I covered my mouth and nose with my hands and ran through the burning study and down the flaming hallway into the kitchen. The room wasn’t lit yet, thank God. I rushed across the wet floor toward the mudroom door.
Stumbled, skidded, and fell, soaking myself in the puddles of gasoline.
The hems of my jeans were burning from my run through the study. The flames licked out to the gas on the kitchen floor and streaked across to the wooden farmhouse cabinetry and Gran’s cheery dish towels. Fire zipped across the mudroom exit in front of me and I could see my jeans were now alight as well, from knee to ankle. I hurled myself toward the mudroom door, running through flames.
“Get out!” I yelled, though I doubted anyone could hear me. “Get out now!”
Outside I threw myself onto the grass. Rolled until my pants stopped burning.
I could see already that the top two floors of Clairmont were glowing with heat, and my own ground floor was fully alight. The basement level, I couldn’t tell.
“Gat? Johnny? Mirren? Where are you?”
No answer.
Holding down panic, I told myself they must be out by now.
Calm down. It would all be okay. It had to.
“Where are you?” I yelled again, beginning to run.
Again, no answer.
They were likely at the boathouse, dropping their gas cans. It wasn’t far, and I ran, calling their names as loud as I could. My bare feet hit the wooden walkway with a strange echo.
The door was closed. I yanked it open. “Gat! Johnny? Mirren!”
No one there, but they could already be Cuddledown, couldn’t they? Wondering what was taking me so long.
A walkway stretches from the boathouse past the tennis courts and over to Cuddledown. I ran again, the island strangely hushed in the dark. I told myself over and over: They will be there. Waiting for me. Worrying about me.
We will laugh because we’re all safe. We will soak my burns in ice water and feel all kinds of lucky.
We will.
But as I came upon it, I saw the house was dark.
No one waited there.
I tore back to Clairmont, and when it came into view it was burning, bottom to top. The turret room was lit, the bedrooms were lit, the windows of the basement glowed orange. Everything hot.
I ran to the mudroom entry and pulled the door. Smoke billowed out. I pulled off my gas-soaked sweater and jeans, choking and gagging. I pushed my way in and entered the kitchen stairwell, heading toward the basement.
Halfway down the steps there was a wall of flames. A wall.
Gat wasn’t out. And he wasn’t coming.
I turned back and ran up toward Johnny and Mirren, but the wood was burning beneath my feet.
The banister lit up. The stairwell in front of me caved in, throwing sparks.
I reeled back.
I could not go up.
I could not save them.
There was nowhere
nowhere
nowhere
nowhere now to go
but down.
82
I remember this like I am living it as I sit on the steps of Windemere, still staring at the spot where Gat disappeared into the night. The realization of what I have done comes as a fog in my chest, cold, dark, and spreading. It turns me to ice. I grimace and hunch over. The icy fog runs from my chest through my back and up my neck. It shoots through my head and down my spine.
Cold, cold, remorse.
I shouldn’t have soaked the kitchen first. I shouldn’t have lit the fire in the study.
How stupid to wet the books so thoroughly. Anyone might have predicted how they would burn. Anyone.
We should have had a set time to light our kindling.
I might have insisted we stay together.
I should never have checked the boathouse.
Should never have run to Cuddledown.
If only I’d gone back to Clairmont faster, maybe I could have gotten Johnny out. Or warned Gat before the basement caught. Maybe I could have found the fire extinguishers and stopped the flames somehow.
Maybe, maybe.
If only, if only.
I wanted so much for us: a life free of constriction and prejudice. A life free to love and be loved.
And here, I have killed them.
My Liars, my darlings.
Killed them. My Mirren, my Johnny, my Gat.
This knowledge goes from my spine down my shoulders and through my fingertips. It turns them to ice. They chip and break, tiny pieces shattering on the Windemere steps. Cracks splinter up my arms and through my shoulders and the front of my neck. My face is frozen and fractured in a witch’s snarl of grief. My throat is closed. I cannot make a sound.
Here I am frozen, when I deserve to burn.
I should have shut up about taking things into our own hands. I could have stayed silent. Compromised. Talking on the phone would have been fine. Soon we’d have driver’s licenses. Soon we’d go to college and the beautiful Sinclair houses would seem far away and unimportant.
We could have been patient.
I could have been a voice of reason.
Maybe then, when we drank the aunties’ wine, we’d have forgotten our ambitions. The drink would have made us sleepy. We’d have dozed off in front of the television set, angry and impotent, perhaps, but without setting fire to anything.
I can’t take any of it back.
I crawl indoors and up to my bedroom on hands of cracked ice, trailing shards of my frozen body behind me. My heels, my kneecaps. Beneath the blankets, I shiver convulsively, pieces of me breaking off onto my pillow. Fingers. Teeth. Jawbone. Collarbone.
Finally, finally, the shivering stops. I begin to warm and melt.
I cry for my aunts, who lost their first-born children.
For Will, who lost his brother.
For Liberty, Bonnie, and Taft, who lost their sister.
For Granddad, who saw not just his palace burn to the ground, but his grandchildren perish.
For the dogs, the poor naughty dogs.
I cry for the vain, thoughtless complaints I’ve made all summer. For my shameful self-pity. For my plans for the future.
I cry for all my possessions, given away. I miss my pillow, my books, my photographs. I shudder at my delusions of charity, at my shame masquerading as virtue, at lies I’ve told myself, punishments I’ve inflicted on myself, and punishments I’ve inflicted on my mother.
I cry with horror that all the family has been burdened by me, and even more with being the cause of so much grief.
We did not, after all, save the idyll. That is gone forever, if it ever existed. We have lost the innocence of it, of those days before we knew the extent of the aunts’ rage, before Gran’s death and Granddad’s deterioration.
Before we became criminals. Before we became ghosts.
The aunties hug one another not because they are freed of the weight of Clairmont house and all it symbolized, but out of tragedy and empathy. Not because we freed them, but because we wrecked them, and they clung to one another in the face of horror.
Johnny. Johnny wanted to run a marathon. He wanted to go mile upon mile, proving his lungs would not give out. Proving he was the man Granddad wanted him to be, proving his strength, though he was so small.
His lungs filled with smoke. He has nothing to prove now. There is nothing to run for.
He wanted to own a car and eat fancy cakes he saw in bakery widows. He wanted to laugh big and own art and wear beautifully made clothes. Sweaters, scarves, wooly items with stripes. He wanted to make a tuna fish of Lego and hang it like a piece of taxidermy. He refused to be serious, he was infuriatingly unserious, but he was as committed to the things that mattered to him as anyone could possibly be. The running. Will and Carrie. The Liars. His sense of what was right. He gave up his college fund without a second thought, to stand up for his principles.
I think of Johnny’s strong arms, the stripe of white sun block on his nose, the time we were sick together from poison ivy and lay next to each other in the hammock, scratching. The time he built me and Mirren a dollhouse of cardboard and stones he’d found on the beach.
Jonathan Sinclair Dennis, you would have been a light in the dark for so many people.
You have been one. You have.