How to Start a Fire (7 page)

James thought Kate was joking, but it was practically the truth. No one used any other word to describe the event. Anna was moving to St. Louis for medical school and wanted Kate to move with her. Anna devised a shockingly manipulative and well-laid plan to make that happen. Despite aiding in the abduction, George didn’t necessarily believe that Anna’s company was the best option for Kate. But it was superior to Kate’s remaining alone in Santa Cruz in that house.

“You moved to St. Louis against your will?” James asked.

“As a matter of fact, yes,” said Kate. “My roommate abducted all of my things and so I had to follow my stuff.”

“Are you staying here against your will?”

“No. But I’d never have moved if left to my own devices.”

“So maybe your roommate did you a favor.”

“I wouldn’t go that far. I finished the baseboards. Can I start prepping the windows?” Kate asked.

“Uh, sure. Don’t you have someplace to be?”

“No.”

Kate shoved the window open and scraped buckling paint from another era off the pane.

“Were you left-handed or right-handed?” Kate asked.

“I was left-handed. Still am,” James said, flashing his good hand.

“That was a lucky break,” Kate said. “Only ten percent of the world’s population is left-handed.”

James was glad she didn’t try to put some God-was-looking-out-for-you spin on it like everyone else.

“You ask a lot of questions, Kate.”

“I have a lot of questions.”

“You should have been a cop.”

“I don’t know about that. But I should have been something.”

Kate sat at her kitchen table sipping coffee and reading the paper. A shirtless male entered the room, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

“Morning,” the shirtless male said.

“Morning,” Kate said.

“Any coffee?” the shirtless male asked, even though the aroma wafted through the room.

“This isn’t a B & B,” Kate said. “This is a shitty, rundown motel on the side of the highway. There is no continental breakfast, and it’s checkout time.”

Boston, Massachusetts

“Anna, it’s time to leave,” Lena Fury, wearing a Jackie Onassis suit with the requisite pearls, said as she knocked on her daughter’s bedroom door.

While she waited for Anna to surface, Lena checked herself in the hallway mirror. Her highlighted blond hair was in an elegant upsweep, revealing her long ballerina neck—one of her more attractive features, although she had never been a dancer. Lena’s face was perfectly proportioned. That was a compliment she’d received from a plastic surgeon a week ago as they’d discussed options for stopping time. People used to tell her she was beautiful. Now she was told she was perfectly proportioned. She obsessed over her skin and every new mark of age that seemed to surface overnight. Her evening ritual involved a gentle face scrub, a prescription retinol cream, and a moisturizer with ingredients that, one day, would be deemed hazardous to the water supply.

Lena knocked on the door again, thinking about whether she could blame the permanent equal sign between her brows on her fifteen-year-old daughter.

“For God’s sake, Anna, open up.”

Anna had a lock on her door. Every time Lena and Donald had it removed, Anna would install it again. She’d checked out a DIY book at the library and purchased a two-dollar screwdriver. Lena lost so many fights with Anna that she had to choose her battles carefully, since they were almost invariably followed by defeats. Lena reached for the knob and it turned, to her surprise. The bed was made and the room was empty. Lena hurried downstairs.

“Where’s Anna?” Lena asked her husband.

“Probably still sleeping,” Donald said, eyes on his newspaper.

“I just checked her room. She’s not there.”

“We have many rooms,” Donald said. “Perhaps she’s in one of the others.”

“Martha,” Lena said to the Fury housekeeper, “can you check her usual haunts and remind her that she was supposed to be ready by eleven and dressed appropriately?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Martha said, a tiny smirk passing over her face.

Donald chuckled to himself, eyes still focused on the newsprint.

“Something funny?” Lena asked.

“With Anna, you can’t use words that are open to interpretation.”

“Excuse me?” Lena said.

Donald finally tore his eyes away from the headlines.

“Remember when you forced Anna to take ballet class? You bought her pink tights and a tutu and when it was time to leave, you ordered her upstairs and told her to dress appropriately.”

“I don’t remember,” Lena said.

She did remember, vaguely, but it had been an event that so alarmed her sensibilities, she refused to let herself think of it too often. Besides, it was years ago.

“She wore her field hockey uniform,” Donald said. “When you reprimanded her for her inappropriate attire, she reminded you that you had said, ‘Dress appropriately,’ but you never specified for what occasion.”

Lena joined Martha on her manhunt. Thirty minutes later, when the entire Fury house and grounds had been inspected, the obvious conclusion was drawn.

“She’s not here,” Martha said.

Not even a flash of panic interrupted Lena’s determined poise. She was disappointed, but mostly in herself. She should have known that Anna wouldn’t go quietly to lunch.

Anna had attended her first ladies’ lunch when she was ten. Her powder-blue dress was overstarched, puff sleeved, and trimmed with lace. Her dainty, pristine white anklets were in sharp relief to the spatter of scabs and bruises on her shins and knees. Everything itched, Anna remembered, and there was nothing to draw her attention away from her stiff, ridiculous outfit. Lunch was a poached fish that was so bland it was hard to imagine it was ever a living creature. The conversations were muted and meaningless. How could clothing be the topic of three hours of discussion when the goal of the gathering was to raise money for impoverished inner-city schools? Anna’s mind wandered into adventures that didn’t require good posture. She imagined being a hobo. In her closet was a bindle made from an old blanket and her field hockey stick. She even had train schedules hidden on the underside of her desk. She stashed extra cash in a smelly sneaker—a place she knew her mother would never look. Anna had always lived like a convict, even as a child, perpetually preparing for her next breakout.

She had escaped a few times before but was invariably caught, wearing rags, carrying her bindle, strolling down her quiet Beacon Hill street, where a child in hobo gear could not go unnoticed. A neighbor would call. A BMW or Mercedes would pull up next to her, and some adult would tell her to get into the car. When she refused, a litany of threats would follow. Eventually, one of them would induce cooperation.

At fifteen, Anna had planned a more sophisticated escape. She stuffed her school bag with a change of clothes, a toothbrush (no toothpaste, since she assumed that where she was going, she’d find it in abundance), and a few pairs of underwear. She had enough cash on hand for a proper vacation, which was how she saw the whole thing. She’d climbed out of her window at 8:00 a.m. after calling a cab from the phone line in her father’s office. The cab took her to the train station. She bought a ticket, boarded the train, and read Salinger’s
Nine Stories
, a gift from her brother last Christmas. She transferred trains and read “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” She laughed convulsively when Seymour had his outburst on the elevator, accusing a woman of staring at his feet. Other passengers stared at Anna. At the end of the story, she thought she might cry, could feel that half second in which she could lose control. She turned it off like a spigot. She was prouder of that talent than she should have been.

Nine hours and two buses later, she was in Princeton, New Jersey. Anna had visited before, with her parents, so she knew where to find her brother. But she needed to wait and then find him later at night, when no one would be willing or able to drive her home.

She found a café where she could sit and read until she finished the book and could see her own reflection in the glass. Then she used the battered map her brother had given her on a family tour of the university and tracked down his dormitory. Outside the dorm, Anna applied lipstick and pulled her hair into a knotty college-girl bun. She looked remotely like an underdeveloped coed. She circled the dormitory, looking for those telling Saturday-night lights that signified a party. Her best guess was that it was simmering somewhere on the third floor. Anna climbed the stairs and heard the distinctive hum of humans congregating. From the end of the hall, it was simply a collage of sounds, the common cackles and squeals in an inebriated orchestra. But then the notes in the symphony, the individual instruments, made their claim on Anna’s eardrums.

We need more beer.

I need more vodka.

Where’s Sandy?

Vomiting in the bathroom.

What kind of crazy motherfucker reads Ayn Rand?

How’d you do on the physics test?

Fucked up.

Where are you going for the holidays?

I heard Jamie lost his scholarship.

The problem isn’t reading Ayn Rand, it’s liking her.

Anna slipped through the door unnoticed. She reached into a giant bucket of ice and fished around until the throbbing in her arm radiated up to her neck. She retreated and waited until her circulation returned. A blond guy in a polo shirt approached, sank his arm into the ice bath, and eventually surfaced with a beer. The last beer, he informed her as he uncapped it, barehanded, and gallantly passed it to her.

“Have we met?” he asked.

“Nope,” Anna said.

“Hunter Stevens,” Hunter Stevens said.

“Anna,” Anna said, deliberately skipping her last name.

“What dorm are you in?”

“Clearly I’m in this one,” said Anna.

“Oh, you’re funny,” Hunter said. She could tell he didn’t like the funny ones.

“Thank you.”

“Where do you live?” Hunter asked.

“Far, far away.”

“Who invited you?”

“No one.”

“So you’re crashing?”

“Don’t tell,” Anna said, and she fought her way through the crowd and out of the eye line of Hunter Stevens (Hunter Stevens III, she would learn years later).

Anna drank her beer and leaned against the wall. She knew how to shed that cloak of self-consciousness. The beer helped, but it was more the role she played—she was an anthropologist, objectively studying her subjects. Usually they were overdressed women with too much time on their hands. Tonight they were casually dressed college students numbing their stress through alcohol, maybe drugs, and the hope of sex.

Her beer empty, she tossed the bottle in a grocery bag brimming with others of its kind. More booze arrived, and another unfamiliar face passed her a plastic cup filled with vodka and cranberry juice.

“Thanks,” Anna said.

When she was halfway through her drink and feeling a warm buzz, a hand reached out from the mass of bodies and pulled her away like a rip tide. Red liquid splashed from her cup and she found herself face to face with Malcolm Davis.

She noticed his eyebrows first, black and severe and completely at odds with his warm brown eyes. Anna also liked Malcolm’s nose, which veered just slightly to the right. (She always figured he’d gotten it from a fight but had never had her theory confirmed. Anna’s mother once described Malcolm as Jewish-looking. Later, in school, one of Anna’s classmates asked her what her type was. “Jewish,” she’d said.)

“Come with me,” Malcolm said, brusquely ushering her out of the party.

Silently he dragged her through the hallway, down a flight of stairs, and into the dorm room he shared with her brother. While Malcolm’s expression was an exact replica of the scowl of disappointment that Anna had come to see as normal in grownups, it looked funny on a nineteen-year-old male.

“Your parents phoned Colin five hours ago after an exhaustive search in Boston. Where have you been?”

“It takes a long time to get from Boston to Princeton. Did you know there are no direct trains?”

“This isn’t funny, Anna. Nobody knew what happened to you.”

“Ah, that’s what I forgot. I should have left a note,” Anna said, as if she had forgotten to buy a gallon of milk on her way home.

Malcolm picked up the phone and beat numbers into the handset. Anna thought about tackling him to the floor, but she knew he’d still find a way to make contact with the furious Furys, so she raided the minifridge, uncapped a beer, and sat down on her brother’s bed.

“Hi, Donald, it’s Malcolm. She’s here. I would drive her home myself, but I let a friend borrow my car for the weekend. Colin is on his way to Boston. Maybe he’ll call from the road so he doesn’t have to make a full trip. I’ll put her on a train tomorrow morning. Do you want to speak to her?”

Malcolm extended the phone to Anna while trying to confiscate her beer. She shook her head no. Malcolm covered the mouthpiece and whispered, “I’ll let you have the beer if you talk to him.”

“Hi, Dad,” Anna said. “I’m sorry about that. I just needed to get away. You know how that is.”

Malcolm could hear Donald yelling all the way from Boston. Anna moved the phone away from her ear. When her father quieted, Anna spoke again.

“Tell Mom I’m sorry. Tell her if she really wants to punish me, she must
never
invite me to lunch again.”

With that, the phone call ended. As far as Malcolm could tell, Donald had hung up on his daughter. Anna wasn’t one to fret over future punishments. She had learned long ago that punishments would always be in her future. She took another swig of beer and smiled at Malcolm.

“How should we celebrate?” she asked.

“What are we celebrating?” Malcolm said.

“My last night of freedom. After this I’ll be kept under lock and key for at least the next few months.”

“Why do you do this, Anna? It only causes trouble for you and your family.”

“Sometimes I just need to breathe fresh air,” Anna said.