The Burning Girl
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
For Livia, Lucian & James
And in memory of C.H.
Love’s the boy stood on the burning deck
trying to recite “The boy stood on
the burning deck.” Love’s the son
stood stammering elocution
while the poor ship in flames went down.
. . . And love’s the burning boy.
ELIZABETH BISHOP, from “Casabianca”
THE BURNING GIRL
PART ONE
YOU’D THINK it wouldn’t bother me now. The Burneses moved away long ago. Two years have passed. But still, I can’t lie in the sun on the boulders at the quarry’s edge, or dangle my toes in the cold, clear water, or hear the other girls singing, without being aware the whole time that Cassie is gone. And then I want to say something—but you can’t, you know. It’s like she never existed.
So either I don’t go out there in the first place, or I end up coming straight home, dropping my bike on the back lawn with its wheels still spinning, and banging the screen door so loudly that my mother startles each time, and bustles through to the kitchen and looks at me, her eyes filled with emotions that I glimpse one after the other—love, fear, frustration, disappointment, but love, mostly. She usually says only one word—“Thirsty?”—with a question mark, and that word is the bridge from there to here, and I either say “Yep” or “Nope” and she either pours me water from the jug in the fridge or she doesn’t. We take it from there, we move on.
In this way the days pass and will keep passing—wasn’t it Cassie herself who used to say, “It’s all just a question of time passing”?—and we’ll get to the end of this summer, the way we got to the end of the last one, the way we got through all that happened over two years ago now. Each day puts a little more distance between now and then, so I can believe—I have to believe—that someday I’ll look back and “then” will be a speck on the horizon.
It’s a different story depending on where you start: who’s good, who’s bad, what it all means. Each of us shapes our stories so they make sense of who we think we are. I can begin when Cassie and I were best friends; or I can begin when we weren’t anymore; or I can begin at the dark end and tell it all backward.
There’s no beginning “before,” though: Cassie and I met at nursery school, and I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know her, when I didn’t pick her sleek white head out of a crowd and know exactly where she was in a room, and think of her, some ways, as mine. Cassie was tiny, with bones like a bird. She was always the smallest girl in the class, and the span of her ankle was the span of my wrist. She had shiny, white-blond hair, almost albino she was so fair, her skin translucent and a little pink. But you’d be wrong to mistake her size and pallor for frailty. All you had to do was to look into her eyes—still blue eyes that turned gray in dark weather, like the water in the quarry—and you could see that she was tough. Strong, I guess, is a better word. Although of course in the end she wasn’t strong enough. But even when we were small, she had a quality about her, a what-the-hell, an “I’m not chicken, are you?” sort of way.
According to my mother, and to Cassie’s mother, Bev, Cassie and I became friends in the second week of nursery when we were four years old. That was always the story, though I can’t tell now whether I remember it, or have just been told so many times that I invented the memory. I was playing with a group of kids in the sandbox, and Cassie stood in the middle of the playground, hands at her sides like a zombie, staring at everything, not apparently nervous, but totally detached. I left my friends to come touch her elbow, and I said—so I was told—“Hey, come build a castle with me?” And she broke into that rare, broad smile of hers, a famous smile, made all the better when she was bigger by the Georgia Jagger gap between her front teeth. She came with me back to the sandbox. “And that,” my mother always said, “was that.”
When you’re in nursery school, you don’t think too much about it. Both only children, we said that the other was the sister we never had. Nobody could mistake us for blood relations—I was as tall for my age and as big-boned as Cassie was small, and my hair is dark and curly. But we shared our blue eyes. “Look at our eyes,” we’d say, “we’re secret sisters.”
I knew her house and her bedroom as well as I knew my own. Cassie lived with her mother on a dead-end side road off Route 29 at the entrance to town, in a newish subdivision built in the ’90s, when the economy was good. A perfect little Cape house on the outside, it looked as though it had been picked up from somewhere else and plopped on its modest plot of land: a white house with red shutters, dormer windows, a long, sloping dark roof, and a careful skirt of lawn out front, a little skimpy and each year more weedy, until it was more crabgrass and clover than lawn, and a funny white picket fence, just a U of fence, with a gate at the front walk, but it didn’t go all the way around the house—an ornamental fence, I guess you’d call it. Just beyond the fence and behind the house spread nature unadulterated, rampant Queen Anne’s lace and maple saplings, eager acacias and elders reaching for the sky, and beyond this first wildness, the dark northeastern forest, not twenty feet from the back of the house, a constant reminder that the trees and hawks and deer and bears—we saw a mother and her cubs on the tarmac of the cul-de-sac one time, on their way to check out the garbage cans—had been there long before humans showed up, and would surely be there long after.
The word that comes to mind is “encroaching”: it felt like the forest was encroaching on the Burneses’ house, although in truth of course it was the other way around: the developers had made humans encroach upon nature. Houses stood on either side of the Burneses’, bigger models than theirs, plain cedar shingles rather than white, surrounded by swollen hungry bushes. The family on one side, the Aucoins, kept two German shepherds, often outside, that terrified us when we were small. Cassie always claimed one of the Aucoins’ houseguests had had a hole bitten out of his butt by the bitch, Lottie, but this couldn’t have been right, I realize now, or the Aucoins would’ve had to have Lottie put down. Cassie liked a good story, and it wasn’t so important that it be strictly true.
Cassie’s mother, Bev, was a nurse, but not a regular nurse in a hospital. She worked in hospice care and every day she drove in her burgundy Civic full of files and equipment to the homes of the dying, to make sure they were comfortable, or as comfortable as they could be. My father, who isn’t religious—who won’t even go to church at Christmas with my mother and me—said that Bev did “God’s work.”
Bev was always cheerful—or almost always, except when she wasn’t—and matter-of-fact about her job. Devoutly Christian, she didn’t get teary about her clients dying—she always said “passing”—and she spoke as though she was helping them to prepare for a mysterious but possibly amazing trip, rather than helping them to prepare for a hole in the ground.
Bev had big, soft breasts and a broad behind. She wore long, flowy printed skirts that swirled when she walked. Only her delicate hands and feet reminded me of Cassie. Bev’s greatest vanity was her hands: her fingernails were always perfectly manicured, oval and filed and painted pretty colors like hard candies. That and her hair, a sweet-smelling honey-colored cloud. When you hugged Bev, you smelled her hair.
My mother was not at all like Bev, just as my house is not at all like Cassie’s. And I have a father, and in that sense we were always different. For a long time, Cassie liked being at our house because she could pretend that we really were secret sisters, that my family was her family too.
My parents set
tled in Royston not long after my father finished school, before I was born. When they moved into our house it must have seemed as vast as a castle: a ramshackle hundred-and-fifty-year-old Victorian with five bedrooms, a wraparound porch, and a building behind that used to be stables. Not fancy, just old. The kitchen is older than my mother—a 1950s kitchen, with white cupboards that don’t close all the way and black-and-white checkerboard lino—and when the furnace kicks in, it sounds like a cruise ship.
My father is a dentist, and he has his office in the stables. On the big lawn, a shield-shaped shingle announces DR. RICHARD ROBINSON, DENTIST, DDS, FACS in black capitals. It squeaks when it’s windy. When he goes to work, he walks a hundred feet out the back door. On the other hand, when someone has a toothache at ten o’clock at night, they know just where to find him. Tracy Mann, the hygienist, comes in on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and dad’s assistant, Anne Boudreaux, has been there every weekday since I can remember. She’s about the same age as my parents but seems older, maybe because she wears a lot of makeup. She has a dark mole on her upper lip like Marilyn Monroe, but on Anne it isn’t what you’d call sexy.
My mother is a freelance journalist, a vagueness that seems to mean she can be a journalist when it suits her. She writes restaurant and movie reviews for the Essex County Gazette, and for the past few years she’s written a literary blog that has a following, including an adult English class in Tokyo that writes very polite comments. The third floor of our house is her office—my friend Karen’s dad did the renovation when I was in first grade. Karen moved to Minneapolis when we were nine.
My room is next to the bathroom on the middle floor, facing to the side, with a view toward the Saghafis’ next door. They put in an aboveground pool a few summers ago, and I hear their kids splashing around all season long. As soon as it’s warm enough to keep my window wide open, they’re out there. The Saghafis said we should feel free to come over and use the pool anytime, but I don’t anymore, because their kids are an awkward amount younger than I am, and always in the water.
I did, though, the first summer they had it. My father called the pool “an eyesore,” but my mother said, “let people have their fun.” She said I should take them up on their open invitation, that we’d seem standoffish if we didn’t. I went almost every day with Cassie, that summer. I’d just turned twelve: the summer before seventh grade. The Saghafi kids, still too young to swim without their mom’s supervision, weren’t around nearly as much then, and Cassie and I spent entire afternoons swimming and tanning and talking, then swimming and tanning and talking some more, with great deliberation, as though we followed to the letter a complicated recipe.
If I could go back, I’d write it all down: the secrets we told each other and the plans we made. The songs we listened to, even, when we turned up her iPod so it sounded like a scratchy transistor radio: “California Gurls” by Katy Perry, and that hit Rihanna made with Eminem, so catchy but creepy when you actually listened to the words. “Stand there and watch me burn . . .” My mother changed the station when it came on in the car, shaking her head and saying “Girls, I’m sorry, but as a feminist, I object.”
It was the summer of my stars-and-stripes bikini—the top, stars; the bottom, stripes—and I was proud that when I lay flat on my back, the bottom stretched from hip bone to hip bone. In between there was a dip, my stomach was a dip, and if I lifted my head a little and looked down, I could glimpse the dark curling hair between my legs that was newly there. Cassie, so fair, had to wear a ton of sunblock, and even so, she’d burn wherever she missed a bit. I remember the night she slept over and the backs of her thighs, near her knees, were almost purple. My mother soaked cloths in vinegar and laid them on the burn to take away some of the heat. Cassie shrieked when the first cloth went on, but she didn’t cry. Cassie almost never cried.
That same summer, we volunteered at the animal shelter out of town on Route 29, and each adopted a kitten. The kittens were sisters, from the same litter, two tortoiseshells, small enough then to hold in your hand, with tiny white teeth and opalescent claws that dug pulsingly but painlessly into your jeans when you set the creatures on your lap. She named hers Electra. I called mine Xena, after the warrior princess, because it sounded good alongside Electra. Xena is now a plump and placid puff of fur on the cusp of middle age, whose warrior nature extends only to chasing birds and mice under cover of darkness—she brings us occasional mangled offerings and deposits them on the kitchen floor, as if we might fry them up for breakfast—but within a year, Electra, still small, had vanished in the night.
She was an adventurer, and from early on went marauding in the forest behind Cassie’s house. There came the time, not long after Anders Shute moved into the Burneses’ lives, that Electra simply never came home. If she’d been hit by a car out on Route 29, we would’ve found her corpse. We wondered if she’d been kidnapped by a person or stolen by a hawk, or whether her tiny skeleton lay somewhere among the rotting leaves in the Encroaching Forest. Cassie liked to imagine that Electra had slipped off to join another family, maybe even a mile or two down the road, and that she was happily devouring tuna from a silver bowl: a better new life. “If you have to imagine, why imagine something bad?” she’d say. I was the one who was sure she must be dead.
That summer, we both wanted to be veterinarians, among other things. I was going to be a vet, a pop star, and a writer—although, I’d sometimes reflect, being a writer of pop songs might be good enough; then I’d be just a vet and a pop star—and Cassie wanted to be a vet, an actress, and a fashion stylist. We flipped repeatedly through Tiger Beat—my mom had got me a subscription because of my interest in music, and because she’d had one when she was young. I was interested in what the bands sounded like; Cassie rated them on how they looked. Her mother had explained that there were people out in Hollywood or in New York who made a living choosing the outfits for celebrities to wear. Bev didn’t say this like it was a good thing; more like, We live in such a crazy world that some people think this is an acceptable way to spend your life! But that’s not how Cassie took it. She loved fashion. We’d dawdle in the makeup aisle at Rite Aid while she tested every different eye shadow on the back of her hand. I pretended to be into it because she loved it so much. She thought Lady Gaga was cool not for her songs but for her fashion sense: those crazy shoes; that dress made out of meat. And partly, maybe, because you couldn’t get further from Bev Burnes than Lady Gaga.
Bev approved of our desire to become vets. She encouraged it. She was the one who approached my mother and suggested that if they split the driving, it wouldn’t be a hassle for us to work at the shelter. My mother agreed it would introduce us to “adult responsibility.” “When I was young, in Philadelphia, I was a candy striper at the hospital,” she told us. The volunteers had the name because they wore red-and-white striped pinafores. “I pushed people around the hospital in wheelchairs,” she recalled, “from their rooms to X-ray, or from the ER to their rooms. To Physical Therapy. To the hairdresser even, sometimes. One old lady would clap her hands when she saw me, and cry, ‘My girl! My girl!’ ” She told us about turning a corner too hard and ramming a woman’s outstretched broken leg, encased in plaster, into a wall. Even many years later she couldn’t stifle an embarrassed laugh: “From how loudly she yelped, it must have hurt a lot.” I guess it seemed to her safer for us to hang out with animals, but still in the spirit of “service.” Bev and my mother were both big on the idea of “service,” of “giving back,” expressions that were meant to remind us of how fortunate we were.
Royston isn’t a wealthy town, in spite of the Henkel plant not far away; and in spite of the fact that the nearby towns, like Newburyport and Ipswich, are on the water and attract wealthy people, especially in the summer. If, in the terms of, say, Boston, the Robinsons are negligible, in Royston we’re pretty privileged. Even Bev and Cassie were privileged, in their modest way.
The animal shelter, a one-story breeze-block building, felt like a cros
s between the vet’s and a kennel. The air-conditioned front room had navy plastic chairs set up on the linoleum tile, like a waiting room, and a high counter behind which sat one or two real employees with computers and files. It smelled like Band-Aids and was always cold, like a walk-in freezer. On the dun-colored walls hung posters about caring for animals and vaccinations (“Heartworm: the heartbreaking killer”; “Lyme Disease and Your Pet”), and along one side of the room stretched a big bulletin board plastered with photographs of dogs and cats alongside their new owners.
Marj, the woman in charge—small, wiry, and brown—had short graying hair that looked as though she cut it herself, and a scratchy voice. Her loose tank tops bared her muscly arms. Underneath, her old-lady boobs dangled flat and wide somewhere just above her navel. Cassie and I had pictured our veterinary selves in professional white coats and smart, clicky low-heeled pumps, and while Marj wasn’t a vet (when a vet was needed, Dr. Murphy came in from Haverhill, bluff and bearded, his belly tight beneath his white coat), she gave us a different sense of how you could be in the world: someone who did what you did for the love of it, and didn’t care what anybody thought.
Marj really loved those animals. Her leather hands were all pop-up veins, but when she touched the tottering, one-eyed pug Stinky on his rippled tummy, she was tender, and when she held a skittish cat like Loulou to her loose bosom, the cat’s wild eyes would quickly grow heavy, her body slack, and she’d emit the low, motorized hum of feline pleasure. Marj was especially good with the pit bulls and pit crosses that the shelter got in such numbers. Most people were afraid of them, even just a little, and Cassie and I were considered too young to take on their care; but Marj approached each one as if he were a long-lost friend, murmuring in a low voice, careful but sure. They called her the Pit Whisperer, but it didn’t always work out well. She had the scars to prove it.