How to Set Yourself on Fire

by Julia Dixon Evans

  “Oh shit,” I say out loud. “Your mom. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t think like that. How dare I envy a girl with a dead mother!”

  Torrey smiles. “I like her like this,” she tells her dad. “It’s like, Sheila unplugged. I think she’s having some sort of brain barf.”

  “No, I’m not,” I say. “I’m totally fine. I guess I checked out for a minute. I was lost in my head.”

  “You still are,” Vinnie says.

  “Pizzaaaa,” Torrey says.

  I look at her. She is intently staring at me with a crazed look in her eyes.

  “Oh my God! You’re trying to trigger me!”

  “Torrey,” Vinnie says. A warning tone. I like him when he’s being fatherly. It occurs to me at this incredibly twisted time that, yes, I am sleeping with him.

  “Vinnie, you’re a good man,” I say. Vinnie’s eyes flash to mine. “Torrey, did you really run and get your dad when I was…thinking?”

  “Thinking?” she says. “About pizza?”

  “Stop it, you.”

  “Torrey,” Vinnie says. “Sheila is fine. I’m going back home now. I have dough to punch down.”

  Vinnie puts his scratchy fingertips beneath my jaw and lifts it just a teensy bit. It’s such a Hollywood move, but it’d be more effective if he just said, Look up a quarter inch, would you? He slowly moves his head side to side, never breaking eye contact.

  “Vinnie,” I say in a stage whisper, my chin pressing down into his hand. “I don’t have a goddamned concussion.”

  He flicks my chin up a little more, like he’s some sort of Humphrey Bogart.

  “Pizza’ll be ready in probably twenty minutes,” he says to Torrey, and walks out.

  “Do you think people have soul mates?” Torrey asks from amongst the letters on my kitchen floor.

  “Torrey, can we go back to pretending I’m having a mental breakdown? That was easier.”

  “No, you’re fine,” she says. “But look at Rosamond and Harold.”

  “Technically we can only look at Harold.”

  “Technically we can look at neither of them right now,” she says. “But Harold’s letters tell us a lot about both of them.”

  “Yes, okay, fine.” I want to roll my eyes only because it bothers me when a twelve-year-old has more motivation than I do.

  “And,” she says, “we know your grandmother. Well, you do. You know what she was like before she died.” She’s speaking in a teacher or lawyer voice, all prompty.

  “True. She had dementia,” I say. Torrey glares at me. “And before that, she was, you know, nice and all, but she was always a bit distant.”

  “Exactly!” Torrey says.

  “I don’t mean to make it sound like she wasn’t a good grandma,” I say. “She was. She was always very sweet with me.”

  “Torrey!” I hear from across the courtyard. It’s Vinnie’s inside voice. “Pizza.”

  She runs out of my place. And then she runs back, just to pop her head in the door. I know exactly what she’s going to say.

  “We’re not done with this. This isn’t over!”

  THIRTY-ONE

  I CAN SET MY clocks by Torrey.

  It’s dark and dinner’s over. And she’s knocking on my door. I hide the evidence of my shitty frozen dinner because I don’t want anyone to ever say anything they’ll regret, like You should come over and eat with us next time.

  “Okay,” she says, as she walks through the door. “Hear me out.”

  “Come on in.”

  “I’m just saying that it is incredibly likely that everyone has a soul mate.”

  “No,” I say. “No, it’s not. That is such bullshit.” I consider Jesse Ramirez.

  “Harold and Rosamond.”

  “That’s one example, not proof for everyone.”

  “Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t exist,” she says. She doesn’t sound depressed or suicidal as she says it. She kind of shrugs a little. She sounds scientific.

  “Go on.”

  “Well, my mom and dad were not soul mates.”

  “Oh.”

  I sit there in quiet. The only lighting in the room is the dim pendant lamp above the kitchen sink and the flickery glow of PBS’s News Hour.

  “So, you see, if we are to only seek out our true soul mate, and only have children with them, then there are a lot of people out there who are shirking responsibility.”

  “Shirking responsibility?” I laugh. “What are you, sixty?”

  “I’m well-educated,” she says. “And I have no friends yet. I have lots of time for vocab.”

  “I’m your friend,” I say, even though I didn’t mean to say it out loud.

  “And what about you?” she continues, undaunted.

  “What about me?”

  “Well, your grandmother wasn’t supposed to have your mother.”

  “I think you’re being presumptuous,” I say.

  “Listen—not only should your grandmother have been mating with Harold C. Carr, your mother doesn’t seem to have found her soul mate, either.”

  “Torrey, you’re worse than, like, a pope. Divorce is okay. Divorce does not render a child worthless.”

  “But do you think Rosamond regretted having your mother?”

  I’m supposed to reply very quickly here. I’m supposed to say: absolutely not! A few months after her mother’s death is not the time for a kid to be wondering if her mother regretted her. But there’s something about Torrey. Something that drives me to be as real as possible. I want to do the right thing.

  “Well, possibly only logistically,” I say.

  “Logistically?” she asks.

  “Like, a pesky child meant it’d be harder for her to walk away from my grandfather.”

  “I wonder…” she starts, but she looks down. It occurs to me that she’s prettier than I ever noticed. It’s an unassuming, sneaky pretty.

  “Your mother never regretted you. Neither did your father. That’s totally impossible. Your mom probably thought things like, ‘Wow, that marriage was terrible. The only good thing that came of it was my sweet baby girl.’”

  Torrey smiles and for some reason I feel triumphant. I try to remember a time when my life didn’t revolve around a twelve-year-old’s state of mind.

  “It’s not even what I’m worried about,” she says.

  “Don’t worry about any of this stuff, is what I’m trying to tell you. Nobody loves anyone in the exact same quantity and quality as that person loves them back. It’s impossible.”

  “That’s depressing,” she says.

  “Look at Vinnie, for example.”

  “What about my dad?” she asks. Her voice is slow and cautious.

  “I think he was still in love with your mom.”

  She looks surprised. “Are you in love with my dad?” she asks.

  I laugh. “No, Torrey.”

  “Well, is he in love with you?”

  “No, Torrey.”

  “So you’ve never, like, kissed him?” she asks. Her cheeks are red.

  “No, Torrey,” I lie, and in a split second I realize I’m not lying at all. “I’ve never kissed your dad.”

  I reach for the remote. Gwen Ifill is on and I love Gwen Ifill. I turn it off. The silence hurts. There are too many spaces in the room.

  “Torrey,” I say. “You know, I have no fucking clue what you know about sex and reproduction. I actually am wishing I never started this conversation.”

  “Go on,” she says in a fake bored tone.

  “Well, the probability that you end up being you is so small, minuscule. One in billions. And that’s just, like, that your DNA gets crafted a certain way. There are so many ways by which you either do or do not exist.”

  “Ugh.”

  She lies down on my couch. She puts her feet up with her shoes still on. I consider how Vinnie recently fucked me on that couch. I’m ready for the television to be back on again. It was only a minute ago when I realized that my happiness hinged upon this girl, and now
I’m so tired of everything, so tired of having her in the house, so tired of her being happy, so tired of me being happy, so tired of me being unhappy.

  “Rosamond and Harold might have been infertile. If my grandparents hadn’t been married with a child, they likely wouldn’t have moved from their apartment downtown into that house. And then Rosamond wouldn’t have even met Harold.”

  Torrey closes her eyes.

  “The only things we have going for us are our skin and our bones. Our ancestors, the shit we live in, the world—none of that is ours,” I say. I feel incensed. “It’s not something we can control and it’s not something we’ll ever benefit from. The only inheritance I have is me.”

  I close my eyes and lean back, propped halfway up on the bed. My head hits the wall behind me.

  “Sheila?” she asks. The room is dark. The sun must have set. How long have we been sitting there?

  “Hm?”

  “If the only things we have going for us are our skin and our bones, what happens to us when we die?”

  I pinch my eyes shut tight again, furrowing my brow and scrunching my nose. My eyes sting for a split second, but I squeeze them closed even more tightly. It passes.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t fucking care.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  IT’S PROBABLY FOR THE best that I’m alone when I finally realize I want to find Harold. I’ve read this letter three times already. This time, it gets to me.

  It’s dark and silent outside. There’s no oceanic traffic coming and going in waves, no birdsong, no Vinnie, no Torrey, no pedestrians on cell phones or the clacking whir of skateboard wheels. Without looking at the clock, I know it’s something like three in the morning.

  I’m naked. I’ve been naked for hours. It’s been hot for days, but I’m starting to shiver. My mind is racing and I can’t get away from any of it.

  In the bathroom, I scrape out a horrific clump of soap scum and filth-blonde hair from the bathtub drain, and then I fill the bath. I can’t remember the last time I took vitamins, so that’s probably why I’m losing so much hair. Am I even losing so much hair, or is it just that I haven’t cleaned the drain in months? I think: I should go to the kitchen and take a multivitamin. I think of a girl online who takes dozens of pills a day for her autoimmune disorders. I bet one of them is a multivitamin. I bet she eats lots of leafy greens. This is a familiar pattern, the passing recognition of solutions but the unwillingness to go through with them. And maybe an accumulation of slimy hair in a drain isn’t the problem at all. It’s all symptoms. The problem is me.

  I don’t get up. I don’t take a vitamin. I lie flat on the bathroom floor with my arms flailed out beside me while the tub fills. The way the water moves through the pipes shakes the whole floor. I feel it in my belly. The cold of the tile makes contact with my skin in so few places: my scalp, my shoulder blades, the top of the swell of my bottom, my elbows, the backs of my hands, my calves, my heels.

  I turn my face and press my cheek to the tile, too. I feel the movement of the water in my teeth.

  With my fingertips, I reach for a letter from the small stack by the sink and inch it toward me. I curl my body to the side, fetal.

  I think about my mother.

  I lived inside of her for forty weeks and three days. I didn’t breathe except for the oxygen she gave me straight from her blood. She grew a new organ just to feed me. I learned to move while curled toward her guts. I grew fingernails and hair before I ever left her body. I pissed and shit meconium tucked up inside her. While still in the womb, my own ovaries filled with six, maybe seven million eggs of my own—six, maybe seven million possible children of mine, my cells dividing and regenerating to the thrum of my mother’s heart. Everything about me was finished while we were still together.

  And where are we now? Nothing ever happened to make us like this, nothing beyond the relentless drain of being us, surviving my father, surviving my teenage years, surviving, surviving, surviving. I miss her, and it’s all wrapped up in the fear of even trying to be close to her again.

  My dear, sweet Rosamond.

  I must start with gratitude. Thank you, my darling Rosamond. Thank you for being in my life. Thank you for your visit. It was remarkable to sit across the table from you. Everything about today was remarkable. I felt blessed by a God I don’t believe in. It was as if the sunshine coming through my kitchen window was a sacrament. The way it fell upon the exquisite skin of your cheek, it was as if you were on fire, an angel. Your beauty makes a zealot out of this hardened, unbelieving soul. I must laugh, however, to think of the horrifically decapitated doll that brought you into my life.

  I could sit across from you and listen to you speak for days on end, watching the way your mouth moves, the way it forms vowels and the thing your lips, tongue, and teeth do together when you say “the.” It’s such a simple word, but my God if it is not my favorite word in all the languages of all men on this entire fragile Earth. I have never, ever had a friend like you, someone who can make me feel peace and happiness, but also get me thinking, get me talking, get me interested in the vastness of the world. My friends are dear to me, and I enjoy my time and cherish that we will always be incredibly loyal to each other, but I talk to none of them like I talk to you.

  My sweet Rosamond, when can I see you again? Let us go to the park again next Tuesday. Still, as wonderful and electric as it is to encounter you in public, I crave privacy with you. I hope that does not sound untoward. I do not intend to. I just want to be free to speak with you. Please make time for me as soon as possible. Until then, write me. Write whenever you can. Write everything you can. Write me a hundred letters a day. I will read each a hundred times or more.

  Sincerely,

  Your Harold

  There’s a line in the Book of Common Prayer, 1979 (written decades after Harold and Rosamond shared their letters) that I will never forget, and if I hear any combination of these words, my memory fills in the rest: At your command, all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home.

  It’s exactly everything I hate and love about religion. I absolutely do not believe that some sort of divinity sat there waving a finger. I always imagined a scene with a conductor’s baton. There’s a music stand, and God is standing at the podium, conducting. Would creation be in three-quarter time, a waltz?

  But, “this fragile earth, our island home.” I adore that. I imagine Earth on a little stem, like a volcanic island, a little broccoli planet. I imagine myself on a little stem. I am fragile. I am an island.

  And that is the part that makes me want to find Harold. He says my grandmother made a zealot of him, but I know he’s being hyperbolic. He wasn’t a religious man in a time when almost everyone was. I want to crawl inside his head.

  I fold up the letter and put it back in the pile. I’m shivering again. My hands feel disconnected from the rest of me. I touch my chest, letting each breast fill each hand, but I hardly feel a thing. I lift and push them until the skin scrunches up and wrinkles and I’m not young anymore. I climb in the water and it’s not hot enough, it’s never hot enough, but I feel the pressure as I lower all the way in, all the way under, eyes shut tight and water leaking into my ears. In this watery static, I marvel at the weight of the water, its solidity, its deadly comfort. My lungs begin to burn. Eyes open, mouth closed, cheeks puffed with the air I need to exchange. It’s loud, the splash and the gasp as I emerge. Out of the open window, once-slumbering birds take flight from the trees, their wings a drumline in the quiet night.

  I’m ready to find Harold.

  THIRTY-THREE

  “HONESTLY,” I SAY. “IF that squirrel fell off of the telephone wire, I’d just leave it.”

  “Just leave it?” Torrey says. She’s horrified. I’m sitting on my front step, and she’s sitting on theirs. If we both stretched out our legs and our toes, they might touch.

  “Yeah. I can just
imagine its mangled body. I’d probably have to touch it or something to clean it up.”

  “God, you are so selfish,” she says, plucking the green leaves off some tall, stalky weed. I don’t know the name of it, but Vinnie would. Vinnie would know the name of it but still not pull it.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I mean, yes, I’m selfish, but I don’t think that’s what’s at work here.”

  Torrey looks up at me. She squints with her whole face and blocks the sun with her hand.

  “You know what?” she says. “You make me feel so much better sometimes.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Like, however weird I’m feeling, I know you’re weirder.”

  “My point is, I think I’m helping along the social order,” I say. “I’m stepping into certain roles and stepping out of certain other roles.”

  “Or copping out,” she says.

  “Well, take you, for example.”

  “What about me?”

  “If a squirrel fell off a wire, you would absolutely race to it.” Torrey laughs.

  “Yes, you would, you’d race through traffic if necessary. I say that with certainty. You’d even pick it up. You wouldn’t give a shit about getting blood and squirrel guts on your shirt. You wouldn’t even give a shit if it was almost in two pieces, held together by stringy squirrel tendons. You’d gladly contract rabies for its sake.”

  “You’re gross.”

  “But I’m right,” I say. “You see? I can’t go near the squirrel. I need to make room for the people like you who don’t know what they’re capable of. Plus, I would rather it die than have to sift through tiny, freakish, furry squirrel guts.”

  Torrey doesn’t say anything for a while. A car slows on the street, windows open, the bass in the speakers shaking all the nuts and bolts of the vehicle, more rattle than music. I watch Torrey as it dopplers away. She’s looking out toward the street, beyond the bushes and the rusted gate, her eyes a bit darty. I wonder if she’s looking for squirrels. I wonder if she knows I’m right, that she’d run to a wounded animal. A wounded anything.

  “But, these letters,” she says.