Beyond the wall, I dropped onto the beach, my momentum growing sluggish against the wind as I chased after her in my heavy moon boots.
Across the creek was a world so different from the one we lived in. There homes were the size of city blocks, and fancy inns rose above manicured walkways to claim ownership of the frost-covered sand. Passing the mansions, I could no longer concentrate on my stride, and I slowed, peering into their lit windows and thinking about how my father admired those kinds of master homes, always claiming that with a little more money our lives would be all ease.
To my shock, there at Quayside, my mother veered off the strand and down a pebbled path, while I made ground on her. Close enough to track her course, I followed her up to a paved drive, to the walkway of a house whose colossal door she opened and entered as casually as if it were her own.
I stopped in my tracks, taking in the house my mother had entered. It was grand and white, erected in the time of whalers, when women walked its watch in petticoats and squinted out over the ocean for a glimpse of familiar ships coming home. As I stood shivering in the dark, a room on the second floor of the three-story house brightened. From my vantage point, I saw a leather sofa next to a large desk covered in papers. Next to the desk was a huge telescope, even more remarkable than the one in Mr. Barnet’s science lab, and it pointed out toward the blue. I had trouble believing that my mother could know someone there, yet there was a throb in my belly all the same.
Mom came into view, and I shook my head in disbelief as she shed her white ski parka and hung it on the telescope, as if it were a coat hook. I thought of Christa McAuliffe, her smiling face in the autographed picture, and how my mother had cried and cried when she drove us home from school only hours ago.
In the illuminated window, a slim man with silver hair approached my mother. His robe was the same stark white as her parka, white like the telescope and the clapboards of the house, white like the drifts of snow that collected along the breakwater.
He put his arms around her.
I held my breath.
What I wanted then, what I prayed for, was that my mother would turn toward the window, somehow seeing me there in the impending dark, and that my presence would stop her from doing what would happen next. But in the orange light of the room, she unfastened the man’s robe and slipped it from his shoulders. He stood before her naked, something I forever wish I had not seen. Then, she pushed him onto the desk and climbed on top of him with her green boots and jeans still on, while pulling her turtleneck over her head.
“Mom, no!” I shouted.
Gulls shrieked back from breakwater, and anger percolated from where my worry and sadness had been.
Part of me wanted to run inside, to catch her red-handed and say simply, “Come home.” And another part of me, the biggest part, wished I had never crossed the breaker to discover her.
Full of adrenaline, I raced home, slipping as I ascended the cold rock jetty, and charged toward the creek. Rushing through the rising tides of the stream, I was soaked waist high. Undone by what I had witnessed, I wished those waters could quell the fire in my heart, but it bloomed into an inferno no ocean would ever halt.
Back in the empty living room of our tiny ranch on Willard Street, I peeled off my wet Levis and wriggled into a dry pair from a laundry basket left on the couch. From the television blaring into the empty room, President Reagan assured a grieving nation that the Teacher in Space Project would persist.
“We’ll continue our quest in space,” he said. “There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers and women in space. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue.”
On the deck off the back of our house, out beyond the chatter of the media’s questions to a deflated-looking President Reagan, I could see the silhouettes of Rex, Uncle G, and my father, who held Kara’s hand. The men passed a joint between them, and when I opened the door, I was surprised to find that the discussion was not about my mother’s departure, but NASA’s inability to determine the cause of the explosion.
My father spoke in a grave tone. “By now, there’s not a prayer that anyone on that crew survived. My platoon leader once told us that the brain could only last four minutes without air before the functions broke down. By six minutes it’s game over. They’re gone.”
Rex shook his head, his arms folded across his chest. Despite the chill he wore no coat. “We won’t hear anything until the Coast Guard finds the debris.”
From where they stood, I could hear foghorns in the distance.
Uncle G dropped the butt on the deck and snuffed it out with the toe of his boot. “NASA’s going to keep this bullshit ‘no comment’ policy when it comes to the astronauts. They might know the whole story now, all those radios and devices on that rocket, but they aren’t gonna tell the public shit until they’re good and ready. And I promise you this: none of it will be their fault.”
“Dad,” I interrupted, “I’m going to work on my comet project with my lab partners. Can I be back by ten?” I wanted to ask him about my mother, if he knew when she would return, but I couldn’t find the words.
“Great,” Dad mumbled, staring as far off as the Milky Way. He pulled the winter cap Mom had knit him for Christmas over his ears. “Walk your sister to the skate pond when you go and I’ll pick her up when she’s ready.”
Kara and I kicked a stone between us as we walked through the neighborhood. Tasseled with blue and pink pompoms, her skates were slung over her shoulder. “I thought your project was done,” she said. “Didn’t you bring it to school already?”
We both watched our feet.
“This is a different thing,” I lied. “Group work. Individual projects were handed in.”
Kara stopped dead in her tracks and set her skates on the ground. Her face was the carbon copy of our mother’s. Even her expression, the way she pressed her lips together, was the same. “The astronauts, do you think they felt it?” she said.
Ahead of us, the street lamps wore halos.
“Felt what?” I said.
Kara shouted to hear herself from under a pair of fuzzy earmuffs. “The fire. All of us watching them burn to death?” Her voice echoed off the indistinguishable houses lining our street.
“No,” I lied again. “I think it happened before they felt a thing.” But in my mind I imagined air masks falling from overhead compartments, sirens, the shudder of the cabin, heat from the flames, followed by the resonating clap of the fatal belly flop the capsule made off the coast of Florida. I pictured each of the crew members’ faces watching the others from behind their masks as their oxygen winked out, while at home a thankful Barbara Morgan, the runner-up for the mission, ate Doritos and drank Cherry Coke with her kids, watching the whole thing from her couch, grateful to God that it wasn’t her, after all, who got to be the Teacher in Space.
I took Kara’s mittened hand in mine, and as we turned into the warming hut at Marsh Cove Park, I lied to her one last time to protect her from the sadness in her eyes. “They never even had a second to think about anything other than how happy they were to be chasing Halley’s comet across the sky.”
“Good,” Kara said. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and waved to her friends.
“Call Daddy to come get you when you’re done,” I told her and handed her a shiny dime.
Then, as I had done only hours before while tracking my mother, I rounded the bend, where, at the creek’s dead-end, I saw the billowing exhaust of Dean’s truck. I hadn’t expected him to be there before me.
He sat alone in the dark, leaning against the bed of his pickup, the tailgate open, blowing cigarette rings at the night. He was handsome like Simon Le Bon, the lead singer of Duran Duran, my favorite band in those days, but in a tougher, less British way. In his jeans and camouflaged hunting jacket, with his cigarettes and c
offee, Dean already seemed somewhat old. I guessed that having four sisters and no dad at home weighed him down with a cargo of responsibility. At seventeen years old, he had a steadier job than my dad, and working hard to make money for his family seemed to be the thing he honored most.
Dean pointed to his watch when he saw me. “You’re early,” he said. “I’m glad.” He walked toward me across the frozen ground and wrapped his arms around my neck, whispering, “I’ve been thinking about you all day.”
We stood like that, holding each other until I shivered.
“It’s bitter,” he said and escorted me to the passenger side of the pickup.
In the cab, Dean played Dream Academy on the tape deck and began to kiss my face and neck, pulling me out from my layers of clothes. The windows fogged with the heat of our breath. The tape clicked over to the B side. Dean slid one hand inside my jeans. The other tugged his belt from its buckle.
“Wait,” I said.
Dean touched my face. “Don’t be afraid.”
My eyes filled with tears, but I was no longer sure who I was crying for.
“Trust me?” he asked.
I nodded and disappeared inside myself as Dean leaned me across the bench seat. His mouth made its way down my chest.
I wondered where my mother was.
Resting a warm hand on my belly, Dean slid the fabric of my panties to the side.
“Open your legs,” he whispered.
When I didn’t respond, he did it for me.
I held my breath until his mouth found its way back to my neck and lips.
He pressed his forehead against mine. Our noses touched. His mouth tasted of coffee and smoke, and he buried his hands in my hair. I surrendered then and closed my eyes, envisioning the rocket split in two, my mother’s coat hung from the end of the telescope, the man dropping his robe to the floor, Mom’s green boots, her turtleneck over her head. And I saw flames for the first time—red, orange, and blue.
Barely touching me, Dean made half-moons with his thumbs on the lobes of my ears and lured me into a spell. With his fingers and tongue, he stirred my need for him until it turned urgent.
He whispered, “I’ll be careful.”
Against a moment of pain, my mind went blank.
Then the tape ended, the music silenced, and the strange day vanished with it.
In a way that felt safe, like possession or love, Dean took my face in his hands and stared into my eyes. “My girl,” he whispered. He smiled reassuringly and smoothed my hair off my forehead, before starting the whole process over again.
Thinking back on it now after all that happened over the past twelve weeks, I believe Dean understood all those years ago that some part of me would forever belong to him, because for me, sex would never again be that forbidden or dangerous or new.
• • •
That night of the Challenger explosion, as I lay sleepless in my twin bed beside Kara, who snored lightly from beneath her covers, restless images of my mother circled my mind. I could not shake the vision of her hanging her parka from the end of that telescope, the naked man draped in his robe like a king, or Mom’s bare back as she pulled her turtleneck over her head.
Unable to sleep, I padded out our front door in my coat and slippers to my mother’s station wagon, which we had nicknamed the Dove, parked in the street along the curb. I swear it was beckoning to me to stop her.
It was unlocked, as always, so I climbed inside. Gray upholstery drooped from the ceiling, fabric that flapped in the wind like the wings of a bird whenever we drove the car with the windows down.
The old 1973 Chevy was in constant need of repair. Dad often put it on blocks to work on it himself, but watching him do so caused all of us alarm. My father’s body was not as strong as it had been the year before, when he was still working as an engraver at Colt Firearms, and my mother seized every occasion she could find to remind him of this fact.
Something about going on strike had caused his midsection to grow softer, not fat exactly, but rounded at the waistline, more like a woman’s belly than a man’s, while my mother grew slimmer and slimmer with her Richard Simmons exercise tapes and the pink cans of Tab she took along for her walks to Sea Glass Beach.
The interior of the Dove contained parts that I had learned would be easy to ignite: carpets, seat foam, soft plastic along the dash—the highly flammable materials we had learned about in Mr. Barnet’s chemistry unit on combustibles. And the paper cups and newspapers stacked on Mom’s passenger’s seat made for perfect kindling.
Before I struck the match, I sat inside the car in my pajamas, rummaging through the glove box, where I discovered a picture of Mom and Dad before Kara and I were born. In the snapshot Mom wore an A-line minidress and held their goofy Scottie dog, Holiday, in her lap, while Dad, who looked like a little boy with his crew cut and Army uniform, leaned in for a smooch.
I studied the picture before putting it back, wondering how she could leave my father, whom she had moved in with before they were married, when she was still seventeen. It was unfathomable to me then that my own mother could actually walk into another house, a completely different kind of life, and take off her clothes for that silver-haired man.
But, looking back, I remember Mom talking about different kinds of lives, lives out of our reach, lives she envied, wanting them for herself and our family. Those notions were divulged to all of us when my parents fought, most often over the money we never had, or when my mother came home from a double shift still in her starched, white nursing uniform to find a messy house and my father and his friends watching television or shuffling a deck of cards.
Her message to Dad was always the same: “I worked forty-eight hours straight and I come home to this,” punctuating her assault by reminding my father of all his failed promises. “When we got married you said you’d take care of us, Pete. You promised I’d be able to stay home and raise my kids.” Sometimes Dad would reach for her; other times he would grow heated, frustrated by his inability to grant her that life. But no matter how he responded, Mom headed straight out the door for her walk, and I had discovered where she went to seek comfort.
Wadding up sections from the Hartford Courant on the Dove’s passenger seat, the same newspaper that had announced my parents’ courthouse wedding after my father was called to the draft in 1969, I balled up every last bit of the Sunday edition into kindling, the ink marking my hands black.
What I knew from Mr. Barnet was that fire needed two things to burn: oxygen and fuel. My fuel sources were the paper and the lighter fluid I’d lifted from Dad’s Weber grill on our front porch, next to the silk daisies he left outside all year long. Under the grill’s dome, he kept both the butane and a long-handled grill lighter inside a plastic bag. I squirted the lighter fluid like a water gun, dousing the paper and the interior. Then, climbing into the backseat, I rolled down the windows on each side of car so that oxygen could nourish the flames.
Once the prep was done, I slammed the doors and waited for someone to stop me.
I imagined my father on the front stoop, calling my name and asking me, “Just what in the Christ are you doing out here, Claire?”
But when I turned to the house, it stared back like an unlit jack-o’-lantern.
“Stop me, long-haired star,” I called to Halley’s comet.
I thought if nothing else, my summons might wake up my parents or Kara, and they would come outside and we could find a way to make things better for all of us.
But the house stayed dark and the sky did not answer. I did not see the comet that night. I cannot blame it for starting my fire, and I cannot credit it for stopping me.
From above, only Orion winked back, his club in hand, protecting us from Taurus, the bull, in heaven.
I put the letter snatched from my father’s dresser into the car with the last of the coupon inserts from the Sunday circu
lars and triggered the lighter with my thumb. Not wanting my mother’s words to be true, I ignited the letter first, then the loose fabric of the car’s interior. The heat flamed up against my hands and my face, while the rage welled in my heart. I shut the door and walked swiftly toward the house in slippers soaked by the snow.
There was a hush, a moment of peace as I walked off. Then I heard the whoosh of the fire gulping the oxygen and that furious, glorious rush of flames.
I approached the front door, and reflected back at me from the bay window of our house were flashes. They crested over the car like waves, oranges and blues, reds, a sliver of green. They lapped at the sides of the vehicle and reached over the hood. Witnessing it, a kind of warmth spread through me. It moved from my heart, up my neck, out my arms, down to my frozen toes. The awe caught in my throat. I giggled. I remember covering my mouth with both hands, tiptoeing into the foyer, and shutting the door, pausing to behold that miraculous thing, the same combustion that allows flight, and I counted: “Three, two, one, liftoff.”
I crept up the stairs and slipped back into bed next to Kara, shutting my eyes and feigning sleep when she stirred.
There was a minute, maybe two, before the sound of fireworks, followed by an explosion that roused everyone else inside.
My father ran down the hall, shouting to my mother who slept on the couch. “Kat! Jesus Christ, it’s your car! It’s on fire!”
She yelled back. “Get the kids!”
They scrambled, my mother running up the stairs, my father coming down the hall, colliding at the top of the landing. One of them gasped.
“Girls!” my father hollered.
I sprang from my bed, turning the corner behind Kara to find my parents watching the flames from the window.
And, there, despite all the distance between them and the letter Mom had written, my parents held each other, proving the lesson Mr. Barnet had imparted:
What Burns Away Page 7