The Arsonist (6 page)

The lovemaking itself was awkward and usually uncomfortable. Only once had they done it in a bed, when her grandmother was away and he came to her late at night. That was near the end of her senior year, when she’d been accepted to college. Lying in the dark next to her when they were finished, he asked her not to go, to stay and marry him; and she understood, abruptly, what her grandmother had meant when she said at the tentative start of their high school affair, “I’d think about whether it’s such a great
kindness
you’re doing the boy, taking up with him before you go off to your real life.” She’d been smiling, her voice was mild, as it usually was. Her eyes were unreadable behind her bifocals.

“This
is
my real life,” Sylvia had said.

“Oh,
is
it, now?” her grandmother had asked. They were having dinner together, as they did most nights that year. Sylvia’s parents had taken the two younger children with them, but they thought Sylvia should stay in the States for her senior year. It would be better for her college applications to have a normal year, to be able to take the required tests easily. So Sylvia and her grandmother learned to move around the old farmhouse companionably, to talk comfortably in the evenings over dinner; or, just as comfortably later in the evening,
not
talk, as Sylvia did her homework on the dining room table, and her grandmother read or wrote letters in the living room. “We’re like monks, off to our cells,” her grandmother said one night as they separated.

She’d wait to call Adrian until nine or so, she thought now, drinking her coffee. She’d have to remind him of their arrangement, of her expectations. This added a heightened sense of—what?—unpleasantness, she supposed, to the worries about the day.

——

But when Alfie got up, he was fine, he
had
bounced back, and she felt herself relaxing. She poured him coffee, and herself a second cup, and they went to sit outside on the screened porch together—it had warmed up enough by now to make this possible. He didn’t mention getting lost the night before. They talked quietly, aware of Frankie, asleep upstairs. They talked about her, about how worn out she seemed, even taking the jet lag into account. They talked about the fire. They talked about Liz and Clark’s arrival on Sunday.

After a while, she stood up to go to make breakfast. He followed her to the kitchen and poured himself another cup of coffee while she pulled out the equipment she’d need.

He went back to the living room while she got things ready. She could hear that he was listening to NPR on the radio, but she couldn’t hear the words—the bacon frying made a kind of white noise. When she called him in and they sat down, he summarized what was happening in the world for her, mostly more on the Lewinsky scandal. She was tired of it already.

As they were finishing breakfast, she thought perhaps she’d try now, she’d ask him what had been going on the night before. But what did she want?

For him to acknowledge it, she supposed.

What he’d put her through? Was that it? Or—this would be more generous—what he was going through himself?

Maybe that.

She smiled at him. “So,” she said. “What happened last night, do you think?”

“Oh, you were probably just tired, dear.” His voice was reassuring. “It was so dark out, it’s easy enough to make a mistake. I shouldn’t have let you do it.”

She was so disoriented by this that she didn’t know what to say. What came out quickly, without really thinking, was, “But you drove, too.” She couldn’t help it, her voice was accusatory.

He looked at her with concern for a moment, frowning. Then he smiled, gently, kindly—his Alfie smile—and said, “Surely not.”

She turned away, shocked. After a moment, without looking at him, she got up and started to clear the table.

Behind her, he seemed to be waiting for something. She ran the water over the first plate, watched the yellow paste of the egg yolk disappear. Should she argue with him? Should she insist he remember it as it had happened? Would that be punitive?

Or would it be condescending, punitive in a different way, to let it go, to assume he wouldn’t be able to correct his error? And why was she so furious at him? Whatever it was, he couldn’t help it, could he?

“Okay,” she said finally.

And it seemed this was enough. At any rate, after a moment she heard him go out of the room.

As she finished loading the dishwasher, as she wiped the counters, scrubbing fiercely at the fine, faint sprays of grease from the bacon, she was fighting back tears.

It was in the midst of this confusion of feeling that Adrian’s old blue pickup truck came up the driveway and parked by the barn. But it wasn’t Adrian in it. She watched as a young man swung himself down from the cab, a skinny kid maybe twenty or so in a plaid shirt and blue jeans, orangey work boots. He opened up the back of the truck and pulled out two long boards, which he rested against the bed of the truck to make a kind of ramp. He walked up this and started to slowly back the riding mower down.

She wiped her hands. She blew her nose and went out to confront him. He looked up as she crossed the circular drive.

“I’m Sylvia Rowley,” she said coldly, approaching him.

He looked at her for a few seconds before he said, flatly, “Hi.”

“And you are?”

“Tink. Snell.” He was a handsome boy, with dark curly hair that spilled over his forehead, that covered his ears. He had pale eyes, a greenish blue, with lashes so dark they looked mascaraed.

“I thought Adrian did our work,” she said.

“Not no more,” he said.

“Well, you’re late, if you’re in charge. This lawn is a disgrace.” She swept her hand around grandly.

“Yes,
ma’am
,” he said. A little smile. An assertion, she thought, that the
ma’am
, maybe even the
yes
, were meant ironically.

And then she was remembering. A scandal. Adrian’s sister, much younger, always in trouble, pregnant in high school by somebody or other. This would be her boy.

“You’re taking over for Adrian?”

“
Some
stuff. Just what he doesn’t have time for no more.” He reached into a red plastic milk crate full of tools and equipment in the back of the truck and extracted some bright yellow plastic ear protectors.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist on Adrian unless you can do the work we have for you in a timely fashion.” She waved around herself. “This is … unacceptable.”

He smiled once more. “Ma’am? It’s been raining.” He spoke as though this was something everyone ought to know. “For about three weeks steady. And now it warms up overnight and everybody’s getting here all at once and every one of um has got a list.” He lifted his shoulders, his hands:
What can you do?

Then: “If you want, you can talk to Adrian, but he’s behind in his stuff, too. You can’t do much about rain.” They stood silently for a moment. “If you want, you can talk to Adrian,” he said again.

“No. No, that’s okay,” she said. She was aware, suddenly, of how much she was taking out on this kid, of how unfair she’d been. Of her tone, which she hated.

And that word,
unacceptable
. Why that word? She detested it, that schoolmarmy word with its assertion of the hierarchical arrangement between them.

“Okay,” he said. He put the ear mufflers around his neck and turned away, climbed onto the mower. She turned away, too, and went back to the house.

Inside, she sat for a while at the kitchen table, watching the mower make its slow circuit around the house, its noise sudden, unpleasantly loud through all the open windows.

He hadn’t been rude, exactly, she thought—she’d been ruder to him than he was to her—but she felt injured, all the same. And she felt, reasonlessly, that the injury came from Adrian.

——

He’d wept when she told him she had to go to school, to college. That her family expected her to. She’d watched him, astonished that she could have such power over someone. Thrilled, really. It was like a balm to a wound she’d hadn’t known she had. But as it went on, she was increasingly appalled—at how he looked, at the noises he made, crying. At the way he said, “Please. Please,” his voice rising, weakened, on the second iteration of the word.

His weeping that night had made her imagine that her power over him was a permanent thing, something she could count on, something that belonged to her. She didn’t think about how her own feelings for him had changed as she opened the acceptance letters one by one, as she spread them out on the kitchen table and allowed herself to imagine walking—solitary, unencumbered, beginning her real life—across the pathways of some campus or other. She didn’t think of the way Adrian and his love for her had seemed suddenly irrelevant then. Or worse, a thick impediment, a hurdle to get over on her way there.

She didn’t consider the possibility that his feelings could change, too, that he would seek a balm for the wound that she’d inflicted on him.

Summer came and, with it, the summer people, the summer kids her age—the ones she’d played with when she was small, the ones she’d gone swimming with or hiked with or danced with or had crushes on in summers past. She sank with easy delight back into all the old routines. It was as if she’d forgotten the intricacies and pleasures of that temporary, compelling world as she lived through this past year here, she thought. Now she was out almost all day, every day, and often at night, too.

She was glad Adrian had a job, that his time was taken up during the day. She did try to include him in whatever was going on at night, to include him as her boyfriend. It was sometimes complicated, a little awkward, but she did it, aware of her generosity, her sacrifice. Aware, too, that it would all be over at summer’s end, that she would have her own life back, her new life.

He stopped by one Sunday with two of the summer boys. They wanted
her to come swimming at Silsby Pond. They were going to pick up the Caulfield girls, too. Adrian was driving.

Adrian was often driving that summer, as he had the previous summer, too—though she’d thought of it differently then. Then, Adrian was just a town boy, just a town boy they sometimes used.

They used him, then and now, because Adrian was the only one of them with his own car. Most of the summer families had just one car in Pomeroy, though some probably had two at home. But most of them came up in one, and that meant it was complicated for the teenaged kids to get around as much as they would have liked—to go to the Dairy Queen in Somerset or the miniature golf course in Winslow or to Mount Epworth to pick blueberries or to Silsby Pond to swim in the potholes. But if you asked Adrian along, you had your means of travel.

She went inside to put on her swimsuit, to get a towel. Her bedroom was small and narrow. It sat apart from the other rooms on the second floor at the back of the house, just over the kitchen and its doorway. The sun was pouring in, and she stood for a moment in its warm light, naked, stirred sexually as she looked at herself in the mirror over her bureau. The window was open, and through the screen she could hear the voices below, talking. She heard someone say her name. She stepped over to the window, she pressed her face, her body, against the screen to look down at them, nearly directly below her. The soft, fresh air touched her everywhere.

The three of them were foreshortened from her vantage. Billy McMahon was sitting on one of the steps of the back stoop, his knees spread wide, his elbows resting on them, the disorder of his curly hair predominant from up here. Skinny Walter Eberhardt was standing on the bottom step, leaned against the handrail of the stairs. There was an apron of worn, packed dirt around the last step, and Adrian was standing in this, facing the other two. They were all laughing. They were laughing because Adrian had grabbed at his crotch for a moment and was moving his hand up and down, a pumping motion.

A joke. His joke. About her.

She stepped back quickly, covering herself with the clothes she held in her hand. After a long moment, she pulled on her bathing suit without
looking again in the mirror. She pulled her dress on over it and bent to lace up her sneakers. She went into the bathroom and lifted the worn towel from its hook. She came down the stairs and across the dining room, the kitchen, and went outside to join them.

She might have had a sense then, if she’d been able to think about it clearly—which she wasn’t for several more years—of how it would be as their lives took the forms they did, separately. Of how polite they would learn to be to each other. How carefully kind, in her case. How scrupulously accommodating, in his. Of the courteous, bland exchanges they will have in public. And then of how sometimes, as he offers her change through the open window of her car at the pump, as he turns away from her in the aisle of the low-ceilinged grocery store, she will catch the suggestion of a smile at the corners of his mouth, or a quick, rolling-sideways motion of his eyes for someone else’s benefit—born of that same impulse, she guesses. The impulse to claim some ownership of their history, and also some salving distance from her.

But there was no reason for any of that to cause her pain or sorrow now. That was what she told herself as she set breakfast things out to be waiting for Frankie when she woke, as she moved around the house putting things away, cleaning up—always with the hard, nasal complaint of the mower following her, room to room to room.

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