Invitation to a Bonfire

by Adrienne Celt

  It took three days for the local paper to print the story, or at least it took three for the notice to reach Vera at her hotel in Twisted Branch. Midway through, it occurred to me that I had no assurance that she was in Twisted Branch at all: there are a number of adjacent towns, some closer to Maple Hill, some farther away. She could’ve just left, and I wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it. All I had was her promise that we would have a new life in Paris, and that was supposed to be enough.

  I spent those three days in increasing agony, crumpling the useless newspapers up into kindling after I’d paged through them. Three days of opening a book and then closing it again, washing the same pan every evening and hoping my stomach wouldn’t feel too bad after another meal of beans. Then one afternoon the knob twisted on the front door, and it opened, and there she was. I do think she stayed by the ocean at least, since she’s got a fresh spattering of freckles across her nose, and a pinkness beneath: pink, like the rim of a mouse’s eye. When she arrived she embraced me, and I could’ve sworn she’d grown much larger, her face all high and distant with a light that shone behind. She kissed me on the edge of my lips, and I felt the burn of it for some time afterwards.

  She was very solicitous. She drew a hot bath and placed me in it, rubbing peppermint soap all up and down my back and asking me questions about how I left him. Were there smudges from my mouth on a cup? (Lipstick on cigarette.) Did I wipe the gun clean of fingerprints? (Hardly.) Did I touch him at all? (Entirely.) She wanted me to know that I was perfectly safe with her, though when I started to cry, heaving and phlegmatic, she didn’t like it. I grabbed her wrist and she pulled it away, splashing water across the floor.

  It’s been a week since then. Most days, Vera seems satisfied. She floats from room to room flexing her fingers, as if new and uncomfortable strength was flowing into them. The way a child’s legs hurt in a growth spurt. She’s been making lists with an increasing frenzy, phone calls to her travel agent that she doesn’t let me hear. I stay out of her way in my room or walking on the beach, and sometimes when I come back in I notice that a page I’ve been writing on has moved, though naturally this could be my imagination. Vera hasn’t yet explained her plan for getting me out of the country, since I told her it would be a risk to use my passport. If they have any notion about what I’ve done, they’ll be watching for me. She says I worry too much.

  Sometimes when I walk into the room where’s she’s planning, thinking, I can feel myself crawling like a beetle over the bones of her hand. If she realized I was there, she would shake me onto the ground and she would crush me. But how can I help letting her know? It’s in the nature of my trivial feet, my clicking wings. Generally if she sees me lurking, she calls me over and asks me to make tea. Which is companionable enough. But sometimes, too, she looks at me like I am dinner.

  67.

  All it would take is a single phone call: Yes, Officer, I did notice the girl had an unnatural attachment to my husband. Of course I would appreciate being left out of the questioning, but I can tell you where she’ll be at such and such time, on such and such day. I’ll be heading out of the country. A period of mourning. You understand.

  I could be inventing things. But in my experience a terrible feeling is usually followed by a terrible act. I used to think if I followed the rules, every new set, I’d get to the end of the rainbow, the end of the line. Now I think I’d do better to make my own rules. It’s what everyone else does.

  68.

  Maybe you’re concerned about me, dear reader. Don’t be. Vera will be back from the store soon, and in the meantime I’ve tried on several of her dresses, plus a blouse, and that pair of work pants she wore to the jetty café. Turns out they were rolled up because they’re much too long for her, which is lucky; we aren’t the same size, but it’s mostly a problem of length and height. I can button her nice wool skirts around my waist with ease. (Not eating well lately has helped. I’ve dropped five pounds, maybe ten. Dinners of oyster crackers. No matter.) They fall to just above the knee, instead of mid-calf as I’d prefer. But I only have to manage for a little while.

  It’s easy to want what you do not have: I would know. My life has been a study in this. In Moscow I saw girls with fox-fur coats, and when I say girls I mean ten years old. Though what I really wanted was not the coats, but the feeling of a small creature tucked around my throat. The feeling that, if I could not control the weather, at least I could gather a group of mammalian ushers to shield me from the harshest wind. I wanted my dreams to come true, even the ones I could only describe as colors or sensations. Yes, I wanted power.

  The wind is high today; chilly for midsummer. Vera always overextends herself at the store, and will be wanting a cup of tea. The cabin’s rent is paid through the end of the month, though of course that will soon become irrelevant.

  I asked her: Don’t you need to go back to Maple Hill? Not just to talk to the police and show them you’re grieving (which I assume, or assume she could put on like a jacket; tears for the camera), but to gather your possessions and make an inventory? Their house was not enormous, but it was nice. There were wedding photos on the walls, Vera radiant in her white gown. She told me she has everything she needs. That she spoke by phone with a very sympathetic detective, and can withdraw cash with just a signature. She’s good at letting things go, I guess. Her father passed away a long time ago; he couldn’t manage the transition, postwar, and took his own life, leaving her his empty apartment in the fourteenth arrondissement, which has gone quite fashionable in the years since Lev and Vera left. The police? She snorted. The police will be no trouble at all.

  In Paris she’d be une veuve jolie, a beautiful mourner. Black crêpe, black polished shoes, la pauvre femme en deuil. There would be no reason to stop her at passport control, as she isn’t the official object of any investigation, and if she meets with a Parisian police inspector, that will be her duty fulfilled. If she becomes a benefactor to the Donne School, they’ll lean on the local sheriff to avoid any line of questioning that places her under suspicion. That’s what she says, and I believe her. She walks so confidently. It’s a step you can pick up, with care, a little like imitating a person’s voice on the phone. I’ve made a study of her notes on Lev’s manuscripts, which she didn’t think to destroy along with her letters, and can now do a passable version of her handwriting.

  I couldn’t save much of Lev’s, in the end. Not for myself. His gifts felt empty of him (presents without presence, kind without kin), so I left them behind in Maple Hill, where perhaps they’ll act as clues or links between us. Twenty dollars spent on gold; a bangle abandoned in a gardener’s apartment. What I did save was a folded envelope, and the tablets sliding back and forth inside. Powder held safe from the elements, lying in wait. Vera was the most glowing one of us, the kind of woman God makes as an example to the rest. Here, you can imagine Him saying, is a life worth living. A life of modesty and steam. There will always be a Vera, I assured myself, one way or another. With a dark rinse, I think our hair will look quite similar. She sets it to the side, in a style that’s easy enough to replicate with the right number of pins.

  My mother told me to take cues from my betters. Learn their habits, and track them like deer in a live wood. Keep watch of their movements, and, if it helps, imagine you’ve tied a line of bright yarn to one ankle to make their path clear. Vera puts two spoonfuls of sugar in her tea before even sipping. She and I share a soul, or so Lev insisted. Why not share a little more? I found out yesterday when she went to town for a bottle of wine that she doesn’t carry her passport with her, nor check it for safety upon her return. Easy enough to move it into a clean purse, where I will slide her wallet too. Take her wedding ring from around her finger, though I doubt it will fit on mine. Something to ask a jeweler about when I arrive in France.

  A fire in the fireplace might pop and get out of hand. In a place like this, made all of wood, the destruction would be catastrophic. Police, when they come, might find a woman’
s body burned clean of all identifying marks, except the locket—my locket—around its neck, and scraps of my clothes melted to the remaining flesh. Why would they look closer? Already they’ll have found my fingerprints on the gun that shot Lev, and it can’t be long before they match them to the set that’s been on file since the orphan boat carried me to America. Remorse, they’ll think. A murder and then a suicide. Not the most shocking idea, when you get down to it.

  And then imagine: a woman walks onto an airplane and smiles, ironic and wan. She answers questions from the stewardess with an exhausted non or oui before waving her off and falling asleep with a scarf tied around her hair. I don’t speak French well, but Vera doesn’t talk in excess, and I can pick anything up in time. I will avoid her old acquaintances, if any still remain, and eventually it will be my face that people associate with her name, if only through the force of habit. Not such a strange thing, for a widow to hide herself away, especially when she has her husband’s legacy to maintain. Correspondence. The occasional grieved statement made by postcard. A packet of papers, a yellow old manuscript, locked in a safe underneath her bed. Maybe two packets, if I can’t bring myself to burn these pages after all.

  With a bit of effort, a bit of distance, I know this too can be smoothed over. We forget about the atrocities of history all the time, so long as there is a fair conclusion. The poor rising up to take the place of the rich. The dead living on in our earthly memories. Practice saying it: I am Vera Petrovna Orlova. I was born Vera Volkova, just outside Moscow, on an estate that would rival Arthur’s royal seat. I can make things happen with the strength of my mind, the force of my will, and it was my prerogative to disappear. I hold my secrets close, because there’s no one left alive who’ll understand them. No one left at all, but me.

  And I am determined to be happy.

  Acknowledgments

  I’m endlessly grateful to Emma Patterson for her insight, friendship, and forbearance, all of which serve to make me a better and (usually) saner writer. Thanks also to Lea Beresford for being an incredible champion for this book, and for helping me realize its best possibilities. I think we three make a pretty good team.

  Thank you to Sara Kitchen, Lauren Hill, and everyone at Bloomsbury USA and UK. I’m especially grateful to my UK editor Alison Hennessey for her enthusiasm and care in bringing this novel to a readership across the pond. To my phenomenal copy editor Janet McDonald: I appreciate you. To Katya Mezhibovskaya: Thank you for designing a cover that is truly better than anything I imagined.

  Love and gratitude to Branden Boyer-White (first reader, second reader, hero of my heart), Angie Dell, Rachel Andoga, Lyndsey Reese, Sam Martone, Peter Turchi, Tara Ison, T. M. McNally, and Melissa Pritchard for years of friendship and inspiration. To Reneé Bibby, Lilian Vercauteren, and everyone who is a part of Write Wednesday, for sometimes letting me pick the restaurant. To Lauren Cerand for excellent advice and generosity with her time. To Katie Adams for offering valuable feedback on an early version of this manuscript, as well as her enthusiasm writ large. To Esmé Weijun Wang, for offering joy, sharing John Wick, and being brilliant. To Edan Lepucki and Alissa Nutting for support when it was most needed. To Mairead Case, for being. To Lynn Steger Strong, Katie Coyle, Rachel Fershleiser, Jaime Green, Erika Swyler, and other friends who make my daily life better, even if it’s usually through a crackling digital void.

  Heartfelt thanks to the Willapa Bay Artist Residency Program, the Jentel Arts Foundation, and the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop for offering me space and support while I worked on this book. (To my Launch Pad friends: this may not have been quite what you had in mind, but studying science fiction writers turns out to have been as valuable for me as studying science.) Thanks also to my mother-in-law, Karen Clark, for taking us on a vacation to Mexico where I drafted a huge swath of pages and got a nice suntan, too.

  Thank you to my family, always.

  Thank you to Dave, especially. I love you.

  A Note on the Author

  Adrienne Celt’s debut novel, The Daughters, won the PEN Southwest Book Award for Fiction and was an NPR Best Book of the Year and an NYPL Favorite Book of the Year. Her story “Temples” was included in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016 after originally appearing in Epoch. Celt’s short fiction appears or is forthcoming in Zyzzyva, Ecotone, the Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Esquire, Electric Literature, and Carve Magazine, among others; her nonfiction has appeared in the Rumpus, Tin House’s “Open Bar,” Lit Hub, the Toast, Catapult, the Millions, and elsewhere. Adrienne has an MFA in fiction from Arizona State University, draws weekly web comics at loveamongthelampreys.com, and lives in Tucson, Arizona.

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  First published in the United States 2018

  Copyright © Adrienne Celt, 2018

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  ISBN: HB: 978-1-63557-152-3; eBook: 978-1-63557-151-6

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