas. She transferred trains and read “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” She laughed convulsively when Seymour had his outburst on the elevator, accusing a woman of staring at his feet. Other passengers stared at Anna. At the end of the story, she thought she might cry, could feel that half second in which she could lose control. She turned it off like a spigot. She was prouder of that talent than she should have been.

  Nine hours and two buses later, she was in Princeton, New Jersey. Anna had visited before, with her parents, so she knew where to find her brother. But she needed to wait and then find him later at night, when no one would be willing or able to drive her home.

  She found a café where she could sit and read until she finished the book and could see her own reflection in the glass. Then she used the battered map her brother had given her on a family tour of the university and tracked
down his dormitory. Outside the dorm, Anna applied lipstick and pulled her hair into a knotty college-girl bun. She looked remotely like an underdeveloped coed. She circled the dormitory, looking for those telling Saturday-night lights that signified a party. Her best guess was that it was simmering somewhere on the third floor. Anna climbed the stairs and heard the distinctive hum of humans congregating. From the end of the hall, it was simply a collage of sounds, the common cackles and squeals in an inebriated orchestra. But then the notes in the symphony, the individual instruments, made their claim on Anna’s eardrums.

  We need more beer.

  I need more vodka.

  Where’s Sandy?

  Vomiting in the bathroom.

  What kind of crazy motherfucker reads Ayn Rand?

  How’d you do on the physics test?

  Fucked up.

  Where are you going for the holidays?

  I heard Jamie lost his scholarship.

  The problem isn’t reading Ayn Rand, it’s liking her.

  Anna slipped through the door unnoticed. She reached into a giant bucket of ice and fished around until the throbbing in her arm radiated up to her neck. She retreated and waited until her circulation returned. A blond guy in a polo shirt approached, sank his arm into the ice bath, and eventually surfaced with a beer. The last beer, he informed her as he uncapped it, barehanded, and gallantly passed it to her.

  “Have we met?” he asked.

  “Nope,” Anna said.

  “Hunter Stevens,” Hunter Stevens said.

  “Anna,” Anna said, deliberately skipping her last name.

  “What dorm are you in?”

  “Clearly I’m in this one,” said Anna.

  “Oh, you’re funny,” Hunter said. She could tell he didn’t like the funny ones.

  “Thank you.”

  “Where do you live?” Hunter asked.

  “Far, far away.”

  “Who invited you?”

  “No one.”

  “So you’re crashing?”

  “Don’t tell,” Anna said, and she fought her way through the crowd and out of the eye line of Hunter Stevens (Hunter Stevens III, she would learn years later).

  Anna drank her beer and leaned against the wall. She knew how to shed that cloak of self-consciousness. The beer helped, but it was more the role she played—she was an anthropologist, objectively studying her subjects. Usually they were overdressed women with too much time on their hands. Tonight they were casually dressed college students numbing their stress through alcohol, maybe drugs, and the hope of sex.