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

“This is your fucking fault, Sam,” he said to me over his shoulder. I caught a glimpse of Deirdre lying there: her red jacket had turned black, and her face had turned black, too. The only thing of hers not black and scorched were her eyes: they were white and blank and staring skyward, at the birches, at the stars, or at nothing. I looked away and then at the gas can lying next to her body. I could tell, even in the darkness, that it was one I’d helped design back when I was still a person who designed things. And then I looked away from the gas can, too, and closed my eyes. They immediately started to tear up, tears being your eyes’ way of forbidding you to look away, of forcing you to look at the world you’ve made or unmade.

“It wasn’t me,” I said, and started backing away, the way we do when we’re not brave enough to do anything else. “She set herself on fire.”

“Fuck you anyway,” Detective Wilson said, still furiously patting her through my coat. “I saw her do it. So what? You didn’t fucking stop her.”

“She asked me to meet her here,” I said. “She wanted me to save her and my father.”

“You could have saved her,” he said, and I realized that he had started crying, crying being that thing you do when you’ve done everything else, and then I started crying, crying also being that thing you do when you haven’t done enough and you’re afraid it’s too late to start.

“Is she dead?” I asked.

“You could have saved her,” Detective Wilson said, “and you didn’t.”

At that, I turned and broke into a sprint. Deirdre had wanted me to save her and I showed up too early and didn’t. But Deirdre had also wanted me to save my father. My mother was only a few blocks away, at our house, with him. I ran as fast as I could, but even so, when I got there I was too late.

You wouldn’t expect a burning house to look like a burning woman, and you’d be right: it doesn’t. There is nothing beautiful about a woman on fire, but there is plenty that is beautiful about a house burning hot and high in the dark, cold night: the way flames shoot out of the chimney like a Roman candle; the way the asphalt roof shingles sizzle and pop; the way the smoke pours and pours and pours heavenward like a message to the house’s great beyond. There is something celebratory about a house fire, which is why so many people always gather to watch it, just as there were so many people gathered to watch my parents’ house burn that night. The crowd was three or four deep, and I had to push my way through, jostling and shoving until I got to the front row, next to my mother, who was standing there, holding a forty-ounce Knickerbocker, regarding the fire thoughtfully, as though it were an especially difficult question that she was this close to solving.

“There you are,” she said. She offered me a sip of her beer and I took it, took more than a sip, then gave the can back to her. The wind shifted and the smoke blew toward us, and the crowd bent over, as one, until the wind shifted back and we all resumed our upright fire-watching position. There were firefighters everywhere now, looking puny and laughable with their axes and their floppy hoses. Even their helmets looked like a joke version of red next to the real red of the fire. The house was looking bigger and bigger, as though the flames were its fourth and fifth stories.

“Here I am,” I told my mother. We were surrounded by people, at least ten people within earshot, but their hearing and all their other senses were fully devoted to the fire. Something exploded in the house — the furnace, maybe — and there was a terrible shriek of something metal becoming something not. The people in the crowd shrieked in response to the house, and the house shrieked back at them, the heat stoking the noise. I wasn’t worried about anyone listening to us when they could be listening to the house. “Where’s Dad?”

“It was so easy,” my mother said. She was talking calmly, evenly, and I would have found this creepy and awful if I hadn’t been listening calmly, evenly, myself. And how could I have been so calm? you might want to know. I don’t have a good answer, not even now, seven years after the fact. Was it because of what had just happened to Deirdre? Was I thinking that nothing could be worse than Deirdre’s setting herself on fire? Was I thinking that no matter what happened to my father, it couldn’t have been as bad as what happened to Deirdre? When the worst thing happens, does it then make us calm in expectation of better things, or does it just prepare us for the next worst thing? “I dumped gasoline on the couch and lit it,” my mother said. “That’s all I needed to do.”

“Mom,” I said, “where is Dad?”

“I lit some of the curtains, too, in the dining room, just in case. But I didn’t need to. It was so easy. I didn’t expect it to be so easy.”

“Mom,” I said, “where is my dad?”

“Why wasn’t it more difficult?” my mother asked, still calm. “Shouldn’t some things be difficult?”

This was the scariest thing my mother had said thus far. She’d set our house on fire; I knew that. That wasn’t so scary. But it came so easily to her, as easily as reading a book or busing a table or drinking a beer or pretending she had a happy family — that was the scary part. My mother is the most capable person I have ever met, even more capable than Anne Marie. She could do anything she wanted, which was why she’d always scared me and still does.

“Mom,” I said, very, very slowly so that she’d understand me, so that there would be no confusion. “Dad left Deirdre to be with us. To be with you. He loves Deirdre, but he’s chosen you and me.”

“I know,” my mother said, turning away from the fire and toward me. The fire lit up the left side of her face, making it glow, while the right side looked so cold, so white in comparison. “He told me the very same thing. He said he wanted me to come home. He said he really meant it this time. He said I could believe him.” Then she turned back to the fire, her whole face glowing with the heat and the light, and I was glad, because she looked beautiful. I wanted her to look beautiful, and maybe this is what all children want: for their parents to look beautiful. And in order for them to look beautiful, you have to find ways to ignore their ugliness. It is easier to be ugly yourself than to admit to the ugliness of the people who made you; it is easier to love the people who made you if you are ugly and they are not. And it is easier to live on this earth if you love the people who made you, even if that means risking the love of the people you yourself have made. Even if.

“Sam,” said a familiar voice behind me. I didn’t have to turn around to see who it was or to know what I had to tell him. Because I could also hear another voice, not my inner voice, not the voice that said, What else? and not Deirdre’s voice, the one that told her, Nothing, but Anne Marie’s voice, telling me that it was time to take responsibility for something, for everything.

“It was me,” I said, not looking at Detective Wilson, still looking at my mother — who was looking at her house and her fire — still thinking about Deirdre’s burning herself to death and my doing nothing to save her. “I did it.” My mother didn’t say anything; she kept staring at the fire, as if she knew that it was making her beautiful, as if fire were the best kind of makeup.

“You set fire to your parents’ house before you went to meet Deirdre,” Detective Wilson said, helping me out. “Before you watched Deirdre burn herself to death, you set fire to your home.” I was still looking at my mother when he said this. She closed her eyes for one, two, three beats and then opened them again. For years, my mother must have hated Deirdre; for years she must have wished her dead. And now that Deirdre was dead, my mother looked no different than she had when she thought Deirdre was alive — not guilty, nor relieved, nor happy. How was this possible? How could my mother know Deirdre was dead and still look at the world as if it were the same world, at the fire as though it were the same fire? But maybe this is what happens when you hate someone for so long: the person you hate dies, but the hate stays with you, to keep you company. Maybe if I’d hated Deirdre for longer, I wouldn’t have felt so bad about not saving her.