Читать книгу The Arsonist's Song Has Nothing to Do With Fire - Allison Titus - Страница 15

That first night she learned everything. Helen at the other end of the table, about to cry or beyond crying; the muscles in the face going the same either way, tensing then wilted. Vivian concentrated on the window just behind Helen. When the wind picked up, drooping branches gusted against the side of the house, tapped the glass.

“My husband’s gone,” Helen said, cradling her head with one hand like a headache. “Paul, goddamn it—he’s just, how do you—” She stopped to take a drink and shrugged.

Vivian tried to keep her face regular, tried to not look alarmed—though she was alarmed—because looking alarmed wasn’t going to help Helen, who was telling her how Paul didn’t come home from his office one night, where he still went twice a week even though that semester he was on sabbatical. How he was studying a certain kestrel of a certain northern region of some habitat off the Indian Ocean.

She said, “It wasn’t someone else, if you’re thinking that. We weren’t having trouble. The police ask about my marriage every other day, there’s nothing I haven’t answered twice already. It’s fucking humiliating. We were leaving that morning, the next morning, for Montserrat.”

Vivian pictured Montserrat: volcanoes. Currents like harp necks. Then sat there because what could she say, everything had changed. Now a man was missing. But she had no history here, no way to tabulate differences—see, that chair’s his favorite and the cat won’t budge.

“It’s been a month,” Helen said. “A month and two days.”

So she was going to Florida where her sister lived. Pensacola for the time being.

“And you will take care of this,” she said.

The table, the unopened mail, the empty bottle, the empty house. Said it with a casual sweep that included every forty-watt in every fixture, every chore, every joke souvenir from every pseudo-historical day trip they’d taken.

“You’re a saint for coming,” she said, “A saint.” She repeated it under her breath; she repeated it to the ceiling, her head swayed all the way back. She was drunk.

Vivian tried not to picture the chair tipping back, the crash of Helen breaking her head open, how she’d have to call an ambulance because she couldn’t drive stick. Vivian wasn’t a saint. Paul’s vanishing, which she could never tell Helen, meant she’d have a place to stay a few more weeks. If he returned tomorrow she’d be disappointed, not to mention homeless. Nothing about what she was doing there made her anything more than a short-term contract employee. There wasn’t even a dog to require walks and feedings and fresh bowls of water.

After some time had passed Vivian said, “Do you have any idea where he might be?”

Helen sat up in her chair then leaned forward, possibly surprised, Vivian thought, to realize she wasn’t alone in the room.

“I’ll tell you who doesn’t have a fucking idea, not a fucking clue,” she said. “Jenner and that idiot Maxwell—they made me wait a week to file the report when it was obvious the third night he was missing. They keep showing up with questions and the one with the mustache refuses to tell me a thing, he can’t tell me anything.”

She set the bottle down clumsy. “Like I’m just in the goddamn way,” she said.

“No, I don’t know where he is. It’s bullshit, it doesn’t make sense.”

Helen reached into the jacket draped over her chair.

“Do you mind?” She held up a sad looking pack of cigarettes, dumped the last three out on the table. “Want one?”

Vivian shook her head.

Helen smoked for a minute while Vivian tried to come up with something to say.

“They’re Paul’s,” Helen said, watching the cigarette between her fingers.

“He’s supposed to quit.”