“Fires possess an ultimate, unlimited kind of power.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Repossession
Even before reconnecting with Dean, I sometimes dreamed about the Quayside, that view from the windowsill where he and I last made love, carrying with it a dark reminder of all that had been poached from my childhood the minute my mother opened the door and stepped inside the place. Those consequences of my mother’s affair kept me inside my own marriage, one I became ambivalent about after the move, and even before, when I started to question it shortly after the birth of our son.
Miles tried to make things right. I don’t blame him, really. He sensed my slipping from the present a few weeks after arriving in Madison, believing I was falling into a transitional depression. That’s what he told my counselor, that he thought it was something he could fix if he had more time to pitch in around the house.
And I wish, of course, that the answers were as basic as Miles making his own coffee and rinsing his mug when he finished, or managing the mountain of trash in his office and clearing away the bowls encrusted with food strewn across his desk. Those were the chores generally left for me after he headed for the hospital to perform acts of God, while I stayed behind to tidy the mess. And sure, I resented those things at times, but the trouble was deeper, old trouble all mine.
When he came home late one night to find me tearful, a box of faded snapshots of the Quayside scattered across the floor, he said, “Maybe the drive was too much,” blaming the nineteen hours in the overstuffed car four months prior and the 1,100 miles we’d crossed with our screaming baby as the shortest days of winter set in.
In some ways, he was right. With each tick of the odometer, I slipped further from our axis, allowing a magnetic field to form between us, replacing the powerful attraction I once felt for Miles with resistance to the change.
Our first night in the rental house, the start of the fall term for Miles’s academic responsibilities for the Department of Medicine, began with a fight. We were tired and weary from the nineteen-hour drive, a race through the night to meet the movers, who were already unloading our things when we arrived.
I held Jonah in my arms as I entered the narrow quarters Miles had rented for us, a place he had found during his recruitment and that I had not seen. Inside, it was stark and angular. The stairwells had tight, sharp corners, not a banister to be found. Each wall was paneled in dark wood, aside from the front room made entirely of windows. The bedrooms had cast-iron balconies with no railings, the worst kind of situation for our new walker, Jonah, still unsteady on his feet. And each room hosted a beautiful open-concept fireplace with no glass around the hood to contain the flames.
Although beautiful, the place was not a family house. It felt, as I walked through it, like a house Miles had chosen for himself, a hasty self-serving choice made for its proximity to the hospital, ignoring Jonah’s safety and my own comfort. This disregard was reminiscent of my husband’s lack of consideration for my career when he pushed for a relocation I had already expressed apprehension about. The work of motherhood and the priorities of our family seemed to be afterthoughts to Miles, swept up with ambitions, and I was enraged by that.
“Isn’t it great?” Miles asked.
I cut open a box of dishes. And lifted them toward the cabinets I’d lined with paper. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” I paused.
Miles grinned ear to ear. “I love it. And it’s so close to the lab. Super convenient.”
Heat ran through me. My face flushed. And something in me, something I had been holding tight, snapped. I tossed plates and saucers to the ground, where they broke into shards.
From the Pack ’n Play beside me, Jonah erupted into tears.
I screamed at Miles. “Did you think about anyone other than yourself for even one second before you dragged us here?” And what I couldn’t tell him in that moment, because I was too angry, was that I was desperately afraid.
• • •
I was thirty-two years old when I was first drawn to my husband. My third glass of white wine was empty as Miles and I stood in a mass of people in Boston Red Sox caps watching the playoffs, all eyes holding fast to the flat screens lining the bar, while Jason Varitek stepped to the plate, working his way toward erasing an eighty-six-year curse.
Miles, who was one year my senior, stood out from the crowd in his Cleveland Indians T-shirt, which announced his dedication to the Rust Belt team and the hometown he had left behind. With his serene green eyes and full lips, dressed in the tattered vintage crewneck tee beneath an open dress shirt with monogrammed sleeves, he presented himself as an attractive combination of awkward and refined.
“An Indians fan, really?” I said as I moved past him to get a closer view of the game.
He looked right at me and raised his hand in the greeting of Chief Wahoo. Fumbling through his pants pockets, he placed a guitar pick, a fistful of ketchup packets, his Ohio driver’s license, and one marmalade jelly packet on the bar, then bought my drink with a wad of wrinkled singles held together by a paper clip.
I held up my glass for a toast. “Go Sox,” I said.
“Sometimes I steal things,” he told me, “to hang on to the important moments.” Then he touched his snifter, a keepsake he would later pocket, to my wineglass.
“To the Sox. To meeting you.”
For a split second his fingertips grazed the fleshy center of my palm, and he gave me a nod as if we were in it together.
During the game’s eighth inning, Carl Crawford and Aubrey Huff scored two runs, setting the Red Sox up for a 4–9 loss. I hissed along with the crowd before Miles swept me off to the wharf.
We cut through cobblestone alleys toward Mystic’s waterfront port, where all the buildings leaned against each other, exhausted by their old age. The willows that lined our path had yellowed with the September frost, and the gaslights set between them drew moths out from the dark. We walked to where the streets ended and the docks began, the tide gently frothing and a low fog rising off the ocean.
Ambling through the village, Miles held my wrist, not my hand, and anyone who saw us would have thought I was being dragged. Yet I submitted willingly to the childishness of the gesture, which endeared me to him immediately.
“Want my hand?” I offered in an almost-shout over a tugboat horn.
“I’m taking your pulse,” Miles announced.
Then, through the open doors of the pubs lining Main Street came the collective grumble of a wanton Red Sox nation. And, as if inspired by their groan, Miles pulled me into his coat and we stood looking over the water, our backs to the noise.
He did not kiss me but whispered instead, his lips barely touching my ear, “Nervous girl.”
“No, no.” I corrected him. “Excited girl.”
He let go of my wrist and guided my fingers to his neck, where I felt his pulse racing and the world receding around us. I breathed deeply, smelled the salt in the air, and asked the same question: “Nervous man?”
He whispered, “Maybe.”
And in that moment, staring out over the flat waters of the Atlantic, dark and slick as obsidian, I knew somehow that the two of us would run off into the unknown together.
“Beautiful night,” I said.
“But no wind,” he added. “Otherwise, I’d take you out in my old dory right now. But without a motor, we might be set adrift.”
It didn’t sound so bad. “Let’s swim,” I said, buzzed by the wine.
Feeling enchanted by the mild autumn night, I tugged on his arm, moving us further down the wharf, growing eager for the possibility brewing between us. I pointed to a spot above the horizon and below the quarter moon.
“Sea smoke,” I told him. “The ocean is warmer than the air. Probably the warmest, calmest waters we’ll see until summer.”
I pulled off my coat and laid it across the creaking
dock, then slid off my sandals and wiggled out of my jeans.
Miles watched me.
“You’re insane!” he said, meaning it as a compliment.
And shortly thereafter he was tossing his own coat onto the wharf, shrugging out of his shirt, and pulling his Cleveland Indians T-shirt over his head. “So we’re really gonna do this?”
His body was lean and chiseled in those days, the physique of a runner or a swimmer, maybe, some sinewy sort of Iron Man. And in the dark, his smile was bright.
Then I took him by the wrist. And as I heaved Miles toward the end of the plank, wearing only my tank top, bra, and panties, he was heavier than he appeared. Unable to budge him further, I stood on my tippy-toes and shouted: “Ready? One, two, three!”
Headfirst into the water with my best swan dive, my body plummeted through the calm. I held my breath through the momentary shock of the cold and opened my eyes, watching the bubbles and silver light as I crested to the water’s surface.
Standing shirtless in just a pair of jeans, Miles watched me bob.
“No way!” he shouted.
I let out a shriek. “It’s only cold for a second!”
Miles took several slow paces backward, his head held low like a scolded puppy, and as soon as I believed he had decided against it, he dropped his jeans, stepped from them, then ran as fast as he could, cannonballing into the bay.
A foot away from me, he came up for air.
“You’re nuts, you know that?” he called out with such open admiration that it made me laugh too, delighted at myself.
We swam toward each other, treading water and giggling like kids, holding on to one another and finally kissing until Miles’s teeth began to chatter.
“Let’s get warm,” he said, initiating our return.
I hurried up the slick rungs of the wharf first.
Close behind, Miles spotted me, keeping his hand on my hip.
Still giggling and hopping to ward off the chill, we dried our dimpled skin on our coats and shimmed our damp bodies into our jeans. Dressed, we stood for a moment, beholding one another. He grinned. “I like you,” he said, and all I could think about was that kiss. I wanted more of it, of him. Then driven by an intense attraction, I took his hand.
“Come home with me,” I told him.
Both of us ran, shoes in our hands, winding through the cobblestone streets against the breeze, until we reached the door of my apartment, where I turned the key.
I glanced over my shoulder at Miles.
“You were right,” I admitted. “Nervous girl.” I wasn’t so sure I was prepared for what would unfold, but I wanted it nonetheless.
Miles smiled his wide, bright grin and said confidently, “You should be.”
And there we began.
• • •
But Miles, I’ve come learn, is not as vulnerable as me. I’m still the nervous, needier one, and my husband has come to view that wariness as an unattractive insecurity.
Although our relocation was exhausting and hard, it was “just a move,” as Miles likes to remind me now. “Not even all the way across the country, just half.” And, yes, he is right. People do it all the time, people with much harder lives than our own.
And I should feel thankful that our son pulled through the pneumonia he had the week after we arrived in Wisconsin, where my mother’s letter waited, in which she wrote to Jonah: “Moving is tough, my sweet, sweet boy. But what’s a little loneliness, my dear,” even though I am quite certain she has never allowed herself to be lonely.
Simply, the moment our boxes of packed dishes hit the floor, I couldn’t stop the sadness. Maybe it was the adjustment to the lack of lithium in the air. Being too far from the ocean has always messed with my head, which is why for nearly forty years of my life I’d avoided living in the middle, the great oceanless expanse of it, keeping a tight hold on the coast. And it was a bad time for us to be here, arriving in mid-September during the onset of shorter days, soon to be trapped by the coming winter, feeling like foreigners in our own country, and just as I was beginning to feel a part of the world after my clunky initiation into motherhood.
Maybe I didn’t want to start over again because I didn’t know who to start over as. The former outrageous blond girl I remember was unrecognizable in the murky-haired stranger with puffy eyes who looked back at me from the mirror. Maybe because Dean remembered who I had been, I was compelled by him and those old powers he had over me.
Having grown up with four sisters, and being the youngest and only son born to an Irish Catholic mother, Dean admitted to me that back in high school, his sisters had blessed him with insider information about girls. It was the Fourth of July, we had been dating seven months, and as we sat in the bed of his pickup truck, sharing swigs from a bottle of Miller High Life, he told me, “You know, I used every secret my sisters whispered to each other about boys to my full advantage with you.”
I took the bottle from his hands and peeled the label back. We leaned against the cab, counting fireflies. “I don’t have those kinds of secrets,” I said. “But after I caught my mom in a lie, I set her car on fire.”
Dean seemed neither shocked nor amazed. He simply held me as if he understood the motive.
Over his shoulder, I watched Roman candles flaring up into the sky.
“We all have secrets,” he said, his face buried in my hair. “I bet when we’re old, we’ll have a lot more skeletons in the closet. I’ve got a few fires I’d like to set myself. If I knew where my father lived, his house would go first.”
We sat silent for a moment. Maybe it was then that we first considered making a fire together, mutually imagining how the scene would play out. Then Dean jumped from the bed of the truck onto the gravel road and walked toward the creek. He lit a smoke. Something told me not to follow.
Above us I located Scorpius set off by Antares, the sixteenth brightest star in the sky. I considered what other secrets I would have to keep and, like the scorpion battling Orion, I wondered what battles I would fight.
When I turned back toward the water, Dean had stripped out of his jeans, down to his boxer shorts, and was wading into the stream.
• • •
I’ve never told my husband about the fire I set in my mother’s car. Dean was the only person who ever knew. Although I’d like to think that Miles and I could tell each other anything, we can’t. Or at least I can’t. I learned the hard way to keep my secrets after I divulged my mother’s infidelity to Miles in the early months of our courtship. That character flaw became something he referenced anytime her name came up, pressing on a wound that would never heal, reminding me of the danger in sharing old confidences.
In a moment of tenderness, I came close to telling Miles about the car fire only once. It was before Jonah. We had been camping at Maho Bay in the U.S. Virgin Islands, celebrating the completion of his doctoral program in medicine. We were alone on the beach, our skin branded by the sun after a day of snorkeling. Drinking rum from the bottle, we sat with our faces illuminated by a bonfire we had built together.
Miles threw his hand over my shoulder. “What is it about fire?” he wanted to know.
With our eyes open, we made love there on the sand. But Miles’s gaze remained on the blaze, and in his eyes I watched the reflection of light flicker. I wanted to tell him then how I got away with it, how I kindled the car with newspapers and struck the match, but I didn’t because Miles had always possessed a righteousness, a belief in order and laws typical of the son of a judge. Disclosing my crime would mean opening myself up to questions that, if answered, would reveal a part of myself that made even me uneasy. So I tucked that part of my story deep in the corner pocket of myself.
• • •
But I did tell Dean how the fire trucks pulled onto Willard Street just seconds after I slipped back into my bed, faking sleep, before my parents came t
o get us.
“My father cried,” I explained in a whisper. “And he pulled at my mother’s shirt so hard, trying to hold her, that we heard the fabric tear as she moved away from him. When the officers came to the door, he finally let go.”
“I remember that fire,” Dean said. “It was in the Hartford Courant. The article was all about how your dad was out of work, walking the picket line at Colt, and how he was the victim of vandalism. They blamed it on the changes in the neighborhood after Pratt and Whitney moved south. My mom was all worried about her property value.” He moved my hair off my shoulders. “It wasn’t a bunch of thugs from New London after all. It was you.”
“Me,” I confessed to Dean. “To punish my mother.”
When the cops arrived at the scene, they questioned my parents on the stoop while it snowed and snowed. Kara sat in my lap and we watched them from the living room. It was the last time I saw my mother touch my father, her fingers on his shoulder as the officers drove up. They were both afraid and Dad grabbed her, tried to keep her in his grip, but she pulled away from him, even as he begged her “Please” and “Don’t” and “Wait.”
Despite the fire, Mom left the next day. She had packed just one bag and set it in the hallway the night before, the same rose-colored suitcase she took on their honeymoon weekend to see the Statue of Liberty, before Dad left for Vietnam. Other than her luggage, everything else stayed behind with us, even Mom’s sea glass.
As a girl, I blamed myself for my parents’ divorce, always wondering if giving Dad that letter might’ve made a difference in his behavior, if he might’ve been softer, more attentive in time to save things. Perhaps, if he’d been given a chance to read it, he would have pleaded with her to reconsider the split. And although it was never my intention, as an adult I’ve come to understand that by confiscating my mother’s note and setting fire to her car with it, I made things far worse for Dad, who was caught completely off guard when she left.
Without her own vehicle, Mom was no longer able to move herself into her lover’s house. Instead, that next morning, “the Douche Bag,” as my father later named him, fetched her in a Mercedes the color of banana cream pie. Together they backed out of the driveway into the fog while Dad leaned in the door frame, watching, and the yellow crime scene tape billowed along the edges of our front lawn.
What Burns Away Page 8