This was how people lived: they left keys under their flowerpots, taped them inside their mailboxes, snapped magnetic boxes inside the wheel wells of their cars. They left windows unlocked like they were leaving instructions. Here, the bar’s not soldered. Slide it out and the window practically opens itself. Here, the deadbolt sticks so be sure to pull forward then turn.
The first time, it was winter. The back door was unlocked; she held her breath and counted by twos to a hundred, a nervous habit. She stayed three days. Slept on the couch, left the lights off in the afternoon, drank water straight from the tap. She took a Polaroid of the kitchen: a sick argyle of green and yellow tiles, rotting pears on the table. She couldn’t say she wasn’t nervous. The second time was a year later. An ex-boyfriend’s house. She meant to stay for the entire Memorial Day weekend. The family had a wedding to attend in Connecticut; Vivian had backed out of the trip months before. She knew where the spare key was kept, which brick was loose behind the shed. She’d spent Thanksgiving with Mason’s family—his parents, his brothers, their wives, his younger sister—but hadn’t been back since. They’d been so nice. She hated it. She wasn’t in love with Mason and it didn’t seem fair, all that warmth. All that generosity made her sick to her stomach. All the ways she wasn’t gracious.
The afternoon of the wedding, Vivian wandered in and out of rooms, taking photographs from the thresholds. When she’d used up the roll, she mostly sat at the dining room table and thought about that holiday. Sometimes she wished she could go back. Sometimes she missed how Mason’s fingers stung her everywhere he touched, from the softest, untoned parts of her inner thighs to her wrists.
By evening, she gave up. She’d miscalculated how full of regret grief could make you, even if the grief had more to do with abstract longing than desire for a particular thing. She hadn’t been in love with Mason, but she had wanted to be in love with him, and that meant she couldn’t stay there like a stranger, which was the only way she allowed herself to stay anywhere. The only rule she had. She left the house as soon as it turned dark. Slid the brick in place and walked all the way to the bus station.
Back inside, Vivian flipped through the newspaper while she waited for the water to boil. Death notices, D-8; she skimmed columns for her name. Olivia M. Frommer, 36, survived by two daughters, a husband, a mother, grandmothers on both sides. Richard Nelson Fost, born 1927; survived by wife, Ava Fost, and stepson, Edward Case. Morgan Vargas Fitzgerald: 62, no survivors. This was Vivian’s sad math, a fucked up game of points for the number of times her name and its variants appeared in the daily obits. First name proper was five. Names like Victoria, Vera, Vernon, Violet, Veronica were two. Foster was five points. Something like Fost counted once, and so did Olivia, because it contained Liv which resembled Viv. Middle name, half-point. Significant combinations or listings with her initials in order counted three points. VMF. One for each. That was how Vivian kept track of how close she was to dying. The fewer points the better. Each name that didn’t match hers reduced her odds a little. That morning she counted three, and three was safer than ten.
Three was safer than ten. So Vivian left the house. Helen had mentioned a market nearby and pointed the way downtown, so she headed in that direction. She would establish a routine. Routine established purpose, a trick Vivian had learned to feel less like a visitor. Though, if she was being honest about it, community and stability weren’t what she sought from her profession. This time felt different, if she couldn’t exactly pinpoint how. But she noticed it as she walked—zipping her jacket against the damp, pulling the collar close at her neck—that she didn’t feel the familiar drumming urgency to be anonymous, an outsider on the periphery slipping in and out of towns, giving fake names to fellow subway passengers, baristas, guys at bars. Here was a place, apparently, where someone could just vanish into thin air. What else could happen in a place like that.
At the market she weighed grapefruits. There was an announcement: reduced cakes. Vivian paced the aisles looking for the bread, found it, chose multiple grains. At the checkout she touched the slick corner of a celebrity magazine but did not buy it. She handed over her twenty-dollar bill and said thank you for the change.
On her walk back to the house, Vivian counted eight cicada shells. It was the season of nostalgia, August turning into September, almost her birthday, which was their birthday. She could almost forget she had a brother, since they hadn’t been in touch for years. He was obscured, he was part time, he was in hiding. He was a mime. He was no forwarding address/no longer at this address/undeliverable. He was a postcard back in March that said I am an exhibit at the state fair. They were twins, but that didn’t mean much that Vivian could vouch for. They weren’t psychically connected. Vivian and Seth weren’t aligned in some intrinsic, magical twin way and never had been. All they had in common was their gift for evasion. It was hereditary, in their family—the one quality you could point to that connected them. Evasive, evading, evaded. He evaded the law. He evaded the question. It was their mother’s fault—she was the queen of evasion, having grown up ringside after seasonal ringside, the perma-costumed daughter of parents who worked the small-time carnivals. The names of those setups were fixed in her memory from stories her mother told: Bayside Marvels (New Madrid, MO); Land of Wonders (Carbon, UT); Point Mercenary Daylong Enchantments (Sulphur, LA). And here it was, the end of another summer. The two-headed calf was stumbling his final parade around the ring. The fire eater’s awkward teenage assistant was dismantling the portable coaster, trying to forget the acne blushing painfully over half his face.
Vivian hardly heard the footsteps before someone rushed past her, running down the sidewalk. He would’ve run her over if she’d moved left; the person was oblivious. Startled into pausing there on the sidewalk, she watched as he dodged off. Lanky guy, dark sweatshirt; dark pants—she lost sight of him quickly.
She was almost at the house, Helen’s house, when she spotted him again up ahead, a black sweatshirt turning down a driveway, jogging up to the side door of a green foursquare. He waited there on the porch a few seconds, then disappeared inside.
Dropping the match was easy.
The flame grew, peeling into the air as the match tip crumbled, and right as the last bit of it fell to flame—the orange creeping so close to his thumb the skin there began to glow—he dropped it. Opened the pinch of forefinger and thumb that held it steady and let go. The match caught the cardboard lip and flung into a hundred sparks, a thousand sparks, streaking through the boxes propped on the Dumpster until the whole thing was burning.
It was easy.
Ronny took off. The sound of his feet pounding the ground, pounding the dead leaves, was nothing compared to the blood knocking in his ears. He catalogued the items he passed as he ran, mostly to keep from turning around and looking. The woods edging the parking lot were full of things. Pabst Blue Ribbon cans, some forties, an empty bottle of Wild Irish Rose, a red baseball cap poking through the moldy leaves, an assortment of paper products—shredded napkins, grease-stained bags, flattened coffee cups. Ronny ran through the cold afternoon, gritting his teeth, breathing through his nose, eyes on the ground. Gray sleeve cut from a long-sleeved shirt. White plastic bag. White Styrofoam cup.
A cramp jerked his side, that familiar running stitch, and caused him to double over finally and brace against a tree. Head spinning, eyes hot, he was less than a mile from the fire still. He looked up—blackbird, shred of sky—had to keep going, get out of there.
His father stood over the stove in an ex-cowboy’s brown plaid shirt, stirring something with one hand while the other held a section of newspaper up to his face. Ronny paused on the front porch before going in, catching his breath and watching through the kitchen window. His father looked small standing there like that, like he’d aged ten years in five months.