Singe (23 page)

Right now she’s coming down, slumping boneless until she’s sprawled on his chest like so much warm dead weight. “Um,” she says, nudging her forehead at his sloppy chin like she’s shy all of a sudden. “Hi.”

“Hi.” Eli laughs, running both hands up her back to tangle in her hair. “How you doing?”

“Goooood,” Addie slurs, hiding her sweaty face against his neck. “Better than I felt after dinner, that’s for sure.”

“Yeah?” Eli rubs across the skin of her back, tracing down to the wicked curve of her waist. Her lips are against his pulse point, slow breaths. “Was really that bad, huh?”

“Uh-huh.” Addie reaches up with one thumb to smear his slippery mouth. Eli can still taste her everywhere, behind his teeth and on his tongue. It’s so much better than the stale beer. “How about you, how was your day?”

Eli thinks about the hours he spent staring mindlessly at the TV and trying not to think about Will, about running from the burning shack to get help all those years ago, choking on the smoke. “Boring,” he tells Addie, kissing her ear. “I’m sorry about your dad.”

“Me too.” Addie snuggles further in against him, arms around his chest. “Set the alarm for early, okay? Gotta run back to my apartment before shift.”

“Okay,” Eli says, holding her head against him with one hand as he reaches over to the clock. “Six a.m. okay?”

“Mmm.” Addie nods. She’s already half asleep.

Eli isn’t. He stays awake for a long time.

Chapter Thirteen

The third arson happens on a bright, sunny Tuesday morning the first week of August, a split-level four blocks from the site of the first one. It’s the same accelerant as the last house, the shrubs outside going up with an audible whoosh just as the company trucks pull up with the lights and sirens raging. The only thing that’s different?

This time, they aren’t fast enough.

The casualty’s a woman in her forties, Addie learns later, stepmom to two teenage girls and a chronic insomniac who took a sleeping pill around four in the morning. She probably never even woke up. The ambulance drives off in silence, and Eli doesn’t say a word the whole trip back to the house.

“You okay?” Addie asks when she finds him by the lockers later that morning, hair still wet from the showers and dripping down the back of his tawny neck. The muscles in his shoulders are bunched and angry. The scars stand out silvery and raw-looking on his arms. “Hey,” she says quietly, when it takes him a moment to answer. “Eli.”

“Yup,” Eli says without looking, yanking a T-shirt out of his locker. His mouth is a moody line. “I’m good.”

Addie frowns. “Okay.” She has the St. Florian medal out of her left boot in hand, taking it back to stash in her locker. Everyone who got accelerant on them is being issued new gear, Cap’s orders. “Are you—” No one else is around, Jill Buono and the boys out back hosing off the engine. Addie drops her voice. “You sure?”

“Yup,” Eli repeats, pulling the shirt over his head roughly. He scrubs a hand through his curls, spraying droplets everywhere. Then he turns to face her with a sigh. “Yeah, I am. Yeah. How are you?”

Addie rubs the rounded points of her Florian cross, feeling weirdly stung. His voice is gentle enough now, but his face is still etched in stone. “Okay, I guess,” she says. She looks down at the medal. “You got a good luck charm?” she asks Eli, trying for a new topic. “Like, for going out on a call? My dad had a medal just like this. Still does, actually.”

Eli holds out his hand for the cross. “Yeah, huh?” He examines it for a second, turning it this way and that. “No,” he says finally, handing it back. “Don’t need good luck.”

Addie feels her eyebrows jump. “Yeah? You’re probably the only firefighter who doesn’t.”

Eli smiles without it touching his eyes. “I’m special,” he says.

Addie thinks of him lying on his back underneath her, two orgasms in a row and a third the following morning. “You’re special,” she echoes, smiling back. “You’re also done at noon, aren’t you? You wanna go to lunch? See a movie, maybe?”

He looks for all the world like somebody who needs to be distracted, and for a minute Addie’s sure he’ll say yes—she feels herself brighten at the notion, a burger and an afternoon in the chilly, sugary dark of the multiplex in the Berkshire Mall, far away from the heat and stench of this morning’s disastrous call. She’s picturing it, holding his hand across the armrest, making out like she never actually did with anybody in high school, when Eli shakes his head.

“Next time, princess,” he tells her, slamming his locker hard enough that Addie’s teeth rattle. The edges of the cross bite into the meat of her palm. “Got plans.”

So.
Plans
is maybe overstating it.

By one o’clock Eli’s working a buzz at Kitty McLean’s, a dank dive bar down at the dicier end of Lee near the highway. By two o’clock, he’s good and fucking drunk. It smells like sweat and yeast and beer, and Eli’s head is swimming pleasantly, the glass heavy and warm in his hand. Between the fifth and sixth beer he staggers out to the Outback and grabs the shoebox out of the trunk, sits it beside him on the bar stool. Another beer, he tells himself. Another beer, and he’ll open it. Throw it in the garbage, flush it down the toilet, maybe. Just open it.

It doesn’t so much happen like that.

“Is this seat taken?” someone asks as Eli’s trying to figure out if he wants to switch onto the hard stuff. He turns around and there’s Addie. “Eli, right?”

Eli blinks and it’s her cousin standing there instead, the one who makes out with girls behind the Stations of the Cross. The Addie-through-a-funhouse-mirror effect is exacerbated by the booze, but now he can see her straight hair, her skinnier angles. “I—hey,” he says. “No, no. Of course not.” He scrambles to shift the shoebox to the bar top. The clock on the wall-mounted TV says it’s just after three. There’s no one in here but the bartender and another drunk down the other end of the bar.

“It’s Jenn,” Jenn reminds him, sitting down. She plunks her purse beside the shoebox and orders a vodka tonic. “You didn’t break up with Adelaide, did you?” she asks after she’s had a swallow. “Because I didn’t get a text.”

Eli blinks again. His eyelashes feel slow. “I—no. Why?” His brain is running two steps behind the game, still trying to reconcile her clattery jewelry and gigantic purse with this highway bar. Suddenly and wildly he’s worried Addie decided to dump
him,
told her cousin first, and is back at her apartment just waiting to drop the bomb.

But Jenn just shrugs. “Midday drinking,” she says, gesturing around them with her glass. “Generally a breakup.”

Ah. Eli picks at his coaster. “That why you’re here?”

“Me? No.” She twists her engagement ring around her finger. “Not my problem either.”

Eli remembers then, about her family and her wedding, Addie’s angry, helpless expression cutting through the haze in his head. He makes a face he hopes is commiserative. “To not breaking up,” he says, raising his bottle. Jenn clinks.

“So what’s in the box?” she asks, once she’s sipped a bit. She’s got thin leather bracelets stacked up on one narrow wrist.

Eli feels himself stiffen. “Nothing,” he mumbles, wiping his mouth with one clumsy hand. “I don’t know.”

Jenn raises her eyebrows. “See, you should have just said shoes,” she advises, crossing her legs like she’s settling in for the long haul. “That would have been the clever move. Now I’m curious.”

Eli drains the rest of his beer. “Too drunk to be clever,” he tells her.

“I can see that,” Jenn says, sounding for all the world like her cousin. Eli can picture them, dimly, what they must have been like as kids and teenagers. He bets they were a mouthy pair. “A reptile?” she guesses, when he doesn’t answer. “The head of John the Baptist? Schrodinger’s cat?”

That makes Eli laugh. “Schrodinger’s cat,” he says. “Exactly. He’s in there, and also he’s not.” He blinks at her for a moment, then signals the bartender for another. “You ever been to New Hampshire?” he asks.

Jenn raises an eyebrow. “No. Is it nice?”

“It’s where I’m from,” Eli supplies. Then, “No. I never thought it was all that great, actually.”

“Uh-huh.” Both of them watch his beer arrive, a fresh coaster with it. “Is this related to Schrodinger?” Jenn asks as Eli pulls the glass toward him. She’s finished off her own drink, he notices. He wonders if it was something specific that brought her here today. If he asked Addie, he bets she would probably know.

“Addie isn’t going to like this,” he hears himself saying, too loud.

“I won’t tell if you don’t,” Jenn promises. She taps her nails across the top of the box. “Now, are you going to make me open this myself? Because if it really is a head, we probably don’t want witnesses.”

“It’s from New Hampshire too,” Eli says, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “It’s not a head.” He’s going to have to tell Addie anyway. Fuck, he’s such an asshole. His new beer tastes watery and metallic, hovering somewhere just below room temperature. “I mean, it’s mine from New Hampshire. It’s stuff I took before I left for college. From my old house.”

“And you keep it in a shoebox to bring to bars?” Jenn gestures for a refill of her own. “That’s different.”

“I’m different,” Eli tells her. Then, a second later and with a different inflection entirely than the one he means to come out of his mouth, “I’m pretty fucked up, I think.”

“Looks that way,” Jenn says, and it sounds like she means it in a broader sense than just drunk on a Tuesday afternoon. She nudges the box back in his direction, like she’s letting him off the hook. “Eli,” she says after a moment, not unkindly. “Are you fucked up in a way where I need to be worried about my cousin?”

Fuck. “No,” he says immediately. Shit, that’s all he needs, her family spooking and then— “No, I’m sorry.” He tries to look as sober as humanly possible. “I’m not trying to give you a hard time. It’s stuff of my brother’s, in the box.” He shakes his head and just like that he’s bad drunk, not good drunk, here in this bar with Addie’s cousin. He should see if he can get a glass of water. He’s going to need to call a cab. “He died when we were kids, my brother. I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be an asshole.”

“Hey, hey.” Jenn puts a hand on his shoulder, familiar. They’re touchers, the Manzellas. “You’re okay, relax. I’m sorry. I was being nosy. I’m the one who was being an asshole.” She shakes her head. “Addie really likes you.”

“I like
her
,” Eli says sincerely. He’s filled with the compulsion to justify himself to this woman. “He just, he died in July, my brother, you know? I always get a little fucked up in the summer.” Then, too quickly, “Addie knows about it though.”

“Okay.” Jenn squeezes his shoulder one last time and pulls her fresh drink toward herself, skirting it around the box. “Addie doesn’t have like, a ton of good boyfriends, you know? I’m looking for a catch. I’m an asshole.”

“I come equipped with many catches,” Eli supplies, holding out both hands and waggling his fingers. He tells himself to end the conversation there. Instead he says, “I thought if I had a few drinks I could work up the nerve to throw it out.”

“Throw it out?” That gets her attention. “Why?”

Eli shrugs. “No real happy memories in there.” Now he’s really bad drunk. He asks the bartender for a glass of water, trying not to slur too noticeably. It arrives in a clear plastic cup like the kind they use in high school cafeterias, chipped rim and beveled edges. Eli makes himself drink the whole thing.

Jenn watches him, calm and even. “No?” she asks.

“I—” For a second he almost just blurts it all out to this virtual stranger, this woman who’s Addie-but-not—about Will and how dry it was that summer in New Hampshire, the small fires he taught Eli how to set. Old brush from the acreage behind their parents’ modest farmhouse, scrap wood out of the dirt-floor basement.

The abandoned shed at the edge of the property.

Eli shakes his head, wanting to clear it—everything feels jumbled up in his brain, the chemical crackle from this morning’s brutal fire and the heat of flames from twenty years ago on his skin. That’s why he came to this place to begin with, the panicky feeling of this summer blurring together with that one. That’s the feeling he was trying to drink off. “I should probably scram,” he finally says. Already his mouth has that old-sock feeling, the dim lights of the bar giving everything a runny quality.

Jenn lets him be. “You want a ride?” is all she says. Her second drink is still mostly full.

“I can cab it,” Eli says. Then, more quietly, “Look, can you just—”

“I said I wouldn’t tell my cousin, and I meant it,” Jenn interrupts. “It sounds to me like maybe you ought to though.”

“Yeah.” Eli scrubs a hand through his too-long hair, digs some crumpled bills out of his back pocket. “I got you,” he says, nodding at her drink.

“I like you,” Jenn says as he’s leaving. “Come to my wedding, okay? Best excuse to day drink there is.”

Eli sits on the curb with his shoebox until the cab arrives. It’s not even four o’clock, the summer sky bright and sticky blue. He has more than enough time to sober up, call Addie. They could still catch that movie, even. He imagines telling her about Will over chili fries in the mall food court, the rows of plastic tables with teenagers hanging all over them, fluorescent lights and noise. It might make the story go down easier.