Those Who Favor Fire

by Lauren Wolk

  “Have you ever read Charlotte’s Web?” she said to Paul, the best of her school friends.

  He shook his head, daydreaming.

  “Read it,” she said, peering at her macaroni. “The pig in it, Wilbur, gets fed all this luscious slop. Scraps of this and that, soup labels, potato peelings. Somehow it all sounds just great. I’d trade this slop for that any day.” She threw down her fork. “What I wouldn’t give for some five-bean salad.” And that’s when she looked around and saw Harry, three tables down.

  He was quite a lovely man, as a painting is lovely, or a meadow, and looking at him made Rachel feel hungry in a completely physical sense.

  Paul pushed his own plate into the middle of the table. “Key lime pie,” he said. “Or maybe a proper hot dog.” He laced his fingers behind his head. “Let’s have dinner off campus.” He turned to look at Rachel, then over toward Harry. “Oh, hell,” he said.

  “What.”

  Paul shook his head. “Another one bites the dust.”

  “What?” She turned to look at him, her eyes slow to focus.

  “Never mind,” he said. Then, “Come on. Russian lit in fifteen minutes.”

  And from then on, for the rest of her life, Rachel would not be able to eat ham loaf without thinking of Harry Gallagher.

  Three weeks later, when she discovered that Harry had joined Paul’s fraternity, Rachel wasted no time. There was to be a party at the house Saturday night. She hated frat parties. She had been to a few, for reasons she could no longer fathom, and had gone home feeling soiled and frightened. That Paul belonged to a fraternity confused her, for he was her friend and, in her experience, a decent person. But, since she found most young men confusing in one way or another, Rachel gave Paul the benefit of the doubt and believed him when he said that they were not all wild and amoral. She trusted Paul. So it was to him that she turned for help.

  “I want you to introduce us, casually, if we run into him. Don’t embarrass me. Don’t make a big deal out of it. I’ve seen him a lot lately. We even danced a dance the other night in the Blue Room. But it was so noisy that we didn’t say anything, really. Just danced. I want to meet him properly, that’s all.”

  It was one of the last warm nights for months to come, and they were sitting on the statue of Walt Whitman that pegged the campus green. Paul wore a pair of crumpled red boxer shorts, dirty white sneakers without any laces, a backward ball cap, and a pair of sunglasses. No shirt. His chest was peeling from too much sun. He had a plain face, pale eyes, no accent, hair the color of mud. He was whip thin. He often wished he’d been born a more colorful, robust boy. But he was a good sport with a quirky sense of humor, and Rachel had never felt threatened by him in any way.

  “I’m surprised at you,” Paul said.

  “What’s so surprising? Why shouldn’t I want to meet him?”

  Paul didn’t answer her right away. For the thousandth time, he studied the way her hair matched her eyes, as if a painter had trailed his brush through a loamy brown, auburn, and ginger and used the same rich skein to color them both.

  “You’re right,” he finally said. “What’s it to me if you end up with some brain-dead jock? See if I care.”

  They didn’t talk for a while. Rachel watched the stars and thought briefly about Belle Haven. Paul watched Rachel and slowly became convinced that it was time to take back his heart.

  Then, “All right.” He sighed. “I’ll introduce you if that’s what you want, but I think you’re being foolish.”

  “I thought you liked Harry.”

  “I do,” he said mildly.

  “You just called him a brain-dead jock.”

  “That doesn’t mean I don’t like him. Some of my best friends are brain-dead jocks.” He squinted at the stars. “But he’s not right for you.”

  “And if I decide to prove you wrong?”

  He shook his head. “Don’t come crying to me.”

  “I wouldn’t do that. If you’re right about Harry, he’ll be my mistake.”

  “I am,” Paul said quietly. “He will. Mark my words.”

  The night that Rachel Hearn met Harry Gallagher began well enough. True, the party was stupidly crowded, as such parties are. The floor was awash with beer from a leaky keg, the bathrooms unspeakable, the music hurtful, the boys predatory, the girls undone by the humiliating hope that they might be the ones to save these boys from each other and from themselves.

  But it was hard to see such things from their midst. Excitement has a way of gilding filth. And there was, in truth, an element of purity even at the evening’s lowest ebb, for many of the people in the fraternity house that night were there almost against their will and had no intention of pursuing or becoming prey.

  “It looks like The Rape of the Sabine Women,” Rachel said to Paul as they sat at the top of the stairs and watched the crowd boil below.

  “No horses,” he pointed out.

  “True, though there is a cow tethered out front. I’ve been trying to figure out why—beyond the obvious link between livestock and frat boys—but I think I give up.”

  “It’s White Russian night,” he replied.

  “I see. And that’s the czar out there tied to a tree?”

  “Cream,” he said impatiently. “Vodka, Kahlúa, and cream. White Russians.”

  “Ah,” Rachel said, shaking her head. “Frat humor. I might have known.”

  For a while she and Paul sat on the steps, watching halfheartedly for Harry Gallagher, and chided each other gently. They drank their White Russians too quickly, linked their arms and told secrets, and finally decided to call it a night.

  “I feel like a lamb escaping the slaughter,” she said, laughing as Paul walked her back to her dorm. It was one of those cold and clear October nights, fancy with stars and plumes of chimney smoke. The cold cleared Rachel’s head a bit, but her lips and cheeks were still numb from the vodka and she felt sleepy as a child. She let her feet shuffle through the dying leaves that lay upon the sidewalk and gave little thought to the dangers of walking abroad so late at night, regardless of escort. Even the sudden appearance of Harry Gallagher at the curb ahead, splendid in his trademark Camaro, failed to alarm her.

  What will be will be, she thought lazily. And gave herself up to fate.

  It might have been the ice cream, drowned in banana liqueur, that Harry fed her when the three of them reached his apartment. Or perhaps the shock of having so many unexpected things happen to her, one after the next, for hours on end. Whatever the cause, Rachel kept only a few remembrances of that night, and these made her recoil even after many years had passed.

  “Come over to my place for ice cream,” Harry had said on the cold, star-ceilinged street where they’d met. Nothing had seemed so wrong with that.

  “You can’t eat ice cream without a splash of liqueur,” he’d said in his sloppy apartment. And Rachel had felt her muscles contract in anticipation.

  “I’ll take you home in a minute,” he’d promised. “Finish your drink.”

  But then she and Harry had watched an old I Love Lucy rerun, side by side on the derelict couch, sipping from the same glass of syrupy booze, while Paul glared and muttered in a corner. Everything Rachel was doing astonished her, but she felt certain that nothing bad could happen while Paul was with her. And even when she glanced over and noticed that his chair was empty, she knew that he would not have left her there alone. The liqueur had made her drunk very quickly. She was not even aware that her head had fallen onto Harry’s shoulder. But when he turned her into his lap and began to move against her, she knew it. She felt as if she had left her body and was watching from above, shocked and amused at the sight of flesh below. Her sense of time was so confused that it could have been minutes or hours before she felt all in one piece again.

  “Where’s Paul?” she finally mumbled, pushing her hair from her eyes and wondering how she’d burned her mouth. It was sticky and raw. Her breasts, she realized, had been bared. Harry was taking off her shoes. He
pointed toward the kitchen.

  “He’s in there,” Harry said as he placed her shoes quietly on the floor. “He can take care of himself.”

  One part of Rachel knew precisely what was happening and reluctantly welcomed her impending metamorphosis. Twenty-year-old virgins were as rare as comets, and Rachel had long since decided that her virginity was too distracting. Besides, she was curious about sex and had difficulty imagining what it would be like. It was therefore with a somewhat scientific attitude that she approached the whole experience, watchfully open to possibility.

  Another part of her looked at matters differently. This boy was, really, a stranger. Rachel knew only that something about the arrangement of his eyes, the grain of his hair, the contours of his hands shocked her senses into a new state: she had never before been attracted to anyone as she was to Harry Gallagher. Disarmed, she was inclined to think the best of him, to anticipate the discovery of a fine and honorable boy inside the lovely skin. What Paul had said about him, what she had heard here and there from disappointed girls, did not matter to Rachel. She felt almost virtuous as she made her decision to judge him according to what he said, what he did, and nothing else.

  Sober, Rachel might have allowed her indecision to escalate and, eventually, to lead her safely home. As drunk as she was, she simply declared a stalemate, put her concerns aside for the moment, and concentrated on keeping her feet as Harry took her by the hand and led her to his bedroom.

  She did not say a word as he shut the door and pushed her gently onto the mattress. When he knelt over her and began to unfasten her pants, Rachel closed her eyes and allowed herself to drift, to recall the absolutely safe and satisfying feeling of her mother’s hands putting her to bed when she was very small, perhaps drowsy with fever, removing her socks, lifting her compliant limbs, arranging the blankets over her, moving quietly about the room.

  Harry removed the last of Rachel’s clothing, tugged her from the edge of the bed, all without a word. He paid her no compliments, made no inquiries, offered her no protection. He addressed himself not to her but to her flesh. Through it all, Rachel kept her silence and, with it, a degree of distance.

  The weight of his body on her changed things. It yanked her into the here and now, purged her memories of home and comfort, so that she opened her eyes and suddenly felt as if she had a great deal to say. But it was as her lassitude left her that she felt herself tear. She hissed like an animal, bit right into her lip, and, through the rest of it, coached herself gently, silent and removed.

  This is inevitable. It happens to everyone. I should never have waited so long. Maybe it’s like chicken pox: much worse the older you get. God, this is awful. After tonight I won’t have to worry about this anymore. I’ll be through with this part of it. I’ll know what it’s like. I won’t ever let it be like this again. They say the first time is awful. Thank God they told me. There is no pleasure in this. Not for me, anyway. Is this what men are after? They must know something. Or maybe they just set their sights lower. Or maybe they just don’t know any better. Isn’t he through yet? He’s not even looking at me. I’ll have to ask Paul about this. He’s a man. He must know something about it. There must be more to it than this, even for them.

  When Harry rolled over onto his side and straight into a deep sleep, Rachel waited until her insides had slowly rocked to a standstill and then, floundering against the tangled sheet, threw up in her naked lap. She would have laughed at this whole astounding turn of events, but she was concentrating fiercely on containing her nausea and cleaning herself. When she dragged the soiled sheet into the bathroom with her—feeling vaguely like a giant snake shedding its skin—she found the cloth streaked with blood. She tried to assess her wounds, but bending over made her feel sick again, and faint. So she climbed carefully into the bathtub, blinking at its brightness, and pulled the linen in after her. The hot spray of the shower stung her cheeks, inflamed by Harry’s whiskers, and scorched her swollen breasts. It took all of Rachel’s strength to stay on her feet, to stay awake, and to tamp down the invasive impression that she had made a terrible mistake.

  It wasn’t the sex that alarmed her. It wasn’t the blood or the sickness or even the way she’d surrendered herself so completely, so quickly, so knowingly.

  It was the distance he’d put between them in that ill-made bed, the back he’d turned to her, the realization that he had never once called her by name.

  Chapter 5

  On his first morning home from Yale, Kit Barrows woke early, showered, shaved, dressed carefully, and crept past his father’s bedroom door, down the stairs, and into the kitchen. While he waited at the table, the cook made him a pan of bacon, a stack of toast, and a pot of black coffee. She knew what he wanted without asking, and she knew him well enough to keep quiet. There were mornings when he was friendly and talkative, but this was not one of them.

  When he had finished eating, he picked up the phone, dialed the carriage house, and asked Holly to join him in the garden as soon as she could. He did not apologize for waking her. Nor did he ask her if she was alone. The thought of her asleep in her bed did not even enter his mind.

  There was an old gazebo in the garden where Kay Barrows and her children had feasted on strawberries and read stories through the hottest part of many summer days. As Kit sat there, waiting for his sister, he passed the time by thinking about business school, Wall Street, and wealth. Such daydreams never failed to fill him with anticipation. They did not fail him now. When he saw Holly making her way slowly through the tulips, he stood up reluctantly and put his hands into his pockets.

  “Hello, Holly.”

  “Hello yourself,” she said. When they sat down, they kept a yard of bench between them. “What’s so important that it can’t wait past the crack of dawn?” But as she looked up from her tennis shoes, she forgave him with a modest smile. It made him uncomfortable to see the way her face worked. The way her skin stretched taut over her bones. He did not see how it could be anything but painful.

  “I’m worried about Dad. I wanted to talk to you before I saw him again.”

  “He’s not up yet?” Their father had always been an early riser, as if to sleep in daylight was to miss an opportunity.

  “No. He was … he had too much to drink last night.” To which Holly showed no surprise at all. “I found him outside when I got home. In the magnolias. He must have been drinking for some time by then. He was sick.” Kit worried a loose button on his shirt. “It was awful. I don’t understand what he was doing out there, acting like that.”

  He looked at Holly, hoping she’d be the one to say, Maybe it had something to do with the man I was with last night. But she didn’t. She simply blinked slowly, sleepily, and looked out at the tulips in their beds. She seemed to have lost interest in what he was saying. “You don’t seem too concerned,” he said.

  “I’m not,” she said to the tulips. “Why should I be?”

  Despite the way Holly had distanced herself from their father, Kit had expected more than this. “Because it’s so unlike him,” he said. “I would have been less surprised to find him playing bingo.”

  Which got him another ghost of a smile.

  “How do you know what’s like or unlike him?” she said, the smile receding.

  “How do I know? No one knows him better than I do.”

  Holly looked at him for a long moment. “Of the two of us,” she finally said, “I know him better.”

  Although Kit suspected that Holly’s tryst on the carriage-house roof was linked to his father’s strange behavior, and although he was often easily annoyed by things she said and did, Kit had not called her out here for a scolding. Now, however, in the face of this claim, he felt himself become angry.

  “That’s ridiculous, Holly. You’ve done everything possible to avoid Dad for as long as I can remember. What makes you think you know him better than I do?”

  Holly had become accustomed, over the years, to being reprimanded by her brother and her f
ather. She had learned to expect little from either of them. Certainly not much in the way of affection or respect. But she had also grown tired of holding her tongue, keeping her own counsel, and on this invigorating spring morning she was for once unwilling to hold herself in check.

  “What do you want from me?” she asked him. “You call me out here, tell me a sad story about Dad drinking, remind me that the two of you are great pals. What for?”

  She was right. It didn’t make a lot of sense. But none of what he’d seen since coming home made much sense to Kit. “I guess I was curious to see if you knew what was bothering him. If it had anything to do with your visitor last night.”

  “My visitor.” Holly looked out at the tulips again. They were dependable flowers. Tough. Lovely, even in their last days. “Yes, it had everything to do with my visitor.” She pushed her hair back away from her face with both hands. “But I don’t really think that’s any of your business, Kit. And since you know Dad so goddamned well, figure him out for yourself.” She pushed herself up off the bench and straightened her clothes, slipped her hands into her pockets, and took a step away from him. “I’m sorry you had such a lousy homecoming,” she said. “But I’m sure things will be much better from now on, if you put last night out of your mind.”

  As she turned to leave, Kit’s inclination was to let her go, take her advice, and start over fresh when he saw his sober and predictable father back at the house. But there was much here that he didn’t understand. And it bothered him to think that Holly might know something too important to be left in her hands.

  “I don’t want to put it out of my mind,” he said, although he did. “I want to know what’s going on in my own house.”

  She turned back and stood thoughtfully, considered what he was asking of her, weighed his words carefully. She said, “Be careful, Kit.”

  But he didn’t know what he had to be careful about. “For God’s sake, Holly, if there’s something going on, I want to know what it is. I’m sorry, too, if I walked in on a problem between you and Dad, but I did. And I’d like to know what it is. I might be able to help.”