THE RIDING MOWER had been sitting in the middle of the overgrown lawn for three hours now. The pickup truck with its ramps set out was smack in the middle of the driveway. If she’d wanted to go somewhere, Sylvia would have had to drive over the unmown grass to get out. Not that she wanted to go anywhere, but it was the idea. The principle.
The boy—the young man—Tink, had driven up at about eleven, and with what seemed to Sylvia his usual deliberated, elaborate slowness, set the planks out, backed the mower down, donned ear protectors and goggles and started the engine up.
Alfie had been having a bad day anyway today, and this clearly tipped the balance. He’d come almost immediately into the kitchen, where Sylvia stood at the door watching Tink.
“Tell that …” He pointed out the window. “Tell him to go away.”
Sylvia turned to him. His face was working, agitated, his jaw moving up and down, his head almost palsied.
“It’s just the mower, Alfie. He’s doing the lawn.”
“No! That machine.”
“Yes, the machine that mows the lawn. The mower. He comes every week, to cut the grass.”
“It’s too loud.”
“Well, I agree with you.” She stepped over to him, touched his elbow. “But come, let’s shut the windows in your study. Come on. That will help.” And perhaps it would. They were new windows, double-glazed, tight. She took Alfie down the hall, matching her gait to his unsteady one. As she shut and locked the last of the windows, the noise was suddenly domesticated. It was as though someone were mowing off in the distance—an almost pleasant sound. She shut the curtains, too, so Alfie wouldn’t see the machine as it passed around the house again and again, and she turned the desk lamp on over Alfie’s work. Her eye fell on the papers scattered around, filled with Alfie’s vertical handwriting, almost completely illegible now.
“There!” she said. “Cozy and quiet. Perfect for working.” She hated herself—this tone, this condescension. Next she’d be using the nurse’s first person plural: Now we’re going to sit down and we’ll just get at it.
May I die first.
“But I don’t know where my books are,” Alfie protested. He sounded like a child.
“They’re right here.” Sylvia gestured at the stacks he’d placed on his desk, four or five of them, sloppy towers of different heights lurching this way and that.
“No, I mean the other books.”
“These?” She pointed to the bookcases lining the three walls of the room where there were no windows. They held the several hundred books Alfie had culled from his libraries at the college and the house in Connecticut.
“No, no.” He was angry at her now. “The others.” You idiot.
“I’ll tell you what,” she said, willing herself to patience, to cheerfulness. “You sit down and do your work, and I’ll go get the other books.”
He looked dubious.
“Okay?” she said. “Okay,” she answered herself. And she was grateful to see, as she walked to the doorway, that he was complying, that he had sat down and was pulling in, to do his “work.”
She shut his door behind her. She was thinking that this would give her a chance to get all the piles of books that were now messily stashed around the house into his study, at least for a little while. She started to gather them onto the kitchen table, beginning with the two piles from the porch, thickened with damp. She had just bent to pick up the pile on the floor by his living room chair when a motion outside flickered at the edge of her vision. She stood up and went to the window.
It was the police car, the big green star taking up the whole driver’s-side door. It had driven right across the lawn to Tink’s mower and stopped in front of him. Now the mower stopped, too, and Tink dismounted, though he didn’t turn the motor off.
Loren stayed in his car. She could hear their voices, yelling, though not what they said. She assumed he was asking about her—he’d come to her house, after all—but it didn’t make sense to her. Why hadn’t he just parked his car and come to the back door?
Ah. Perhaps because that would have been difficult with the truck taking up so much of the driveway. She felt a helpless irritability rise in her. She wanted to slam Alfie’s books down. She wanted the noise of the mower to stop.
She crossed to the porch door and stepped outside. She walked through the lanky grass to Loren’s car and greeted him and Tink. She had to shout to be heard, and she could barely hear Loren’s shouted greeting in return. She wasn’t sure whether Tink said anything at all. His face stayed impassive. Dull. It was dull, she thought. Dull and sullen and pretty. She stepped toward him and shouted, “Could you please turn off your mower.” She gestured at it.
It seemed to her he paused just a beat too long before he turned back to the mower. A beat meant to tell her he could goddamn well choose or not choose to do as she asked.
The silence that fell when the mower went off seemed shocking. Embarrassing, really. Loren was grinning up at her.
“Hope you’re well, Sylvia,” he said.
“I’m fine,” she said, ignoring Tink, who was coming back to stand by the car. And then she saw that there was someone in the backseat. She lowered herself a little to look in. His head, too, was ducked, to see her. “Gavin!” she said.
“Hi, Miz Rowley.”
“Are you boys in trouble? What is this, Loren?” She had stood back up and was looking at Loren levelly.
“I was looking to borrow your yardman for a bit.”
“But he’s in the middle of things here, as you see.”
“Yes, I do. And I apologize for that. But we won’t be too long. Just a few things to talk over.”
“But what’s so important? Why can’t it wait?”
“If you insist, Sylvie, I’ll wait. We could wait, couldn’t we, Gavin?” His tone was jovial.
“I can wait, for sure,” Gavin said.
“It’s just, I’d rather not,” Loren said, looking directly at her.
“Well, I suppose it’s none of my business …”
“It’s town business, Sylvie. You don’t need to concern yourself with it.” His tone had cooled.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Loren,” she said in exasperation. “Go ahead.” She stepped back from the car. “It’s inconvenient, to say the least. But I suppose that’s it, isn’t it? The law speaks, and that’s that.” She turned to Tink. “Go ahead, then,” she said.
Without looking at her, the young man went around the car to the passenger side and got in.
Now Loren smiled up at her again. As he started to turn the car around, he raised his hand in a regal salute. The king, riding off in his carriage.
“Please don’t be too long,” she called. She thought his smile deepened, but she couldn’t tell for sure. She was sorry she’d fed his vanity, or whatever it was. She turned and went back into the house, where Alfie’s books waited for her.
At about two-thirty, she called Adrian. He wasn’t at home, so she tried the store. Tink had been called away, she said, and the mower and truck had been sitting all over her yard for hours now. Her voice, she thought, was conciliatory. She was always careful of her tone with Adrian.
“What do you mean ‘called away’?”
“Loren Spader stopped by and picked him up.”
There was a few seconds’ silence. “Loren,” he said.
“Yes.”
“On official business?”
“It seemed so. He was in the police car. He had Gavin Knox in the backseat.”
“Gavin?”
“Yes.”
Another pause. Then: “I wonder what those boys got up to.” His voice had relaxed, it sounded slightly amused. Gavin’s involvement must have been reassuring to him, she thought.
“Well, whatever it was, it’s taking a while to resolve it. And meanwhile, I’d either like my lawn mowed or for this equipment to go away.”
“I s’pose I could get up there in, maybe, half an hour or so.”
“That would be perfect.”
It was less than half an hour, though, when she heard his car in the driveway. She stood up from her desk to watch him park behind the truck. He started across the yard toward the back door, and she quickly went to the kitchen so he wouldn’t have to knock, so he wouldn’t disturb Alfie, who was taking his afternoon nap.
He started when she opened the door—clearly he hadn’t expected it—and his face seemed unguarded, open, in a way she rarely saw it.
“I’m sorry about this, Sylvie,” he said, gesturing behind him at the truck.
“Oh, it’s okay,” she said. “Just, can you get them out of the way?”
“No, I’m going to finish up mowing now. I’m not sure when Tink’s coming back.”
“Are he and Gavin in some kind of trouble?” she asked.
“Sounds like maybe. Anyway, Loren took them over to Black Mountain, to the state police. Fran”—this was Loren’s wife—“wasn’t sure when they’d be back.”
“Is it about the fires, do you think?”
“I wouldn’t think so. Both of those boys’re on the fire squad, don’t you know.”
“No, I didn’t realize that.”
“Yep,” he said. “No, Fran said it was something about a car, maybe one of theirs. What I’m hoping is that it’s not some hit-and-run kinda thing.”
“Oh. Yes. That would be terrible.”
“But we don’t know.”
They stood for a moment. It was, Sylvia thought, the longest exchange they’d had in years.
“Well, I’d better get on it,” he said. “I won’t do the trimming today. Just the mowing. Then I can get that out of here anyhow.”
“Fine. I’m grateful for anything.”
He turned and went around the corner of the house. Sylvia went back inside. She’d make tea for Alfie. The mower would surely wake him.
So she was in the kitchen when the mower started up again, and between the noise outside and her own noise inside—the running water, the kettle clashing on the stove as she set it down—she didn’t hear Alfie. She didn’t hear the porch door slam shut after him, she didn’t hear him shouting at Adrian. She didn’t see him, either, trying to pull Adrian off the mower. Just suddenly the motor was off.
And then she did hear him, his terrified voice, shouting senselessly something about the house being his. “You’re not going to wreck it!” and she was across the living room, across the porch, the door was slamming behind her as she stepped outside.
Adrian was holding Alfie, easily. Alfie was frantically swinging his body back and forth and shouting, and underneath that, she could hear Adrian’s voice, steady, reassuring, saying Alfie’s name, saying Calm down, calm down. She stood, aghast, some paces away, and then Alfie saw her.
“They’re coming again,” he said, piteously.
She went to him. “Alfie,” she said. “Alfie.” She held him, too. She and Adrian were holding him between them, trapped like some child in a game, Take the keys and lock him up.
Sylvia was looking into Alfie’s face as she spoke her words now, the same kinds of words Adrian had been saying—Alfie’s name, and then that it was all right, it was all right. She could feel Adrian’s hands on her arms, gripping them. Holding her.
Holding Alfie.
Alfie calmed, slowly. His mouth opened and shut again and again, fishlike. She relaxed her embrace experimentally. She could feel Adrian doing the same, releasing her, and then, when Alfie stayed unresisting, trembling, he let his arms drop, he stepped back, away from her and Alfie.
She could see that his face was stricken, full of pity—for Alfie or for her? He met her glance, and for a moment she had a sense of who he might have been to her if their history hadn’t been what it was.
She turned away then, to Alfie. “I put some tea on,” she said to him. “Come inside. Come with me. It’s all right.” And speaking gently to him, her arm around his shoulders, she moved him, stumbling, toward the house. “It’s all right.”
She led Alfie to his study, where the curtains were still drawn, the windows shut. She hoped it would feel hermetic, safe. She got him to sit at his desk, she showed him his books.
Once he seemed calm, or quiescent, anyway, she went back to the kitchen. The kettle was boiling vigorously, its metal top chattering. Adrian was standing in the open doorway. She turned the heat off and took a step toward him. “I guess it would be better if you just didn’t try to mow right now.” She was almost whispering.
“Yes.” He turned his hat slowly in his hands. He looked at her. They stood perhaps three feet apart. “I didn’t know, Sylvie.”
“He’s … not well.”
“Yes. Well, I moved the truck out of your way till Tink can get it. The mower … I’ll leave it there. Maybe when you’re not going to be home? You could call? Tink or I could come up and mow quick and get it out of your way.”
“Thank you.”
“He’s …?”
“It may be his medication. He seems … worse, suddenly.”
“Ah.”
They were quiet for a moment that grew into a question. “We think he has Alzheimer’s,” she said. And even as she said it, even as his face shifted in sympathy, she knew she was announcing it to the town, that he would tell. His gentleness with Alfie today, their strange intimacy, the way he’d looked at her and whatever that meant, these wouldn’t have much weight in the balance. He would tell, because such information was his currency, as surely as the cash in his register.
“I’m sorry for that,” he said. He was sorry, she could hear it. “He was a fine man. Such an intelligent man. It just seems … wrong, doesn’t it?”
She nodded. “Well, life isn’t fair.”
“Aah, we know that.”
She moved to the Hoosier cabinet to get the tea for Alfie. “Thank you, Adrian,” she said. “For everything.”
“That’s okay, then,” he said. He put his hat on his head and turned and left.
——
The rest of the day had seemed endless, though Alfie was quiet. Silent, actually. He seemed utterly spent. Each time Sylvia passed his study door, he was sitting in his rocker, staring off at nothing. Either that, or dozing.
For dinner, she warmed up some soup. Alfie barely ate any, though he had two pieces of pie afterward. She had two martinis and wanted a third, but stopped herself.
By eight-thirty, Alfie was in bed, sound asleep. Sylvia tried her novel, one Frankie had recommended, but whether she’d had too much to drink or was just too agitated by the events of the day—Tink and Loren. Alfie. Adrian—she couldn’t settle into it. She moved restlessly around the house, sitting briefly in the kitchen, then at the dining room table. The windows were black. Alfie’s snoring was oppressive. She needed to get out, to talk to someone, if only for fifteen minutes.
She’d try Frankie, she decided. Drive down. If Frankie wasn’t home, she’d be back up within five minutes. If she was home, she’d stay no longer than half an hour at the most. That was all she needed. A human voice.
She pulled on a sweater she’d left draped over the back of a dining room chair and picked up her keys on the way through the kitchen.
The night air was chilly, and the darkness was absolute—no moon, no stars. Adrian had moved the truck partway down the driveway, she saw, and pulled it off to one side. She drove past it to the road and turned right, downhill.
The lights were on at Frankie’s. Sylvia’s relief was so great she was, for a moment, tearful. It took her a few seconds to notice that there was a car pulled up at the side of the house, an old car. Who could that be?
And then she remembered. Of course—Bud Jacobs.
She hesitated for a moment, but then she thought, This might be better. This would keep her from unloading all her sorrows onto Frankie. Half an hour of polite chitchat, then, with Bud or whoever this visitor was, chitchat that would probably be distracting enough, pleasant enough, to lift her spirits, to send her home ready to manage another day with Alfie. And perhaps tomorrow would be better. It often worked that way—after a really horrible episode, he would seem suddenly himself again for a few days.
And then it occurred to her: there might be something romantic, something sexual, going on between Bud and Frankie.
But no, here was the door opening, and Frankie standing in the light, looking out. She’d seen the headlights, no doubt. Sylvia turned off the engine.
“I thought it might be you,” Frankie called. As Sylvia got out of the car and walked across the yard, she stepped back. “Come in,” she said. “What a nice surprise.” She gestured behind her to where, yes, Bud Jacobs was standing up at the big table. “You know Bud, I think. He knows who you are, at any rate.”
“Yes,” Sylvia said, crossing the room to shake Bud’s hand. “We’ve met a few times, town gatherings of one sort or another.”
They talked briefly about these events. Then he asked after Alfie, and Sylvia reported he was sleeping.
“Sit. Sit down, both of you,” Frankie said. “What would you like? Coffee? I have decaf, too. Or wine? That’s what we’re having. Bud brought some over.” She was at the refrigerator.
Sylvia said she’d have a glass of wine.
Frankie brought her a jelly jar and set it down. While she was pouring wine for all of them, Sylvia turned to Bud and said, “Well, there’s no dearth of news for you this summer, anyway.”
“No,” he said, smiling. “It’s kept me jumping. And probably neglecting stuff people would much rather read about.”
“Oh, I think everyone wants to read about the fires. I think we need to read about them.”
“Well, I’d agree. And I have to say, it’s a high for me to know how widely the paper’s being read right now.” His long fingers turned his glass slowly on the scarred tabletop. “But why do you say people need to read about it?”
“Oh, I think … to be prepared, in part. And then, it’s interesting, the question of arson, and arsonists. Why they do it. How they do it. Wouldn’t you always read an article about arson?”
“Especially if it’s close by,” Frankie said.
And they went on talking about it, passing around the things they knew, the things they’d heard. Then they talked for a while about the debate in town over whether to put up a cell-phone tower in the town woods. Bud was always attentive, his face alert, noticing. Sylvia was aware of her impulse to respond to his focus, his interest. She said to him, “Here’s something else entirely, but interesting, I think. Loren Spader came by today to pick up Tink. Tink Snell, who was supposed to mow my lawn. He had Gavin Knox with him, too—Loren did.”
“What do you mean, he had him?” Something had shifted in Bud’s tone.
“Well, in the backseat. And he took Tink also. Adrian came by later and said they’d gone off to the state police, but that’s all he knew.”
Frankie was looking at Bud. “Because of the fires?” he asked.
“No, no,” Sylvia said. “Because of something to do with a car.”
“Oh, God, I knew it!” Frankie said. She leaned her head back, shut her eyes. “Unh,” she groaned. “It’s because of the taillights, I’m sure of it.”
“Oh, probably not, Frankie,” Bud said. He was trying to be reassuring, Sylvia could tell. And she could also tell he didn’t really believe what he was saying.
She asked then what Frankie was talking about, and Frankie and Bud explained Frankie’s having seen what might have been the arsonist’s car, her reporting that to Loren. Loren’s coming by with photos of car taillights he’d taken here and there around town.
They talked about what they knew of Tink, of Gavin. Of how unlikely it was that either of them could be the arsonist. Sylvia was thinking about Tink, about the way in which she felt insulted by every encounter with him, but she didn’t mention this. After all, she was at least partially responsible for what seemed like his contempt for her, or his dislike, anyway—she’d behaved so badly when she first met him. And she couldn’t believe that any of that was connected to the arsons.
Bud knew them both a little. He thought Gavin was “a nice kid” and that Tink was maybe of marginal intelligence. At any rate, incapable of this long, planned-out terrorism. “Plus, they’re both on the fire crew,” he said.
“Oh!” Frankie said. “Well! Doesn’t that make it even more likely?”
Sylvia watched him smiling at Frankie. “You’ll explain this theory?” he said.
“Oh, you know this theory,” Frankie said. “You wrote about it, the trooper talked to you about it.” She turned to include Sylvia. “They sign up because they’re fascinated with fires. They like to put them out, they like to start them. They just plain like fire. Something about it is … thrilling, I guess.”
“Yeah, well, I find them interesting, too,” Bud said. “I always like to go when there’s a call. But that doesn’t mean I’d start one.”
“Nor have you joined the fire department.”
Bud made an acceding motion, a lift of his shoulders.
Throughout this exchange, Sylvia continued to watch them, their attentiveness to each other, the pleasure apparent in their looking at each other. The pitch of Frankie’s voice. Were they sleeping together? There was clearly something going on between them, some spark.
They talked about the fires, then, how they differed from one another, how bad each was. Sylvia knew the older Cotts well, and she talked about their house, which had burned the week before, how it had been built in the twenties or thirties by the town’s master builder and had a number of his trademark elements, among them wooden wainscoting throughout.
“All of it nice, dry wood by now,” Bud said.
“Yes, kindling essentially.”
“I heard it made an amazing bonfire.”
At one point, Sylvia said she should get back up to her house, she was worried about Alfie. But Frankie poured her another glass of wine, pointed out how deeply he slept now, hadn’t Sylvia said so?
“Until about midnight or so,” Sylvia said. “Then he seems to think he needs to get up. I can hear him moving around. But as long as I can hear him, I figure it’s all right, and I try to soldier on in my quest for the requisite eight hours.” They laughed. She had thought quickly about telling Frankie about Alfie’s confusion today—his panic, really. But then she knew she wouldn’t, couldn’t, with Bud there. Bad enough that Adrian had seen it.
Though bad wasn’t what she had felt about that in the moment it happened. What she had felt, she thought now, was a strange kind of pleasure when they were holding Alfie, when they were almost holding each other. And this too might have been part of why she didn’t speak of it to Frankie.
But she and Bud had moved on, anyway. They were talking animatedly about fires as a childhood fascination. The wonderful sulfuric smell of matches. They both argued for the superiority of wooden to cardboard matches. Bud remembered the technique of lighting matches with a flick of a thumbnail, with a quick slide across a metal zipper. It made Sylvia recall the bonfires of her youth, and she talked about them—the leaves of the Chicago street raked together into an enormous pile and set alight on a dark fall night, the hangers bent into sticks for marshmallows, the marshmallows burning, dangling down, the faces of the children in the firelight, rapt, naughty.
They spoke of other pleasures of childhood. Making yourself dizzy by spinning around. The amazement of numbing a leg or a hand by lying on it oddly for a while. Breaking through the surface of an ice-covered puddle in winter, lifting up an entire magical sheet of the clear, cold, wet stuff.
Suddenly there was noise in the room, a buzzing. “Uh-oh,” Bud said, standing up. He took something out of his pocket—a pager—and pushed a button on it. A woman’s voice, distorted, hard to understand, spoke from it. “Call for a fire,” she said in a squawking, fuzzy voice.
“Ah, fuck!” Bud said. And then turned quickly to Sylvia. “Sorry,” he said.
“Repeat, call for a fire,” the voice was saying. “Address, Carson Road, number nineteen.”
“Nineteen, on this road?” he said, looking up at them, his face questioning.
“Alfie!” Sylvia cried. She was already standing up. She saw him, sleeping, smoke around him, or waking to fire, confused and helpless as a child. She was in motion, picking up her keys, her sweater, stepping quickly to the door. He would have died while she sat there drinking wine, talking. She pushed under another thought, a momentary glimpse of release for herself in this, whatever was happening.
She ran across the dirt to her car and fumbled with its door. Frankie was running out of the house, getting in on the other side. At first, Sylvia couldn’t find the key on her ring in the dark, and then she finally had it, had it in the ignition, and the car started and she pulled forward. She was about to turn out into the road when she heard the siren approaching and stopped. After a few moments, the town fire truck went by, headed uphill, siren wailing. There were two cars following it, driving fast, and then Sylvia swung out and joined the caravan.
She followed them up the hill and into the long driveway. There were three or four cars already parked in the driveway and on the grass—and men running all over. But the flames, she saw with relief, were rising only from the barn, just the barn. She got out and had started toward the house when the door to the porch off the kitchen opened and Alfie came out between two men in fire gear. Each was holding one of his arms. He was in his pajamas, looking around, amazed and frightened at the chaos, the yelling.
Then she was there, she had him. She put her hands on his face and turned it to her own, she spoke to him, and he seemed to see her. Later, she couldn’t remember what she said. The meaningless words you say to a child: It’s all right, it will be all right, shh, shh, come with me.
Frankie was beside her, she saw. One of the firemen asked if anyone else was home, and she heard Frankie tell him no.
Together she and Frankie led Alfie back to the car. She noticed a faint but pungent smell centered on him, and she wondered how long it had been since he’d bathed, feeling a pang of guilt, of shallow embarrassment, for that, for Frankie’s surely noticing it, or the firemen, one or the other of them perhaps thinking that she hadn’t been taking good care of him in this way, either. And somewhere under all of that—she was only momentarily aware of it—a pulse of rage: this, too, she’d have to be in charge of, apparently.
By the time they got him settled in the backseat, Sylvia next to him, Frankie in front, Sylvia looked up and saw that the flames were already quieting under the arc of water rising over the barn.
Alfie asked, “But what is this … event?” in a perplexed, irritated tone.
Frankie laughed in relief, and Sylvia started to try to explain it, feeling a complicated relaxation engulfing her as she did. A fire, she said, set by someone. The barn saved—you see? “And you, you were in the house, and they rescued you.”
“But who were they?”
“Yes, Mother,” Frankie said. “Who were those masked men?” and it was Sylvia’s turn to laugh, as much in relief as anything else.
——
After Alfie had gone back to bed, she and Frankie sat together for a while. Bud had stayed, too, but not long, just long enough to be sure Alfie was safely settled and to tell them what he’d learned about the fire from Davey Swann.
Tink Snell had called it in.
Loren had dropped him off here a little while ago to pick up the truck after their day in Black Mountain—Adrian had called Loren on his car phone to tell him he wanted Tink to get it moved tonight.
Tink had told Davey that as he was turning the truck around, he had seen something—a flickering—moving inside the barn, at the back. He’d gotten out, gone around behind the barn, and discovered the corner farthest from the house engulfed in flame. He’d tried the door on the house and found it unlocked, found the telephone in the kitchen, and called the fire station. Then he’d gone outside again to find a hose. There was one, attached to a spigot coming off the porch. It didn’t stretch far enough to reach the fire, but he began at least to wet down the side of the house connected to the barn. He was still doing this when the first firemen and then the fire truck arrived.
“Well, thank God he was here,” Sylvia said. The three of them were in the kitchen, at the table.
“Yeah, quite the coincidence,” Bud said.
“I guess it would be, wouldn’t it?” Frankie said.
“Sure would,” Bud answered.
“Do you not believe him, then?” Sylvia asked. “But why would he lie?”
“He’d lie if he’d set it.”
“But why would he set it and then call it in?” Frankie asked.
“It makes him a hero, doesn’t it?” Bud said. “I mean, he’s under suspicion, clearly—he and Gavin—and this would make him a hero.” After a second or two, he shook his head. “Ahh! I don’t know. I don’t know enough about it. About the fire, or the timing of Loren’s dropping him off—all that stuff. To be discussed.”
“Well, I’m just grateful it wasn’t the house,” Sylvia said.
“Of course. I am, too,” he said, and then Frankie went out on the porch with him to say good night.
When she came back, she sat down, facing Sylvia. They didn’t say anything for a moment, and then Frankie said, “You’re okay? You want me to spend the night?”
“No, no, you don’t have to do that. No one’s going to come and set another fire here tonight, of that I’m certain.”
“That’s not why I’m asking.”
“I know.”
After a moment, Frankie said, “Are you? All right?”
Sylvia laughed quickly. “Of course not, darling. I’m a mess.”
“I know I would be, in your shoes.”
“Oh, it’s not because of the fire. The fire.” She lifted her shoulders. “Well. That’s easy.”
“ ‘Easy’?”
“It’s just … I’m not sure I can do this.” She heard the wobble in her own voice and took a deep breath.
“Mother.”
“I will. I will do it. But it seems like … too much.”
Frankie leaned forward in her chair, her face earnest, concerned. “What can I do? How could I help?”
“Ah, Frankie. I don’t want you to do any of this. This is, really, the least I can do for Alfie now.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean. I suppose. That I don’t love him.”
“Mother. He’s not … himself. So naturally …” She trailed off, looking steadily, sadly, at Sylvia.
“No, that’s not it. It doesn’t have to do with his illness. I haven’t loved Alfie for a long time. And I should love him.”
Frankie sat back, her mouth opened slightly.
“I should have loved him,” Sylvia corrected herself. “If I’d loved him, imagine! I could do this gladly now for the sake of that. I would take care of him now for the sake of having loved him before. So I … I will take care of him. And hope that no one thinks I’m brave or noble or anything like that. I’m doing it, I will do it, so I can feel … decent, at least. Just barely decent.”
“I’m sorry,” Frankie said.
Frankie’s voice changed. “Surely there are programs. Visiting nurses, or some kind of day care …”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything beyond what I’ve talked about so far with the doctor.”
“Well, maybe I can find out. I could research this for you. Find out what’s out there.”
“This isn’t the city, you know.”
“I know. But there must be programs for people, somewhere. It will make me feel better to do this. To check it out. And maybe there really will be something.”
“All right, Frankie. I don’t mean to be difficult. Yes. Thank you. Maybe there’s something. I’d be grateful.”
The old house made a noise. Sylvia looked over at Frankie. Her face was open in a kind of yearning compassion. In an impulse responding to that answering warmth, Sylvia said, “You know, for half a second, when I heard it was our house, when Bud said nineteen, I thought Alfie would be dead. I thought I’d be free.” Her voice was almost a whisper. “I thought it was done, I’d be free.”
“Mom.” Don’t, Frankie’s face said.
“And then. And then I wanted to get him, to find him, to rescue him, or whatever I could do.”
“Of course. That’s what you wanted.”
“Mmmh,” Sylvia said.
Frankie looked away. Then her hand rose quickly to her own face, as though she’d just thought of something. After a moment, she seemed to sigh. She’d pulled back somehow, Sylvia could tell.
She shouldn’t have told her any of this. She had no right to tell her.
She looked over at Frankie. “I’m sorry, dear,” she said.
Her daughter’s pale eyes met her own again. “I know,” Frankie answered.