The Grief of Others (25 page)

When Simon’s birthday passed unremarked, Biscuit had gotten down on her stomach and ventured in halfway under her bed, shoving aside Clue Jr. and electronic Battleship, a deflated inflatable easy chair, her mother’s old figure skates, several markers without their caps, and the dust-furred plaid skirt she’d pretended to have lost so she wouldn’t have to wear it to her fifth-grade chorus concert, and located the book of funeral customs. She’d stolen it from the library when Mrs. Mukhopadhyay didn’t come back to work after having her baby.

She had told Biscuit she would come back. She’d go on maternity leave in June, then to Bangladesh in the autumn to visit relatives, then come back to work early in the new year. Biscuit knew when the baby was born. One day after school let out for the summer she’d been at the library and saw a birth announcement on the circulation desk in the children’s room. It was a whole display, pasted on green construction paper, with a photograph of a big-headed baby with lots of dark hair, and a card announcing the arrival of Arun Jason Mukhopadhyay, 7 pounds, 11 ounces, 21 inches. Ounces and inches, like the results of a science experiment.

In January she’d begun keeping an eye out for Mrs. Mukhopadhyay, but each time she went, Biscuit saw only the same old assistant librarian who’d been filling in since summer. Then in February another woman appeared behind the circulation desk of the children’s room, a white woman with white hair cut in a heavy bob that hung and swung about her face; it looked as though she were wearing a wig too far forward on her head.The same woman kept being there each time Biscuit went in. Finally in March Biscuit had asked this person if she knew when Mrs. Mukhopadhyay was coming back.

“Who?” the woman said.

“The librarian.”

“I’m the librarian. Can I help you find something?”

“That’s okay,” Biscuit mumbled.

“I’m sorry?”

“No, thank you,” Biscuit said, a little louder, moving away from the desk.

She didn’t even know where Mrs. Mukhopadhyay lived, Nyack or one of the other towns, or indeed if she had ever returned from Bangladesh. Biscuit missed the sound of the librarian’s silver bracelets, missed twirling herself in the librarian’s plush swivel chair, watching her stir the fruit up from the bottom of her boysenberry yogurt. Standing before her bedroom mirror, she tried speaking to herself in Mrs. Mukhopadhyay’s Bengali accent, but had lost the way the rhythms went, lost the lilts up and down the scale.

So she stole the book. She returned to that part of the stacks where she remembered finding it a year earlier. She didn’t remember the title or author or call number, and it took her some time to locate, but locate it she did, and zipped it inside her parka. She walked past the circulation desk the way her father had coached her to walk through the hospital corridors a year earlier: like she owned the place, and she timed her walk through the electronic sensors to coincide with a man who was checking out a sizable armload. When the alarm went off, the man returned to the circulation desk with a beleaguered sigh, and Biscuit continued outside.

That had been a couple of weeks ago. Now she sat on the edge of the bathtub with the book open on her lap. Having located at last, after much paging, the passage that had provoked Mrs. Mukhopadhyay to comment, “That has a beautiful sound to it,” Biscuit read it aloud to herself now:

The acoustics in the bathroom were very good. Biscuit was confident Mrs. Mukhopadhyay would have been equally pleased with her reading today. She had done the first bit of the ritual—minus the coconut shell of course, and using proxy ashes (she had no knowledge of what had been done with her brother’s body after he died, nor was it anything she dared to ask)—and the last bit, with the egg. All that was left was burning the string.

Biscuit was shy of fire. She’d lit a match only twice in her life, both times holding the stick so timidly, and conducting it along the strip so lightly, that she’d had to strike it several times before producing even a spark, and all the while cringing so exaggeratedly Paul had made fun of her, scrunching up his own face like a drawstring bag. Paul was the opposite. He was, as he liked to say, a real pyro.Whenever their mother set the table with candles, he’d ask to light them. Same with jack-o’-lanterns, same with birthday cakes. He’d let the match burn down so far that Biscuit, watching, would feel dizzy. The front part of the stick would blacken and crumple while the living flame stole closer to his fingers, spreading just before it a line that gleamed like moisture, as if the wood had begun to sweat. Once he’d gotten them lit, Paul couldn’t keep his hands off the candles. He’d stick his fingertips in their pools of wax and let the wax cool into hard little caps, with which he’d tap out muted rhythms on the table. Biscuit would look on jealously, wanting but afraid to stick her own fingers in the liquid wax. Sometimes Paul let her have the little caps when he was done; she saved them in a special box she kept in one of her mother’s figure skates.

Only if their parents were not looking, Paul would pass his finger back and forth through the flame, quickly at first, then slower, slower, at last so slowly he’d stop a moment and hold it still in the flame. Then he’d hold up his finger and show Biscuit the black mark that did not seem like it could be anything other than what he told her, grinning, it was: his own singed epidermis.

“Paul!”
she’d cry, as much in reverence as reproach.

“What? It doesn’t hurt.” And he’d lick his finger and wipe the blackness on his pants.

He was swagger and she was swoon. She understood that the role she played in it was key, and also that it was part sham.

Still, at least some of Biscuit’s fear of fire was real, as was all her lack of experience. She set the book on the floor next to the box of matches. The house was still. She could feel its stillness through and through, feel it right inside her bones. If she were the gray lady, she’d be able to sense even more things. The emptiness of all houses. The contents of people’s dreams. The causes of their sadness, as revealed by the shapes left behind in their sheets.

Outside the bathroom window light played through the shadows of branches. Scraps of Hudson glinted blue. It was a little past two. She had not skipped the whole day; she’d gone dutifully to school that morning, arrived on time, handed in her homework, done her math worksheets and her language arts exam and gym, then slipped quietly away after recess.

A great mistake people made about Biscuit was to assume her unpragmatic. She was not. She was capable even of being strategic. She had, for instance, carefully timed the event of the burning of the string. She knew perfectly well, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, gathering up the box of matches now with shaking hands, that her father was due home from work at any minute.

Yet there was whimsy about her, and caprice; people were right in this. She had not known, for example, that she would do this part of the ritual until just last night, when Jess brought home a cake from the bakery. Jess kept bringing things into the house, little gifts: candy necklaces, pints of ice cream, colored soaps in the shape of flowers, a pink Depression glass vase from one of the antique shops in town. “It’s fun giving things,” she’d say with a shrug when they thanked her. She’d act like it was nothing. Biscuit’s mother had made quite a fuss over the little vase, which found a home on the windowsill above the kitchen sink. She’d made more of a fuss over the little vase than she had over the mandolin Biscuit’s father had given her a week earlier. And they’d all made a fuss over the bakery cake (which had been, in point of fact, exceptional: chocolaty and dense and decorated all around the rim with orange buttercream roses)—but it was the sort of fuss you made with guests, Biscuit noticed. It didn’t matter that they really liked the cake; their exclamations had a ring of artifice, of striving, a note of form’s sake. Just as Jess’s shrugging off the importance of things—the cake, the vase, the soap—was not real.

At any rate, there had been no birthday cake for Simon, but then soon after Jess had brought home this cake, and it was in a bakery box tied with bakery string, which she snipped off right at the table, and Biscuit had thought,
Aha
. She pocketed it, only at that moment hatching her plan. She smoothed the string across her lap now. It was thin and festive-looking, candy-striped. She climbed onto the rim of the bathtub and looped the string around the shower rod. She thought she’d been admirably responsible in choosing for her site the most fireproof room in the house.

Climbing down, Biscuit retrieved the box of matches from the floor. She took one out, being careful to shut the box again. She slid the match along the phosphorous strip. Not even a spark. She tried again, willing herself to press harder, strike faster, and then again and once more: nothing. She wiped her hand on her jeans, tried again. The match broke. She bit her lip. “There, there,” she said. She fished out a new match, struck it. It flared with a sharp hiss. Biscuit felt heat seize her finger like teeth. She dropped the match with a cry.

Because she had not remembered to slide the box shut after extracting the second match, it sat in her hand with its inner compartment jutting far out, like the lower jaw of a hungry dragon, and this dragon, right before Biscuit’s eyes, snapped up the falling match quite neatly, even greedily, upon which all its rows of skinny teeth burst into flame.

With a scream she flung the box away. It landed on the doorsill, burning brightly. Her palm was hot and she pressed it to her chest, inside of which her heart pounded. But as she stood there, recovering from the shock and fright, watching the flames and seeming still to feel the heat, the way it had come alive so suddenly bright and hissing in the palm of her hand, a peculiar thrill came over her, a scandalous, scoundrel excitement: this was more than she had hoped for.

Black smoke, flecked with ruby sparks, writhed upward. The wooden doorsill, painted white, had begun visibly to scorch in the area around the blazing box. Even if she were to douse the fire immediately a mark would be left. She stood where she was. Something like a laugh trembled in her throat. It was all wrong, both what she’d done and this urge to grin, to laugh, but the plainer the problem grew, the lighter she felt. It was beyond her. Beautifully, blissfully beyond her. Someone else would have to fix it.

Not until the smoke alarm went off did Biscuit come out of her state of exhilarated paralysis. Coughing, aware of a rawness in the back of her throat, she went to the sink. Her eyes stung. She turned on the tap, dumped all the toothbrushes out of the toothbrush cup—in her agitation scattering them all across the floor—and held the cup under the faucet.

The sudden presence of her father—although expected, although precisely planned for—was like something out of a dream: there he loomed in the mirror over the sink, where a moment earlier there had been no one. He looked large and angry. Biscuit loved him for it. His lips were set tight in his beard.

He snatched the cup from her hand, pushed her aside with forgivable roughness, crossed the bathroom in two large steps, trodding on toothbrushes as he did, and poured water over the fire, creating an instant cloud of steam and smoke, within which orange tongues still flickered. Paul should have been here, thought Biscuit. He would have been in heaven. The alarm keened and keened. Her father tossed the cup in the sink, threw a towel in the tub, ran the water, got it soaked, and laid it out over the whole blackened, still smoldering doorsill. Then he crossed the hall, disappeared for a moment into Paul’s room, and came out carrying Paul’s desk chair, onto which he climbed in order to reach the smoke detector, which he ripped from its mount with such force the plastic cracked. A piece fell to the floor and the house fell quiet. Her father stood there a moment, holding the smoke detector in one hand, inspecting the other, on whose index finger Biscuit saw a small gash.

She stepped over the doorsill and came tentatively to him.

He climbed down, breathing heavily.

In the meekest of voices: “Is your finger okay?”

“
This
is not okay! This is not
okay
!”

She stared. He’d yelled. His eyes were wide, his nostrils bulllike, flaring, and nothing about him was not furious. She didn’t know the last time her father had been angry at her like this. Never.

“What are you even doing
home
?
Again
. During
school
.”

She looked at the floor. Her heart was a mouse curled in a ball.Yet even now, the truth was she was not sorry; or she was, a little—sorry about his finger, anyway, and sorry to have him angry with her. But not that she’d caused a fire, not that she’d caused notice.

“You cut school again.”

She didn’t answer.

“What are Mom and I supposed to do?” The hallway stank of doused flame, wet charred wood. “Can you tell me?” Loud, loud was his voice. Clanging. “HELLO?”

She was studying the wooden floorboards, the grain, the way it made patterns and the way those patterns got interrupted, and also repeated. She was making herself as tiny as the grain, intricately traveling along its traverses and swirls.

He threw the broken smoke detector across the hall.The sudden motion made her startle. It smashed apart.The battery skidded across the floor and into Paul’s room. She looked at him, indignant, awed. “You skip
school,
you put yourself in
danger
, I don’t know what you were trying to do at the Hook the other day but you could have
drowned,
now you’re setting
fires
—what? Is this”—he broke off, and a terrible kind of laugh escaped him—“is this a cry for help?” Sarcasm edged his voice. “Do we not give you enough
attention
? Do we not give you enough
love
?”