Burn

Stephanie Wheeler

Stephanie Wheeler's short stories have appeared in Natural Bridge, Hurricane Review, and Front Range Review. She holds a BA from Bucknell University and an MFA from Arizona State University. She lives in Massachusetts.

Her name was Bea, and she’d shown up on our front steps in the black hole of night, barefoot in her fraying nightgown despite the frost that clung to the dead grass. She didn’t even have any underpants on. She was breathless because her mother had told her to run on over to us, their closest neighbors. Or the closest neighbors with a child in the house, anyway, because we were a good mile down the road and there were nearer houses if only she had turned in the opposite direction. Maybe Bea’s mother trusted that another mother would understand. That my mother would not ask too many questions and would simply take care of Bea until things could be sorted out, even though our families were not friends.

She stood there tattered, bug eyed, wordless. Stunned, my mother later said. We attended the same school-when she went-but we were always in different classes and not friends. I was already in bed, a detail I later lied about when Bea’s story turned into gossip, instead saying I’d seen her through the front window, bounding along the road towards our house, her nightgown billowing behind her like a cloud in the wind. Back then, I was dramatic when I had the attention of my classmates. Back then, it seemed embarrassing to be in bed when another girl was running through the streets, unattended.

Bea did not answer my mother’s questions but then my mother saw a flicker, a glowing orb through the naked oaks that grew between our properties, and a shifting shadow of smoke rising in the moonlight from the direction of Bea’s house and she knew. She could see it burn. She yelled to my father to call the firehouse. And quick.

When she called his name, Jerry, sharp and urgent, I lifted my head from my pillow. Panic was not a pitch familiar in her voice.

Bea’s was a ramshackle old farmhouse, with shutters hanging from single hinges, and old lawnmowers, tires, and gasoline cans littering the lawn. There were dozens of other rusted-out contraptions I didn’t know the name for lying all around. Her father called himself a fixer and he kept all the leftover junk he couldn’t repair for the parts. Bea’s mother had grown up in that same house, and my mother said it had once been beautiful with crisp, white spindles edging the front porch and a glossy green front door with a wreath for each season. 

Bea came inside and my mother plated her cookies and milk. This was her remedy for everything. Scraped knee: cookies and milk. Menstrual cramps: cookies and milk. Miscarriage: cookies and milk.

I kid you not.

I heard the scream of sirens, but soft and in the distance. When my mother opened my bedroom door and whispered for me to move over in bed and make room for Bea, I still wasn’t sure what exactly was going on.

“Bea who?” I asked. 

My mother pursed her lips, like I was making trouble on purpose, and repeated that I needed to scoot over. My mother tucked Bea in my twin bed, next to me. Everything will be okay, she told Bea, pressing her hand on the girl’s cheek. The firefighters were well-trained and already at her house. Bea laid still on her back, her breasts small planets pressing through the sheets, her tummy a crescent moon between her hips, and she stared at the egg crate spiders that I had crafted for Halloween and hung from my ceiling fan with thread, her face unreadable. I was still flat-chested. Excepting her round parts, Bea was otherwise skinny, like me in that way, and we fit alright. But she smelled like cats, so I slipped out from under the covers once my mother left the room.

“You can have the bed,” I said. “I don’t mind the floor.” 

I laid out a pile of stuffed animals and curled into them, my head pressed into the corner of my bedroom.

That’s when I heard my father’s voice, low, from the other side of the wall.

“She shouldn’t be here,” he said. “We should call child services. We can’t get involved with that family.”

Then the crack of a beer can opening, and my mother’s voice, quieter.

“We’re their neighbors, Jerry. Poor girl looked terrified. Let’s give her one night. What harm can come of it?”

“That man is trouble,” his only response.

My father’s boots were heavy but steady moving down the hallway, so I knew he was okay, only a couple of beers in, when he hushed their bedroom door shut.

“I wish I had my cat,” Bea whispered.

“I have a stuffed one, if you want,” I offered.

“It’s not the same. I want my cat,” Bea said.

I don’t know if Bea slept that first night. But the next morning, I found the spiders on my dresser. Bea saw me noticing them and told me she pulled them down after I fell asleep.

“I couldn’t relax with them hanging over me like that, all that string and staring, google-eyed. I hope you don’t mind,” she said.

“That’s fine,” I said, wondering how a girl our age would have a problem with egg crate craft spiders dangling from the ceiling.

Bea stayed at our house for two nights. She was quiet around my parents, mostly. But alone, she told me things. 

“I saw him hanging,” she whispered the first day, her eyes steady and wide.

“Who?” I asked. 

She told me her dad. She said that his head was lolled over with white goop stretching down out of his mouth. He was hanging by a rope he had lassoed around a pipe in the basement.

“He must have bent his knees to do it,” she said, “cause his feet skimmed the ground. His one leg moved, twitched a little, and I saw he could have stood right up, if he’d wanted to.” 

By this time, I knew Bea’s father had died. In the fire, I was told. That’s what my mother told both Bea and me. “I’m so sorry to tell you this Bea, but your father passed in the fire,” she’d said. I did not understand how Bea could have seen him hanging if he had died in the fire. I didn’t know what she was talking about. 

Still, I asked why he’d do that.

“I have no idea,” Bea said. “Maybe he was plain done.”

“Done with what?” I asked.

“Done living,” she said. “Or maybe there was no reason at all,” she added, lifting her shoulders with the possibility. “But don’t tell anyone, okay,” she said. “I’m not sure I was allowed to tell.”

“Does your mom know?” I asked. 

“I ran to get her after. But don’t say anything to anybody else, okay,” Bea repeated.

Her father was a known drunk. But lots of our fathers were, so that wasn’t anything. He was the rough sort, though, and that made him different from my daddy. I’d seen him grab Bea hard by the forearm once at Sunday school, when she tried to stay for a piece of cake after he said it was time to go. She had flinched first, then turned, followed, and not said a word. She stared at the floor. When he let go of her arm, his fingerprints lingered, dark pink on her pale skin. 

I understood, by this age, that there were different kinds of drunks, and I considered myself lucky because I’d gotten the good kind. My father might drink until his words turned to taffy, but then usually he’d fall asleep in the recliner. And there were nights when he came home and he couldn’t stand up straight, his voice loud and razor-edged. But he had never laid a hand on me or Mom, as far as I knew. Once, he climbed onto the kitchen table to show us a dance he’d seen at a bar. He tried to kick up his heel, but his boot caught on the edge of the table and he tumbled off, breaking a chair first, then his wrist when he crashed onto the linoleum floor. He’d refused to go to the doctor and get it set, saying that was his punishment for playing the fool and he wasn’t going to waste our family’s money on being a jackass. He was generous like that. Instead, he asked Mom to help him make a splint out of rolled up newspaper and tape. He got a little tan envelope with white pills from a guy he knew at work to help ease the ache. For the rest of his life, I’d catch him rotating his wrist in tiny circles, first one way, then the other and wincing as he did so. For the rest of his life, he carried around a packet of pills, swallowing, sweating if he went too long between doses. I could not imagine Bea’s father, with his pale, glaring eyes that were always set on Bea or her mother, suffering that kind of pain for his family. 

—

The day Mom told us about Bea’s father being dead, Bea didn’t react much, but my mother’s eyes filled up with tears. As it turned out, and I later learned, Bea already knew, so that might have explained her mild reaction. Or maybe it was something else. 

“What about the house?” Bea asked. 

“Burned down,” my mother said.

Bea twisted her lips in thought. “To the dirt?” she asked.

My mother nodded and Daddy, who had been pacing, laid a hand on my mother’s shoulder.

“What about Tiger?” Bea asked. When Mom and Daddy looked at each other, she added, “My cat.”

“I’m not sure,” my mother said. “Your mother didn’t say anything about a cat.”

Daddy stared at the top of Mom’s head, then looked at me. Daddy asked Bea if she’d like to pray. Bea shrugged her shoulders and Daddy said a few words about loss. Whether he was talking about the house or Bea’s daddy, I wasn’t sure, but Bea stood up in the middle and walked away. Daddy kept talking until Mom patted his hand.

“Give her a little space,” my mother told me, looking down the hall towards my bedroom where Bea had gone.

Once we knew Bea’s father was dead, my own father didn’t mention child services again. That night, my mother made American chop suey for dinner and Bea ate two whole plates full. I’m glad you’re eating, Daddy told her. Bea wore borrowed jeans rolled at the ankles and a baggy sweatshirt my mom gave her, a pair of my own woolen socks. We sat at the kitchen table, where I saw the newspaper on an empty chair and the headline that read, Unknown Man Exposes Himself at Playground. When my mother saw me looking, she reached for the paper, folded it and set it in the mail pile.

Everybody knew about the pervert roaming our area. There had been reports in the paper and word-of-mouth stories about an unknown man wearing a shiny black trench coat, exposing himself to little girls. He’d walk up to them at playgrounds or on sidewalks, silently, and unbutton his coat, under which he wore no clothing. He’d hold both flaps of the coat open wide like a greeting card, revealing his naked body. Reportedly, he’d just stand there, waiting for whatever might happen next.

That night when we were in my room, Bea in my bed, and me on the floor, I asked Bea if she knew about this pervert. She told me yes, that a girl she knew had seen his parts over at the baseball field. He had exposed himself to her and her older sister, and they had laughed in his face.

“Why’d they do that?” I wondered out loud. “Weren’t they scared?”

Bea chuckled a little then, the only time I remember hearing her laugh. 

“All his parts were hanging there, hairy balls, flaccid penis.” She said the word flaccid like her mouth was full of marbles. “And these girls thought he looked disgusting, and disgusting things make these girls laugh.” 

“I don’t think I’d laugh,” I said. 

“They have brothers,” she added. “Once you’ve seen the parts a few times, they’re not such a big deal.”

Bea spoke with certainty, as if from experience. But I knew that Bea didn’t have any brothers.

Later, when I was almost asleep, I thought I heard Bea whisper, “I wish I never saw him. I just wish it never happened.” 

“You didn’t,” I mumbled. “Your friend saw him. It wasn’t you at all.” But Bea was silent. If she ever replied, I didn’t hear her.

—

The next day, when Bea’s mother came for her, she was holding a scrawny, striped cat and she still smelled of smoke. Bea reached for Tiger and my mother sent us to my bedroom to pack some things, since all of Bea’s belongings had burned. She had nothing. When I asked Bea what she wanted, she began crying, and hard. She pressed her face into her cat. I walked towards her and put my hand on her back but she shook me off. 

“He was still my father,” she said.

I nodded. 

Then quieter, “I just wish I could die sometimes, you know?”

I nodded again, although I did not know. I did not wish I could die sometimes. 

Bea took a deep breath, stared into the mirror, sighed, and blinked. 

“There were kittens, too,” she said. “I can’t bear to ask about the kittens.” She wiped her tears with the back of one hand. She looked around my room and kissed Tiger on top of the head.

“Can I take a book?” she asked. 

I told her to take whatever she wanted and she reached for a fat, cloth-covered, fairy tale collection.

“They can be creepy at the end,” I said, “not like the movies.”

Bea flipped through the pages and tucked it under her arm.

“I like scary endings,” she told me. 

We walked out of my room and Bea grabbed a spider from my dresser without even asking. She dangled it in front of Tiger.

“Don’t tell my mom I was crying,” she said.

When we got to the front door, we saw snowflakes drifting down from the sky. My mother clucked when she noticed and went to the hall closet. She came back with my snow boots and her own winter coat. She handed both to Bea. Daddy shook his head and walked away. He never even said goodbye to Bea and her mother. 

—

After they left, Daddy went to the refrigerator. 

“He was a damn coward,” he said, opening a beer. 

“Not now, Jerry,” my mother said.

“She needs to know the world is full of selfish cowards,” Daddy said. He turned and pointed at me with his index finger. “That man didn’t die in the fire. You should know, he hanged himself.”

“She doesn’t need to know that,” my mother said.

“Word will spread. These things don’t stay quiet. It’s better she hears it from us,” Daddy said.

“It’s tragic,” my mother said. “Desperately sad.”

“Selfish coward,” Daddy repeated, spittle spraying from his lips when he spoke the words. “Took the easy out,” he added. The venom in his voice coiled my stomach into a knot.

Daddy slid a pill out of his pocket, dropped it into his mouth and swallowed.

“Can you bring in some wood for the fire,” Mom asked. “The temperature is dropping.”

Daddy stared out the window and nodded. He finished his beer, crunched it in his hand and left it lying on the counter. He took another, then went outside into the cold, into the falling snow. The storm door snapped behind him.

“What does he mean, the easy way out?” I asked.

Mom sighed. “He just means things will be awfully hard now, for Bea and her mother,” she said.

I watched my mother move to the window and look outside after Daddy. “But she told me there’s some house insurance money. I think they’ll be okay.” She bit the inside of her lip. 

“But I don’t understand,” I said. “How’d the fire start?”

She turned back towards me and came into the kitchen. “Bea’s mother thinks that her father was messing around with the gas cans and tools, and he set the fire either by mistake or maybe on purpose. He was always getting into trouble of one kind or another.” Mom picked up the empty can from the counter and dropped it into the recycling bin. “Once he realized the house was going to burn down, all the way down, and that he couldn’t put the fire out, she thinks he went inside. And that’s when he ended his life.”

I thought about how Bea had seen her father hanging. How she wouldn’t have gone inside the house after it was burning. I thought about how Bea came to us in her nightgown, smelling of cats, not fire. I thought that none of this made any sense.

But all I said was, “That’s sad.” 

“I think so too,” Mom said. “Heartbreaking.”

That afternoon, with dusk slipping through the trees, I looked out our front window and saw my father on the front steps, his elbows resting on his knees, shoulders hunched, head tilted towards the ground. He rotated his wrist in tiny clockwise circles. He was not getting the firewood for Mom. I opened the door and went outside to sit alongside him. Silently, he draped his arm over my shoulders.

“I shouldn’t have said all that about Bea’s father,” he said. 

“It’s okay,” I said. “I already knew. Bea told me.” 

Daddy turned to me, his eyes creased into a question.

“She found him first, hanging in their basement.” 

Daddy stared off into the sky, then pulled his arm back and cradled his face in the palms of his hands. 

“She saw his leg twitch. Then she ran to find her mom,” I said.

My father groaned, as if somebody had just punched him in the gut. “Just when you think it couldn’t get any worse,” he said, his voice muffled. “I’d have never guessed that could happen.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Nobody would think of that,” he said.

“Why not?” I asked.

Daddy lifted his head and stared off into the trees, in the general direction of Bea’s house. Her old house, that had burned to the dirt and was no longer there. A crow winged through the sky. I tilted my head, and saw it land on the edge of our chimney.

“Do you think he still would have done it, if he knew Bea was going to find him?” I asked.

Daddy pressed his lips together. “I don’t know. I’d like to say that would have stopped him. But I don’t know.”

“Would…” I began, but then the crow screamed, caw, caw, caw, high pitched and grating against the silence. We both looked up. Smoke slithered from our chimney now.

“Your mom got the wood herself,” Daddy said.

The crow turned its head, scanning, then took two shuffling steps. It angled its beak toward us, staring.

I wanted to ask Daddy something. I thought, Would that have stopped you? might have been the question I felt flickering, but I paused and I knew that wasn’t quite it. What I wanted to know, what was making my stomach achy and hot was something else, something slightly different. But I couldn’t capture the words in my mind, let alone my mouth. Instead of my real question, I said, “I wonder if he knew that Bea saw him? I wonder if she was his last sight.”

Daddy shut his eyes tight and when he opened them they were wet. He reached into his pocket and slipped another pill into his mouth.

“Selfish coward,” he whispered. He stared at his wrist and circled it a few times.

My stomach twisted again, but since I had no other place to go, I rested on Daddy. He kissed the top of my head and pulled me in tight. He wanted to make me feel safe and I wanted to feel that way too, so I pretended that this helped.

I leaned into my father and I watched the snow drift down from the sky, saw the crow cut across our yard, staring at us all the while, and I decided to ignore the question I felt burning inside me. I left it for another day.

Issue 10.2