Those Who Favor Fire

by Lauren Wolk

  For the first time Holly became upset. Her chin trembled as she looked at him. She bent a little at the waist as if standing up straight were too difficult. “I don’t think you can,” she said after a moment. “And I’m certain that you’re going to wish you’d left well enough alone.” But she didn’t leave. Instead, she returned to the bench and sat down again, waited quietly, gave him one last chance to go his own way, much as he had done for more than a decade now.

  “Tell me,” he said, more gently than anything he’d said to her in a long time. “Tell me what’s wrong.” He sat patiently next to her and gave her some time. And the minutes that she took to collect herself and to consider her words were the last moments of the life he’d always led and had thought he always would.

  “I guess it’s wrong to think you could leave well enough alone,” she murmured, more to herself than to him. “Nothing about this is well enough. But I’ve been handling it, getting pretty good at it, since I was eleven years old.” She looked at him, as if she hoped that he would interrupt her, change his mind, opt to prolong the silence they’d honored between them for years. But he did nothing. Said nothing. Simply waited.

  “When I was eleven years old,” she continued, looking away from Kit, “he … Dad … began to … to bother me, whenever I was home from school.” She kept her face turned away from him, and as he listened he wondered if he were hearing her correctly. “At first it was little things,” she said, the words coming faster now. “Some of them he’d been doing for years, but I never really thought about them. Like coming up behind me when I was at the piano, standing very close to me so he was pressed up against my back. He never hugged me when I was little, or kissed me, and I used to love it when he’d stand like that behind me. I thought it was something any father would do. I’m sure it is what most fathers do, in a very different way. For very different reasons.”

  And all at once Kit did not want to hear another word. He was terribly afraid of the things Holly was saying. She was slowly turning the knob of a door he’d never expected to find in the house at his back, and if such a door existed, if she pulled it open all the way, he knew that he would not want to look through it, to see what waited on the other side. He stood up and began to walk away from her, down the steps of the gazebo, shaking his head. “No, no, no, no,” he said. “You’re not going to do this to me.”

  But she had given him his chance, and he had lost it. “Do this to you!” she called after him, scrambling to her feet. “To you. No one has ever done anything to you in your whole goddamned life. You come back here and sit down and listen to me until I decide to stop. I did not start this. I did not call you out here. I did not badger you into talking about the wreck he’s made of my life. All I’ve ever asked of you is a little privacy, which you’ve insisted on denying me. But if you think you have the right to summon me out here, interrogate me like this, then I certainly have the right to answer you the way I choose to answer you.”

  She was shouting, her neck webbed with tendons, her arms so stiff at her sides, her hands clenched so tightly they looked like clubs. “All right,” he hissed, holding his palms out toward her, both afraid and half hoping that his father would hear Holly and come striding out to silence her. Kit climbed the steps of the gazebo as if he never expected to leave it again and stood as far from her as he could, his back against a pillar. “All right. Get it over with. Tell me how he’s wrecked your life.” But he was afraid to his bones that he already knew.

  “You won’t believe me,” Holly said. All the anger had gone out of her. She seemed tired and almost as if she, too, wanted nothing less than to talk about her life. “But I meant what I said before. Now that I’ve started I’m going to tell you everything I’ve got to tell. And then I want you to leave me alone. I don’t ever want you to bring it up again.”

  Kit felt as if he ought to be the one saying these things, for it was precisely how he felt. He wanted her to get it all over with and then put it to rest. If it was something she had lived with, then it was certainly something he could live with, too. It had to be.

  But as it turned out, it wasn’t.

  Holly’s father had never raped her. He had stopped short of that. She never said the word incest or abuse as she told Kit the story, although she might have. Her father had been more subtle than that, at least in the beginning, when Holly was only eleven, and on top of that small for her age. He had often walked in on her in the bathroom, as if by accident, especially when she had just stepped out of the shower. She had sometimes woken up in the night to find him sitting on the edge of her bed, his hands resting on her hips or her legs, but before she’d come fully awake he would walk out of her room without saying a word and in the morning she would wonder if she had dreamed the whole thing. And then she would feel unclean for dreaming such a dream.

  For years she had felt nervous and confused around him, for no matter how hard she tried to stay out of his way, to do nothing that would draw his attention, he always found a way to cross her path, to stand too close, to collide with her and then reach out as if to save her from a fall, grabbing her around the middle one time, by the shoulders the next. “Clumsy girl,” he would say, and then as she left he would touch her with his eyes. If anything, it was this impalpable touch that left bruises.

  Much as she had hated boarding school in the beginning—still small, her mother newly dead—Holly had eventually come to love her exile and to dread the approach of every holiday, every summer home. Over time, she became more self-assured and was strengthened by her association with a stern, resourceful headmistress, the daughters of other important people, and the world at large. And by her fifteenth birthday she had outgrown the insecurity and confusion that had prevented her from knowing how to behave in the face of her father’s strange interest—whether to be alarmed, how to deflect his advances. She expected her father to notice the change in her, when she went home again: to look at the way she kept her head up, her shoulders back, and her eyes steady, and be intimidated. She expected him to see, in her, a challenge. But she did not expect him to take it.

  When he did, when he walked straight into her bedroom the first night she was home again, a day earlier than Kit, when he shut the door behind him and stood glaring at her as she lay absolutely still in her bed, when he suddenly rushed toward her and pulled away the covers and opened his robe, Holly knew that she was completely alone. There was no one to hear her scream. There was no one to protect her. There was no one to stop her father from wrenching away her nightgown and pinning her with all his weight in the bed where her mother had once brought her picnics and read her books and polished her heart until it shone.

  Chad Barrows would have raped his fifteen-year-old daughter that night, and he did try. But, whether he had drunk too much or failed to completely disarm his conscience, he was unable to do what he’d intended. His body seemed to have greater scruples than his soul.

  After that, Holly went home only when she had to. Christmas, Easter, summer vacations were all spent in odd maneuvers. Because Kit was usually home, too, Chad was more careful, but Holly still made sure never to be caught alone. She locked all doors behind her. She accepted every invitation to spend time away from home. And, when her father approached her one morning in the woods behind their house, she stood her ground and said, as loudly as she could without screaming, “If you touch me, I will tell Kit.”

  Had she known how effective this threat would be, she would have issued it much sooner. Her father’s eyes had widened with fury and alarm. He panted like a wild man. He took one more step toward her and stopped, his hands slowly clenching, and said, “If you tell him, I will break your fucking face.”

  “My face!” She had actually laughed. “Go ahead! Maybe you’ll improve it.”

  This time, the strength she’d gained from years of unhappiness made some impression on him. Either that, or he felt he had no choice but to let her be. Whatever the reason, Chad backed off. Although he still watched her and s
eemed always to be holding himself in check, he never touched her again. He did not try to stop her when she eventually moved her things into the carriage house. And when she finally brought a man home with her for the first time, her father stood among the magnolia trees with a bottle of whiskey in his hand and showed her that she was even stronger than she’d thought.

  Kit sat in the gazebo beside his sister and felt that a large part of him had slipped free of its bones and now hovered somewhere nearby, listening, waiting for the remaining parts of him to rise and follow. He felt light-headed and was sure that if he stood up too quickly, he would collapse, maybe die. He could only imagine one cure for what he was feeling, and that was to prove Holly wrong.

  “If all this is true,” he began, “I would think you’d have told me a long time ago.”

  Holly looked at him curiously. “If all this is true,” she said. “Didn’t I say you wouldn’t want to believe it? I don’t blame you.” She laced her fingers behind her neck and worked her head cautiously from side to side. “You were only a kid when all of this was happening. What could you have done?”

  Kit tried to remember what it was like to be that young. “You were just a kid, too,” he said. “I can’t believe you thought you could handle a problem like that by yourself. There must have been another reason why you didn’t tell me.” It never really happened, he thought. That’s why you never told me.

  “You’re right,” she said, dropping her hands and straightening her shoulders. “The truth is, I didn’t tell you because you’re a bastard. That’s why.”

  Kit leaned away from her. He wished he were sitting on her other side, where he could not see the ruined part of her face. “What did I do to deserve that?”

  “It’s not so much what you’ve done. It’s what you are, Kit. What you’ve become. What’s been happening to you ever since Mom died.”

  When Holly looked at Kit’s face, saw how carefully he was breathing, how pale he had become, she realized that she was asking too much of him, that she had to lead him through this one step at a time if she hoped to reach him in the end. “For God’s sake, Kit, we’ve behaved like strangers for years now. We barely spoke to each other back then. What would you have done if I’d come to you and said, ‘Dad keeps touching me’?”

  Kit had no answer. He might have laughed at her. He might have told her not to be a fool. He might not have listened in the first place. He did not know what he would have done. “I don’t know,” he said.

  Holly sat back and looked at him in silence. “Thank you,” she said after a moment. “That’s the only answer I would have accepted.”

  They sat for a while. Then, “What about later on?” Kit said, the questions he’d assembled refusing to be dismissed. “When things got worse? If he really did what you say he did, why didn’t you come to me then? Or leave altogether?”

  “You see? You say things like that, you call me a liar, and you wonder why I didn’t come to you.”

  “Oh, please, Holly. Did you really expect me to accept this story without any doubts? He’s my father. I’ve never known him to do anything like what you’re claiming he’s done. Why should I believe you? Why should I disbelieve him?”

  Holly put her hand on Kit’s arm. It was the first time either of them had touched the other in many months. “All right,” she said. “That’s fair. It’s natural for you to deny what I’ve told you. I denied it myself, for years, so I can’t blame you for doing the same thing. Which answers your question. I didn’t come to you when things got worse because I knew that if it came to a choice between him and me, you’d choose him. In fact, you did choose him, a long time ago. Why such a choice was necessary, I don’t know. I suppose it’s because of the kind of man he is. The more distance I put between him and me, the less chance I had of keeping you.”

  Kit was ready with his next question. He knew that he had another choice to make and that he would not be able to make it until he had asked every last question, weighed every last answer, and hopefully found a way to walk out of this gazebo a whole and healthy man.

  But before he had a chance to ask anything else of her, Holly said, “I also think that the only way to learn the really important things in life is to live them. People learn things best on their own, in their own good time. Which is another reason I never told you. I kept hoping you’d grow out of his shadow. He’s a bad man, Kit. I know that’s a childish word. It makes him sound like a little boy. But that’s what he is … bad. Maybe it’s not all his fault. Maybe the seeds were in his blood or in his upbringing, but he fed them, let them put down roots. Like you’re doing.” The tulips, Kit noticed, appeared to be nodding. He suddenly felt outnumbered. “But I think there’s still a chance for you,” Holly said. “That’s why I’ve told you all this. What he’s really like.”

  Kit suddenly found it difficult to remember what he had meant to ask Holly. Nothing came to mind but a memory of sitting in this same gazebo with his mother at his side.

  “It’s impossible,” he said slowly, turning the memory around until it showed him another way to defend both his father and himself. “It doesn’t make any sense. You can’t say things like this about Dad without questioning everything you know about her.”

  “About who?” And for the first time Holly too looked afraid.

  “Mom. You can’t honestly think she’d have married a monster. She was smart. She would have seen signs. She would have known if he was capable of such things, long before he ever did them. She never would have stayed with such a man. You may not remember her, but—”

  “Not remember her! Christ! Shut up! Don’t you talk about her!” And suddenly Holly was swinging her arms at him, her hair flying in her face, the tears she must have been saving for years streaming down her cheeks. He grabbed her arms and held her against him, wanting to silence her, wanting to hurl her into the garden, and yet wanting to mend everything about her that was broken, wanting everything to be all right and not knowing how to make it so.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, trying to quiet her. “I’m sorry.”

  But something had come loose inside Holly, and although she no longer struck out at him she now threw back her head and bared her teeth and said, before she could stop herself for the millionth time, “She sailed those waters her whole life, but she headed straight into a storm, Kit. Alone. She chose to do that. She died because she did that. But if we didn’t have her body to prove it, I’d be sure that she was alive somewhere as far from him as she could get.”

  Holly clawed her hair back and dried her face with her hands. She was spent. She sagged against the wooden rail at her back. “I’m sorry,” she said. She sounded as if she’d run a hundred miles. “I didn’t mean to say anything about that. I’m probably wrong. It had to have been an accident.”

  “It was an accident,” Kit said through his teeth. He couldn’t look at his sister. His heart had stopped beating. How he continued to live he did not know. He could not move. He had no strength left at all. “It was an accident. It was an accident.”

  “It was. I’m sure you’re right.” Holly could see that her brother had to believe this absolutely. “I was upset. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  Kit’s heart began to beat again. Slowly. Like an old man’s. And as it did, one last question slipped up out of the place that had flourished in the half-light of his father’s shadow. “If all this is true,” he said once again, “not the part about … about her … but the rest of it. If all of that is true, why didn’t you leave? How could you have stayed here?”

  Holly sighed. A part of her, too, wished that she had never come out to this garden, never said any of the things she’d forced herself to say. “At first I was too young, and what he’d done was fairly innocuous. Not in hindsight, but at the time—more confusing than anything. And later, I was too afraid of him to tell anyone. And too embarrassed. If he’d raped me, yes. I know I would have gone for help. Or if he’d tried a second time, I would have told someone. Maybe even you.
I don’t know. If he had, maybe I would have gone off on my own. But he didn’t. I was unhappy and scared, but I wasn’t home that often. And once I’d moved into the carriage house, things were better.” She’d spent years scrutinizing her own behavior, coming to understand why she had done what she’d done, and it should have been easy to explain herself to Kit. But it wasn’t.

  “Besides, think about what you’re suggesting, Kit. How would I leave? Dad gives you money, but I have none of my own. Certainly not enough to live on. Dad bought you a car, but not me. I suppose I could go out, try to find a job where looks aren’t important, and never come back here again. I suppose I could do that. But why should I? I want to write. That’s all I want to do. I don’t want to have to struggle to make a living. Which sounds spoiled, I know, but I’m not asking for anything more than I’ve been led to expect. So I’m biding my time, Kit. In a few months, we turn twenty-one. Our trust funds will be ours. And then I will go.”

  Kit nodded. He was almost through. “I can understand all that, I guess. But you have to forgive me for having my doubts.” He saw her face harden. “Come on, Holly, put yourself in my shoes. Every time I open a newspaper these days I read about some woman making terrible accusations against her father. It’s become the fashion to blame every problem on something that happened in childhood. Except half the time it’s an incident that’s remembered in a dream or in hypnosis or at the hands of a very persuasive therapist. Who’s to say what’s a real memory and what’s not? How is a father supposed to defend himself in a situation like that? I’m sorry, Holly. Too many of these accusations turn out to be false, which is not to say that the women involved don’t honestly believe their own lies. I’m sure some of them do. But that doesn’t change the fact that they’re lying.”