by E. Lockhart
and
Jonathan Sinclair Dennis
perished in a house fire thought to be caused by a jug of motorboat fuel that overturned in the mudroom. The house in question burned to the ground before the neighboring fire departments arrived on the scene.
Cadence Sinclair Eastman was present on the island at the time of the fire but did not notice it until it was well under way. The conflagration prevented her from entering the building when she realized there were people and animals trapped inside. She sustained burns to the hands and feet in her rescue attempts. Then she ran to another home on the island and telephoned the fire department.
When help finally arrived, Miss Eastman was found on the tiny beach, half underwater and curled into a ball. She was unable to answer questions about what happened and appeared to have suffered a head injury. She had to be heavily sedated for many days following the accident.
Harris Sinclair, owner of the island, declined any formal investigation of the fire’s origin. Many of the surrounding trees were decimated.
Funerals were held for
Gatwick Matthew Patil,
Mirren Sinclair Sheffield,
and
Jonathan Sinclair Dennis
in their hometowns of Cambridge and New York City.
Cadence Sinclair Eastman was not well enough to attend.
The following summer, the Sinclair family returned to Beechwood Island. They fell apart. They mourned. They drank a lot.
Then they built a new house on the ashes of the old.
Cadence Sinclair Eastman had no memory of the events surrounding the fire, no memory of it ever happening. Her burns healed quickly but she exhibited selective amnesia regarding the events of the previous summer. She persisted in believing she had injured her head while swimming. Doctors presumed her crippling migraine headaches were caused by unacknowledged grief and guilt. She was heavily medicated and extremely fragile both physically and mentally.
These same doctors advised Cadence’s mother to stop explaining the tragedy if Cadence could not recall it herself. It was too much to be told of the trauma fresh each day. Let her remember in her own time. She should not return to Beechwood Island until she’d had significant time to heal. In fact, any measures possible should be taken to keep her from the island in the year immediately after the accident.
Cadence displayed a disquieting desire to rid herself of all unnecessary possessions, even things of sentimental value, almost as if doing penance for past crimes. She darkened her hair and took to dressing very simply. Her mother sought professional advice about Cadence’s behavior and was advised that it appeared a normal part of the grieving process.
In the second year after the accident, the family began to recover. Cadence was once again attending school after many long absences. Eventually, the girl expressed a desire to return to Beechwood Island. The doctors and other family members agreed: it might be good for her to do just that.
On the island, perhaps, she would finish healing.
81
REMEMBER, DON’T GET your feet wet. Or your clothes.
Soak the linen cupboards, the towels, the floors, the books, and the beds.
Remember, move the gas can away from your kindling so you can grab it.
See it catch, see it burn. Then run. Use the kitchen stairwell and exit out the mudroom door.
Remember, take your gas can with you and return it to the boathouse.
See you at Cuddledown. We’ll put our clothes in the washer there, change, then go and watch the blaze before we call the fire departments.
Those are the last words I said to any of them. Johnny and Mirren went to the top two floors of Clairmont carrying cans of gas and bags of old newspapers for kindling.
I kissed Gat before he went down to the basement. “See you in a better world,” he said to me, and I laughed.
We were a bit drunk. We’d been at the aunties’ leftover wine since they left the island. The alcohol made me feel giddy and powerful until I stood in the kitchen alone. Then I felt dizzy and nauseated.
The house was cold. It felt like something that deserved to be destroyed. It was filled with objects over which the aunties fought. Valuable art, china, photographs. All of them fueled family anger. I hit my fist against the kitchen portrait of Mummy, Carrie, and Bess as children, grinning for the camera. The glass on it shattered and I stumbled back.
The wine was muddling my head now. I wasn’t used to it.
The gas can in one hand and the bag of kindling in the other, I decided to get this done as fast as possible. I doused the kitchen first, then the pantry. I did the dining room and was soaking the living room couches when I realized I should have started at the end of the house farthest from the mudroom door. That was our exit. I should have done the kitchen last so I could run out without wetting my feet with gasoline.
Stupid.
The formal door that opened onto the front porch from the living room was soaked already, but there was a small back door, too. It was by Granddad’s study and led to the walkway down to the staff building. I would use that.
I doused part of the hall and then the craft room, feeling a wave of sorrow for the ruin of Gran’s beautiful cotton prints and colorful yarns. She would have hated what I was doing. She loved her fabrics, her old sewing machine, her pretty, pretty objects.
Stupid again. I had soaked my espadrilles in fuel.
All right. Stay calm. I’d wear them until I was done and then toss them into the fire behind me as I ran outside.
In Granddad’s study I stood on the desk, splashing bookshelves up to the ceiling, holding the gas can far away from me. There was a fair amount of gas left, and this was my last room, so I soaked the books heavily.
Then I wet the floor, piled the kindling on it, and backed into the small foyer that led to the rear door. I got my shoes off and threw them onto the stack of magazines. I stepped onto a square of dry floor and set the gas can down. Pulled a matchbook from the pocket of my jeans and lit my paper towel roll.
I threw the flaming roll into the kindling and watched it light. It caught, and grew, and spread. Through the double-wide study doors, I saw a line of flame zip down the hallway on one side and into the living room on the other. The couch lit up.
Then, before me, the bookshelves burst into flames, the gas-soaked paper burning quicker than anything else. Suddenly the ceiling was alight. I couldn’t look away. The flames were terrible. Unearthly.
Then someone screamed.
And screamed again.
It was coming from the room directly above me, a bedroom. Johnny was working on the second floor. I had lit the study, and the study had burned faster than anywhere else. The fire was rising, and Johnny wasn’t out.
Oh no, oh no, oh no. I threw myself at the back door but found it heavily bolted. My hands were slippery with gas. The metal was hot already. I flipped the bolts—one, two, three—but something went wrong and the door stuck.
Another scream.
I tried the bolts again. Failed. Gave up.
I covered my mouth and nose with my hands and ran through the burning study and down the flaming hallway into the kitchen. The room wasn’t lit yet, thank God. I rushed across the wet floor toward the mudroom door.
Stumbled, skidded, and fell, soaking myself in the puddles of gasoline.
The hems of my jeans were burning from my run through the study. The flames licked out to the gas on the kitchen floor and streaked across to the wooden farmhouse cabinetry and Gran’s cheery dish towels. Fire zipped across the mudroom exit in front of me and I could see my jeans were now alight as well, from knee to ankle. I hurled myself toward the mudroom door, running through flames.
“Get out!” I yelled, though I doubted anyone could hear me. “Get out now!”
Outside I threw myself onto the grass. Rolled until my pants stopped burning.
I could see already that the top two floors of Clairmont were glowing with heat, and my own ground floor was fully ali
ght. The basement level, I couldn’t tell.
“Gat? Johnny? Mirren? Where are you?”
No answer.
Holding down panic, I told myself they must be out by now.
Calm down. It would all be okay. It had to.
“Where are you?” I yelled again, beginning to run.
Again, no answer.
They were likely at the boathouse, dropping their gas cans. It wasn’t far, and I ran, calling their names as loud as I could. My bare feet hit the wooden walkway with a strange echo.
The door was closed. I yanked it open. “Gat! Johnny? Mirren!”
No one there, but they could already be at Cuddledown, couldn’t they? Wondering what was taking me so long.
A walkway stretches from the boathouse past the tennis courts and over to Cuddledown. I ran again, the island strangely hushed in the dark. I told myself over and over: They will be there. Waiting for me. Worrying about me.
We will laugh because we’re all safe. We will soak my burns in ice water and feel all kinds of lucky.
We will.
But as I came upon it, I saw the house was dark.
No one waited there.
I tore back to Clairmont, and when it came into view it was burning, bottom to top. The turret room was lit, the bedrooms were lit, the windows of the basement glowed orange. Everything hot.
I ran to the mudroom entry and pulled the door. Smoke billowed out. I pulled off my gas-soaked sweater and jeans, choking and gagging. I pushed my way in and entered the kitchen stairwell, heading toward the basement.
Halfway down the steps there was a wall of flames. A wall.
Gat wasn’t out. And he wasn’t coming.
I turned back and ran up toward Johnny and Mirren, but the wood was burning beneath my feet.
The banister lit up. The stairwell in front of me caved in, throwing sparks.
I reeled back.
I could not go up.
I could not save them.
There was nowhere
nowhere
nowhere
nowhere now to go
but down.
82
I REMEMBER THIS like I am living it as I sit on the steps of Windemere, still staring at the spot where Gat disappeared into the night. The realization of what I have done comes as a fog in my chest, cold, dark, and spreading. I grimace and hunch over. The icy fog runs from my chest through my back and up my neck. It shoots through my head and down my spine.
Cold, cold, remorse.
I shouldn’t have soaked the kitchen first. I shouldn’t have lit the fire in the study.
How stupid to wet the books so thoroughly. Anyone might have predicted how they would burn. Anyone.
We should have had a set time to light our kindling.
I might have insisted we stay together.
I should never have checked the boathouse.
Should never have run to Cuddledown.
If only I’d gone back to Clairmont faster, maybe I could have gotten Johnny out. Or warned Gat before the basement caught. Maybe I could have found the fire extinguishers and stopped the flames somehow.
Maybe, maybe.
If only, if only.
I wanted so much for us: a life free of constriction and prejudice. A life free to love and be loved.
And here, I have killed them.
My Liars, my darlings.
Killed them. My Mirren, my Johnny, my Gat.
This knowledge goes from my spine down my shoulders and through my fingertips. It turns them to ice. They chip and break, tiny pieces shattering on the Windemere steps. Cracks splinter up my arms and through my shoulders and the front of my neck. My face is frozen and fractured in a witch’s snarl of grief. My throat is closed. I cannot make a sound.
Here I am frozen, when I deserve to burn.
I should have shut up about taking things into our own hands. I could have stayed silent. Compromised. Talking on the phone would have been fine. Soon we’d have driver’s licenses. Soon we’d go to college and the beautiful Sinclair houses would seem far away and unimportant.
We could have been patient.
I could have been a voice of reason.
Maybe then, when we drank the aunties’ wine, we’d have forgotten our ambitions. The drink would have made us sleepy. We’d have dozed off in front of the television set, angry and impotent, perhaps, but without setting fire to anything.
I can’t take any of it back.
I crawl indoors and up to my bedroom on hands of cracked ice, trailing shards of my frozen body behind me. My heels, my kneecaps. Beneath the blankets, I shiver convulsively, pieces of me breaking off onto my pillow. Fingers. Teeth. Jawbone. Collarbone.
Finally, finally, the shivering stops. I begin to warm and melt.
I cry for my aunts, who lost their firstborn children.
For Will, who lost his brother.
For Liberty, Bonnie, and Taft, who lost their sister.
For Granddad, who saw not just his palace burn to the ground, but his grandchildren perish.
For the dogs, the poor naughty dogs.
I cry for the vain, thoughtless complaints I’ve made all summer. For my shameful self-pity. For my plans for the future.
I cry for all my possessions, given away. I miss my pillow, my books, my photographs. I shudder at my delusions of charity, at my shame masquerading as virtue, at lies I’ve told myself, punishments I’ve inflicted on myself, and punishments I’ve inflicted on my mother.
I cry with horror that all the family has been burdened by me, and even more with being the cause of so much grief.
We did not, after all, save the idyll. That is gone forever, if it ever existed. We have lost the innocence of it, of those days before we knew the extent of the aunts’ rage, before Gran’s death and Granddad’s deterioration.
Before we became criminals. Before we became ghosts.
The aunties hug one another not because they are freed of the weight of Clairmont house and all it symbolized, but out of tragedy and empathy. Not because we freed them, but because we wrecked them, and they clung to one another in the face of horror.
Johnny. Johnny wanted to run a marathon. He wanted to go mile upon mile, proving his lungs would not give out. Proving he was the man Granddad wanted him to be, proving his strength, though he was so small.
His lungs filled with smoke. He has nothing to prove now. There is nothing to run for.
He wanted to own a car and eat fancy cakes he saw in bakery widows. He wanted to laugh big and own art and wear beautifully made clothes. Sweaters, scarves, wooly items with stripes. He wanted to make a tuna fish of Lego and hang it like a piece of taxidermy. He refused to be serious, he was infuriatingly unserious, but he was as committed to the things that mattered to him as anyone could possibly be. The running. Will and Carrie. The Liars. His sense of what was right. He gave up his college fund without a second thought, to stand up for his principles.
I think of Johnny’s strong arms, the stripe of white sunblock on his nose, the time we were sick together from poison ivy and lay next to each other in the hammock, scratching. The time he built me and Mirren a dollhouse of cardboard and stones he’d found on the beach.
Jonathan Sinclair Dennis, you would have been a light in the dark for so many people.
You have been one. You have.
And I have let you down the worst possible way.
I cry for Mirren, who wanted to see the Congo. She didn’t know how she wanted to live or what she believed yet; she was searching and knew she was drawn to that place. It will never be real to her now, never anything more than photographs and films and stories published for people’s entertainment.
Mirren talked a lot about sexual intercourse but never had it. When we were younger, she and I would stay up late, sleeping together on the Windemere porch in sleeping bags, laughing and eating fudge. We fought over Barbie dolls and did each other’s makeup and dreamed of love. Mirren will never have a wedding with yellow roses or a gro
om who loves her enough to wear a stupid yellow cummerbund.
She was irritable. And bossy. But always funny about it. It was easy to make her mad, and she was nearly always cross with Bess and annoyed with the twins—but then she’d fill with regret, moaning in agony over her own sharp tongue. She did love her family, loved all of them, and would read them books or help them make ice cream or give them pretty shells she had found.
She cannot make amends anymore.
She did not want to be like her mother. Not a princess, no. An explorer, a businesswoman, a Good Samaritan, an ice cream maker—something.
Something she will never be, because of me.
Mirren, I can’t even say sorry. There is not even a Scrabble word for how bad I feel.
And Gat, my Gat.
He will never go to college. He had that hungry mind, constantly turning things over, looking not for answers but for understanding. He will never satisfy his curiosity, never finish the hundred best novels ever written, never be the great man he might have been.
He wanted to stop evil. He wanted to express his anger. He lived big, my brave Gat. He didn’t shut up when people wanted him to, he made them listen—and then he listened in return. He refused to take things lightly, though he was always quick to laugh.
Oh, he made me laugh. And made me think, even when I didn’t feel like thinking, even when I was too lazy to pay attention.
Gat let me bleed on him and bleed on him and bleed on him. He never minded. He wanted to know why I was bleeding. He wondered what he could do to heal the wound.
He will never eat chocolate again.
I loved him. I love him. As best I could. But he was right. I did not know him all the way. I will never see his apartment, eat his mother’s cooking, meet his friends from school. I will never see the bedspread on his bed or the posters on his walls. I’ll never know the diner where he got egg sandwiches in the morning or the corner where he double-locked his bike.
I don’t even know if he bought egg sandwiches or hung posters. I don’t know if he owned a bike or had a bedspread. I am only imagining the corner bike racks and the double locks, because I never went home with him, never saw his life, never knew that person Gat was when not on Beechwood Island.