An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [52]
"Well," my mother said, "we went to work and you did nothing. Another normal day."
"Just like it used to be," I said, thinking about when I was a kid and they would go to work, or said they did, and I did nothing, or said I did. We all drank to that, as was not true when I was a child, and drank some more, and they seemed to forget about the whole thing. My parents were very wise in their forgetting, of course, amnesia being, like a fixed mortgage, the thing that keeps your house your house. But I wasn't wise. I didn't forget. I got drunker and drunker, but still, the whole time I was thinking about my parents' normal days and whether they were anything like my normal day, and I was still thinking about this as I went upstairs. I took off my watch before climbing into bed. It's the expensive, indestructible sort of watch that tells you things ― the barometric pressure, wind speed, and high tide in the second-largest city in Sri Lanka, for instance ― that you don't necessarily need to know, but two of the useful things it does tell you are the time and the day of the week. And right then, my watch was telling me the time was 11:21 P.M. and the day of the week was Saturday. It was Saturday. "It is Saturday," I said out loud, making it official. My parents had gone to work on a Saturday, or said they had. For my father this wasn't so strange: apparently you could edit or not edit books on whatever day you wanted, and he'd always kept irregular work hours and days. But what sort of teacher goes to work on a Saturday? The question exhausted me, and I fell asleep before I could begin to answer it. I had already looked into the Edward Bellamy House fire and now I was going to have to look into this, too. As everyone knows, once you start looking into one thing, you can't help but start looking into others.
9
And once you start looking into others, then apparently you can't stop others from looking into you. I learned this truth the next day when I woke up and found Thomas Coleman leaning over my bed, his face far too close to my own, as if trying to make sure I was breathing.
"What do you think you're doing?" he asked.
"What?" I said, and then, "Hey!" and so on as I scrambled out of my bed, threw on some clothes (like the first time I'd met Thomas, I was half-dressed and thought that maybe our second meeting would go better if I were fully clothed), went to the bathroom, brushed my teeth, and walked downstairs, Thomas following me everywhere I went until I settled at the dining room table, where my hangover potion and "Drink me" note were waiting. I sat down and did what the note told me to. Thomas was still standing; he looked more substantial than he had the first time I saw him, which had been less than a week earlier. It seemed as though he'd put on some weight; even his hair looked a little thicker and had a little wave to it now, and there was a little color to his face, and all in all he looked like a matinee idol almost all the way recovered from cancer and chemo.
"What do you think you're doing?" Thomas asked me again.
I didn't respond, this being one of the all-time most difficult questions to answer, especially if you're not doing anything or think you're not doing anything.
"You quit your job," Thomas said, barely holding on to his patience. I could almost see it against the back of his bared teeth, struggling mightily to escape.
"That's true," I said.
"I called up Pioneer Packaging Friday to tell them that you'd burned down the Emily Dickinson House and killed my parents, and did they know they had a murderer and an arsonist working for them, and before