Burning House Read Online Free

photograph, instead of putting his eye to the wall. He’d find pennies on the sidewalk when the rest of us walked down city streets obliviously, spot the chipped finger on a mannequin flawlessly dressed, sidestep the one piece of glass among shells scattered on the shoreline. It would really have taken something powerful to do him in. So that’s what happened: a drunk in a van, speeding, head-on, Nicholas out for a midnight ride without his helmet. Earlier in the day he’d assembled a crazy nest of treasures in the helmet, when he was babysitting the neighbors’ four-year-old daughter. Spence showed it to us—holding it forward as carefully as you’d hold a bomb, looking away the way you’d avoid looking at dead fish floating in a once nice aquarium, the way you’d look at an ugly scar, once the bandages had been removed, and want to lay the gauze back over it. While he was in the hospital, his fish tank overheated and all the black mollies died. The doctor unwound some of the bandages and the long brown curls had been shaved away, and there was a red scar down the side of his head that seemed as out of place as a line dividing a highway out west, a highway that nobody traveled anyway. It could have happened to any of us. We’d all ridden on the Harley, bodies pressed into his back, hair whipped across ourfaces. How were we going to feel ourselves again, without Nicholas? In the hospital, it was clear that the thin intravenous tube was not dripping life back into him—that was as farfetched as the idea that the too-thin branch of the lemon tree could grow one more piece of fruit. In the helmet had been dried chrysanthemums, half of a robin’s blue shell, a cat’s-eye marble, yellow twine, a sprig of grapes, a piece of a broken ruler. I remember Wynn actually jumping back when he saw what was inside. I stared at the strangeness such ordinary things had taken on. Wynn had been against his teaching me to ride his bike, but he had. He taught me to trust myself and not to settle for seeing things the same way. The lobster claw on a necklace he made me was funny and beautiful. I never felt the same way about lobsters or jewelry after that. “Psychologists have figured out that infants start to laugh when they’ve learned to be skeptical of danger,” Nicholas had said. Laughing on the back of his motorcycle. When he lowered the necklace over my head, rearranging it, fingers on my throat.
    It is Nicholas’s birthday, and so far no one has mentioned it. Spence has made all the jam he can make from the fruit and berries and has gone to the store and returned with bags of flour to make bread. He brought the
Daily Progress
to Pammy, and she is reading it, on the side porch where there is no screening, drying her hair and stiffening when bees fly away from the Rose of Sharon bushes. Her new sandals are at the side of the chair. She has red toenails. She rubs the small pimples on her chin the way men finger their beards. I sit on the porch with her, catcher’s mitt on my lap, waiting for Wynn to get back from his walk so we can take turns pitching to each other.
    “Did he tell you I was a drug addict? Is that why you hardly speak to me?” Pammy says. She is squinting at her toes. “I’m older than I look,” she says. “He says I’m twentyone, because I look so young. He doesn’t know when to let go of a joke, though. I don’t like to be introduced to people as some child prodigy.”
    “What were you addicted to?” I say.
    “Speed,” she says. “I had another life.” She has brought the bottle of polish with her, and begins brushing on a new layer of red, the fingers of her other hand stuck between her toes from underneath, separating them. “I don’t get the feeling you people had another life,” she says. “After all these years, I still feel funny when I’m around people who’ve never lived the way I have. It’s just snobbishness, I’m sure.”
    I cup the catcher’s mitt over my knee. A bee has