An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [134]
"Like what?"
"Like you've hurt both of us a lot." I don't say anything more to this, because I know there is nothing a victimized woman loves more than a victimized man, and because I also know that what she says is true. She doesn't ask me about the fires themselves or the people who died in them, about why I did what I did or why I did what she thinks I did ― maybe out of kindness, maybe out of sadness, or maybe because she can't stand to think about them more than she already has and does. I will never tell her the truth about those fires, because that would mean I'd have to admit that I lied to her, again, again, and I know how much that would hurt her, and maybe this is what it means to take responsibility for something: not to tell the truth, but to make sure you pick a lie for a good reason and then stick to it. In any case, we don't talk about any of that. It's safer to talk about Thomas, and so that's what we do.
"He's really good to the kids, Sam," Anne Marie says.
"I'm glad."
"He's good to me, too."
"OK," I tell her.
"I'm sorry," she always says, and I always ask her what I asked my mother that first night I moved back home, seven years ago now: "What happens to love?" I asked her, my mother, and now I ask Anne Marie.
"I don't know," Anne Marie says, just telling the truth, that being just one of the many enduring qualities that makes me love her, still, still.
"I still love you," I tell her.
"Well, me, too," she says, by which she means, I think, that love endures, but that it isn't everything, and it isn't ever what we want it to be, which was probably what those books my mother made me read and then got rid of were trying to tell me, and us, which was just one of the reasons she got rid of them.
Speaking of my mother, she doesn't visit me much. The prison is two hours northeast of Springfield and hard to get to if you don't have a car, which my mother doesn't anymore. She doesn't have a license, either. My mother lost both in a drunk-driving accident, two weeks after I came here. She's moved out of her place in Belchertown and into my old apartment, the one above the Student Prince, so she can walk to work and not drive and still drink.
So my mother doesn't visit me much, but she does take the bus up at least once a year, for my birthday. I turned forty-five just last week, and she brought me a present: a worn, creased, used-up copy of Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance.
"Happy birthday," she said.
"Thank you," I said. "How did this thing get so beat up?"
"I have no idea," she said, but she did have an idea, and so do I. My mother is reading again, the way you always return to something you've quit, like drinking, which my mother hasn't done. Quit, that is. I know that, too: I can always smell the Knickerbocker on her breath, her clothes, coming out of her pores. But I don't tell her what I know, and I don't tell her that I've already read and reread the book since I've been in prison. It's about a utopian community, about how a group of people in Massachusetts tried to become one big, happy family and failed completely.
"Thanks a lot," I told her. The guard came over and made sure I hadn't been given contraband, saw that it was only a book, and then left us alone. Once he was gone, I asked my mother, "Do I look forty-five?"
"Absolutely," she said. "Do I look sixty-six?"
I didn't answer. To be true, she looks older than sixty-six. She's still thin but looks stooped and wizened now, not fit at all. Her hair is mostly gray, and her face looks grayer, too, and lined with deep wrinkles, the sort no cream can make vanish. She looks like an old woman who was once beautiful. Maybe it's all the drinking that's aged her so. Or maybe it's my father: not necessarily that she killed