Burn

I dream of fire. I dream of purple hearted flames and flickering shadows and a red gauze sky. I dream of open-mouthed ghosts in ceremonial dance, rising from jet black ash. I wake with my fingers tingling, the urge coursing hot through the valleys of each fingerprint.

The shed on the edge of Mr. Duncan’s lawn goes up quickly. It burns and burns, and I watch from the trees, peaceful for just a moment.

***

Detective Brower was a volunteer firefighter once, when he was eighteen and wanted desperately to be a hero. But he never got to run into a burning building or mount fast-crumbling stairs two at a time or army crawl over, under and through blazing detritus. He never handed over a soot-covered child to a grateful parent and never got to say, “Just doing my job, Ma’am.” These are the things that happen again and again in the movies he likes best, but these are not the things that happened when he was a firefighter in Brandon County.

Now, three decades later, he is a detective with a paycheck and a pension. The years have been marked by the type of crimes that buoy suburban town gossip – domestic disputes, shoplifting, the occasional break-in, one very terrible car accident he prefers to forget. But there are no unsolvable crimes, no long held mysteries to unravel. And this is why Brower, with his long-ago disappointment in putting out a few kitchen fires, is particularly interested in Case 841.

Until, that is, Holly turns up at the station to confess.

“You know where to find her,” the front desk clerk, Laila, says. She gives him a sympathetic squeeze on the shoulder as she passes his desk, the stacked bracelets on her wrist clinking together all too merrily. He lifts his chin slightly in acknowledgment and looks back down at the pictures in front of him.

A charred mailbox on Hackney Drive, and another on Amber. A burning dumpster behind the CVS. The metal skeleton of an old park bench, standing naked among its own remains. Every three months or so, another fire, growing in size and in spectacle. But it’s only been one month since the bench and, now, there’s this. He brings the photo of the shed to his face for a closer look, though he saw it in person just this morning. Arson.

Brower pushes the pages back into the folder and stands up with a forceful exhale. He doesn’t have time for this, not today. He reaches Interrogation Room 2 and pushes the door inward. It isn’t locked. They don’t bother with all that anymore.

In the past year, Holly – who lives with her mother in a narrow bi-level in the housing development two blocks from the station – has confessed to a burglary, a murder, and the park bench fire. He knows now that she gets her details from the newspaper, confuses public knowledge for her own secrets, the place and time largely irrelevant. Brower is obligated to take her statements.

When he enters the room, Holly is pacing back and forth against the back wall, the sleeve of her sweatshirt in her mouth, a Rorschach blot of wetness inching steadily towards her wrist. A section of her hair is pulled loosely through a dark scrunchie, the rest a forgotten chestnut tail disappearing limply into the hood.

“Hey, Holly. Hey.” Brower sits slowly.

Holly whirls. Her eyes are bloodshot, wet and wild. She wears exhaustion like a straitjacket, arms tight against her chest.

“It was me. I did it. The shed. It’s me.” She doesn’t stop moving, but changes course. She walks towards him then away, back and forth, a pendulum thrown at a new angle. “I can smell the smoke. In my hair. So I didn’t wash it. I know that would be, that would be, tampering. So I left it just like this. To keep the smell in. So you can smell it. And then you’ll see.” She gives her head one hard Etch-a-Sketch shake to try again. “Not see, smell. Smell. So you can smell the smoke.”

She leans across the table and bends towards him, her head nearly hitting his nose and hair falling onto the metal tabletop. Brower catches mildew, sweat, cigarettes maybe.

“Hey Holly, why don’t you have a seat and we can talk, okay?” She looks up, her movements jerky, a cruel hand pulling too hard on her invisible strings. “Tell me what happened.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I was home. In my room. And then I went to sleep. I shut my eyes. Like this,” she scrunches her face tight, deep lines exploding outward. “And then I opened my eyes and they told me that I did it. They told me that I did a bad thing again. So I came here. I came to a safe place.” She holds herself tighter, sobbing now. He imagines the voices he cannot hear, whispering poison into her ear. Brower’s hand drifts forward, to touch her arm, comfort her, but he stops himself. Protocol and all. But still, he softens.

He flips through the file and sets an image on the table, in Holly’s line of sight. He taps it gently.

“You see this?” She lifts her eyes just barely. “This is a footprint we found at the last fire. And it’s pretty small, right? Smaller than yours, right?” He watches her lean back further in her chair to steal a look at her own feet. “And there was one just like this at the shed last night, too.”

“But what if I wore small shoes? Sometimes my shoes are too small.”

“Yeah, that’s good thinking. But remember what we talked about last time? You also have an alibi, right? And that’s really important. Because we know where you were, and it wasn’t anywhere near that old bench. Remember, your mom told us you guys were having dinner. Mac and cheese.” Holly mouths the words. Mac and cheese. She turns them over with her tongue, neon orange noodles taking shape in her memory.

“These fires,” he gestures to the folder, “you didn’t set these, Holly.”

The door behind Brower cracks open and Laila pokes her head in, voice low.

“Mrs. Wendel is here.”

“Let her in.”

A short woman with wet hair and panicked eyes rushes into the room. The stale air is cut through with the scent of generic floral shampoo and cigarette smoke. Her coat is too heavy for fall weather and it gapes open, revealing sweatpants and a stained T-shirt.

“Oh my god, Holly. Are you alright?” She bends down and holds Holly’s face, scanning her for injury though they both know that what is wrong can’t be seen, not really. “What happened?” She wraps her arms around her daughter, burying Holly’s face in her shoulder. Over Holly’s head, she looks towards Brower. “I was in the shower. It was 15 minutes. I’m so sorry.” Her body quakes, shook by Holly’s sobs.

On the worst day of his career, Brower was called to the site of a car accident where a girl had fallen asleep at the wheel and gone headlong into a tree that did not give. Sometimes he thinks about her foot on the gas going straight towards her end. He looks at Holly’s mother, a woman desperately slamming again and again on the brakes for a daughter who can’t seem to get off the collision course. The room feels too small. Brower motions towards the door, silently communicating that he’ll be waiting outside.

He slumps into his desk chair, defeated. Laila comes up behind him, sets a cup of coffee gently next to the case file.

“God, I feel sorry for that woman. Was completely out of breath. Came sprinting in on those little feet of hers.” Brower shakes his head sympathetically. The coffee cup is halfway to his lips when he stops. He throws the file open and looks again at the photo he’d set in front of Holly.

“Goddamnit.”

In criminal psychology, there are many theories about arsonists. Their motives range from revenge to profit to thrill-seeking. Some light fires to conceal other crimes, some as nothing more than vandalism. Brower knows in this instant that none of these are the reason for his fires. Sometimes – this time – it is the desire to control just one uncontrollable thing, in a life of uncontrollable things.

Brower walks back to the interrogation room and grabs the door handle. He hesitates for a moment. He does not like this movie. He goes in.

“Mrs. Wendel, I need to ask. What shoe size are you?”

***

I hold the cigarette at eye level between my thumb and forefinger, ember dancing and dying in front of me. The light reaches the filter and goes dark with a soft hiss. I think of Richard grabbing his half pack of Marlboros off the counter as he walked out the front door with his bags. I think about going home to an empty house, again.

Those little feet of hers.

It was almost too easy.

I toss the bud onto the pavement between my size 6s, which are new and roomy at the toe.

I turn towards the station and the doors slide open to welcome me back inside. I take my seat again at the front desk, shuffle papers, pretend that I am not thinking, already, about the rusted Jeep at the back of the auto body lot. Tucked into the shadows. No one will miss it. It would be so easy to set alight, so nice to watch it burn. Watch anything burn. Fuck you, Richard.

I beckon an old woman forward to the desk, bracelets knocking together noisily.

“Next.”