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

“Does my father know you’ve asked me to meet you here?”

“He doesn’t know anything about anything,” Deirdre said. “He doesn’t want to see me anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Because of you,” Deirdre said. Her voice shifted when she said that, and I could tell Deirdre’s hatred for me was the only thing preventing her from crying. “Because after what happened at the house, he felt ashamed. He said he couldn’t do it anymore. He told me he couldn’t ever see me again, and no matter how much we loved each other, it was over.”

“Maybe you’re not really in love.”

“We were in love,” Deirdre said. “Things were good.”

“They weren’t so good for my mother.”

“Things were good,” she insisted, “until you came home and messed everything up.”

“Deirdre,” I said, “did you try to burn down the Edward Bellamy House?”

As I said earlier, I’ve now become something of a reader and have read my fair share of detective novels and even a few essays on how to write detective novels, and so I now know that this shouldn’t have worked: you can never ask a suspect if she’s guilty, and you can never expect her to confess if she is; you must catch your suspect in the act, red handed. I know this now, and next time, if there is a next time, I’ll do things differently and by the book. But remember, I was a bumbler and didn’t know that I couldn’t ask this sort of question, and Deirdre was a bumbler and didn’t know that she couldn’t answer it.

“I tried to,” she said, dropping her face into her red-gloved hands.

“How about the Mark Twain House?”

“I tried to,” she repeated, her voice muffled in her gloves. “I just can’t do anything right.”

“Why did you do it?”

“Because I knew this would happen,” she said, lifting her head out of her hands and looking straight at me. “I knew when you came home, Bradley would feel guilty and get rid of me and go back to your mother. I had to do something.”

“So you tried to set fire to those houses, thinking I’d get blamed for it,” I guessed.

“I can’t do anything right,” she said, weeping. Deirdre was wrong here, of course; Detective Wilson was running around trying to blame me for the fires and prove exactly how wrong Deirdre was. I hated Deirdre right then for doing what she’d done to me and my mother and father and even those homes, too. But I also empathized, because she’d tried to do these things out of love, and because she had bumbled the attempt, and I suppose this — the ability to empathize with the people we hate — is exactly the quality that makes us human beings, which makes you wonder why anybody would want to be one.

“Sam,” Deirdre said, and I could already hear the desperate pleading in the way she said my name, could hear the way her voice was sandwiched between too much hope and too much grief. I knew what Deirdre was going to ask, and I was glad, because I knew how I would respond, knew I would answer with that mean little hammer of a word, that word that gives its speaker a feeling of the purest satisfaction, always followed soon enough by a feeling of the purest regret.

“No,” I said, for my mother.

“Your father is home right now.”

“No,” I said, for myself.

“I want you to go home and tell your father to take me back. You know he loves me. You can save us. He wouldn’t have done this for all these years if he didn’t love me so much, if I weren’t the one he really loved.”

“No,” I said, for my father, even though — or because — I knew Deirdre was right.

“You can have the three thousand dollars, the money in the envelope,” she said. I could hear the last gasp in her voice, the sad whine of it. “Please, Sam.”

“No, no, no,” I told her, by which I also meant, Revenge, revenge, revenge.

When I said my last no, Deirdre seemed to get tired, very tired. Her arms dropped to her sides and her shoulders slumped. “No,” she repeated dully, then reached behind the bench, picked up a red plastic gasoline can, and held it up in front of her, neck high, as though it were some sort of offering. I immediately wanted to take back everything I’d just said, wanted to take back each and every no, wanted to turn each no into a yes, the way Jesus supposedly turned water into wine, a loaf of bread into food for a crowd. And why did he do that? Was it because he was worried about his people, or about himself? Was it because he didn’t know if his people could live on only bread and water, or because he didn’t know if he could live with himself if he let them?

“Deirdre,” I said, trying to be very calm, “I didn’t really mean all that.”

“Maybe you did.”

“Maybe I didn’t,” I said. “Please put down the gas can.”

“I don’t want to live without your father, Sam,” Deirdre said. “I feel so dead without him.”

“Maybe you’ll meet someone else,” I said.

“Maybe I don’t want to meet someone else,” she said, and then she raised the gas can over her head and tipped it, dumping the contents on her head, letting it run in streams down her back and front. This happened so suddenly that I didn’t have time to do or say anything. Or at least this is what I tell myself. Because after all, I’d seen the gas can, and what did I think she was going to do with it? Was what happened next because of what Deirdre did, or because of what I didn’t do? Are we defined by what we do, or by what we don’t? Wouldn’t it be better not to be defined at all?

“Good-bye, Sam,” she said. “Please forgive your father. That poor man loves you so much.” Then she pulled out a lighter, flicked it, and grabbed a clump of her hair. Deirdre was setting herself on fire, not starting at the feet the way the people at Salem did to their supposed witches, but starting with her hair. With her hair. Even now, seven years later, it’s the memory of Deirdre clutching her hair and setting it on fire — the dry snick of the lighter; the way Deirdre tugged on her hair, as though she were a child whose hair was being pulled by an especially mean teacher or classmate; the way burning hair makes the smell of gasoline almost welcome, like perfume; the terrible, sad, patient look on Deirdre’s face as she waited for the fire to creep up her hair toward her head, her face; the way her face screamed and then disappeared in the fire; the way I stood there, watching her do it — it’s that memory that wakes me up from a deep sleep shouting and crying, or prevents me from falling into one in the first place. If I could pick one moment, one detail I wish I couldn’t remember, it’s this one, and that is another thing I’ll put in my arsonist’s guide: detail exists not only to make us remember the things we don’t want to, but to remind us that there are some things we don’t deserve to forget.

“Deirdre, don’t!” I yelled, but who knows if she actually heard me. By then the flames had already crawled up the wick of her hair, and her hat burst into flames. And then her head was on fire, her head was fire, a ball of fire, and for a moment it was the only part of Deirdre on fire. The rest of her body was standing still, and her head, on fire, was cocked to the side as if she were listening to her own inner voice, except that her inner voice wasn’t asking, What else? What else? but instead was telling her, Nothing, nothing.

“Sam, do something!” I heard a voice say, but it wasn’t my voice, it wasn’t that voice inside me, it was Detective Wilson’s, who was all of a sudden right next to me. He, as I found out later, had read the note in the envelope after all and knew to show up at midnight. And he had. But I had shown up early, and so had Deirdre, and she was on fire because of it. Together, Detective Wilson and I ran toward her. Detective Wilson tackled her, and she landed with a hiss in the snow. “Give me your coat!” he yelled (he was only wearing his hooded sweatshirt). I did, and he started patting Deirdre down with it, saying soft, comforting things to her under his breath as he patted.