be something,” Viv said.
“I’m telling you, this town—is, where I grew up. Right across the street. I did everything here, all of school, all the stupid milestones, right, first drugs, first dates, first petty crimes. And then I left, now I’m back, and all I can think is this town gets fucking smaller.”
“And,” Vivian said.
“That’s it.”
“No ghost stories or tales of misery and fortune that get passed around? Nothing that used to scare the shit out of you when you were a kid,” she said.
“Besides this?” he joked, indicated the room and meant the whole house.
A man was missing. A power outage, two strangers in a house. The dumb story where the caller is calling from inside the house and cut the fuse box on purpose. Vivian didn’t want to think about it.
“Why’d you come back?” she said.
Ronny hesitated, aware that he should lie. He should definitely deny the past two years, every lame mistake. Everything they could arrest him for. He could have said anything, put it all behind him, could’ve just changed the subject, and he would never know why he didn’t, why he told Vivian everything right from the start—later, looking back, the effect she had on him would still be confusing—but he told her all of it. Why he left, the fires, Pete’s accident, his parents’ divorce, moving out with his mother, moving back to town. He’d never told anyone this stuff. How for a month they made him see a counselor at the center but the counselor was a grad student, an intern, and Ronny was a shortcut, an easy write-off. When Ronny refused to talk, the counselor played solitaire while Ronny sat staring out the window until his hour was up, week after week. The first fire, Ronny told her, was before Pete’s accident. Or actually, it might have been—which Ronny hated to realize, it made him guilty—the fire might have begun, might have still been burning, at the exact moment the truck approached, skidding, Pete’s wheel clipped and twisted and going under, flipping him off, flipping the bike over the edge of the road—
He couldn’t think about it. And he hadn’t planned it out; he’d just done it. Lit the match, stuck it in the trashcan outside the high school’s shop room, touched the tiny flame, just the tip, to a wad of paper under sawdust, a scrunched up bag that probably held some kid’s lunch a few hours earlier. Ronny pictured the perfect sandwich square as he dropped the match, slowly turned, took three slow steps before sprinting into the woods. Where Ronny hid, just inside the stand of trees, he could see clear across campus to the track and field. No runners on the track yet; Coach Driver would still be going over meet times with them in the locker room. As Ronny watched, a janitor opened the back door and dumped a box into the trashcan. He remembered what happened, saw it playing out in slow motion: the thin flash of orange; the janitor stumbling back, shouting as he darted into the building; back again seconds later with a fire extinguisher, sinking the trash can in white foam. He watched, Ronny watched, and his knees got weak, he was sweating. The afternoon had been unseasonably warm, the sky a broad ribbon between clouds. The whole way home he’d felt it, the heat grazing his thumb as he took too long dropping the match. When he’d gotten home that afternoon there’d been a message from his father, calling from Bellsden. There’s been an accident Ron. It’s Pete. It’s Pete, his voice breaking over the chirping loudspeaker that went emergency-emergency-emergency. All he remembered from the rest of that day was the hospital’s generic hallways lined with pastel tiles: peach and yellow and pale blue. The fluorescent buzz overhead made him think of wasps. So cold inside the waiting room, so bright and deceptively clean when just being there made disease stir inside you, in your kneecaps, ankles, ears. It seeped in. Ronny had kept his hands in his pockets, stared straight ahead. Counted each door he passed. Nine until he got to Pete’s room. Nine doors and he was the last brother left. Nine doors and he was at the end. Nine doors and his mother inside sobbing.
“He didn’t wake up,” Ronny told Vivian, “From the coma. It was pretty bad, the wreck was pretty bad.” He went on about the days after—his parents’ split, his mother’s move to a larger city three hours away, his father’s method of coping, which was a self-imposed amnesia, walking around acting like nothing had even happened. Each time he looked over at Vivian she was watching him expectantly, so he went on. He moved out to stay with his mother; it was a disaster; he quit going to class. He dropped out of high school the first semester of his senior year, washed dishes at a place called Spirits, spent all his money on shitty beer; his mother went on dates with men who wore spray tans and sports jackets with pocket squares. He got caught setting fires three separate times. The fourth was a close call—behind a convenience store, which would’ve meant endangerment, worse than arson, and he would have been held and charged—so he got a few months in juvie and community service, wearing an orange vest and picking up litter from the medians. He went back to his father’s, even though he could’ve just taken off, gone anywhere. Couldn’t explain why he was back. For now, he added, and knew it sounded like so much bullshit. He looked at Vivian, wishing he had more whiskey in front of him, cursing himself for having left the bottle in the kitchen.
“This was all a year ago, a little over a year ago, Pete’s accident. His bedroom is exactly the same,” Ronny said. “It feels like this kind of permanent funeral over there.”
He picked up the mug again but it was empty. Put it down. He hadn’t meant to make himself sound this pathetic.
“So fucking depressing,” he said.
They were quiet for a while. Then Vivian reached for the flashlight and turned it off. The room went dark, except for the icy light floating in from the window, and she sat up, leaned over, and kissed him, kissed his cheek, and her lips were so soft, and her chin brushed against his earlobe as she pulled away and her hair smelled like cold leaves.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Left the light off.
Ronny said, “No, you know—” He shrugged, “It’s—”
He wanted her to come back, as if he could already feel that she was farther away or disappearing. She had that way about her, where she could move steady in one direction but instantly retreat.
He lowered himself next to her on the bed, facing her, his head on his propped up arm. It was getting colder. He gathered the quilt over them and they lay together, waiting for something to happen or not happen.
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
“What for,” he said. “There’s nothing for you to be sorry for.”
“Everything,” Vivian said. “I’m sorry for all of it.”
She meant it. She wanted to make it stop, to turn the switch that would bring on the next life. But the house stayed dark. Outside the storm carried on. She brushed her hand across his forehead, barely touching him, and he closed his eyes.
The ice storm lasted two days, and Ronny spent both with Viv, camped in the guest room. Ronny had returned to his father’s house once to rally groceries, and his father—Ronny guessed he was in the library upstairs, buried in the paper—did not stir. Undisturbed. Was that Ronny’s specialty, probably, being perpetually overlooked? Barely registering but in his wake: ashes, mud prints, discarded glove. Evidence of criminal intent. He was the kind of joker that summoned pity. What had Vivian said when he’d finished telling her? I’m sorry. He was at her mercy, which made him feel dumb and sort of miserable.
He lit a cigarette and tossed the lighter into the trash can. More evidence, he thought, as it clanked against the trash can’s metal lip. He leaned against the wall and smoked, waiting out the five minutes before he had to report for work. The new arrangement. Another sign he was a loser: his father had pulled strings to get him hired, calling it a step in the right direction, pleased Ronny would not be returning to Concrete Jungle. “You see how this goes, Son”—he’d said at breakfast, at the table that was sticky with juice that dried where it spilled—“and who knows, maybe you’ll study medicine yourself.” His father had talked to a friend, an old fraternity