Crazy Love You (13 page)

“So what brings you around?” my dad asked finally. I was sitting at the top of the stairs out of sight.

“Funny thing,” said Detective Cooper. “You heard about the fire at the Beeches'.”

“Oh, yeah,” said my dad. “Bad luck. Good thing no one was hurt.”

“That's just the thing,” said Cooper. “Bad luck didn't have anything to do with it. Someone started that fire. Came in through the basement and poured gasoline around the lower level, set a blaze. It was arson.”

“Oh my goodness,” said my dad. “That's awful.”

His tone had turned wary, though. I heard them move into the living room, my dad offering the detective a seat.

“Who would do such a thing? Why?”

“We're looking into all the possibilities. But there's one I just want to check off my list. Some people say that Mikey and your son have been having some big problems at school. Mikey hurt Ian the other day, gave him a black eye. Is that right?”

“Well, Ian's no tattletale,” said my dad. “He said he had a fight and we left it at that.”

Actually, it was two black eyes. And they hadn't healed completely yet, so the answer should have been obvious. And I thought it was interesting that Cooper used “Mikey” instead of Mike or Michael. “Mikey” sounded almost affectionate, like he had already taken sides.

“Okay,” said Detective Cooper. “Mikey hit Ian in the face with a dodge ball. Then later in the same gym period, Mikey tripped him. The coach said that it did seem to be an accident, though you never can tell with a kid like Mikey. He's a bit of a problem; all the teachers say so. But as they were taking Ian to the nurse's office, your son, according to folks who were there, was enraged, screaming. He said, ‘I'm going to burn your house down, motherfucker.' ”

My dad issued a low grunt of a laugh.

“You obviously don't know my boy,” said my father. “He wouldn't hurt a fly.”

“I know that's always been true,” said Cooper. “But there's been a change in your son since his mom . . . went away. According to his teachers, he's sullen, withdrawn, prone to violent verbal outbursts. I know you've been called in about it.”

There was a heavy silence.

Then, “We've been through a lot here, Cooper. My mom has moved in to help out. But a boy needs his mother and she's just not ready to come home yet. I'm doing my best.”

My dad sounded different, not like the pompous hard-ass I'd always known him to be. He sounded sad.

“I get that,” said the detective. “But he threatened Mikey Beech. And there's a neighbor who witnessed someone matching your son's description around the Beeches' neighborhood that night.”

“Wait a second,” said my dad. His voice had gone up an octave. I leaned myself against the cool wall and remembered the dream I'd had about fire.

“What are we talking about here? Ian's just a boy. You're telling me you think he burned down someone's
house
?”

“I don't think anything,” said Jones easily. “Let's not get ahead of ourselves. But I do have to look around, with your permission, Nick. And I need to talk to Ian.”

“Sure,” he said. “Look around. We have nothing to hide.”

My dad was a smart man, but he was naive. He should have refused and called a lawyer, made them get a warrant, just to be on the safe side. But he didn't think like that. The accusation seemed outlandish to him, impossible. His instinct was to throw the door wide open.

“This is about my wife, right?” Now some of his old fight had returned. That angry, don't-fuck-with-me tone was back in his voice. “She's crazy, so he must be, too.”

“No, nothing like that,” said Detective Cooper. “You know me better. I'm just doing my job.”

My father came to stand at the bottom of the stairs and looked up at me as if he'd known I'd been sitting there.

“Come on down, buddy,” he said. He wasn't a gentle man. But he was gentle with me that day. And tired—I remember he looked so tired. Of course, I never saw him as a forty-year-old man who'd just lost his daughter, whose wife was hospitalized, whose son was about to be questioned by the police for arson. He was just my dad—a permanent fixture in my life, but someone I loved far less than my mother.

Even when I was older, we never talked about how he handled it all. We never talked about anything really, me and my dad. Even when he was dying, and I came up every week to help out at the house and sit with him in the hospital. We just talked about the weather, the Knicks. I'd read to him from the newspaper; he'd rail about how
the whole goddamn system was broken
. He'd tell me that the septic tank didn't have too many years left in it. He couldn't take care of my mother's bills anymore at that point, though he'd sold the business to his partner for a pretty healthy sum. His illness was eating up most of his savings. We talked about what would be left, and how my mother could get Medicaid after he was gone. And what I would be able to cover. But we never talked about anything real.

“The police have a few questions for you,” he'd said that day.

I came down the stairs and loped self-consciously into the room. The detective asked me about what I'd said to Mikey and I told him that I'd never said it. Because I hadn't. All I did when Mikey hit me in the face was cry like a girl; I hadn't raged and threatened. I hadn't burned his house down. But I wished I had. I wished I wasn't such a scared, helpless wuss. Though I didn't say that to Jones Cooper.

He looked around the house, the garage. But there was no physical evidence, no half-empty gas cans or open boxes of matches in my room, or in the garage, or anywhere. Someone started a rumor at school, and it was pure bullshit. Anyway, I knew who had started the fire and why. And while that made me feel guilty, my dad was right: I was no tattletale. I wasn't going to tell on Priss. But I think Jones Cooper picked up on that guilty vibe. He kept at me for like an hour—walked with me from my room, to the garage, out to the shed in the back of the house. My dad kept looking out at the woods, and back at me. But he didn't say anything. Cooper kept asking me to repeat what happened at school. Wanted to know when was the last time, on the night of the fire, that my dad had checked on me. Had I ever snuck out of the house before? The Beech house was just a quick bike ride away; couldn't I easily have made it there on my own? My dad seemed to have an answer for everything. He'd looked in on me at midnight. No, I'd never snuck out. Ian's not that kind of kid; he's afraid of the dark. Did he sound disappointed in me? That I was a scaredy-cat and a wuss. Did he wish I was the kind of kid Jones Cooper seemed to think I was? Cooper was looking at me hard. He had a kind of penetrating gaze; nothing would get away from him. Anything bad or hidden in you started to squirm under that stare.

“Just tell Detective Cooper the truth and it will be okay,” my dad said at the beginning of the conversation. And that's what I did. I told him that I didn't know anything about what happened that night. Other than some nightmares, and Priss showing up in my front yard, and an odd, twisting feeling of guilt in my belly—all of which I kept to myself—I had nothing to tell.

After we'd finished his probe of our property, we came to sit at the wobbly kitchen table. It was smeared with something sticky, and my father brushed away a few crumbs. The room was dirty in a way it never had been when my mom was there—grease spots on the backsplash, dishes in the sink, dust bunnies in the corners. My grandmother, I may have mentioned, was not much of a housekeeper.

“Son,” Cooper said, “I'm just going to ask you outright: did you start that fire? I know the Beech boy has been giving you a hard time. Maybe you wanted to teach him a lesson. I can understand that.”

“No, sir,” I said. “I didn't. I wouldn't. I wouldn't hurt anyone like that.”

He looked down at his laced fingers and then back at me. It was the truth and he knew it. “I just wouldn't,” I said again. “Even if I wanted to.”

He gave me a slow nod. “And what about the witnesses that saw someone who looked like you that night?”

I shook my head. “I don't know. I guess a lot of people might look like me in the dark.”

Our conversation seemed to satisfy him. And after some hushed words exchanged with my father in the front room, he left. I stayed at the table, my throat suddenly dry, my heart thumping with adrenaline. I was afraid and I didn't even know why.

My father came in after Cooper left and sat beside me. He drew in and released a breath. I knew he was wishing for a cigarette. But he'd quit for my mom's sake a couple years back, and my dad never broke a promise.

“Tell me, Ian,” he said quietly. He looked scared, too—which only made me more scared. “Tell me what you didn't tell him.”

So I did.

•  •  •

It was twilight when we walked out into the woods, the gloaming settling like a blanket. I picked my way through the trees with my dad trailing behind me and brought him to the place where I'd first met Priss. The place they'd found me the night my sister died. But there was nothing there—the ramshackle, one-room house, the rusted-out propane tank, the windows with glass long shattered into oblivion. It was all gone. I walked closer and could see that the broken pieces of an old foundation were buried beneath leaves and debris. I just stared at it, my whole body hot with confusion, embarrassment. My father had insisted that there was nothing out there, not anymore. There
had
been an old place, but the city made him tear it down years ago. It was unsafe, threatening to fall, he told me.

He pointed over to a large oak a few feet from the foundation. “We found you there the night your sister passed, crouched into that indentation in the trunk. Not inside any house.”

I looked up into the purple sky I could see between the canopy of the treetops. A crow sat on a branch, looking at me with its glassy black eye, its blue feathers glinting in the remaining sunlight. I waited for it to caw at me, but it didn't.

“It used to be out here when I was a kid,” he said. And there was something strange in his voice. I turned to look at him. He had his hands buried deep into his pockets, was rocked up a little on his toes.

“It was kind of spooky, all run-down and creaky. I don't know whoever lived in it. Before our time. Some folks thought it was, you know, haunted.” He looked embarrassed, glanced at me oddly.

Then, “Of course, that's just kids talking, right? But I was happy enough to have it torn down.”

He moved closer, kicked lazily at some leaves. “I cheaped out, though, you know? I should have had them dig up the foundation.”

He looked at it regretfully. I could sense that there was something he wasn't saying. But I didn't want to know what it was.

“Dad.”

“Let me show you something.”

He started walking, and I followed. He knew his way around The Hollows Wood. Our property backed up right against the state-owned land, and he'd been romping about it all his life. He seemed more at home there than I'd seen him anywhere.

He was an awkward guy, not great with words. He did okay with a certain kind of man—which was why his partner did all the sales and customer service at No Paine Construction while my dad supervised the workers, made sure the jobs got done.

My dad was the kind of guy who unwittingly said inappropriate things, laughed too loud, looked red-faced and awkward anywhere off a construction site—at school functions, on the soccer field, at church. And when he drank, which wasn't often, he was downright mean. He got quickly belligerent and unkind. My parents didn't have many friends even when times were good, and I think he had a lot to do with it.

As we walked, the Whispers chattered—nervous, excited, gleefully malicious. I looked at my father, wondering if he could hear them, too. But he didn't seem to hear anything, kept his gaze straight ahead.

The sun faded from the sky as we walked and my dad, always prepared, pulled a flashlight out of his pocket. The shadows danced around, shifting and changing in the wind. It seemed like we walked forever, with the sky growing darker and the moon getting brighter, casting the world in silver blue.

Finally, we came up behind the ruined old church. It was little more than a pile of stones and one wall that cut a jagged shape against the night.

“What are we doing here?”

“We used to play out here,” he said.

He moved near what was left of the building, and kicked at a crumpled old beer can that lay there, shining his light on what looked like the remains of a bonfire. The moon was high and bright now, not full but almost, and the stars were making their early-evening debut, weak and distant.

“Have you been out here before?” he asked me.

“No,” I said.

But I
had
been out there before with my mother. It seemed like a long time ago—before she'd gotten pregnant with Ella. We'd just been walking in the woods and we'd stumbled on this place. It wasn't on our property; it was over the line into the state forest. It had been a beautiful day, sunny and warm, and the building site and grounds were covered with tall, high grass and wildflowers. There were hundreds of monarch and azure butterflies that day, dragonflies hovering, and birds singing in the trees. We were dazzled by its prettiness.

“Oh my goodness,” my mom said that day. She was herself then, funny and happy. “It's magical. Fairies could live here.”

“There are no such things as fairies,” I'd said. I was still feeling bitter about the whole Santa and Easter Bunny thing, having recently had those myths busted by some little asshole at school. “Nothing magical is ever real.”

She picked a tall purple snapdragon and looked at me with a patient smile.

“If it were real, it wouldn't be magic,” she said. “Real is dull and flat, two-dimensional. Magic is anything you want it to be. It sparkles.”