How to Set Yourself on Fire

by Julia Dixon Evans

  “How did you know her name?” I ask.

  “Come inside,” he says. “We should sit down and talk.”

  “No,” I say. My voice is low and I’m a little afraid of it. “Tell me. How did you know her name?”

  I try to remind myself not to frighten this stranger who, standing across from me, forms some sort of ancestral mirror of two tormented soul mates. We’re descended from the same sad souls. Sad for the same reasons. I want to touch him, I want to reach up and put my hand on the side of his face, and it takes a moment before I realize that I am, I’m touching him. My hand is on his face.

  He puts his hand on top of mine.

  “I know her name,” he says. “Because I have some of her letters.”

  “Holy shit,” Torrey says.

  “I’m sorry I don’t have them on me,” Simon says. “They’ve been packed up.”

  I’m mostly incapable of speaking, but I manage to say “Oh.”

  “Don’t worry,” he says, and my hand is still on his face. His hand is still on top of mine. I’m suddenly really aware of this, but I’m not sure how to take my hand away.

  He squeezes my hand a little and that’s it, that’s the cue. I lower my hand swiftly. It hits my dress with a whoosh.

  “I know where they are in storage,” he says.

  “Oh.”

  “Come back,” he says, and there’s a plea in his eyes. I don’t understand why, because I probably look desperate enough for the lot of us.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Tomorrow,” he says.

  “Tomorrow,” I say.

  “Or even tonight. I can go get them now?” he says. Maybe he’s trying not to act too eager.

  “Yeah,” Torrey interrupts. “Go get them now.”

  He laughs, Simon, and I wonder if there’s the same sort of mania in his house as in mine.

  FORTY-NINE

  IF ANYONE HAD TOLD me fifteen years ago that today I’d be sitting on the trunk of my car, age thirty-five, wearing a hand-me-down dress and eating Twizzlers with somebody else’s kid in the late afternoon sunlight, I would have laughed. I never imagined myself getting less cool as I aged.

  “He likes you,” Torrey says. “My dad.”

  “Your dad likes everyone,” I say.

  “No, I mean,” she trails off. “Ugh. This would be so much easier if you weren’t so impossible to talk to.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You’re not sorry,” she says. “You’re clueless.”

  “Probably,” I say, bringing my knees to my chest. “But I really am sorry.”

  She doesn’t answer. She jumps down and picks up fallen eucalyptus leaves, shaping them into the letters in her name.

  “I like your dad, too,” I say. I wish I sounded more sincere because, it occurs to me, I am sincere.

  “And you don’t like everyone,” she says.

  “Correct.”

  “But I mean,” she begins, and she rustles up all the eucalyptus leaves into a scattered mess on the sidewalk: fallen leaves in a city without a fall. “He likes you.”

  I take a big breath.

  “Vinnie is the best human being around,” I say. “You don’t even know how lucky you are to have him as your dad.”

  Torrey laughs. “You sound like you’re letting me down gently.”

  I laugh a little. “What I’m trying to say is that Vinnie is really, really nurturing. If I were to venture a guess, I’d say he sees me as someone in need.”

  I smile when I realize that I’m not at all lying. Then I realize I basically said that Vinnie fathers me and my smile drops.

  “Well, you’re probably right. But I’m still saying he likes you.”

  “And yeah, you’re probably right too,” I say, on the edge of being too tired of this entire thing, on the edge of feasting on it all.

  “So what are you going to do about it?” she asks.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Torrey, what do you want me to do?” I say, frustrated.

  “I don’t know!” she says, all defensive.

  “I don’t think you’d like it.”

  “Don’t not go for my dad just because I wouldn’t like it,” she says. She kicks the back tire of my car. “Ugh.”

  “There are so many reasons why your dad isn’t going to go for me and why I’m not going to go for him, and only one of them is that you wouldn’t like it.”

  She climbs back on the trunk next to me.

  “I do like your dad,” I say, my voice this quiet, alien thing. “I do. He’s the best man I know.”

  “Yeah.”

  We’re quiet for a while.

  “Do you like this guy better?” she asks.

  “What?”

  “Simon.”

  “Harold’s Simon?” I laugh.

  “Well, he’s really handsome,” she says.

  “Oh, do you have a crush on him?”

  “No! He’s like, middle aged, like you.”

  “Fuck you,” I say, flicking her knee with a Twizzler.

  I try to think about what she’s saying. Simon is an attractive man. Simon comes to me with this sort of built-in ancestral soul mate business that I’m not entirely sure I can wrap my brain around. Simon carries with him the agony and love that Rosamond and Harold inadvertently bequeathed to us both.

  “It feels like incest,” I say, and I shrug but it’s a bit pantomimed.

  “Yeah,” Torrey says.

  “Incest,” I say again.

  I look over to Torrey, and she looks toward me, and it’s hard to stop ourselves. We’re cracking up. I laugh so hard that my stomach hurts, my cheeks hurt, my jaw hurts. None of this changes anything important, but in this moment I am so free. My heart sings.

  “It’s almost time to go,” I say. “Simon will be back from his storage unit any minute.”

  “Do you think he’ll let us take them home?” she asks, her words muffled, her mouth full with Twizzler. “Rosamond’s letters?”

  “That’s a good question.” I wouldn’t.

  “You wouldn’t,” she says.

  “Come on. We can wait on his front steps.”

  “That’s awkward. You have no shame,” she says.

  “I know.”

  Moments later, we’re back at Harold’s old house. Not his house behind Rosamond’s, but his new house, where Simon lives. It wasn’t that hard for us to find it, and I wonder if Rosamond ever looked. The painful truth of their tragic romance is that he only moved a few miles away. The new tenants of the house behind Rosamond’s knew exactly where he moved to. If it were me, if I were Rosamond, would I be content with his final letter, his goodbye? Or would I ask around? Would I try to find him?

  Not even all that long ago, my answer would have been such a clear yes. I’ve spent weeks in the car watching Jesse Ramirez. Isn’t that sort of obsessive thing genetic?

  “I don’t think he’s back yet,” Torrey says.

  “Let’s go in the backyard,” I say.

  “Sheila!”

  “Come on,” I say. “I want to see something.”

  “This isn’t the house, remember?”

  “I know. I still want to see something,” I say, walking between the fence and the side of the house.

  “You’re looking for sunflowers, aren’t you?”

  I spin around. Torrey is right behind me and we both flinch a little.

  “No,” I say. She stares. “Yes.”

  “Sheila,” she says, and her voice is quiet and a little insistent. She grabs my elbow.

  “What?” I say, feeling attacked. I don’t like feeling attacked. I don’t like feeling attacked by a twelve-year-old. I don’t like feeling stupid.

  “Sheila, I get it.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I get it enough. But I think you should wait and ask Simon to show you or something.”

  It’s true. I can find out another day if Harold planted some sort of weird shrine to a sixty-years-gone ma
ybe-fling here. And I already know. Maybe not in his old age, and maybe not right away, the year he moved in, the year he left Rosamond. Maybe he hated sunflowers for a little while. But he planted sunflowers in his garden at some point. Certainly.

  “Or I could just look right now.”

  “Ugh, don’t,” she says.

  She’s still holding my elbow, and I like the way it feels. I like someone needing to touch me. I don’t know if she’s trying to protect me in some really saintly way or if she’s just not eager to watch me make a fool of myself. It doesn’t matter.

  “Just be friends with Simon.”

  “Friends?”

  “Friends. Like with me. Like with Vinnie.”

  “I don’t need any friends.”

  “Sheila,” she says. “Everyone needs friends. Just don’t sabotage this from the start.”

  “I’m not going to sabotage it. I’m going in the backyard. There’s a world of difference.”

  “When you put it that way, sure. But what if that guy comes home and thinks you’re a weirdo.”

  “I am a weirdo,” I say.

  “I mean, what if it makes him not want to talk to us because you’re so weird?”

  Torrey is so wise. I’ve known this all along. I’m not immature enough to ignore that I could ruin my chance at seeing my grandmother’s letters, at seeing the things she wrote to Harold. But there’s something about my volatile relationship to this shoebox that just sends everything to shit.

  “Fine,” I say. “Fine.”

  We walk back to the front porch and sit down. I notice a small rip forming at the seam in the skirt, between some of the pleats. The tear only opens up to more of the pleat, but it makes me panic nonetheless. This dress. I don’t want it to tear. I pull at the pleat, smoothing it out.

  “I don’t want to put up a wall,” I say. “I guess I didn’t know I didn’t want that.”

  “You’re doing fine, Sheila,” she says, and smiles up at me.

  “You know what?” I say, patting her knee. “You’re doing fine, too.”

  We look at each other and there’s so much I could say to her.

  The front door opens. “You guys ready?” Simon says.

  “You’ve been home the whole time?” Torrey asks.

  He doesn’t answer, and I’m pleased about this. I don’t want him to say anything, because knowing Torrey, she would tell him something about the conversation we had in the side yard. She’d ask him if he heard it. If he said he had heard, maybe I’d lose control a little. If he said he hadn’t, I’d assume he was lying. And maybe I’d lose control anyway.

  “Come on in,” he says, fanning out his arm and pushing his back against the door, a half-smile on his face. “We’ve got some reading to do.”

  FIFTY

  “I HAVE TO CONFESS,” Simon says. “I haven’t really read all of the letters.”

  I quickly look over at him then and try to gauge what he feels. How could he own these letters for a whole year since his uncle passed away and not read them? How could he not spread them on his bed every night? How could he not wake up on the floor in old, inherited clothing, cheek pressed against the floorboards, letters spread around him like shed skin? How could he still be okay?

  “Why not?” I ask.

  “Well, I mean, most of them are pretty similar. And I don’t really think I have them all.”

  I feel it in my gut, the disappointment, like a hope I didn’t even know I was allowed to have has been crushed.

  “How many do you have?” I ask carefully. I’m afraid. I suddenly don’t want to be here, in the place Harold lived with a broken heart, the second of the two houses in which Harold lived with his broken heart. I want to be home. I want to smell Vinnie’s cigarette smoke from outside, I want to hear the noise of his fucking phone, fucking Tetris. I want to surround myself with Harold’s letters and go back to just imagining what’s on the other side of them.

  I want the letters to never have happened to me in the first place. I want Harold and Rosamond completely purged from my life. I think of my mother, and how I once thought that’s what she wanted all along: a normal mother herself, with a normal marriage, but it’s more than that. I think it’s something we share now, whether it be a burden or a treasure. Rosamond didn’t die with sixty years of heartbreak on her frail shoulders alone.

  “Hm. Quite a few, actually. Like a couple dozen, I guess?” Simon says. “Here. Count them.”

  They’re still in the envelopes, pinched together with a massive black binder clip. It’s an optical illusion, I’m aware of this, but the stack looks tiny compared to the three inches of black steel.

  I breathe in, the smell of old paper, the smell of the house, something woodsy, dusty, a little bit like an open canister of ground coffee, and I wonder if this is a Simon smell, or if this is how Harold’s house has always smelled.

  “You haven’t read them all?” I ask.

  “Sheila.” Torrey whispers through her teeth. “Can we just read them already?”

  “Well,” Simon says. “I’ve read these ones.”

  “What makes you think there are more?”

  “Well, there was one empty envelope, but also there were huge gaps in time and, I don’t even know—” he trails off.

  “No lines like, ‘Hey, Harold, sorry I haven’t written in a while’?” I offer.

  “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I guess that’s it.”

  “You’re probably right. I have hundreds,” I say, nodding toward the shoebox under my arm. The shoebox I’m making no gesture to offer. I’m aware of this in a painfully cold way. I’m going to have to take baby steps.

  “Go on, then,” he says. “Have a seat. Read them.”

  “But,” I say. I don’t finish.

  “Sheila wants to know if she can bring them home.”

  “My uncle was really special to me,” he says and he takes a deep breath. “Though I do think they belong to you more than they belong to me. I just think we should be careful with these, treat them as relics, I guess?”

  “She wants to line them all up in order, like the ones she has,” Torrey says. I didn’t know this until she said it out loud. I didn’t know that this was what was unsettling me. It doesn’t help, though, because now I’m unsettled by the fact that he is not going to allow this.

  “Let’s make copies,” he says, and he’s brilliant, because that has never occurred to me. “I can get you copies made.”

  “Okay,” I say, grinning. “That will do.”

  “Now,” he says. “Read.”

  It hasn’t been long since I’ve known Harold and Rosamond. Since they’ve been somewhere between real and fictional characters to me. I haven’t known about them for long. But this moment feels so important, like the kind of moment someone awaits their entire life. This doesn’t feel like it’s supposed to feel. I’m scared. I feel like I’ve put too much into this and I just want to go home.

  “I just want to go home.”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” Torrey says. Simon looks between us, back and forth a few times.

  “It’s okay,” he says. “I understand. But they’re really nice letters. She seems very kind.”

  That word does it. It snaps me out of it. Because I was expecting “tortured.” I was expecting “adulterous.” I was expecting, at the very best, “star-crossed.” “Kind” doesn’t seem to fit the places Harold’s letters went to as the time progressed.

  I slip open an envelope. The letter is tiny, the paper thin. I look at the date and it’s toward the end.

  Dear Harold,

  It’s so nice of you to write so much. I’m always so happy to hear from you. It’s nice to have a friend. It’s nice to be friends with a neighbor, especially in this day and age. You never know when you could need something.

  Today we went to the art museum. It was a lovely outing, even though Ellen does not have the same sort of patience for the exhibits as my husband and I do. Even I sometimes feel like I do not have enough patienc
e for it, but I find myself persevering for decency’s sake. Do you ever go to any museums? Which is your favorite?

  I wish I could write to you as much as you can to me. I’d love to hear more from you about your work or your family if you have time.

  Sincerely,

  Your neighbor,

  Rosamond Baker

  And just like that, the bubble is burst. There’s no date but it’s in the middle of the small stack. If this stack is in order still, Harold was regularly professing his love and their shared chemistry, their shared agony in his letters. Rosamond acted like they were new penpals. He thanked her profoundly for replies like that?

  “Sheila.” It’s Torrey, and her voice is full of concern and curiosity. “Is it bad?”

  I look up, and I try to hide whatever is written all over my face. I try to hide what I can barely name as my own heartache. Harold’s agony, which I’ve swallowed all along as my own, must have been so much more than I could imagine, if he only ever received letters like this.

  I probably should offer it to Torrey to read, but I don’t. I fold up the letter and put it back in the envelope.

  “Want to go get copies now?” Simon asks.

  “No thanks,” I say.

  “Oh,” he says, sounding confused. “I can always just bring them by another time?”

  I just don’t want to be mean. I don’t want to say anything that would hurt Torrey, or even Simon, but I just need to be away, I need to take flight and I need to bury myself under the floorboards, both at the same time. I use everything I have to keep myself together.

  “It’s okay. I don’t need copies,” I say.

  “What?” Torrey says. “No.”

  “Torrey,” I say, trying to sound steady. “I don’t want to read any more.”

  “Well, I do,” she says. “Let’s go get copies, Simon.”

  “You know what?” Simon says, and he sounds like a teacher, a teacher on that constant tightrope between patience and frustration, and I don’t blame him. “Just take them.”

  “Really?” Torrey asks, gathering up the bundle.

  “Yeah,” he says. “You know, as soon as I said it out loud, I felt shitty anyway. She’s your grandmother. They’re yours.”

  “Great,” Torrey says. “I mean, she wasn’t my grandma, she was Sheila’s, but I’m kind of Sheila’s family anyway.” She’s talking really fast, too loud, too much. “I’ll make copies and get them back to you. And maybe you can read Harold’s letters to Rosamond too, one day.”