AFTER BREAKING FOR LUNCH and deliberating for less than an hour, the jury returned with a verdict: Tonya was guilty. For that single charge, they recommended a sentence of three-and-a-half years.
CHAPTER 27
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
SHUCKERS—the site of Charlie and Tonya’s meeting and romance and engagement—it closed. I couldn’t ever figure out exactly why. A couple of folks on Facebook referenced an undesirable element, like maybe there had been one too many fights, and management thought the bar needed a fresh start. The owner announced he’d be renovating and reopening the restaurant under a different name. New ceiling, new signs, new bar, new menu. As it turned out, the last big hurrah that Shuckers would ever have under its original name happened on Halloween 2012, twelve days before the arsons began. Charlie had put on a long black wig, and Tonya had worn plastic vampire fangs, and they came to the bar to dance to classic rock played by a Virginia Beach cover band, along with all the other people dressed as vampires, pimps, geisha girls, and sexy witches at the Eastern Shore’s Studio 54.
When the remodeling was finished, the new place was called Salty Dog Country Bar and Grill. It was less booty-poppin’ and more boots-and-sawdust: the logo was a Labrador retriever wearing a cowboy hat and a red bandana. Then, while Tonya’s court proceedings dragged on, Salty Dog closed down, too. It reopened as The Fair Grounds, a family-friendly, Chuck E. Cheese-y restaurant with corn hole tournaments and arcade games in the back. By the time I first visited the address, the building was in that phase; I ordered a plate of fettucine Alfredo in the booth that, someone told me, used to be the location of the stage that women like Tonya danced on. Even though the building had been renovated and the roof had been repainted a bright blue instead of gray, there were still auras of Salty Dog under The Fair Grounds, and Shuckers underneath everything. A palimpsest of Eastern Shore history, on a slab of a parking lot with weeds sprouting through fractures in the concrete.
LOVE IS A WEIRD ACT. An optimistic delusion. A leap of faith and foolishness. Sometimes when it is tested, imperfections that were there from the beginning, lurking deep, can begin to work their way to the surface. Even two people who love each other deeply will always be two people, two souls. You can’t ever completely get in someone else’s head, or in someone else’s heart. It is the greatest tragedy and the greatest beauty of a relationship: that at some level, the person you are closest to will always be a total friggin’ mystery. Maybe the real mystery is why we ever do it at all. It must be something incredible.
Charlie and Tonya together had felt, to Charlie at least, like an epic love story. But by the end it was a mess, and maybe it always had been. Did lighting fires save a struggling relationship, at least for a time? Or did those fires crush a relationship that might have otherwise had a chance, by sweeping two people up in something that was crazy and that neither one of them would have done alone?
The trouble with being the type of person who would do anything for love was that you would do anything for love. If Tonya had wanted to rob banks, Charlie might have bought a ski mask and a handgun; if Tonya had wanted to pickpocket strangers, he might have worked on his light-fingers techniques. Tonya, according to Charlie’s version of things, wanted to spray paint a bunch of buildings, and later she wanted to light a bunch more on fire, so that’s what they did.
And that’s assuming Charlie was the one telling the truth. This was a love that had resulted in one of two scenarios: Either Charlie loved Tonya so much that he was willing to light a string of fires just to make her happy, or he loved her too much to allow her to go free while he went to prison. Either Tonya had trusted Charlie enough that she never suspected Charlie was lighting the fires while she was innocently at home, or she trusted him enough to believe he wouldn’t tattle on her—and now he’d talked and she hadn’t, and she’d lost.
Here was a county that had almost burned down. Here was that county moving on. All of these fires could have happened only in Accomack, a place with empty, abandoned buildings, prominently signaling a fall from prosperity. Where else was there so much emptiness, so many places for someone to sneak around undetected? Except that maybe it could have happened in Iowa, heart of the heartland, where rural citizenry has been decreasing for the past century. Maybe in southern Ohio, where emptying factories led to emptying towns. Maybe in eastern Oregon, where rural counties had aged themselves almost out of existence. Maybe it could have happened anywhere.
By the numbers, Accomack could look like a desolate place to live. The Opportunity Index, a nonprofit measurement of sixteen different indicators of success in every county in America, gives it a forty-three out of one hundred. But numbers can be misleading. To residents, statistics could not account for the deep feeling of belonging that came from being able to find your surname in three hundred-year-old county records. They couldn’t account for how clean the air felt and how orange the sun was setting over the Chesapeake Bay.
How do you calculate fish fries in the backyard, kiddie pools in the front yard, and unfettered views of a thousand stars in the night sky? So much of life is intangible, and places don’t feel like they’re disappearing to the people who are living there.
I went to Accomack County and I found endless metaphors for a dying county in a changing landscape. There were endless metaphors that went the opposite way, too: rural life as a fairy tale, better than the rest of the country.
The reality is probably somewhere in between. The people who lived in Accomack were happy to live in Accomack. It wasn’t small, it was close-knit. It wasn’t backward, it was simple. There weren’t a hundred things to do every night, but if you went to the one available thing, you were pretty much guaranteed to run into someone you knew.