How to Start a Fire

by Lisa Lutz

  “It’s Anna’s night. She never does her chores. You have to take a stand. The smell is nauseating.”

  “Remember, most wars begin when someone takes a stand. Taking stands isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” Kate said. Then she hoisted the garbage out of the bin and tied the plastic bag into a knot.

  “I’ll do it,” George said.

  “Why? So you can pick a fight later?”

  “I feel like getting some air.”

  “In the alley, with the rest of the trash?” Kate asked, relinquishing the bag.

  George needed leverage in the showdown she was eager for. Anna never abided by the household rules. One week she’d do nothing at all. Then, when she could sense George’s fuming tension or Kate’s passive-aggressive reproach (sometimes she’d put the trash bin outside Anna’s bedroom door), she’d compensate by knocking back a pot of coffee and some NoDoz or something stronger and then scrubbing the house from top to bottom.

  George took out the trash, returned to the kitchen, and grabbed the recycling bin. The telephone rang. Kate picked up.

  “Your dad’s on the phone,” Kate said.

  George put the recycling bin down by the back door and took the phone. Bruno called every week without fail. The first few weeks after his confession about the other woman, George wouldn’t take his calls, but George was an unrepentant Daddy’s girl and he was the only man who offered her the unconditional affection she craved. It didn’t take long for father and daughter to fall back into old habits. An hour on the phone with Bruno was nothing out of the ordinary for George.

  “What do you talk about for an hour?” Anna would ask. Her phone calls with Donald Fury could be as brief as a handshake:

  You’re well?

  Yes.

  Good. Stay that way.

  George often described her basketball practice in such detail that sometimes it seemed to Kate that the account lasted longer than the practice. On this particular phone call, George grumbled about Anna’s irresponsibility. Bruno had learned to not play adviser with his daughter. Long ago, he’d decided that women didn’t want answers even if they seemed to be posing questions. “What am I supposed to do?” George asked. Bruno said, “That’s a tough one.” The phone call ended exactly fifty-seven minutes and thirty seconds after it had begun. Kate had gone to bed. George took a bath. The recycling bin sat by the unlocked back door.

  Roger Hicks bought Anna a drink anyway. She was drinking well whiskey, so he opted for a middle-shelf blend to show he had taste.

  “For the lady,” he said to the bartender, who slid the drink six inches in Anna’s direction.

  Anna glanced at the drink but didn’t touch it, knowing that making contact with the glass would somehow be taking ownership.

  “The lady can pay for her own drinks, and the lady really hates the word lady,” Anna said.

  “The lady is kind of a bitch,” Roger said.

  “Do we have a problem here?” the bartender said.

  “I don’t,” said Anna. She shifted a few stools down and sat next to one of those pickled regulars who move into the bar on the first of the month and move out when their disability checks are spent. Anna bought the guy a drink. His name was Herb. Herb, she thought, might have dementia, or maybe he was just drunk. Herb struck up a conversation about the universe expanding. He’d read it somewhere, he told her.

  “Does that mean just the universe is expanding, or is everything inside the universe also expanding? Maybe that’s why we’re fatter than we used to be,” Herb said, looking down at his gut.

  “Maybe,” Anna said. She liked talking to the older barflies. They wanted nothing from her except maybe another drink, but they were fine with just the company and the peripatetic conversations.

  Roger Hicks had had his share of rejection, but usually when a pretty woman turned him down, it was for a prettier man. Herb had a gut that hung low over his belt and a greasy mop of brown-gray hair, and his face had the veiny marks of a career alcoholic’s. Plus everyone knew that Herb was as mad as a cut snake. And that bitch was chatting away with him, laughing at his nonsensical patter. Hell, maybe she was just playing hard to get.

  The girl could hold her liquor, he’d give her that. She’d drained five whiskeys and two beers since he’d arrived. But now she was on the move. She set a few more bills on the bar and made her way, weaving ever so slightly, down the galley to the door. She was drunk. Maybe drunk enough.

  Roger Hicks closed out his tab, waited a minute or two, and left. He saw her at the end of the block making a right turn, and he followed her home. He almost quit after the second mile, but then he saw her reach for her keys as she turned onto High Street. He watched her unlock the front door. He sat by a tree, waited for the lights in the house to be extinguished, and then checked the front door. Even these days, some people forgot or still thought they were living in a different world. The door was locked. Hicks checked the windows. Closed. There was one that might work in a pinch, but he’d need to find a milk crate or something. He walked around to the back door, gripped the doorknob, and it turned, just like that.

  Some people, he thought, still trust their neighbors.

  2014

  Boston, Massachusetts

  Lena Fury died in her car on her way to lunch. She had a stroke at a stoplight, slumped over the wheel, and was pronounced dead at the scene. Colin was the emergency contact; Kate answered the call. She phoned Colin and spent the rest of the day being the messenger of death.

  Anna got the news at work. Matthew saw tears streaming down her face as she spoke to Kate. Later, when she thought about it, Anna knew those tears were not for herself but for her mother, for the ugly truth that an entire life could be wasted on appearances.

  She stepped into Matthew’s office and asked for a week off. He said yes, of course. Then he approached her cautiously. He had been cautious with her ever since that night they’d kissed.

  She’d gone home. They never spoke of it again.

  “I’m going to hug you now,” said Matthew. “Take it up with HR if you have a problem with it.”

  He put his arms around her. Anna didn’t tense up, like he’d expected. She just fell into the embrace and let someone comfort her. He hugged like Max Blackman, she thought.

  At their boozy office Christmas party, Max had tried to encourage the relationship.

  “Matthew is a good man,” he said.

  “He’s my boss,” said Anna.

  “I’ve seen you two together,” Max said. “You’re the boss.”

  “That’s not a good idea.”

  “You have become so boring, Anna.”

  “True. But nothing bad has happened.”

  “Is that going to be the litmus test for your life?” Max said. “My stepson is never coming back. Besides, what are the odds that you and he would have made it anyway? You probably would have forgotten about him by now. You were always too—”

  Max let a handwave finish his sentence.

  Although Anna thought it made more sense incomplete. She was too something, but even she didn’t know what. Years of therapy, rehab escapes, and meeting after meeting, and all she could tell you was that she was too something. And Max was right about Malcolm. When Anna was being honest with herself, she knew exactly how that relationship would have played out. She would have worn him down, gotten him, and then fucked it up.

  It had been more than five years since she’d last lost control. Five years of every morning and evening exactly the same. She imagined her life as the readout of a healthy EKG, her heart beating slow and steady.

  Lena’s death threatened Anna’s equilibrium. Whenever serious emotions fought to surface, Anna watched herself like a prison guard. She reminded herself again and again of what she was capable of.

  Anna and Colin wrote the eulogy in one coffee-fueled night, agonizing over every word, trying to find the balance between respectful and honest and still manage to fill five minutes, which they’d decided was the absolute short
est acceptable length of time. Colin was saddled with the job of delivering it, so he expected Anna to pull her weight in words.

  “Lena Fury was a principled, disciplined woman who dedicated her life to charitable endeavors,” Anna said. “She was a devoted wife and mother who … something, something.”

  “I need the something, something,” Colin said.

  “What did Mom like?”

  “She liked shopping.”

  “You can’t say that in a eulogy.”

  “Frame it differently. She had a love of fashion—no, she was a champion of artistic expression,” Colin suggested.

  “You got that from ‘She liked shopping’?” Anna said. “Remember, her friends are going to be there.”

  “What did Mom love?”

  “Order,” Anna said. And as she said it, she realized that she too had come to love that condition. Here she was, finally on the same side of the fence as her mom—unless you considered the line between life and death a fence. Which it kind of was.

  Colin delivered the eulogy in four minutes and forty-nine seconds. He rushed it when he was at the podium. He spoke of Lena and Donald’s fairy-tale romance, of how she’d stood by his bedside until the very end. He talked about her love of animals and her endless charitable work. He mentioned her humor without using the word biting at any point. He spoke of her warm embrace, from the memory of one hug thirty-two years ago when he’d lost a soccer match. He mentioned bedtime stories and never revealed that they were delivered by Agnes, their nanny.

  A single anecdote was the centerpiece of the brief tribute. Colin told the story of when he was in high school and one day decided to ditch class and go to the movies. Midnight Run was playing. He sat in the third row and ate an entire box of licorice and drank a Coke. When the movie ended, after the credits rolled, he walked up the aisle and right into his mother, who had been sitting just a few rows back.

  They regarded each other for a long, awkward moment until Lena finally said, “I won’t tell if you won’t.” Then she bought him an ice cream cone and wrote him an absence note for the day. The anecdote was the only really true thing in the eulogy, but it had happened to Anna.

  George had flown out with her three boys for the funeral. Edgar had business but sent the most obscenely enormous flower arrangement. Everyone stayed at the old Fury mansion. On the last night, the sky was clear, and George suggested they pitch tents and sleep outside.

  Kate dug another fire pit.

  Zooey sang.

  God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son.”

  Abe say, “Man, you must be putting me on.”

  God say, “No.”

  Abe say, “What?”

  God say, “You can do what you want, Abe, but

  The next time you see me comin’ you better run.”

  “Sweetie, what are you singing?” Colin asked Zooey while staring directly at Kate.

  Zooey answered by singing the next verse.

  Abe says, “Where you want this killin’ done?”

  God say, “Out on Highway 61.”

  “Kate, you have to stop playing music like this in the car,” Colin said.

  “You said you wanted her to learn the Bible,” Kate said.

  Anna said to Zooey, “Why don’t you go help Hudson do whatever he’s doing.”

  “He’s foraging for snails,” George said. “Do you know if your mother used pesticides on this lawn?”

  Carter surfaced from his tent briefly and handed his mother his Game Boy.

  “Battery is dead. I need your phone.”

  “How about you get some fresh air. Go play with Miller. Where is he?”

  “Up there,” Carter said.

  Miller was twenty feet in the air, straddling a long branch on a hundred-year-old oak tree.

  “Miller, it’s time to come down,” George said.

  Zooey ran inside the house and returned wearing last month’s Halloween costume. She wore a black cape and hood and was carrying a cardboard scythe.

  Colin gaped at his daughter. “On the day of my mother’s funeral. This is so inappropriate.”

  “It’s just a costume,” said Kate.

  “That’s what you always say,” said Colin.

  “It’s just a job; it’s just a house,” Kate had said when Colin lost his job and the house. He found a new job and a smaller house. It was still too big for Kate.

  “It’s just a piece of paper,” Kate had said when he’d asked her to marry him.

  Colin was ashamed to admit this, but it wasn’t until Kate turned him down that he knew what it felt like to be in love.

  “It’s not just a piece of paper to me,” he’d said.

  “Courthouse,” Kate said, bargaining for the smallest nuptials.

  “Backyard,” Colin countered, and won.

  The wedding was too simple for Lena, but since she didn’t approve of the bride, she could hardly complain about the lack of fanfare over the ceremony.

  When Colin phoned Anna to tell her the news about his relationship, Anna first thought he was joking. Then, after he convinced her otherwise, she hung up on him and called Kate to remind her of his two failed marriages. It never occurred to Anna that Colin would be different because Kate wasn’t like the others.

  “He could break your heart,” Anna said.

  “Or I could break his,” said Kate.

  “I prefer that scenario,” Anna said.

  Anna phoned her brother after she ended the call with Kate.

  “Try not to fuck this one up,” she said.

  Two months later, Anna received an invitation to the wedding. Anna thought it was the kind of wedding that you had when you had nothing to prove, and this time she believed her brother when he said, “Until death do us part.” Kate had tried ardently to get that bit excised from the ceremony, but the preacher was old and forgetful and ignored the red line Kate sliced across the vows.

  In the Fury backyard, after the funeral, Colin kissed Kate on the lips in front of all the company. Sensing Kate’s discomfort with the public display of affection, he pulled her into a full embrace and then dipped her in a movie-star smooch.

  “I’m going to bed. Inside. Like normal people,” Colin said, shaking his head at the collection of tents in his mother’s backyard. Lena would have been furious.

  “That’s nothing to be proud of,” Kate said.

  Colin returned to the house but didn’t go to bed. He started his own fire in the civilized living-room hearth. Kate had finally taught him how to build a fire, and he’d gotten pretty good at it. After twenty minutes it was a beautiful blaze. Colin sat down on the couch and opened up a biography of a now-deceased movie star that Kate had recommended after noting he only read books on business or politics.

  Hudson found eight snails in the grass and proudly delivered them to his mother. George asked for butter and a skillet so she could fry them up over the fire.

  “Are you going to eat those snails?” Anna asked.

  “We eat them at home,” George said, “once I stopped the gardener from using pesticides. They’re the same kinds you get in a French restaurant.”

  “I’m sure my mother used pesticides.”

  “Sorry, Hudson,” George said. “These are poisonous snails. I’ll fry you up a batch as soon as we get home.”

  Hudson shoved his hands in his pockets and bowed his head in disappointment, like a child actor playing sad. He snapped out of it when Kate fetched a bag of marshmallows from the pantry.

  Zooey showed Miller the two bears in the sky and told him not to look for a third while Anna stabbed marshmallows on chopstick stakes.

  The group held their wands over the flames.

  “Not as good as snails,” Hudson declared.

  “Better than snails,” Zooey countered.

  The conversation repeated seven times until Kate interrupted: “Zooey prefers marshmallows; Hudson prefers snails. There is no universal truth.”

  After the children were tucked into sleeping bags in t
heir tents, Anna, Kate, and George returned to the fire, fueling it with another log.

  The women regarded one another silently.

  Is this as good as it gets? George thought.

  Nothing is better than this, Kate thought.

  And Anna thought how peaceful it was to think about nothing at all, to simply sit by the fire and enjoy the snaps and cracks and the smell of burned wood and the ghostly swirls of smoke dissipating into the cold night air.

  When the fire died, the women crawled into a two-man tent, knowing that only one of them would sleep well that night.

  Kate woke shortly after 2:00 a.m. when George kneed her in the ribs. She curled into a ball in the corner and tried to go back to sleep. The smell of burned embers lingered in the air. She’d been sure the campfire was dead when they went to sleep, but she crawled out of the tent to check again. The bonfire was indeed a cold, damp pile of charred wood.

  The Fury mansion, however, was alight with flames, the entire bottom floor engulfed. Kate rushed to the back door as the kitchen window burst out. She raced back to the campsite and found George’s coat in the mouth of the tent. She rifled through her pockets, picked up her cell, and dialed.

  “Wake up, wake up, wake up,” she repeated.

  He woke up and answered.

  “What?” Colin said groggily.

  “The house is on fire. Climb out of the bedroom window and onto the trellis.”

  “What?” Colin said again.

  “Wake up, Colin, and get the fuck out of the house. Now,” Kate said. It was the loudest she had ever spoken to anyone.

  Kate rushed toward the house and willed the bedroom window to open. Colin unhooked the latch, wondered why there needed to be a latch on the top floor, and opened the window. He fumbled with the fastener to the screen and shoved it loose. Colin straddled the window and thought that maybe he should go back and get a coat and slippers.

  Kate saw him hesitate and shouted, “Whatever you’re thinking is wrong.”

  Colin climbed onto the aging trellis, feeling the sharp wood dig cornered grooves into his bare feet. He descended the lattice like a grownup on a jungle gym, the distant tactile memory returning. He jumped the last few feet to the ground and landed on a rock.