The Secrets of a Fire King Read online

  My mother had a job as a secretary and decorated cakes on the side. In the pressing heat she juggled bowls between the refrigerator and the counter, struggling to keep the frosting at the right consistency so she could make the delicate roses, chrysanthemums, and daisies that balanced against fields of sugary white. The worst ones were the wedding cakes, intricate and bulky. That summer, brides and their mothers called us on a regular basis, their voices laced with panic. My mother spoke to them as she worked, trailing the extension cord along the tiled floor, her voice soothing and efficient.

  Usually my mother is a calm person, levelheaded in the face of stress, but one day the bottom layer of a finished cake collapsed and she wept, her face cradled in her hands as she sat at the kitchen table. I hadn’t seen her cry since the day my father left, and I watched her from the kitchen door, a basket of laundry in my arms, uneasiness rising around me like slow, numbing light. After a few minutes she dried her eyes and salvaged the cake, removing the broken layer and dispensing with the plastic fountain that spouted champagne, and which was supposed to rest in a precarious arrangement between two cake layers held apart by plastic pillars.

  “There.” She stepped back to survey her work. The cake was smaller but still beautiful, delicate and precise.

  “It looks better without that tacky fountain, anyway,” she said. “Now let’s get it out of here before something else goes wrong.”

  I helped her box it up and carry it to the car, where it rested on the floor, surrounded by bags of ice. My mother backed out of the driveway slowly, then paused and called to me.

  “Katie,” she said. “Try to get the dishes done before you go to work, okay? And please, don’t spend all night with those dubious friends of yours. I’m too tired to worry.”

  “I won’t,” I said, waving. “I’m working late anyway.”

  By “dubious friends” my mother meant Stephen, who was, in fact, my only friend that summer. He had spirals of long red hair and a habit of shoplifting expensive gadgets: tools, jewelry, photographic equipment. My mother thought he was an unhealthy influence, which was generous; the rest of the town just thought he was crazy. He was the older brother of my best friend, Emmy, who had fled, with her boyfriend and 350 tie-dyed T-shirts, to follow the Grateful Dead on tour. Come with us, she had urged, but I was working in a convenience store, saving my money for school, and it didn’t seem like a good time to leave my mother. So I stayed in town and Emmy sent me postcards I memorized—a clean line of desert, a sky aching blue over the ocean, an airy waterfall in the inter-mountain West. I was fiercely envious, caught in that small town while the planes traced their daily paths to places I was losing hope of ever seeing. I lay in the backyard and watched them. The large jets moved in slow silver glints across the sky, while the smaller planes droned lower. Sometimes, on the clearest days, I caught a glimpse of skydivers. They started out as small black specks, plummeting, then blossomed against the horizon in a streak of silk and color. I stood up to watch as they grew steadily larger, then passed the tree line and disappeared.

  When my mother was gone, I went back inside. The air was cool and shadowy, heavy with the sweet scent of flowers and frosting. I piled the broken cake on a plate and did the dishes, quickly, feeling the silence gather. That summer I couldn’t stay alone in the house. I’d find myself standing in front of mirrors with my heart pounding, searching my eyes for a glimmer of madness, or touching the high arc of my cheekbone as if I didn’t know my own face. I thought I knew about madness, the way it felt—the slow suspended turning as you gave yourself up to it. The doctors said my father was suffering from a stress-related condition. They said he would get better. But I had watched him in his slow retreat, distanced by his own expanding silence. On the day he stopped speaking altogether I had brought him a glass of water, stepping across the afternoon light that flickered on the wooden floors.

  “Hey Dad,” I had said, softly. His eyes were closed. His face and hands were soft and white and pale. When he opened his eyes they were clear brown, as blank and smooth as the glass in my hand.

  “Dad?” I said. “Are you okay?”

  He did not speak, then or later, not even when the ambulance came and took him away. He did not sigh or protest. He had slid away from us with apparent ease. I had watched him go, and this was what I knew: madness was a graceless descent, the abyss beneath a careless step. Take care I said each time we left my father, stepping from his cool quiet room into the bright heat outside. And I listened to my own words; I took care, too. That summer, I was afraid of falling.

  STEPHEN WASN’T COMFORTABLE at my house and he lived at the edge of town, so we met every day at Mickey’s Tavern, where it was cool and dark and filled with the chattering life of other people. I always stopped in on my way to or from work, but Stephen sometimes spent whole afternoons and evenings there, playing games of pool and making bets with the other people who formed the fringe of the town. Some of them called themselves artists and lived together in an abandoned farmhouse. They were young, most of them, but already disenfranchised, known to be odd or mildly crazy or even faintly dangerous. Stephen, who fell into the last two categories because he had smashed out an ex-lover’s window one night, and had tried, twice, to kill himself, kept a certain distance from the others. Still, he was always at Mickey’s, leaning over the pool table, a dark silhouette against the back window, only his hair illuminated in a fringe of red.

  Before Emmy left, I had not liked Stephen. At twenty-seven he still lived at home, in a fixed-over apartment on the third floor of his parents’ house. He slept all morning and spent his nights pacing his small rooms, listening to Beethoven or playing chess with a computer he’d bought. I had seen the dark scars that bisected both his wrists, and they frightened me. He collected a welfare check every month, took Valium every few hours, and lived in a state of precarious calm. Sometimes he was mean, teasing Emmy to the edge of tears. But he could be charming too, with an ease and grace the boys my own age didn’t have. When he was feeling good he made things special, leaning over to whisper something, his fingers a lingering touch on my arm, on my knee. I knew it had to do with the danger, too, the reason he was so attractive at those times.

  “Kate understands me,” he said once. Emmy, the only person who was not afraid of him, laughed out loud and asked why I’d have any better insight into his warped mind than the rest of the world.

  “Can’t you tell?” he said. I wouldn’t look at him so he put his fingers lightly on my arm. He was completely calm, but he must have felt me trembling. It was a week after my father had been taken to the hospital, and it seemed that Stephen knew some truth about me, something invisible that only he could sense.

  “What do you mean?” I demanded. But he just laughed and left the porch, telling me to figure it out for myself.

  “What did he mean?” I asked. “What did he mean by that?”

  “He’s in a crazy mode,” Emmy said. She was methodically polishing her fingernails, and she tossed her long bright hair over her shoulder. “The best thing to do is pretend he doesn’t exist.”

  But Emmy left and then there was only Stephen, charming, terrifying Stephen, who started to call me every day. He asked me to come over, to go for a ride, to fly kites with him behind a deserted barn he’d found. Finally I gave in, telling myself I was doing him a favor by keeping him company. But it was more than that. I knew that Stephen understood the suspended world between sanity and madness, that he lived his life inside it.

  One night, past midnight, when we were sitting in the quiet darkness of his porch, he told me about cutting his wrists, the even pulse of warm running water, the sting of the razor dulled with Valium and whiskey.

  “Am I shocking you?” he had asked after a while.

  “No. Emmy told me about it.” I paused, unsure how much to reveal. “She thinks you did it to get attention.”

  He laughed. “Well it worked,” he said, “didn’t it?”

  I traced my finger around the
pattern in the upholstery.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But now everyone thinks you’re crazy.”

  He shrugged, and stretched, pushing his large thick hands up toward the ceiling. “So what?” he said. “If people think you’re crazy, they leave you alone, that’s all.”

  I thought of all the times I had stood in front of the mirror, of the times I woke at night, my heart a frantic movement, no escape.

  “Don’t you ever worry that it’s true?”

  Stephen reached over to the table and held up his blue plastic bottle of Valium. It was a strong prescription. I knew, because I had tried it. I liked the way the blue pills slid down my throat, dissolving anxiety. I liked the way the edges of things grew undefined, so I was able to rise from my own body, calmly and with perfect grace.

  Stephen shook a pill into his hand. His skin was pale and damp, his expression intent.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t worry. Ever.”

  STILL, ON THE DAY the cake collapsed, I could tell he was worried. When I got to the pool room he was squinting down one cue at a time, discarding each one as he discovered warps and flaws.

  “Hey, Kate,” he said, choosing one at last. “Care for a game?”

  We ordered beer and plugged our quarters into the machine, waiting for the weighty, rolling thunk of balls. Stephen ran his hand through his red beard. He had green eyes and a long, finely shaped nose. I thought he was extremely handsome.

  “How goes the tournament?” I asked. He’d been in the playoffs for days, and each time I came in the stakes were higher.

  Stephen broke, and dropped two low balls. He stepped back and surveyed the table. “You’ll love this,” he said. “Loser goes skydiving.”

  “You know,” I said, remembering the plummeting shapes, the silky streaks against the sky, “I’ve always wanted to do that.”

  “Well,” Stephen said, “keep the loser company, then.”

  He missed his next shot and we stopped talking. I was good, steady, with some competitions behind me. The bar was filling up around us, and soon a row of quarters lined the wooden rim of the pool table. After a while Ted Johnson, one of the artists in the farmhouse, came in and leaned against the wall. Stephen tensed, and his next shot went wild.

  “Too bad,” Ted said, stepping forward. “Looks like you’re on a regular losing streak.”

  “You could go fuck yourself,” Stephen said, but his voice was even, as though he’d just offered Ted a beer.

  “Thanks,” Ted said. “But actually, I’d just as soon ask Kate a question, while she’s here. I’d like to know what you think about honor, Kate. Specifically, I want to know if you think an honorable person must always keep a promise?”

  I shot again. The cue ball hovered on the edge of a pocket, then steadied itself. There was a tension, a subtext that I couldn’t read. I sent my last ball in and took aim at the eight. It went in smoothly, and I stepped back. There was a moment of silence, and we listened to it roll away into the hidden depths of the table.

  “What’s your point, Ted?” I asked, without turning to look at him.

  “Stephen is going skydiving,” he said. “That’s my point.”

  “Stephen, you lost?” I felt, oddly enough, betrayed.

  “It was a technicality,” Stephen said, frowning. “I’m the better player.” He took a long swallow of beer.

  “What bullshit,” Ted answered, shaking his head. “You’re absolutely graceless in defeat.”

  Stephen was quiet for a long time. Then he put his hand to his mouth, very casually, but I knew he was slipping one of his tiny blue Valiums. He tugged his hands through his thick hair and smiled.

  “It’s no big deal, skydiving. I called today and made the arrangements.”

  “All the same,” Ted answered, “I can’t wait to see it.”

  Stephen shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’ll go alone.”

  Ted was surprised. “Forget it, champ. You’ve got to have a witness.”

  “Then Kate will go,” Stephen said. “She’ll witness. She’ll even jump, unless she’s afraid.”

  I didn’t know what to say. He already knew I wasn’t working the next day. And it was something to think about, too, after a summer of sky gazing, to finally be inside a plane.

  “I’ve never even flown before,” I told them.

  “That’s no problem,” Ted answered. “That part is a piece of cake.”

  I finished off the beer and picked up my purse from where it was lying on a bar stool.

  “Where are you going?” Stephen asked.

  “Believe it or not, some of us work for a living,” I said.

  He smiled at me, a wide, charming grin, and walked across the room. He took both my hands in his. “Don’t be mad, Kate,” he said. “I really want you to jump with me.”

  “Well,” I said, getting flustered. He didn’t work, but his hands were calloused from playing so much pool. He had a classic face, a face you might see on a pale statue in a museum, with hair growing out of his scalp like flames and eyes that seemed to look out on some other, more compelling, world. Recklessness settled over me like a spell, and suddenly I couldn’t imagine saying no.

  “Good,” he said, releasing my hands, winking quickly before he turned back to the bar. “That’s great. I’ll pick you up tomorrow, then. At eight.”

  WHEN I GOT home that night my mother was in the kitchen. Sometimes the house was dark and quiet, with only her even breathing, her murmured response when I said I was home. But usually she was awake, working, the radio tuned to an easy-listening station, a book discarded on the sofa. She said that the concentration, the exactness required to form the fragile arcs of frosting, helped her relax.

  “You’re late,” she said. She was stuffing frosting into one of the cloth pastry bags. “Were you at Stephen’s?”

  I shook my head. “I stayed late at work. Someone went home sick.” I started licking one of the spoons. My mother never ate the frosting. She saw too much of it, she said; she hated even the thick sweet smell of it.

  “What is it that you do over there?” she asked, perplexed.

  “At work?”

  My mother looked up. “You know what I mean,” she said.

  I pushed off my tennis shoes. “I don’t know. We hang out. Talk about books and music and art and stuff.”

  “But he doesn’t work, Kate. You come home and you have to get up in a few hours. Stephen, on the other hand, can sleep all day.”

  “I know. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  My mother sighed. “He’s not stable. Neither are his friends. I don’t like you being involved with them.”

  “Well, I’m not unstable,” I said. I spoke too loudly, to counter the fear that seemed to plummet through my flesh whenever I had that thought. “I am not crazy.”

  “No,” said my mother. She had a tray full of sugary roses in front of her, in a bright spectrum of color. I watched her fingers, thin and strong and graceful, as she shaped the swirls of frosting into vibrant, perfect roses.

  “Whatever happened to simple white?” she asked, pausing to stretch her fingers. This bride’s colors were green and lavender, and my mother had dyed the frosting to match swatches from the dresses. Her own wedding pictures were in black and white, but I knew it had been simple, small and elegant, the bridesmaids wearing the palest shade of peach.

  “I saw your father today,” she said while I was rummaging in the refrigerator.

  “How is he?” I asked.

  “The same. Better. I don’t know.” She slid the tray of finished roses into the freezer. “Maybe a little better, today. The doctors seem quite hopeful.”

  “That’s good,” I said.

  “I thought we could go see him tomorrow.”

  “Not tomorrow,” I said. “Stephen and I have plans already.”

  “Katie, he’d like to see you.”

  “Oh really?” I said sarcastically. “Did he tell you that?”

  My mother looked up from the
sink. Her hands were wet, a pale shade of purple that shimmered in the harsh overhead light. I couldn’t meet her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll go see him next week, okay?”

  I started down the hall to my room.

  “Kate,” she called to me. I paused and turned around.

  “Sometimes,” she said, “you have no common sense at all.”

  SECRETLY I HOPED for rain, but the next day was clear and blue. Stephen was even early for a change, the top of his convertible down when he glided up in front of the house. We drove through the clean white scent of clover and the first shimmers of heat. Along the way we stopped to gather dandelions, soft as moss, and waxy black-eyed Susans. Ted had given me his camera, with instructions to document the event, and I spent half the film on the countryside, on Stephen wearing flowers in his beard.

  The hangar was a small concrete building sitting flatly amid acres of corn. The first thing we saw when we entered was a pile of stretchers stacked neatly against the wall. It was hardly reassuring, and neither was the hand-lettered sign that warned CASH ONLY. Stephen and I wandered in the dim open room, looking at the pictures of skydivers in various formations, until two other women showed up, followed by a tall gruff man who collected forty dollars from each of us, and sent us out to the field.

  The man, who had gray hair and a compact body, turned out to be Howard, our instructor. He lined us up beneath the hot sun and made us practice. For the first jump we would all be on a static line, but we had to practice as if we were going to pull our own ripcords. It was a matter of timing, Howard said, and he taught us a chant to measure our actions. Arch 1000, Look 1000, Reach 1000, Pull 1000, Arch 1000, Check 1000. We practiced endlessly, until sweat lifted from our skin and Howard, in his white clothes, seemed to shimmer. It was important, he said, that we start counting the minute we jumped. Otherwise, we’d lose track of time. Some people panicked and pulled their reserve chute even as the first one opened, tangling them both and falling to their deaths. Others were motionless in their fear and fell like stones, their reserves untouched. So we chanted, moving our arms and heads in rhythm, arching our backs until they ached. Finally, Howard decided we were ready and took us into the hangar to learn emergency maneuvers.