House on Fire

by Bonnie Kistler

  I’m afraid it’s a package deal, Peter had said when they first started to discuss a future together, and she smiled and said Two for the price of one! What a bargain!

  Ahead she saw Fred Dietrich peering into the mailbox at the end of the Golden Oldies lane. He straightened and grinned and flapped his fistful of mail to wave her down. “Hey, there, Leigh,” he said, stooping to the window. “You just missed Carrie. She’s off to Richmond.”

  “That’s okay. I’m just passing by on my way to Peter’s job site.”

  “Oh, sure. Boy, that place looks amazing. I bet it’ll be in a magazine when it’s done. He is some craftsman, that husband of yours.”

  “What’s going on in Richmond?”

  “Some charity function. Carrie figures if people already have their wallets open, they can shell out a few dollars for the farm.” He frowned at the sheaf of bills in his hand. “God knows we could use it.”

  “Donations down?”

  He gave a grim nod. “You know who we really miss around here?”

  Her throat tightened. Of course she knew. Chrissy was missed everywhere.

  “He was a huge help with our fund-raising.”

  She blinked. “Who?”

  “Your boy Kip. What a whiz he was at getting donors to give. Dialing for dollars, he called it. I used to listen to him work his magic. That boy could charm the birds out of the trees.”

  Of course. How could she forget Christopher Con Man? Always running some kind of scam. Sometimes for good, most times not. “Yes,” she murmured. “Well, bye, Fred.”

  A lump formed thick in her throat as she drove on. Package deal, she remembered, but the price had gone up since then.

  Another half mile brought her to the site. The last time she saw the house it was little more than a shell, but now it was nearly finished, and it was beautiful. King Midas’s first vision for the place was straight out of Gone with the Wind, but Peter had slowly coaxed him into something more organic to the site. Three stories tall but built into the hillside like it grew there. It was made of stone and stucco and copper flashing that winked in the sunlight, with a hundred muntined windows and doors, a gabled pergola at one end, and a vast bluestone terrace at the other. Peter always did beautiful work, but she could see that he’d outdone himself this time.

  It was late afternoon, his crew was gone, and she was able to pull all the way up the drive. But when she reached the top of the hill, she saw that Peter’s truck was gone, too. She should have called ahead. Music was playing from somewhere nearby. She could feel the heavy bass line vibrating through the floorboards of her car. A shadow passed by one of the open windows of the house. Kip was in there, alone, blasting his music like cannon fire through the countryside.

  She sat idling. It was Peter she came to apologize to, and she wasn’t sure what to say to Kip. That she was sorry, but for what? That she did her job and represented an emotionally abused wife to the best of her ability and didn’t foresee that years later Boyd Harrison might take it out on a stepson she didn’t even have at the time.

  After a long moment, she put the car in reverse and backed slowly down the drive.

  She still owed an apology, though, to someone else, and after she returned home, she steeled herself to make the call.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said as Shelby answered at the same moment with the same words.

  They met for lunch on Monday at a new place near Foggy Bottom. It was a long walk from both their offices, but Shelby said it was worth the hike. Farm-to-table, she told her, a real comfort-food restaurant.

  Leigh arrived first to the faux-rustic space and was shown to her seat at a rough-hewn plank table. The place was packed, and as she settled in to wait for Shelby, a party of boisterous young people caught her eye on the other side of the restaurant. There were six or eight of them, young men in shirts and ties and young women in office skirts and dresses. They looked like a lot of the young people that populated Washington—Hillrats or White House interns or GS-9s in some government agency. They seemed to be having some kind of reunion, and Leigh speculated that they went to school together and all came to Washington with their big dreams and high spirits. Ambitious young hopefuls. Kip would have been one of them in five or ten years.

  Shelby swept in ten minutes later wearing a lime-green romper. One of the most respected lawyers in the District and she was dressed in a style Leigh stopped putting Chrissy in at age five. It looked unbelievably sexy on Shelby, and heads swiveled to watch her as she navigated the restaurant in her long-legged stride.

  Leigh stood up to hug her, and Shelby held her back and looked her over, up and down. “You look wonderful,” she decided. “You’re practically glowing.”

  “I believe that’s called sweat,” Leigh said as they took their seats.

  Shelby ignored the deflection. “Does this mean you’re feeling better?”

  “A little. Being back to work helps. I might have a new custody case that looks interesting. And I’ll tell you what else—promise you won’t laugh?”

  “Cross my heart.”

  “I’ve been meeting with a minister.”

  “How nice.” Shelby opened her menu and let her lips curve behind it. She had the usual sophisticate’s disdain for religion.

  Leigh laughed. “I saw that.”

  “Oh, whatever works, darling. Just promise me you won’t start selling flowers in the airport. Or wear homespun dresses, God forbid.”

  Their server arrived, and after they put in their orders, Shelby picked up her water glass and said, “So tell me about this minister of yours.”

  “Well, he’s really more a professor than a minister, at the moment, at least. He teaches Ethics at George Washington, and he’s written some interesting books—”

  “Wait.” Shelby slammed the glass to the table. “Are you talking about Stephen Kendall?”

  “You’ve heard of him?”

  “Of course. The gun control guy. I don’t agree with a thing he says, but, honey”—she affected a southern-belle drawl—“ah do declare ah admire the way he looks while he says it.”

  “I know.” Leigh was a little sheepish. “I used to think of him as Reverend Brooks Brothers.”

  “No, that’s not right.” Shelby tapped her chin. “Let me think. Not Clooney. We need to go back to the golden age of Hollywood. Gregory Peck? No, your reverend has more of a twinkle in his eye. I know! Cary Grant! But without the transatlantic accent.”

  “Okay, stop!” Leigh laughed.

  “So exactly how are you seeing him?”

  Leigh knew she was teasing her, but she tried to answer anyway. Her relationship with Stephen was more than simple friendship, but the extra dimension was hard to define. It wasn’t priest-penitent, not exactly. She didn’t confess everything to him, and he never preached at her and certainly didn’t grant her absolution. Sometimes she thought of it as a therapist-patient relationship, but Stephen confided too much about his own struggles for that to be accurate.

  “It’s like we’re in AA,” she said finally. “And he’s my sponsor.”

  “Huh. So what is it you’re addicted to?”

  Grief was the obvious answer, but she was spared speaking it as their plates arrived. She changed the subject, to the new man in Shelby’s life. He was a complete departure from her usual type. He was black, for one thing, and older than she was, and as a senior cabinet official, he had an even more distinguished career. “So what’s he like?” Leigh asked. “More Denzel Washington or Idris Elba?”

  Shelby pretended to deliberate. “Morgan Freeman,” she said finally.

  Leigh sputtered a laugh, and Shelby joined in until they sounded nearly as raucous as the reunion table of young people across the room.

  That party was starting to break up. They were all on their feet and going through an exchange of elaborate good-byes around the table. One of the young women turned to one of the men and presented her cheek for a peck, but he grabbed hold of her instead and bent her backward l
ike the iconic sailor and nurse in Times Square on V-J Day. He dipped her so low the girl’s wheat-blond ponytail swept the floor. Everyone laughed, and she joined in good-naturedly, straightened her dress, and headed for the door.

  A beat too late Leigh recognized her. She jumped up from the table and ran for the door and burst out on the pavement as the ponytail fluttered around the corner at the end of the block. By the time she reached the corner, Emily Whitman was out of sight.

  Shelby came up behind her. “What the hell was that about?”

  Leigh struggled to catch her breath. “I thought I recognized somebody.”

  “Who?”

  She searched the skyline of all the familiar Foggy Bottom landmarks. The Kennedy Center was nearby. George Washington University, the World Bank, the State Department, and the notorious Watergate hotel complex. The mysterious minister of disinformation could have disappeared into any of those buildings. “Oh, nobody important,” she said finally. “Shall we go back and pay the check?”

  “Already taken care of,” Shelby said and linked arms with Leigh for their walk back to work.

  Leigh received a call that afternoon from someone named Deborah confirming her appointment with Dr. Alfarsi the next day.

  “You have the wrong number,” she said and started to hang up.

  “Wait—isn’t this Leigh Huyett?”

  “Yes, but I’m not a patient of your practice.”

  “I was told—” Some papers rustled on the other end of the line. “Oh. This is Devra from Dr. Alfarsi’s office calling to confirm your appointment.”

  “Oh!” Leigh took down the address the woman recited. “Yes, tomorrow at nine thirty. I’ll be there.”

  Dr. Alfarsi was a gynecologist, and his office was in a brick town house shrouded in tangled vines of ivy on a quiet, tree-lined street in Alexandria. Leigh announced herself at the reception desk and was immediately ushered down a wainscoted hallway and into a small examining room. The walls of the room were hung with posters illustrating the development of a fetus from blastocyst to zygote to full-term infant. “Have a seat,” the nurse said. “The doctor will be right with you.”

  The doctor meaning Devra, but the subterfuge was so much like a real doctor’s visit that Leigh wouldn’t have been surprised if they gave her a paper gown and made her put her feet in the stirrups. The examination table took up most of the room, but there were two chairs, and she took one of them and pulled out her notes. She’d done some further work on the Virginia domicile issue and had a list of questions for Devra to complete the analysis. One of them she could cross off already. Receiving her medical care in Alexandria would be one point on the Virginia side of the scale.

  The door opened again, and Devra swept in. Gracefully, as if in a dance, she removed her abaya. Beneath it she wore a sleeveless, full-skirted dress with elephants embroidered in gold thread around the hemline. Her hair was styled differently today, in a sleek French twist, and she had dark circles under her eyes that her elaborate makeup failed to conceal.

  She held out both hands to Leigh. “Thank you for meeting me here. I was afraid my Saturdays at Saks were becoming too regular. Hassan”—she nodded in the direction of the waiting room—“could become suspicious.”

  “He may already be,” Leigh said.

  Devra’s brow furrowed as Leigh told her about Emily Whitman and her threats. “I don’t understand. Why should this woman care about such a thing?”

  “She must work for your husband. He must suspect that you’ve been meeting with me.”

  Devra’s eyes went wide and fearful.

  “I took the liberty of getting this for you.” Leigh handed her a prepaid, disposable phone. “My numbers are programmed in. Office, home, and mobile. Whenever you need to talk to me, call me on this.”

  Devra took it gingerly. “I don’t know if this is possible. There are people . . .”

  “Take it in the bathroom,” Leigh suggested, remembering a hundred different spy movies. “Turn the shower on.”

  Devra still looked doubtful. Leigh wondered if she’d never used a mobile phone or if her doubts went deeper. “That is, if you’ve decided to go forward?”

  “I have.” Devra straightened. “I wish to file immediately in Virginia on grounds of adultery.”

  She’d gotten ahead of herself on both points, and Leigh hurried to rein her in. Virginia jurisdiction was still uncertain, she told her—they needed to examine the domicile issue more closely. And a claim of adultery wasn’t certain either.

  “But you told me—” Devra sounded betrayed. “You told me his second and third marriages would not be recognized by your courts.”

  “That’s correct, but he could assert a defense known as condonation. If you continued to have sexual relations with him after you knew about the other wives, then you’re considered to have condoned his adultery. So the crucial question is, when did you learn of his subsequent marriages?”

  Her erect carriage collapsed. “I attended the weddings,” she said helplessly. She looked up from her bowed shoulders. “So I am lost?”

  “In Virginia, there’s still the alternative of no-fault divorce. You mentioned you have a country home there?”

  “Yes.”

  Leigh took out her notes. “What’s the address there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Her head came up. “You don’t know your address?”

  “How would I know it?” A defensive tone crept into the sheikha’s voice. “Someone else drives me there. Someone else handles the mail. Why should I concern myself?”

  “Well, if you could move there and live apart from your husband for a year—”

  She sighed as if she were trying once again to explain something to a slow pupil. “This is impossible. He would not allow it.”

  Leigh forged ahead. “There’s another alternative. In the District, you’ll recall, separation from bed and board can suffice. You could continue living with your husband but sever all sexual relations—”

  “This is even more impossible!” Devra looked appalled. “A wife may not refuse sex! My husband would—” She broke off with a hand to her heaving chest.

  “He would—what? Would he hurt you?”

  “I have never given him cause. But a husband has that right.”

  Another idea started to take shape in Leigh’s mind. “You’re afraid he might exercise it?”

  “Of course I’m afraid. But it’s more than that. It would be a sin for me to refuse him. The angels would curse me!”

  Leigh nodded but it was only the first part that interested her, her admission of fear. “Another fault ground is cruelty.”

  “No. He has never once struck me.”

  “The law requires only that you have a reasonable apprehension of bodily harm.”

  “It feels dishonest to claim such a thing.” Devra’s black eyes stared unfocused into the middle distance, as hazy as if she were looking through the veiled slit in her niqab.

  Leigh followed her gaze to the posters on the wall, and a half-dozen embryonic children gazed back at her. “You can leave him, you can refuse sex, or you can sue for divorce on the basis of cruelty. I’m afraid I don’t see another alternative.”

  “Except to stay with him.” Devra stood up so abruptly that the elephant embroidery on her dress swayed like a swinging trunk. “I must reflect further on these things.”

  Leigh rose to her feet. “Of course.”

  Devra rewrapped her abaya and opened the door a crack. “Someone will contact you.” She peered out into the hallway. “Please wait here until we’ve gone.”

  Leigh waited ten minutes before she left, though it probably didn’t matter anymore. She wasn’t sure she’d ever hear from Devra again, on the prepaid phone or otherwise. In the rules of their world, Devra’s ability to divorce would always be defeated by the sheikh’s unwillingness to let her leave him.

  Though maybe it wasn’t cultural, she reflected on the drive back to the office. Maybe it was simply
that some husbands held on tighter than others.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Two weeks into summer Kip mutinied. “I’m done with all that,” he announced from his cot Sunday morning. This was his version of taking a stand: lying flat on his back. “I’m not going.”

  “You damn well are,” Pete said, because he had to, not because it would make any difference. Short of dragging the kid out of bed and wrestling him into the truck, there was no way he could force him to spend the day with his mother. He was eighteen now, a theoretical adult, and all the carefully negotiated and sometimes hard-fought visitation protocols were out the window. Kip didn’t have to visit anybody he didn’t want to anymore.

  “What’re you gonna do, stuck here all day?”

  He scrunched up his pillow and flopped over. “Catch up on my z’s.”

  Fair enough. He’d been working long days for the past two weeks. It was hard for Pete to believe the Millers could have so much clutter—they must be major-league hoarders—but Kip seemed to like the work. He tore out to the Jag every morning when Yana arrived to pick him up, and he staggered back every night looking wrung out but happy, the way a guy should look after a good day’s physical labor.

  “Suit yourself,” Pete said, but he gritted out the words to show he was still pissed.

  Karen answered the door and looked past him to the driveway, smiling her tentative smile at the truck until she saw that Kip wasn’t in it. Her eyes filled with tears.

  Pete leaned in and spoke in a low voice. “Call him. It’s not you he’s avoiding.”

  She blinked and looked away.

  “Daddy!” Mia squealed as she pranced down the stairs in her party dress, and he caught her up in his arms and gave her a twirl.

  Pete didn’t have to come up with any ideas for today’s outing. It was already ordained: she had a birthday party to attend. He drove her to her friend’s house on the far side of the school district and followed behind as she skipped to the front door clutching her gift like the ticket to admission. “Hello, Mia!” the friend’s mom cried out in a voice like a circus ringleader. “Hurry! Come see what’s out back!” She prized the gift from Mia’s hands and waved her inside, then stepped aside to hold the door open for Pete. “Come in, Mia’s daddy!” she cried at the same volume. “The men are in the man cave! The game’s already started!”