Things We Set on Fire Read online

  PRAISE FOR THINGS WE SET ON FIRE

  “Reed is fearless in nudging her characters toward disaster, and the reader follows with a thumping heart, confident in the story’s authoritative prose and, ultimately, redeeming spirit. I was genuinely moved by this novel, and recommend it highly.”

  —Antonya Nelson, author of Bound: A Novel and Some Fun: Stories and a Novella

  “With striking lyricism, sly humor, and great sympathy for her finely drawn characters, Deborah Reed has written a beautiful novel about family and forgiveness in Things We Set on Fire. I couldn’t put it down, which is the kind of problem that I think every book lover hopes for.”

  —Christine Sneed, author of Little Known Facts and Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry

  “Deborah Reed is one of my favorite new writers, and Things We Set on Fire would be an excellent introduction to her work, if you are still among the uninitiated. Here we have three generations of women, separated by space and circumstance, unexpectedly pulled back into each other’s lives as though sucked into a vortex. And this is where Reed takes us: the eye of the family storm. From the intense opening scene of this kaleidoscopic, largehearted novel to its last page, there’s not a dull moment here, folks.”

  —John McNally, author of After the Workshop

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2013 Deborah Reed

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  ISBN-13: 9781477809518

  ISBN-10: 1477809511

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013941698

  For Jack Driscoll

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  PRELUDE

  PART ONE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  PART TWO

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  PART THREE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  PART FOUR

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  AND SLOWLY I WOULD RISE AND DRESS,

  FEARING THE CHRONIC ANGERS OF THAT HOUSE.

  —ROBERT HAYDEN

  PRELUDE

  THIRTY YEARS AGO VIVVIE REPLACED the frayed laces in Jackson’s work boots with bright red ones, telling him they were all Roth’s Grocery carried in that length, telling him the clash of tan boots and red laces provided him a certain style, like a woodsman. A Florida woodsman.

  The following day Jackson went into the woods behind their house on Turtle Dove Lane, and Vivvie went, too—not that he could see her crouched along a squeezed corner of the Crooked River. His shoelaces were eye-catching, dizzying through her riflescope from fifty yards away.

  A trace of juniper, like gin, surrounded Vivvie’s head. She’d tethered Big Boy to her ankle once he brought her to Jackson, but her husband’s scent, so close, caused the hound to tug, and Vivvie forced him down, knowing she was asking too much. Big Boy loved Jackson, everybody loved Jackson. No one more than Vivvie.

  She watched as her husband dug through his vest pocket and pulled out a turkey call. He was poaching, the season still two weeks away, and he hadn’t worn his orange vest, hadn’t told anyone but Vivvie he was coming, and this was how she came to the idea. Her eyes stung when he’d practiced the piercing call on the porch, and again here as his trills warbled through the trees.

  Vivvie’s small hands were nearly palsied the way they trembled. She lowered the rifle to search for a breath, to fight the urge to run and fall into Jackson’s arms and hide from the very thing she had planned against him. Elin and Kate were too young to be left home alone, and yet Vivvie would not be rushed. She set the rifle down, massaged the dog’s neck, and drove the hair from her face long after the strays had settled behind her ears.

  Rifles cracked off shots in the distance. Deer hunters—any one of whom could have mistaken Jackson’s camouflaged coloring for a buck.

  Vivvie raised the barrel, pressed the cold scope to her eye just as Jackson spit out the call, held his fist to his mouth, and clenched his eyes as if seized by pain or prayer. At her feet, a soft wavering moan grew into a searing bellow.

  Big Boy lunged and Vivvie was airborne, dragged across brushwood that hiked up her jacket and tore the skin from her backbone. A line of breathy curses meant nothing to the dog. When the leash finally snapped free Big Boy kept running, and Vivvie scrambled like a soldier on the ground, latched onto the rifle, and now Jackson’s throat was magnified, flecks of whiskers encompassed in a halo so close she could have been lying next to him, kissing the long tendon from collarbone to jaw. And there was Big Boy licking syrup off Jackson’s jeans from the plate that’d slipped his hands at breakfast. Jackson was laughing. She thought he was. Laughing, and looking for her.

  The blast echoed a white, high-pitched silence in Vivvie’s ears.

  She lowered the rifle and turned toward home, toward Elin and Kate, just the three of them now, a mother and two children from here on out, and Vivvie did not look behind her, only above in search of what Jackson had last seen. The sun, blazing through holes in the moss, a ceiling of tattered, filthy lace.

  PART ONE

  ONE

  THE CALL CAME IN THE middle of the night, and at first Vivvie stood in the dark near her bed, trying to make sense of the hour. She fingered the grooves of wainscoting in the hall and into the kitchen, saying “Who on earth?” midway to lifting the receiver.

  Wink’s floodlight next door cast off her appliances, shooting silver sparks of light in Vivvie’s eyes. She drew the curtain above the sink to see their joined yards glowing like a football field in the rain.

  “I’m trying to reach Vivien Fenton?” a young man was saying, but rain crashed the tin roof like pellets, making it difficult to hear.

  “For heaven’s sake,” Vivvie said.

  “I’m with the Orlando police.”

  She let go of the curtain and plugged her ear. “This is Vivvie,” she said, and walked into the hall where it was quieter.

  “Mrs. Vivien Fenton?”

  “Yes?”

  He apologized for the time, said his name was Tyler Moore. Officer Tyler Moore. And then, “I need to ask if you have a daughter named Katherine. Her father’s name is, well, was Jackson Fenton?”

  Vivvie switched the phone to her other ear as if what the man was saying
might be better understood over there. “Kate’s my daughter,” she said. “Why?”

  “There’s been an accident, ma’am.”

  “What kind of accident?”

  “I believe your daughter took too many pills—I’m afraid you’ll have to check with the hospital.”

  “You mean an overdose?”

  “They can tell you everything.”

  “But she’s all right?”

  “I can give you their number.”

  “Are you sure it’s the same Katherine? I haven’t seen my daughter in years. She’s not even in the state.”

  “Well, ma’am. She is now. Down at Orlando Regional. And your granddaughters are here with me.”

  “Oh,” Vivvie said, or thought she had, as Officer Moore explained what an impressive eight-year-old Averlee was, calling 911, looking after her little sister until help arrived. But the girls were shaken, he said, and the younger one—what was her name again?

  “Quincy,” a small voice insisted in the background.

  “Quincy,” the officer said, “doesn’t feel so well.”

  Vivvie covered her eyes. She never dreamed this was how it would happen—Kate and the girls returning by way of a midnight call from the police.

  “She seems to be running a temperature.”

  Was he talking about Kate now, or Quincy?

  “What I’m getting at is we need some family who can assume temporary custody of these girls.”

  “Custody?”

  “Yes, ma’am. There doesn’t appear to be a father in the picture.”

  Vivvie walked the hall.

  “Social Services tells us they can’t place the girls together, not tonight anyway, but if you’re—”

  “Where are you? What part of town?”

  “Binion Road, where it intersects Orange.”

  “How’d you get my number?”

  “Records at the DMV.”

  Vivvie peered into her bedroom for something, she didn’t know what, something, she guessed, for wearing in the company of doctors and police. Her white oxford shirt and black pants from Roth’s Grocery lay over the busted kitchen chair in the corner.

  “Ma’am?”

  The rain suddenly quit, and for a moment there was nothing but a quick, steady calm. The spare room—a mess of boxes, dust, and clothes she no longer fit—hadn’t been used in years. And she had bleach under the kitchen sink, but of course the girls were no longer toddlers from six years ago, sleeping in a playpen, trying to get at the poisons.

  “Ma’am?”

  “All right,” she said, her stomach hot and sick. “It’s going to take me some minutes. Have they got their things with them?” It crossed her mind to go next door and ask Wink for help, his floodlight finding her again through the crack in her drapes. But no. She wouldn’t do that. Wide awake now, she couldn’t think of a single person to call.

  Half an hour later Vivvie traveled the two-lane truck route north of the theme parks where an eagle had nested atop a telephone pole. Eagles lived long lives and Vivvie wondered if the same bird she’d brought Kate and Elin to see, with a cheap set of binoculars, still lived up there, decades later. They never did see it, the girls too busy fighting over the binoculars. She should have purchased two sets, which she realized the instant they pulled off the road, but for once in their lives they might have shared, might have shown the slightest bit of cooperation. They weren’t out of the pickup more than five minutes when Vivvie got tired of pointing, tired of saying cut that out or else, tired of saying for God’s sake she’s your sister, and ushered them back into the cab without witnessing so much as a feather.

  The police station’s parking lot was nearly deserted when Vivvie shut the engine down, opened the window, and sat until the smell of acidic soil and wet pine stuck to her skin. Five in the morning, and the running lights around a billboard claiming “You’ll Never Die of Thirst at Gilligan’s Hideaway in Orlando” flickered into the nearby trees. The last time Vivvie was in a police station was 1974, when the cops smoked cigarettes with her and apologized for asking so many questions. They offered her coffee cake. “We may never have an answer,” they said. “No other hunter has come forward to claim that the bullet might have been his.” They were sorry for her loss. It was tragic, they said. Senseless.

  Vivvie wrenched herself from the truck and into the billboard lights flashing like cameras reflecting in small puddles and in the nylon sheen of her windbreaker. Across the lot the station’s windows and glass door were warmly lit, like a holiday house full of people waiting for her to arrive.

  She stepped inside, and a voice opposite the lobby said, “You must be Mrs. Fenton.” Two young girls with wild blond curls stood on either side of the officer who must have spoken, must have been the one who’d called her on the phone, but right now all that registered was Quincy, a flimsy-looking six-year-old, wiping her nose on the back of her hand. She had just learned to crawl when Vivvie last saw her, white dumpling hands plopping on the floor before her. And Averlee, now grown into a stony-faced eight-year-old, but her eyes still clear and blue as Fanning Springs.

  Vivvie’s throat squeezed so hard she had to cough to shake it loose.

  The officer stepped forward and shook Vivvie’s hand. The deep color of his skin blanched the girls’ even more, and Vivvie wondered if they never got out in the sun.

  “We have a few papers for you to sign,” Officer Moore said. He stepped back and Vivvie did the same, stuffing her hands deep inside her pockets.

  She studied the girls for a clue of where they’d been, what they’d witnessed, whom they might have been living with. Neatly dressed in white T-shirts and khaki shorts, white anklets rimming the tips of clean sneakers—one red pair, one blue. No shark-tooth necklaces from the beach, no hippie fashions from a commune, no cowboy boots from out west—nothing to give their lives away.

  She didn’t know what to say. “Averlee, you look so much like Elin,” she said, which was true.

  The girl didn’t move.

  “Do you know who Elin is?”

  Nothing. Vivvie wasn’t sure she’d heard.

  “Elin. She’s your aunt. Your mother’s sister.”

  Averlee stared up at the officer.

  Moisture clung to Vivvie’s face and chest. “Well,” she said, pointing to the Publix grocery bag at Averlee’s feet. “Those your things?”

  “Averlee threw some stuff together,” the officer said, and handed Vivvie the bag. “She did a pretty good job.”

  Vivvie peeked in at shorts and T-shirts, a coloring book, and loose, chewed-up crayons. “Your toothbrushes in there?”

  Averlee nodded.

  “All right.” Vivvie handed the bag to Averlee. “Let’s get to signing those papers then.” She stepped to the counter, lifted a blue pen with “Josephine’s Auto Supply” written on the side, and clicked the spring in and out, the only sound in the room.

  “You say their mother’s over at Orlando Regional?” she whispered.

  “That’s right.” The officer placed several papers on the counter in front of her. “We’ll need to see some ID.”

  “Quit wiping your nose like that,” Averlee said.

  Quincy faced the door and wiped it again.

  Time was playing tricks on Vivvie. She had to tell herself that these girls in need were not hers, that she was not their mother. They belonged to her daughter, a grown woman laid up in the hospital by her own hand.

  Vivvie glanced at the officer and then the papers. “Too much of a prescription?” she asked.

  “That’s what they said.”

  Vivvie climbed behind the steering wheel while the girls peered through the open passenger-side door as if into a cave. Averlee set her bag on the floorboard, stepped up, and dug the middle seat belt out from between the seats. Decades of dirt and gum wrappers slid free of the seam, and Averlee and Vivvie brushed everything to the floor. Then Averlee hopped back out. “Go on,” she said, nudging her sister like a little mother. Quincy got in
quickly, as if on a dare, and pressed her tiny bones against Vivvie. Averlee clicked the middle belt across Quincy’s waist, pulled the door shut with a grunt, and closed the three of them in.

  The old Ford 150, a sturdy truck for thirty years, had belonged to Jackson, and that was all that mattered until Vivvie saw it through her granddaughters’ eyes: dirty black and rusted edges, a slick vinyl seat leached with cigarette smoke, springs bursting past the brittle orange foam. Paper coffee cups littered the metal floorboard, and they, more than anything, embarrassed her. How hard would it have been to throw them away? The engine took its time catching, and when it did, the muffler bellowed like a Harley.

  “You girls like grapefruit?” Vivvie asked as she popped the gear into place and circled back onto the road.

  Neither said a word.

  “I don’t have any kind of breakfast cereal at home. Does your mother feed you grapefruit?”

  “No,” Averlee said.

  “No what? You don’t like it or she doesn’t feed it to you?”

  “She doesn’t feed it to us so I don’t know if we like it or we don’t,” Averlee snapped.

  “Well, now.” Vivvie kept her eyes straight ahead. “You use that tone with your mother?”

  Averlee leaned her head against the side window.

  Vivvie thought to mention the eagle nest on the telephone pole but didn’t feel like talking, and anyway it was too dark to see. She pulled a cigarette pack from her purse, thought better of it with the girls, and stuffed it back in.

  “What about peanut butter?” Vivvie asked.

  “She feeds it to us and we like it,” Averlee said.

  “Is that right.”

  Minutes later the sky began to fade from black to midnight blue and a cattle field cut through the pines, revealing a pink horizon. Turkey vultures circled above the sunrise. “Look there,” Vivvie said, surprising herself with the friendly outburst, but the sight was wondrous—as if she and the girls were on their way to catch a flight, or take a road trip to the mountains, some place fun so early in the morning. “The early bird gets the worm,” Vivvie said.

  “My sister has a fever,” Averlee said, her eyes locked on Vivvie’s. “And her throat hurts, too.”