An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [119]
"What?" Detective Wilson said. "Why are you sitting like that?"
"Don't worry about it," I said. "Is there anything else you need to say to me?"
"It would be better if you'd just confess right now, Sam," he said, consumed by a sigh that came from somewhere deep within him and drifted out his nostrils. "It just would be much, much better."
"For whom?" I asked.
"For everyone," he said, raising his voice now, raising your voice being the thing you do when you don't know what else to do with it. "Just tell the truth."
"It will make you feel better, dude," I said.
"What?"
"Nothing," I said. I was remembering, of course, the bond analysts and their theories about the memoirs they'd never written and how the one they had written hadn't made them feel better and wasn't their truth at all, or my father's, either, and how maybe the search for the truth was as pointless as looking for it to make you feel better. "I have to shower," I told him. "Are we about done?"
"So you're not going to confess," Detective Wilson said. "So you're going to make this difficult. What the fuck are you smiling at?" But then he got up and stormed out of the house before I could tell him that I was smiling about my mother. When I was a boy, she would make me read all those books and then ask me questions, these tough questions about what the book might or might not mean, and I'd always say, "You're making this difficult," and she'd always tell me what I would have told Detective Wilson if he'd still been in the house: "It already is difficult."
There was still the matter of the manila envelope. I turned it over and opened it. It was heavy and bulging, and I was pretty sure I'd find Wesley Mincher's three thousand dollars inside. I did ― three rubber-banded groups of one-hundred-dollar bills. But there was also something else in the envelope: a handwritten note saying, "Meet me at the Emily Dickinson House at midnight." The handwriting wasn't familiar. It wasn't my father's from the grocery list, wasn't my mother's from the postcards, either. I looked at my watch: it was half past five o'clock. Plenty of time for me to shower, change, drive down to the Student Prince, and then meet someone ― and I had that hunch as to who it was ― at midnight at the Emily Dickinson House, or at least where it used to be. I put the money and the note back in the envelope, finished my beer, went upstairs, and made myself a more presentable Sam Pulsifer. Then I went downstairs, grabbed another beer out of the fridge, walked out the front door, climbed into my van, and headed toward the Student Prince and my mother, not realizing I would see my parents' house only one more time, which would be the last time anyone ever saw it.
Part Five
24
One of the things it means to get older is that you start, in the overlong telling of your life's story, to introduce each scene like so: "Here I was, in again, for the first time in years." Which is just another reason you stay at home, or at least another reason the people listening to your story wished you had stayed at home.
But I hadn't, and here I was, in Springfield again for the first time in five years. It was much grimmer than I remembered. Main Street was absolutely deserted; the check-cashing places that had replaced the Italian restaurants and candy stores were boarded up. Maybe there were no checks left to cash in the city. Half the bulbs on the Paramount Theatre were burned out, which didn't matter because the marquee was blank and there was nothing playing there anyway. The gray concrete civic center -where