Burning September

by Melissa Simonson

  ***

  There was one huge difference I noticed upon entering the visitor’s room of the facility: the powers that be had decided it was safe to remove Caroline’s restraints. They were unnecessary from the start. The only person she’d been a danger to had been dead for three weeks.

  Florescent lights, normally so unflattering, poured over my sister standing in the center of the room, pale blue scrubs sagging around her like a melting iced cake.

  She broke into a jog and threw her arms around me. The only time she’d hugged me tighter was when we were newly orphaned and she’d dropped me off for my first day of fifth grade.

  “I missed you,” she said when she pulled back with a luminous smile. I echoed her, and she sat on the couch, dragging me down next to her by both hands.

  It was amazing how vibrant she could be when surrounded by the other dead-eyed patients. Breakthrough Recovery Center was not where she belonged. Anybody who saw her would have said it. Except Detective Slater; he’d say she belonged in a two-man cell.

  “Have you been keeping up with your classes?” she asked, arranging my hair around my shoulders. Her pupils whizzed between mine, sized me up in a blink, intuitive as ever. A stark contrast between the eyes of her fellow lunatics.

  “Yeah.”

  She snorted, an overgrown hank of hair ruffling. “That doesn’t sound convincing. School’s important. I hope you’re not blowing it off.”

  I hadn’t been blowing it off. Every day I’d shown up. My body, anyway. “I’ve got a class in two hours. I’m heading there after this.”

  “I don’t want this mess to affect your grades.” She rubbed both thumbs beneath my eyes. “I can tell it’s been affecting your sleep.”

  I’d never been good at sleeping. She knew that as well as I did, since she was the same way.

  “I’m glad you’re here, though. There’s a few things I need to go over with you. You have my debit cards, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. The landlord automatically debits my account for rent, so it shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “It will be when the account runs dry.” Breakthrough didn’t offer work-release programs, and I doubted the magazines she wrote for would be dying to run an in-depth piece on insane asylums.

  “That won’t happen.”

  I arched an eyebrow. Maybe she was insane, forgetting how money and debit accounts worked. “Caroline, you’re not going to be out of here in a month. Even if they release you, they’ll send you straight over to jail. I’m not a little girl anymore. I can handle this. I’ll get a job.”

  “It’s handled. Your job is school.”

  “Well, I can do both.”

  “I don’t want you doing both. School needs all of your effort and attention.”

  I leaned forward, turning my head so she wouldn’t see my eye roll, and rested my elbows on my knees. “You’re not my mother.”

  “I might as well have been.” She snapped her fingers in front of my face so I’d look at her. “You’re not getting some bullshit dead-end minimum wage job. There’s no need, and you’re under enough stress as it is.”

  Is that what you’d call this oxygen-less freak show? Stress? I always thought it was something only bored housewives complained about.

  Stress was as good a descriptor as any, though. The enormity of the issue at hand and all the variables that would crop up as its bastard children would certainly cause some discomfort. Or stress.

  Stress. The word felt foreign, twisting on my tongue. Stress.

  Whenever I learned a new word when I was little, I’d write it over and over. Bunny bunny bunny bunny. Caroline would feed me reams of paper to continue my written repetition.

  Suddenly I couldn’t believe I’d said she wasn’t my mother.

  “Do you ever regret it?”

  “What, school?” Her eyebrows contracted. “Not for a second.”

  “No.” I ran a hand over my face. “Do you regret me. Being forced to take care of me when there were plenty of better things to be doing.”

  A shocked Caroline isn’t one I’m used to seeing, but she recovered in a second.

  “That is literally the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, and—” she inclined her head at the guy who passed his days screaming about ferrets, banging his head against walls, “—I hear Mr. Ferret’s crap 24/7. Nobody forced me. Foster care was never an option. I wasn’t going to lose you to the system.”

  She waited for a few beats. Expecting some kind of response, but I couldn’t dream one up.

  “Where is this coming from?”

  “I don’t know. You had so much responsibility so young. I wondered if you hadn’t gotten the chance to experience normal dating and stuff people your age do. Your whole life’s been about taking care of me. And maybe you couldn’t get over your first broken heart because you’d never learned how.”

  Her lips twitched from side to side before settling into a deep frown accented by narrowed eyes. “I’m only going to tell you this once, so you need to hear me. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me. Brian was the worst. I didn’t do it because he broke my heart. I did it because he was an asshole who deserved it.”

  Did he? I wasn’t his biggest fan, but he taught me how to play guitar. That counted for something. Of course he could have taught me simply to win points with Caroline, but why quibble?

  Pointing out that in my personal opinion he absolutely broke her heart didn’t seem politic.

  “His whole life he’d treated all women like shit. Lying, cheating, juggling four at a time. Not to mention the drug-dealing side business. He had skeletons, you’d better fucking believe it.”

  “That’s your plan? You’re going to tell the jury he deserved it because he cheated on you and sold some weed?”

  “That’s for a lawyer to decide.”

  Yeah, right. When hers actually made time to see her.

  ***

  Waiting lists for college classes are something equivalent to a bottomless abyss. You could spend eternity on one, but then I suppose when your sister is accused of a salacious murder it would tend to shunt you to the top. Especially when that sister had been a favorite student of the Department of Arts head.

  Valerie Rasmussen had emailed personally rather than an auto message informing me of the good news—I’d been granted a reprieve from Waiting List Purgatory.

  Art teachers are an odd breed. The bulk of those I’d been around were everything one would imagine a hippy getting on in years to be. Matted hair grown long, more often than not sporting grease buildup at the roots. No makeup; art materials might smear it. Lopsided eyeglasses, attached to a groovy neck chain. Not least, the air of a lecturing blowhard; someone who’s been there, done that, probably done it better, and my my, you kids these days.

  I couldn’t tell if it was a good thing Professor Rasmussen was none of the above. With the looks of an aging soap star, sleek hair, and smart suit, she beckoned from behind the desk as I knocked on her open office door, cutting over my introduction. “Katya, right? Caroline’s sister?”

  Of course it was never simply Katya, right? Caroline always got a mention.

  “Kat is fine.”

  “You look a lot like her. I’m glad you stopped by.”

  I dithered in the doorway, fingering the strap of my backpack. “I figure it’s not every day you get off a wait list. Thanks for that.” Though the jury was still out on her motives.

  She closed the thick datebook she’d been flicking through. “Caroline meant a lot to me. She’s a very talented artist; you always remember the gifted students. Sweet, too. A very nice girl.” Sure, she was sweet. Sweet like antifreeze. “And you were one of her favorite subjects. A lot of her pieces and projects had something to do with you. That photograph of you with the tarot cards got her a lot of attention. More than she normally got, even, which certainly says something. I have a copy of it hanging in my classroom.”

  I don’t even remember Caroline taking that
picture, but it must have been the first time we went to the fair. The sun had begun its descent behind the mountains, and smoke curled in the air from an out-of-focus bonfire. I had my little girl legs crossed as I sat alone in a deserted stretch of swaying bleach blonde grass on a violet swath of velvet that frayed at the edges. My hair dripped over my shoulders, my hand cupped my chin as I considered the complicated tarot spread in front of me. I’m sure my thoughts were along the lines of uhh, what? but luckily it didn’t come across in the photograph.

  She gestured for me to sit in the chair across from her. “Did you know she didn’t title it originally? The photo of you? She’d called it Untitled for months before I finally put my foot down.”

  “Yeah. It’s still in our living room.” My backpack slithered to the floor with a dull thud as I sat. “Is she the reason you wanted to see me? You couldn’t find a way to contact her, or something?”

  She sat back in her chair, gazing over the pen she fiddled with, letting the silence stretch further than was comfortable. “She’s partly the reason. Let’s just call it a mixture of general concern and maternal instinct. I know a lot about your history, yours and Caroline’s. You can’t have many people to lean on, given the circumstance. I imagine it’s been rough going.”

  Or stressful.

  “Well, it hasn’t been fun.”

  Blue eyes considered me beneath knitting brows. I’m not sure what she was looking for in my face, but I was plenty certain she wouldn’t find it.

  “I helped her win custody of you after your father died,” she said, after another long bout of dead air. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen such an overwhelmed eighteen-year-old.” She traced the contours of her pen with a fingertip. “I wondered for a moment if what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger was entirely accurate. It looked like she’d fall to pieces at any second.”

  Nice as it was to see my back-then sister through the lens of someone else’s gaze, I couldn’t tell why she’d decided to invite over only to drag me down memory lane. Sure, Caroline had thought a lot of Professor Rasmussen, but she’d also taught me her own brand of paranoia, and never to trust implicitly. Gather information first; make an educated guess later.

  And like the case of Mr. Brown, Professor Rasmussen had proved a treasure trove of important introductions, extra scholarships, and useful trade information.

  Everyone serves a purpose, says Caroline. You just have to look hard enough to find theirs.

  “You’re an art professor and a lawyer?”

  “I’m an art professor who had her own nasty custody battle and a brother-in-law who’s a lawyer. But never mind that.” She opened a desk drawer and selected a file. “Before everything happened—before semester started—Caroline sent me some of your work. Had she told you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, she was looking out for you. Must have taught you well, what she sent is impressive.”

  “Thanks.” Though I wasn’t ever as interested in the arts as Caroline. It turned into an obvious hobby because she was all I knew as far as role models, and what did she do? She bled art. Turned everything into a gallery of some sort.

  “I want to offer you something freshman aren’t usually in the running for. It’s nothing fancy, just a TA position. Unpaid, but you’d have the opportunity to sit in on classes you wouldn’t get into because of seniority and waiting lists and prerequisites.”

  The part of me that Caroline owned recoiled in a dark and dusty back corner of my mind. Accepting handouts was typically unacceptable. Life isn’t a soup kitchen, Kat.

  But hadn’t she accepted handouts left, right, and center when it helped her get ahead? Hadn’t she told me so herself?

  And as though Professor Rasmussen knew the circles in which my thoughts spun, she smiled gently. “It’s not charity if the job’s given to you based on merit. You’d learn a lot. Think about it.”

  ***

  Mr. Ferret sends his regards, Kitty Kat, and your lunatic sister hopes you’re too busy with a class or something to answer the phone.

  Guess what? My lawyer deemed me worthy of a visit. He just left. Seemed more interested in getting my loony bin records than me, since he only said two words, hello and bye. Maybe I’m about to find out firsthand why everyone and their mother hates lawyers.

  Well give me a call tomorrow if you need help with homework or something, God knows I’ve got nothing else to do.

  I love you, milaya.

  ***

  Early evening found me the same as usual—a pile of books blanketing the surrounding carpet, and the tarot deck I kept idly shuffling in my hands. Maybe Caroline was onto something, claiming people clung to old delusions in the face of crises. Maybe when you got right down to it I wasn’t any better than the hopeful new divorcees who clamored about Caroline’s gypsy tent at the fair, praying tarot would bring answers and good news.

  I cut the deck and turned one card over. Death. Fits, though, just ask Brian, I thought for one wild moment before I remembered the whole institution was bullshit. Coincidence then, though a rather large and accurate one. But Death didn’t mean it in the literal sense—though it could be, as any tarot swindler will come up with any number of reasons to explain its appearance. More often it meant change, transformation, sudden and unexpected.

  Ace of Cups. Give me a break, I had no patience for Cups and their romanticism, how could I when life was crashing around my ears?

  The King of Swords—

  My pointless perusal dropped like a curtain over a lit stage at that knock on the front door. I don’t like hearing knocks on my front door. It never means anything good. There was a knock before a police officer informed Caroline and me of our father’s death, one when CPS came to collect me a day afterward, another when we were told of Brian’s demise, though of course Caroline had been expecting such. A subsequent knock when they hauled her off. Presumably there was a knock before the coroner came to pack my mother away in a body bag. I couldn’t remember.

  But to my knowledge nobody had died, I hadn’t murdered a man, and there was no one in the house with suicidal ideations, so I climbed to my feet and answered the door.

  The knocker looked nothing like a cop or a girl scout selling cookies. Those would have made more sense, because nobody with a briefcase and expensive shoes ever came around this condo complex in this crappy area of Orange County.

  “Katya?”

  I clung to the door like one of those koala bears I used to snap around my pencils in grade school. “Yeah?”

  He extended a hand, blinking gilt-dipped lashes. “I’m Kyle Cavanaugh. Caroline’s attorney. I was hoping to get some background information from you. I wish we were meeting under different circumstances.”

  I wished we weren’t meeting at all, but I shook his hand and shrugged. “Okay. Come on in, I guess.”

  He smiled at his shoes as though at some inside joke I didn’t get, and followed me inside. His immediate reaction was one I knew well, since everyone who stepped over the threshold reacted the same way. Something between a gasp and a grimace.

  “Yeah.” I nodded at the satin-lined walls, the ornate frames, the ruffled pillows that looked more like eighties prom dresses. “That’s Caroline for you. You won’t want to see the bedrooms.”

  I studied him, this man who wasn’t interested in talking to Caroline. If he wasn’t gay, he was an alien. Not the illegal sorts Republicans bitch about—he had dark blond hair and skin that proved he didn’t trounce around farms or construction fields—the little green spaceship flying kind.

  Every man I’d ever met wanted to talk to Caroline. Not that some were able. I was long used to her, but from a distance watching them falter and sputter, I felt how her presence could make a room heady and oddly airless. Maybe that was what all the stammering had been about.

  His eyes lingered on the photo of a ten-year-old me at the fairgrounds. “It’s not something you see every day, I can tell you that.” He nodded at the photograph. “Is this you?”
<
br />   “Yeah. In another lifetime, it feels like.” I knelt to collect the tarot cards. The living room had enough ‘character’ without this guy thinking we were gypsy criminals. “So. What is it you want to know?”

  “More about you would be nice.”

  “You must know the basics,” I said between a pencil case wedged between my teeth, hoisting up an armload of textbooks. “Caroline’s sister. Kat is fine. Freshman in college. The end.”

  He pried the pencil case from my mouth and tossed it on the sofa. “What school?”

  “USC.” I kicked a pillow out of my way and dropped the stack of books on the coffee table.

  “My alma mater. Class of 2009.”

  “A baby lawyer.” I blew a strand of hair out of my eye as I straightened up, my hands finding their way to my hips. “This your first gig from the public defender’s office?”

  “No.” He retrieved the pillow and tossed it on the couch. “So it’s just you and Caroline, then?”

  I pointed at the mantel, where my parent’s dusty mosaic tombs sat. “Our mom and dad. They’re very quiet housemates.”

  “I know how you feel. My parents are both gone. It’s been a while, but it’s still hard.”

  He deserved more sympathy on the orphan front. My mother died before I really knew her, and while my father had been the sperm donor, he could hardly be classed as a parent.

  “And your sister’s eight years older? Big age difference. She must have been a surrogate mother.”

  “That’s pretty much the size of it.” I swept a collection of healing crystals aside on the coffee table with my forearm and sat on the empty space. The sofa was a tiny loveseat. I didn’t want to sit that close to anybody I didn’t know.

  “Funny how it’s only you with the Russian name. I’d expect it to be the opposite, but you got the old world name instead of Caroline.”

  “My parents were only here a year before they had her. I guess they tried to Americanize themselves, but by the time I rolled around, they didn’t give a shit anymore. At least that’s what Caroline told me. What do we need to talk about?”