“Art isn’t finished,” I tell him. “It’s abandoned. Who said that?”
“Da Vinci,” he says, so quietly I almost don’t hear.
“Exactly. And if it’s going to be abandoned, it might as well burn.”
And I hand him the match.
His face goes white. “What? No.”
“Just do it. I can’t do it, so you have to. You have to. For me.”
“Janie, you don’t know what you’re saying—”
“I do know. Why is that so hard to believe? I know. I know what I want and what I want is for you to take this match and light it and drop it. Okay? Micah. Please. I love you more than anything. Please just do it.”
He’s biting the inside of his cheek so hard that he must be bleeding. He can’t hold himself back from asking. “But why?”
I don’t look at him. “Stop it. You don’t want to know why.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see him almost. Almost ask why again. Almost press the issue. Almost change my mind. But he doesn’t. He leaves it at that.
And he lights the match.
And he drops it.
“Everything.”
They burn quickly, feathers first, curling black. Then the bamboo. It only takes a minute or so until there’s nothing to save.
Purification. You burn everything, you burn and burn and burn, and you start over. This fire isn’t quite big enough for that. This fire is just for me, for everything Janie Vivian ever was. I stare for a little longer and then I go to the barn for vodka and buckets. When I come back out, Micah’s eyes are on me, wary and uncertain, but waiting all the same.
“I think most people are embers,” I say.
He takes a deep breath, and doesn’t answer for a long time. When he does, finally, it’s just to say, “Okay.”
“Embers. Most people are just waiting for a breath to coax them to life. Some of the lucky ones are the breath. But some people aren’t either.”
I hand Micah a bottle of vodka, and he starts drinking right away. I wait for him to take at least what I estimate to be six shots before I fill the buckets in the quarry. The fire screams as I put it out, and it makes me want to cry.
I don’t, though. I take Micah’s hand and lead him to the car. I drive us to my house, where people are already arriving.
after
DECEMBER 19
When everything comes back into focus, it is nearly dark. The moon is huge and rising. I am freezing. I can’t feel my fingertips.
I remember and then I don’t.
I forget and then it all comes rushing back.
I lose count of how many times I throw up.
I lose track of when I stop counting.
I don’t know how I got there but I am lying in the grass. Then I am lying on the rocks. Then the grass. The world is vertical and horizontal and nothing but sky. I don’t know what’s happening but it might be that nothing is happening at all.
“Janie,” I whisper. The stars are cold and burning, like her. The stars are unreachable and everything, like her. “Janie, Janie.”
“Micah? Is that you?”
Janie was driving. It was my car, but Janie was driving. Her hair was wild; the windows were rolled down even though it was cold already. It would snow soon. I remember thinking about that as I took another shot.
“All right!” Janie screamed. I jumped. The bottle was already at my lips and I gulped down more cheap vodka than I could handle, and I could handle a lot. I coughed, almost choked, almost puked.
Janie’s head was half out of the window and she was driving too fast. Her hair streamed behind her, brighter than her wings on fire.
Her wings on fire. I had set her wings on fire.
“You and me,” she screamed as the car swerved back and forth and I tried to keep the vodka in the bottle. “You and me, universe! Let’s fucking go!”
I remember the relief. She was insane, and this was Janie. This was the Janie who loved fire and carried rocks. This was the Janie Vivian who trusted rarely but deeply, and hoped with everything she was. This was the Janie Vivian, who I had loved with every atom in every cell in my body before memory was relevant.
Maybe she heard me think that. Maybe she had always been right about our souls being joined, because she came back into the car and ran a finger down my arm, shoulder to elbow, feather light, and down to my knuckles. She stopped when our fingertips met and kept them there until we pulled into her driveway. We had to park at the bottom because it was already clogged with cars.
It wasn’t until she moved away to pull the keys out of the ignition that I realized that she had been shaking.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said, voice barely audible. The lights in the car were dimming, and she was going dark.
“We can fix this,” I said. My tongue was thick. “You and me.”
We can do anything, she always said. Anything, everything. You and me against the world.
“Don’t,” she said. There was a flash of light as she lit a match and blew it out. “Don’t do that. Don’t pretend. That’s my thing. You’re supposed to be the one person who never pretends. So why are you pretending?”