House on Fire

by Bonnie Kistler

  “Hey, listen,” he said when he climbed the ladder back down to the ground floor.

  “Yeah?” Kip was doing his homework at the makeshift desk, typing up some notes while his head swiveled from phone to laptop.

  “Just in case. Stay out of sight and sound of those people next door, okay?”

  “Yeah, whatever,” he said and kept on typing.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Leigh remembered stories of long-ago pioneer women who were driven mad by the howling winds that swept across the wild empty plains of the frontier. She’d spent most of her life in the gentle rolling hills of Northern Virginia and couldn’t imagine what it must be like, living in that kind of geographic desolation, battered by those relentless prairie winds.

  But she knew what the desolation of her own house felt like, and the incessant whining of the dog had to come in a close second to the wind. Shepherd was driving her insane with his agitated rounds through the house as he sniffed out the corners of every room and reared up at every window to press his nose and paws to the glass. Whining for his family to gather into the fold.

  She thought it was awful when Ted left, but at least then the house was full of people. The kids and all of their friends were there, and all of Leigh’s, too. Her girlfriends were united in their outrage at Ted, and Leigh spent some of the most boisterous evenings of her life those first few months, drinking wine and trash-talking about men with Peter Pan syndrome. Her mornings were full of company, too, since the new kitchen was under way by then and the construction crew arrived early every day. And her days would begin with her handsome builder knocking on the door to go over the work plan and lingering for a cup of coffee and a little conversation.

  Now the house was empty. Hollow House was her stupid joke name for Peter’s latest job, but this was the house that was truly hollow. Gutted, as if a fire swept through and incinerated everything they’d built here. The fire was sparked by Kip, but who fanned the ember into flames? No one but Leigh. It might be Peter’s decision to leave, but it was her fault. It was the worst sin a stepparent could commit. She made him choose between her and his son.

  She felt a thud in her belly like a rock dropped down an empty well when she watched them pack up and go. She was responsible—she’d said the wrong thing, she flicked a domino and all the others had to fall—but it wasn’t at all what she’d intended. She certainly didn’t want Peter to leave, and not even Kip. She wanted to be the one to go, because then she would be the one to come back. When the day came that she could look at Kip and not see Chrissy, she would come back and they would be here waiting for her. But now it was all turned around. Now it was Peter’s decision when to come back. Or whether.

  The second Peter suggested moving to Hollow House, she should have said No. Don’t go. I’ll try harder. We’ll get through this. But all she’d said was I don’t want you to leave. She may have even said I don’t want you to leave. No wonder he left.

  She wandered through the empty rooms of the first floor. The kitchen still stank of smoke and ash, a lingering reminder of the chicken she’d cremated, and she fled upstairs to escape it. Their bedroom was their sanctuary, she always thought, but now it looked like a place hastily evacuated in the path of a wildfire. Peter’s closet door stood open, his dresser drawers gaped empty, the bed was still unmade after three days.

  She closed the door on that room and wandered, inevitably, to the children’s wing. Kip’s door stood open, and she closed it. Chrissy’s door was closed, and she opened it and stood on the threshold, gazing in at the space her child had occupied most on this earth. Where she’d left her deepest mark. Now it was all that remained. It was a dinosaur’s footprint, fossilized in the rock.

  She sat down on the narrow bed and smoothed over the fabric of the comforter. Grosgrain ribbons were stitched into a frame around the edges, and she ran a nail across their corrugated surface. Then her fingers touched something else—a spiraled filament, gossamer-fine—and she plucked it up and held it to the light. It was a hair. A single red-gold hair.

  Every night after her bath Chrissy would run down in her pajamas and sit on a stool at Leigh’s feet to get her hair combed out. She smelled of soap and strawberries, and her firm young back melted into a soft puddle of flannel as she pressed against her mother’s knees. Leigh worked out the tangles, and when she was done she plunged all ten fingers in until a perfect little corkscrew twisted around each one. When she let go, the curls sprang out all over Chrissy’s head. Like a nimbus.

  She cupped the single hair in the palm of her hand to hold in the memory, and when she lay back and wrapped the comforter around her it was like she was spinning her own cocoon.

  He’d stop by every day, he’d said, and though they hadn’t discussed exactly when, dinner was the most likely time. Mornings were when everyone rushed about and scattered. Evenings were when they slowed down and came together. So she forced herself out of bed that first day and made a salad and put on a pot of water for pasta. But the storm blew in that afternoon and he didn’t come. He was right not to—they’d already lost too much to wet roads in this family. They talked on the phone instead, but she was so terrified of saying the wrong thing again that she barely talked at all. The pot boiled dry before she remembered to turn off the burner.

  The next day she marinated a pair of lamb chops and made a fresh salad. She was upstairs doing her hair when she heard Peter’s truck in the driveway, and she ran down to find him in the kitchen, on his haunches, ruffling Shepherd’s fur and accepting his slurping licks all over his face. He stood up to kiss her, and she felt the wet scrape of his beard against her cheek. He hadn’t shaved and his face was covered with heavy black stubble.

  “Would you like a drink before dinner?” she asked. “I only have to grill the lamb chops and we’ll be ready to eat.”

  Peter looked at the table, already nicely set. Then his eyes slid toward the front window.

  The realization hit her like a sledgehammer. “Kip’s outside?”

  “I’m sorry, babe. He wouldn’t come in.”

  She’d made another terrible mistake. Setting only two places on the table, marinating only two lamb chops. There was no way Peter wouldn’t take this as a slap in the face.

  “Shall I see what I can pack up out of the fridge for you?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t bother. We’ll hit a drive-thru.”

  “Oh. Wait a minute.” She went to the desk built into the kitchen cabinetry. Mission Control, she’d described it to Peter when they were designing the space. It was where they kept the bills and the message board and Leigh’s laptop and a little file box, which she flipped open now. “We have some coupons here.” She started to sort through them but finally gave up and thrust the whole handful at him. “Some of them might be expired, though.”

  “Okay.” He stuffed them in his shirt pocket, then didn’t seem to know what to do. Neither did she. They stood six feet apart in the middle of the kitchen and shifted from one foot to the other with their arms folded awkwardly. “I guess I should be—” he began.

  “Okay.” She turned her face slightly when he stepped in to kiss her, enough to avoid the worst of his beard-scrape.

  He stepped back stiffly. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow?”

  “Good night.” She felt foolish after she said it. It was still broad daylight outside. But after he left, she went back upstairs and into Chrissy’s bed again.

  He didn’t come the next night, even though she dressed and waited and watched for him. He called instead, at seven, and she flew down the hall to answer the phone in the bedroom. But when she saw PETE’S CELL on the display, her hand froze. He wouldn’t be calling except to say he wasn’t coming, and she didn’t know what to say in return. That’s okay? Or Please come! No, she wouldn’t muster anything but banalities. She could only talk of weather and food and coupons.

  Three rings, then four, then voicemail cut it off, and she lost her chance. He’d be worried about why she didn’t answer.
She needed to call him back, and she tried to think what to say. I love you, always and everywhere, that much she could do. I miss you. But what next? The fear that she would say the wrong thing again was paralyzing.

  She picked up the phone, and when a rapid beeping told her a voicemail was waiting, she dialed in.

  Hey, sorry, he said. I got held up on the job today. We had a couple snafus, and it took me a while to straighten things out. So I’m running too late to stop by. But I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?

  Carefully, she hung up the phone. There were times in her practice when emotions ran too high and she couldn’t trust herself to phrase her position correctly over the telephone or in person. Whenever that happened she managed the situation by cutting off voice contact with opposing counsel—sometimes even with her own client—and communicating only in writing. Whether in emails or letters or fifty-page briefs, she could control the dialogue so much better in writing.

  She got out her cell phone and typed out a text. Sorry I missed your call— No, she wasn’t sorry, not when he was the one who should apologize. She backspaced to delete that text and typed another. No need to stop by. I’m fine. You?

  She pushed SEND the way she would have said Over on a walkie-talkie. It was his turn now. She sat down to wait for his reply on the edge of their bed. It was still unmade, and she could smell him in the sheets. She could smell the musk of their last failed lovemaking.

  It was twenty minutes before the phone burbled with an incoming message. OK. That was all.

  Over and out.

  A week passed, and nobody came to visit. All her old friends seemed to have drifted away. She must have been too wrapped up in Peter these last five years to tend to her friendship fires. She’d missed too many book group meetings and coffee dates and wine-and-cheese gatherings. She’d been too content in her little circle of two and her bigger circle of seven. Or perhaps nobody came or called because they didn’t think she needed them to. That was the trouble with a lifetime spent always striving to project an image of competence and self-sufficiency. Oh, don’t be silly, no need, I’ve got it covered. Eventually people took her at her word.

  Though maybe the reason nobody came or called was because nobody knew what to say to the crazy bitter bereaved lady. There wasn’t even a name for what Leigh was now. If she lost her husband, she’d be a widow. Her parents, an orphan. But what did you call a mother who lost her child? There was no word for what she was. It was unthinkable and thus unnameable.

  Shelby checked in now and then, but those calls were brief and unhelpful. They used to tell each other everything, no topic was ever off-limits, but now Shelby cut her short. You know I can’t talk to you about that, she said whenever Leigh asked about the case or the quest for the mythical priest. Shelby was supposed to be her best friend, but apparently she changed her loyalties as often as her Agent Provocateur lingerie. Kip was her client now, and Peter was paying her hefty fees.

  Leigh couldn’t steel herself to call her office, but she stayed in touch with Polly by email, enough to juggle her calendar and postpone hearings or palm her work off on colleagues. Enough to track her phone messages and persuade herself nothing was so urgent that she’d have to poke her head out of her shell and pick up the phone. One day Polly flagged a message with a question mark: Someone named Ashley Gregg called. She said you’d know what it’s about. But she didn’t, she didn’t even recognize the name, and she didn’t call back.

  The twins called every day, separately, in actual, live-voice telephone calls that would have thrilled her once. She would have pressed them for every detail of their classes and hoped for a few sanitized details of their social lives or just free-floated on the husky boy-man timbre of their voices. But now their conversations were full of false starts and awkward silences. They were trying hard to be dutiful sons to her, she knew that, but they were swimming in their own grief, and she couldn’t make it worse by confiding how much pain she was in, or God forbid, by crying. It was her job to buck them up, though her attempts were feeble. Their calls inevitably trailed off into wisps of words. “So . . . ,” and “I guess I should . . . ,” and “Yeah, I guess.”

  One day she answered the phone and heard both their voices on a rare three-way call that obviously took some coordination. Their tones were different, too, with none of the meandering somnolence of their earlier calls. “We just heard,” Zack said abruptly.

  “What?”

  “Everything,” Dylan said.

  “Is it true?”

  “What?”

  “Any of it.”

  She took the phone into Chrissy’s room and stretched out on the bed as they explained. It seemed they’d been having actual, live-voice conversations with Peter, too, and today it came out that he and Kip were living at Hollow House and they badgered him until he explained why.

  “What did he say?”

  They didn’t answer. They had other things on their minds. “Is it true, what Kip’s saying?”

  “Well—” She pulled the comforter up to her chest. “It’s true that he’s saying it.”

  “Do you believe it?”

  “What do you think?”

  “He’s lying,” Zack said.

  “I don’t know,” Dylan said.

  Zack was always the more impetuous of the two. He went with gut instincts while Dylan liked to think things through more carefully. The difference made them a good duo. They acted as a check on each other and usually ended up someplace in the middle. Leigh waited to hear where they’d end up this time.

  “Pete believes him,” Dylan said.

  Zack snorted. “What choice does he have?”

  “But think about it. If Kip was wasted, there’s no way she’d let him drive.”

  “He wasn’t wasted,” Leigh put in.

  “But if she thought he was. You know what that party must have looked like to Chrissy.”

  “Like Animal House or something.” Zack’s tone was grudging.

  “Right.”

  The two of them fell silent, and Leigh held her breath as she waited for them to complete their silent deliberations and render their verdict. But when Zack spoke again, he had a grin in his voice. “Hey, remember spring break, how she took the course over by that church?”

  Leigh was caught off guard by this turn in the conversation. Did Chrissy ride a steeplechase in March? Maybe, but she couldn’t recall that the course ran anywhere near a church, and she certainly didn’t remember that the twins were among the spectators.

  “Oh, man, she was something. Tearing around those cones like Mario Andretti.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We were just fooling around,” Dylan said.

  “She wanted a turn. It was an empty parking lot. Nobody was going to get hurt.”

  “She was good at it, though. Real good.”

  Chrissy had been driving, they were telling her. Leigh pulled the comforter up to her chin.

  “But here’s the thing,” Dylan said next. “I can see her driving, but I can’t see her lying about it to the cops. She wouldn’t let Kip take the fall for something she did.”

  “Right!” Zack said, like Bingo!

  The same reaction rang inside Leigh’s head. If Chrissy was driving—if—she would have owned up to it.

  “So he’s gotta be lying,” Zack said, coming full circle.

  “I guess,” Dylan said.

  “But still. It’s not Pete’s fault. Right, Mom?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why won’t you let him come home?”

  “Why won’t—I?” Now she’d come full circle. “What did Peter tell you?”

  “He said you need some space.”

  That was the opposite of what she needed. She had too much space. There was nothing but space and emptiness here in this hollow house. Even this long stretch of silence over the telephone line held too much empty space.

  “Mom?”

  “It’s not that. It’s just—he needs to be w
ith Kip right now.”

  Their silence told her she hadn’t quite answered their question. She sank deeper under the comforter. Negotiating the rapids of this conversation had sapped all her energy.

  “Well, what should we do? About Pete, I mean.”

  She never had to tell them before. She never even gave them the standard lecture about respecting and obeying their new stepparent just as they would a parent. They took to Peter from the start and got there all on their own.

  “That’s up to you,” she said.

  “Oh,” they said, nearly in unison, and they sounded so dejected that she knew she must have said the wrong thing again.

  “Well.” After a moment Dylan cleared his throat. “I know this much. It’s the last thing Chrissy would want.”

  “For this to tear us apart,” Zach said. “Right?”

  Tears burned in Leigh’s eyes. No, the last thing Chrissy would want was to be dead. “Right,” she said thickly.

  “So . . .”

  “I guess.”

  “Yeah.”

  And then it was good-bye.

  She spent hours in the family room loading the old home videos in the DVD player and watching Chrissy de-age from teenager to infant. Ted was a sloppy cameraman and he never seemed to get the audio on right, so the early videos were jerky and soundless, like old-time silent films, except in color. Vivid color. Chrissy’s persimmon curls and cornflower eyes lit up the screen and left Leigh convulsing with sobs. It was supposed to be cathartic to cry. Let it out, people always said, you’ll feel better afterward. But she only ever felt worse. Chrissy was still dead, and no amount of crying could change that.