What Burns Away

by Melissa Falcon Field

  Up the hill and back into the dark near home, I considered the teenaged boy in the backseat of the cruiser, the envelope from Dean hidden in my closet, Jonah asleep in his crib, the trip we were about to take, and Miles, never stirring as I slipped out, still snoring now on the couch.

  I pulled the lighter from my pocket and fingered its trigger with my thumb. As a forty-year-old, stay-at-home mom, I couldn’t be further off anyone’s radar. Any of that old danger beating inside me was invisible to nearly everyone.

  PART 2

  “Somewhere out in the back of your mind

  Comes your real life and the life that you know.”

  — Stevie Nicks, “Rooms on Fire”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Homecoming

  Miles drove Jonah and me to the airport for our departure, and as we pulled up to the curb, he looked over the seat at our boy, then back at me.

  “Claire…I know I agreed to this, but to be completely honest, I started worrying last night that a trip might not be such a good idea. Are you sure you want to go? You seem so spacey lately. The oven was on again when I got up this morning, and I had to blow out a candle in the living room. That stuff makes me nervous about you traveling alone with the baby.”

  I took a deep breath. “We better head out,” I said. “And please don’t worry. I’m fine, really.”

  A couple parked in front of us unloaded their luggage and shared a long, passionate good-bye. Slipping his hands into the back pockets of the woman’s jeans, the man snatched her back close to him every time she attempted to leave.

  Inspired by them, I supposed, Miles pulled me across the console jammed with empty juice boxes and Matchbox cars and brushed a kiss over my forehead. He whispered, “And if you see your mom while you’re home, don’t get into it with her, okay? Keep things light.”

  Of course, she had no idea I was headed east, though I’d let Miles believe a meeting between us could take place, even though I’d only spoken to my mother a handful of times in the last two decades. The first phone conversation was when I graduated from college. The second was when I got into graduate school, and the third was to announce my wedding, to which she was not invited because she refused to attend without Craig. The fourth call was to tell her I was pregnant with Jonah.

  In that stretch of twenty-some-odd years, I saw my mother once, during my extended hospital stay after the birth of my son. And the only contact I’d initiated with her since was in the mass mailing forwarding our new contact information in Madison to everyone in our address book, in case she needed to reach us in some kind of emergency.

  Occasionally after that, Mom sent gifts to Jonah. The enclosed letters were often addressed solely to him, occasionally to us both, always written on the same monogrammed stationery pressed with her and her husband’s initials.

  The last time I saw my mother, she looked well preserved, her eyebrows penciled in to set off her steel-colored eyes, and she wore a sundress that hugged her slim figure. Her giant silver bangle bracelets clanged together like cymbals as she entered the hospital room in a burst of noise after my thirty-three hours of active labor, followed by what ended in an emergency C-section that saved both Jonah and me from the unimaginable.

  Mom thrust a bottle of champagne in my lap and left a perfect blot of coral lipstick on Miles’s face, then, hanging over my shoulder, she rubbed her thumb along Jonah’s brow, murmuring: “He looks like your father, don’t you think? He has your father’s fair skin and his cleft chin.”

  For me, the comment took from that moment, reminding me of our collective loss at a time when I needed to be protective of my new joy. Heatedly, and retrospectively I think wrongly, I sent her away without letting her hold her grandson. Since then our correspondence has been limited to letters in which she tells Jonah where “Mimi” (which is how she refers to herself) has been traveling with Craig (whom she calls “Pop-pop”) and what types of restaurants they are enjoying in Fort Lauderdale by the Sea, where her husband bought a condo on the fourteenth floor of a giant, pink skyscraper.

  When the letters from my mother arrive, if compelled to open them at all, I skim them quickly and throw them away, her loopy scrawl always a sad reminder of the long-ago note she wrote to my father, marking the change of everything.

  • • •

  When I boarded the plane to Connecticut, I already knew I would not see my mother or her husband. Their sale of the Quayside to Dean was something I had not shared with my husband, who believed they were living mostly in Connecticut until Craig could formally retire from the financial sector, at which point they would move to the condo in Florida to golf and sail away their golden years together. Miles never asked much about my family, so when he hefted our baggage from the car and told me not to get into things with my mother, should I see her, I said simply, “I won’t. I promise.”

  An airport security officer whistled his horn and instructed us to “move it along,” signaling to Miles that he could not park at the curb.

  Relieved to hurry along the good-byes, I said, “See you soon,” and pushed against the January gale to curbside check-in.

  “How soon?” Miles shouted over the noise of a shuttle.

  “Four days—unless we decide to never come back,” I said, trying to tease.

  Miles pulled Jonah from his car seat and hugged him tight. “You have to come back,” he told me. “We’re in this together.”

  I dragged our bags behind me, while the frigid wind whipped my hair into my eyes.

  Holding him close, patting Jonah’s bottom, Miles said, “I miss you already, bud.” Then, to the bulky security officer who blew a whistle as he circled our car, my husband called, “One more second, sir,” holding up his index finger, racing us toward the check-in counter.

  Together, we three stormed the line and I dug the necessary documents and ID from my coat pocket. There, I discovered the yellow lighter tucked among the paperwork and quickly slipped it into our checked bags before the airline attendant tossed them onto the conveyor belt.

  “Park and come inside,” I told my husband, meaning it. “Wait with us. We can grab coffee. Talk, maybe?”

  He squeezed my shoulder, and his concerned face looked back at the officer who stood at the rear of our vehicle. “I feel guilty just leaving you guys here, and I do want to talk…but they need me in the ER. There’s a patient on life flight headed in now.” He rubbed his chin and pulled me in for a hug one last time. “I better run,” he said. “Safe flight, okay? We’ll talk more when you get home. Love you.”

  He walked to the car, and a part of me believed I should chase after him. I wanted us to hold each other like we had outside his vandalized lab, to stand inside a moment together so I could explain how I was about to violate his trust and have him stop me before I went any further. I wanted to apologize for being so distracted, so absent from him, and to tell Miles I was so sorry for his losses—the data and the research—and to admit that I too was remorseful for my part in the distance between us.

  Hoping he might return to Jonah and me for that imagined embrace, I called, “Miles.” He turned back to us, raised his hand in a Chief Wahoo wave, and then dropped into the front seat of his car.

  “Bye-bye, Daddy,” I whispered into Jonah’s ear.

  “Bye-bye!” Jonah said.

  I set Jonah down and he toddled ahead of me, dragging his robot backpack behind him through the sliding terminal doors. Following my son, I glanced over my shoulder to the roadway, scrutinizing the taillights of Miles’s Volvo. His blinker signaled. He turned out into traffic, and inside me was a pang.

  • • •

  Landing at Bradley International Airport is like arriving at a Chili’s restaurant with airplane access. The airport is small with just two snack kiosks, a Dunkin’ Donuts, and a merchandise stand selling Hartford Whalers hockey T-shirts, even though the team left Connecticut fifteen yea
rs ago.

  Having declined Dean’s offer to greet us, I walked the short distance to baggage claim with Jonah and out the door into the grim fog that often accompanies a New England winter. Out along the tarmac, I watched flaggers direct a tiny Airbus backing from the gate. And there, despite all of it, I shivered with the jubilant sensation of a homecoming.

  “Jonah!” I squealed. “We’re here.”

  We picked up the rental car Dean had arranged and headed down Interstate 91 South to the Bee and Thistle Inn, where a two-bedroom suite awaited us. Maneuvering that familiar stretch of road, I shed layers of my current self and steered us into a memory. Dizzy with pleasure the day I got my license, I had driven my first car along that very stretch—over the Baldwin Bridge, off Exit 22, and onto Route 9, the corridor of my youth.

  Near the Shoreline Service Center, I slowed as we approached the corner where my father first taught me how to pump gas into Mom’s station wagon and check the oil on the old Dove, long before I set it on fire or could drive myself. A few hundred yards later, I saw the tattered green awning of his old watering hole, Cherry Stones, from which Mom and I would fetch him after too many hours passed, while Kara slept in the back the way Jonah dozed off behind me in the backseat of the rental car.

  I got a wobble in my belly going back to the East Coast. It was the combination of joy mixed with the dread that comes from realizing that time never holds still and that the old haunts are not always as charming as nostalgia claims.

  Passing the turnoff to my childhood development, I saw a yellow sign reminding drivers to slow for pedestrians. The stick-figure person on the roadway marker had been spray-painted with a giant blue cock and balls. And beyond the sign, the houses I envied as a kid look tired and overgrown.

  Moving from East Lyme to the haughtier west side of town, where my inn awaited me on its scenic ocean lot, I regarded the tidelands, where brown sea grasses swayed and the naked sumac trees stood watch over the winter that froze everything into slow motion.

  At the Bee and Thistle, I did as Dean asked and registered for the room under the name Mary Tooke, the wife of Edmund Halley, discoverer of our comet and a pet name Dean once called me. “Room’s under your nickname,” Dean wrote in his envelope of printed instructions. “And I paid for all of it in cash in case your husband asks questions.”

  Up a creaky staircase I carried the skeleton key to a two-bedroom suite draped with too many doilies and lace curtains. The place had the musty smell of a beach property, and a newly lit fire roared for us in the hearth. A Pack ’n Play was set up already, the sheets laid smooth, so I put a sleeping Jonah down, hoping he would continue his snooze while I headed into my adjoining room for a shower, wondering exactly what it was I expected to find there.

  Washing my hair, I thought about the last time I was in a hotel without Miles, nearly five years prior, before I quit my meteorology program. At an inn similar to this one near the Idaho State University campus, I’d spent a week attending a women’s science convention, during which Barbara Morgan spoke to five hundred female students and faculty members at the Rendezvous Complex planetarium on the twelfth anniversary of Christa McAuliffe’s death.

  Barbara Morgan, runner-up for the Teacher in Space Project and later a mission specialist for NASA, had become a full-time astronaut at age fifty-five. Her hair was streaked with silver when she walked to the podium to deliver her lecture, and she took her time to adjust the microphone and pour herself a tall glass of water. Projected onto an enormous screen behind her was a slide show of the Milky Way taken from the Hubble space telescope. Looking back at the image, she cleared her throat.

  “Although we’ve been researching for years, we’ve learned very little about this universe and our own atmosphere,” Morgan told us. “It’s exciting to realize how much there is left to know about the sky.”

  The projection transformed from an assembly of stars to an earlier image of Barbara Morgan, at age thirty-two, seated beside Christa McAuliffe, both of them in spacesuits holding helmets in their hands.

  To me, it seemed unfair that she would still be cast in McAuliffe’s shadow over a decade later, despite her own merits as an astronaut and scientist.

  As she took a moment of silence to acknowledge Christa McAuliffe, my admiration for Barbara Morgan was replaced with tenderness, seeing that even with all her accomplishments, the astronaut would forever be wedded to the ghost of my childhood hero, never moving beyond second place.

  “It’s very loud, very shaky, and you’re pressed back in your seat,” Professor Morgan said as she explained her first mission. “It’s difficult to breathe. But I’m not scared by it anymore. In fact, I’m usually relieved that we’re finally launching after that three-and-a-half-hour wait.”

  She scanned the audience.

  “Ladies, imagine the speed at which the launch happens by closing your eyes, picking a destination five miles away, and envisioning being there in just one second. It’s 0 to 17,500 miles per hour in only eight and a half minutes. The movement is faster than a blazing fire.”

  • • •

  The Bee and Thistle’s floorboards creaked when I tiptoed from the bathroom to the bedroom, toweling off my hair. Turning the corner to check on Jonah in the connecting room, I startled.

  Dean stood quietly in the doorway.

  “Jesus,” I said. “You need to stop doing that.”

  Wearing a button-down shirt and khaki pants, he held out a bouquet of orange tiger lilies, my favorite flower.

  “Shhh.” He held a finger to his lips. “Baby’s asleep.” He pushed the blossoms into my arms. The cellophane wrapping crinkled.

  Too awkward to speak, I smiled, sniffed the flowers, and carefully set them on a wingback chair by the fireplace.

  Dean wrapped his arms around me. He kissed my neck once, under my ear. The gesture was intimate; the hug lasted longer than a hello. Then he kissed my lips, just a peck, and I pulled away, confused by all my unanchored emotions.

  “I have the other key,” he whispered, setting it on my bedside table where he had poured us each a drink. He handed me a wineglass, took one for himself, and said, “Welcome home.”

  I took a sip.

  Dean sat on the bed and patted the spot beside him.

  “Come,” he said. “Let’s talk.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Strategy

  I began poring over the images of Dean on Facebook because I wanted to learn what had become of him in the world, not because I wanted to sleep with him. Initially, I just wanted to scroll through the pictures of his wife and compare myself to her. I was curious. I wanted to see their babies—which I was sad to learn he never had—and I wanted to understand the kind of life Dean ended up with, to see if it was different from the life he might’ve had with me.

  And because I had overheard the hushed voices of mothers in Jonah’s music class and older women speaking in whispers in the locker room of the YWCA where I swam, I knew that there was a nation of women out there hunched over iPads and laptops in the evenings, searching for the boys they first gave themselves to, while their husbands worked into the night or watched the Golf Channel silently beside them in comfortable living rooms. Women like me who avoided the dangers that fed our girlhood desires, and who were finally free of worry but full of longing for that kind of passion and our youth, both of which were fleeting if they had not vanished from our lives completely.

  But I never planned for those what-if fantasies to move from the virtual world to my bedside at the Bee and Thistle Inn, where Dean and I perched apprehensively on the edge of a brass bed and touched our stemmed glasses together in present time.

  “Claire,” Dean said as if we were on a date, “to your return.”

  The St. Christopher medal around his neck was the same one he wore at age seventeen, and strung next to it was the gold wedding band my father gave my mother in 1969, the day
after he was drafted for Vietnam. After she left us, my mother set the ring on my bureau next to my ballerina jewelry box with a note she had scrawled quickly, the ink smeared by her hand: Claire, a keepsake that you may want someday. Love, Mommy. It fit my index finger, and before sliding it on, I looked inside the band and read the inscription, K&P Forever, a reminder for me that nothing promised to us was certain.

  Shortly after my parents’ divorce was finalized, I could no longer bear to wear the gold band. So after we made love on the beach one night, I plucked it off my finger and offered it to Dean with a different kind of vow.

  “Let’s never be like our parents,” I said.

  “Easy promise to keep.” Then he threaded my mother’s wedding band through the gold links of his chain.

  As we sipped our wine, Dean noticed my eyes on the band. “I’ve worn it a long time,” he said and unhooked the chain. “Give me your hand.”

  I did as he said, and he pressed each one of my knuckles against his lips. I closed my eyes, permitting his touch, knowing full well that it was wrong.

  When his mouth reached my pinky finger, he turned my hand over and imprinted the band against the fleshy part of my palm.

  I closed my fingers around it.

  Dean was near enough to detect the heat of him, the pressure of his thigh against mine. My entwined emotions of desire and hesitation unnerved me, even though I’d allowed him to make the hotel reservations, his intentions made clear. And although I had not invited him to the room, his ambitions were the same ones I had entertained myself.

  There, with him at my side, my allegiance grew confused. I breathed him in, that smell of his like summer rain on hot pavement, something clean and earthy, familiar and enticing. It had been a long time since I yearned for a man this way, and I knew that if I didn’t move from my place next to him on the bed, Dean would kiss me again, and what would unfold from that moment would be something I couldn’t stop.