The Arsonist

by Sue Miller

  So she felt some relief at starting things up with Philip, the relief of being with someone who understood her life, whose own life was in many ways similar. Neither of them, she assumed, had any long-term expectations of the other. Still, during the month or so they were working next to each other, they conducted their affair with a hunger, a recklessness, that startled them both.

  Once Philip had left, she assumed it would be over. She was surprised, then, when he contacted her in Nairobi after she was back. He was staying on there for a while, for various work-related reasons. Just his voice on the phone thrilled her, caused her to feel a heavy, dropping sensation in her abdomen.

  They saw each other four or five times a week for the next month or so, mostly at her house, always at night; and then just before he left for good, they took almost a week together in Lamu. When they climbed the stone steps of the house they had rented, holding the lantern the steward had left out for them, its soft light moving up over the old, uneven walls, making strange shadows, Frankie felt a weakness in her legs at the thought of everything they would do with each other, to each other, at the way in which their bodies belonged to each other. She realized over those days that something had shifted for her. That without changing any of her underlying assumptions, she had been imagining this going on. Imagining a life together—though it wasn’t located in any particular place, though it consisted only of Philip and her. Though it was, in other words, impossible.

  But after he’d gone for good—there was, it turned out, a wife and children to “visit” in England—Frankie swung quickly back to her first understanding of things. She was sorrowful, she was pained, but within a few weeks, she was angry, mostly at herself—for her romanticism, for her sexual vulnerability.

  And then slowly, over the next months, the months before she was to go home for her annual leave, she began to feel it was time to end this. Not just the kind of relationship she had with Philip, but her relationship, too, with Africa, with this whole way of living. They seemed connected somehow—the passionate affairs that ended, one after another, and the deep but temporary engagement she felt with her version of Africa’s life. And it was always deep: the indelible memories of the children, of the mothers, the ones she’d failed as well as the ones she’d helped. The work that was so compelling.

  And then was done. Finished. On to the next job.

  All of this was what she was lost in thinking about on the dirt road in New Hampshire when the car appeared. When she stepped into the ditch at the side of the road. When she watched the car disappear, then rise over the next hill, dropping out of sight, rising again. She didn’t give much thought to it then, or to the smell of smoke she’d been vaguely aware of for a while. She used both of them, though, as the signal to turn and head back.

  The way home, all uphill, seemed longer. Seemed endless, actually, she was so tired.

  The house was still, and she went upstairs and straight to bed. She thought she might sleep now. And only a few minutes after she’d lain down, she could feel the almost dizzy, falling sensation of complete exhaustion.

  Later she woke again briefly. Something had pulled her out of her deep sleep, she didn’t know what. Then she heard it—in the distance, a long, faraway, insistent sound, a honking. Animal, she thought for a moment.

  It came again. Not animal: mechanical. But she didn’t remember what it was or what it meant—she thought of it just as an odd, forgotten noise she would have to reaccustom herself to.

  ——

  Her father was the only one home when she finally got up for the second time, around eleven. Hearing her clanking in the kitchen, he came in from the new wing, where he had his study now. He watched her heat milk for her coffee, and they talked of this and that—the trip home, how she had slept, a great blue heron he’d spotted down by the pond earlier this morning. Her mother, he told Frankie, had gone to town. Shopping. She remembered then the sound of the porch screen door smacking shut that had half waked her earlier. That, and the car starting up under her window.

  As they were talking, Frankie noticed how stooped his shoulders seemed—the liability of being a scholar, she supposed. In the end, it gets you, hunched endlessly over all that recorded knowledge. He was wearing, as usual up here, a pair of brown cotton slacks—his UPS pants, she and Liz used to call them—and an old shirt, fraying at the collar. He had a little rounded potbelly, almost exactly bisected by his belt, and long, skinny legs. His face, too, was long and thin. His nose was beaky under his wildly curling eyebrows, half white now. There was a slightly simian aspect to the way he looked, mostly on account of the unusual distance between his nose and his upper lip, but he was attractive anyway, partly because of the gentle attentiveness he brought to bear on any conversation, any new person.

  She looked like him, she supposed. Certainly more than she looked like her mother. She was almost as tall as he was, and as slender, and she had his long face; but, as he used to say to her from time to time, she’d invented her own coloring, different from anyone else’s in the family. She had red hair, and her eyes were light—an oddly pale blue that could look washed out and empty when she was tired, as she was today. Liz was dark, like their mother.

  Frankie had often thought that if she’d looked more like Liz, she would have had an easier time of it in Africa. As it was, her appearance had made people turn to stare at her in the street. Her skin itself, which was paper white, sprinkled everywhere with pale brown freckles, was part of that. The little children she worked with sometimes laughed at her “dots” and sometimes were terrified by them, as if they were the result of some spell, some curse called down upon her.

  Today she was exposing a lot of those freckles in her shorts and tank top, in her bare feet, which made a light, whispering sound on the kitchen floor as she walked back and forth. She was aware suddenly of how happy she was to be dressed this way—happy to be barefoot, happy not to have to worry about giving offense with her body, as she would have in Africa with this much skin visible. It seemed to her an easy and very American happiness. The happiness of no rules.

  She carried her coffee out to the porch, her father following her. They sat in the old Adirondack chairs facing the distant blue hills. The nearer hills were green. She was aware, suddenly, of birdsong everywhere and, somewhere off in the distance, a steady hum, a motor—someone haying or brush hogging. This was almost a constant here, she realized abruptly. The sound of someone else working—the background noise of summer life.

  Her father was speaking now of some work he was doing. He had a project, apparently, just as her mother had said. Yes, he was reading for a prize, something to do with historical writing for a wider, lay audience. His face changed as he spoke of this, and she saw how proud he was of it, and remembered now that he’d spoken of it briefly last night, though she’d been too tired to ask about it, to really take it in. This would explain the books stacked everywhere, she thought, even out here on the porch. Though there had always been books stacked everywhere, wherever they went, whatever new house they moved into. Books that drove her mother mad: Why did he need so many? Where would they all go?

  They chatted now about several he thought were strong contenders. He dug one out from the pile next to his chair, the chair he always sat in out here. He read a few paragraphs from it, looking up to see her reaction.

  Frankie agreed, it was fascinating, and then a little silence fell between them. She was looking at him, thinking how unchanged he seemed. Always the same, with these shifting, fleeting enthusiasms to which he brought so much energy. She had a quick, surprised moment of sympathy for her mother’s perspective, for her fatigue with Alfie’s endless projects.

  “Oh!” he said suddenly, as if just remembering something. “Did you hear the fire horn in the night?”

  She had to think for a moment, but then she recalled the odd noise as she was drifting off after her walk. “Yes. Oh! That was it. Yes.” And she imitated the sound, the long, distant honk she had at first thou
ght was an animal. It was a good imitation, and her father made his quiet laughing noise, his head tilted slightly back, his face transformed in pleasure.

  “It woke me actually,” Frankie said. “Though I’d been up earlier. I’d been out walking around. Jet lag.” The moon on the road, the cool night air. “I wondered what that was. That noise.”

  “That’s what it was,” he said.

  She had some more coffee and set the cup down on the broad wooden arm of the chair. “Was there, in fact, a fire?” she asked.

  He nodded. “The Kershaws. It’s gutted, they say.”

  They, in this case as in most cases when they were quoted, referred to Sylvia, the one who went out into the world and heard the gossip and brought it home. Frankie’s father almost invariably repeated it in this form, which she and Liz used to laugh at behind his back. Now she made herself respond as he clearly wanted her to: “My God! Are they okay?”

  “Oh, no one was there. They’re not up yet.” Meaning they hadn’t arrived from wherever else in the country they lived, almost certainly farther south—which was why to be here was to be up. Probably farther west, too.

  “Well, that’s good, I guess.”

  “Yes, they were lucky, in that sense. It’s a terrible thing otherwise, of course.”

  “Of course. It would be.” After a moment she said, “It’s funny it should burn with no one there.”

  “Oh, these old houses.” He shook his head, sighed. “They’re tinder, basically. Anything could have caused it. They’d had the electricity turned on for the season, they say, so it could have been that—some old, worn-out wiring. Or someone told your mother that the painters were in over the spring. Who knows? Maybe rags, that kind of thing.”

  “I suppose it’s possible.” Though this had always seemed unlikely to Frankie. But then it occurred to her that she was probably confusing spontaneous generation with spontaneous combustion. One a fairy tale, one not. She thought.

  “Eminently possible.” They sat in silence for a moment or two. She wondered what he was thinking. His eyes, she noticed now, were empty in repose, staring out at the meadow, the hills.

  “I sort of forget who the Kershaws were.” She corrected herself. “Are.”

  He turned to her, looking almost startled. He cleared his throat, a tic she’d forgotten until just now. He said, “Well, she’s the Olsens’ daughter.”

  And he went on to bring her up-to-date with their history—how the elder Olsens were retired now and had moved to California, how they came up now only for a week each year and stayed with the Kershaws, who’d taken over the house. How “young Kershaw”—this was what her father called this man who must be fifty-five or so—was a lawyer for some white-shoe Boston firm and got up only for a week or two himself each summer.

  Frankie wasn’t listening to his words so much as she was hearing the shift from what had been his fleeting sorrow over the fire to eagerness about all this information; and she was struck again by the intense preoccupation he, as well as her mother, had with this little, closed-in world.

  And then she checked herself. This wasn’t fair, and she knew it. They read the Times every day, they watched the news. They could commiserate with her—they had commiserated—about the repressive and corrupt nature of the Moi government, about the violence in Sudan or Somalia or Kenya or Uganda, about clean-water issues in Africa generally, about the criminality of the banking system in Switzerland. They could speak of these things passionately. But always, Frankie felt, with a certain inherited vocabulary: Tribal conflict. Numbered bank accounts. Globalization. Islamic radicalism.

  And when she spoke of her work, of the children—of the dying, or even of the rescued—they had trouble listening. “I don’t know how you do it,” they’d say, and Frankie thought she could hear in this the wish not to have to listen to any of the details, not to have to imagine it.

  But after all, why should they? How much had she ever asked to understand what might be difficult in their lives?

  She watched her father talking—now about the sale of a property down the road. She smiled at him, she sipped the dregs of her cold, bitter coffee. She thought about where she’d been the day before, about how far she’d come to be sitting here. How glad she was to be sitting here, and, yet, already a little bit restless, a little bit bored.

  She heard the car in the driveway, and then the slamming of its door. The screen door banged shut, and there were footsteps, noises in the kitchen. Her mother’s noises.

  The steps came to the doorway out to the porch, and Frankie looked up.

  Her mother looked from her to her father and back, and Frankie felt the sense she sometimes had as an adolescent, the sense of having laid some claim to him that her mother didn’t like—or, at any rate, would try not to acknowledge.

  Now she said brightly, “Well! Here you are, you two!”

  3

  SYLVIA HAD HAD TOO MUCH to drink, and that, plus her bad night vision, meant that Alfie insisted on driving them home.

  She hadn’t resisted. First, he was right. And second, she’d had a good time at the party.

  She hadn’t thought she would. She was feeling bad about Frankie, who, she had assumed, would come, too. She’d forgotten how jet-lagged Frankie would still be feeling, one day home. She couldn’t possibly do it, she’d said to Sylvia. So they’d left her at home, alone, and Sylvia felt guilty about that. And then they’d been late arriving because they had to swing by Snell’s for gas—Sylvia hadn’t remembered to fill the tank when she went shopping earlier in the day. All this meant that she was short with Alfie, and they were silent and unhappy on the drive over to the party, both of them.

  But once there, she had moved around, talking mostly to people she’d known for years, but also to a few strangers. She felt animated, attractive. Over the course of the evening, she began to have the sense that it could work, this business of retiring up here—something her first month in this new life, those long rainy days of early summer, had made her doubt.

  They’d stayed too long, but so had many others. In the car, as they started home in the deep twilight, she’d leaned back and closed her eyes.

  “Do you mind if I listen to the ball game?” Alfie asked. She looked over at him, startled. She’d been nodding off.

  “No, that’s fine.” She sat up. “I’ll do it.” And she turned the radio on and fiddled with the buttons until she got a station carrying the game, already a little fizzy with static. It was the fourth inning, still no score. She tilted her seat back a little and looked up at the deepening indigo of the sky, listening to the slightly nasal, assured voice of Joe Castiglione. She liked that voice. She felt comforted by it. She closed her eyes again and imagined the things he was looking at—the brilliant green of the Fenway grass, the muted powdery green of the walls, the figures in white and gray at their stations, almost motionless until the ball was hit and they responded, moving wildly in different directions but in balletic synchrony.

  She woke sometime later—suddenly, completely—to the dark outside the car’s windows. The headlights made a bright tunnel ahead of them, the trees arching over it were caught at the edge of the light, falling away to join the blackness that surrounded them. The road was narrow, two lanes. She recognized nothing. There was nothing—no buildings, no milestones, just the black woods rushing past them. Her mouth was dry and tasted stale. The radio buzzed steadily.

  She looked at Alfie. He was intent, focused on the road ahead, both hands gripping the wheel tightly.

  She reached over and turned the radio off. “Where are we?” she said in the sudden silence.

  He looked at her and then back at the road quickly. “I don’t … know,” he said. He sounded almost bemused by this fact, as if it had occurred to him just this minute that perhaps this was strange, that perhaps he ought to know.

  She looked at the dashboard. It was past eleven. They should have been at the house now, getting ready for bed.

  “How … what do you me
an? How can you not know?” She felt a rising impatience that she tried to keep out of her voice, but she could hear herself, hear that she wasn’t successful.

  “I … I must have … taken a wrong turn somewhere, I suppose.”

  “But how long ago, do you think?” She’d gotten her voice under control. “How far back?”

  He looked at her again, his mild, handsome face emptied out, blank. “I don’t know.”

  Okay, she had thought then in the car. This is it. His failing, the thing they’d both been aware of in less critical moments, that they’d talked around, gingerly, over and over. The reason, after all, for him to be retiring, for their move—the negative student evaluations, the trouble sustaining his latest book. And for her, the increasing sense of an absence in him. Here, distilled, made pure and clear and undeniable.

  Where the hell were they?

  “I think you should pull over when you can,” she said, as gently as she could. “Slow down.” The car slowed, instantly. They crept along. Within a few miles she saw a spot ahead where the shoulder on the right widened a little. “There,” she said. “Up there.”

  He slowed more and pulled over. Gravel crunched under their wheels. The headlights met an impenetrable wall of forest—trees, shrubs, undergrowth—all a surprising vivid green in this flat, harsh light.

  “I’ll drive,” she said. “Put it in park.” He obeyed her. She got out and came around behind the car. The air was cool and full of night noise. It smelled of pine, of earth. As she came to the driver’s-side window, she looked down at him. He seemed frozen, his hands still on the wheel. When she opened the door, he looked up at her, a scared child, and then quickly turned away to fumble with his seat belt. He unsnapped it finally and got out.