A Chill Rain in January (27 page)

All a person needed, she thought, to ensure her physical and mental health, was solitude; seclusion.

The rage was big and strong and getting all the time bigger and stronger. Zoe imagined anger taking up all the room in her body, growing and growing, pushing other stuff out. Her eyes would pop out of their sockets, her brain would squeeze itself out through her mouth, all the yucky things inside her, intestines and stuff, would push out where she had BMs. It was very scary.

She didn't even need the old people's trees anymore, because she'd found an even better private outdoor place. But that didn't make any difference to the size of her anger.

She found it down the road, past where the gravel began. She was going along the road one day, the dust from the gravel getting all over her feet in their brown sandals, turning her sandals gray just like her feet, and next to the road was a field that didn't have anything in it except weeds. Beyond the field were some trees—not a whole bunch of them like a forest, just a few. She ran across the field and through the trees, looking carefully around for signs of people or wild animals, but she didn't see anything. On the other side of the trees the land kind of dipped, and at the bottom of the dip was a big old barn. This became her private outdoor place.

The front door of the barn was broken and hanging open. The first time she went inside she heard some rustling, and her skin got all cold and crawly; then she saw a cat looking at her from behind a big piece of rusty machinery. Zoe moved a little bit away from the door, and the cat ran to it and through it and far away.

At the side of the barn was a ladder. She climbed it and found a bunch of hay up there, and a kind of window, without any glass in it. She liked to lie down in the hay and look over the edge to the big floor of the barn down below her. There was always a lot of dust, and when the sun shone the air was full of little bits of floating stuff
.

It smelled good in the barn. And maybe she was the only person in the world who knew it was there.

She started going there almost every day, except when it rained, because then it was chilly and clammy in the hay. She was very glad she'd found it; it was much better than sitting up in a dumb apple tree.

But she was still jam-packed with rage. She found things in the barn, tools made of metal all rough and flaky with rust, and she banged with them at the dirt floor and the hanging-down door, using all her strength, and this made her tired, but she was still just as angry as ever.

One day when she'd done this she climbed up the ladder and lay down on the hay, and then all of a sudden there was a picture in her head, Zoe climbing the side fence into the old people's yard and nobody seeing her because it was night.

She wondered why she hadn't thought of this before.

Zoe began to feel drowsy in the bath; it was difficult to keep her eyes open, and her limbs felt flimsy, unsubstantial.

She pulled the plug, set her wineglass on the floor, and got on her knees to wash her hair under the tap.

When she was out of the tub and wrapped in a terry-cloth robe, she cleaned and dried the entire bathroom thoroughly.

Then she used the hair dryer. Her hair was thick and glossy, and she had never minded the silver in it.

It was very quiet in her bedroom when she turned off the dryer.

Suddenly she was stricken by melancholy. She sat on the edge of her bed and doubted, for a few moments, the wisdom of every decision she had ever made.

That night she didn't go to sleep when she went to bed. She kept herself awake by planning. It seemed a very long time, though, before the rest of the people in her house were asleep. She kept on just about dozing off. Finally she got up and moved her desk chair underneath one of the windows, and opened the window. Then, she sat in the chair wearing only her nightgown, and the cool air coming in the window made her shiver and kept her awake.

Late at night she heard her parents come upstairs. She heard their voices for a while, although she couldn't tell what they were saying; then she heard their bedroom door close, and everything was quiet.

She knew that Benjamin wasn't in bed yet. He probably wasn't even home yet, from wherever he'd gone with his friends. Zoe was starting to get cold, and she was impatient, too. Either she had to go right away or she'd have to wait for Benjamin, and she didn't know how long he'd be, he might be hours, and even when he got home he might not go right to sleep. After thinking about it for a few minutes she put on her bathrobe and her slippers, opened her bedroom door very carefully, listened but heard nothing, and made her way slowly, on tiptoe, down the stairs.

Without turning on any lights, she found the big bowl full of books of matches that her mother kept in the kitchen. In the living room she emptied the basket that held wood for the fireplace and put back into it a few little pieces and two big ones and the newspaper that was lying on the coffee table.

She hurried across the lawn, the basket hitting against the side of her leg, and climbed awkwardly over the fence. She squatted down and waited for a minute, almost expecting to hear her mother yelling from an upstairs window, or the old people pushing open their squeaky screen door; but she didn't hear anything at all except a little bit of wind pushing through the vegetable garden in front of her.

She got up on her knees and looked over the vegetables to the old people's house. It was dark and quiet. Zoe's heart was hammering away in her chest. After a while she got up and began to sneak toward the house. The grass was damp, and so were the bottoms of her slippers. Her bathrobe got caught on a rosebush for a minute; she had to put down the basket and use both hands to pull herself free.

When she was near the house she squatted down again and listened some more, but still she heard nothing, and no light came on.

She scooted underneath the back porch and waited for a minute, listening as hard as she could, before getting out the newspaper, to be really sure nobody was awake in that house.

Then she made a fire.

After a while Zoe rallied.

She went to her closet and thought about what to wear.

She flipped through her bar clothes, smiling. Dresses with no back, dresses with very little front, dresses with huge full skirts and tiny waists; slinky things, sexy things, little-girl things; a cowgirl's outfit, something that looked like a nurse's uniform… She began to feel melancholy again and turned to the other closet, where her ordinary clothes hung.

She chose a sweater in almost exactly the same shade of blue as her eyes, and a flowered skirt that had some of the same color blue in it.

She put on the skirt and sweater and slipped her feet into a pair of dark-blue flat-heeled shoes. She wore no underwear, and no jewelry.

Zoe scrunched up newspaper and laid kindling and then the two big pieces of wood on top. She got the matchbook out of her bathrobe pocket and lit the paper in three places. Then she scrabbled out from under the porch and ran.

She was halfway to the fence when she remembered the basket. She thought about leaving it there to burn up with the porch, but she knew her mother would miss it, so she turned around and ran back and grabbed it—just in time, too: it was warm, almost hot, when she touched it; the fire was already burning hard and making crackling noises.

Zoe sprinted across the old people's yard and threw herself over the fence and bolted for the back door of her house. Inside, she refilled the basket, put it back next to the fireplace and ran as quietly as she could upstairs to her room.

She sat looking out of her window while she caught her breath.

She watched as the old people's porch set fire to their house. It was a much bigger fire than she'd expected. She could smell the smoke and feel the heat from it all the way over here in her own yard, her own house, her own room.

She heard Benjamin come crashing up the stairs, yelling at the top of his lungs, and then her mother and father got up in a big hurry, shouting and banging doors.

Zoe got into bed and pulled the covers up to her chin.

The fire burned up the porch and the whole house and the old people, too, and Zoe's anger got burned up with them.