A Sudden Light: A Novel (35 page)

The fuel was extremely dry; it hadn’t rained since I had been there, and there was no telling how long before that. So the crackling began and the flames leapt, and soon, as Serena said, the kindling created a chimney; cool air was sucked in from below and rushed up to the top and, like magic—we had a bonfire.

Stone benches encircled the fire pit, and we all took our places. Even Dickie was with us that evening, sitting next to Serena on a bench; Grandpa Samuel and I sat on another bench; my father sat by himself on the far side of the crescent. My father reached into the cooler, which rested on the bench next to him. He pulled out a beer and passed it to Dickie, and another for Serena. He looked at me.

“What do you want? We have Coke in here,” he said of the cooler.

“I’ll take a beer,” I said.

My father looked at me hard, and then, much to my surprise, he twisted off the top of a beer and handed it over. I realized, then, that being an adult was just about bullshitting everyone around you. Just do things until someone stops you from doing those things, and then say, “Oh, that isn’t allowed?” I took a swig and didn’t like it. It was bitter, and not at all what I thought a beer would taste like. Bitter bread. I set the bottle down by my foot, and I must have made a funny face because my father didn’t look at me, but he said, again, “We have Coke in here.”
I sheepishly handed him the beer in exchange for a Coke, and I felt like a dumb kid, but my father didn’t make a fuss about it, so neither did I.

The fire was raging and loud. We sat, our faces and hands and arms baked by the inferno, and our backs and necks left to cool. It was after nine, but still light out, because Seattle was practically South Alaska in terms of latitude. For a long time we were silent, staring into the flames.

“Mother loved a fire, Trevor,” Serena said eventually. “We built fires every weekend night, winter or summer, as long as it wasn’t raining, and sometimes even when it was raining, if it was only a drizzle.”

“She liked a hot fire in the winter,” Grandpa Samuel echoed.

“She did. She said fires were transformative. She told us fires provided light to lead souls through the darkness of our universe. Everything in this world begins with fire and will end with fire, and so it is
through
fire that we can find the answers to the riddles. Didn’t she say that, Brother Jones?”

“She did,” my father agreed.

“She was a very forgiving woman,” Serena said. “Mother was very forgiving, Trevor. I believe I inherited that trait from her. Your father inherited her impulsiveness and passion. I inherited her generosity of spirit, her forgiveness.”

She looked at my father significantly. He avoided her gaze for a moment, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, but when she didn’t continue speaking, he grew impatient and looked up at her and nodded as if to say he understood that he had been forgiven for his transgressions, whatever they were. I knew. She was talking about their fight in the kitchen.

“Daddy couldn’t start a fire with a blowtorch, but Mother?” Serena said. “She was very good at building fires. She taught your father how to do it. Isn’t this a magnificent fire, Dickie?”

“Indeed, my love.”

“I remember . . .” Grandpa Samuel said.

“You don’t remember much, Daddy,” Serena said. “What is it you don’t remember this time?”

Grandpa Samuel was silent for a bit, then he said: “I don’t remember.”

“No, you don’t remember, and sometimes it’s best that way. Sometimes it’s best to start fresh. Every day, fresh. Living always in the present, unburdened by the pain of the past. Most of us drag around our misdeeds like giant dead birds tied to our necks; we condemn ourselves to telling every stranger we meet the story of our anguish and inadequacies, hoping that one day we will be forgiven, hoping that we will find a person who will look at us and pretend to ignore the ridiculous dead birds hanging from our sunburned and weather-beaten necks. And if we find that person, and if we don’t hate him for not hating us, if we don’t hold him in contempt for not treating us contemptuously, as we expect to be treated—nay, as we
demand
to be treated—well, that person will be something of a soul mate, I imagine. That’s got to be in the definition somewhere, don’t you agree, Trevor, my fellow bibliophile and reader of fine poetry? But not you, Daddy. Because you can’t remember. Sometimes I envy you, Daddy. I really do.”

“No. . . .”

“No, I suppose you’re right; I will never envy you. Did you remember what it was you wanted to say?”

“No.”

“Of course not. It’s fine, Daddy. There are more terrible ways to die.”

Silence again, and then Serena stood up and gathered the willow sticks that had been stripped down to green wood. She gathered the marshmallows.

“The fire is still too hot,” my father said.

“Oh, poo,” Serena said. “So we burn a few. It will take forever for the fire to burn down to embers.”

“Fine.”

He took a stick and poked the tip through a marshmallow, then another. He handed the stick to me, and I aimed it toward the fire.

“Tell us about your wedding day, Brother Jones,” Serena said. “Sing to us, as we gather around the fire. Weave us a story from your memories.”

“I don’t think that’s very interesting to anyone,” my father grumbled.

“It is to
me
,” she replied. “And I don’t think anyone else minds.”

“I really don’t want to.”

“It’s important for you to reveal yourself to your son,” Serena said significantly. She turned to Richard and instructed him to pass me the chocolate bars and the graham crackers. “And now tell us what it was like, Brother Jones. It was in England, we know that much. Tell us.”

It was clear that my father felt uncomfortable, but it was also clear that he couldn’t resist Serena’s urging.

“It was in an old stone manor house,” he said. “In an old, rolling country club.”

“A magical place!” Serena said. “A place that will last forever.”

“Frayed around the edges,” my father clarified. “There were seams showing.”

“Like
this
house.”

“Not nearly as bad, but . . .”

“Tell us.”

“The day started with rain showers, but then it got very beautiful, sunny and warm. Then it cooled off again.”

“The service was outside?”

“No, in the chapel. The reception was outside, while it was clear. We ate dinner in the dining hall as the fog rolled in.”

“Oh, the fog!”

“Drama,” Richard observed.

“Yes, drama!” Serena exclaimed. “Magic!”

She nodded, satisfied, and passed napkins to me, since I was struggling with my melted chocolate and gooey marshmallow concoction.

“She wore a white dress,” my father said without prompting. “I wore a suit; it was the first suit I ever owned. She was so beautiful. She had her hair put up, which I always liked because it showed off her smooth,
sloping neck. Even still, when I see her from across the room and she has her hair up, I feel something. Happy. I don’t know. Contented.”

“I think we call that love, Jones,” Serena said. “That feeling we can’t quite describe but thirst to possess.”

“Her family was . . . funny, you know. They’re a very caustic family, and I hadn’t met many of them before the wedding. It’s all about dry British humor with them, like you’d see in a movie. But they love each other, you can tell. There’s a connection between them that’s deeper than all that.”

“Like you had with Mother.”

“Something like that, I guess,” he said. “I liked being with her family.”

My father stopped talking and stared into the fire, and I could have sworn I saw tears pooling in his eyes. I was moved by it.

“Where is she now?” Richard asked loudly, breaking the moment.

Serena glared at him.

“Your wife,” Richard clarified in a more suitable tone. “I’m afraid I don’t know her name.”

“Rachel,” my father answered.

“Yes, Rachel. Where is she now? Why isn’t she here, sharing this seminal moment with us?”

“She’s in England,” Serena explained. “She and Jones are taking a bit of a break. There have been many changes recently, so it only seemed right to accommodate Rachel’s request for space. Isn’t that right, Jones?”

“Magic doesn’t last forever,” he said.

“You shouldn’t be afraid,” Serena said soothingly.

“I’m not, I don’t think. Afraid of what?”

Serena stood up and circled around the far side of the fire, behind the flames, to the cooler, which she opened to remove a bottle of beer.

“It’s okay to want things,” she said, kneeling next to the cooler, in front of my father; she put her hand on his knee. “It’s okay to change. We’re always so afraid. We live our lives in fear, like we’re children afraid of going to our first day of school. There is nothing to fear about the
unknown. Tomorrow is
not
going to be the same as yesterday, so why do we
need
it to be?”

She twisted off the top and handed the bottle to my father.

“Hey, I thought you were getting that for me,” Richard teased.

“Relax, dear,” Serena said, taking another bottle from the cooler and circling back to him. “There’s plenty for you.”

She walked toward him and didn’t stop until she was inches from his face. She reached down and pressed his head to her belly, and as she did so, she leaned back and took a long drink from the bottle. She took the bottle from her lips and looked at me deliberately as she released Richard’s head; she handed him the beer. Still she didn’t take her eyes off me, and I wondered if she was going to have sex with Richard right there by the fire and then murder him and eat his heart, or twist off his head and swallow it like a giant humanoid praying mantis.

She did neither. She took her seat and looked down her nose, somewhat satisfied.

“Trevor,” she said softly, almost inaudibly.

And the heat from the fire engulfed us all.

“I remember!” Grandpa Samuel blurted out, startling everyone.

“What do you not remember now, Daddy?” Serena asked with an obvious roll of her eyes. “And please make it good.”

“I remember a fire,” he said.

“A fire. There were so many fires, how do you know which was which? How do you know you’re remembering the fire you think you remember and not another one?”

Grandpa Samuel looked at her, baffled, and I wondered if he would succumb to her deliberate attempt to confuse him. I hoped he wouldn’t.

“I
think
I remember,” he ventured.

He said it feebly enough that Serena cast it aside and began collecting garbage and bottles. Richard and my father helped her, and, soon, they had collected all the things and placed them back in the bags.

“Are you coming?” Serena asked Grandpa Samuel and me.

We looked at each other, then we looked at Serena.

“We’ll stay for a while,” I said. “To watch the fire.”

“Ah,” Serena said, her face dawning with recognition. “An excellent idea. I see, Trevor, that you are more clever than I thought. Yes. Alone time, so you can attend to your mission. Be sure to scuttle the coals before you leave; we don’t need to start a wildfire tonight.”

She gathered the remaining bags and followed my father and Richard, who had already started back to the house. I picked up a long stick and poked at the fire. The darkness was nearly complete, though some of the spilled sun still clung to the mountains.

“When I was a boy,” Grandpa Samuel said after a time.

I was relieved that he seemed to really remember something. I wanted to hear it.

“What happened when you were a boy?” I asked.

“My father took me to a logging site, up north, near Chuckanut,” he said, and the embers glowed. “I was six years old, I think. He wanted me to see the world of men. I had only lived here at Riddell House. I had been raised by my mother and the nannies, alongside my sisters, as if I were another girl like them.”

“You had sisters?” I asked.

“Two. Daisy and Alexandra.”

“What happened to them?”

“I don’t know. My mother left with them, and we never heard from them again. When my father died, the lawyers tried to find them; they never could.”

“So they weren’t there when your father took you to the logging site?”

“They were at home. They left after that. They left because of that.”

“What happened at the logging site?”

“The hills had been clear-cut. My father left me with the other boys while he went to attend to things, and, at the end of the day, they lit fires. All over the mountain. They burned the stumps and branches and
scraps of wood left behind; they piled them into giant piles and they lit the piles on fire. It was gray and cold and almost raining. It smelled of burning wood.”

Grandpa Samuel fell silent in the glow; I smelled the smoke on myself.

“What else?” I prodded.

“The boys had hatchets. The older boys. They took out their hatchets and chopped on a chopping block. Small pieces of wood. They took turns holding the wood and chopping, always with the grain so a sliver curled off. I was fascinated by it. I’d seen loggers chop down trees, but these were boys like me, but bigger, and they were chopping things, too. So my father told one of them to show me how to do it. ‘He’s awfully little,’ the boy said. ‘And he’s never held a hatchet before.’ My father yelled at the boy until he was almost in tears—that’s how my father was; he was mean. The boy stood behind me and held my hand with the hatchet in it. ‘Never cut with a dull ax,’ he said, and my father said, ‘That’s right!’ The boy held my hand and guided it down so I cut a sliver of wood off the split of firewood. The boy was relieved and smiled like he had been spared his life.”

Grandpa Samuel looked over at me and nodded.

“Was your father proud of you?” I asked.

“My father told the boy to let me do it myself. He made the boy step away from me; he wanted to see me do it. So I held the wood steady and I lifted the hatchet over my head. The boy was afraid, but I wasn’t. ‘Let it drop straight,’ he said. ‘It’ll cut all right; it’s sharp.’ But I knew what my father wanted, so I did it.”

He paused as if he’d run out of steam, his eyes fixed on the fire.