The Burning Girl Page 7

  I shook my head in a mock dismay that was actually real: “All good things come to an end, right?” She laughed, and shook her head back.

  As the evening wore on, I helped my father with the dishes and my mother took over the candy so I wouldn’t have to speak to the bigger kids, most of whom I knew. Inevitably, a posse from my own class turned up, including a girl named Reba from my field hockey team, who saw me lurking and called out, “Juju, you’re not out? Come on, come with us!” I put on an “I don’t care” face and came to the door.

  “Naw,” I said, “I think I’m past it.”

  “Don’t be so boring!” There was a chorus—not just Reba, but Brent and Joel and Suzanne, dressed as a bee, with translucent wings and an antennae hairband.

  “I’m good, guys. Besides, no costume.”

  At which point Brent, whose effort consisted of his dad’s sports jacket and a porkpie hat, said, “It doesn’t matter. Come without one.”

  I laughed, but there were tears right behind. I waved my dish towel and turned my back. “Thanks anyway,” I said. “Have fun. See you in school.”

  When she’d closed the door on them, my mother came through and pretended to be looking for The New Yorker, but for a moment she put her hand on my shoulder, without speaking; and that was when the tears came, just a couple. Luckily I had my back to her.

  “I’m going up to do my homework,” I said. I’d done my homework already, and instead scrolled through Facebook, looking at the photos Cassie had already put up—in real time!—of the Evil Morsel’s party, of Mrs. Morsel holding up a tray of decorated cupcakes, and of Peter—handsome Peter, who ought to have been mine—with his left eye and some of his teeth blacked up, wearing an oversized Bruins jersey and wielding a whittled hockey stick dipped in red paint. Delia was dressed as a bunny, a Playboy sort of bunny—how could wholesome-looking Mrs. Vosul have allowed that?—and Cassie, in spite of her white bunny hair, was dressed as a cat, in a cumbersome black velour jumper complete with whiskers, ears, and a tail. I had to smile, because I could see in Cassie’s getup the over-vigilant hand of Bev, who would no more have let her daughter out in a Playboy-bunny outfit than gone out that way herself.

  “Serious costume!” I commented. “Sewn by Bev?”

  And Cassie texted me to say, “How well u know my mom. WTF, right? Pickup @ 9!!”

  “School nite?”

  “U know it”

  “Sorry 4 u”

  “Love u Juju,” she wrote back. Enough for me to feel consoled, as though we were suddenly okay, and my mother might be proven right after all.

  That wasn’t the only time she was sweet to me. There wasn’t anything angry or cruel about our drifting, not for her. More like I was an old pair of shoes and she had a couple of fancy new pairs; she didn’t think to wear the old ones, but wouldn’t have thrown them away. With the Morsel that fall, Cassie moved at speed into a different world, more grown-up than mine, one where she put on different faces for different people. Maybe I made her feel trapped, like she’d outgrown me. But from my side, it was like I knew her too well, I saw her too clearly, when she no longer wanted to be known: she wanted to try out a new role, and didn’t want to be reminded that it was fake.

  I hoped our family visit at Thanksgiving might bring us back together. In the car with her mother one afternoon, I asked whether Peter would be coming too.

  “Peter?” Bev looked at us in the rearview mirror. “Why would he come?”

  “I don’t know—I just thought—”

  “Cassie, is there anything I should know?”

  “ ’Course not, Mom.” Cassie used what my mother called “tone.”

  Bev looked again in the rearview, directly at me. “Cassie’s embarrassed, I know, because she wants to be popular. Believe me, I know how it is to be a teenager.” I knew Cassie’s mother had never had to worry about being cool. “Did you not tell her, Cassie?”

  “My mother decided,” she began—but Bev, steely but bright, interrupted her.

  “No, sweetie. We decided. We had a long conversation and we decided.”

  “We decided that I’m too young to have a boyfriend.”

  “Not too young to have friends who are boys,” Bev clarified, “but too young for exclusive relationships.”

  “So I told Peter that.”

  “So now they’re simply friends, not special friends.” Bev wore a tight smile. “Isn’t that right, sweetie?”

  Cassie didn’t say anything.

  “And that’s much more appropriate,” Bev concluded. “It means that they can be friends forever, which they’ll both be glad about in time.”

  Later, I texted Cassie to ask what had happened.

  “Whisker smudge Halloween” she texted back. “Bad scene omw home” And then, “Fuck her.” Which wasn’t something she would have said easily in earlier times. Cassie and her mother had always been a team, the two of them, and they took care of each other. Cassie made jokes about her mother’s outfits, or about how her mother would refuse dessert at our house and eat half a tub of Ben & Jerry’s when she got home (“Chunky Monkey for the chunky monkey,” Cassie would say), but nobody else had ever been allowed to do it. You weren’t supposed to laugh too much when Cassie did it, though you were supposed to laugh a little—there was a balance you were expected to find, and I’d long ago figured it out. But the balance had changed. Now there was Peter; now there was the Evil Morsel; now there was Anders Shute. Bev and Cassie weren’t on their own anymore; they weren’t necessarily a team.

  Which became all the more apparent when we stopped by their house on Thanksgiving—my parents and me, although my father had tried at the last minute to stay home with the cousins. My mother had said, “Rich, you can’t possibly bag out. What kind of message does that send? That only the sisterhood can be bothered!” Which both annoyed him and made him laugh.

  We’d had twenty-four hours of my father’s family by then: my grandfather in headphones on the sofa, conducting an orchestra only he could hear, while the eight-year-old twins, Brad and Joe, Mike and Eileen’s youngest, chased each other noisily around him. My grandmother spent a great deal of time in the kitchen, “helping.” She added seasonings to my mother’s sauces; she rearranged the flower arrangements; she polished the special-occasion silverware as if my mother hadn’t spent the previous Sunday doing it. Nana Robinson was never still or quiet. She loved to talk, she loved to laugh; she loved a party and a crowd.

  “If only she loved to listen,” my mother would whisper, only then to apologize. We adored Nana; it was just difficult having her as a houseguest. Grandpa too adored her, but he found it difficult sometimes having her as a wife—hence the headphones: expensive Bose noise-cancelling ones that removed him, immediately and entirely, to an encompassing aural universe of his own choosing. He was a lover of Satie and Debussy, of limpid, private music; Nana was more like Wagner.

  As for Mike and Eileen and their four children: the twins essentially counted as a single, lunatic kid. Jake, the eldest, was like Grandpa in his retreat. Lanky, seventeen, with big glasses that enlarged his dark eyes and a rash of little red spots on his porcelain-white forehead, he wasn’t doomed to be a gamer; he was one by choice. He could actually have been—and would soon thereafter become—fairly handsome. He didn’t have a speech impediment or halitosis. His dark hair was curly, his full-lipped mouth kind of sexy. But that fall he spent most of their visit in the attic guest room, plugged into an alternative game world—“Like a cockroach,” his mother joked. “Only comes out when the lights are off.”

  Their sister, Una, was closest to me in age—ten that fall, in fifth grade. She’d always admired me; imitation is the highest form of flattery, as my mother says. When I loved Harry Potter, she copied me. When I wore Doc Martens, she wanted a pair. When I got bangs in the fifth grade, we sent the cousins my school photo, and the next time we saw her, she had bangs that brushed the top of her glasses. But that year, the distance between fifth grade and seventh grade se
emed unbridgeably huge, and looking at her bright eyes behind their thick glasses and at the pink baubles in her hair, at her flat little Gumby body that could still easily perform backflips and cartwheels, that had no lumps or odorous emanations or secretions to mask—it was like looking back across a rough channel to a shore upon which you’d never again set foot. So I’d been mostly avoiding Una, and her eager conversation about books or shows or movies or pop stars. I wanted to say to her, Can’t you see I’m contaminated? Can’t you see the grown-up dirt all over me?

  My mother was annoyed with me throughout their visit—ostensibly because I wasn’t being a good enough hostess to the cousins, but really because she found it overwhelming to have so many members of my father’s family staying; but they were all so good-natured that she couldn’t show it, or even allow that she was mildly irritable. The cousins were there on my father’s account, and she wanted very much to be a good enough person not to be annoyed, because he himself was that sort of good person, and put up with my mother’s family without ever, apparently, losing his temper. So I was the only person she could lash out at in good conscience. She knew it, and I knew it, and I tried not to take her outbursts to heart.

  The three of us went over to the Burneses’ in my mother’s car around six p.m.—“I think you’d better drive, honey,” my father said—and left the cousins to watch Night at the Museum 2, the only film they could agree on.

  The Burnes house was lit up like a stage set, all the windows bright, and the Aucoins’ dogs barked when we pulled up. You could smell their fire in the chill night air, and from the houses on either side you could hear vague partyish noises and see moving shadows behind the blinds. In spite of all the lights at the Burneses’, it was quiet and still. When we rang the doorbell, Cassie opened at once as if she’d been standing there, waiting. She had her phone in her hand and quickly stuffed it into her pocket.

  Cassie acted with my parents as though everything was normal—best behavior, super polite—and in the flurry got by with a quick “Hey, Juju” to me. She led us into the living room—about three steps to our left—where Bev, in royal-blue chiffon, looking like an opera singer, stood imposingly next to Dr. Anders Shute. I knew straightaway who he was.

  Bev introduced us and we sat, as if on cue. They’d pulled in a dining chair ahead of time, to have exactly the right number of seats for the six of us. On the glass coffee table sat a harvest arrangement from the florist in Royston—I’d seen them in the window all week—involving autumn leaves and a warty mini-gourd and an elaborate bow of sparkly russet ribbon. I wondered whether Bev had bought it or Anders Shute had given it as a gift. The gourd resembled an ugly man’s face, and I thought that in a different moment, Cassie and I would have laughed about that.

  “You look so familiar . . .” My mother actually clapped her hands. “Of course! Dr. Shute! You patched up poor Cassie at the hospital this summer.”

  “That’s right,” he said with a thin sliver of a smile, his voice soft. “We patched her up.”

  “The importance of being patient,” my mother went on. “Don’t be the im-patient! Such a good line. Of course.”

  He dipped his head, still slightly smiling.

  “So is that how you guys met?” My father leaned forward in the La-Z-Boy and his flannel trousers rustled on the leatherette. “Clue me in.”

  “No, no.” Bev waved her elegant little hands—she’d painted her nails to match her dress, only a more silvery sort of blue—“We met in church.”

  “So you didn’t know—” My mother looked from one to the other.

  “Oh, we figured it out pretty quick. Even before Cassie came into the room. Talk about coincidences, right?”

  Anders Shute nodded some more. Still the little smile. He looked as though his jacket, shirt, and tie had all been clipped on, the way you clip clothes on paper dolls, and they’re always a little askew. Everything hung a bit wrong: the collar, the sleeves. Maybe he was just too skinny.

  “Yeah, crazy, right?” Cassie said. “Like, what are the odds?”

  “You have to believe the Lord has a plan for us,” Bev said. “Isn’t it amazing?” She pushed herself up from the sofa in one swift movement. “Now, who-all is ready for a little pie?”

  My parents and I made eager noises.

  “I’ve laid everything out on the dining table, so let’s all go help ourselves; and then we can sit back down and get to know one another.” She paused in the doorway, flushed and almost pretty for a second. “I’m so pleased that we’re getting together. I’ve been looking forward to this.”

  It occurred to me that she was proud not only to have a date—Bev had never had a boyfriend after Clarke, not in all Cassie’s life; she hadn’t wanted to—but also that she was proud to show Dr. Shute that she was friends with my father, the dentist; and that she was proud to show my parents that her beau, worth waiting so long for, was a doctor, which on some invisible scale trumped “dentist” anytime. When Bev said she was so pleased, she really meant it. She had planned for that moment, had probably imagined it a dozen times.

  I was waiting for Cassie to signal to me that we could escape upstairs to her room. I couldn’t believe that she wouldn’t, but as we sat pinkening in the too-hot living room, with the fire crackling and the grown-ups droning (“Then seven years in Bangor,” Dr. Shute was saying, “at the hospital there . . .”) and the pecan pie so sweet—sweeter than Nana’s, if that was possible—that it made my back right molar ache and made me aware of a new cavity . . . as this went on and on, I thought with a sudden lurch that maybe I’d been fantasizing, that things between us were even worse than I’d imagined and that the punishment for my newly demoted status was to stay trapped on the puffy chintz for the entire visit. I worried that Cassie would rather suffer the boring adults than hang out with me alone.

  But eventually, in a voice so naturally kind that only I could tell she was acting, Cassie offered to make more coffee for everyone, and suggested that I come with her. In the kitchen, things felt strange for a moment, but our familiarity, so deep in our bones, won out; and she hadn’t finished scooping the Starbucks Colombian Dark Roast into the Coffeemaster before I said, “What the fuck, Cassie? How did this happen? Your mom’s been shot by Shute! Why didn’t you say?”

  “It’s not a fricking joke, Juju.”

  “But how long?”

  “He first came home a few weeks ago. Like a horrible Halloween ghost, the morning after. Right after we had the big blow-out about Peter.”

  “Was that bad?”

  She snorted, fiddling with the water tap and the coffee pot. “ ‘Was that bad?’ It was fucking insane. My mother pulled me up the stairs by my hair. I’m surprised there isn’t a hole in my scalp.”

  “For real?”

  “For real.” And then: “All we did was make out. For Christ’s sake, it was a party. Delia’s mom and dad were in the next room. But Bev went psycho. Cue the horror music.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  “She’d been seeing him”—she nodded toward the living room—“for, like, a month before she brought him home. The first time I saw them talking at the church group was the day after Columbus Day.” She didn’t hesitate over the date; she had it firmly recorded. Columbus Day weekend, I’d gone with my parents to New York City, where we’d all stayed in one hotel room and my mother had got tickets to Wicked. Anders Shute—we’d met him together, practically sisters in the ER, hardly four months before.

  “What’s he like?”

  “Exactly like he seems.”

  “Thin?” Hoping for a laugh.

  “He wasn’t a church guy. He’d never been to our church even once, and then he shows up, like that, at Bible study. What’s that about?”

  “Did someone bring him along?” At our house, we mocked Bev’s Bible study group as an alternative dating site for the socially impaired. But I wouldn’t ever before have shared that with Cassie. “You know, was he with a friend of his?”

  “He didn’t
know a soul. He made a point of it. He said he read about the meeting on the bulletin board at the Market Basket. Do you believe that?”

  “Lonely guy.”

  “Here’s what I believe,” she said. “I believe he was looking for us—for me. I believe he found out about the youth group because of our photo album online. And then he figured out about the Bible study, and Mom, and then he came there. He doesn’t even live in Royston, for fuck’s sake. He lives in Haverhill, and he works in Haverhill.”

  “That doesn’t seem too likely, does it?”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  “Wouldn’t there be easier ways to find you than pretending in some long-term way to be a practicing Christian?”

  “There might be easier ways, but it’s a pretty certain way to my mom’s heart. She’s totally gone on him. It’s surreal.”

  I thought a minute. “Why do you think he was looking for you? Is he, like, creepy or scary around you? Does he say stuff? Or—”

  “No.” She leaned in and whispered, and I was gratefully aware of his even voice from the other room: he was still holding forth about the differences in the medical profession between Maine and Massachusetts. “It’s the opposite. He doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t speak to me. He doesn’t stay in a room with me if she walks out of it. He’ll make up some reason to leave.”

  “That sounds like a good thing, no? You wouldn’t want to have to talk to him on your own.”

  “God, no. But it’s weird. Admit it, it’s really weird.”

  “But he is weird. It’s the most obvious thing about him. Maybe he’s embarrassed.”

  “Embarrassed?”

  “When he realized you were Bev’s daughter—maybe that somehow makes it strange, that he’d already met you, but not her.”

  Cassie snorted.