What Burns Away Read online

  If nothing else, I was intrigued by the fact that Dean had married an extreme version of that madcap girl my husband once found in me. So it was then, I remember, that I lost the first of many afternoons scrolling through Dean’s images to scrutinize his life and contemplate the adventures he had with his wife in that Connecticut town where I was born, comparing it to what Dean and I had, once upon a time, and what we might’ve become had we shared a future together.

  That afternoon, as Jonah slept, Dean set the stage for what would unfold between us in the weeks to come, revealing very little about himself beyond the daily grind of his real estate tours and the staging of open houses for our former mutual friends, and instead focusing his correspondence almost exclusively on the intimate details of a past we shared together.

  Claire,

  I don’t know if I should say this, but last night I thought about your hair. The way it smelled. How you braided it after a swim, sitting in your yellow bikini and cutoffs in the bed of my truck. It was so thick it never seemed to dry. And I remember teaching you how to drive. It was summer, July of ’86. You were tan. And drove all of 35 mph in a 65 mph zone on the freaking interstate.

  And what was that sticky stuff you wore on your lips? The berry kind? I remember tasting you for hours.

  You were so sweetly shy when I followed you upstairs and sat you on the windowsill to undress you after your dad died. I’ll never understand why I started to fade out of your life afterward, or how I allowed myself to kiss you good-bye forever on your birthday that winter. I was a stupid jackass of a kid.

  Dean

  Reading his emails, I allowed myself to become the girl Dean wrote about, letting everything in Madison fade out—the laundry baskets full of clothes to fold, the toys scattered across the rug, the isolation—and I went back home with him to that long-ago windowsill in my mother’s second husband’s house on the day of my father’s funeral, with the hot sun streaming in, my face wet with tears, Dean unzipping my navy-blue romper, his breath in my ear, his mouth on my neck. And in his reiteration of that afternoon, I unearthed a desire I believed myself no longer capable of and began to sense myself coveting not only him, but also the me that he remembered, yearning for her youth, her spontaneity, her energy, her skin.

  Serendipity played its role in how those messages affected me, no doubt, and as the therapist has suggested, I might not have been so vulnerable if Dean hadn’t caught me just then, after the move and particularly on my fortieth birthday, that ridiculous marker of middle age, another indication of all that was behind me—my career, my youth, my home, and my marriage, it seemed, following suit.

  Although, in his own way, Miles did reach out to me. Perhaps sensing my distraction or the gap grown between us, he made a rare call home from work and told me, “Get ready, babe. We’ve got to do it up for your birthday!”

  “I thought we were going to skip it,” I said.

  “Tonight,” he announced, “I’ll be home to take you out.” And, for once, he was.

  Reluctantly, I shimmied into a black dress, stepped into a pair of heels, and glossed my lips red. I pinned my hair up into a twist and thought about all the ways Miles and I could turn things around. For a long while, I stared into the mirror, turning to the side and sucking in my stomach, examining the lines around my eyes and smoothing them out with my fingertips, fingering my untamable blond curls as I told my reflection, “You’re forty years old. Holy shit.”

  While I dressed, Miles agreed to put Jonah to bed, and once his little snores purred into the room, the awkward teenager across the street came over with a book weighing more than her frame. “Happy birthday, Mrs. Spruce,” she told me and took the monitor from my hand, curling catlike into a wingback chair.

  In the car, my husband played a CD he’d made me for my birthday the previous year. “I didn’t really plan anything special,” he said. “I thought we could be spontaneous. I know you like that kind of thing.”

  But Miles has never been good at knowing the right kind of spontaneous, and so we walked from place to place, getting turned away at every establishment we entered because it was the first week of the winter term, and the University of Wisconsin’s men’s basketball team was playing at home, in our new university town. The whole city was booked with students, their parents, and crowds of middle-aged alumni, decked out in the university’s colors, cheery red and white. Hoards of alums in Bucky Badger sweatshirts and coats had returned to a place they held dear, a place that reminded them of their youth, a place they loved to revisit because a part of their story began there, while we, in contrast, bumbled down side streets in long black dusters with our iPhones directing us through a city to which we remained strangers.

  Block after block we peered into restaurants, finding couples our own age holding up pint glasses and stemware, their eyes glossy with drink, their cheeks rosy with nostalgia. And as we checked with the hostess stations, hoping for a seat in each place we passed, we witnessed roars of laughter as friends leaned across tables to embrace each other. All of it made me homesick for our life back East.

  After looping Madison’s capital square three times, unable to find seating elsewhere, we settled for a Nepalese restaurant on State Street that served mostly takeout but offered a few wobbly tables near the window. We were ridiculously overdressed, and both of us were trying to make the best of things, feeling the pressure of the occasion and the expectations of the first date we’d had in ages.

  In an attempt to sound encouraging, I said, “This is cozy,” while we huddled over a greasy menu and I pushed my disappointment with the venue into the empty pit of my stomach. Outside, groups of coeds dressed in support of the home team, wearing Badger-red snow hats and red-and-white-striped overalls, huddled against the cold and cheered for what must have been a victory over at the basketball stadium.

  While I waited for Miles to place our order, I checked my cell phone to see if there was word from our sitter. Finding none, I scrolled to my Facebook account, where there was a photo from Dean, no note this time—just a scanned snapshot from an old Polaroid camera, a picture of me blowing out the candles on a giant sheet cake with a Happy 15th Birthday he had iced in pink across the center of it, before he kissed me that final good-bye.

  Considering the flurry of flames cast over the cake, I recalled my high school chemistry lab, my ninth-grade science teacher that year, Mr. Barnet, and how one day after class, when I was supposed to be on my way to second period study hall, I simply couldn’t tear myself away from the tornadic flames we had made. Set on a lazy Susan, the conflagrations rose and spun into motion as currents moved through a protective mesh screen, replicating the role of trees in a wildfire and whirling the flames into a vortex. Beholding the beauty of that illuminated twister, I stayed in my seat long after the bell, charmed by its animated whirl.

  Mr. Barnet dragged a wobbly metal stool over to sit beside me and said, “Pretty cool stuff, right?”

  Almost in a trance, I whispered, “I love it,” while the fire cyclone gained momentum.

  “Then stay a minute,” he told me.

  Opening his cabinet and pulling down a plastic container that looked like an egg crate, each compartment holding what appeared to be salt, Mr. Barnet wiped a platinum wire with hydrochloric acid and dipped the looped end of it into the first sample on the tray. He then waved the wand through the fire, the flame changing from orange to sky blue—the fire gone magic.

  I laughed with pure pleasure and asked, “How did you do that?”

  “Arsenic,” he said, sliding a heavy volume across the space between us.

  The book, The Chemical History of a Candle, featured the image of a taper whose single flame seemed to blow across the cover, as if someone were making a wish.

  “You should read this,” he said. “It was written by the English scientist Michael Faraday in 1860, who once gave a series of Christmas lectures for young people
at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London. Each of his experiments deduces the chemical and physical properties of fire.”

  All those years later, sitting at a wobbly table in a Nepalese restaurant on my fortieth birthday, I could still recite the title of the first lecture in the book’s series: “A Candle: The Flame—Its Sources, Structure, Mobility, Brightness.”

  And when I spotted Miles returning to our table with a tray full of steaming food, I slipped my phone and the image of my fifteenth birthday cake back into the side pocket of my winter coat.

  Miles took his seat and apologized. “Babe, this isn’t what I expected. I had no idea the town would be so crowded on a weeknight. I hope this is okay.”

  I forged a smile for him, not wanting to dishearten him by revealing my own disappointment with the night, with our marriage, or with this new life he had chosen for us.

  “It’s great,” I encouraged and lied the way you do for someone you love, willing myself to feel some simple gratitude for the food he set before me.

  At the only other table in the restaurant, a trio of undergraduate boys rated the girls walking past the window on an academic scale of “hotness.” The thin boy with reptilian eyes and a fedora was the ringleader. “Okay, so a hot chick would be like a 4.0. An average cute one would be like 3.0 or 3.5, and a chick who is a 2.0 would be what we call fuckable only when drunk.”

  I wondered where a forty-year-old woman would rank, knowing that in our previous life, Miles and I would have made jest of their conversation, adopting it as our own, one of us winking at the other and proclaiming something like, “I think you’re more a 3.5, babe, but for the rest of your curry dish and a quickie, I’ll grant you a 4.0 for the night.”

  Instead, we stared blankly into our entrees, eating salty vermicelli while swatting away a fly that had somehow survived the winter and joined us for my milestone birthday celebration.

  I wanted to go home and take off my heels, and while I was speculating about where our laughter had gone, Miles stood up. Regal in his suit and tie, as if we were at a large party in a room full of people, he cleared his throat. “I’d like to make a toast to my beautiful wife.”

  The three boys beside us grew silent. The asshole kid wearing the fedora clapped.

  Noticing their attention fixed upon us, Miles sat back down and leaned in close to me. With his steaming cup of tea held high—to our disappointment, the restaurant served no wine—he lowered his voice.

  “Claire, happy birthday. I love you. And despite your desire to leave on every light in the house when you go to bed, and although you never make chili con queso as good as mine, and even though you put chicken bones in the garbage disposal, which makes me insane, I love you still. I love that you make everyone you talk to feel like the most important person in the room.

  “I love your big, loud laughter, and I love the way you play with Jonah, making spaceships out of blankets and boxes, launching him through the atmosphere in his booster seat. I love your pie crust. I love the way you kiss me. And maybe most importantly, I love the way you dance in your underwear when you’re happy. I know you’ve been out of sorts since the move, babe, and I hope you’ll be happy again soon.” He touched his mug to mine. “Claire. Happy birthday!”

  I sipped from my tea, feeling my bottom lip quiver while I blinked back tears, wishing that motherhood, that being his wife, that the privilege of those things alone could heal what was broken in me.

  From his pocket Miles pulled out a gift, my favorite photo of Jonah making a spooky face in his Halloween shark costume. The picture was matted and placed inside a four-by-seven silver frame, engraved with the words “Boo Forever.”

  I hooted then. My big, loud laughter for Miles, the tears streaking my cheek, and I recognized a tiny bit of myself in the mounted image of Jonah’s grin. I understood the way a child locks your love, how Miles and I would, no matter what, always be the two people who loved Jonah more than anyone else ever could.

  Miles arranged the gift between us and said, “We have such a sweet boy, don’t we? All those years of worrying we’d never get a baby, and we got the best one there is.”

  He gulped down the rest of his tepid chai and appropriated the mug, tucking it into the pocket of his sports jacket from which he had produced my gift. Noting my usual look of disapproval when he pinched a glass, he blushed. “A little souvenir to remember the night.” Then he picked up a spongy slice of green tea cake from our tray, eating most of it in one bite, and brushed the crumbs from his newly mounting belly.

  On the long, subzero walk to the car, we held hands, and despite my attempt to embrace the sweetness of Miles’s gestures, his unusual attempt to be unrehearsed, the framed photograph, and a beautiful toast in my honor, I felt myself retreat. After all we had endured with the move and me giving up my career for his dream, followed by the heralding of my middle age that made me feel more old than middle, I had hoped the evening would somehow reassure me that I was—and that we as a family would always be—okay.

  Out front of our house, Miles asked, “Kiss me?”

  So I gave him my cheek and rubbed my hands together, forcing another grin in his direction, while I again slid from the moment into a memory of Dean guiding me across the creek, where we found a sandy stretch alongside the bird sanctuary and explored the uncharted parts of each other, ending the night on our backs, breathlessly regarding the summer constellation Scorpius, with its mythological sting.

  When Miles opened the door, the sitter greeted us with, “Wow, you guys are home early!”

  From the ten-dollar bills he kept held together with a paper clip, Miles peeled away twenty bucks and handed them to her. “Thank you,” he said reaching for the girl’s coat, which hung as thick and downy as a sleeping bag from a hook in the front hall.

  And while he saw her out, I kicked off my shoes and slipped into Jonah’s room. There I coiled up on the rug beside his crib. I closed my eyes and listened to the white noise machine project the crash of waves—the noise I still miss most.

  Miles whispered through the door, “Claire, come to bed.” But when I didn’t respond, he crept in and covered me with the blanket I kept on the back of the rocking chair, tucking it tight around my body to keep out the cold.

  Once, Miles would have lifted me from the floor and carried me to bed, coaxing me out of sleepiness and into passion with his lips and breath and warm, deft doctor’s hands. But I could no longer even imagine such brazen desire on his part, much less on mine. I wanted to blame its disappearance on our move to the Midwest, whose lake waters, devoid of a changing tide, lacked the kind of dependability that kept me steady.

  But I see now that my knock from our equilibrium was no fault of Madison but something that started seven years prior, in the meteorology lab back East when those images of the past returned to me. Unobstructed, looping like a movie reel, they grew more frequent during our futile efforts to make a baby; once we had Jonah they lessened some, but worsened again with the stress of the move, during which I bottomed out completely.

  For three years prior to arriving in Madison, after the house was done, I’d made getting pregnant the new project and the central theme of my life. I thought about it at work, at home. I dreamed about babies—human babies, animal babies, myself as a baby.

  I took all the assessments: ovulation testing, ovarian function tests, luteal phase testing, luteinizing hormone tests, follicle-stimulating hormone tests, estradiol tests, progesterone tests, prolactin tests, free T3 tests, total testosterone tests, free testosterone tests, DHEAS tests, androstenedione tests, cervical mucus tests, ultrasound tests, hysterosalpingograms, hysteroscopy, laparoscopy, endometrial biopsy.

  And I made Miles get tested too.

  Again and again I asked him to jerk off into a cup and deliver the specimen for semen analysis testing to the lab at the University of Connecticut Health Center, where he worked. And for me,
he did this eleven times in desperate attempts to quell our frustration and disappointment.

  “Are you sure?” I would plead. “It doesn’t make sense. The results can’t keep coming back normal.” I wanted answers, scientific findings, to substantiate our failure.

  Each time he took a test, Miles responded by handing me the printout from the lab screening and said nothing.

  Sperm count: 40 Million

  Sperm motility: Grade A .90

  Sperm morphology: Regular .60

  Pus cells: Absent, Volume 3 mil

  To my dismay, we tested normal every time on every screening. Miles and I were both scientists, yet for us science failed to provide a hypothesis that explained exactly why we could not conceive. We were older, yes, but all the statistics were in our favor. Our parts worked, and our hormone levels—despite our “late parental age” of thirty-seven and thirty-eight years old—were, by all technical definitions, exceptional.

  Yet with all those thermometers and charts, all those visits to make love in his office and at my lab, with all those quickies in the car, the planned overnights at downtown hotels and little inns by the sea, with all that lingerie I ordered online, we were disappointed every month, finding my period there again on day thirty-three, almost exactly at noon.

  Gradually we lost our sense of humor and gained, instead, an awareness of our collective failure. Both of us blamed ourselves, then each of us quietly blamed the other. Finally, following Miles’s announcement of “I just can’t do this anymore, I feel like a farm animal,” we conceived a baby without any scientific interventions on our fourth wedding anniversary.