Things We Set on Fire

by Deborah Reed

Rudi set Fluke on the floor. “I thought they loved your work,” he said, touching her shoulder. Prickly vines unfurled behind her eyes. Another flash of migraine. His cologne rose like a fence corralling everything in—the passing of his sage-colored dress shirt, fingers through golden hair, chinos swishing socked feet—a collage of a man, arms through a summer jacket, leather shoes cutting across the kitchen, and then a slow, slow face pressing warm lips onto her cool forehead.

He’d been going on about the architect and some building in Berlin, but Elin was searching for Rudi’s smile in the dark, no longer visible; she’d always loved his full red lips, the way they reminded her, oddly, yet erotically, of Ingrid Bergman’s, surrounding the most beautiful white teeth she’d ever seen. His mouth always so fresh and clean, strangely savory, and this must have been what she was imagining when she’d finally fallen asleep. Now she lay in the grass thinking of all the lies inside Rudi’s mouth, like a black swarm of flies feeding off his tongue.

She massaged her forehead, propped the book back up on her chest, but couldn’t read. On their third date Rudi told her she seemed too “patrician” to come from the family she’d described, and when he said this he studied her hair and eyes, the scarf around her neck. She loved hearing him say that. It confirmed what she’d believed all along, that she didn’t belong to those people, and never had. Instead of connecting Elin with her past, Rudi had marveled at the way she’d pulled herself out of it like a diamond from the rough. She was the sparkly gem he protected with an umbrella on the street after dinner, whispering that he was falling in love with her, and she whispered the same. Maybe the rain tapping the umbrella, the steam rising from wet concrete, the fine Pinot Noir warming their blood, had all served as a setting for love, a mood mistaken for the thing itself, romancing them into believing in each other when they were really nothing more than actors caught up in a scene. Maybe one had believed and the other had not. Seven years they’d been married. The seven-year itch. Was Poppy Rudi’s itch? Elin searched for a clue that something had been off, revealed in increments over time, like tiny fissures, virtually unnoticeable but for the cumulative effect on the whole. All right. There was a loneliness, a silence that had crept into the bathroom after they made love, the way they no longer looked at one another beneath the vanity light, just wiped themselves clean, no laug...

“Well, if you’re patient enough anything’s bound to come around sooner or later.”

“Sometimes it’s better to let the very best of us go up in flames.”

She gestured a hand to Wink across the yard, smiling weakly beneath the dawning realization that her granddaughters were the cause of the shyness. Mercy me. Small voices and peanut butter breath. Fingerprints on the plate glass window. These little sisters had laid Vivvie bare. A ragged skin peeled back, a blaze of light shining on the person she used to be.

It was as if she believed the world was designed to slight her and she had no choice but to lunge and sucker punch a kidney in order to seize what she considered hers.

If she hadn’t been robbed of her ability to speak she would have told him in that moment that she loved him more than all their days put together, loved him with a new kind of love, moonshine and lifeblood, pure and wholehearted, so intoxicating it made her weak.

“Room 218,” the nurse said. “But you didn’t hear it from me.” Elin rested her hands lightly on the girls’ shoulders as they walked down the hall, anxiety braiding her steps toward the unknown, and then toward the known, which felt a whole lot worse; all those old, pigheaded arguments now filling her with guilt, her hands on her sister’s daughters, her sister/their mother, the person at whom Elin had hurled insults for years. She fought off the worming in her chest, the bile headed for her throat. It was one thing to bicker like siblings, all the shoving, bullying, competition. But something else, something sinister and base to wrap an ugly lie in a truth, to place it inside her sister’s childhood heart where it could not escape, where it could only grow as she grew, Kate’s own life’s blood feeding it all the days of her existence.

The quiet room held a dense, droning weight, as if someone had just passed away, or was about to, and Elin recalled her mother’s white catatonic face at her father’s funeral, her lips slack with red lipstick she never wore. She didn’t speak that day, didn’t even cry. When she finally opened her mouth it was as if her vocal chords had been wrung between two fists, squeezing out the brightest tones, leaving behind an unpleasant brassy dullness that remained there to this day.

Kate’s lids bobbed, eyes still wet and blazing with a heat already extinguished from the rest of her, even as her face appeared ice-bound, giving nothing away. Elin brushed her sister’s wrist bone, the back of her hand white and cold and smooth as marble, and it was then that Elin understood what was ravaging Kate’s body. Not the name, but where it came from, and the fact that it ran through her sister’s blood, and if Kate’s blood, then her own, too. The air bristled with cruelty. Her father’s arms, too weak to be trusted, her mother’s rising panic as he swung Kate one last time in the autumn sun.

If only she could speak. This close to leaving for good, there were things she wanted to say. And laugh. She was dying to laugh. That was funny. It all seemed funny now. Crack up over a crackpot attempt at rushing herself out when she was already so close to leaving. What had been the point? Oh. She remembered. Believing she could control the world, a fool’s mission, right down to the burning desire to manipulate the memories inside her daughters’ heads. Play God. Leave them with visions of her own making. Infuse meaning into the murkiness of confusion, recalling a childhood from decades-old conversations. Painting the past was as futile as it was necessary to get right, which one could not, ever, get right. How many versions were there? Everyone attached to her own. Still, Kate had planted the seed. Her daughters would look back someday, remember their mother was ill, and it would be tragic, yes, but at least Kate died in her sleep. Give them that. The peace of it. A died-in-her-sleep story. Kate was lucky, then, so would say friends at dinner parties, spouses, psychiatrists, her children’s children, someday. She had not suffered long. No better way to go. What pain had these doe-eyed daughters of happiness known before Kate became so ill? How had they suffered? A bad day at school? Wanting a toy, a dress, a book Kate could not afford? Never knowing their father, perhaps? No. Even there they were still better off. All the fighting had gone on when Averlee and Quincy were ...

Now that Elin understood that this was where Kate had been hiding—not so much hiding as living, not so much living as plodding toward her death—she stood at the foot of this tiny woman’s bed, held in place by an emanating, delicate innocence. Her sister was a stranger whose life had existed outside of Elin’s understanding, hidden from her affections, an outsider with a warmth and affection all her own, uncloaked inside this house, broadcast in everything around her, the faces of her daughters the most staggering display.

Vivvie dropped her feet to the grass and smoked and smoked. She wished she could speak about these things with Elin. Vivvie had told her own mother most anything, her mother more like a friend, offering laughter instead of advice in the years just before she died. Why did everything have to go unspoken between Vivvie and Elin? Unspoken but not unaware. Why did they feel the need to play this game of fool you/fool me that neither was winning or would ever win?

Vivvie flicked her cigarette butt into the grass and slid her palms down her thighs. The world did not owe her a thing. And yet she had the urge to tell a Lord she’d long stopped believing in that she recognized she ought to be grateful for having been given this day, like a gift she in no way deserved but willingly accepted, even though she could not feel its worth. Not now, not yet, not this offering or anything else, but surely there would come a day when she’d no longer be numb, and she’d recall what she’d been given, this day with her daughters, her granddaughters, gathered together this one and only day, and she would cry hot tears and give herself over to agony, and she would not be terrified by either.

She couldn’t protect her sister, or any of them against what was to come, and she supposed what she felt was hopeless, helpless. Utterly alone. Then she remembered—as if her marriage had happened decades ago in some forgotten country—that somewhere in the world she had a husband. She’d married a man with the intention of spending her life with him, he for her and she for him, a kind and loving buffer against the harsh edges of the world, a man so different from herself, their life together so unlike any she had known, that she could not help but forget all about the person she used to be. But how strange that all sounded now. And yet how perfectly correct it rang out when they began, how right the promise declared itself, a win-win deal cut and shaken upon, and everything that followed, everything built up and out around them was evidence of their agreement. And now? So soon, the marriage was already feeling past. And looking back she had no way of knowing if Rudi had ever actually loved her, or if he loved her still. What had he seen when he looked at her all those years? Had she ever allowed herself to be seen?

He had done them both a favor. She saw this now, evidenced by the pang of guilt she’d felt the other day. She’d been waiting for something to happen, waiting since the day they married, since she’d branded love like one of her accounts, slapped it with an identity, an easily recognizable logo. She’d been waiting for someone to come along and break it open, let the yoke ooze in directions unknown because that mess was where she was, all over the place. That mess was who she was, neither here nor there, and she’d been waiting for someone to free her from the neatly assigned category where she lived so tidily, dry as an egg shell, as Rudi’s wife, waiting so she wouldn’t have to bust it open by herself.

Elin read that poem and several others before the rainstorm, a deafening racket, crashed against the roof. A sheet of drizzle on the windows distorted the dark outside, lightning flashed, and Elin placed her hand back onto Kate’s, feeling the life inside her sister thin and cool as fog.

Forgive me. For God’s sake, line up at my feet and forgive me everything. Just like the poem, Kate had not understood the sober sacrifices of love. Then six years ago it became clear. Staying would have hurt them all, staying could only maim the spirit of the living. Staying was to be a stand-in for her father, for what her mother had done. Yes, Kate had known all along, the way Elin knew. Knowing without knowing. She had no choice but to disappear. She had never been fully part of the world in the first place, one foot in, one out. Only these past six years had she truly come alive. Elin never even knew her, would never know Kate. A mother. A good mother. Rosemary in her kitchen windowsill. Notebooks full of poems. A poet. Elin never knew. Never knew how she’d broken Kate’s heart. Never knew Kate understood that she’d broken Elin’s, too. Dear sister. Dear mother. Oh, mother. So attached to their versions of the truth.

But here was a man who put out fires for a living, pulled mangled children from wrecks, siphoned scalding water from busted hot-water tanks, and he did not see the emergency in Elin’s soul. “Come with me,” she said, and Neal, an only child of older parents long since dead, let slip his steadiness, his need for safety first. A risky adventure seemed to hook his imagination, an alternate, unknown future flashing behind his eyes. “You know you can get a job anywhere,” she said. “That’s not true,” he said. “It’s mostly true,” she said, and watched as his steely, protective curtain returned, forever obstructing the view of the great wide open.

“Come back inside,” he said. “Please. Just for a minute, so we can talk.” “I’ll call when I get where I’m going,” she said. If she’d gone inside he would have talked her out of it, out of her shorts and shirt, too. He would have prodded her with a reasoning that wasn’t necessarily wrong, just wrong for her, but by then she would not see past it, not with him touching her, gazing eye to eye. “Maybe you’ll have changed your mind by the time I get there,” she said, still believing her sister without reason, believing out of want, but Neal turned away from her. How many destinies were altered when he slammed the door in her face? How many more when Elin got into her Volkswagen hatchback, trembling and weeping down Interstate 4 with the hurricane season at her back? She’d brought a copy of The 50 Best Places to Live in the United States, read it at rest stops, and four days later she arrived in Portland, Oregon, a place she’d never before been. How many more lives felt the ripple effect of that? How many reshaped, transformed, and undone?

A week after arriving, when she was at the base of Mount Hood, she’d slipped into the phone booth, barely able to contain her excitement. She knew what she needed to say to him. But as soon as he heard it was Elin on the line, she lost her voice, not because of what he said, but because of his silence, the wall of disdain so impenetrable, he could not absorb what she needed him to take in, which was that leaving had been such a simple, small thing, like stopping the car on the side of a road to take in a farmhouse, to study a tree on the side of a hill. Leaving had allowed her to think about the people who lived other lives in other towns, and to find her own life, because it did not exist in Florida, she did not exist in Florida, but she did now, in the west, come alive like an animal, roused and catalyzed through the wilderness. “Come west,” she was going to say. A line for a laugh, standing in the snow she was going to make him laugh. Come west, young man. She’d come down a mountain to tell him this, and to tell him that she loved him. I’ve come down a mountain and it’s snowing and I love you. But she said none of those things because he could not hear them. She did not know ...

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Elin said. A cupcake. Sugar. Butter. Cream. I will blow out the candle for you. Make a wish. Kate traveling with Averlee and Quincy down the two lane truck route toward an eagle she’d never before seen. Look there, in the trees and in the smell of pine, and the sharp, wintery blue sky, a tenderness, how perfect the cool, cool day, benevolence in her bones put there long ago by her mother. Look now, Kate pointing at an eagle lighting on its thickly woven nest, as wondrous as an early morning trip to the mountains, yet so close, in the bright flickering flame, to home.

He pulled the envelopes from his pocket, slapped them into his open palm, and stared across the living room into the kitchen as if daring someone to come toward him, though that wasn’t how he felt. A guilty anger wove through his gut, an eerie charge for which he had no words, only the shape of a vague and sudden future forging through his mind.

All those letters he’d mailed over the years to his daughters, letters like the one returned in his hand, letters he was sure they never saw, and he wrote them anyway with the belief that one day Kate would change her mind, would sit the girls down and slide the stack across a table and explain how she’d held them back and how that had been a mistake. She would tell their daughters how Neal had sent news to them every month along with a hefty amount of child support ever since they were babies, and she would encourage them to sit together in a quiet kitchen and read each letter carefully. Their hearts would reshape with every word, all the worried little threads that had formed there over the years dissolving with each peak of insight until they came to rest in the long valley of understanding that life was not perfect, and not everything had been as they’d believed. Their father had loved them after all, his staying away dictated by this selfsame love. And now Kate was dead. A new kind of lonesome tore through him. Unlike the days where he felt he could not rise from his bed if another human being did not lay hands on him, if a voice did not whisper one small word into his ear, even to ask for a fork, a book off a shelf, unlike that, this new, godforsaken battering of hurt called for motion. Through the house and out the back door he went to stand before a golden-purple sunset, the outline of a mule deer against the sandstone peaks before it disappeared into the cottonwoo...

Grief filled her bones like buckshot, painfully weighing her body to the bed. It caught in her throat every time she spoke, and on top of that, a gritty glue of anguish permeated her membranes—the lining of her sinuses, the tender bed of her fingernails. Every whiff of gardenia in the sun, every piss taken hurt—tugging with it a new layer of agony from some other crevasse it had folded itself into.

Magnolia branches rasped against the shingles on the roof. Elin missed home. She missed the purple wisteria out her bedroom window and the neighbor’s tabby and the hummingbird at the window. She missed Rudi, the man he was, the man she thought he was. She missed herself, the woman she’d pretended to be, a woman so much easier to be than this one dragging her feet across the floor.

Over the last couple of weeks her mother went from hands-on caring to nearly vanishing after Kate’s death. It was too familiar. Grief ought to be debilitating, ought to bring the living, the loved, together in their sorrow. For Elin, to talk to her nieces meant taking their hand, to leave them alone in a room meant she had to first touch a shoulder, the top of a head, a knee. If her mother had cried Elin didn’t see it, and the only hugs she gave the girls appeared stiff and brief, a quick pat on the back at the door. Old habits die hard, emotional triggers like stubborn weeds, profoundly twisted and entrenched, rising to the surface. Elin’s own insides knotted every time she heard her mother’s voice, every time her mother averted her eyes from those two little girls.

She felt Wink rise from his chair. “Don’t,” Vivvie said, her insides shattering, sharp and loud as glass. “Please. Just leave me be.” He was next to her now, touching her shoulder. She jerked away. But a wail sprung, a series of retched cries broke free. Make it stop, she thought, make it stop. Stop. Stop. But it would not. It gained in strength, a torrent of sobs drowning out the room. This was not about what she’d done to Jackson, not about being sorry for that. This was grief, plain and simple, long in the coming, a greedy, wretched sorrow laying her to waste. Vivvie wailed, recalling a sympathy card like it was yesterday: A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more. But it was from years ago, when a coworker’s son died in a car accident, and someone had printed that verse right on the front, and here and now Vivvie wailed, thinking of how they had passed those cards out at the door, the cruelty of it, a grieving mother reading that merciless truth, passed around again and again in the light of day for all the world to see.

She nodded, her lips twisting against her will, his kindness causing more stinging in her chest. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry you’ve had to carry this, all of this, by yourself. Lord, what you’re made of, Vivvie.” He gathered her to his shoulder and held her there until she stopped crying, until the light had shifted significantly, and the day felt like a different day from the one they’d began. A hazy, dreamy day where nothing else was expected of them, and she said, “All right now. That’s enough. My ass is falling asleep.”

Averlee sobbed and Elin understood what Averlee could not say, perhaps not even inside her own head. Elin couldn’t love Neal the way Neal loved her. She could never be an ideal part of their lives. She would not be stepping in as a mother figure, helping in that way to mend the ruptured life her sister had left behind. Her role would always be that of aunt. Elin hoped Averlee understood, if not now then please someday, she thought, giving her an extra squeeze, someday she said to herself like a prayer, let this girl and her sister, but especially this one here, let her know that Elin could not lift her away from the injustice of it all, no matter how badly she wanted, she couldn’t keep Averlee from having to absorb the world’s achy, lopsided weight. The power was not all hers.

Having them now did not mean the years of grief would stand down and leave him alone. He guessed the opposite was closer to the truth. Having them brought it all back. Even when he wasn’t thinking about the past, he was forced to think about the future, forced to grieve all that would never be. Elin was never going to walk through the door and take him back. Kate was never going to forgive him. He would have to learn how to give all that up, hand it in once and for all, in exchange for all that suddenly was.

Knowing how to make a life mean something, to wring out its worth when it was right there in one’s hands instead of just wishing about it afterward, or imagining how it could have been, or should have been, different.

Every morning she woke to her father swinging her sister through the air. It was as much a memorial to them both as it was a reminder that loving someone, loving anyone, even those long gone, was of consequence, and not loving them was of consequence, too.

But today the sun shined, and the air let go a weak, pleasant breeze, and Elin felt an opening in her chest. It wasn’t happiness so much as being on the verge of happiness, perched up there, readying to flee.

But not every kind of love called for action. Some demanded one stay put, allowing for nothing more than it to be exactly as it was.

It was all laid out before her now, the whole messy past, and she’d done everything in her power to put things right. No doubt she’d come up short, and that, she believed, was what it meant to be alive. The absence of answers and perfection allowed for the wonder, mistakes for tripping trap doors to the glimmering unforeseen.

That same opening, that same verging happiness returned with the feel of flesh and blood and heat. She thought of her father swinging her sister, her mother capturing the moment for all time. Elin had captured it, too, understanding, even then, that the moment had meant something, that the world could change in an instant, and she needed to be mindful of where she was, to live with intention, to always recognize the deliberateness of love.