Local Knowledge

by Liza Gyllenhaal

  “We’re blocking this area off,” one of them told me. “You’ll have to go back that way.” He pointed west through the tree line.

  “But my daughter’s up there!” I said, pushing past them. “I’ve got to get her.”

  “No, ma’am. She’s safe. The family just drove down, okay? Best head back that way. You’re sure to find her down there.”

  A large crowd had gathered beyond the fire trucks: people had left their stranded vehicles and walked up to watch the show; neighbors had joined the spectacle. At the juncture of River Road and Maple Rise, I saw Richard Zeller standing by the front passenger door of his Lexus. He was talking to Chief Langlois, who was sitting in his cruiser, lights flashing. I made my way through the crowd toward them. Katie and Max were sitting cross-legged on the hood of the car; Anne was in the front seat, her short hair clearly outlined against the terrible light. I didn’t see Rachel anywhere.

  “Where’s my daughter?” I asked when I reached Richard. “Didn’t she come down with you?”

  “Who?” Richard asked, turning toward me.

  “She was right here, Maddie,” Tom Langlois told me. “Don’t worry. She’s somewhere in this crowd.”

  “What about Luke?”

  “We don’t know yet,” Tom told me. “We’re doing everything we can.”

  I glanced over at Anne. She was sitting motionless in the front seat, her arms crossed on her chest. The window was up. I don’t know if she saw or heard me; I’d stopped thinking I knew anything about her by then.

  I turned back into the crowd, searching for Rachel. I kept seeing flashes of her—something blond or lavender, a familiar curve of shoulder, a freckled arm. I tried calling her name, but my voice was drowned by all the other voices, the roar of flame and water. I saw Paul in the midst of a group of firefighters, hauling a hose up the hill. Another truck was backing around and following them up the driveway. The effort seemed to be shifting now away from the house and up into the woods behind it. Firemen were stationed along the road, trying to get people to stay back. At one point, I heard a woman near me say, “God, no, who would live there? The place has been empty for years.”

  And then I saw Rachel: she was standing at the very front of the crowd, gazing up at the house, which was being allowed to self-destruct. I began pushing my way toward her, crying out to her, when the roof suddenly collapsed. Sparks flew up into the night and then showered back onto the crowd. A woman next to me screamed and stumbled into me. I slipped and fell. I lost sight of Rachel. People were shouting. I don’t know how long it was, probably no more than a minute or two really, until I saw her again. She was only a few feet away, transfixed by the spectacle in front of her. The hemlocks were smoldering skeletons. Most of Luke’s sculptures had been overturned; some burnt, others half melted. But a few still remained intact, black silhouettes—misfits every one—making a final, hopeless stand.

  “Let’s go, honey,” I said, taking her hand.

  “Where’s Luke?” she asked, turning to me. “I’ve been looking for him. Have you seen him?”

  “No, I haven’t,” I told her, pulling her away. “But we should go; it’s dangerous. He wouldn’t want you here.” We made our way back to town along the side of the road. It was almost deserted now, except for the empty cars. Everyone had gone up to watch Luke’s house burn down, as if it was some kind of fireworks display.

  “I called 911 first. And then you,” Rachel told me. “Then when the flames got so bad, I called Mrs. Zeller. They’d gone to the party after all. I didn’t think she’d go, Mom. Not after everything.”

  I didn’t understand what she was trying to tell me. I thought that Rachel must have somehow overheard Anne’s and my conversation when I dropped her off to babysit. That “everything” was Anne’s casual destruction of our friendship, my own anger and hurt feelings.

  Phyllis Linden had carried Lia and Beanie into the house after Lia had woken up and begun to cry. Lia had fallen back asleep on the Lindens’ living room couch, but Beanie was awake, sitting next to her sister, wide-eyed and mute.

  “I tried to get her to have a cookie, or some milk, but she didn’t seem to want anything,” Phyllis told me. “She just keeps shaking her head.”

  “She’s a little shy,” I said.

  “Let’s go, Beanstalk,” Rachel said, scooping her up. By the time I’d picked up Lia and thanked Phyllis, Rachel and Beanie were halfway to the car. I turned back to Phyllis. “Have you heard anything about Luke?”

  “Carl called me about fifteen minutes ago. They’re pretty sure he was in there. The fire started in the basement where he works. The place went up so fast, though, there’s no way the guys could have reached him in time. And they’ll have to wait until it’s safe to go in. So until then, at least, I guess there’s room for hope.”

  When we got home, Rachel helped me get Lia and Beanie upstairs, and then she went back down again. I stayed with Beanie for a while. She still had a temperature, and I could sense she knew something more serious than that was wrong with her world. I did what I could to soothe her. When she finally drifted off, I went downstairs to find Rachel on the couch on the porch.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, sitting down next to her.

  “Yes,” she said. “I think so. But it’s been the worst night of my life.”

  “I know,” I told her. “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t like Mrs. Zeller anymore,” Rachel told me. “In fact, I think I hate her.”

  I thought I understood. We had both been hurt by Anne.

  “Sometimes people aren’t who you think they are.”

  “Sometimes nobody’s who I think they are.”

  “It’s one of those awful lessons you learn when you grow up.”

  “Is that what you’ve been waiting for?” she asked, turning to me in the dark. “For me to grow up?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing. You’re right. It’s just one of those awful lessons.”

  I wasn’t really listening to her; my mind was on something else. I felt I had to warn her. That she needed to be prepared.

  “You know, you asked before about Luke? If anyone had seen him? There’s a chance that he was there. In the house.”

  “No, he wasn’t.”

  “Well, there’s a chance. Nobody knows for sure yet. But I think you have to—”

  “No. I don’t care what you think, okay? Everything’s ruined anyway.”

  “Rachel, honey—” I reached out for her.

  “Oh, stop it!” she said, jumping up from the couch. “Just leave me alone. Why should I believe anything you have to say?”

  38

  The next two days were hell. Neither Paul nor I got any sleep. The night of the fire he was too wired and worked up even to think about going to bed. His usual self-control deserted him, and he spent the rest of that night going over the details of the accident with me again and again. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so angry. At Luke. How careless he’d been. How senseless the fire was. Stupid. It was in those desperate early-morning hours that he figured out that it must have been the blow-in insulation that had so accelerated the blaze. He latched on to that as if—altering this one part of the scenario—Paul could have somehow prevented the whole catastrophe.

  “Luke’s always so half-assed about safety! I told him not to use that cellulose shit. It’s just a bunch of shredded newspapers, for chrissakes! But that’s what he liked about it, you know. The fact that it was organic.”

  Paul’s anguish was only exacerbated by Rachel’s behavior. The next morning, she came down to the kitchen around six thirty, prettily dressed, dragging her large duffel. Paul had gone upstairs to lie down for an hour or so before heading up to Covington for the morning. He was planning to delegate as much of the critical last day of work at the site as he could, and try to be back at the fire scene by noon to help with the terrible business of sifting through the rubble.

  “I’m ready,” she said.

  Rachel.
I’d forgotten all about her plans to see Aaron. “You’ve got to know you won’t be going now,” I said.

  “But you promised you’d take me down to the bus depot!” she replied, as if this was the only stumbling block to her enjoying her weekend away.

  “But, Rachel. What are you thinking? Luke is—they haven’t found him yet.”

  “He’s fine, okay? Don’t sound like that. And you promised to take me!”

  “Honey, please. Your father and I were up all night. He’s upstairs now, trying to get a little rest.”

  “Well, I don’t care. I want to go. Now! I’m not going to let you make me miss that bus!”

  This was so unlike Rachel that I didn’t know what to do. I felt utterly exhausted and confused, but I also knew that something was seriously wrong with my eldest daughter, and that I’d have to pull myself together and approach the situation with care. Things might have worked out differently if Paul hadn’t come clumping down the back stairs at that moment.

  “Why are you yelling at your mother?” he demanded.

  “Because she’s going back on her word!”

  “What is this?” Paul turned to me, his face gray with fatigue. “What’s she talking about?”

  “Her trip to Maine to see Aaron Neissen. I was supposed to take her down to the bus this morning first thing.”

  “What in the world’s the matter with you?” Paul said, turning back to Rachel.

  “With me?” she cried. “What’s the matter with me? How about asking what the matter is with you! Both of you. Why should I believe anything either one of you has to tell me ever again!” She ran back up the stairs and slammed her door.

  “Jesus,” Paul said. “What the hell is going on around here?”

  It only got worse after that. Rachel refused to leave her room. Beanie’s earache got so bad she began to whimper around noontime and wouldn’t stop. I had to call Kathy and ask her if I could drop Lia off at the farm so I could take Beanie down to our pediatrician in Northridge. It was a holiday weekend, about the only time Kathy got to have to herself. It made me so sad to feel that I was imposing.

  Beanie, it turned out, had a bad ear infection, probably from some kind of bacteria she’d picked up at the pond. She’d forced herself to go under the water for the first time that summer, something I know she’d been desperately afraid of doing for the longest time. It seemed so unfair to me that she should be penalized for being brave.

  Around seven that night, with the help of a special crew from Albany that included search dogs, a team of recovery workers was able to pull Luke’s body from the ashes and rubble of his house. Paul helped them dig him out, and he traveled in the ambulance with Luke up to Harringdale, where the autopsy was to be performed. He called me from there.

  “I think you should go ahead and tell the girls. I’m going to be too exhausted when I get home to do anything but collapse.”

  Breaking the news to Lia and Beanie was hard enough. They both started crying before I’d even gotten the words out. I thought I’d managed to keep them pretty sheltered from what was going on, but it’s easy to forget how much kids pick up. They’re like little sponges, soaking up all our excess hopes and fears. The three of us cried, right through a dinner that we didn’t eat. I took them up to bed around nine, and then went and stood in front of Rachel’s locked bedroom door.

  “We need to talk,” I said.

  “Go ahead and talk,” she said. At some point earlier in the evening, probably when the rest of us were having dinner, she’d left her room long enough to grab the cordless phone from our bedroom.

  “I need to tell you something, Rachel, and I don’t want to do it this way,” I said. My words were greeted by silence. I felt I had no choice; this was one burden I knew I had to spare Paul.

  “Luke’s dead, Rachel. Your dad was on the crew that found his body.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “No, I’m not.” I felt so defeated. “Why would I want to lie to you about this?”

  “Because you’ve been lying to me about everything. All my life.”

  Paul finally got home around midnight. He’d been holding himself together so tightly all day that he couldn’t relax now. I made him sit out on the porch in the dark. I brought him a beer. He asked me how things had gone with the girls, and I told him it hadn’t been easy. I didn’t know what to tell him about Rachel, so I didn’t say anything. His heart was already too heavy. The anger from last night had burned itself out. He sat staring out into the darkness. The last fireflies of the summer drifted over the wildflower field. For the first time in days I heard the crickets again, though they must have been singing the whole time: that endless sad song.

  We didn’t exactly fall asleep out there; my mind kept skittering back and forth over a fractured series of events, resting for a moment on my final conversation with Luke, then jumping ahead to Rachel’s nastiness, flitting back to Anne staring past me on her doorstep, then returning to Luke walking me across his cluttered yard to my car. Sometime in the gray light of early morning, as the dew settled upon us with a narcotic heaviness, I felt myself falling. Just before hitting bottom, I woke with a jolt.

  Richard Zeller answered the phone.

  “Is Anne there?” I asked.

  “Who’s calling?”

  “It’s Maddie Alden. I need to talk to her.”

  “She can’t talk to anyone right now.”

  “It’s important. Tell her I’m driving over.”

  “No, really, she—” But I didn’t wait to hear what excuse he’d find for her; I hung up the phone. It was Labor Day. The general store closed at noon, and the rest of the town seemed deserted. Up in the hills, across the lush meadows, the spacious, expensive new homes of weekenders and summer leasers were being cleared out, packed up. Children would be starting back to school in the city tomorrow, or the day after. I knew these people now; I’d sold several of them their houses. I’d made small talk with the husbands, kidded around with the children. I knew what the women were thinking: the summer had been lovely, almost relaxing for a time. But the children had become bored and had started to bicker. And there wasn’t a decent hairstylist in the whole county. They’d found their perfect country getaways; filled their designer homes with expensive antiques, throw pillows, and quilts from the stores in Northridge. They’d be back for leaf-peeping in the fall and maybe a skiing weekend here and there, but this summer was over. The gas grill wheeled back into the pool house. A note left for the cleaning woman: she could take whatever perishables she wanted from the refrigerator.

  As I drove past it, I couldn’t allow myself to look at the charred ruin of Luke’s cottage, but the smell of the fire seeped through my closed car windows: an acrid, earthy, rotting stink that made me want to gag. I turned sharply up the Zellers’ driveway. The fire had claimed most of the woods between Luke’s property and the Zellers’, but their lawn was untouched: a rolling, well-kept carpet of green. A series of sprinklers, sunk into the sod, sprayed a fine mist over the sloping lawn. As I circled the turnaround and pulled up by the front path, Richard Zeller came out of the house and walked down to meet me.

  “I’m here to see Anne,” I told him, as I got out of the car.

  “Well, she can’t see anyone,” he said. He stood on the path where it met the driveway, arms crossed above his belly, his heavy, imposing body essentially blocking me from going farther. It was one of the few times I’d ever seen him dressed casually. He was wearing a striped polo shirt and cargo-style shorts, and the effect was the opposite of what it should have been; he looked constrained and uncomfortable. It was hot in the open sun, and his thinning hair had separated into damp strands across his forehead. He had sunglasses on; the silver chain attached to them made two fussy loops behind his ears.

  “This isn’t a social call. I’m here because I’m worried about my daughter.” When he looked down at me without any discernible reaction, I felt my anger building. “You know, Rachel? The girl who took care of your hous
e and your children all summer?”

  “Yes, I know Rachel,” he said.

  “Something happened here the night of the fire, and I want to know what it was. She’s been acting—she hasn’t been herself.”

  “Well, Anne’s been having a bad time, too,” he said. “Listen, I’m sure you’ve figured out by now that my wife’s a little fragile. Unstable is probably a better word. I was hoping that a summer up here—away from everything that happened last spring—would help her. Get her back on track.”

  “What happened last spring?”

  “She didn’t tell you? And I thought the two of you were such great friends.” Sighing, he took the dark glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Well, I guess that just fits the pattern. Anne had an entirely inappropriate affair with a client at her advertising agency. He was the son of the owner of some sporting goods outfit the agency represented, a real loser from what I learned, whose judgment was about as sound as Anne’s. They did nothing to hide what was going on. The agency lost the account. Anne was fired. It was pretty awful. For us. For me.”

  He could have been describing what happened to a total stranger. There was a definite sense of disapproval and distaste in his tone, but I didn’t hear any anger or humiliation, little emotion, in fact, of any kind.

  “She just told me she was taking a sabbatical. For the summer.”

  “Is that what she said?” He shook his head. “Well, now you know. And now this! After she was fired, I thought she’d finally learned her lesson. I actually began to believe that she’d gotten all this nonsense under control.”

  “What nonsense?”

  “These affairs of hers,” he said, sliding his sunglasses back on. “She has a history of hooking up with totally unacceptable people. Losers, liars, this—this drug dealer. She takes these people up, you know, and sweeps them into her orbit, building them up in her mind—and theirs—to be her equal. It always ends badly. I’ve got to say, though, this has been the worst.”

  It was as though he was complaining about his wife’s bad taste in clothes or art. A certain tacky streak in her that he found objectionable. Evidently this was the “emotional problem” that Anne had alluded to many times—the vulnerability that attracted her to Richard in the first place. This big, strong man wanted to take care of me. And it was also what attracted Richard to her, I realized. There was something almost indulgent in the way he spoke about her faithlessness. I remembered what Anne had told me: I’m really beginning to think that he wants me to stay troubled. It lets him remain in control, do you know what I mean?