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

But still, no matter how silent we were, the food eventually was eaten and the meal was over. Mrs. Mirabelli got up to clear the dishes, and Thomas helped her, leaving me and Mr. Mirabelli alone in the room.

“Mr. Mirabelli, may I ask you one question?”

“You may, Coleslaw.”

“Why are you all dressed up like this if Anne Marie isn’t even here?”

“She was here,” he said, “but then before we even sat down to eat, she said she was going over to your mother’s house. That all this”—and here he swept his hands over his costume in demonstration—“was ridiculous.”

“She said that?”

“‘I’m not a child anymore’—those were her very words.” I could tell that this was the saddest thing that had happened yet, as far as Mr. Mirabelli was concerned. His eyes went cloudy and wet; he closed them, took off his glasses, and rubbed the bridge of his nose for a few seconds. When he put his glasses back on and opened his eyes, they were clear again. “I’m sorry you have to go, Coleslaw,” he said. “It feels like we barely got to know you, and here it is, time for you to go already.”

“I’m sorry, too,” I said.

“Everyone is sorry,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. “You should say good-bye to your son.”

“I should,” I said. I got up without saying another word, walked to the TV room. Christian was lying on the couch in front of the squawking set. He was asleep, his head halfway hidden by the crook of his arm, and I could hear his sweet breath fluttering past his lips. I loved him. I loved him so much, and I was afraid to say good-bye. You should never say good-bye to your children, not because of what it will do to them, but because of what it will do to you. So I didn’t say good-bye. Instead I took the towel off my head, spread it over him as a blanket, then kissed him softly on the forehead. He shifted and moaned in his sleep, and I turned and crept out of the room before he woke up. On my way out of the house, I passed by the dining room. Thomas wasn’t there, but Mr. and Mrs. Mirabelli were sitting at the table, drinking coffee and talking about the time in Morocco when their tour guide asked them if they’d ever tried a hookah, and they thought he’d said “hooker.” More hilarity, the sort that is years and years in the making. Mr. Mirabelli even took off his towel to hide his face, he was laughing so hard, and I took advantage of his momentary blindness to open the door and leave the Mirabellis and my house in Camelot behind.

T HOMAS WAS OUTSIDE, waiting for me, leaning against my van, arms crossed over his bare chest. He must have been cold: it was snowing harder now, and the runtish maples lining Hyannisport Way were bending and swaying in the howling wind. Inside, dressed the way he was, Thomas looked as though he belonged; outside, though, he looked like a man who didn’t have enough sense to wear a shirt in a snowstorm. Inside, he was mostly mute; outside, I hoped, he might answer some questions.

“Did you set fire to the Mark Twain House?” I asked him.

“No,” he said.

“I don’t believe you,” I said. “What about that burn on your hand?”

Thomas removed his hands from his armpits and showed them to me. There, on his right hand, was the burn mark: it was about the size of a quarter, red around the edges, and already starting to scab over. “I got this from the burner on your stove,” he said. “You really ought to fix that thing.”

“I already did,” I said. I knew what he was talking about. A year or two earlier, our stove’s front left burner wasn’t getting as hot as its three siblings. Anne Marie told me it didn’t matter and to leave it alone. This I did not do. I figured it would be easy to fix. I figured it was a loose wire, and so I went inside the stove and loosened and then reconnected the wire to its port, or thought I did. In fact I’d managed to rewire the stove in such a way that the rear left burner didn’t work at all, and in fact, when you turned that knob, it managed to heat the front left burner instead. A person who didn’t know this about the stove could easily burn himself on it. It could easily happen. I’d promised Anne Marie I would fix it, again, but I never did. I’d never gotten around to it. “So you really didn’t try to burn down the Mark Twain House?” I asked.

“No. That’s what I told your Detective Wilson, too.”

“This was before you told him I was going to New Hampshire, correct?”

“Correct,” Thomas said, his teeth starting to chatter a little. He returned his hands to the caves of his armpits, where they’d been hibernating.

“Detective Wilson believed you?”

“I had an alibi,” Thomas said, and pointed to my house. “I was here that night.”

“All night?” I asked, not really wanting the answer. My heart was about to beat its way out of my chest. I almost took my own shirt off, thinking that maybe the cold would numb the pain and persuade my heart to stay in its cavity, where it belonged.

“All night,” Thomas said.

“I don’t believe you,” I said. “You told Anne Marie that you lied about my cheating on her and she still let you stay all night? Why would she do that? Didn’t she want to know why you lied in the first place?”

“Of course she did,” Thomas said. “She asked me why in the hell would I lie about you, of all people.”

“Oh no,” I said.

“It was an excellent question,” Thomas admitted. “It deserved an excellent answer.”

“Oh no,” I repeated.

“So I told her I did it to get back at you for killing my parents.”

“You told her the truth,” I said.

“That I did,” said Thomas. He looked so proud of himself, as though the truth was the thing he’d never thought he’d be able to tell. “But she didn’t believe me, not at first. Even when I told her about it in detail, about the Emily Dickinson House and the fire and you going to prison, she didn’t believe me.”

“She didn’t?”

“No, she was convinced you wouldn’t have hidden those things from her. ‘Sam wouldn’t do that to me’—that’s what she said.” Here he paused, and I watched his pride turn to confusion, as it often does. “I don’t get it. She seemed to have really loved you.”

“She still does!” I said. “She still does!”

Thomas didn’t pay any attention to this, wishful thinking being the easiest kind of thinking to ignore. “So then I told her that if she didn’t believe me, she should go talk to your parents.”

“Oh no,” I said, because if our life is just one endless song about hope and regret, then “oh no” is apparently that song’s chorus, the words we always return to.

“And that’s when she told me what you’d told her: that your parents were killed in a house fire.”

“Let me explain,” I said. I could tell his low-grade anger was about to turn into pure hatred and rage, the way you can tell when rain is about to turn into one of the colder forms of precipitation.

“Your parents were killed in a house fire,” he repeated. “Was that supposed to be funny?” Thomas asked. He took a step toward me, removed his right hand from his armpit, and clenched it, and for a second I thought he was going to hit me, but he didn’t. Maybe Thomas had learned from my mistake earlier, when I’d hit him. When we hit someone, we want that to be the final word. But it never is. And if a blow to the face wasn’t the final word, then what was? Are we wrong for wanting there to be any such thing as a final word? Was there any such thing as a final word? And where, oh, where could we find someone to speak it?

“Wasn’t it enough that you killed my parents?” Thomas said. “Did you have to kill your own parents in the same way?”