How to Set Yourself on Fire

by Julia Dixon Evans

  “When someone leaves you,” I say, and I’m staring at a spot on the metal bed frame. My vision starts to blur and the silver spot becomes the whole room and I can feel my eyes widen but I’m powerless to stop this staring. “Even when you deserve it, it’s hard to, I dunno. Heal.”

  “People heal all the time, Sheila.”

  “But,” I continue, ignoring him, “when you don’t deserve it, but they leave anyway?”

  “Sheila,” Vinnie says, his face in his hands. “I know.”

  I don’t keep going because I don’t have the words for it. I close my eyes but it’s still blurry silver everywhere, like the inside of my eyelids are molten steel.

  “Do you remember,” he suddenly asks. “When Torrey’s mom died?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Well, remember, also, how I wasn’t gonna go? To the funeral? And you talked me into it?”

  I look down. I close my eyes. “Yeah.”

  “I’m a good father, you hear me?”

  “Vinnie,” I say, my eyes open. “You are. You’re the best. You’re the best man.”

  “And I still needed someone to talk me into showing up.”

  He touches my index fingertip, presses down on the nail. It’s a weird kind of intimacy, like holding my hand would’ve seemed dumb right now, not enough.

  “What if,” he says, “this whole time, your dad hasn’t had a friend like I had in you? Telling him to show up?”

  I try to bring my other hand up to my face. I want to squeeze the bridge of my nose or something but the bandage is in the way. Vinnie is running his fingertip across the edge of my nail and I don’t want him to stop.

  “Maybe he thinks he’s not welcome,” Vinnie says.

  I don’t say anything because I don’t really know if he’d be welcome.

  “You could try, too. Instead. That’s what I’m trying to say.”

  I look up.

  “In case he doesn’t have a crazy neighbor showing him how to be a better man.”

  He squeezes my fingertip again, his thumb on my nail, and I love the feel of it, the hurt, the way it’s already normal for him to touch me like this.

  “You could try,” he says again.

  It’s so quiet between us. Even the nurses on the other side of the curtain, even the other patients, they’re all hushed. All listening, all waiting.

  “Okay,” I whisper.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  I’M IN MY MOTHER’S house, my old home, sitting on our old couch. I turn the TV to PBS and it’s Huell Howser and he is so excited about everything about San Diego. I put it on mute.

  The shoebox must have sat in a puddle of water from the firefighters. Torrey saved it, but the box and the bottom layer of letters got really soggy. In the hospital, she told me she had the wet letters spread out in their warm kitchen, but the box fell apart when she picked it up. The dry letters are in one of those disposable Tupperware containers, resting on my knees. The rest are with Torrey.

  I open the container and see the letters for the first time since that night. I wait to feel something, some sort of spark, but nothing happens. I don’t care. I don’t care that it’s been weeks since I’ve seen these letters. I don’t care that many of the letters from Rosamond to Harold burned to scraps in the fire. I don’t care that the remaining letters are scattered all over town. Decades and decades ago, when these letters were born, when a man sat at his kitchen table trying to comprehend whether what he felt was wonderful or wretched—that was the biggest moment for these letters. That’s when they shone, not now, not when they’re just little exhibits.

  That’s the moment to worship, to light candles to, to light the world on fire for.

  The one on top is the final letter. It’s the one I’ve read the most. The one that takes the edge off my disappointment. That fills my grandmother with mystery again. It’s the one that most makes me want to see the Rosamond letter he’s replying to.

  My dearest Rosamond, my dearest love,

  I suppose you are right: It is unusual for you to send me letters without receiving a reply. Normally it works the other way around, and I’m the one who sends and sends again without waiting. But I have been withdrawn lately. I have been busy, you see. And I have been incredibly, incredibly sad.

  I am leaving.

  I need you out of my life. You need me out of your life. It’s simple, really.

  What we have, what we are, can never be decent. It can never be as pure as our love is. I do not wish that for us. You deserve a life much better than this. I deserve better than this.

  When you came into my life, my world lit up in such a way that, while brilliant, meant nothing will ever be so bright again. The rest of my life will be a dim understudy to the life I knew with you.

  But, in the last few months, the last year, really, I realized that I was becoming more and more unhappy. I witnessed you becoming more and more trapped in your horrendous life, but less and less comforted by me.

  I’ve felt angry about this, betrayed. I have always felt like it’s my right to be able to comfort you or bring you joy. Examining that makes me feel ill. Selfish. I shouldn’t feel like I have any right to anything of yours, even if it’s something as indefinable as being the one to make you happy. It all makes me feel unhinged. You make me feel unhinged, ready to fall from the rafters. It is killing me to feel like this.

  I am leaving. In fact, I have already left.

  As soon as I finish writing this letter, I will fasten up my bags, load the boxes onto the truck, put the letter through your fence, and drive away. You will never hear from me again. You will never see me again.

  Sincerely Yours, Always and Forever.

  Forever.

  Harold C. Carr

  I fold it up and put it back in the container. At first, when I moved back in with my mother, I kept the letters hidden from her, because it just seemed like too much for her to take. Her daughter, the deadbeat, burns down her own house, moves back home, and reveals an elaborate ruse about burying letters with a dead woman. It’s too much. It wasn’t even that I was ashamed of having lied, or ashamed of keeping up the lie. It’s just that I didn’t want my mother to have to deal with it.

  But now I set the container down on the side table, my mother’s side table, in my mother’s living room, and I don’t even bother putting the lid back on.

  I walk toward the mantel. It seems to have even more ridiculous stuff on it now than the last time I was here. From behind a family of small angel statues, I pick up the photograph of my mother as a child and her parents, my grandparents. I try to place the date based on my mother’s age, but I can’t even begin to guess how old she is. Four, maybe five? Rosamond looks so sad and alone, despite being surrounded by her happy family. I wonder, is this after she met Harold, but before he left her? Or after everything? Is she regretting never telling him how much she cared?

  When my grandfather died a decade ago, if I had been Rosamond, I think I’d’ve rushed to see Harold. I wonder if she found him again. I wonder if when he died last year, she knew. I want that for her. I want her to have known.

  What became of the letters Harold did not give to Simon? Maybe Harold saved some, the good ones, the illicit ones. Maybe he had already burned them. Maybe he took them to his grave. I can picture Harold being buried with them. And I can also picture him burning them to the ground, an angry, unfulfilled man, incapable of ever loving like this again.

  I set the photograph down and run my fingers over the scarring on my left forearm. It’s rugged, almost bumpy. I try to pick at it with my nails, but it’s just skin, tougher than ever. The man on the TV is jumping down from a rock onto the sand, near a pier. He’s shouting something into the microphone. I think of the coast, the beach, loud and windy, and I realize I can’t remember the last time I drove the fifteen minutes to the ocean. My father hated the beach: the crowds, the heat, the sunscreen, the danger. We rarely went when I was a child. I don’t have the ocean in my bones like other people ra
ised in this town. The people who raise us, not the places, lay out our futures for us, piece by piece.

  There are no pictures of my father in this house. I wonder, before he left, did he tell my mother? Or did she find out later, like Rosamond did, that he had left her behind. By the time you get this, Harold wrote. By the time you discover that I’m gone, I’ll be gone. My mother had warning: years of unhappiness, of anger and disconnect. Rosamond had warning: increasingly insane letters, his brief (and probably exaggerated) withdrawal toward the end, the fragility of the thing holding them together in the first place.

  But I had nothing. My father left me without warning, without notice, without deserving it. All I had was false hope, because he had left one time before, and then came back.

  “What are you doing?” my mother asks. Her voice is calm but I still flinch.

  “Looking at this picture,” I say. I stop scratching at my arm and pick up the photograph again. “Of you and Grandma and Grandpa.”

  She takes it from me, and she smells good when she’s so close. Something orange and warm, something like home.

  “Ah, I remember that day.”

  “No you don’t,” I say with a laugh.

  “Of course I do! What makes you say that?” she says, one hand on her hip.

  “It’s like sixty years old. You’ve possessed this picture for sixty years. It’s so much more scientifically plausible that you remember the picture.”

  “For such a know-it-all, I don’t understand why you’re not some kind of doctor,” she says.

  “Grandma is so sad,” I say, ignoring her thinly veiled insult. She needs to come to terms with the reality that her daughter is a temp.

  “Mmm,” my mother says. “She does look a bit sad, doesn’t she?”

  I sit down, but my mother stays there at the mantel, staring at the picture.

  “She was always like that, you know,” she says.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “I never thought of her as sad, though. Just quiet.”

  “Do you think she’s sad now?”

  “Now?” she asks.

  “After the letters.” I try not to glance toward the box on the table. I suddenly wish I’d been more careful. I suddenly wish I had cared about lying to her. Right now, more than anything else, I don’t want my mother to flip out. I don’t want her to say something that cuts me, that cuts us.

  “Honey, I’ve known about the letters since I was a teenager.”

  “That’s what I mean. And you didn’t think she was sad.”

  “Well, Sheila,” she says, and breathes in and out, sharply. She puts the picture down, turns toward me, and folds her arms a bit. It’s almost a hostile stance. Somewhere between hostile and at ease, and I feel like a soldier, in a battle, on a worn-down couch in my worn-down childhood living room, all our unhappy ghosts within arm’s reach. “I never thought those letters were sad.”

  I want to laugh a little, because the letters are tragically sad, but I don’t. Maybe she’s right.

  “Rosamond’s letters back to Harold were almost anonymous. She never wrote the way Harold wrote.”

  “I know,” my mother says. I glance up quickly. “Torrey told me about Simon.”

  “Well, so don’t you think it’s sad?”

  She rolls her head on her neck, back and forth in half moon shapes, like a ballerina warming up. She’s so graceful. And then her lips purse, and she looks so old all of a sudden.

  “Have you ever had a love like Harold’s?” she asks, except it’s not a question. And I think, maybe it’s just as bad when you do get that warning when someone leaves. I think maybe, if my dad is out there, and he dies, it’ll be really, really hard on my mother, as hard as the day he left. I don’t understand it, but something tells me it’s true.

  I think of what Vinnie said in the hospital, about how my father is out there somewhere, not just nowhere, and he doesn’t know his daughter was hurt in a fire, he doesn’t even know about the fire. I think of all the fires he’s never known about, and all the fires I’ve never known about. I think about how maybe there’s another fire that he walked into, willingly, to save someone. How many other burning places will it take for us to feel each other?

  “Mom?” I say, and I look at her, and she is right here, she’s always been right here.

  “What?”

  “Thanks for letting me stay.”

  “Oh, honey. Of course. You can live here as long as you need. It’ll be just like the good old days.”

  “I don’t know if I want it to be like the good old days,” I say. “Do you?”

  My mother looks at her feet, and then she looks at the mantel, and then she looks at me. “I’ll take you however I can get you, Sheila,” she says. “Now or then.”

  FIFTY-SIX

  IT’S A MONDAY, THE best day to come here. Nobody in the church biz works on a Monday.

  I pick the lock, like I’ve done many times before, with and without permission, and open the back door to St. Peter’s. It’s cold in here, despite being sunny and warm outside. The cold nights linger in an old building like this.

  “My dad will freak if he finds out I’m breaking into a church,” Torrey says.

  “Then don’t tell him,” I say.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be a grown-up? Setting a good example?”

  “It’s not like you’re in a gang or something. We’re sitting in a church. You’re with an adult. You’re totally safe. I’d probably kill anyone who tried to kidnap you.”

  “No, you wouldn’t.”

  “It depends, I guess,” I say. It really does. “And you’re probably right. Let’s tell Vinnie what we’re up to.”

  I dial his number.

  “Sheila! Don’t really call him.”

  “Vinnie?” I say. “No, she’s fine! We’re fine. Listen, I just wanted to tell you we’re at St. Peter’s? Yeah, the church. Where I used to work. Uh huh. I totally worked at a church. Well, anyway. Torrey thought it was weird, so she wanted to be responsible and let you know we were somewhere unexpected.”

  Torrey rolls her eyes. She walks away from me and lets her fingertips trail across the edges of the pews as she moves toward the altar. She lifts her arm a little between each pew, like her fingers are bouncing from point to point.

  “I’m fine, Vinnie,” I say. “I’m not tired at all. No, I’m not on any medicine. Yes, I drove here. Yes. God. Okay. What time do you eat? I haven’t ever eaten dinner with you guys before, do you realize that? Won’t it be weird? Yeah. You’re right, I am weird. So is your daughter.”

  “I heard that,” Torrey says. She’s behind the altar now. I hang up without saying goodbye.

  I don’t really feel like being at the altar. I sit in the back pew, near the aisle.

  “I wish I could have taken you to the church I actually used to go to,” I say. “Back when I…”

  “Back when you believed this shit?”

  “Yes.”

  All but alone in a church, it’s hard to remember I don’t believe in it.

  “My former church is way bigger. It’s older, too.”

  “This place already seems really old. Let’s go to your church, then,” she says.

  “I only know how to break into this church,” I say.

  Torrey leans back against the altar, and then bends her elbows and hoists herself up onto it. She lets her legs swing back and forth slightly, feet dangling, an arrhythmic thump-thump, thump-thump as her heels lightly bump against the table.

  “Do you ever think this would be different if we met when things in our lives weren’t as messed up?” she says.

  “Different how?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think things are really messed up?”

  “A bit messed up,” she says. “A bit crazy.”

  I walk toward her and sit down on the raised step of the altar, leaning my back against it. Her feet hang inches from my arm, close enough that I feel her proximity like static electricity.
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  “I don’t think I’d treat you any differently, regardless,” I say.

  “But we never would have met,” she says.

  Her shoelace is untied. I hold up a fingertip, and each time her foot swings forward, I swipe at the dangling shoelace.

  “That’s pretty fatalistic.”

  “Even if my mom had still died, I don’t know if we would have talked as much if you didn’t have those letters.”

  “Maybe,” I say. “Maybe not. I don’t know why I even talked to you about the letters, to be honest. It’s not something I’d normally do. I’ve lived in that house for years without really talking to Vinnie, and just all of a sudden, one day, we talked.”

  “It wasn’t all of a sudden. It was because of the letters. Don’t you think?”

  “That’s pretty optimistic.”

  “First I’m fatalistic, now I’m optimistic?”

  “So you’re saying, if my grandmother never told me about those letters—which she only did a few hours before she died—then you and I wouldn’t even be friends?”

  “Basically,” she says.

  “Or if Harold had never fallen for Rosamond?”

  “I can’t tell if you’re mocking me.”

  “Or if my mom hadn’t throw her doll over the back fence sixty-odd years ago?”

  “Exactly.”

  She hops down and sits next to me, graceful in spite of her lanky, preteen limbs.

  I want to tell her that I think we’d have been friends anyway, that something between us, this weird age-defying understanding and peace between us, would have figured out a way. I want to tell her that I’m not glad her mom died and she had to move out here, but I am glad I know her.

  The church smells stale and old, dust warmed over. I think I believe in something good.

  “I feel like I should tell you about how I’m kind of at a rock bottom right now, like, this whole time you’ve known me,” I say.