An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England Read Online Free PDF Page B

started pumping a little bit, as if working up some saliva to spit on the hand I offered to him, and so I took it back.
    “You don’t recognize my name, do you?” he said, and he was right in that. There was nothing, no bells or whistles; right then my memory was a happy, empty, echoing place.
    “Well, I do recognize the name Thomas,” I said, trying to be polite. “But then again, it’s a pretty common name.” Which it was, and I meant this seriously, but he took it as sarcasm. I could tell by the way his jaw started working double time. He was an angry man, all right, and maybe that’s why he was so skinny: chewing so hard on his anger that he didn’t have the time or the energy or the appetite to chew on anything else.
    “Thomas Coleman,” he finally said. “My parents were Linda and David Coleman. You killed them in the Emily Dickinson House fire.”
    “Oh!” I said, since I didn’t know what else to say, and then, because this suddenly seemed like a more formal occasion, I put my shirt on. Once I was fully clothed, and out of nervousness, I went into a flurry of greeting: I shook his hand — I went out and grabbed it this time, there was no stopping me — slapped his back, asked, “How are you? So good to see you. How’ve you been?” and so on. All of this may seem horribly inappropriate, but what should I have done? There is no etiquette book for this sort of thing; I was writing it as I stood there. Besides, Thomas didn’t seem to think that I’d been so inappropriate — maybe after you’ve accidentally killed someone’s parents, every other offense is minor by comparison. His face even seemed to get a little color when I asked him if he wanted a drink — beer, juice, I told Thomas he could have whatever he wanted — although it may have been the glow off my own face illuminating his pockmarks. I really was giving off some heat and light; I probably could have powered the whole subdivision if there’d been a blackout.
    “Do you recognize my name now?” he asked. “Do you recognize my parents’ names?”
    “Sort of,” I said, even though I didn’t, not really, and even at the trial I tried hard not to know their names, as my future seemed a lot more likely a prospect if I forgot the details of my past. “I don’t really remember the whole thing all that well,” I told him, which as I’ve mentioned is a talent of mine and was true besides. Even now, with Thomas in front of me, the fire and the smoke and his parents’ burning bodies were so far away they seemed like someone else’s problem, which is awfully mean to say and in that way perfectly consistent with most true things.
    “ Sort of? ” he repeated. A little more color crept into Thomas’s face when he said this, and I could already see I was doing his health some good, and if this kept up I might even get him to eat something. “Sort of? Don’t you feel even a little bit bad about killing my parents?”
    “It was an accident,” I said. Thomas drew himself up at this and made a face, and in his defense I could see how he didn’t believe me: because if you said over and over again about the fire you’d set and the people you’d killed, “It was an accident,” it sounded as though you were whining, and if it sounded as though you were whining, it also sounded as though it wasn’t an accident, and then it didn’t matter whether it really was an accident or not. If you said about something terrible you’d done, “It was an accident,” you sounded like a coward and a liar, both. I sympathized with Thomas completely. But still, the truth is the truth is the truth. “It was an accident,” I said again, again.
    “There’s no such thing as an accident,” Thomas said.
    “Wow, it’s funny you say that,” I told him. Anne Marie had said the same thing many a time: in our life together I’d ruined more than one surprise party and leaned over backward and broken more than a few of our neighbors’ cherished