Singe (24 page)

Instead he goes home to his apartment and opens the shoebox, lining up the items on the crappy Formica countertop. The prayer card, the Red Sox cap, the two posed family photos—one when he and Will were babies, one from the summer before the fire. Will has a striped polo and a brilliant smile. Eli looks shy. A Christmas ornament, him and Will in Santa hats in one of those silver keepsake frames,
JOY
engraved across the lower edge. Birthday cards, Eli to Will and Will to Eli. A picture they drew together for their dad on Father’s Day. A sea-smooth stone from their vacation to Florida. Beach glass.

Once it’s all out, Eli retrieves his bottle of whiskey. A shot for every item feels symbolic and stupid in equal amounts. Shoving the whole lot of it in the trash without ceremony feels sacrilegious. He scrubs a hand through his hair and tries to make a decision, his past sitting there in front of him on the counter, real and immediate as a wall of flame.

Addie spends her day off cleaning her apartment and buying new toys for Chicken Cat, plus some Red Sox and Celtics onesies for her sure-to-be-gender-normative new nephew. She throws in a hot pink hat and socks at the last second just to be contrary, then texts Jenn a picture of the completed ensemble laid out on her futon next to a bottle of Sambuca she’s had since college and the Young Person’s Study Bible every grandchild in her family gets for First Holy Communion with the caption
Manzella Survival Kit.

yoooooou are very beautiful and strange
, Jenn texts back.

Addie almost sends the photo to Eli too—she thinks he’ll get a kick out of the gist if not the specifics—but changes her mind at the very last second, tossing her phone on the table and turning on the TV instead. She hasn’t heard from him since yesterday at work, Eli with his secrets and his scars and his maybe-worrisome drinking. She’s kind of in the mood to let him be the one to come to her.

She’s halfway through an Iron Chef marathon when Jenn texts her again:
you free right now?

Addie looks around at her living room. Chicken Cat is sleeping on top of the refrigerator. The baby gifts are wrapped. On screen, the Chairman has just revealed his “culinary curveball”, a blow torch this time. Bobby Flay boasts that it’s playing right into his hands.
free as a bird
, she tells Jenn.

Ten minutes and a change of pants later, she’s driving out to the apartment Jenn shares with her fiancée, Liz, a two-bedroom over near Beckett with tall, tall ceilings. Liz works at a firm in Springfield, an hour away. Jenn works from home. The second bedroom has been converted into her studio, a big glass craft table with a tilting top that Addie likes to play with. It’s got a built-in lamp system that lights it from below. Addie loves the studio, loves their home. She knows for a fact she’s the only Manzella who has ever visited.

“Hey,” Jenn says when she arrives, pulling open the door. “Sorry for the short notice. I’ve just been spinning my wheels in here today. Liz’s parents are asking about my mom again.”

“Oh, woof,” Addie replies, settling herself on a stool at the kitchen island and wishing she had something actually helpful to say.
I love you, I’m proud of you
and
our parents are jerks
both feel as useless as they are true, so instead she eats the cheese and grapes and crackers Jenn puts out on the counter and gets overly enthusiastic about both the flower arrangements and Jenn’s dress, which is finished and flowy and gorgeous.

“Holy crap,” Addie says when her cousin tries it on, a million antique beads glittering in the afternoon sun coming through the window. She feels her eyes fill dorkily with tears. “
Jenn
.”

“Don’t,” Jenn warns, waving the air in front of her face like she’s trying to swat something annoying. “If you do, then I will, and I don’t want to right now.” She reaches behind her and fusses with the zipper, stepping out of the wedding dress and hanging it back on its padded satin hanger. “Let’s talk about something else, okay? Where’s your fireman lover today, huh?”

“Oh my God, please never call him that again,” Addie says, flopping backwards onto the quilt on Jenn’s bed—she made that too, Addie knows, all cool grays and whites. “I don’t know. Off being weird, probably. Drinking a six-pack. Beats me.”

That gets Jenn’s attention—she raises her dark eyebrows, curious. “That a thing he does a lot?” she asks, sounding exactly too casual not to have an agenda.

Right away Addie wishes she could take it back. “No. What? What does that mean?” It feels like that time in eleventh grade she confessed Michael Lawlor wanted under-the-bra action but also to go stag to senior prom. “No,” she repeats, watching Jenn tuck the dress back inside its shiny garment bag. “That’s not—
no
, Jenn.”

“Okay.” Jenn shimmies back into her jeans, pulling on a Cornell Law tee that has to be Liz’s. “Easy. If you say so.”

Addie plucks at the quilt in silence. “I thought you
liked
Eli,” she says, feeling her voice go high and little-cousin stupid.

Jenn closes the closet door and launches herself onto the bed, belly first beside Addie’s hip. “I
do
,” she soothes. “Come on, hey. He’s great, of course I do.”

Addie profoundly wishes she hadn’t opened her stupid mouth. She wants to tell Jenn all the good things about Eli and keep the not-so-good things to herself, an impulse she has never, ever had about other boyfriends.
He
thinks I’m beautiful,
she imagines herself saying.
He wanted to meet my family. He really loves his dog
. “Has Liz decided yet?” she asks instead. “About the dress?”

Jury’s still out on Liz’s outfit, either a suit or the traditional white dress. Jenn was worried about it for a while, Addie knows, back when they thought her mom still might come. She thought a dress might be more palatable to Marianne. Privately, Addie thinks Aunt Marianne can go screw.

“Ads.” Jenn nudges at Addie’s anklebone until Addie turns to face her. “Look. I think I need to tell you something.”

Addie feels her heart land somewhere around her ankles, a weird gravitational phenomenon considering she’s still lying down. “What?” she asks, scrambling upright, her voice a lot higher and shriller than normal. “About Eli? What?”

“Easy, tiger.” Jenn puts a hand out to steady her. “Look, I told him I wouldn’t even mention it to you—he explicitly asked me not to mention it to you, actually—but I just,
that
makes me feel weird, so.”

“
Jenn
.” Addie’s heart is beating unpleasantly. She thinks of the blonde in the bar that night, skinny and pale. “Spit it out.”

Jenn sighs slow and noisy, just like Addie’s dad does when he’s frustrated. Jenn used to do an impression of him that would have Addie in stitches. Eventually she just adopted the tic as her own. “How much do you know about Eli’s family?” she asks.

It takes Addie almost fifteen minutes to get the whole story out of Jenn, the dive bar and the shoebox, Eli wandering out into the hot, sunny afternoon. The skin all over her body feels prickly and hot. “He doesn’t like to talk about it,” she finally says. “Eli. He doesn’t—” She breaks off as Jenn disappears out the bedroom door, coming back a minute later with her shiny Mac laptop. “What’s that for?” Addie asks.

Jenn sits down on the bed, opening a new browser window to Google. “Detective work,” she says. “What’s his last name again?”

Addie gives it to her in a daze, watching as Jenn types
Eli Grant
and
New Hampshire
and
brothers
into the search bar and presses enter. The hits stack up immediately, blue link after blue link. Addie’s so nervous they blur together into an unreadable mass.

“Here we go,” Jenn says, falsely cheerful, selecting a blue blur that’s fourth from the top. She clicks, and a newspaper article materializes on the screen. Addie sees the words FIRE and BROTHERS and DEATH. But one word in particular leaps out at her: ARSON.

“Oh,” Jenn says. Her voice echoes around the room.

Chapter Fourteen

Eli is walking Hester around Chelsea’s block when he gets the text from Addie.
We need to talk.

Well. That’s never good.

He’s still staring at his phone when it buzzes again a second later, trying to come up with a jokey reply and telling himself he’s a grown man who’s allowed to drink on weekdays, if that’s even what this is about. Eli thinks that’s probably what this is about.

Your house
, she orders.
Half hour.

Hester squats in some bushes. Eli starts to sweat.

She’s sitting on the hood of her car when he gets to the parking lot outside his building, one of those long swingy skirts he likes and a pair of flip-flops drawn up on the bumper. The weather turned as he was bringing Hester back to Chelsea’s and the sky is gray-purple and heavy, the metallic smell of coming rain hanging low and threatening in the air. Addie’s holding a bunch of folded up paper in her hands.

“Hey,” he says when he’s out of the car, and she hands them over wordlessly. She’s got sunglasses on even though it’s cloudy. Eli can’t really get a read on her face.

He can read the papers just fine though, opening them up and taking a look. They’re computer printouts of some dumb New Hampshire newspaper, shit from the Internet back when the Internet was still a new invention.

And they’re about Will.

“Addie.” Eli shuffles through them again, looking at the grainy pictures they ran with the headline, school photos. Will’s is a year off, fourth grade instead of fifth, a careless, easy-fix of a mistake. Eli swallows. “What the fuck?”

Addie’s face is impassive beneath her sunglasses. Eli loves her in sunglasses normally, how they bring all the attention to her pretty, plush mouth. “You never told me,” is what that mouth is saying now, neat white teeth. For an insane second Eli imagines hauling off and punching her like he would a dude.

“You should have—you didn’t
ask,
” he spits. The papers crumple in his hand. “You knew he died, Addie. You knew I didn’t like to talk about it.”

“I didn’t know he died in an
arson,
” Addie says shrilly. “That would have been relevant information, I think.”

Eli sighs, scrubbing a hand over his face and trying to figure out how in the hell he didn’t see this coming, where in the hell she gets off being the one who’s pissed right now. He can hear the low roll of thunder coming in through the mountains. “Look,” he tells her, trying real hard not to lose his temper. “It was a long time ago, all right? It’s not a thing I—”

“
You’re
the one who pushed here,” she reminds him, voice low and deadly. “You’re the one who wanted to meet my family and be exclusive and you don’t get to
say
stuff like that, Eli, you don’t get to walk around making promises when the whole time you’re sitting on something like—like—”

“Like the fact that I set the fucking fire that killed my older brother?” Eli explodes, and
oh
, he can feel his whole life burning down all around him, hot and immediate. He finds he doesn’t exactly hate the sensation of it. “Or that my dad hung himself in our garage three months later? Huh, princess? Exactly which part of that should I have dropped in over burgers, huh?”

Addie stares at him, slack-jawed. “I didn’t—” she starts, then breaks off, pulling off her sunglasses. Her eyes are wide and afraid. “Eli. Okay. I didn’t.”

But Eli isn’t finished. “Jesus
Christ
, you are so fucking spoiled, do you know that? You with your picture-perfect family and your dinners and your small fucking dramas. You’re a kid, Addie.”

“This isn’t—okay.” Addie holds her hands up, sunglasses dangling from one thumb. Eli can see the plastic arms shaking. “Okay. Let’s just.
Eli.
”

She’s about to say how sorry she is, Eli can tell. She’s only the fifth person alive he’s told that detail to. The in-hospital shrink, a man with soft hands and a brightly lit office, told Eli it was natural to want to tell lies to cope with the feeling of responsibility. His parents didn’t believe him either. Will was the firebug, everyone knew it, backyard bonfires and a pack of matches in his jeans at all times. Eventually Eli just let them assume. In a way, Addie’s only the second person to hear the truth and actually believe it.

The first? Was Chelsea.

“Go home,” Eli says. His voice is very, very quiet. “Right now.”

Addie’s mouth works silently for a long minute before she can form words. It’s shock. They teach you how to look for it when you’re a candidate. “Eli.”

Eli walks past her toward his building. She doesn’t follow.

Upstairs, he skips the beer and goes straight for the bottle of whiskey, turning on the TV without registering what channel or program he’s watching. All day the sky gets darker and darker, but the storm never breaks. The clouds look almost green, but Eli guesses that could be the Jameson. When his phone trills on the counter it takes like four or five rings for him to get his act together enough to pick it up.

“Hey,” he mumbles vaguely. It’s Chelsea, he registered before he hit the green button—he doesn’t know if he would have picked it up if it was Addie, not that she’s called. She’s finished with him now, probably. Nothing good ever stays. “Hester okay?”

“Dave moved out,” Chelsea announces without answering his question, sounding, if Eli is not mistaken, way more broken up than she ever was about the end of their marriage. “What are you doing right now?”