An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England by Brock Clarke Read Free Book Online

would be true. I would tell Anne Marie and the kids the truth about me and the Emily Dickinson House and how I’d burned it to the ground and killed those poor Colemans. I had lied for too long. Now that Thomas Coleman had shown up and threatened to spill the beans, I knew I should tell my family the truth while the truth might still do me a little bit of good and while I was somewhat in control of it. And maybe the truth would make me happy. This was what the bond analysts had told one another during their memoir-brainstorming sessions: “Just tell the truth, dude” (this was the way they talked: like surfers outfitted by Brooks Brothers). “You’ll feel better afterward.” It seemed a simple matter of cause and effect, which was the kind of thing I, as a packaging scientist, could understand and appreciate. But it would be tough, I knew that. On my walk out of Camelot, across Route 116, and around and around the parking lot of the gardening-supply superstore (I would have walked on the sidewalks along 116 or in Camelot, except there weren’t any), I was picturing my little bambinos’ faces as I tried to explain that Daddy was a murderer and an arsonist, not to mention a long-term liar, and that weakened my resolve a little. But that was OK, because I knew I was right to do what I was going to do, and I had surplus resolve and could stand to lose some of it.
    And then I walked back into Camelot, into my driveway, and lost some more of the resolve. Anne Marie’s minivan was parked there. Like Camelot and the house and the children and Anne Marie herself, the van was well maintained and I loved it and them so much, could feel my love growing and growing, could feel my heart wanting to get bigger and bigger until it was so full of love that it would explode all over the place and make a mess and I would die and not care. I went around the house and through the back door and into the kitchen, the floor covered with gleaming adobe tile. I had no idea what adobe tile meant, exactly, except that I thought it had to do with Indians and clay and earth, and none of that seemed to have anything to do with what was on my kitchen floor. That floor and its name were mysterious and inexplicable, like love itself, and my heart continued to grow, testing the limits of its chambers. I bent to kiss the floor, put my lips right on the cool, cool tile. You are mine . That was my very thought, to the tile. You are mine, and I love you . But would the tile still love me back after I told it the truth about my past? I could feel the tile shrink from my lips at the very thought. Would my family not do the same? How could they not? Oh, I was afraid, not of one thing, but of everything, even though I’d been full of courage and determination not a minute earlier. I was even afraid of the adobe tile, wanted to get away from it as fast as possible before it rejected me completely. I wiped my lip prints off the tile and got up from my hands and knees just as my daughter, Katherine, walked into the kitchen.
    Katherine was eight now, tall and bony, the kind of girl her mother had been — the kind of girl who in adolescence lived in overalls as she made her trip from tomboyishness to beauty. She’d learned from some television show or her friends to greet people not in the conventional fashion but by saying, “Hey-low,” and she said it now, to me, in the kitchen, and I wanted to say back, Oh, dear heart, my first born, I have to tell you something, and you might hate me for it, but even if you do, will you at least promise to never say “Hey-low” again? Instead, I asked, “Where’s your mother?”
    “She’s upstairs, working out.” It was that time of day. Anne Marie would be upstairs in our bedroom, in her exercise outfit, all spandex and white strips of flesh and hair piled high and beaded sweat on her upper lip, watching television and pedaling the hell out of her stationary bike. At times I wondered how much longer it would stay