The Arsonist (31 page)

“That there’s no such thing in life as a sabbatical?”

She smiled, a quick sad smile.

At his office, after he’d dropped Frankie off, after he’d shown her how the coffee machine worked, he started his workday. He had a message on his voice mail from Georgie Morrell saying that Paul Ardery had been taken to the hospital with what they thought was a heart attack. He’d have to follow up on that. And Matt Reinhart had called, the guy from the
Boston Globe
who’d started to follow the fires after the piece of Bud’s that AP had printed. He was just checking in, wanting to know about any new developments. Bud called him back and left a message about Frankie’s
parents’ fire. Then he wrote up his own account of that one for the paper, mentioning that Tink Snell had phoned it in.

When he was done, he made himself a fresh pot of coffee. As it was dripping through, he heard Barb come in downstairs, and he called down and offered her a cup.

She came up, and they talked, as they sometimes did. She had heard about Loren driving Tink and Gavin down to the state police barracks the day of the Rowleys’ fire. “But just to talk, they say. And you know what I say to that? Enough already. Just arrest someone.”

“Yeah,” he said. “The hell with evidence and witnesses. Let’s get this
over
with.”

“I’m at that point, man.”

“What, you’re scared?”

“Scared shitless. But I’ve got, like, three suitcases right by the door,” she said. “If he lights my house up, I already know what I’m taking out.”

“What?”

“Oh, mostly sentimental crap. Photos of my kid when she was little, and letters, and some of my favorite clothes.” She smiled. “That’s a problem. I have to keep opening up the damn suitcases to find something I want to wear.”

After a moment, Bud said, “I’m going to use this.”

“For what?”

“As an example of how people are dealing with the arson, natch.”

She snorted. “Or
not
,” she said.

When he opened the door, he could hear Frankie in the living room, still talking on the phone. He stood there for a few seconds in the doorway. She was saying, yes, she would be interested to look around. It sounded as if she’d moved on from the events in Africa to whatever the local stuff was that she’d wanted to explore.

He shut the door, deliberately making enough noise in the kitchen to announce himself. He went around the corner to the living room. She was on the couch, her long legs curled beneath her, the phone propped on her shoulder. Her paperback was open on her lap. She was writing on
the endpapers, notes in ink. He took her in, the wide swell of her buttock and thigh in her jeans, the long white foot tucked beneath that swell, the messy hair, the glasses, the freckles—there was nothing he didn’t like. She raised her hand in response to his appearance in the doorway, and he went back into the kitchen.

Just as he’d finished making himself a sandwich—leftover chicken, chutney, cucumber slices, and the bread he was so fond of—she came into the kitchen in her bare feet.

“Want some of this?” he asked.

“Sure,” she answered. She seemed subdued.

He got out a serrated knife and sliced the sandwich in half, holding it flat with his hand. He put each half on a plate and carried the plates into the dining area. He came back to the kitchen for glasses and paper napkins. She was standing, looking out the window. “What do you want to drink?” he asked her.

She looked over at him. “I’ll get it,” she said, taking the glasses from him. “Water’s fine for me. What do you want?”

Bud said water, too. She put ice in the glasses and filled them. In the dining room, they sat down opposite each other. She picked up the sandwich and took a bite, and Bud felt a pang, a yearning, for exactly this unremarkable domesticity.

“What’s the news?” he asked.

Her mouth was full, her jaw working. She raised a finger: Wait. Finally she swallowed and said, “Everyone I know is okay. The person I most worried about, the one who actually worked there, is fine. But it’s just awful, they say. So many people hurt, and people just flooding the hospitals. Thousands. It’s … they can’t take care of them all. All these windows blew out, so there was glass everywhere. Horrible injuries just from that. And it was mostly, of course, Africans who got killed and hurt.”

“I heard a couple of Americans died, too.” He’d had the radio on again, driving back from the office.

“Oh, I know. And I don’t mean I wish they all
had
been Americans. But just, it all seems so misplaced. Poor Africa.”

They sat silently for a moment, and then lifted their sandwiches again. After another minute, she said, “Everyone’s really worried now, too. The
aid agencies, I mean. Especially the American ones and the church ones. They’re worried about who will be next. But for now …” She lifted her shoulders.

They were quiet. Then he said, “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, I am, too.” She rubbed her face. “But thanks.”

“Do you wish you were there?”

“Part of me does, I suppose. But I wouldn’t be any more helpful than the average bystander.”

“Because it’s medical?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She gave a light, quick, mirthless laugh. “I’m not sure I was ever any use in Africa.”

“Hey.” He reached over and touched her hand lightly. “That’s not true. You’re just … this is just, overwhelming, I suppose.”

“Probably,” she said. And then, in a minute, “You know, once, this past spring, I was working in Sudan, in a village—I was going from village to village, actually, working with local people, with the Ministry of Health. We were trying to help them set up programs in health facilities to deal with malnutrition. You know, training people, supervising systems. I was doing a lot of the care myself. Feeding tubes, that kind of thing.” She paused and looked over at him. She said, “But these weren’t health facilities as you and I know them. Really, they were huts. What you should imagine is people lined up outside huts.”

“Okay,” Bud said.

“
Quietly
lined up. That was something that always saddened me. How quiet they were. Their acceptance of … life, I suppose. And of our rules for them. It was … I found it almost unbearable sometimes.”

Bud nodded.

“Anyway, this was in an area that was safe,” she went on. “Or it was supposed to be safe. We wouldn’t have been there otherwise. And if we hadn’t been there, they wouldn’t have come. But we were there, and so they did come. They came from miles and miles around. They walked, mostly. Women and children and babies. Some fathers.”

She had been looking down, remembering this. Now her eyes snapped to Bud. “But it wasn’t safe. We were in the midst of things when an elder from the village came to tell us that an armed group was maybe a few
hours away, approaching. That we had to go, we had to get out, right away. He told everyone, the people waiting, too.

“So
we
, we packed up all our fancy stuff, our radios, our computers, our medical equipment, and left. Trucks, you know, took us to the airstrip so we could get out. And we could see the villagers leaving, too, carrying
their
stuff, possessions bundled in cloths on their heads or their backs. Carrying their babies—some of them the babies we were supposed to be treating. Heading off into the bush to hide, to wait it out.”

She sat still. She was playing with her napkin, tearing it into strips. “We left. We left, and they stayed.” She made a funny noise, an exhalation. “That was always our option,” she said. “To go. Our great
privilege
.” She was sarcastic, angry.

“But if you’d stayed, you would have been killed, I assume.”

“Killed, or raped.” She shrugged. “Or maybe not. Not all of them were. We heard it wasn’t too bad.” She laughed, once. “But you see my point.”

“I don’t, really.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Just … I had a way out. I always had a way out. And it marked a terrible … divide, I guess you’d say. I wasn’t
African
. I couldn’t be
African
.”

“And that’s what you wanted?”

After a pause, she said, “I wish I could explain it. I just … I felt so … allied with them, but when we were up against it—when
they
were up against it—I couldn’t be their ally.” Her hair swayed as she shook her head. “And this, this bombing … why should they be chosen to suffer again, when the bombers wanted to punish America, clearly?”

“Because the bombers were very, very stupid.”

After a moment, she nodded.

“Or very, very callous,” he said. “Or both.”

They sat without speaking for a long moment. They were finished eating, though she’d left part of her sandwich.

“Do you want anything else?” he asked.

“Food?” she said.

“Yes.”

She gestured at her plate. “No.”

“Shall I take you home then?”

“Oh, you don’t have to do that. I can call my mother, if it’s not convenient.”

“No, I want to do it. I just meant, are you finished with everything you need to get done on the phone.”

“I am. For now.” She pushed back from the table. “I’ve got a healthcare place I’ll want to go look at in Whitehall, and one in Black Mountain. They’ve got an Alzheimer’s day-care program and a visiting-nurse association in the Whitehall center, and a hospice attached to an Alzheimer’s program in Black Mountain. I think something might work out for my mother—for my father, really. But I want to check it out first.”

“You’ve been busy,” he said.

“I got a lot of calling done, yes.”

“Will you need a car when you go?”

“Bud.” She made a stern face. “I’m not going to ask you to drive me to Whitehall.”

“No, I didn’t mean that. Just … you could use my car.”

“I’m not going to
borrow
your car, either.”

“No? Why not?”

“Because you need it. You’re like Loren. It’s your office.”

He laughed. “Now there’s a nightmare vision.”

“What?”

“Becoming like Loren.”

“Well, that’s not going to happen. Never fear.”

“If only you could guarantee that to me.”

“Mmm,” she said. Her face shifted somehow. “I guess there are no guarantees.”

Her voice was cooler, and he realized that it had come around again, that he had pushed it—there was something in what he had said that seemed to be asking for something from her.

Now she got up with their plates and went back to the kitchen. And then to the living room, to get her purse, her book. He was silent. He rinsed the plates in the kitchen and put them into the dishwasher.

In the car, more than halfway to her house—her sister’s house—she spoke first. “Thank you,” she said.

“For?”

“For letting me use your home. For listening to me. For coming to tell me about the bombings. That was … kind.”

“Shucks,” he said. She looked over at him and, after a moment, grinned. He was happy, suddenly.

“For showing me the aurora borealis,” she said, still smiling.

“Come on: for
arranging
for the aurora borealis.”

“Well, that too.
That
was kind.”

“That was
work
.”

After a minute, she said quietly, “It was wonderful.”

When they parked in front of her sister’s house, Bud wasn’t sure what to say. He wasn’t sure even if he should turn the engine off.

“I think you’d better come in,” she said. She was facing forward, as if they were still driving, as if there were something to look at in the road ahead.

Something happened in his body, and he felt himself getting hard. “Because …?” he said.

“Because I have so much …” She turned to him, not smiling now. “So much to thank you for.”

15

A Letter from the Editor

Here’s what an arsonist on the loose does to a small town. First, of course, everyone is afraid. That could happen anywhere, but in a small town, the person you’re afraid of is bound to be someone you know, someone you probably see regularly in the store, at church, at the post office. The sense of community that is the bedrock of small-town life is broken, suddenly. People look at one another with suspicion and fear, friend to friend, father to son, wife to husband
.

Everyone is on edge. In our town, the fires have almost always been set at night, so people don’t sleep well, listening for the footstep outside on the porch, the splash of kerosene or gasoline or charcoal starter at the doors or windows. Families take turns. Tonight I get to sleep and you stay awake to watch; tomorrow night you’ll sleep and I’ll stay up. Everyone is exhausted. The men in the volunteer fire department are exhausted, too. They’ve risen again and again from their beds and driven across town to try to put out fires that were set with the confounding intention of causing maximum damage
.

People have armed themselves. We’re a community of many hunters, so that wasn’t a difficult step, but it was a radical one, getting the guns out before hunting season, having them always loaded and close at hand. It’s resulted in at least one accident, fortunately not fatal. But more important, it’s brought the fear of one another to that extreme a possibility: If he comes here, I will shoot him. Or worse: Let him come here. I want to shoot him
.