An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

by Brock Clarke

  “Where is she?” I demanded of my in-laws as I charged down the stairs and into the dining room. “She has to be here. Her van is out front. Where is she?”

  “Where is who?” my father-in-law asked. Then before I could clarify, his nonchalance disappeared for a second, and he said, “It’s none of your goddamn business anymore.” Then he recovered, made a slight adjustment to his head wrap, and added, “Coleslaw.”

  “Where is she, Thomas?” I asked, turning toward him. Thomas was no longer smiling, no longer “boola, boola’ing.” He didn’t look content, either, but nervous, as though his place at the table were in peril. Thomas shook his head gravely, lips locked, making it known that one of the big differences between him and me was that I was speaking and he was smart enough not to.

  “Mrs. Mirabelli, please,” I said. She was a volunteer for most of the Catholic charitable organizations in the area, and so I hoped she would take pity and add me to her body of good works. Mrs. Mirabelli inhaled and exhaled loudly, her veil fluttering with each breath, but no words followed.

  So I turned to Christian. He was all I had left in the room, in the house. The towel was on his head now, pouring down his neck and over his ears. He looked so nervous and scared and small, sitting there between his grandparents, not knowing whether to look at me or not, not knowing why he didn’t know whether to look at me or not, but knowing all along where his mother was.

  “She went to see my grandma,” he told me.

  “Grandma is right here,” I said.

  “My other grandma,” he said. “I have another grandma?”

  How to describe the way Christian said this? How to describe a five-year-old boy who finds out that he has two sets of grandparents and not just one? How to describe a boy who discovers that his father has for years and years lied about his own parents’ being dead? And how to describe a father who doesn’t once think that, in killing off his parents, he has killed his children’s grandparents in the bargain?

  “Oh, Christian,” I said, “I’m sorry, bud.” And then, because as we all know, sorry isn’t good enough, I started crying just to show how sorry I really was, crying and crying and crying, all the while patting myself for a handkerchief, which I didn’t have. So Christian took the towel off his head and gave it to me, and I wiped my face with it.

  “Thank you,” I told him.

  “May I go watch TV?” he asked me, using the manners his grandparents or maybe TV itself had taught him, because I never had.

  “You may,” I said, and then he left the room with just the towel for me to remember him by, which made me cry even harder. All this crying must have softened the Mirabellis’ hearts just a little bit, although maybe it would have been better if it hadn’t: it would be easier for me to remember them now only as the hard-hearted, costumed lunatics they appeared to be, and not as my in-laws who allowed their hard hearts to be softened by the man who had hardened them in the first place and who would soon be just another part of the past, except I’d be a part of the past they wouldn’t want to relive.

  “Coleslaw, why don’t you sit down and eat,” my father-in-law said softly. “Things always seem a little better on a full stomach.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said. I began to take my place at the opposite side of the table, but Mr. Mirabelli said, “You’re so far away down there. Why don’t you sit here,” and he patted the place where Christian had just been. Both elder Mirabellis moved over to make room for me.

  “Are you sure?” I said.

  “Yes,” Mr. Mirabelli said. “But put your son’s towel on your head.”

  I put my son’s towel on my head and sat down between my in-laws, and we all ate slowly, in silence, as befitting a last supper. I wanted to ask so many questions. Why, if they were dressed this way for Anne Marie’s benefit, was she not here? What exactly had Thomas told them, and when had he told it? Had he told them about my parents, or was this another thing Mr. Mirabelli found out on his own? But it was the sort of silence that was much preferable to the words that would break it. Besides, I had the feeling that once the silence was broken, the meal would be over and I’d be asked to leave. It was my house, and once again I’d be asked to leave it, and once again I would. Some men would refuse to leave their own homes, but I wasn’t one of them. I’d given up my right to refuse, the way some criminals give up their right to remain silent.

  But still, no matter how silent we were, the food eventually was eaten and the meal was over. Mrs. Mirabelli got up to clear the dishes, and Thomas helped her, leaving me and Mr. Mirabelli alone in the room.

  “Mr. Mirabelli, may I ask you one question?”

  “You may, Coleslaw.”

  “Why are you all dressed up like this if Anne Marie isn’t even here?”

  “She was here,” he said, “but then before we even sat down to eat, she said she was going over to your mother’s house. That all this”—and here he swept his hands over his costume in demonstration—“was ridiculous.”

  “She said that?”

  “‘I’m not a child anymore’—those were her very words.” I could tell that this was the saddest thing that had happened yet, as far as Mr. Mirabelli was concerned. His eyes went cloudy and wet; he closed them, took off his glasses, and rubbed the bridge of his nose for a few seconds. When he put his glasses back on and opened his eyes, they were clear again. “I’m sorry you have to go, Coleslaw,” he said. “It feels like we barely got to know you, and here it is, time for you to go already.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” I said.

  “Everyone is sorry,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. “You should say good-bye to your son.”

  “I should,” I said. I got up without saying another word, walked to the TV room. Christian was lying on the couch in front of the squawking set. He was asleep, his head halfway hidden by the crook of his arm, and I could hear his sweet breath fluttering past his lips. I loved him. I loved him so much, and I was afraid to say good-bye. You should never say good-bye to your children, not because of what it will do to them, but because of what it will do to you. So I didn’t say good-bye. Instead I took the towel off my head, spread it over him as a blanket, then kissed him softly on the forehead. He shifted and moaned in his sleep, and I turned and crept out of the room before he woke up. On my way out of the house, I passed by the dining room. Thomas wasn’t there, but Mr. and Mrs. Mirabelli were sitting at the table, drinking coffee and talking about the time in Morocco when their tour guide asked them if they’d ever tried a hookah, and they thought he’d said “hooker.” More hilarity, the sort that is years and years in the making. Mr. Mirabelli even took off his towel to hide his face, he was laughing so hard, and I took advantage of his momentary blindness to open the door and leave the Mirabellis and my house in Camelot behind.

  T HOMAS WAS OUTSIDE, waiting for me, leaning against my van, arms crossed over his bare chest. He must have been cold: it was snowing harder now, and the runtish maples lining Hyannisport Way were bending and swaying in the howling wind. Inside, dressed the way he was, Thomas looked as though he belonged; outside, though, he looked like a man who didn’t have enough sense to wear a shirt in a snowstorm. Inside, he was mostly mute; outside, I hoped, he might answer some questions.

  “Did you set fire to the Mark Twain House?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said. “What about that burn on your hand?”

  Thomas removed his hands from his armpits and showed them to me. There, on his right hand, was the burn mark: it was about the size of a quarter, red around the edges, and already starting to scab over. “I got this from the burner on your stove,” he said. “You really ought to fix that thing.”

  “I already did,” I said. I knew what he was talking about. A year or two earlier, our stove’s front left burner wasn’t getting as hot as its three siblings. Anne Marie told me it didn’t matter and to leave it alone. This I did not do. I figured it would be easy to fix. I figur
ed it was a loose wire, and so I went inside the stove and loosened and then reconnected the wire to its port, or thought I did. In fact I’d managed to rewire the stove in such a way that the rear left burner didn’t work at all, and in fact, when you turned that knob, it managed to heat the front left burner instead. A person who didn’t know this about the stove could easily burn himself on it. It could easily happen. I’d promised Anne Marie I would fix it, again, but I never did. I’d never gotten around to it. “So you really didn’t try to burn down the Mark Twain House?” I asked.

  “No. That’s what I told your Detective Wilson, too.”

  “This was before you told him I was going to New Hampshire, correct?”

  “Correct,” Thomas said, his teeth starting to chatter a little. He returned his hands to the caves of his armpits, where they’d been hibernating.

  “Detective Wilson believed you?”

  “I had an alibi,” Thomas said, and pointed to my house. “I was here that night.”

  “All night?” I asked, not really wanting the answer. My heart was about to beat its way out of my chest. I almost took my own shirt off, thinking that maybe the cold would numb the pain and persuade my heart to stay in its cavity, where it belonged.

  “All night,” Thomas said.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said. “You told Anne Marie that you lied about my cheating on her and she still let you stay all night? Why would she do that? Didn’t she want to know why you lied in the first place?”

  “Of course she did,” Thomas said. “She asked me why in the hell would I lie about you, of all people.”

  “Oh no,” I said.

  “It was an excellent question,” Thomas admitted. “It deserved an excellent answer.”

  “Oh no,” I repeated.

  “So I told her I did it to get back at you for killing my parents.”

  “You told her the truth,” I said.

  “That I did,” said Thomas. He looked so proud of himself, as though the truth was the thing he’d never thought he’d be able to tell. “But she didn’t believe me, not at first. Even when I told her about it in detail, about the Emily Dickinson House and the fire and you going to prison, she didn’t believe me.”

  “She didn’t?”

  “No, she was convinced you wouldn’t have hidden those things from her. ‘Sam wouldn’t do that to me’—that’s what she said.” Here he paused, and I watched his pride turn to confusion, as it often does. “I don’t get it. She seemed to have really loved you.”

  “She still does!” I said. “She still does!”

  Thomas didn’t pay any attention to this, wishful thinking being the easiest kind of thinking to ignore. “So then I told her that if she didn’t believe me, she should go talk to your parents.”

  “Oh no,” I said, because if our life is just one endless song about hope and regret, then “oh no” is apparently that song’s chorus, the words we always return to.

  “And that’s when she told me what you’d told her: that your parents were killed in a house fire.”

  “Let me explain,” I said. I could tell his low-grade anger was about to turn into pure hatred and rage, the way you can tell when rain is about to turn into one of the colder forms of precipitation.

  “Your parents were killed in a house fire,” he repeated. “Was that supposed to be funny?” Thomas asked. He took a step toward me, removed his right hand from his armpit, and clenched it, and for a second I thought he was going to hit me, but he didn’t. Maybe Thomas had learned from my mistake earlier, when I’d hit him. When we hit someone, we want that to be the final word. But it never is. And if a blow to the face wasn’t the final word, then what was? Are we wrong for wanting there to be any such thing as a final word? Was there any such thing as a final word? And where, oh, where could we find someone to speak it?

  “Wasn’t it enough that you killed my parents?” Thomas said. “Did you have to kill your own parents in the same way?”

  “I didn’t kill my parents at all,” I said. “Thomas, it was just a story.’

  “Shut the fuck up,” he said. “In the story you killed your parents in the same way you killed my parents in real life.”

  “OK, I get your point,” I said, his point being that once something bad happens to you, once you become tragic, you have rights to that tragedy, you own it—not just the tragedy, but the story of that tragedy, too—and then you and only you can do what you want with it. You could write a memoir about it, for instance. Yes, I had plagiarized Thomas’s grief, the way the bond analysts thought they’d plagiarized mine. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “You’re damn right you’re sorry,” he said. “You’re always sorry.”

  That was so obviously true that I didn’t feel the need to confirm it. “And then I’m guessing Anne Marie told her parents what you told me,” I said. “And that’s when Mr. Mirabelli started following me.”

  “And then you kissed a woman who wasn’t your wife with your father-in-law watching,” Thomas said. “I didn’t really have to do any work at all.”

  “My mother saw me do it, too,” I admitted.

  “That poor woman,” he said.

  “I know you know my father,” I said. “Do you know my mother, too?”

  “I’ve known them both for a long time, Sam,” he said. His anger had turned to sadness now, meaning not that anger is fleeting, but that when anger melts away, then sadness is always there in its middle.

  “From my father’s parties,” I said.

  “No,” Thomas said. “Your mother has never been at the parties, not that I know of.”

  “My father said she didn’t like his guests.”

  “Just one guest, really,” Thomas said, and finally I was starting to understand. My parents had something like an agreement: every Tuesday my father would have a party at the house with Deirdre among the guests, and my mother would know to stay away. As long as my father remembered what day of the week it was, my mother wouldn’t have to see Deirdre, and as long as she didn’t see her, she didn’t have to admit she existed. She would go to her apartment that night, and Deirdre would come over to the house; when my mother came back to the house the next day, Deirdre would be gone. She did and she didn’t know about Deirdre; now I knew what my father meant when he said things were complicated.

  “So you know that my father has a Deirdre.”

  Thomas nodded. “It’s complicated,” he said.

  “My father has been cheating on my mother for thirty years,” I said. “That’s not complicated.”

  “They’re not bad people, Sam, not any of them.” I recognized immediately what he’d said and the way he said it: this was a rationalization a son might make about his parents. It occurred to me that my mother and father had become his parents as much as they’d stayed mine. Or was it my father and Deirdre whom he considered his parents? How many parents might a person have in this life? Was there an infinite supply? And supposing there was, did this infinite supply of parents mean an infinite supply of comfort, or of heartbreak?

  “How do you know my mother if she wasn’t at the parties?”

  “Your mother came and found me after my parents died,” he said. “She wanted to say how sorry she was. She’s the only one in your family to say that. I used to come around and see her in her apartment once in a while, but I had a feeling she didn’t want me there.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t think she likes me very much,” Thomas admitted. I knew why: my mother probably pitied Thomas too much to like him. I remembered there were books she wouldn’t read, and wouldn’t let me read, because they were so full of pity. For my eighth-grade English class, I was assigned Uncle Tom’s Cabin and To Kill a Mockingbird, and my mother refused to let me bring them in the house. I had to read them on the front porch, even though it was winter and uncomfortably cold even if you were completely dressed, as I had been back in eighth grade and Thomas wasn’t now. Snow was starting to accumulate on his hair, his shoulders. He was
hopping from one foot to the other to keep warm. He was so cold, even his sternum was turning blue. The only reason I could figure he didn’t go inside was that he enjoyed showing me how much he knew about my family that I didn’t.

  “Tell me about my mother’s apartment,” I said. “How long has she had it?”

  “A long time. Almost ever since I’ve known her.”

  “But when I came home from prison, she was living in the house,” I said. “My father didn’t have any parties then, either. I lived there a whole month.”

  “They tried for a month, for your sake,” Thomas said. “And then you left.”

  “But they wanted me to leave.”

  “It’s complicated,” Thomas said again, world-wearily, sagely, as if only he could know what it felt like to know so much.

  “You seem to know so much,” I said. “If you didn’t try to burn down the Mark Twain House, then who did?”

  “I have no idea,” Thomas said. This was exactly what my father had said when I asked him why my mother didn’t like the parties. But he’d had an idea, all right. My father had known exactly why my mother didn’t like the parties, even though he pretended he didn’t.

  “What about the Edward Bellamy House?” I asked Thomas, knowing what he would say.

  “I have no idea,” Thomas said. Now he looked longingly toward the house, a house being not just a shelter from the elements but also a place where you could try to hide from all the things you didn’t know or didn’t want to know.

  “I think a woman did it,” I said, testing him out. “That’s my theory. Do you know a woman who might have tried to burn down those houses?”

  “I have no idea,” Thomas said.