for this thing—”
“No, it was stupid,” Viv said.
“It was nothing, anyway,” he said. “Should I go? If you’re fine and I’m . . . interrupting.”
Nothing about Ronny was too precise—his hair was wild enough to require that he sometimes shake it out of his face, and in another day or so he’d have a beard—so he seemed soft, despite looking rugged, and weary, as if he’d been hiking for weeks. He waited for Vivian to ask him to stay. He didn’t want to give the wrong impression, but it was a test to remain completely oblivious of her there; especially since it seemed—it was hard to see—that she was dressed in basically a long flimsy shirt—like she was getting ready to take a shower or go to bed. He didn’t want to stare. But he could confirm, as he’d suspected last night, that she was lovely in a way. She was somewhat Victorian seeming—he could imagine her wearing button-down blouses and wool skirts in the swelter of August—but she was also disheveled and oblivious to her valentine mouth and her large eyes, which were dark stare factories. Her hair was pulled back, messy, in a ponytail.
“I wouldn’t mind company,” she said, “and—have you eaten? I haven’t had dinner.”
She opened the refrigerator. A block of cheese, several imported beers. All the rest was leftovers from Helen, ugly-sad rubber containers of what looked like party food from a wake. Casserole fractions. Pulled meat.
“Help yourself,” Vivian said. “There’s food like someone died.”
She brought out the cheese on a plate and found some crackers. Opened a bottle of beer. Ronny fumbled at the counter with a bottle of whiskey, pouring into a mug. A symphony mug, because Helen and Paul probably donated.
“I have quilts in my room,” Viv said, and they took the flashlight down the hall to the guest room. At the window, she pressed her forehead to the glass and cupped her hands to look outside. The street, the trees, the telephone wires and power lines: everything was lacquered in ice. The wind had slowed, was pushing the trees around less violently from the sound of things.
Vivian moved across the room, set her beer down on the floor next to the bed.
“It’s warmer here,” she said, getting in and gathering up the blankets, “Come on.”
She made room for him, patting the mattress beside her. He sat down so that his back was against the wall and his legs stretched out over the edge in front of him.
“So,” Ronny said, holding up his symphony mug like cheersing. She couldn’t see from there but bars of music were stamped around the lip.
“Tell me something,” Vivian suggested.
Ronny didn’t know what to say.
“Anything, tell me something about this place.”
She tugged at the hem of his sweatshirt, the scrap she could reach without moving.
He drank again, it was warm, and thought about what he could tell her. What good thing he could tell her. The quarry came to mind. It was remarkable, a deep gorge in the earth, so huge it was unbelievable unless you saw it for yourself, and even then you felt so dwarfed it was hard to look down when you were standing at the edge of it. But it was manmade. And thinking about the quarry meant thinking about the fire, and there you had it: this town, he wanted to burn it. Last night when he’d left her and started back out, he’d gone to assess the damage, and when he’d gotten there he’d regretted it because his boss was there too, the office all lit up blazing like afternoon, and he knew he might’ve seriously fucked up. Was his boss sleeping there now? Pulling surveillance? It could’ve been seriously fucking bad. He’d stayed back in the woods, back of the shop, and from there all he could tell was the shop seemed normal, still standing. That’s what he wanted: to fuck shit up, but fuck it up within reason, not obliterate it.
“Well,” he said, “this town—”
“There’s got to be something,” Viv said.
“I’m telling you, this town—is, where I grew up. Right across the street. I did everything here, all of school, all the stupid milestones, right, first drugs, first dates, first petty crimes. And then I left, now I’m back, and all I can think is this town gets fucking smaller.”
“And,” Vivian said.
“That’s it.”
“No ghost stories or tales of misery and fortune that get passed around? Nothing that used to scare the shit out of you when you were a kid,” she said.
“Besides this?” he joked, indicated the room and meant the whole house.
A man was missing. A power outage, two strangers in a house. The dumb story where the caller is calling from inside the house and cut the fuse box on purpose. Vivian didn’t want to think about it.
“Why’d you come back?” she said.
Ronny hesitated, aware that he should lie. He should definitely deny the past two years, every lame mistake. Everything they could arrest him for. He could have said anything, put it all behind him, could’ve just changed the subject, and he would never know why he didn’t, why he told Vivian everything right from the start—later, looking back, the effect she had on him would still be confusing—but he told her all of it. Why he left, the fires, Pete’s accident, his parents’ divorce, moving out with his mother, moving back to town. He’d never told anyone this stuff. How for a month they made him see a counselor at the center but the counselor was a grad student, an intern, and Ronny was a shortcut, an easy write-off. When Ronny refused to talk, the counselor played solitaire while Ronny sat staring out the window until his hour was up, week after week. The first fire, Ronny told her, was before Pete’s accident. Or actually, it might have been—which Ronny hated to realize, it made him guilty—the fire might have begun, might have still been burning, at the exact moment the truck approached, skidding, Pete’s wheel clipped and twisted and going under, flipping him off, flipping the bike over the edge of the road—
He couldn’t think about it. And he hadn’t planned it out; he’d just done it. Lit the match, stuck it in the trashcan outside the high school’s shop room, touched the tiny flame, just the tip, to a wad of paper under sawdust, a scrunched up bag that probably held some kid’s lunch a few hours earlier. Ronny pictured the perfect sandwich square as he dropped the match, slowly turned, took three slow steps before sprinting into the woods. Where Ronny hid, just inside the stand of trees, he could see clear across campus to the track and field. No runners on the track yet; Coach Driver would still be going over meet times with them in the locker room. As Ronny watched, a janitor opened the back door and dumped a box into the trashcan. He remembered what happened, saw it playing out in slow motion: the thin flash of orange; the janitor stumbling back, shouting as he darted into the building; back again seconds later with a fire extinguisher, sinking the trash can in white foam. He watched, Ronny watched, and his knees got weak, he was sweating. The afternoon had been unseasonably warm, the sky a broad ribbon between clouds. The whole way home he’d felt it, the heat grazing his thumb as he took too long dropping the match. When he’d gotten home that afternoon there’d been a message from his father, calling from Bellsden. There’s been an accident Ron. It’s Pete. It’s Pete, his voice breaking over the chirping loudspeaker that went emergency-emergency-emergency. All he remembered from the rest of that day was the hospital’s generic hallways lined with pastel tiles: peach and yellow and
