Brock Clarke - An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

“Jesus,” I said. “It is.” I suddenly felt so tired I had to sit down, right on the front slab. The truth makes you tired, not free; that’s another thing I’ll put in my arsonist’s guide — wherever it’s relevant to burning down writers’ homes in New England, that is.

“OK, then,” she said, and then turned to go back inside.

“Wait,” I said, scrambling to my feet. “Can I come home now?”

“No,” Anne Marie said, her back to me. Her hand was on the open door, preparing to put it between her and me once again.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because you lied to me,” she said, turning around to face me. “I don’t know why you lied to me, but you did, and I don’t trust you anymore.” Fatigue had replaced ferocity in Anne Marie’s voice; maybe the truth made her feel tired, too.

“Do you think you can trust him?” I asked, not needing to specify who “him” was.

“I don’t know what I think about him,” Anne Marie admitted, which was her way of saying that she knew me all too well, but that Thomas was still mysterious and that mystery is sometimes closer to love than familiarity is — depending, of course, on whom you’re so familiar with.

“Please, let me explain,” I said, but she held up her hand to block my explanation.

“Thomas hurt himself,” she said. “I’m taking care of him.”

“So why don’t you ask him how he hurt himself!” I said, my voice getting high pitched and hysterical. “Why don’t you ask him right now!”

Anne Marie looked at me curiously, her eyebrows and nose moving toward each other, making the face’s own unique question mark. “OK, I’ll do that,” she said, and then closed and locked the door behind her.

I took this to mean, I’ll ask him and then come back out and tell you what he said. So I waited there on the slab, for a long time. Night arrived and the streetlights came on. Neighbors came home from work, and since this was Camelot, they did their very best to ignore Thomas’s car parked curbside and me sitting on the front slab. Finally I got tired of waiting. I rose from my slab and knocked on the door, and then I knocked and knocked and knocked and knocked. I was making such a racket that I wondered if even my fellow Camelotians could ignore me for much longer. But I didn’t care. Let them look at me from their bay windows; let them watch me knock. I felt strong; I could have knocked all night.

I could have knocked all night, that is, if I hadn’t heard a car pull into the driveway behind me. I stopped knocking, turned, and saw a dark green Lincoln Continental back in behind Anne Marie’s minivan. It was my father-in-law’s car; I recognized it right off because he’d always driven Lincoln Continentals and also because my father-in-law was a man of principle, and one of his most cherished principles was that you should always back into a parking space.

But it wasn’t my father-in-law who first emerged from the car: it was Katherine, my daughter. She was strapped into a backpack so large that it rose almost to the top of her head. She walked up the driveway very carefully, maybe so the backpack wouldn’t capsize her. It was like watching a young, overburdened female gringo Sherpa walking toward you, a Sherpa you loved and missed so much. “I love you,” I told her when she was close enough to hear. “I’ve missed you so much.” I gave Katherine and her backpack a hug, and they returned it, with feeling, for which I was grateful.

“Are you coming inside, Daddy?” Katherine asked. She was already adult enough to ask questions to which she already knew the answers and then to pretend not to recognize the lies those answers were.

“I’ll be in in a second,” I told her.

“OK,” she said. Katherine walked up to the door, turned and pushed on the handle, and discovered, of course, that the door was locked. She turned to give me a quick look of assessment— You are my father, the look seemed to say, and your front door is locked and you cannot open it —then reached behind her, unzipped one of the backpack’s many pockets, pulled out a set of keys, and expertly unlocked the front door. This was the most heartbreaking thing she’d done thus far — there is nothing sadder than a child with her own set of keys — and I would have cried right there, if Christian hadn’t suddenly been around my legs, tugging on them and me as though we’d fallen right into our old game, in which I was the marauding giant and he the pint-size villager determined to topple me.

“Hey, bud,” I said, holding him close to me. “Hey, guy.” I was speaking in that awkward, bluff way fathers speak to their young sons, knowing that it won’t be too long before their sons will grow up enough to tell their fathers to stop being so bluff and awkward.

“That damn car seat,” my father-in-law said. He was right in front of me; his breath smelled of coffee and the Styrofoam cup it came in. “I couldn’t get Christian out of that damn thing.” His voice had a transportational effect on Christian: he disappeared from my legs and a moment later he materialized on the slab with his sister. Both of them waved at me and then vanished into the house.

About my father-in-law: He was shorter than me and slim, wore — and as far as I know still wears — pressed khaki pants and comfortable, broken-in loafers bought in the closeout section of the L.L. Bean catalog. You’d never see him wear a shirt without a collar and he was wearing a collared shirt now, with broad red stripes and the sleeves buttoned. I’d never seen him wear jewelry except for his wedding band. His wife, Louisa, only briefly enters this story, but she figured largely in her husband’s: at extended family dinners, I often caught him looking at her, his eyes wet and grateful — grateful, I guess, to have her as his wife, and maybe to have the eyes with which to see her, too. He looked at Anne Marie, his only daughter, in much the same way. He was a good husband and father, is what I’m saying. Of course, he was a racist, too, as I mentioned earlier; it probably does no good to say that he wasn’t a racist unless the subject of race was raised, and then only some of the time. This is not to say that he wasn’t a racist, but that when I see him now, I see his racism competing with his other, better qualities. I mostly liked him, and I wanted him to like me, and he had, too, mostly, I think, until now.

“Please leave Anne Marie alone,” he said. The disappointment was heavy in his voice, pulling it down to its lowest levels. His eyes were baggy and resentful, and I felt sorry for dragging him into all this. My father-in-law had just retired after thirty-odd years of being an insurance claims investigator. He had finally paid off the mortgage on his house. His daughter had a marriage that had seemed to work; she had two kids, her own house, her own life. And now this. What a terrible thing it must be to be an aging father and grandfather and have to take on a second load of familial trouble just when you’d gotten rid of the first.

“I can’t leave her alone,” I said. “I just can’t.”

“You have to,” he said.

“You don’t want me to leave her with that”—and here I had trouble finding the right word to do justice to the specific feeling I had about this specific person— “guy, do you?”

“I know,” he admitted, and this gave me some hope. “He worries me. But still, Anne Marie wants you to leave her alone.”

“I can’t,” I repeated. “I love her.”

“I know you do, Sam,” he said, and I got that terrible shivery feeling you get when things are serious enough for people to use your name in conversation. “But I don’t know if she loves you anymore.”

With that, he, too, disappeared inside the house — he’d given a short knock on the door, which must have been the knuckled code, because the door opened enough to let him inside and then closed authoritatively behind him — and once again I was by myself in the driveway. I suppose if I’d been a better estranged husband and father, I would have resumed and persisted in my knocking until I’d gotten some answers, right then and there. But I wasn’t any better an estranged husband and father than I’d been a normal, complacent one. And then there was my sadness, which was huge. If sadness were a competitive event, I’d have broken the subdivisional record. Sometimes when you’re sad — as I’ll write in my arsonist’s guide — you have to sit around and wait for your sadness to turn into something else, which it surely will, sadness in this way being like coal or most sorts of larvae.