Page 19 of A Slow Fire Burning

“It happened to me,” Angela said. “You can’t say I didn’t experience what I experienced. You wouldn’t know; you weren’t around.”

“Yoga classes” became a weekly thing, an exercise in determination on Carla’s part. She believed in hard work; in fact, she believed that the most worthwhile goals were often the hardest to realize. She believed that if you worked hard enough at something, most often, you would achieve it. Call it the ten thousand hours theory: If she spent ten thousand hours trying to forgive her sister, would she succeed? No way of telling, but it seemed a reasonable course of action—after all, her parents were gone, her son was gone. There was precious little left for her in the world: only Angela, and little Daniel, and Theo, of course, although she knew, in the saddest part of her heart, that she and Theo would not survive what had happened to them.

Once when Carla came to visit Angela, she heard noises as she approached the front door, voices raised. She had barely finished knocking when the door flew open, her sister yanking at it as though she were trying to pull it off its hinges. “Oh, Christ,” she said, when she saw Carla. “Forgot it was our day. Daniel’s off school. He’s—” She broke off, shrugged. “He’s just... off school.”

They sat in the living room as they always did, and after a while, Daniel came down to say hello. In their year and a half of separation, Angela had aged by a decade and Daniel not at all. At nine years old he was still small for his age, dark and uncertain. He had a habit of sneaking around, appearing suddenly and without warning, wringing his hands in front of his belly. “Like a little animal,” Carla commented with a smile.

“A little savage,” his mother said.

That day, when he appeared, as if from nowhere, in the doorway and said, “Hello, Aunt Carla,” he bared a mouth full of metal at her.

“Jesus, Daniel, don’t make that face!” Angela snapped. “It’s his fucking braces,” she said. “He can’t smile normally any longer. Most kids when they get them, they try to hide their teeth. Not him—he pulls that awful expression all the time.”

“Angela,” Carla hissed, as Daniel slunk away as quietly as he’d arrived, “he can hear you.”

Her heart, the bit of it that was left, broke for him.

The next time she came, she brought him a huge set of colored pencils, which she took up to his room. His eyes shone when he saw the gift. “Oh,” he breathed, delighted almost beyond words, “Aunt Carla!” He smiled his ghastly smile, wrapping his skinny arms around her waist.

Carla froze. She was unprepared for how it took her, the feeling of a child’s body against hers for the first time in so long; she could scarcely breathe, could hardly bear to look down at his small head, at the rich chestnut of his hair, at the nape of his neck, on which she noticed two bruises. Around the size of a finger and a thumb, as though someone had grabbed him there, and pinched hard. When Carla looked up, she caught her sister watching them.

“He gets into fights at school all the time,” she said, turning away. Carla heard her clumping down the stairs, her tread strangely heavy for one so light.

Carla let the child hold her for a little longer, and then, gently, she removed his arms from around her waist and crouched down so that her eyes were level with his. “Is that true, Daniel?” she asked him. “Have you been fighting?”

He wouldn’t look at her for a moment. When he did, his expression was grave. “Sometimes,” he said quietly, “sometimes people don’t...they don’t...” He blew out hard through puffed cheeks. “Oh, it doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter, Dan. It does.”

“No, it doesn’t,” he said, shaking his head gently, “because, I’m going away. I’m going to a new school. I’m going to live there, not here anymore.” He hugged her again, his arms around her neck this time. She could hear his breathing, quick and light, like cornered prey.

Angela confirmed it; he was going to boarding school. “His father’s paying. It’s the same one he went to, somewhere in Oxfordshire. It’s quite good, apparently.”

“Somewhere in Oxfordshire?Ang, are you sure about this?”

“You’ve no idea how difficult things are, Carla.” She lowered her voice. “How difficult he is.” Her voice had that hard edge again. “Don’t.Don’t look at me like that. You don’t see it, you don’t... you’re here once a fucking week, you don’t see how he behaves when it’s just me and him, you don’t... He was traumatized.Severelytraumatized by what happened to him.”

Carla gave a swift shake of the head and Angela said, “I know you don’t want to hear this, but it’s true.” She reached for her cigarettes, fumbled one out of the pack. Angela’s hands shook all the time now. Before, she’d been a little shaky the morning after the night before, but now it was constant, a tremor in hands that were always moving, always reaching for something to occupy them—a glass, a book, a lighter.

“Yes, of course he’s traumatized.”

“The psychologist says,” Angela said, lighting her cigarette, taking a drag, “that now he’s telling her that he saw... you know, that hesawhim fall, that he saw Ben fall. He’s saying that it wasn’t just that he found him, but that he actually saw it.” She closed her eyes.“He’s saying that he screamed and screamed, that no one came, he’s saying—”

Carla held up her hand—Angela was right, she didn’t want to hear this. “Please,” she said. She took a moment to allow her breath to steady. “But surely they can’t think—youcan’t think—that the answer to his trauma is to separate him from his mother?”

“His motheris the whole problem,” Angela said, crushing her half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray. “He blames me, Carla, for what happened.” She looked up at Carla, wiping tears from her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “He told his psychologist that what happened was my fault.”

Itwasyour fault, Carla thought. Of course it was your fault.

ELEVEN

Could you open your mouth a bit wider please, sir?There was a young woman, brisk and uniformed, bending toward him, inserting a plastic stick into his mouth, and while the experience ought to have been intrusive and unpleasant, Theo was disappointed to admit to himself that he found it stirring. He closed his eyes, but that only made it worse. He tried not to look at her while she was taking his fingerprints, but when finally he met the young woman’s eye he could tell that she sensed something, something that made her uncomfortable, and he felt like a total shit. He wanted to say to her,I’m sorry, I really am. I’m not like that. I’m not one of those. I’m a one-woman man.

Theo had only ever loved Carla. There were women before and there had been the occasional one since, but Carla was without question the one. The one and the many, he supposed, because there was this Carla and there was the previous Carla; it seemed as though over the course of his life, he’d known multiple Carlas and loved them all, would continue to love them in whatever incarnation they appeared.

Carla was all he had. There had been Ben, of course, for that short, glorious interlude, that three years and forty-seven days of joy, but now, there was just Carla. Carla, and his work.

Fifteen years ago, when Ben died, Theo had been deep into his third novel. He abandoned it without much thought; he simply couldn’t bear to read words he’d written while Ben played on the lawn outside, or sang with his mother in the kitchen. For a year or two, he couldn’t write at all, he barely even tried, and then when he did try, nothing came. For months and months, foryears, nothing came. How to write when his heart hadn’t been broken but removed from his body?Whatto write?Anything,his agent told him.It doesn’t matter. Write anything.So he did. He wrote a story about a man who loses his child but saves his wife. He wrote a story about a man who loses his wife but saves his child. He wrote a story about a man who murders his sister-in-law. It was awful, all of it.It’s like pulling teeth, he told his agent.Worse than that. It’s like pulling fingernails.With his heart gone, everything he did was worthless, sterile, inconsequential.What if,he asked his agent as he sat, terrified, in front of a blank screen,I cannot work any longer because the man who wrote books is gone?

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