Five Fires Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Five Fires

  An Excerpt from Sunburn by Laura Lippman 1

  2

  3

  About the Author

  Also by Laura Lippman

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Five Fires

  “There was another fire last night.” That’s the first woman. Tennis skirt, Lacoste polo, gold chain with a diamond on it, like a drop of water.

  The other woman—I don’t know either of them; you can’t, even in a town as small as ours, know everybody—says: “That makes three this month, doesn’t it?”

  “Two. The one at the vacant—you know that place. And now behind Langley’s.”

  And the playhouse, I want to say. The first one was that playhouse. But I don’t say it, because, again, I don’t know them. But three is right. There have been three since August 1, and it’s only August 10.

  “Do they know the cause?”

  “Lightning.”

  “There wasn’t a storm last night. There’s barely been a drop of rain since Memorial Day. Good for the beach towns, but nobody else.”

  “I know, but there was heat lightning. You could see it in the sky.”

  “Heat lightning doesn’t cause fires.”

  “Why not? It’s still lightning.”

  “But it doesn’t strike the ground, does it?”

  “It must strike somewhere. There’s no other explanation. No evidence of arson. I suppose, at Langley’s, someone could have thrown a cigarette in the dumpster, but there’s nothing that can make a vacant lot catch fire, except lightning.”

  But the playhouse had electricity. Or did it? I’d never been in it, of course, but I’d heard about it. The two-story house that Horace Stone had built for his only daughter, Becca. It had a kitchen and a bedroom and real furniture and, I think, running water. But no electricity. Or maybe it had electricity but not running water? It definitely had a bed. But everyone in town knew that. About the bed.

  Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure it had running water. And maybe a little minifridge with ice. There had to be ice. Not that I ever knew Becca Stone to play with. She’s a lot older than I am, four years ahead of me in school, going into her senior year at Princeton. She may want to be my friend, all things considered. But right now, I’m going into my senior year at Belleville High School, and it’s hard to imagine a day when I’ll be friends with people so much older. Even people who are inclined to like me, like Becca Stone. At least I think she likes me. Or would, if we get to know each other.

  The women take their sandwiches and go. They never said a thing to me the entire time they were in the store, except: “Wheat bread.” “No mayonnaise.” And: “Do you have any other chips?” It was like I wasn’t there. So I don’t say good-bye. I don’t know them, although I might know their kids, if they have any. Kids don’t come to the deli. It’s not cool. Most of the kids go to Subway or McDonald’s, maybe the Sonic, although only to get food to go, not to stay and eat in their cars, despite the fact that it’s a drive-in. That would be uncool too. I’ve made a study of what’s cool and what’s not, but it’s harder than it looks. Why is it cool to get Sonic food to go, but not eat there in your car? I don’t know. I just know that’s how it is.

  It’s almost four, when I get to leave, if Wendi, who works the next shift, is on time. Big if. Wendi’s boyfriend, Jordan, is working as a lifeguard at the community pool this summer, but she’s not sure of him, so she goes to the pool and stays until the last possible minute, then comes here, smelling of lotion and chlorine and french fries. I think she’s silly. He’s not going to do anything while she’s around, and watching him until the last minute isn’t going to make Jordan behave. I don’t know, if some girl were watching me that way, I think I might feel obligated to do something.

  And when Wendi finally gets to work, she wants me to stay and listen to her complaints and suspicions about Jordan, even though I’ve punched out. Wendi is one of those people who doesn’t seem to exist when she’s alone. But she never talks to me anywhere else, so I don’t see why I have to linger past the time I’m on the clock to listen to her talk about Jordan. True, I used to like it. Back when she was happier with him, when I could be a positive influence. Back last fall, when people said some nasty stuff about Jordan, I told Wendi she should trust him. She seemed to appreciate it.

  “And then Caitlin—she’s such a slut—”

  “I’ve got to go, Wendi.”

  “Why?” she asks. Meaning: You don’t have anywhere to go. Wendi knows how to do that, put a lot of meanness into words that aren’t necessarily mean.

  “Actually,” I say, “someone’s waiting for me.”

  “Who?” She thinks I’m lying, I can tell. Won’t she be surprised when she finds out who’s back. But that’s a secret, for now. I’ve promised not to tell. So I just smile. Enigmatically. That’s one of my vocabulary words. En-ig-mat-i-cal-ly. I’m not going to take the SAT, but if I did, I bet I would get a pretty good score.

  There are exactly seven ways for me to walk home from the deli. I worked it out. It’s sort of like an algebra problem. I’ve always tried to vary it, even before this summer, because I like some variety.

  “More like geometry,” Tara says, falling into place beside me at the corner of Tulip and Elm. The north–south streets are named for trees, the cross streets for flowers.

  “No,” I say, conscious that she’s smart, that she got into a good college, even if she decided not to go there in the end. Her decision, no one else’s. But that doesn’t mean she’s always right. “It’s not about the shapes. It’s about the variables. If I go straight on Elm, then there are three possible places to turn right—so those would be X, Y, or Z. But if I choose to go right here, on Tulip, there are still two more possibilities. So that makes Tulip ‘X,’ or—”

  “BOR-ing,” she says, the way she used to in class sometimes, in a light, high voice, almost like singing, that all the boys seemed to think was funny. “Is there anything more boring than figuring out how many ways you can walk between your job and your house? Except this town.”

  “Well,” I say, “you didn’t have to come back to Belleville if you think it’s so boring. And you don’t have to stay.”

  “Of course I have to stay,” she says. “At least for a little while.”

  “Why? Your family moved away last spring. Why did you come back?”

  “You know why,” she says. I don’t know why she thinks that. I mean, I know she’s here, staying with a friend, I guess. But she hasn’t explained everything to me, and it’s not like we were close in school.

  No one’s home at my house, 333 Rose. My mom’s working four to eleven this week. “I can’t have people in when my mom’s not home,” I tell Tara. “You know that.”

  “Like you’ve never broken that rule.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Only because no one’s ever wanted to come over to your house.”

  That’s not true. Okay, it’s true, but it’s not nice. But Tara was never that nice, despite what some people think. She wasn’t mean—it wasn’t like the movies, where the girls are so nasty you can’t quite believe it. She just made it really clear that she thought she was up there and other people weren’t. True, she was pretty and a cheerleader, but her family didn’t even move to Belleville until she was a junior. And, sure, she made varsity cheerleader without ever being on JV, but so what? It’s not like she was the only girl who ever did that. Becca Stone made varsity as a freshman and also graduated at the top of her class, then went to Princeton. There’s a world of difference between someone like Tara Greene and Becca Stone, and Tara never seemed to get that. Mama always said that the Greene
s just didn’t understand Belleville, that you don’t move to a place and try to make it be like you. You have to learn to be like it.

  I guess Tara came back because she’s a few credits shy of her diploma. But if she’s not in college, she has no one to blame but herself.

  I shut the door, leaving her on the walk. “See you tomorrow, Beth!” she says, but I’m already thinking maybe there’s a new way to walk home from the deli, a way that will keep Tara from waiting for me. It was interesting at first, having her seek me out, determined to be my friend. Now I’m not so sure. She’s sneaky. I don’t know what she wants from me, but I don’t owe her anything.

  I don’t mind coming home to an empty house, although I feel bad for my mom, who hates the night shift. But if she’s here when I get home, she’s on me. Even when school is out and there’s no homework to do. She tells me to take a shower because I smell like salami and sweat. She tells me to put my clothes in the hamper, then says, “Can’t you see that hamper’s full, Bethie? Start a wash.” She stands nearby when I count my tips—at the end of your shift, if you’ve worked alone, you get everything in the tip jar, although there’s a tradition that you leave a dollar for the next girl. I don’t know why, but I do it. Wendi doesn’t, though. She’s not . . . honorable. It’s silly not to do it. It’s not as if you lose out. Because, of course, if everyone does it, no one loses a dollar.

  I still hide my tip money from my mom, although she’s okay now. I can’t imagine her going through my room again, looking for my savings. Well, I can, but if it happened, I would know what to do. I’d tell her to call Bill, the guy responsible for getting her through the rough patches, and if she wouldn’t, then I would. That’s happened only once, and if you ask me, it was kind of Tara’s fault. I mean, things got so crazy there for a while and it was hard on my mom. People said mean things. I was okay with it, but she was fragile, taking it one day at a time, like they say, and she had a bad day. One. Only one. I’m really proud of her.

  Thinking about my mom, and how she loves me and wants the best for me, makes me want to be good to her. So I do all the things she would tell me to do. I take a shower. I start a wash, gathering all the dark clothes, except that one bright red T-shirt at the bottom of the hamper. It’s not that I’m ashamed of it, not at all, it’s just that I won’t know what to do with it once it’s clean. Plus, once it’s clean, then, I don’t know, it’s as if everything will be over, and I really don’t want things to be over. I keep thinking that maybe it’s just summer, that life will be exciting when school starts again, but I’m not sure. Daniel Stone graduated, and he’s going to Johns Hopkins on a lacrosse scholarship. Some people say it’s wrong, Daniel Stone getting money he doesn’t need, but I don’t see why he shouldn’t get a scholarship. I mean, it’s for being a good athlete, and if having a poor family shouldn’t keep you out of college, then having a rich one shouldn’t keep you from being recognized for your genuine talents.

  I wanted to go away to college, but my mom says it’s community college for me unless the sky rains money sometime between now and next spring. I’m a good student, but I don’t have any kind of special talent that gets you scholarships. It’s not that I wouldn’t get some aid, but my mom is dead set against loans and says it has to be a free ride or nothing if I want to go away.

  Last fall, I talked to a recruiter from Delaware State University, but my mom just got this look on her face and said, “Over my dead body.” I told her that it wasn’t an all-black school anymore, hadn’t been for a long time, that it’s ranked very high on some lists and a US congressman went there. I kept in touch with that recruiter, telling her of my situation, and she seemed really encouraging until this winter, when she suddenly said she didn’t think the school would be a good fit for me. I figure my mom went behind my back and said something. What can I say? My mom is prejudiced. Lots of older people are.

  Also, my dad left her for someone from Dover, and I think she just has a grudge against Dover. She’s lived in Belleville all her life. Me, too. My dad didn’t move here until he was in first grade, and he stayed here until he met that schoolteacher from Dover. She got a flat tire on the way to the beach. This would have been the summer I was three years old, but I remember it. Well, I remember him packing up, moving out. My mother told me about the schoolteacher, her red Miata, how she rode in the truck with the tow truck driver, wearing a shift that was barely a shirt over her bikini. “Slut,” my mother said. “Nice example for a third-grade teacher to set.”

  The teacher had a summer share over at Dewey Beach with a bunch of other schoolteachers. My father started taking weekend shifts at the garage, coming home on Saturday nights with a two-tone tan—dark brown on his forearms and face, a paler brown on his torso and legs. And he smelled of beer and the sea, without a speck of grease on him. He would try to get into the shower fast, he’d be a blur moving toward that bathroom, but my mother knew and she threw him out, expecting him to come crawling back. (She’s told me this story more than once.) So he packed up and moved to Dover, and next thing we know he’s sending Christmas cards, addressed only to me, with one baby boy, then two, then three. His new wife encouraged him to push himself, and he switched to selling cars. He pays child support, and he used to visit, but it wasn’t fun for either of us, so we let it go when I was twelve or so. “You have your own life now,” my father said. “You’ll be too busy on the weekends to see your old man. You’ll go out for cheerleading, start dating.” I thought he knew something I didn’t, that those things happened when you were a teenager, almost by law. I was a little puzzled at first, when my life turned out differently, but I didn’t mind.

  “Your father never knew what the hell he was talking about,” my mother said. “Besides, he’s got those other kids now. He’s too busy driving them to soccer and baseball and whatever else they do. Well, he always wanted a son, and now he has three. I hope he’s happy.”

  I don’t think she does.

  My dad kept up his support payments, though. And he says he’ll help, if I get into a school, but he can’t pay the full freight or even put up enough to bridge the difference between what I’ve saved and the full cost.

  Del Tech, here I come.

  Luckily, the Georgetown campus offers an associate degree in criminal justice, and it’s only twenty miles away. I just have to make sure that I don’t take Friday afternoon classes during the summer term, because the beach traffic will make even that short drive hellish. People who don’t live here can’t understand what it’s like, in the summer, to live in the kind of town that people are forever driving through, how you have to put everything on hold for much of Friday–Sunday and it’s annoying. Today is Thursday and everyone is running around like a storm is coming—going to the grocery store, getting gas, whatever—because by noon tomorrow you won’t be able to cross the highway. My mom and I are lucky that we live in town, but even that gets crazy, as there are a bunch of people who think they’re so slick, skipping the bypass and going through town. Why do you think they built the bypass? They come roaring through in their big SUVs, bicycles strapped on the back, kayaks and canoes on the roof, the cargo space filled with beach toys. Belleville comes at the point in the journey when most of them have been on the road long enough to be impatient, but there’s still more than an hour of driving ahead of them. You can almost feel how cranky the kids are, even from behind the deli counter.

  “They don’t use half that stuff they pack,” my mother says. “The boats and the bikes. You just know they don’t even get it off the car. It’s only a week, two at the most, and they pack like they’re going to Siberia.”

  I’ve lived thirty miles from the beach my entire life, and I go only once a year, at most. Not even that anymore. It’s a hassle, and my mom always says, “For what? To get a sunburn and a pound of sand in your underwear.” Besides, you can break your neck bodysurfing. She read about a guy in the newspaper who did just that.

  I don’t even know how to swim. That’s one reason
I don’t go to the community pool, where Wendi keeps watch over her boyfriend.

  I hang the laundry. We have a dryer, but we try not to use it in the summer unless there’s rain, because it heats up the house and you have to run the A/C even higher and my mother says she doesn’t work all the hours she works to keep the wives of Delmarva Power executives in fur coats.

  I make a bowl of microwave popcorn for my dinner—it’s a diet I’ve been trying: normal breakfast and lunch, but microwave popcorn for dinner, and I’m down six pounds—and fall asleep in front of the TV. The next thing I know, I’m dreaming and there’s the bonfire, but it’s the weird kind of dream where I stand outside myself, I see myself in my red T-shirt and I don’t care what anyone says, I think I look pretty, but then there is a pounding, pounding, pounding sound and these women in fur coats start looking around and Daniel Stone puts his arm around me and says, “Thank you, Beth,” and it’s not clear if he’s protecting me or I’m protecting him, and the pounding keeps coming and I think it’s Tara, at the front door, ignoring my mother’s rules, but—

  Shit. It’s raining, a hard, intense rain pounding the roof. I grab the laundry from the line and put it in the dryer, hoping the cycle runs before my mom gets home. I don’t know why I’m so tired. But it was busy at the deli, it being Thursday and all, and I was on my feet for five hours. (“Now you know how I feel,” Mama says when I talk about my feet hurting. “I do it for eight, and I’m twenty-five years older than you.) And wouldn’t you know, the rain stops almost as fast as it started and the sky looks clear, although there are flashes of heat lightning to the east.

  Sure enough, before my mother comes home, I hear the sirens of the Belleville Volunteer Fire Department heading out into the night.

  Fire number four.

  This one’s at the snack bar of the community pool, and they just decide to close the place for the rest of the summer, seeing that summer’s almost over anyway.