The Burning Girl

by Claire Messud

  She changed the subject. We talked instead about how hard she was finding math class, and whether she should get some tutoring help. She showed me a photo in Seventeen of a two-hundred-dollar leather backpack that she wanted for her birthday and knew she wouldn’t get.

  “If only my dad were around,” she said, “he’d get it for me.”

  I remembered Shute’s voice on the phone the night before, acting like he was her father. “I bet you miss him.”

  “Baby you have no idea,” she said in a theatrical voice, and flipped through the magazine to a feature about One Direction. “Which one’s for you?” she asked. “Harry Styles is definitely hot, but I feel like he’s the most obvious choice, don’t you? Like, he’s the default setting.”

  Later I tried to have a repeat of the One Direction conversation with my mother, who always wanted to try to seem younger than she was. She went along with it for about five minutes and then fake-screamed and pretended to tear her hair out. “The inanity!” she shrieked. “I can’t bear the inanity!”

  “What do you want to talk about then?”

  “How about the presidential race, and the fact that we’re going to elect our nation’s leader—either the same one or a new one—in about six months? How about we talk about that, instead of One Direction?”

  “Do we have to?”

  “It matters, sweetie. We have to.” She then made me listen to a political program on the radio, and over dinner with my father, we discussed it, like having social studies class at home. I was surly and annoyed, but I did it.

  PETER OUNDLE was also interested in politics, it turned out, and when I mentioned the radio program, he’d heard it too, not because anyone told him to but because he liked that sort of thing. He gave me tips about online magazines to check out, because their coverage of the issues was, he said, “really sharp.” In the way I might have looked up bands recommended by an attractive boy—not expecting, really, to like the music, but feeling it was an essential homework of flirtation, what my mother called erotomorphia, an illness she attributed to half of America’s teenage girls—I looked up the journals online. The articles weren’t totally engrossing, but they weren’t intolerable either. He told me to watch a film called Gasland, that he said explained fracking. I could see that the issues Peter cared most about—nature and the environment, fracking, and the global-warming discussion—were bigger than our own individual lives.

  On some level, environmental issues felt abstract and remote, but I still thought I could make a passionate speech about the effects of global warming. So I went to Mr. Cartwright and suggested it as the topic for my final speech project of the year. It would mean moving categories, from “Declamation and Recitation” to “Original Argument,” an issue only because I was new to the team: usually it was the eighth graders who did Original Argument. But Mr. Cartwright gave me the thumbs-up, and told me I had two weeks to write the draft because the tournament was, by then, little over a month away.

  He said that the best way to write a strong speech was to make it personal. Our house hadn’t been flooded or destroyed by a tornado; no tree branches had fallen on our car. I could speak about my terror of thunder-snow—the first time I’d seen lightning in a snowstorm, I thought it was the apocalypse—but that wasn’t particularly interesting. I could speak about the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, but that was ages ago—historical, really—and I’d never been to New Orleans. I could try to prepare something about the recent horrible earthquake in Japan—it had caused a nuclear accident too, just a year before. But I didn’t have any personal connection to the event, for one thing; and for another, it wasn’t simply a global-warming issue. While you could argue that it was caused by global warming, you couldn’t reduce it to that.

  My father reminded me about Rudy the caretaker. “Remember that freak storm a couple of years ago? Hurricane . . . who? Which was it?”

  “I don’t remember,” my mother said.

  “A girl or a boy?” I loved that storms had genders.

  “I can’t tell you. The point is, it was a freak storm, a late hurricane, shouldn’t have been this far north. They’d predicted coastal flooding and everyone boarded up and evacuated along the beach, but then it mostly didn’t turn out as badly as they’d feared.”

  “Mostly?”

  “High winds and rain, the kind that makes the road flood in twenty minutes, but bursts of it, not consistent.”

  “I remember,” my mother said suddenly. “That string of mini-tornadoes, right? What was the name for those things?”

  “Damned if I remember.”

  “I can look it up just now on my phone,” I said. At that point I was the only one in the family with a smart phone. “What’s it? A name for a mini-tornado?”

  “It’s not quite a tornado,” my father said. “It’s like a tornado.”

  “What are you doing with your phone at the table?” My mother raised her voice. “We made rules about that thing.”

  “It’s not at the table, it’s near the table.”

  “And that makes it acceptable?”

  “Let her look it up. It bugs me that I can’t remember.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!”

  “A dust devil? Is it?”

  “No. Keep going.”

  “Rich! We’re at table!”

  “You wouldn’t stop her going to get the encyclopedia, would you?”

  “But—”

  “But she wouldn’t be able to find it there, because she doesn’t already know the word.”

  “Derecho?”

  “Bingo! That’s it. Thank you, Miss Julia. A string of derechos. What does it say about them?”

  “They’re thunderstorm wind events, but are not tornadoes. ‘These storms produce strong straight-line winds and can cause damages similar to a tornado.’ ”

  “See? That’s exactly right. I remember having the conversation with Rudy about it, in the Rite Aid parking lot. He explained all that to me. Caused by the hurricane. A string of derechos. Sounds Mexican, Doritos and nachos put together. He was disappointed, as if there would’ve been more cachet in a tornado. A higher class of storm.”

  “Dad—”

  “The point is, a derecho destroyed his house. A little clapboard Cape in the woods out the Vine Tail Road by the nature reserve. He’d lived there with his mother and as I recall, she’d died not long before, so it was especially devastating. I went out and saw it, with Eric, at the time—flattened, like a giant had stomped on it.”

  “Where does he live now?”

  “Same place.” My dad got up to clear the table.

  “Rich! That’s Julia’s job.”

  “Give the kid a break. I’m finishing my story.”

  “Did he rebuild the house?”

  “No, he brought in a double-wide and set it on a raised concrete foundation. Real backwoods stuff. Basically what he could afford with the insurance. Primitive. He keeps that dog in a pen outside, and I’ve heard that at night she howls like a werewolf.”

  “That’s a great story, but it doesn’t help Julia with her speech.”

  “Did the derecho blow the house down? Or was it a tree falling?”

  “You can ask him. But the storm tore up a line of old pines like they were matchsticks—it’s still there, like a road cut through the forest—and I guess the house was in its path. A twisted pile of firewood with some mud-soaked furniture strewn about. When I went out there, that’s what it was.”

  My mother sighed. “Not very cheerful.” She took the vanilla ice cream out of the freezer. “I think we need a Parisian moment. Poire Belle Hélène, anyone? I’ll heat the chocolate sauce, if you’ll change the subject.”

  “I think you should interview Rudy,” my dad said. “His story will make a great speech.”

  “But was it global warming that caused it?” I asked. My mother put the pears in bowls and scooped the ice cream.

  “Of course it was. Who ever heard of a hurricane—or a derecho, for that m
atter—this far north in November before?”

  “I hear you,” my mother said, “but it’s dinnertime, and Rudy can wait. Sweetie, why don’t you tell us about the lacrosse game this afternoon? Who won?”

  THIS WAS HOW I came to interview Rudy Molinaro about his house. It made him into a sort of ally. I didn’t know any adults that weren’t related to kids I knew, or to school, so he was a first. Rudy made being an adult seem weirdly like being a kid—as if things happened to you, and you couldn’t really change the course of life. Like it was fated, somehow.

  My dad took me over to Rudy’s on a Sunday afternoon, and sat on a bar stool by the kitchen counter reading the newspaper while I interviewed Rudy with my mom’s old pocket tape recorder—“the tools of the journalist’s trade,” she’d said as she rummaged in her desk for it and waved it triumphantly aloft.

  “I know you,” Rudy said when we arrived. He pointed his stubby finger at me. “You go with that little blond girl. Hair white as an angel. I seen you around town.”

  “Not so much anymore,” I said. “But yeah.”

  My knees almost touched Rudy’s on the little brown corduroy sofa. A cigarette burn in the cushion next to my thigh distracted me: inside the hole I could spy tufty yellow foam and my fingers wanted to worry and pick at it. Finally I sat on my right hand to stop.

  Rudy’s story was sad. He’d grown up in the house in the woods, and after high school he’d done an electrician’s apprenticeship with a firm over in Lawrence, and had eventually saved enough to move out of his parents’ place and rent an apartment in downtown Royston. This made him the first Royston apartment dweller I’d ever knowingly met. For a time, he’d had a girlfriend, and they talked about getting married, but she wanted to move to Boston, and he wanted to stay near home, where he knew everyone and everyone knew him. Then his dad had a heart attack while driving and crashed the pickup on the interstate, aged fifty-nine, and Rudy, himself aged thirty-one and single (the girlfriend having made her move), was faced with a tough choice.

  Home alone in the woods, his mother, diabetic, had a bad leg, so she couldn’t drive. She couldn’t have moved to an apartment in town, where there would’ve been stairs. So Rudy moved back into the house on Vine Tail Road, and he got Bessie the German shepherd instead of a bride, and he loved her just as much, even though she wasn’t allowed to sleep in the house with him. Rudy spent most of his thirties there—he’d been let go from the electricians’ outfit in Lawrence in 2009, when the recession hit and they were downsizing, though he was the last employee not to be a blood relation of Doug Bergdahl, the owner and founder, and Doug had made much of how sad he was to see him go.

  After that, it was odd jobs, and the security guard-cum-maintenance post for the Land Association, whose land included the asylum—a basic income boosted by short cleanup contracts, which didn’t pay too well, but for God’s sake, it was a job, they weren’t easy to come by, and it enabled him to look after his mother. She was deteriorating from the time he came home to her—missing his dad is what Rudy said, but later my father suggested that Mrs. Molinaro had been fond of a drink or two, which, he explained, is an even bigger problem when you’re diabetic. It got so she was essentially bedridden, and then Rudy became a bit teary remembering and we didn’t go into much detail, but he said that hospice had been great, he didn’t know what he would’ve done otherwise, and by that he meant specifically Bev Burnes. I could picture it, even though the double-wide where we sat and drank instant coffee obviously wasn’t the same as the vanished Cape, but I imagined it similarly uncleaned, with gritty carpets and dust balls and sticky rings on all the surfaces. I could see the bustling, voluminous, righteous Bev, crackling down the drive in her Civic, stethoscope dangling from her neck, ruddy-faced and a tad wheezy in her cloud of sweet scent with her candy fingernails aflutter as she made order, a little derecho of cleanliness in the house, wiping a surface, soothing a brow, taking a pulse, changing a diaper, and eventually—the Angel of Death—administering her seductive and essentially fatal morphine.

  In all this busyness, Rudy would have been baffled and grateful, grateful. He was not—he is not—what my mother calls reconstructed, nor what she calls sophisticated either. Bev would have seemed to him like a lighthouse on a rock, a sturdy and gracious illumination that transformed his dark corner of Royston.

  His mother died of a stroke—“a mercy,” he said that Bev had said, “because you knew her path was headed in one direction only”—in March of 2010, when there were not yet any signs of spring on the forest floor, or birds to sing consolingly in the branches, and Rudy had felt very alone, except for Bessie, who howled for three days straight as if to purge his grief.

  So when the storm had come late that fall and flattened the house, destroying what remained of his known life, the devastation was complete. He didn’t say that—he wasn’t the kind of person who would say such a thing; in fact, he looked at his hands and mumbled, “It was bad. Real bad,” and for a full three minutes afterward said nothing more (I watched the digital clock on his stove in the silence, exchanged glances with my father, waited), as if letting those few words blossom into the room around us, the full and inexpressible badness of his loss. I gathered that he’d felt some dark justice was at work, that he was losing the material objects that represented what he’d already lost with his mother’s death, as if nature were forcing him to understand that he needed to begin again from the beginning, that nothing, ever, would be the way it had been before.

  The night of the storm, he’d been at a poker game in town, a monthly gathering of old friends from high school. Because the bad weather was forecast, he’d taken Bessie in the truck—“She hates a storm; all dogs do. They smell it before it comes,” he said—and had locked her in the cab, where she sat in the driver’s seat with her nose to the steering wheel and her ears pricked. “In the worst of it, I went out to check on her, and she was crying. Okay, but crying a lot. I’d been careful not to park near any trees, just in case. Falling branches, you know. But the crying broke my heart. So I asked Ham, could I bring her in, could she stay in the kitchen, and he said sure, so I did. But the crying didn’t stop. With the guys, we laughed about it, a great strong dog like Bessie, afraid of a bit of weather. I thought it was the wind, you know? The sound of the wind.” He shook his head. “But later . . . Ham had me stay till the storm calmed down, all of us stayed, a poker marathon—I lost a hundred bucks that night—and later, when I drove back to the house and saw . . . well, then I figured Bessie knew all along. I think she knew when it was happening.”

  “It’s a good thing you took her with you,” my father said.

  “You bet.” Rudy smiled. One of his front teeth was gray, a dead tooth, so his smile had a bit of the jack-o’-lantern. And then he was missing some teeth farther back, so his mouth crumpled in some. He really wasn’t scary, I could see up close, with his paunch and his stubby fingers and the wispy gray curls on top of his head. The skin on his cheeks was red and thick, but his dark eyes were like a dog’s eyes, hopeful and sad. “Wisest thing I ever did, taking Bessie that night.” I could see him imagining the other possibility. “Not that,” he said, “I don’t think I could’ve stood it. She’s what I’ve got,” he said. “She’s my family. My wisdom.”

  I thought back to that late-summer afternoon, Cassie and I hidden in the asylum, peering down at him and Bessie and the truck, and how I’d been sure that she knew we were there. “They’re smart dogs, German shepherds, aren’t they?”

  “Smarter than most people,” he said. “Than most people I know, anyhow.”

  Then I remembered how I’d imagined that with his loud Springsteen music, he was reliving a carefree youth; but now I could see Rudy up close, I knew that couldn’t have been the case. He’d never been that guy, sure of himself, his arm around a girl in the cab of the truck. I knew the younger versions of guys like him at school, awkward, lonely, a bit slow, gravitating toward other boys like themselves for the relief of companionship, hopi
ng for and expecting little, and grateful, grateful, for what they got.

  THE SPEECH came out well—“a near ideal combination,” according to Mr. Cartwright, of the personal and the scientific. I chose a few details from Rudy’s story—tear-jerking details, like the moment, the morning after the storm, that he found his mother’s favorite photo of her and his dad when they were young, mud-soaked in a tangle of wet branches and debris. For all that Bessie’s apparent intuition made a great story and was the most meaningful part to me, it didn’t have much to do with global warming, so I left it out. You’ve got to shape the story into an argument, Mr. Cartwright told us, and that means you choose what to put in, and what not to. I started with Rudy, expanded out to Hurricane Katrina and other, bigger, weather events, and then got going with my statistics. Mr. Cartwright always told us that we respond to the individual, not the collective—that we get more upset about one specific child’s death than about the news of 500 or 1,000 dead people—and I kept that in mind. I may have made Rudy sound more heroic and stoic than he was in real life (in real life, my father suggested, it seemed that since his mother’s death Rudy had struck up his own friendship with Johnnie Walker’s poor cousin), but it helped to get my point across and I didn’t make anything up. Mr. Cartwright said he thought the speech would stand a good chance at the tournament, which was as high praise as he gave anyone, so I was happy. In the end, I came in third, but the kids who did better were both eighth graders, so it still felt like a triumph. Jodie, who was in a totally different category, performing a monologue from The Taming of the Shrew, was even a bit jealous.

  IT’S FUNNY what time does: each day a drop of water, and without you realizing it, the stone below the drops wears a smooth divot. By late spring, I didn’t think too much about Cassie. I didn’t never see her, but we didn’t hang out. Peter Oundle had become my friend rather than her boyfriend, and if their failed romance was the reason, then I was grateful to Cassie. Even though he adored her, and maybe loved her even more after they broke up, I knew she could never have been right for him: sure, he ran the 400 meters and was invited to all the parties, but at heart he was a poet, and he showed me his poems and talked to me about them, and asked my opinion about words and lines. For some, he composed music, made them into songs—these, unlike the others, usually rhymed—and he tried them out on me too. He invited me around to his house—the first time, I got nervous, as though it meant something; but it quickly became clear there wasn’t anything particularly meaningful about it, for him anyway.