Bonfire: A Novel Read online

  I don’t want to talk about my dad. I definitely don’t want to talk about my dad with Misha. I clear my throat. “So you married Jonah Jennings?” I ask, with a kind of politeness I hope she’ll interpret, correctly, as fake.

  Misha only laughs. “His brother, Peter.”

  The new Misha is unpredictable. It’s as if the rules to the past have been rewritten, and I’m still learning the game. All I know of Peter Jennings is something I saw in the Tribune, a year or two into college—that he’d been arrested for dealing heroin.

  Misha fiddles with the magazine rack. “Held out for as long as I could, but he was persistent.” She hesitates for just a fraction of a second. “We have a baby, too. Kayla’s out in the car. We’ll say hi on the way out.”

  Even inside, with the air-conditioning going, it feels like standing inside a closed mouth. “It’s so hot,” I say. Misha’s not my business. Misha’s baby’s not my business. But still, I can’t help it. “You sure she’ll be okay?”

  “Oh, she’s just napping. She’ll scream like anything if I try to wake her. God. Listen to me. Can you believe it? I swear, you blink and ten years go by and it looks nothing like you thought it would.” She eyes me as if we’re sharing a secret. “You know I work over at Barrens High School now? I’ve been vice principal for a few years now.”

  This shocks me. Misha hated school almost as much as I did, though for different reasons. She found class to be an inconvenience, and the mandatory homework a distraction from getting felt up by random guys on the football team.

  “I had no idea,” I say, although what I really want to ask is: How? Then again, Barrens High, a tiny school with a graduating class of about sixty, probably isn’t attracting the best and the brightest in the education system. “Congratulations.”

  She waves a hand, but she looks pleased—pleased, and proud. “We make plans and God laughs. Isn’t that what they say?”

  I can’t tell if she’s kidding. “I didn’t think you believed in all that religious stuff. In high school, you hated the Jesus freaks.”

  But of course she didn’t: she only hated me.

  Misha’s smile drops. “I was young then. We all were.” She lowers her chin and looks up at me through lashes thick with mascara. “It’s all water under the bridge now. Besides, you’re our big star around here. The girl who got out.”

  Of course it’s bullshit. It has to be. She tortured me, tortured my family, got pleasure out of making me cry. I didn’t make that up. I can’t have made it up. She left a razorblade taped to my homeroom desk with a note saying, “Just do it.” That’s not water under any bridge I know. She spread rumors, humiliated me, and why? I had no friends anyway. I wasn’t a threat. Back then I was barely even a person.

  Still, when she takes my arm, I don’t pull away. “I could use an iced coffee. How about you?”

  “Nah,” I say. I swing open the cooler door and stare at the rows of bottled water, gripping the handle to steady myself. Six bottles, side by side. Three in each row, except the last, which has only one. That’s the one I grab. “Just this.”

  Even though I really want to say, Stop touching me. I’ve always hated you. But maybe this is Misha’s ultimate power, like the witch in The Little Mermaid: she steals your voice.

  I watch her fill up an iced coffee. I’m trying to figure out how to excuse myself, how to say, Good-bye, have a very mediocre life, hope I never see you again as long as I live, when she suddenly blurts, “You know, Brent still asks about you sometimes.”

  I freeze. “Brent O’Connell?”

  “Who else? He’s a big shot at Optimal now. Regional sales manager. Followed in his father’s footsteps and worked his way up.”

  Brent was from one of the richest families in town, which for Barrens means a basketball hoop, aboveground pool, and separate bedrooms for Brent, his older sister, and their parents. Brent’s father wore a tie to work, and his mother was like Carol Brady: big smile, blond hair, very clean-looking. Brent was hired at Optimal straight out of high school. Whereas the other guys had after-school jobs pumping gas or stocking shelves at the grocery store or even sweeping stables at one of the local farms, Brent had an internship at Optimal.

  “He’s still single. A shame, isn’t it?” She stirs her coffee slowly, like it’s a chemistry experiment and the wrong blend of sugar and cream will make the whole place blow up. One sugar. Stir. Two sugars. Stir. Three. Then, suddenly: “He always had a crush on you, you know.”

  “Brent’s with Kaycee,” I say quickly. I have no idea where the present tense came from: five minutes back in town and the past is invading me. “I mean, he was.”

  “He was with Kaycee, but he liked you. Everybody knew that.”

  Brent O’Connell was one of the most popular guys in Barrens. What she’s saying makes no sense.

  Except…

  Except for the kiss, the one kiss, the night of graduation. A first kiss almost exactly like I’d always dreamed it: an unseasonably warm June day, swimming weather, almost; the smell of smoke turning the air sharp; Brent coming through the trees, lifting a hand to his eyes against the dazzle of my flashlight. How many nights had I walked the woods behind my house to the edge of the reservoir, hoping to run into him just that way, hoping he would notice me?

  It was so perfect I could never be sure I hadn’t made it up, like I did Sonya, a dark-skinned colt-legged girl who lived in the attic of our old house when I was a kid and used to play games with me in exchange for leaves, twigs, and branches I brought her from outside; she had once been a fairy, I explained, when my mother found the attic nesting with rotten leaves and beetles. Like the games I made up after my mom died, to bring her back. Skipping over the sidewalk cracks, of course, but other ones, too. If I could hold my breath until five cars had passed…if I could swim down to the bottom of the reservoir and plunge a finger in the silt…if there were an even number of crows on the telephone pole, any number but ten.

  Misha carefully seals a top on her iced coffee, pressing with a thumb around the edges. “Why?” she asks—so casually, so sweetly, I nearly miss it.

  “Excuse me?” For a second, I really don’t understand.

  Finally, she looks up. Her eyes are the clear blue of the summer sky. “Why do you think Brent liked you so much?”

  I clutch my water bottle so hard the plastic takes on the imprint of my fingers. “I—I don’t know,” I stutter. Then: “He didn’t.”

  She just keeps smiling. “All that long hair, maybe.”

  And then, unexpectedly, she reaches out to tug my ponytail lightly. When I jerk away, Misha laughs as if embarrassed.

  “Maybe that’s where all that BS came from, Kaycee wanting us to hurt your feelings,” Misha goes on. “She was cuckoo, that one.”

  “She was your best friend,” I point out, struggling to keep up with the conversation, to haul myself out of the muck of memory.

  “She was yours, too, for a little while,” she says. “You remember how it was. She scared me to death.”

  Could it be true? Whenever I remember that time, it’s usually Misha’s face I picture, her crowded teeth and those big blue eyes, the look of pleasure whenever she saw me cry. Misha was the vicious one, the pit bull, the one who made the decisions. Cora and Annie, the followers: they trailed after Misha and Kaycee like worshipful little sisters.

  Kaycee was the prettiest one, the one everyone adored. No one could ever say no to Kaycee. Kaycee was the sun: there was no choice but to swing into orbit around her.

  Now, ten years older and ten years free of her best friend, Misha seems to be at ease. “Brent will be so happy you’re back, even if you’re on opposite sides now. Well,” she adds, seeing my face, “it’s true, isn’t it? You’re here to shut Optimal down?”

  “We’re here to make sure the water is safe,” I say. “No more, no less. We’re not against Optimal.” But to the people of Barrens, the distinction will make little difference.

  “But you are with that agency group,
right?”

  “The Center for Environmental Advocacy Work, yeah,” I say. “News travels fast.”

  Misha leans a little closer. “Gallagher said they’re going to shut off the water to our taps.”

  I shake my head. “Gallagher has his signals crossed. Anything like that would be way down the line. We’re just here to check out the waste disposal systems.” Law school teaches you one thing above all: how to speak while saying absolutely nothing.

  She laughs. “And here I was, thinking you were a fancy lawyer. Turns out you’re a plumber instead!” She shakes her head. “I’m glad to hear it, though. Optimal’s been such a blessing, you have no idea. For a while we thought this town was turning to dust.”

  “I remember,” I say. “Believe me.”

  A look of sudden pain tightens her forehead and pinches her mouth together. And for a long second she appears to be working something out of the back of her throat.

  Then she grabs my hand again. I’m surprised when she steps closer to me, so close I can see the constellations of her pores.

  “You know we were only kidding, right? All those things we did. All those things we said.”

  I guess she takes my silence for assent. She gives my hand a short, quick pulse. “I used to worry sometimes about you coming home. I used to fear it. I thought you might come back looking for—” She breaks off suddenly, and I feel a cold touch on the back of my neck, as if someone has leaned forward to whisper to me.

  Kaycee. I’m sure she was about to say Kaycee.

  “For what?” I ask her, deliberately trying to sound casual, spinning a rack full of cheap sunglasses and watching the sun get sucked into their polarized lenses.

  Now her smile is narrow and tight. “For revenge,” she says simply. This time, she holds the door open and allows me to pass through it first.

  —

  Misha’s baby is fussing in the car seat. As soon as she spots Misha, she begins to wail. I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding when Misha reaches in to unbuckle her.

  “This is Kayla,” she says, as Kayla begins to cry.

  “She’s cute,” I say, which is true. She has Misha’s eyes, but her hair, surprisingly thick, is so blond it’s nearly white.

  “She is, isn’t she? Thank God she didn’t get Peter’s coloring. The Ginger Ninja, they call him at work.” Misha jogs Kayla in her arms to quiet her. I somehow can’t square an image of Peter Jennings—blunt-jawed and stupid-looking—with this child. But that’s always true of babies, I guess: it’s not until later that they inherit their parents’ ugliness. “You’re helping put us on the map, you know, living all the way out in Chicago with your big job.” It’s half-compliment, half-command. Subtext: Don’t fuck with us.

  “You’ll have to come by the house for supper. Please. You at your dad’s? I still have the number.” She turns and fastens Kayla into the back seat again. “And let me know if you need anything while you get settled in. Anything at all.”

  She slips into the car before I can say don’t bother, and there’s no way in hell I’d be staying at the old house anyway. As soon as she’s gone, it’s like a hand has released my vocal cords.

  I will never need a thing from you.

  I will never ask you for anything.

  I’ve always hated you.

  But it’s too late. She’s gone, leaving only a veil of exhaust that hangs in the thick summer air, distorting everything before it, too, vanishes.

  Chapter Two

  Senior year, Misha and Kaycee started getting sick. Their hands shook—that was one of the first symptoms. Cora Allen and Annie Baum came next. They would lose their balance even when they were standing still. They forgot where their classrooms were, or how to get to the gym. And it was like the whole town got sick, too, like Barrens spiraled down into the darkness with them.

  And all of it? A joke. A prank. All just because they felt like it. Because they wanted attention. Because they could.

  For a few months, they were famous, at least in Southern Indiana. Poor, neglected small-town girls. Misha’s and Cora’s moms went on local TV, and just before Kaycee ran away, there was even talk of interviews with big-time media. Someone from the Chicago Tribune was trying to link the sickness to other examples of corporate pollution. When the girls came out as liars, though, the story fizzled quickly, and no one seemed to blame them, at least not for long. They just wanted a little attention. That’s how the newspapers spun it.

  But I believed them. And there’s a part of me that never stopped believing the sickness was real—that found myself again and again tugged to questions of environment and conservation, that brought the initial complaint to the agency’s attention, cleaving to it with the small but painful, nagging intensity of a hangnail.

  When I moved to Chicago, I tossed all my old clothes as soon as I could afford to replace them. I traded in my style, such as it was, for whatever was draped on the mannequins on Magnificent Mile. I ran my accent over a blade, sharpening out the long Midwest vowels, and told people I came from a suburb of New York. I slept off my hangover on Sundays, and never prayed unless it was to clear the traffic. And I stopped calling home.

  I did my best to shake Barrens off.

  But the more I tried, the more I felt the subtle tug of some half-dead memory, the insistence of something I’d failed to do or see. A message I’d failed to decipher.

  Sometimes, coming home after one glass too many—or maybe too few—I’d return to old memories of Kaycee, back to afternoons spent target-shooting rocks at the huge mushrooms in the woods, back to my dog, Chestnut, and back to the convulsions of a town felled by sickness.

  Maybe I wanted to believe there was some answer, some reason, for why she did what she did.

  Maybe I just wanted to believe her, because after all this time I couldn’t understand how she had suckered me so badly.

  No matter how many times I swore I would stop, I found myself coming back to the same questions. Why? I could shake free of almost everything, but I couldn’t shake free of that question. Why? Kaycee, Misha, the hoax. Why? Sometimes a month or two would go by. Other times, it was every few weeks. I’d lose hours searching Optimal, combing through the pitiful threads of what in Barrens counted for news. Mostly Optimal PR—new housing, a new community center, a new scholarship fund. All that searching over the years, and it never turned up anything of use.

  Until, six months ago, it did.

  —

  Wyatt Gallagher’s three hundred acres are enclosed entirely by a sagging post-and-beam fence. The drought’s been bad here; the green has gone brown, and dust obscures my windshield. As I turn up the gravel drive, several chained-up hound dogs bark in the distance. I knew the CEAW was renting out temporary space for the legal team, but I had no idea we’d be moving onto Gallagher’s farm—not that it’s surprising, given that Gallagher is the one who first complained about the reservoir.

  Considering Gallagher doesn’t have a cell phone, not to mention the spotty Wi-Fi, it’s a miracle the complaint ever made it past town lines.

  When I first saw the post, I immediately recalled the minutes from the most recent town hall meeting to read Gallagher’s complaint in detail. It wasn’t just Gallagher: a few other families stood up with him and expressed concern about the water. Poring over the minutes, I felt like Alice down her rabbit hole: I tumbled suddenly into old complaints, buried reports from dozens of Barrens residents, all these old issues and complaints neatly spiraled up and bound to Gallagher’s rage. I made four pages of handwritten notes just by reviewing the minutes.

  And for the first time in a decade, for the first time in my whole life, maybe, I felt as if the whole world had settled down. I felt as if everything had quieted to whisper the small promise of an answer.

  I put Gallagher in contact with the Indiana chapter of CEAW. There are procedures, protocols, paths meant to take us out of the entanglement of our fears and suspicions. But the Indiana team, still dealing with a tie-up in state l
egislation about a clean energy bill that should have been passed two years ago, leaned on us for support.

  So here I am.

  I pull into the grass alongside a newly painted barn, identifiable as our headquarters only by Joseph Carter’s beat-up Camaro with the ubiquitous COEXIST bumper sticker. There are a few other cars I recognize and some I don’t—Estelle Barry, one of the senior partners, told us we’d be getting some interns from Loyola.

  I stuff the empty water bottle into two old gas station coffee cups and toss them on the floor of the passenger seat.

  “Williams. You’re late,” Joe greets me as I enter the giant, airy barn, where the team has set up folding tables, filing cabinets, and a mess of computers cabled to a single power strip. The floor is a tangle of wires and dirt, warped floorboards, and cheap by-the-foot carpet.

  “It’s 9:02, dude.”

  Joe and I were hired at the same time in the Illinois office. He’s pretty much my best friend, though I’d chew off my hand before I ever admitted that to his face. We were greenies together. We’ve spent countless nights eating Chinese takeout under the glow of shitty fluorescents, hollow-eyed with exhaustion. We celebrated our first three Christmases as lawyers together. I always had a feeling that, like me, Joe wasn’t close to his family; I remember being stunned and a little jealous when he announced last year that he was taking time off for a family vacation in Florida.

  “I like that morning, tousled look. It works on you.” Joe leads me to a long folding table set up in the back of the barn. “Brings me right back to law school.”

  “Brings you right back to last weekend,” I say, and Joe makes a who, me? expression. Joe picks up boyfriends the way corners gather dust. It just happens. “You’re in a good mood.”

  “Maybe the country air agrees with me,” he says, stretching his arms out as if he’s never seen so much open space before. I wonder why the hell he’s so peppy this early, after a long drive from Indianapolis. Joe refuses to sleep in one of Barrens’s few motels or rentals, claiming that a gay black man belongs in Barrens, Indiana, like a dildo belongs on a dinner table. Instead, he’s chosen to commute.