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"That's why you sent me off to college, isn't it?" I asked. "You knew Dad would go back to her, and you didn't want me to find out."

"He promised," my mother said.

"I don't understand why you didn't just divorce him," I told her. "Why didn't you just end it and move on?"

"Why didn't you just tell Anne Marie about the fire you set?" my mother wanted to know. "Why didn't you tell her about the Colemans, about me, and about your father?"

I didn't answer her; I didn't need to. Because we both knew that sometimes the lies you tell are less frightening than the loneliness you might feel if you stopped telling them. My mother was too scared to get a divorce, and I was too scared to tell Anne Marie the truth. It was that simple. Sometimes there is a simple answer. Sometimes things aren't complicated at all.

After a moment she placed the tray on the empty barstool, took off her apron, and put it on the tray. "Last week you asked me why I got rid of my books," she said, looking me in the eyes. She was Elizabeth again, the mother she used to be, except there was a look of wild desperation in her eyes, and that scared me more than ever. "Do you really want to know why?"

"Yes."

"Because," she said, "they were always full of people like me, and her, and him and you and it."

"It?" I asked.

"The house," she said. "Our fucking house." She said it the way Ahab might say to Ishmael, "Our fucking whale," and now I understood, for the first time, why Melville had him talk about the whale so many times, over so many pages, and why my mother had made me read the book, so many times, over so many years. To my mother, our house was more than just its roof and walls and the furniture inside them, just as Moby Dick was more than just its blubber to Ahab.

"Beth," the bartender said, "would you bring these drinks over to table twelve?"

"No," she said, and then she walked away from both of us, toward the door. There was a blue peacoat draped over an empty chair, and she grabbed it and put it on, even though I was pretty sure it wasn't hers. She opened the door and the wind whipped her hair around.

"Where are you going?" I yelled.

"To see your father," she yelled back, without turning around, before closing the door behind her.

"What did you do to Beth?" the bartender asked when she was gone, and then, before I could think of a concise answer, he said, "You've had enough," and he snatched my last, half-consumed beer away from me. He was right. I'd had enough; everyone had had enough, that was clear. Maybe that's why Deirdre wanted to meet me at the Emily Dickinson House: maybe she'd had enough, too.

25

It was twenty minutes before midnight when I got to where the Emily Dickinson House used to be. The place looked much different at night than it had in the daytime just a few days earlier. There was easily a half foot of snow on the ground, but it had stopped falling sometime earlier, and the sky had cleared, so that you could name the stars above, assuming you'd learned their names in the first place. It was windier than before, though, and the scattered clouds were racing across the sky, and the spindly birches were waving in the wind and sometimes knocking into their neighboring white pines and maples. One of the nearby streetlights sent its flickering glow through the trees, and I kept expecting to hear an organ and see Vincent Price emerge from the shadows. Plus, there was a bone-chilling hoo, hoo sound coming from somewhere nearby, the classic sound of a haunting, although it could just have been the sound fraternity brothers make while ritually beating their pledges. The sound was spooky, whoever was making it.

I made my way through the trees until I found Deirdre standing next to a wooden bench, a bench no doubt meant to commemorate the Emily Dickinson House. Deirdre was early, too. She was wearing a red jacket and a red scarf and red gloves and a red ski hat, all obviously part of a matching set. And this will also go in my arsonist's guide: if you want to appear menacing, then don't wear a matching set. Deirdre was the