White Picket Fences (15 page)

Neil lifted his head to look at her. “Chase seems fine to me, and I thought you liked having Tally here.”

She moved toward him. “I do like having Tally here, but she misses Bart. It would be nice to know that he’s okay. And… and I’m not convinced Chase is fine.”

Neil picked up a pencil and began jotting down some figures on a scrap of paper. “With your brother, no news is usually good news. As long as we hear nothing, I’m of the mind that Bart is fine and he’s just being Bart. The best thing that can happen is that he just shows up here in a week or two. If he calls us from a Polish jail, on the other hand, what are we really going to be able to do for him?”

She waited for him to mention Chase.

“And Chase?” she said, when he did not.

“I already told you what I think about that. I’ve watched him this week. He seems fine.” Neil put the pencil down and reached for a tape measure.

Amanda watched him pull out the tape, hold it close to a plank of honey red cedar, and make a mark with the pencil. He let go of the tape, and it darted like a snake back inside its metal cocoon.

“I talked to Penny Ryder at the school,” she said.

Neil looked up at her, expressionless.

“You said I could,” she said.

“I remember what I said. What did she tell you?” His voice was controlled, calm.

“She said that if Chase has repressed memories of the fire, we owe it to him to help him deal with them now while he’s still at home.”

Neil made another notation on the paper. “But did you ask her how we would know that he has repressed memories? What symptoms he would show? Did she think it was possible that thirteen years could go by with no indication he’s got memories he hasn’t dealt with and then—
bam!—
one day at a church barbecue he starts talking to a gas grill?”

“Neil.”

“I’m just telling it like it is, Amanda. For his sake. Have you thought about how he’ll feel if he gets the impression you think he’s crazy?”

Amanda bristled. “I never said I thought he was crazy!”

“And I didn’t say you did. I said, have you thought about how he’ll feel if he gets the
impression
you think he’s crazy.
What’s he going to assume if you say to him, ‘Hey, Chase, I saw you talking to a fire and I just want to make sure you’re not losing it’?”

Amanda opened her mouth and then closed it. She had no answer for Neil on that point. She already imagined the look Chase might have if she was completely wrong about all of this.

But what if she wasn’t wrong? “Penny said that if Chase has no disturbing memories of the fire, then just asking him if he remembers it won’t be his undoing,” Amanda said. “If we ask him and he says no, there’s no harm done.”

Neil put the pencil down. “And if he says he doesn’t and he wants to know what happened, what are you going to tell him?”

Amanda looked down at the carved piece of wood for Hannah Loughlin’s cedar chest. “The truth.” She raised her head to look at her husband.

“The truth.”

“Yes.”

“All of it? That he could have died? That a baby did die?” Neil’s voice faltered, and he looked away from her.

Amanda raised a hand to touch the bridge of her nose as she counted several seconds to stave off a rush of emotion. Behind her closed eyes she could see Alyssa’s parents racked with grief at their baby daughter’s funeral. She could see the skeleton of the burned house when they drove by it on the way home. She could see Chase in his bed that same night, telling her his pajamas smelled like smoke and waking her later because he heard baby Alyssa crying.

“Amanda, think about it.” Neil’s voice wasn’t much more than a whisper.

She pulled her hand away from her face. It was wet. The tears had started to come anyway. “But it’s the truth,” she said. “What is it we think we’re protecting him from?”

Neil leaned forward on the worktable, resting the weight of his torso on his arms and crushing the tiny wood shavings under his palms. “He doesn’t need to know what happened if he doesn’t remember it.” He delivered each word with measured force.

“What if he does remember it?” Amanda’s voice rose in pitch and volume. It surprised her.

Neil snapped his head up. “If Chase remembered it, we’d know!”

“How? How would we know?”

“Because he wouldn’t be able to hide it!” A rare and softly delivered curse fell from Neil’s lips, and a vein began to twitch in his neck. Amanda stared at him. In that moment she knew Neil was keeping something from her. Something he knew about the fire. Something she did
not
know…

For a moment there were no words between them, and all she could hear were her own words from a moment earlier:
But it’s the truth.

“Neil.” Her voice sounded fragile. “What is it?”

Her husband’s arms were still stretched out on the edge of his worktable. His chest rose and fell several times before he spoke. “Don’t.” He did not look at her.

“Don’t what? What is it? What do you know?” Amanda sought his gaze, and he turned his face from her.

She reached out for him. “Neil, what do you know?”

For a second there was nothing but silence. Then he swung around. “It’s not what I know; it’s what I don’t know. Can’t you just leave it alone?”

A thin strand of fear worked its way into her chest. “What don’t you know? Tell me!” Both arms were on him now.

Neil was silent.

“If it’s about Chase, I deserve to know,” she said. “I’m his mother.”

When he turned his head to look at her, his eyes were rimmed with glassy wetness. “Keith said—”

Her heart thudded in her chest. Keith was the baby-sitter’s son. The boy who lit a cigarette in his room. “Keith? What did Keith say? Tell me!”

Again Neil turned his head away. When he opened his mouth, his voice sounded weary. “Keith told the police Chase wandered into his room and saw the lighter before the fire started, that Chase had it in his hands when he came into his bedroom after using the toilet. Keith said he took the lighter away from Chase and told him to go back to his mother’s bedroom where he was supposed to be sleeping. Then Keith went out on his balcony to smoke the cigarette. He said he left the lighter on his bed and that he had his back to the sliding door while he smoked, that he didn’t turn around until he smelled smoke. He said when he turned around, his room was on fire.”

Neil fell silent.

“What are you saying?” she said in a strangely even tone.

Neil turned his head toward her but didn’t look at her. “I’m not saying anything.”

“You think Chase started the fire? You think Chase killed that baby? Is that what you think?” Heat roiled about inside her, and she felt her chest begin to heave with too much oxygen.

“Stop it, Amanda.”

“You think Chase killed that baby?”

“Amanda.”

“Keith was lying. He’d say anything. How could you even
think
what you’re thinking?”

Neil pivoted. “You’re thinking it right now. You are. Listen to the way you’re talking to me, and tell me you’re not picturing it right now.” Neil’s voice broke and his face contorted into a mask of pain. “He was only four! He was too young to know what he was doing, and you know it. If that idiot of a boy left his lighter on his bed in a house full of little kids, he most certainly did kill that baby. But you can’t tell me you know for certain Chase didn’t start that fire. We weren’t there.”

“No,” Amanda whimpered, gazing at nothing. “No. That’s impossible. Keith was lying. The police, they would’ve… Surely they didn’t…” Her voice fell away.

“That’s right. They didn’t believe Keith.”

Amanda snapped her head up. “But you do? You believe him?”

“No! I don’t! I don’t want to think Keith was telling the truth. But this is not about what I think. This is not about what any of us think. This is about what really happened. You keep telling me, ‘What if he remembers? What if we’re wrong?’ I ask you the same question. What if
we’re
wrong, Amanda? What if Keith was telling the truth after all?”

Amanda closed her eyes and forced herself to see the babysitter’s
son carelessly leaving a burning cigarette on his bed, like she’d always imagined he’d done.

“Chase didn’t start that fire.” She opened her eyes when the image was firmly planted.

Neil stared at her for several seconds. “Still want to ask Chase about it?”

When she said nothing, Neil turned back toward his work-table.

She stood there, unable to answer him.

“Just leave it be.” Neil picked up the carved piece for the cedar chest and ran his fingertips across the indentations, caressing the tiny dips and curves.

Amanda turned from him, the richness of the cedar now too pungent for her lungs. She left the garage with the question hanging between them, and jealous of the wood’s ability to extract from Neil such intimate consolation.

nineteen

A
spill of moonlight fell across Chase’s bedspread, peeking through the plantation shutters. The blue glow of his open laptop provided the only other light in the room.

Chase sat on the floor, knees bent, staring at the stripes of moonlight that fell across his bed like a white picket fence. One hand toyed absently with the frayed edges of a hole in his jeans.

He’d caught Tally looking at him that day, staring at him and then turning abruptly away when she saw that he’d noticed—in the car on the way to school, at lunch while Matt lamented the span of years in between each World Cup soccer championship, and at the dinner table.

He shouldn’t have told her anything. But it had felt good to finally tell someone… Regret over saying anything at all battled against the relief that talking about the fire had given him.

He was fairly certain he could trust Tally. She had secrets too. And Tally didn’t seem to be like the other girls he knew—totally into themselves, into one another, and into guys fawning over them like addicts. She wasn’t an older version of Delcey. Tally seemed different. Perhaps it was because she was his cousin and they shared the same blood. Or maybe it was because she was the daughter of Uncle Bart, a man he’d secretly admired for years because legend had it he never took crap from anybody. Or
maybe it was because they shared a common desire to keep something secret that would change everything if exposed.

She probably wouldn’t tell his parents. But confiding in her had changed her opinion of him. And that bothered him.

Chase moved forward on his knees and reached under his bed. He pushed away video cords, an outdated issue of
Movie-Maker
magazine, and an empty box of Ritz crackers. He felt for an aluminum case blazoned with a graphic of shiny U.S. state quarters. His fingers felt the cool metal, and he withdrew the box, placing it on a wobbly stripe of hushed lunar radiance. He spun the dials on the combination lock. The box opened, revealing not rows of uncirculated state quarters but an assortment of Bic lighters, matchbooks from classy restaurants and sports bars, and a thin stack of two-dollar bills.

Chase eased Tally’s antique lighter out of the case and fingered the shiny finish, the etched swirls and flourishes. It was cool to the touch. He placed his thumb on the striking mechanism and kept it there for several seconds. Then in one deft movement, he ran his thumb across the mechanism. In a clicking instant the flame appeared, bowed, and then craned its little head as if to see who had set it free. It seemed to wave.
What have you been up to?

There was a lighter like Tally’s on that day. Silver, like this. Hinged cover, just like this.

He remembered it was Keith, the baby-sitter’s son, who had a cigarette in his bedroom, Keith who had a lighter like this one. Chase didn’t remember the bedroom catching fire, but he remembered the stink of burning fabric and walls. The audible applause of the flames.

But he could not remember the shape of that fire; he could not remember what it looked like.

The one he did remember was the one he breathed life into two years later in the field behind his house using a thin yellow lighter he’d found in the dirt. But the moment he gave the second fire life, it tried to run away. Tried to hurt him.

Chase had given a name to the fire that wanted loose, that echo of the fire that turned the baby-sitter’s house to ashes:
Ghost.

To his immense relief, he was able to corner Ghost with a garden hose before it clawed its way to his backyard fence and before anyone even knew about it. Afterward, he tried to pretend—year after year—that it didn’t exist.

But lately, even before he found the matchbook on the trolley, Chase had begun to imagine how he might master Ghost for good. Silence it, once and for all, and send it back to oblivion. And when he saw Tally’s lighter, which was so much like Keith’s, the desire intensified.

Chase turned the lighter in his hand, surveying the little flame from every angle. Keith’s lighter wasn’t exactly like this one. But close. Very close. There had been swirls and flourishes. Tiny etchings. And the striking mechanism made the same popping noise when the fire obeyed the summons to appear.

He closed his eyes, probing the folds of his mind.

Keith had showed him the lighter the day of the fire. No, Keith got after him for touching it.

Keith.

Red hair. No. Not red. More like copper brown. Green
T-shirt. Keith came into his bedroom, and behind him was the sound of a toilet finishing a flush cycle. Keith saw him and frowned.

“Hey! What are you doing with that?”

Remember.

“That’s not for little kids. Go back to your room. You’re not supposed to be in here.”

Again, he closed his eyes.

He saw a blue bedspread. No, a floor mat. He had been lying on a blue floor mat.

There were two blue floor mats. And a crib.

The other little boy had blond hair and a striped shirt. And a smudge of reddish orange, probably lunch, on the collar.

Keith had the lighter in his hands now. He stood by his bed, and the door was cracked open. He flicked at the top, and a happy orange flame danced out of the silver lighter. Keith had a cigarette in his mouth. He turned his head to light it. The lighter clicked shut, and the flame skittered away.