The Arsonist Read Online Free PDF Page B

it.
    But after all, why should they? How much had she ever asked to understand what might be difficult in their lives?
    She watched her father talking—now about the sale of a property down the road. She smiled at him, she sipped the dregs of her cold, bitter coffee. She thought about where she’d been the day before, about how far she’d come to be sitting here. How glad she was to be sitting here, and, yet, already a little bit restless, a little bit bored.
    She heard the car in the driveway, and then the slamming of its door. The screen door banged shut, and there were footsteps, noises in the kitchen. Her mother’s noises.
    The steps came to the doorway out to the porch, and Frankie looked up.
    Her mother looked from her to her father and back, and Frankie felt the sense she sometimes had as an adolescent, the sense of having laid some claim to him that her mother didn’t like—or, at any rate, would try not to acknowledge.
    Now she said brightly, “Well! Here you are, you two!”

3

    S YLVIA HAD HAD TOO MUCH to drink, and that, plus her bad night vision, meant that Alfie insisted on driving them home.
    She hadn’t resisted. First, he was right. And second, she’d had a good time at the party.
    She hadn’t thought she would. She was feeling bad about Frankie, who, she had assumed, would come, too. She’d forgotten how jet-lagged Frankie would still be feeling, one day home. She couldn’t possibly do it, she’d said to Sylvia. So they’d left her at home, alone, and Sylvia felt guilty about that. And then they’d been late arriving because they had to swing by Snell’s for gas—Sylvia hadn’t remembered to fill the tank when she went shopping earlier in the day. All this meant that she was short with Alfie, and they were silent and unhappy on the drive over to the party, both of them.
    But once there, she had moved around, talking mostly to people she’d known for years, but also to a few strangers. She felt animated, attractive. Over the course of the evening, she began to have the sense that it could work, this business of retiring up here—something her first month in this new life, those long rainy days of early summer, had made her doubt.
    They’d stayed too long, but so had many others. In the car, as they started home in the deep twilight, she’d leaned back and closed her eyes.
    “Do you mind if I listen to the ball game?” Alfie asked. She looked over at him, startled. She’d been nodding off.
    “No, that’s fine.” She sat up. “I’ll do it.” And she turned the radio on and fiddled with the buttons until she got a station carrying the game, already a little fizzy with static. It was the fourth inning, still no score. She tilted her seat back a little and looked up at the deepening indigo ofthe sky, listening to the slightly nasal, assured voice of Joe Castiglione. She liked that voice. She felt comforted by it. She closed her eyes again and imagined the things he was looking at—the brilliant green of the Fenway grass, the muted powdery green of the walls, the figures in white and gray at their stations, almost motionless until the ball was hit and they responded, moving wildly in different directions but in balletic synchrony.
    She woke sometime later—suddenly, completely—to the dark outside the car’s windows. The headlights made a bright tunnel ahead of them, the trees arching over it were caught at the edge of the light, falling away to join the blackness that surrounded them. The road was narrow, two lanes. She recognized nothing. There was nothing—no buildings, no milestones, just the black woods rushing past them. Her mouth was dry and tasted stale. The radio buzzed steadily.
    She looked at Alfie. He was intent, focused on the road ahead, both hands gripping the wheel tightly.
    She reached over and turned the radio off. “Where are we?” she said in the sudden silence.
    He looked at her and then back at the road quickly. “I don’t …  know ,” he said. He