Art on Fire (37 page)

“Could we please talk about something else?” Alfonse dropped his silverware and let his chin hover inches from his plate. He looked at Vivian, then Isabella. “There must be other things to discuss. I haven't seen Francesca in seven years.”

“Eight,” added Isabella.

“Why is it always lunatics and suicide and holocaust victims and pedophiles? What about something nice? Love, maybe?” He looked at Isabella. “Why don't you write about love?”

Isabella shrugged. “Because I don't know about love,” she said in a flat voice.

“That's not true, Bella,” said Vivian. “Now just stop it.”

Isabella looked at her mother, thinking about her words: “That's not true.”
Were they correct? Was it not true? Was she just being melodramatic
?

“I don't mean parental love,” she clarified. “I know about parental love.”

“Just let the rest of us eat,” said Vivian.

Francesca felt impotent, and this feeling was unpleasant and familiar. She wanted to intervene, to defend her sister, at least to prod Isabella into defending herself.
Tell them to shut the fuck up
, she wanted to say.
Tell them you're 28 years old
. Instead, she did nothing. She began to imagine the drive back to Cape Cod, stopping at Wendy's for a
chicken sandwich (instead of McDonalds), returning to her cabin and unloading all the paintings from the car, unadulterated, having never subjected them to the scrutiny of these fatuous people.

Isabella began to cry quietly. She wiped tears with her sleeve and sniffled, then pulled her chair back from the table, preparing to stand. “Papa? Do you want me at the table?” she looked at him.

“Of course he does,” said Vivian. “We all do.”

“Does Francesca want me?” asked Isabella.

“I really do,” said Francesca.

And so, Isabella sat quietly, close to her sister, feeling, for the first time in her life, that she had a sister. Francesca patted Isabella's knee, then left her large hand there, heavy and reassuring.

That night Alfonse slept fitfully, dreaming of Vivian and his daughters sitting on the neighbor's porch. In the dream, they were all lesbians. From next door he smelled Evelyn's cooking instead of old Mrs. Weinstein's garbage rotting in the garage. He seemed to be going blind. He tried to look at his younger daughter and the lesbian neighbor, but he could not see them anymore.

He awoke in the middle of the night, his throat dry and filled with the taste of copper and garlic. The clock said 3:12. He walked down the dark hallway, the floorboards creaking beneath his bare feet, and stood at the kitchen sink, drinking glass after glass of tepid, sulfur-stained water, gazing out at the silent yard. How, he wondered, could he have tolerated so many years of not knowing whether his youngest daughter was even alive? How had it happened that he and Vivian had returned from a marriage encounter weekend to find one daughter nearly dead, the other gone? The song they'd chosen, for every couple had been required to choose a song, was “For All We Know.” The title took on an unpleasant, ironic sting: It seemed they didn't know much. He'd driven around the neighborhood, stopped by the school, talked with some teachers. He'd even called Mr. Sinsong, who claimed not to remember ever visiting 312 Riverview Street and had suggested, accusingly, that perhaps Alfonse had the wrong Chinese family.

By the time he and Vivian had extracted details from Evelyn—how she'd found Lisa in Francesca's bed, the clothes on the floor—days had passed. “That one from Chapel Street,” Evelyn kept saying, as if Lisa's neighborhood and all it symbolized were to blame.

At the police station, the detective had explained there was nothing to be done about an 18-year-old who chooses to leave home. Unless they suspected foul play. Did they feel she'd been abducted? the policeman had asked. Vivian nodded with certitude, but Alfonse said nothing. He'd wanted to suspect wrongdoing, something to make fade the glaring, throbbing truth that there was nothing criminal about her disappearance: no one had abducted her, forced her to leave; in fact, she'd fled her miserable life. He thought of Francesca's face—lined now with age and sadness. But youthful. It was the face of an honest life. He thought of her deep voice, the way she sat, shoulders straight, head slightly forward, and wondered what sort of thoughts occupied her mind. He wanted to believe she'd escaped unscathed. But he knew that was a lie. Anyone with eyes could see that hers were sad as a war-torn country.

In a sense, they'd forgotten her. The panic had faded to pain, first acute, then unremarkable. In the same way the acuity of any loss lessens, things filling up its gaping hole, the absence of Francesca came to be routine. She was a name rarely mentioned—the daughter they'd once had, the one they'd lost. People in the town stopped including Francesca's name in the general inquiries. Of course, some years later, when it became clear that Isabella would never fulfill her promise, when Evelyn's mind hit the dirt like compost, people no longer inquired, just smiled and said hello. That was the sort of town it was—everyone knew but pretended to know nothing. He supposed all towns were like that, and it seemed sad to him, how little comfort people spared for each other, how separate and safe from each other's tragedies they all chose to remain.

The basement, disguised as a guest room, more closely resembled a friendly prison cell, with hard linoleum tile and plastic paneled walls, one secret window tucked just beneath the ceiling, its pane cracked and cloudy from cobwebs. The air was heavy and mildewed. The seat of a metal folding chair was tucked under the surface of a bridge table, and in the far corner of the room Francesca's old record player balanced precariously on a column of albums, her headphones poised on top. A sheath of moonlight managed entry as she lay on the daybed, her body covered in brick-red wool blankets, topped off by the lavender bedspread of her childhood. She should have stayed in a hotel; she knew this as she dipped her feet under the cold sheets and felt the springs give under her weight. But there was something here that she needed. She felt herself easing into the heaviness of the house, like stepping into a pair of old slippers that are soft and unstable. She chose the basement over her mother's office, the room that had once been Isabella's bedroom. (She had categorically declined her sister's offer to share the attic room.) The basement had the fewest memories, afforded the greatest privacy. And it was tomblike, somewhere safe and dark to which she could retreat.

She dreamt of Lisa—discombobulated, incomprehensible dreams—images violent as the ocean during a storm: pieces of Lisa's face, Lisa's fragmented fingers, Lisa's black shoes stepping in and out of the rusty tracks, moving across the dusty floor of her cabin. Wasn't it strange, Francesca wondered upon waking, that Lisa had gone to the train tracks to die? Or was it pure coincidence? By even thinking it, was Francesca trying to bolster her own significance in Lisa's life?

It wasn't uncommon for her to dream of Lisa; Lisa nearly always
stood about in Francesca's dreams, even the innocuous, everyday anxiety ones where she tried desperately, in vain, to buy socks or cigarettes. Always Lisa lurked—picking up cigs at the liquor store, driving past in the VW—the embodiment of everything Francesca longed for and lost. But to dream of her in this house, while she lay swaddled in the dreaded bedspread, a few feet away from her Beatles collection, across from the oil burner (making a strange knocking, as if a pebble were bouncing against its steel sides), amplified the loss of Lisa, banged on the bruise in her heart.

She reminded herself that she hadn't stepped back in time. She was Francesca deSilva with a lower case “d,” just as she'd been yesterday, still a renowned artist who had long ago fled this suffocating structure and its damaged inhabitants. Still . . . she seemed to have invited all of it inside her again, allowed it to penetrate a cavity that had heretofore been sealed off.

She sat up and lit a cigarette, suddenly overcome with the desire to hear music on her old phonograph, a side of some album absurdly time-worn and dated. She crossed the cold, lacquered floor and lifted her record player—it was surprisingly light and cheaply constructed—into the center of the room and rested it on an unfolded bridge chair. She plugged in the appliance, chose
Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
(worse still: “She's Leaving Home”), and laid the needle gently down, then inserted the headphones jack and reclined on the daybed, her back to the wall, her large feet protruding in front of her.

For a moment, she was soothed, distracted, even transported to the attic room, the early evening hours before dinner when she'd be blissfully alone with music amid the slow capping off of light; before she'd have to join the others for a strained, brief meeting at the dinner table. They weren't all terrible memories. Life had, ultimately, turned in her favor. Art had wrought new possibilities. Lisa had loved her, briefly.

But then, as if she'd been struck from behind, a steep blow to the head by the point of a rock or the edge of a brick—she remembered, afresh, that Lisa was dead. That she'd failed to pick up on the clues that were surely being dropped like a thin trail of breadcrumbs behind Lisa's feet. That she'd failed Lisa in every respect, and this failure on
her part seemed inherent, even destined. Growing up in this colorless, ailing house had made certain that she would never be attuned to the finer dips and curves of life. Nor the joys. Though she experienced little skits of pleasure, life was, had always been, an ongoing, concerted effort to keep pain at bay, to get through this day and onto the next. And all of this mitigating had caused her to miss Lisa's agony altogether; she was too consumed by her own. Now she would spend the rest of her life knowing she hadn't helped the person who mattered most to her in the world.

So much for feeling better.

Upstairs, she brushed her teeth, moving about quietly so as not to rouse her parents, whose company in that moment was as welcome as pins lodged under her fingernails. One more inane conversation in which they'd all behave as if things, having gone a wee bit awry, were now happily repaired, and Francesca felt she might come unhinged, kidnap her sad sack of a sister and return to the beach, never to see or speak with her parents again.

She put on the same clothes she'd worn yesterday, then stepped outside into the cool morning air. It was Sunday; the museum was closed, so there was nothing to do about the paintings. At least, Francesca decided, she'd busy herself by taking a drive; maybe she'd find the housing project where Lisa had lived or drive through downtown New Haven and visit the laundromat where she'd waited, in vain, for Lisa to run away with her so many years ago, when she still swelled with innocence and bravado enough to try and save her.

For a moment Francesca mistook for a raccoon or possum or some other suburban pest the body of her sister, seated inches from the car door on the paved ground, wearing a bulky white sweatshirt and corduroys. Isabella's eyes were closed, her palms pressed flat onto the cold, wet grass.

“Isabella?”

Isabella opened her eyes.

“Were you sleeping?”

“Maybe. I think I couldn't sleep so I came out here.” She looked up toward her room, remembering.

“Have you been here all night?”

Isabella shrugged. “I think so. I think I have. I was so upset after dinner. So I came out here, hoping LeeAnn would step outside. She often does and we have a nice chat, and then I feel better.”

“Who's LeeAnn?”

Isabella jutted her chin toward the neighbor's house. “You'd remember her if you saw her, I'll bet. She's blond.”

“But aren't you cold?”

Isabella shook her head. “I never get
too
cold. A person can learn to tolerate extremes in temperature. For example, when it's really hot outside I hardly sweat. My body simply adjusts. Sometimes I've stayed out all night during snowstorms, though often I take breaks in the garage so I don't get wet. Because once you get wet, a formidable chill is unavoidable.”

“But why not read or watch TV if you can't sleep?”

Isabella's face tensed. She looked away from Francesca and focused on the side of the neighbor's house. “I prefer the outdoors. It soothes me.”

“I understand that.” Francesca squatted down beside her sister. “I often stay up all night working and take breaks outside. Sometimes I just stroll along the road outside my cabin or I ride my bike or I just sit in my car and smoke.” She patted the passenger's side of the VW.