House on Fire

by Bonnie Kistler

  But she wasn’t asleep. “The horses!” She bolted upright. “I forgot to bring them in!”

  “Shit.” That was Chrissy’s evening chore, and they still hadn’t developed a new routine to work around it. “I’ll go.” He pushed to his feet. “You go on up to bed.”

  It was unseasonably warm outside, the kind of hot spring night that all but guaranteed a violent thunderstorm tomorrow. His mind scrolled through the work plan for Hollow Road as he headed out into the pasture and snagged the horses by their halters. The masons were due tomorrow to start on the fieldstone facade, but he could bring them inside if he had to and have them finish pointing up the fireplace in the library.

  He led the horses into their stalls and as he fed and watered them, he wondered if they should sell them. It didn’t look like Mia would ever get over her fear of horses, and Leigh never rode anymore. Nature tells you when it’s time to quit, she liked to joke. It’s when you don’t look good in breeches anymore. Pete didn’t know what she was talking about: she still looked damn good to him.

  She was already asleep by the time he climbed up the stairs to bed, and he was careful not to disturb her as he slipped in under the covers on his side. But as soon as he settled in, she rolled up tight against him, and he felt the wonderful shock of her skin against his. She wasn’t asleep, and she wasn’t wearing a nightgown either. She pressed up close, and he felt the even better shock of her hand sliding around his waist and slipping in under his shorts.

  He rolled over and found her lips in the dark. He would have settled for this, the taste of her tongue, the soft heat of her mouth. But her fingers kept on stroking him as they kissed. “You sure?” he whispered.

  She took his hand and placed it over her breast. Her skin felt so soft under his fingers, her breasts so full and supple. Five years in and he still regarded her body as a gift, something to be unwrapped and marveled at and consumed with gratitude. He wriggled out of his shorts and dropped his mouth to her other breast and gently sucked and stroked her nipples. He still wasn’t sure how ready she was for this. He needed to take it slow, slower than his usual athletic approach to sex. But this time, for the first time, Leigh was the one who grew impatient. She almost had a growl in her throat as she opened her legs and pulled him down between them.

  He’d been afraid he might lose her to her grief forever, but here she was, back again, full of life and lust. She hooked her heels behind his knees and rose up to meet him. “Oh, ye-ess,” she moaned, and it almost undid him. He had to tune out the sharp little pants in his ear and the glorious slip and slide of her skin against his. He summoned up the least arousing image he could think of, and of course, Hollow Road popped into his head. He froze it there on the screen and thought of nothing but tomorrow’s work plan, holding back until he heard the familiar gasp that would tell him he could finish.

  There. It sounded a little different in his ear, but he was already thrusting to the end before he realized: it wasn’t a gasp he heard, it was a sob. “Oh, God, babe—” But it was too late.

  “I’m sorry!” she cried as he collapsed on her. “I’m so sorry!”

  His chest heaved as he flopped on his back. “No,” he panted. “It’s me who’s sorry. It was too soon. I shouldn’t have—”

  “No, I wanted it! It’s only—” Another sob choked off her words.

  “What?” He pulled her into his arms. “Sweetheart, tell me.”

  “I want her back!” The words tore out of her like something ripped inside her body. “I want her back!”

  “I know,” he whispered. “I do, too.”

  “I want her back! I want her back!”

  “I know. I know.”

  He tried to hold her but she wrenched free and rolled over and sobbed the same words into her pillow, over and over again. Helplessly he stroked her back until her shoulders finally stopped shaking.

  He pretended to sleep after that, and so did she. He heard her get up during the night and gulp down some pills, and sometime later she drifted off. He must have slept, too, at some point, because he jerked awake when the alarm chimed at six. He rolled one way to slam it silent and Leigh rolled the other way and got out of bed. She pulled on her robe but sank down again on the edge of the mattress with her back to him.

  “Leigh?”

  “Peter, I’m so sorry about last night.”

  “It was my fault. I shouldn’t—”

  “No.” Her shoulders sagged. “It’s mine. I can’t— I’m just not coping.”

  He rolled toward her and reached to rub her back. “No one would expect you to.”

  “I hear her voice. I think she’s calling me, but when I go look, she’s not there. I thought it must be the drugs, these hallucinations, I thought it would wear off, but it won’t. I see her out of the corner of my eye, and when I spin around, she’s not there. Or I see her and she dissolves and it’s Kip who’s there, and I’m sorry—I’m so sorry!—but it’s like a fresh wound every time. It’s tearing me apart.”

  His hand stilled on her spine. “Seeing Kip, you mean.”

  “I don’t blame him. I swear I don’t. I know it wasn’t his fault. I would’ve swerved for that dog, too.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then why won’t he tell the truth about it?”

  Pete rolled to his back.

  “You believe him, I know it, and I understand why. I wish I could, too. But I can’t. And I don’t know how we go on living like this.”

  “It won’t be forever,” he said. “One way or the other, the truth’s gonna come out. We just need to get through this next little while, okay?”

  “Peter.” She took a deep breath and stood up to face him, and he was shocked at how drawn her face looked. She usually woke up looking as good as she did when she went to sleep. It made him wonder if she’d lain awake while he slept instead of the other way around as he’d thought. “Peter, I think I should go stay with Shelby for a while.”

  “What?” The word hissed in his throat.

  “I can’t be here anymore. In this house.”

  Shelby had an apartment in a luxury building on Logan Circle. Pete had never been there, but he imagined it as a glamorous art deco penthouse straight out of a 1930s movie musical. It was easy to picture Shelby on a set like that, sweeping down a dramatic helical staircase into a party of gyrating revelers. But he couldn’t picture Leigh in the scene at all. She’d be in the guest room, trying to read with her hands over her ears.

  “This is your home. You belong here.”

  “But I can’t be here. Not—”

  She put her hand to her mouth and didn’t say anything more, and in the silence, a stuttering burst of rap music came from the far end of the house. Kip’s alarm had gone off.

  Pete got to his feet. All night the idea played like a bad dream in his head, but now in almost-daylight it seemed the only solution. Kip wanted to leave, and apparently Leigh wanted the same thing. “No. You stay here,” he said as he stepped into his shorts. “We’ll crash at the job site for a while.”

  “We?”

  “Well, he can’t live by himself.”

  “He is eighteen.”

  “You think that means he’s grown up?” He went to the dresser and pulled out a clean T-shirt. “The twins are twenty. You think they’re grown up? Is that what you thought when you called Zack’s professor last month?”

  “No—”

  “I left him once before when he needed me. I won’t do it again, not while he’s going through the worst experience of his life.”

  The pipes whined in the wall as Kip turned on the shower at the other end of the house.

  “But—oh, for heaven’s sake, Peter! You can’t live in a half-built house. It doesn’t even have plumbing.”

  “It won’t hurt us to camp out for a while.” He pulled the T-shirt over his head and opened another drawer for a button-down flannel. “Actually it’ll kill two birds. I’m at the point where I usually hire nighttime security. With me and Kip stayin
g there, I can save that money. Win win.”

  “Win win,” she repeated dully.

  “No, I didn’t mean—”

  “I know you didn’t.” She came up to him and slipped her hands inside his shirt, and he pulled her head to his shoulder and pressed his face in her sweet-smelling hair. They stood together for a long moment, rocking slightly, like a boat on a swell.

  “I don’t want you to leave.”

  “It won’t be forever,” he said. “Just till we get through this. And I’ll stop by here every day. How’s that? You’ll hardly notice I’m gone.” She felt as limp as a ragdoll in his arms, but he knew she had a spine of steel. This was the woman who’d built an addition on her house while her marriage was crumbling and stayed cheerful and resolute through it all. “We’re gonna get through this.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The storm blew in that afternoon. Black clouds scuttled across the sky, and the wind kicked up so ferociously that the American flag in front of the high school lashed and cracked like a snapped cable. It was after five by then, and Kip was sulking on the curb like the last kid picked for the team. “Come on, hurry it up,” Pete shouted out the window. The wind was whipping at their camping gear where it lay exposed in the back of the truck, and Pete had to race the rain all the way back to Hollow Road.

  He pulled up the drive and parked next to the garage. The siding and stonework weren’t up yet, and the wind slipped in under the sheets of Tyvek wrap on the walls and swelled them out like a bullfrog’s throat. “Let’s get this inside before the rain breaks,” he shouted, and they grabbed armfuls of duffels and sleeping bags and ran to the back door.

  The wind was inside the house, too, whistling in through the window openings on one side and whooshing out the other. All the rooms were framed in, but they weren’t drywalled or paneled yet, and the sightlines were clear for a hundred feet from one end of the house to the other.

  They ran out for a second load, and the rain broke only seconds after they made it back inside. The drops beat a rhythm like a chorus line of tap dancers on the copper roof over the back door. “A week ago we couldn’t have done this,” Pete said as he squatted to begin the unpacking. “Good thing the place is dried in now.”

  Kip looked around with a scowl. “Yeah. Awesome.”

  “We got electric in as far as the box, so we can run some cords from there for lamps or whatever. Our laptops.”

  “Super.”

  “There’s only rough-in plumbing, but we got a hose connected out back we can use to wash up. And of course we got the Johnny on the Spot.” Pete grinned up. “All the comforts of home, right?”

  Kip didn’t answer. He had his phone out and was frowning at the screen.

  “Bad news?”

  “No news at all. I can’t get a frigging signal.”

  That was one of the words Leigh wouldn’t tolerate from the boys. We all know what you’re really saying, she’d scold them. But Leigh wasn’t here.

  “Must be the weather,” Pete said. “We usually get pretty good cell service here.”

  Kip held the phone aloft and went off on a circuit of all the ground-floor rooms. Pete decided to set up their cots in the center hall where they could sleep well away from the window openings. By the time Kip circled back, he was rolling out their sleeping bags.

  “Uh, how many bedrooms in this house?”

  “Six.”

  “Any chance I could snag one of them?”

  “The stairs aren’t in. You get up in the night, you’d fall through and break your neck.”

  “So I won’t get up.”

  “It’s not safe.”

  “Come on.” Kip moaned.

  Pete was slow to understand. They always shared a tent on their campouts and motel rooms on their travels. But it occurred to him that those trips were all prepuberty. “Sleep anywhere you want,” he said finally. “As long as it’s on this floor.”

  Kip dragged his cot into the library at the far end of the house and set it up on the other side of the fireplace. The stonework there was the only solid mass in a house full of open stud walls, and Pete wouldn’t be able to see him or probably even hear him back there.

  Stay within sight and sound. The words surfaced suddenly in his memory. That was his constant refrain back when Kip was little and prone to wandering off at the park or the beach or the campground. Stay within sight and sound. He couldn’t remember when he stopped saying it. After he married Leigh probably. He wondered if he stopped saying it too soon. If he’d kept a closer watch and a tighter rein these last couple years, if he hadn’t left him and Chrissy home alone, none of this would have happened. They’d be home together right now, all four of them.

  It won’t be forever, he’d told Leigh. The truth would come out one way or another, and they’d put all this behind them. But she wasn’t going to welcome Kip back with open arms if it turned out he was lying. She might not even welcome Pete back, the man who picked his kid over her and all for a lie.

  Kip was roaming the skeletal rooms again, still searching for a signal on his phone. By the time construction was completed, the house would be equipped with state-of-the-art Wi-Fi, but until then the 4G network was the only link to the outside world, and Kip was starting to look panicky as he scaled the ladder to the second floor.

  Pete moved into the dining room and climbed a stepladder to hang a pair of trouble lights from the ceiling joists. He ran the cords out the window and went outside to plug them into the box on the exterior wall of the garage. The rain was pelting hard by then, and the wind was gusting so furiously he had to put his shoulder into it to get the back door to latch shut. A couple sawhorses stood in the kitchen, and he dragged them to the dining room and balanced a sheet of plywood over them.

  “Check it out,” he said when Kip clattered down the ladder and came into the room. “Dining table and desk all rolled into one.”

  “Hey. Over at the Hermitage?”

  His stupid joke name for the neighboring estate. Pete remembered how Leigh laughed when he first came out with it. She was always egging him on that way. Pete felt like a third wheel sometimes when the two of them got going, riffing on this or that, playing their witty word games. He pulled a wooden crate across the floor. “And these’ll make do for our chairs.”

  “Somebody’s over there.”

  “What?” He dragged another crate into place at the table.

  “I saw a light on.”

  “What are you talking about? You can’t see over the wall from here.” The table wobbled, and he dropped to the floor to slide a shim under one of the sawhorse legs.

  “The way the wind’s blowing the trees? From the third floor? I could see straight in.”

  He climbed to his feet. “Well, don’t say anything to Miller, okay? He’s already got the heebies about that place.”

  “Like I ever even talk to the dude.”

  “Hey, I left the pizza in the truck.” He tossed him the keys. “Run out and get it, would you?”

  The rain was still coming down hard after they polished off the pizza. Pete craned his head out of every window to check how bad the gutters were overflowing while Kip walked another loop through the house with his phone held high. “Got it!” he yelled excitedly from the bump-out for the breakfast room at the back of the house. Like he wasn’t facing trial and living in exile. Cell service, a full belly, and a room of his own were all it took to make Kip happy.

  As for Pete, this was usually his happiest time of day, home on the sofa with Leigh, the kids popping in and out of the family room, everyone under one roof. He didn’t know what to do with himself here, alone under this roof.

  Work. That was the only thing he knew. He took note of some spots along the foundation outside where the rain was puddling too deep—they’d need to do some regrading there—then took a flashlight and did a room-by-room inspection of the whole house and made a list of items that needed to be fixed or done over or worked around. By the time he reached the top floo
r he’d filled three pages of his notebook. Tomorrow his foreman was going to regret that Pete was living here as much as Pete regretted it tonight.

  He went to the double window on the gable end, the one Kip must have hung out of to spy on the place next door. There was no way he could have seen anything inside those walls. The trees formed an opaque green-black umbrella over all the buildings and grounds.

  He took out his phone and held it to the window, and when all the bars lit up, he pressed HOME.

  “Hey,” he said when she answered. “Are you getting much rain over there?”

  “Yes. It’s really blowing hard. I had to bring the horses in already.”

  “I might’ve left a window open in the family room—”

  “I closed it.”

  “Oh, okay.” He paused. “How’s everything else?”

  “Okay. How’s everything over there?”

  “Fine. All the comforts of home.” He winced as he said it. He was only repeating what he’d said to Kip an hour ago, but this time it sounded wrong. Like a rebuke, or a challenge. “Uh, listen, with the way this storm is brewing tonight—”

  “No, of course. You shouldn’t go out on these roads. Stay in. Stay dry.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, though, all right?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I love you.”

  “Always and everywhere.”

  He pushed END CALL and sat back on the sill with a sigh. Always and everywhere. It was what she liked to say, to him and the kids both. It meant unconditional, she told him, and all-encompassing. But he had to wonder. Did always mean even now? Did everywhere include Hollow Road?

  A gust of wind slapped a sheet of rain against his back and drenched him from collar to waist. He got up and shook himself like a dog, and as he did, a flicker of movement caught his eye. The security cameras mounted on the wall surrounding the Hermitage were doing their regular rotating sweeps. The wall was built of cinder blocks and faced with red brick to match the manor house, and it was topped with a little pitched roof shingled in cedar shakes to conceal the strand of electrified wire that wrapped around the entire perimeter. The only break in the wall was where the drive cut in from Hollow Road at the bottom of the hill, and that was blocked by solid steel gates that were always closed.