The Arsonist

by Sue Miller

  “Okay, folks,” he said. “What we have here is maybe nothing. A coincidence. Or maybe just some kids, you know, a coupla pranks that got out of hand. Or maybe some kind of firebug thing that we need to be thinking about proactively. And maybe the state arson squad can answer some of these questions. But for now, here’s what I think all of you should be doing. First …” He paused, milking the moment for all he could get from it, Bud thought. “Stay in touch with your neighbors, and be watchful for your neighbors. If you’re going out for the evening, or you’re going to be away, okay?” He raised his eyebrows, looked around. “Let. A. Neighbor. Know. And let these guys on the fire watch know, so they can swing by your place maybe more often. That would mean calling Bob. Right? Bob?”

  Bob stood again. Yes. Yes, he’d take those calls. He supposed that the procedure would be that he’d relay this information. He gave out his phone number—various people in the audience wrote it down—and said he’d pass along any relevant information he received to the appropriate patrollers.

  Loren went on. Bud was watching him, taking in what he said, but he was fixed on Frankie, his thoughts were of her, even while he was recording what Loren was saying—asking them now to leave lights on, day and night. He talked about installing floodlights with sensors outside, about leaving a car parked conspicuously, even when you weren’t home.

  “And here’s another thing. Lock. Things. Up.” He hit the lectern with his fist on each word. “At night, for example, before you go to bed, lock your doors. Lock your windows. When you go out, lock all the windows on the first floor. Lock the doors, okay? Let’s take this seriously. Let’s be proactive. Those are easy things to do, and you should all be doing them.”

  Annie Flowers stood up again. “But I have never in my life locked my doors, Loren. Not once, all these years, all summer.”

  Leonard Cott followed. “I hate to tell you, Loren, but we don’t even have a lock. We just padlock the doors when we leave in the fall, and then unpadlock them when we come back in June. So there’s our situation.” A self-satisfied smile moved quickly over his face, and he sat down.

  Summer people again, Bud thought, making notes of their comments.

  The smile on Loren’s face had changed in its nature, its warm condescension losing all heat. He was silent a moment, looking around with a half smile. Then he said, “Maybe you all need to make the acquaintance of a locksmith.”

  Someone called out, a woman’s voice, “This is not why we come here.” There was something threatening in this tonally, inflectively, as if to say, If you can’t manage this better, we won’t come here anymore.

  Everyone heard it. The room was quiet. Loren Spader’s smile had gone icy now. “This is life,” he said, nodding rapidly. “Get some locks.” He walked back to his seat.

  After a long moment of surprised silence, Davey got up again. “Well!” he said brightly. “I guess we should adjourn, unless there’s anything else.” He looked around, clearly hoping there wouldn’t be. And it seemed there was enough discomfort at the way the woman had spoken to Loren, and surprise at Loren’s rudeness in return, that no one wanted to prolong things further. “Okay, then,” Davey said. “Bob will be waiting to collect names for a night watch.” He waved behind him at the table. “And Louise, too, if you’ve got a house you could let someone stay in for a bit. And Jay, to help with the cleanup, right?” He nodded in agreement with himself several times. “All right, then, we’re adjourned.”

  Bud sat for a moment in the window as his neighbors filed past, talking to one another, occasionally one of them greeting him in passing. Some moved forward, to sign up with one of the organizers, but most were headed for the open double doors. The night was twilit beyond them.

  As he slid from the windowsill he’d been perched on, Bud could see Frankie’s head above the crowd, and her swan’s neck, but he was pinned in place by the crowd moving into the open aisle between the rows of seats and the windows.

  And now here was Loren coming out of his row, moving toward Bud. People were giving him space, undoubtedly because he’d startled them with his rudeness. Bud fell in next to him. “That was an interesting thing to watch,” he said.

  “Fucking flatlanders,” Loren answered, not bothering to lower his voice very much.

  “Hey,” Bud said. “Watch who you’re confiding your deepest feelings to.”

  Loren raised a hand, part apology, part dismissal. “It is what it is. Still, I didn’t hear you complaining about having to lock your door.”

  “Well, the thing is, I’ll have to find my key first,” Bud said. “I know it’s in there somewhere.”

  Loren barked a kind of laugh. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “And good luck with those civilian patrols. We got fifty square miles of country in this town, and half the houses up some long, hilly driveway?” He shook his head. “No way they’re catching anyone.”

  They were almost at the open doorway. Bud could feel the cool evening air.

  They stepped outside. Loren raised his hand in a kind of farewell without looking at Bud again and walked away, down the steps and along the edge of the road. Bud watched him moving quickly up the road, past the clusters of chatting townspeople, to his cruiser, the only car parked on the grass of the town green. He didn’t stop to speak to anyone.

  Now Bud looked around for Frankie. Gone. Probably just as well. He wasn’t sure what he would have said to her. He was afraid that whatever his opening, he’d come across as what he was—a guy on the prowl.

  The light from the building fell on the last few groups of people still talking below him. Someone laughed loudly, and one of the groups broke up, people ambling off into the near dark in different directions, calling their echoing good-nights to one another.

  Bud stood there alone for a minute or two. The air felt soft, fresh. The darkening sky was still a pale almost lilac blue at the western horizon. Behind him in the town hall, Bud could hear the clatter of people folding the chairs up, stacking them against the wall.

  He should go back into the hot room and help. This was how he had come to know people in Pomeroy, how he had made himself at home here—hanging out with people, joining a reading group, attending meetings of the historical society, of the school committee, of the Pomeroy Thespian Troupe. And volunteering, first at the school, where he helped with the student paper, then at the library, where he taught a tiny journalism class in the winter months.

  He had conscientiously worked at it. He had wanted it—a home. But the conversation in the town hall tonight had made that seem suddenly a contentious issue to him, as though the fires were somehow framing a question he needed to answer for himself about whose home Pomeroy was, whose experience defined it—the chatty, self-assured summer people or the observant, perhaps resentful, year-round folks. A question about who owned the town and who merely used it. Wasn’t that what had been under discussion tonight in some way? Didn’t it have some connection to the way the meeting had evolved?

  Something along those lines anyway—he wasn’t quite sure. A question that had arisen for him before, but vaguely. Not like tonight, when it seemed to have sprung so pointedly to life.

  He’d have to think about it. He’d have to figure out how to come at it.

  For now, he turned and went back in among his neighbors to help.

  8

  COMING HOME IN HER parents’ car from the town meeting, Frankie was only half listening as Clark and her mother talked about the idea of arson and about which of the suggested precautions they might take. She was distracted because she had suddenly started to think of her walk on the dark road the night of the first fire. Of the car she’d seen, and the smell of smoke. Of the possible connection between the two.

  Clark was talking about the riskiness of leaving their house empty, unprotected, when he and Liz went back to Massachusetts. He was so clearly worried that, on an impulse, Frankie offered to move down to their place after they were gone. She was offering for his sake and Liz’s, but even as she was
speaking the words, she realized how much she wanted the move, the change, for herself.

  Why?

  She supposed because she was feeling aimless and oppressed at her parents’ house. Her indecisiveness about her life was open for comment there in a way it hadn’t been before Clark’s question had forced her to talk about it, and Sylvia had started to offer suggestions about her choices, clearly impatient for Frankie to make a decision one way or the other. Which was just what she had wanted the time not to have to do.

  But she was feeling oppressed, too, oppressed and saddened, by the situation between her parents—her father’s strange failing, something she’d seen clearly from time to time in her days living with them, and her mother’s often irritated, sometimes seemingly almost frightened, monitoring of that. It made Frankie feel sorry for them both, but it wore on her, too, and a part of her simply wanted to flee.

  “You’re sure about this?” Clark had asked in the car.

  They were in the backseat, her parents in front. Frankie had to make a conscious effort to keep the eagerness out of her voice. “Yup, it’s okay. I’ll do it.”

  “It’s not exactly the Ritz, the shape it’s in.”

  “I’m happy to. Don’t worry about it.”

  So by the time they got home, back to her parents’ house, it was decided, though over the next few days, the last days of Liz and Clark’s weeklong stay, she wavered more than once, flooded with guilt about what she thought of as leaving Sylvia and Alfie.

  Liz didn’t help with this.

  Frankie had had a long talk with her the night before she and Clark left. They’d had dinner together down at her house. Clark had gotten the Sheetrock up, and what had been one huge room was now three—two smaller bedrooms and the large room with the kitchen at one end and a sitting area at the other. They had eaten at the big table in the kitchen area, and afterward, Clark had offered to bathe the children so she and Liz could have some time alone.

  They went outside onto the porch and sat in the butterfly chairs, inherited from Alfie and Sylvia. They could see the quick flitting of the bats in the twilight. Frankie had been waiting for this moment. For the first time she spoke directly with Liz about what she’d noticed of Alfie’s odd moments of failing.

  Liz was ready. She had multiple anecdotes of his earlier lapses she’d stored up. She relayed them to Frankie now, embellishing them with her dark sense of humor. She described her attempts to discuss them with Alfie himself—impossible—and with Sylvia, who was more reasonable but unwilling, or perhaps too frightened, to acknowledge that they might be really serious.

  “Do you think we should be doing something?” Frankie asked.

  Liz didn’t know what they could do, really, but she was so glad Frankie had brought it up. “The minute you said that thing about not going back to Africa, I thought, Yessssss!” She made a fist and yanked it downward. “She’s staying! I won’t have to do all this alone anymore.” She’d often felt overwhelmed, she told Frankie now, by the sense she had of being responsible for their parents. She said that one of the reasons for her reluctance to move to Pomeroy was that she didn’t want to be Sylvia’s “crutch.” She was frightened of getting sucked in, she said. “But if you’re here …”

  “Well, I won’t be here,” Frankie said.

  “But I mean just in the country, just in this neck of the woods. Visiting, for God’s sake. I’ll take a visit.”

  After a moment’s silence, Frankie said, “Well, I don’t know how much help I could ever be with Sylvia and Alfie. I mean, you know the difficulties Sylvia and I have with each other.”

  “Oh, you just have to learn not to take her so seriously,” Liz said. “Just make her laugh at herself. She enjoys it.”

  “I wish I could, but that’s your MO, Liz. Not mine.”

  A little while later, the children came out wearing T-shirts for bed, their skin pinked from their bath. They wanted Liz to come in and read to them.

  Frankie got up, and they all said their good-nights. Before she left, she promised Liz she’d talk to Sylvia about all this, she’d try to get a sense of what Sylvia was thinking about Alfie, what she might be planning. When she turned at the road to look back, she saw Liz moving into the lighted doorway with the three children around her and felt an odd mixture of something like envy, something like remorse.

  For much of her youth, Frankie had been jealous of Liz, who was outgoing and lively, surrounded always by a group of friends, even when they were new in a place, as they so often were. Frankie was the loner, the awkward older sister, though she usually had one friend, almost always someone as studious, as shy, as she was. Her real focus, though, was on the adults in her world—teachers, yes, but even more than that her parents, whose attention she was always in hopes of receiving and whose preoccupation with everything but her was painful.

  Later she could understand this in a way she didn’t at the time. After all, why should they have paid attention to someone doing so well in school? Someone so orderly, so careful? Someone who didn’t complain or get in trouble? Why should they not have been more engaged with Liz, temperamental and lively, sometimes wildly emotional, occasionally in trouble academically. Of course it would seem to a parent that Liz needed more, that Frankie needed less. The very goodness she cultivated—surely they would notice it and turn to her and praise her and conspicuously love her!—was the thing that set them free to turn to Liz. But not just to Liz, of course. Also to their work, and their colleagues and everything else that took up all their energy.

  In midadolescence, though, a kind of miracle happened in Frankie’s life: from one day to the next, it seemed to her, Liz became her friend—perhaps because Liz was entering her freshman year in the high school where Frankie was a senior and knew the routines. Knew, also, older boys. In any case, suddenly Frankie felt as though she belonged somewhere, in a way she hadn’t before. As she and Liz drew closer over that year, she felt a sense of deep relaxation, of comfort. She was happy to put herself in her younger sister’s hands, to share in the kinds of adventures Liz invented. She was aware of counting on Liz to structure their lives, which Liz was glad to do. For a short while, then, Frankie was one of the high-spirited Rowley girls, and she liked how that felt.

  But then she left, she went off to college. And when she came back after her first year away, she was aware of a certain distance from the role she was playing with Liz. She saw it as a role. But she did play it again for the few weeks in May and June that she was home and, yes, enjoyed it again, even while understanding, this time around, how much more Liz enjoyed it.

  By the time Frankie came back again, at the end of that summer, the summer between her freshman and sophomore years of college, her family had moved for the last time—away from Chicago to Bowman, the little city in Connecticut where they would stay for the next twenty-five years or so. Liz was sixteen, with two more years to go in high school. She would have time to grow used to this new place, to think of it as home, as Frankie’s parents would. But there would be this further separation for Frankie—that she would never live there for more than a few months at a time.

  She had a sense of displacement, then, from all of them and their concerns as they moved around in their new lives. Liz especially. Suddenly the kinds of adventures Liz was inventing—sneaking out, getting stoned, meeting boys at the quarry—seemed to her, in some way that was freeing, irrelevant.

  Because that summer—the summer between her freshman and sophomore years of college—she had gone to Kenya for the first time, a student with a program that offered American college kids the opportunity to live in developing countries. And in Kenya, she’d felt something like a sense of ease, though that was not how she could have explained it then. What she said when she got back was that it had been interesting, which it was. That the people had been warm and gracious, which they were. That the terrain was the most beautiful she’d ever seen. And all of that was true. But what she didn’t say, or didn’t really understand until much
later, was that she felt at peace there. The rules, the codes for life, that had seemed so elusive to her, even within her own family, simply didn’t matter anymore. Frankie was free. Or that’s what she felt.

  All this had lingered uncomfortably in her relations with Liz over the years, especially as their lives turned in such different directions—Liz, with her marriage to Clark, with the children, with her surprising gift for motherhood, domesticity; Frankie to a life away, to a commitment to her work above all, to her series of lovers. Over the years, Frankie often had the feeling that Liz, as well as her parents, was waiting for her real life to begin—the return home, the man, the marriage, the house, the children.

  Perhaps, Frankie thought, Liz saw her tentative decision not to go back as the beginning of all this. Perhaps she imagined a kind of sisterhood—daughterhood—they could share if Frankie stayed. If she stayed in this neck of the woods.

  The next morning, Clark made a trip up in the truck to get Frankie and her bags. Sylvia came out of the house to see him off—she’d said good-bye to Liz and the children earlier. Frankie turned around to look at her as they rumbled down the driveway. She was standing alone by the back porch, looking after the truck, her hand on the knob of the door, her body turned to go back into the house, where Alfie waited for her. Her face looked as stricken as it usually did when Frankie left for Africa at the end of a home stay.

  At Clark and Liz’s house, they unloaded Frankie’s possessions. Then Clark slung the two old duffel bags he and Liz had arrived with up into the truck bed. The kids had come out when they heard the truck return, and now they clambered up into the wide front seat and the jumper seat behind it. After hugging Frankie, Liz pulled herself up, too, and they drove off, yelling, waving. Frankie waved back until the truck turned onto the road. She stood there on the porch until she couldn’t hear the noise of the engine anymore.