Firestarter

trebled, came back together, then drifted into prismatic fragments again. Sun reflecting off bright chrome everywhere.

“And fasten your seatbelt, Charlie.”

The next exit was Hammersmith, twenty miles farther up. Somehow he made it. He thought later that it was only the consciousness of Charlie sitting next to him, depending on him, that kept him on the road. Just as Charlie had got him through all the things that came after-the knowledge of Charlie, needing him. Charlie McGee, whose parents had once needed two hundred dollars.

There was a Best Western at the foot of the Hammersmith ramp, and Andy managed to get them checked in, specifying a room away from the turnpike. He used a bogus name. “They’ll be after us, Charlie,” he said. “I need to sleep. But only until dark, that’s all the time we can take… all we dare to take. Wake me up when it’s dark.” She said something else, but then he was falling on the bed. The world was blurring down to a gray point, and then even the point was gone and everything was darkness, where the pain couldn’t reach. There was no pain and there were no dreams. When Charlie shook him awake again on that hot August evening at quarter past seven, the room was stifling hot and his clothes were soaked with sweat. She had tried to make the air conditioner work but hadn’t been able to figure out the controls.

“It’s okay,” he said. He swung his feet onto the floor and put his hands on his temples, squeezing his head so it wouldn’t blow up. “Is it any better, Daddy?” she asked anxiously. “A little,” he said. And it was… but only a little. “We’ll stop in a little while and get some chow. That’ll help some more.” “Where are we going?”

He shook his head slowly back and forth. He had only the money he had left the house with that morning-about seventeen dollars. He had his Master Charge and his Visa, but he had paid for their room with the two twenties he always kept in the back of his wallet (my run-out money, he sometimes told Vicky, joking, but how hellishly true that had turned out to be) rather than use either one of them. Using either of those cards would be like painting a sign: THIS WAY TO THE FUGITIVE COLLEGE INSTRUCTOR AND HIS DAUGHTER. The seventeen dollars would buy them some burgers and top off the wagon’s gas tank once. Then they would be stone broke.

“'I don’t know, Charlie,” he said. “Just away.”

“When are we going to get Mommy?”

Andy looked up at her and his headache started to get worse again. He thought of the drops of blood on the floor and on the washing-machine porthole. Ire thought of the smell of Pledge.

“Charlie-“he said, and could say no more. There was no need, anyway.

She looked at him with slowly widening eyes. Her hand drifted up to her trembling mouth.

“Oh no, Daddy… please say it’s no.”

“Charlie-”

She screamed, “Oh please say it’s no!”

“Charlie, those people who-”

“Please say she’s all right, say she’s all right, say she’s all right!”

The room, the room was so hot, the air conditioning was off, that was all it was, but it was so hot, his head aching, the sweat rolling down his face, not cold sweat now but hot, like oil, hot-

“No,” Charlie was saying, “No, no, no, no, no.” She shook her head. Her pigtails flew back and forth, making him think absurdly of the first time he and Vicky had taken her to the amusement park, the carousel-

It wasn’t the lack of air conditioning.

“Charlie!” He yelled. “Charlie, the bathtub! The water!”

She screamed. She turned her head toward the open bathroom door and there was a sudden blue flash in there like a lightbulb burning out. The showerhead fell off the wall and clattered into the tub, twisted and black. Several of the blue tiles shattered to fragments.

He barely caught her when she fell, sobbing.

“Daddy, I’m sorry, I’m sorry-”

“It’s all right,” he said shakily, and enfolded her. From the bathroom, thin smoke drifted out of the fused tub. All the porcelain surfaces had crack-glazed instantly. It was as if the entire bathroom had been run through some powerful but defective firing kiln. The towels were smoldering.

“It’s all right,” he said, holding her, rocking her. “Charlie, it’s all right, it’s gonna be all right, somehow it’ll come right, I promise.” “I want Mommy,” she sobbed. He nodded. He wanted her, too. He held Charlie tightly to him and smelled ozone and porcelain and cooked Best Western towels. She had almost flash-fried them both.

“It’s gonna be all right,” he told her, and rocked her, not really believing it, but it was the litany, it was the Psalter, the voice of the adult calling down the black well of years into the miserable pit of terrorized childhood; it was what you said when things went wrong; it was the nightlight that could not banish the monster from the closet but perhaps only keep it at bay for a little while; it was the voice without power that must speak nevertheless.

“It’s gonna be all right,” he told her, not really believing it, knowing as every adult knows in his secret heart that nothing is really all right, ever. “It’s gonna be all right.” He was crying. He couldn’t help it now. His tears came in a flood and he held her to his chest as tightly as he could. “Charlie, I swear to you, somehow, it’s gonna be all right.”

5

The one thing they had not been able to hang around his neck-as much as they might have liked to-was the murder of Vicky. Instead, they had elected to simply erase what had happened in the laundry room. Less trouble for them. Sometimes-not often-Andy wondered what their neighbors back in Lakeland might have speculated. Bill collectors? Marital problems? Maybe a drug habit or an incident of child abuse? They hadn’t known anyone on Conifer Place well enough for it to have been any more than idle dinnertable chat, a nine days” wonder soon forgotten when the bank that held the mortgage released their house.

Sitting on the deck now and looking out into darkness, Andy thought he might have had more luck that day than he had known (or been able to appreciate). He had arrived too late to save Vicky, but he had left before the Removal People arrived.

There had never been a thing about it in the paper, not even a squib about how-funny thing! an English instructor named Andrew McGee and his family had just up and disappeared. Perhaps the Shop had got that quashed, too. Surely he had been reported missing; one or all of the guys he had been eating lunch with that day would have done that much. But it hadn’t made the papers, and of course, bill collectors don’t advertise.

“They would have hung it on me if they could,” he said, unaware that he had spoken aloud.

But they couldn’t have. The medical examiner could have fixed the time of death, and Andy, who had been in plain sight of some disinterested third party (and in the case of Eh-116, Style and the Short Story, from ten to eleven-thirty, twenty-five disinterested third parties) all that day, could not have been set up to take the fall. Even if he’d been unable to provide substantiation for his movements during the critical time, there was no motive.

So the two of them had killed Vicky and then gone haring off after Charlie-but not without notifying what Andy thought of as the Removal People (and in his mind’s eye he even saw them that way, smooth-faced young men dressed in white coveralls). And sometime after he had gone haring off after Charlie, maybe as short a time as five minutes, but almost surely no longer than an hour, the Removal People would have rolled up to his door. While Conifer Place dozed the afternoon away, Vicky had been Removed.

They might even have reasoned-correctly-that a missing wife would have been more of a problem for Andy than a provably dead one. No body, no estimated time of death. No estimated time of death, no alibi. He would be watched, cosseted, politely tied down. Of course they would have put Charlie’s description out on the wire-Vicky’s too, for that matter-but Andy would not have been free to simply go tearing off on his own. So she had been Removed, and now he didn’t even know where she was buried. Or maybe she had been cremated. Or-

Oh shit why are you doing this to yourself?

He stood up abruptly and poured the remainder of Granther’s mule-kick over the deck railing. It was all in the past; none of it could be changed; it was time to stop thinking about it.

A neat trick if you could do it. He looked up at the dark shapes of the trees and squeezed the glass tightly in his right hand, and the thought crossed his mind again.,

Charlie I swear to you, somehow it’s gonna be all right.

6

That winter in Tashmore, so long after his miserable awakening in that Ohio motel, it seemed his desperate prediction had finally come true. It was not an idyllic winter for them. Not long after Christmas, Charlie caught a cold and snuffled and coughed her way through to early April, when it finally cleared up for good. For a while she ran a fever. Andy fed her aspirin halves and told himself that if the fever did not go down in three days” time, he would have to take her to the doctor across the lake in Bradford, no matter what the consequences. But her fever did go down, and for the rest of the winter Charlie’s cold was only a constant annoyance to her. Andy managed to get himself a minor case of frostbite on one memorable occasion in March and nearly managed to burn them both up one screaming, subzero night in February by overloading the woodstove. Ironically, it was Charlie who woke up in the middle of the night and discovered the cottage was much too hot.

On December 14 they celebrated his birthday and on March 24 they celebrated Charlie’s. She was eight, and sometimes Andy looked at her with a kind of wonder, as if catching sight of her for the first time. She was not a little girl anymore; she stood to past his elbow. Her hair had got long again, and she had taken to braiding it to keep it out of her eyes. She was going to be beautiful. She already was, red nose and all.

They were without a car. Irv Manders’s Willys had frozen solid in January, and Andy thought the block was cracked. He had started it every day, more from a sense of responsibility than anything else, because not even four-wheel drive would have pulled them out of Granther’s camp after the New Year. The snow, undisturbed except for the tracks of squirrels, chipmunks, a few deer, and a persistent raccoon that came around to sniff” hopefully at the garbage hold, was almost two feet deep by then.

There were old-fashioned cross-country skis in the small shed behind the cottage-three pairs of them, but none that would fit Charlie. It was just as well. Andy kept her indoors as much as possible. They could live with her cold, but he did not want to risk a return of the fever.

He found an old pair of Granther’s ski boots, dusty and cracked with age, tucked away in a cardboard toilet-tissue box under the table where the old man had once planed shutters and made doors. Andy oiled them, flexed them, and then found he still could not fill Granther’s shoes without stuffing the toes full of newspaper. There was something funny about that, but he also found it a touch ominous. He thought about Granther a lot that long winter and wondered what he would have made of their predicament.

Half a dozen times that winter he hooked up the cross-country skis (no modern snap-bindings here, only a confusing and irritating tangle of straps, buckles, and rings)