How to Start a Fire

by Lisa Lutz

  “Well, the penguin is a drunk,” Matthew said as he twisted his right wrist in a circular motion and studied a lump that had formed over the carpal region. “Could you come over here for a second?” he asked.

  Anna crawled over to Matthew, who was sitting with his back against his desk. He held out his hand and pointed to the small protuberance.

  “Should I be concerned about this?”

  “Maybe you should see a doctor.”

  “I thought I was.”

  “I’m not a doctor.”

  “Whatever you are, you have some medical knowledge. Do you want to put my mind at ease?”

  Anna took his wrist in her hands and palpated the solid but movable mass. She checked the mobility of the wrist and let go of his hand.

  “You’ll live,” she said.

  “It looks like a tumor.”

  “I’m sure you’ve investigated the condition online and already have a diagnosis,” Anna said.

  “Maybe you’d like to confirm my diagnosis,” Matthew said.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “So I don’t jump to the conclusion that I have cancer of the wrist.”

  “It’s most likely a ganglion cyst. It could go away on its own or you could have it drained or surgically removed. And there’s excellent anecdotal evidence supporting some unorthodox treatments.”

  “For instance?”

  “I’ve heard smashing a book on it works. The Bible is best. But I’m sure a law book would do. Most people aren’t capable of striking the cyst hard enough themselves, so they need someone else to do it.”

  “Are you offering?” Matthew asked.

  “Are you asking?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sure about that?” Anna said.

  Matthew was deathly afraid of needles and medical offices and he avoided anything that might cause pain or permanent damage. But as a lawyer, he was accustomed to testing people and their limits, and he found it difficult to step away from a challenge that might enlighten him about someone’s character. He set his wrist on his desk as if patiently waiting for the guillotine.

  Anna surveyed the law books on his shelf, taking her time. She was going to punish him for not letting his medical line of inquiry die. When Anna pulled the copy of California Personal Injury from the shelf and said, “This will do,” Matthew realized it was not a bluff.

  “On the count of three,” she said.

  Matthew pulled his wrist away. “Wait, are you sure this is safe? And that it will work?”

  “No. There are no formal studies on the efficacy of this procedure. The evidence is purely anecdotal.”

  “You’re having a good time, aren’t you?” Matthew asked.

  “Better than usual.”

  “Do you want to hurt me?”

  “No,” said Anna. “But the dormant scientist in me wants to know if it will work.”

  Matthew realized that this gave him bargaining power.

  “If I let you do it, will you tell me what happened?” he said.

  Anna mulled over the offer. “You can ask three questions.”

  “Ten.”

  “Three.”

  “Seven.”

  “Three.”

  “Anna, do you understand how a negotiation works?”

  “I do. I’m worried that you don’t. Three.”

  “Give me five.”

  “Three. Hand on the table now or no deal.”

  “There’s no way you can break my wrist, right?”

  “Doubtful. But you could always sue me.”

  Matthew got on his knees and leveled his arm across the table. He turned his head away and closed his eyes. “Just do it.”

  “On the count of three,” Anna said. “One.”

  She swung the book down on Matthew’s wrist on the first count. A solid thud reverberated throughout the office.

  “Two. Three.”

  1998

  Santa Cruz, California

  George didn’t hear the man enter the house or the footfalls on the creaky floorboards. She didn’t hear the rattle and squeak as he opened her bedroom door. What woke her up was his fingers around her neck. And it woke her up fast. He didn’t look familiar. He wore a blue sweatshirt under a denim jacket. Either the sweatshirt or the jacket smelled like three-day-old armpit. His hair was greasy and vaguely in the mullet category. His skin suggested years spent picking at zits. This wasn’t the kind of man she would have engaged with under any circumstances. And here he was in her bedroom, choking her.

  It took about three seconds for George to understand what she had to do. He was on top, straddling her body. She twisted onto her side, breaking the hold, and then rolled back over and kneed him in the groin. She screamed after he lost his grip. He moaned in pain, but the knee hadn’t been a debilitating blow. He punched her in the face, and his hands returned to her neck.

  “Who are you?” he said, when a sliver of light from a streetlamp illuminated her face.

  She wouldn’t remember the question until later. She boxed his ears. Her legs thrashed beneath him.

  “Bitch,” he said, his fingers tightening.

  You’re fucking strangling me, and I’m the bitch?

  The intruder pinned George’s legs to the bed with his knees. Only her arms were free. She tried to wrench his fingers off her neck. When that failed, she landed blows to his head, but they grew weaker as the oxygen in her blood diminished.

  George’s scream woke Kate. She got out of bed, and as she climbed the stairs from the basement, she heard the muffled sounds of a male voice. She tiptoed over to George’s bedroom door and saw the intruder.

  I need a weapon, Kate thought. She rushed into the kitchen and saw the knife block, but she had heard stories about intruders wresting knives from their victims. She wasn’t sure how well she’d do in a knife fight, never having seen one outside of West Side Story. The recycling sat by the back door. A 750-milliliter bottle of Smirnoff vodka (Anna bought only that brand, in honor of Kate) was at the top of the bin. Kate picked up the bottle and grabbed the phone. She dialed 911, told the operator there was an intruder in the house, put down the phone, and padded down the hall and into George’s room.

  The man didn’t hear her enter or come up behind him. He noticed her only when he felt the bed bounce and tilt as Kate stepped onto the mattress. Kate held the neck of the bottle in both hands like it was a baseball bat. She told herself she had to commit to this swing. She had a tactile memory of playing softball. She had been painfully mediocre, rarely making contact with the ball, but she’d always dedicated her whole body to the swing. Kate smashed the bottle into the side of the man’s head. In the movies, the bottle would have broken, but in real life, it merely slipped from her hands.

  She heard the man grunt, then watched him slowly cant to the side and slip off the bed. George gasped as if she had just come up from a long dive; her breath rattled as her lungs gorged on air. When she could move again, she climbed off the bed and stood over the man. He was on the floor, a small bit of blood on his temple. Kate picked up the bottle.

  “Hit him again,” George said. “He might wake up.”

  Kate’s heart was still bucking in her chest. She didn’t want him to get up either. This time she swung the bottle like it was a golf club. Maybe with a little less conviction, but there was a solid thump as it made contact. The intruder still wasn’t moving.

  “How are you feeling?” Detective Rose Williams asked from the edge of the hospital bed.

  She wore a ridiculously snug brown pantsuit with her badge clipped to the waistband. Rose had gotten married just a year before to an ex–defensive lineman who still had a lineman’s appetite. She’d been gaining weight at a slow but steady pace, eating all those square meals with her husband. She had resisted buying new clothes, but feeling the pinch in her waist now, she was about to relent.

  “I don’t feel much of anything,” George said. “They gave me some painkillers and sedatives.”

  Fuchsia
finger marks were forming around her neck. A mottled purple bruise decorated her eye. She was under observation for a minor concussion but would go home the next day.

  “Could you look at a picture for me?”

  “Sure.”

  Detective Williams showed George a mug shot of the suspect. He had a record, so a picture was on file.

  “Did you know him?” Williams asked.

  George glanced at the picture and looked away. “No.”

  “Are you sure you’ve never seen him before?” Rose asked, rephrasing. There were no signs of a breakin, and her partner, Detective Russell, had said something about the girls’ stories not jibing.

  “I have no idea who he is,” George said.

  “Well, you put up a good fight,” Rose said.

  “Until I didn’t,” George said.

  The drugs made George’s answers sound flat and unemotional. As George was internally piecing together the events of the previous night, the detective walked her through them again.

  “I can come back if you like,” Rose suggested.

  “I’m fine.”

  “What’s the first thing you remember?”

  “I woke up to a man strangling me.”

  “Did he say anything to you?”

  “He said, ‘Who are you?’”

  “That’s an odd thing to say, don’t you think?”

  “I did think it was strange. Although not as strange as his strangling me.”

  “Did you say anything to him?”

  “I couldn’t talk with his hands around my throat.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Kate hit him with the vodka bottle.”

  “Just once?”

  “I think so.”

  “Tell me what happened,” Detective Frank Russell said to Kate as she sat in a swivel chair by his desk. Detectives Russell and Williams had been first on the scene the night before. They’d interviewed Kate and Anna at the hospital, but the women were too distracted, and Anna had been too inebriated, to be much use, so they were questioned the next day. Detective Williams took Anna into an interrogation room. Kate—the batter, as they had dubbed her—was given a seat next to Russell’s desk.

  She was a little thing, Russell thought, much smaller than the two others—and most grown women. Despite Kate’s childish demeanor, Russell sensed a hardness in her, as if her bones were made of titanium. You couldn’t dent or scratch the surface; you also couldn’t get her to sit still. The chair-swiveling drove Russell crazy. He wished he had taken her into the interrogation room, where the furniture was bolted to the floor.

  Detective Russell steadied the arm of the chair and said, “You were saying?”

  “George’s scream woke me,” Kate said.

  “Where were you?”

  “In the basement.”

  “And your other roommate, Ms. Fury. Where was she?”

  “In her bedroom.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “She has the attic.”

  “What happened after you heard Ms. Leoni scream?”

  “I got out of bed and walked upstairs into the kitchen. I picked up an empty bottle of vodka from the recycling bin and dialed 911.”

  “Did you plan on using it as a weapon?”

  “I thought about using a knife, but the bottle seemed better.”

  “Then what?” Detective Russell asked.

  “Then I put the phone down, even though the operator was still talking, and I went into George’s bedroom.”

  “Was she still screaming at that point?”

  “I don’t remember when exactly she stopped screaming, but she’d stopped.”

  “What did you see?”

  “He was strangling her.”

  “You mean the man in the blue sweatshirt, correct?”

  “The same man you found at our house. I couldn’t see the color of his sweatshirt in that light.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “I swung the bottle of vodka at his head. It didn’t break. I thought it would break. He fell off of George. I could hear her gasping for breath. He was still sort of moving and I was afraid he would get up again, so I hit him again with the bottle. It still didn’t break. Then he stopped moving. How is he?”

  “In the hospital.”

  “Will he be all right?”

  “He’s going to prison.”

  “I guess that’s good.”

  “Is there anything else you can think of?”

  “No. Where’s Anna?”

  “She’s talking to my partner right now.”

  “She won’t be much help.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she slept through the whole thing.”

  “She must be a sound sleeper,” Detective Russell said.

  “She is,” Kate said.

  The detective studied his notes. Kate studied the pattern on her pajama top—sheep blithely jumping over stiles. When the detective had asked her to come to the station, she hadn’t changed, just thrown on a pair of jeans and a coat, not considering that she might want to remove the coat. It was warm in the precinct house. She felt ridiculous wearing a top covered in cheery livestock.

  “It would seem that the intruder entered through the back door. Do you usually leave it open?”

  “No. But sometimes we forget.”

  “Is it possible that the intruder had met George before?”

  “That seems very unlikely,” Kate said. “Especially since he was strangling her.”

  Detective Frank Russell scribbled Kate’s answer in his notes. But something about her tone felt off.

  George was released from the hospital the morning after the attack. The marks of her ordeal would take two weeks to completely fade.

  She got home and found Kate in the basement watching television.

  “You plan on changing out of those pajamas anytime soon?”

  “I have nowhere to be, remember?” Kate said.

  “I do. But you used to actually wear outside clothes even when you were inside.”

  “Now sometimes I wear inside clothes even when I’m outside.”

  “I called my mother. She wants me to come home for a few days,” George said.

  “I think that’s a good idea,” Kate said.

  “Do you feel safe here?” George asked.

  “I’ll make sure the doors are locked and I’ll keep an empty bottle by my bed.”

  “It won’t stop you from thinking about it.”

  “I have many distractions.”

  “You have television.”

  “What did people do without it?” Kate asked.

  “Thank you,” George said. “For, you know.”

  “You would have done the same for me,” Kate said.

  “The man said, ‘Who are you?’ Why did he say that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He came in through the back door. She must have left it open again.”

  “George, don’t tell her.”

  “Why not?”

  Kate muted the television. “Because it won’t change anything. It will only make her feel guilty. What’s the point? She didn’t invite that guy into our house. She left a door open. If you tell her she did that, she’ll reframe it as her hands around your neck. She’ll take the blame for everything. And then she’ll get worse. We should blame the person who actually committed the crime, and that wasn’t her.”

  “Okay. If you don’t want her to know,” George said, still unsure what she wanted. But the sedatives and painkillers had made her more agreeable than usual.

  “There are so many things I wish I didn’t know,” said Kate.

  PART II

  People don’t realize that the future is just now, but later.

  —Russell Brand

  2005

  Denver, Colorado

  “Checkout time is 11:00 a.m. Eighty-five plus tax a night and I’ll need a credit card and a photo ID,” Hank said. At least, Hank was the name embroidered on his bowling shirt
.

  “Can I pay cash?”

  “A grown woman should have a credit card,” Hank said.

  “I have a credit card. I just don’t want to use it,” she said. “My business partner gets the bills and we’re having some financial conflicts as of late.”

  “We need a credit card on file in case there’s any damage to the room or you refuse to vacate.”

  “I won’t do either of those things.”

  “Company policy,” Hank said.

  “Are you the proprietor, Mr… . Hank?”

  “Hank Weathers. Yes. I am the … proprietor,” Hank said, sounding out the last word. It had a nice ring to it. He’d use it more often.

  “So, you make the policy?” Kate asked.

  “Miss—I didn’t get your name.”

  “Sarah. Sarah Lake.” She said the name out of habit, immediately realizing it was a mistake. If she couldn’t convince Hank to depart from policy, she’d have a hard time explaining why her credit card said Kate Smirnoff.

  “That’s a pretty name.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Miss Lake, I’ve been burned a few too many times. Now, you look honest, but it’s always the honest-looking ones, so you’ve already got one strike against you.”

  “What if I left a deposit of five hundred dollars? You could inspect the room when I check out.”

  “Five hundred, you say?”

  She pulled several bills from her stuffed wallet.

  “A girl shouldn’t be carrying all that cash around.”

  “Just a minute ago I was a grown woman.”

  “Be careful, ’s all I’m saying.”

  “Do we have a deal?”

  She placed the cash on the counter, right next to the bell. Hank picked up the bills, folded them in half, and put them in his pocket.

  “How long will you be staying?”

  “Two nights. I’ll let you know tomorrow if my plans change.”

  “What is the nature of your visit, business or pleasure?”

  “Business,” she said.

  Room 214 was exactly what she’d expected. Mahogany baseboards set off walls the color of creamer gone bad; tracks of luggage scrapes accented the entryway. The forest-green carpet, once a proud shag, was now almost smooth, greased down like the hair on a balding man’s pate. There were also the obligatory matching pressed-wood nightstands, atop which sat gold lamps with dust-colored shades. A dresser of similar tone and design, but not part of the set, faced them. But the contents of the room were all second-class citizens, invisible really, next to the king-size bed, which was adorned with a once–bright orange comforter and a bamboo headboard.