Cassie hadn’t ever expected to go to Bangor on the weekend. This wasn’t the way she’d imagined encountering Arthur Burnes and her stepfamily. She was also in the thick of her lie about her grandfather, and felt she couldn’t be seen by the Swedish girls to loiter around the hostel when she should be at his bedside. But the girls, keen to hike, dressed by the time it was fully daylight, and slipped quietly from the room, leaving their belongings tidily rolled and stacked for their evening return. Cassie discreetly opened an eye to watch their preparations at one point, Inge’s breasts dangling only a couple of feet from Cassie’s face as she bent to pull on her pants, but hadn’t let on she was awake. It was a hostel, not a Hampton Inn, she told Peter; she couldn’t hang out there all day; and she’d almost convinced herself of her fictional grandfather at the hospital. So when she’d showered and dressed, she embarked purposefully, head down, stride sure, for Bangor General, as if getting there really was important.
The spring morning was chilly but bright, and the budding trees nodded as she passed. Forsythia bloomed in yellow bursts across the yards, alongside patches of crocuses and bluebells. To Cassie, these were signs of hope, blessings on her path. Two cherries, earlier than the rest, had begun to unfurl their frilly pom-poms, and she paused beneath them for a while, looking up at the patches of blue sky behind the pink. She told Peter she felt better than she had in months. The air in her lungs felt different, the slight chill of her fingertips and the breeze at her neck, the rosy hue of the sun through the petals . . . it was like being kissed, not in a romantic way, she said to Peter, but in the way your mother—or father—kisses you when you are small, and gently strokes your hair.
Carefully beanied, without sunglasses, she managed to spend the morning at the hospital, between the gift shop, the main lobby, and the gloomy cafeteria, where she ate a cup of minestrone, a ham and Swiss on rye, and a rice pudding—her first real meal since leaving home. The food was cheap, for which she was grateful, and the rice pudding—Kozy Shack—pleasingly familiar. She made a constant effort to look like she knew what she was doing—as un-waiflike as possible—and she got so caught up in acting her role that, she told Peter, who told me, she could picture her nonexistent grandfather, lying upstairs in one of those complicated beds, head up, knees up just a little, draped in a sheet and a blue-speckled hospital gown, bony arms punctured by tubes, hooked up to blinking machines, his sparse white hair askew and his eyes half-closed. She pictured his face, its jaundiced, freckled parchment, and his irritating way of clearing his throat every minute or two. She pictured a real guy, a composite of some of the old guys she’d seen that very morning, and she so convinced herself that he was real she could feel tears behind her eyes at the thought of his imminent death. She was ready, if anybody at the hospital should ask her, to describe this grandfather in great detail, and to hurry back to him—her only doubt, having studied the directory in the entrance, was whether he’d be in Geriatrics on Three West or Oncology on Five East. But in her hours in the hospital, nobody at all seemed to notice her; certainly nobody addressed her; as though she flitted through invisible, a familiar.
Only now, frighteningly, did she wonder whether her grandfather really didn’t exist, whether he’d died long ago the way Bev had always said, or whether, like her father, he’d been killed off by Bev’s fictions and actually in this life went mournfully about his days somewhere, maybe even in Bangor, Maine, wondering what had happened to his daughter, and whether he might, in this world, have a grandchild he could love. You have to imagine how absolutely Cassie’s faith was shaken, and this before she went to knock on the front door of the Burnes house. Reality had become slippery. Facts she thought she’d always known disintegrated, or appeared to. She didn’t any longer trust in anything she’d believed to be true; but she was also aware that she might be wrong, that maybe Bev had never lied to her, that her beloved father had in fact died on the highway outside Boston that long-ago night.
Cassie hated Anders Shute and wished powerfully that he had no part in her life. Her mother, in whom she’d long placed her love and sense of safety and of self, loved this man Cassie despised, and seemed prepared to sacrifice her own daughter, her only daughter, for that love. What should Cassie have believed? It was better to think that her mother was crazy, a compulsive liar with terrible judgment, than to believe her mother had dropped Cassie with cause, and had some real reason for her choices. In either case, Cassie was on her own; but in the former, at least, she had hope—for a father, for grandparents, for any of a number of alternative lives, none of which could be worse, she figured, than the one she was living.
Sunday afternoon in Bangor was trickier. She couldn’t wander all day through the hospital corridors without attracting suspicion; it wasn’t big enough. She figured rightly that the public library would be closed on a Sunday, but she walked there anyway, up from the riverbank to the flat open plaza on Harlow Street. It was hard to blend into the background on a Sunday, she told Peter—not as hard as it would have been in Royston, where everybody really knows everybody, at least by sight—but she still stuck out more than she liked. She felt people were watching her, and once the sun came out and it grew warm, she worried that the beanie over her hair made her particularly noticeable. But the hair—her famous white-blond hair—would have been worse. She kept expecting someone to ask her questions—the blue-rinsed grandma limping out of Rite Aid clutching a prescription bag who glared at her; the little Asian boy who banged his scooter pretty hard into her heel because he wasn’t looking; the guy who reminded her of Peter, the same dark curls and gangly arms, about our age, hunched on the library steps tapping on his phone. That was the worst, because she actually wanted his attention, because she was looking at him easily as much as he looked at her, flickering, surreptitious glances unlike the others, a kind of flirting. But he didn’t speak, and she didn’t either, in the end a good thing, really, if she didn’t want to get caught; and she drifted away as breezily as she could to the nearby park, where she sat cross-legged at the foot of a maple, freezing her butt on the cold ground, pretending she was waiting for someone—which, of course, she sort of was. She said to Peter, who repeated it to me, that it was only there—in the park, the prickly packed earth under her and the maple’s scaly trunk behind her, its limbs above still winter-bare—that she understood she was a runaway, that she’d put herself in the category of news flashes or Amber Alerts, a minor who wasn’t where she was supposed to be.
The craziness of it all dawned on her: why did Anders Shute have any say at all in her fate? How could that be possible? What would it mean to go home, if she ended up going home, or if that was even the right word, by now, for the storybook house in the cul-de-sac with the Encroaching Forest advancing behind it? Where would she ever be at home now, she wondered, and, she told Peter, sitting in that little park she was weighed, as if by a lead mantle, with a great sadness; she could feel her shoulders and her spine collapsing, and even her cheeks grew heavy—the very opposite of the joy she’d experienced that morning under the cherry blossoms. Because it suddenly seemed to her that coming to Bangor had been a terrible, terrible mistake, and that whatever she would find out from Arthur Clarke Burnes, there’d be no coming back from it, no way to unknow it and either she’d be stuck with Bev and Anders with no way out or she’d have lost Bev forever by exposing her as a lifelong liar, and really, honestly, what she wanted was to be able to go back in time, not a long way, just a couple of years, back to the summer before seventh grade, before it all went wrong. To a time of unknowing. (And when Peter told me she’d said that, I was sure that even though she was talking about how things were with Bev, with her mom, that she also meant going back to me, that she wished too that we could have us back, that the knot had never been untied.)
When Peter told me this, all that Cassie had said to him that Wednesday afternoon and evening in his bedroom, hidden from his parents and from hers, before she vanished again and none of us knew where, I wanted desperat
ely to believe that I could do something, that I could help to find her, of course, but also that it would matter to her, matter hugely even, that I did, that it was me. Of course, it was her story, what went on up there in Maine, of course it was; it didn’t happen to me, even if I feel, now, as though I were there. But if I’m honest, what mattered most to me was how those events affected our story, hers and mine. I wanted her to come back to me. When Peter told me all she’d said, we were in limbo, caught between inhaling and exhaling, and when I tell you what mattered most to me, I’m telling a terrible secret, because all that mattered then to anyone else was simply that we find her.
So what did happen, in the end, in Bangor? Peter wasn’t a hundred percent clear about it. Not that Cassie didn’t tell him, because she did, but the telling made her upset, and she wasn’t particularly lucid. He didn’t want to belabor things, to make her go over the story, obviously so painful; for God’s sake, he’d figured there’d be time. He figured that even a day or two later, when she’d caught her breath and calmed down, he’d have her repeat the progression of events in such a way that he’d know he’d got it straight. So mostly he let her sob and snivel and swallow her words and leave gaps and double back and not entirely make sense.
As Peter understood it, or as he told it to me: after breakfast with the Swedish girls on Monday morning, using her Google Maps printout from the school library in Royston (a printout that Miss Barrocca wouldn’t suggest trying to trace until the following day, and that wouldn’t bear fruit until after Cassie had returned to Royston), Cassie walked the two miles to the Burnes house under a light but persistent April drizzle—needly in its persistence. Number 36 Spring Street turned out to be a little bald, in a neighborhood of newish houses with big, unfenced yards and no sidewalks, where a girl standing still in the rain might quickly be noticed; so she didn’t pause, on that reconnaissance visit, but walked right by and on for another quarter mile or so before turning and walking back to town. The house looked shabbier in real life than on the computer; maybe it was just the rain, or the end of winter, but the paint was peeling, and the concrete drive crazed like old china. The grass had lost the battle in places to patches of dirt that, in the weather, had dissolved into mud puddles. The house was dark—kids at school, parents at work. Cassie noticed that the basketball hoop over the garage was bent all the way down, as if someone had dangled from it, or tried to, but so that you couldn’t shoot a basket, anyway. Later, she remembered that.
When she went back again, the rain had long stopped (though her clothes still felt damp, in spite of the time she spent waving her sweater under the hand dryer in the basement bathroom at the Bangor Library); it was dusk; lights were on in the blue house and in their pooled glow she could see people moving through the rooms—like watching them on TV, she told Peter. But when he told me, I instead was reminded of watching my cousins at Thanksgiving through my own front windows, that strange sense of distance, even where you should belong.
Of course, Cassie didn’t belong at that house in that moment. She told Peter that she chickened out then. She couldn’t ring the bell, she couldn’t even walk up the steps, she stood in the road in the darkening afternoon, peering up into the dioramas of a life that might have been, could have been, maybe should have been hers; until not one but two cars had to swerve slightly to pass her in the dusk, and she retreated.
The Swedish girls had left. The room was lonely, and Cassie had trouble sleeping. She woke before dawn to return to Spring Street before the day had begun: third time lucky. Tired in every way, tired of the situation and of herself, she wanted to make things happen, to make things clear.
It was barely light when she finally rang the Burneses’ bell. Just like the evening before, lights within illuminated the rooms, though differently: a new scene, possibly a new act, in the play. The oldest kid, Jason, answered the door, already in his Catholic school uniform, even a tie. Plumper than in the photos, a bit taller too, he had a mouth like cupid’s bow, and that dark down she remembered from the pictures. His lips were a little shiny—bacon, maybe? It smelled like it. She asked to speak to his dad, to Coach Burnes, and the boy looked her up and down—thinking her a kid from the high school, surely?—before he turned and hollered up the stairs.
“Hang on a minute,” he said, neither rudely nor politely. “If you can just wait here.”
From the house came the jaunty sound of the radio, and piping child voices, water turning on, a knocking pipe. The entrance where Cassie waited, small, was cluttered with boots, scarves, a couple of dropped umbrellas. It smelled of damp. The boy was gone a while, a couple of minutes, and when he clattered down the stairs again he wore a blazer over his shirt and tie, a crest on the pocket.
“He’s just coming,” he said, slightly breathless now, and retreated.
Outside, behind her, the sky had grown almost fully light, a lowering gray day that threatened more rain. Cassie pushed her hands in her jacket pockets, and her shoulders almost to her ears. She told Peter that she tried to slow down her breathing the way we’d been taught in drama class at school, breathing in and out slowly, counting to five at each passage. She figured he took about ten breaths to appear.
Arthur Clarke Burnes was a little guy—or, at least, not a tall guy—but he was solid. His gray tweed jacket pulled tight in the arms and his neck was red. Maybe he’d been freckly; maybe he’d been fair; now he was just ruddy and leathery and mostly bald. His eyes, light blue—like hers, Cassie thought at once—shimmered watery and veined . . . “rheumy-eyed,” I thought, when Peter told me. They looked, she said to Peter, like maybe he was a drinker, especially with the skin so red. And Coach Burnes looked annoyed. He fumbled with his shirt cuffs, his thick fingers tugging the shirt down inside the unwieldy sleeves.
“Yes?” he said, half-attending. “Do I know you? What is it?”
Right away, she told Peter, she knew it wasn’t what she’d wanted. The timing was off; the emotion wrong. This bullish little man, his fleshy neck spilling over his collar, his thin lips tight. He seemed like he might burst.
“My name is Cassie,” she began. She could hear her voice as if it were someone else’s. She could hear her voice trembling, as if on the cusp of tears. “Cassie Burnes.”
He didn’t register her surname; it seemed to make no impression at all. “Yeah?”
“I’m not from here,” she went on. “But I think you know my mother, Bev?”
“Who?”
“Bev. Beverly Burnes. Hospice nurse, Royston, Massachusetts, but formerly of Boston?”
“I don’t know a Bev Burnes,” he said, but he looked troubled now, Cassie told Peter, as if something hovered at the edge of his vision.
“About fifteen years ago?”
He frowned.
“I have a photo,” Cassie said, and reached into her backpack for her notebook. In it, she had both a picture of her mother, a couple of years old, and the snapshot of Clarke Burnes in his youth, the one blurry photo.
“What’s that?”
“I have a photo, a couple of them.” She fumbled for them. “Did you ever go by Clarke?”
“Sorry?”
“Did you ever use the name Clarke as your first name?”
“What’s this about?”
She held out his photo—she was sure from the expression on his face that it was his photo, that he knew at once where it had been taken, and by whom. Her hands were shaking; the photo fluttered in between them. She was almost certain.
“Where did you get this? What’s this about?”
“Art? Arthur, hurry now—your eggs are cold!” His wife’s voice, unconcerned, mildly reproachful.
“He’s at the door,” the boy called back. “Student from school.”
“What is this about,” he said, really looking at Cassie now, for the first time, his mouth a grim line, his bulk suddenly menacing.
“I think you know my mom?” She held out the other photo, larger, in better focus, Bev by their mantelpiece, at a party,
her cloud of honey hair. “Or you knew her, I guess.”
“I don’t know you,” he said. It was like watching a man put on armor in front of you, Cassie told Peter. “I don’t know who you are, or what you’re doing here. I don’t know what you want. But I think you should go now.”
“Please, will you just look at the photo?”
He glanced, but barely, at Bev. “Who is this? What is this about? I don’t know this person.”
But Cassie told Peter that she could have sworn that he was . . . well, not that he was lying, but that he was uncertain. She could have sworn that he got weirder, although of course things were already weird.
His wife’s dark head popped around the wall at the top of the stairs. “Art, it’s time now. The kids’ll be late.” She didn’t look quite the way Cassie had pictured her—in the photos she’d been plump, but her shoulders were thin, almost frail. And she didn’t have any accent.
“Coming.” When he turned back to Cassie, Arthur Clarke Burnes held his hand up flat between them, so he couldn’t really see her face. Like she was too much to contemplate. He didn’t look again at Bev, wavering glossy between them. “I can’t help you,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Look at me,” she told Peter that she told him. “Look in my eyes—your eyes—and tell me that you don’t know who I am.” That was my Cassie, fearless.
He reached around her, carefully, as if she were diseased, she said to Peter, to open the front door. He didn’t look at her at all; he averted his watery gaze. Physically, he seemed both as though he might still explode and as though he had already exploded.
“You need to leave now.” His voice was low and tight. “I am not going to ask again.” He nodded out at the gray morning, a short dip of his skull, his eyes on the pendulous ceiling of cloud.
The Burning Girl Page 14