Burn Our Bodies Down(78)

Mom, living with her own copy for seventeen years. Does she know? Does she know we’re both just Gram all over again?

And that’s where the worst of it is hiding, where I have to fight a sob down my throat, because maybe I’m not a daughter at all. If we’re the same person, what does that make us to each other? All I’ve been for my whole life is a daughter, and what’s left if I’m not that?

I look down at my hands, half expecting to see them gone translucent and decayed like the girls in the grove. But no. I’m still in my body. I’m still myself. And I won’t let this take me apart. I know who I am. Margot, I’m Margot, and that’s the truth that matters. I have hurt and I have loved in ways that Gram never will. I am someone all my own.

And she’s something else. She’s Gram, the beating heart in a living system. Gram, pushing the Nielsen blight further with every breath she takes. Gram, Gram, sitting in this house and doing nothing.

She’s how it stops. How nothing like Tess ever happens again. How I make it right. I think she knows that too. Mom certainly did. A lighter in my pocket. Her rule, ringing in my head.

I came here for Gram. For a family that might love me. And I could have it. I could stay here, I could wrap myself up in my last name and watch the mess we’ve made swallow the whole town. Watch what happened to Tess happen to a hundred other people, and one day, one day, have a daughter of my own, and pass it on to her. Isn’t that what I want? To be somewhere only I can belong?

But it’s not love, to give your wounds to someone else. I won’t be part of it. Not anymore.

“I’m going,” I say. And Gram, she just watches me. Steady, and still, and if I didn’t know better I’d say she looks relieved.

“All right,” she says.

I take the lighter from my pocket. Flick and catch, flick and catch.

I leave the photograph to burn.





twenty-nine





when the fire department finally arrives, they’re too late. I’m at the top of the driveway, shivering and barefoot, and I know without looking that the fire has climbed from the front porch, where I set it, to the second floor. Every door still open. Every window still unlocked. Gram still inside. She won’t ever come out again.

At the station they sit me down in the conference room with a blanket around my shoulders. Officer Anderson can barely look at me. He’s across the table from me, the blinds pulled down. The station has an interrogation room, but nobody wanted to put me in there. Nobody wanted to make this into something they had to handle. Fairhaven burned down with Gram inside. The fields leveled and black. The Miller farm flickering with police lights in the early morning.

I tell Anderson about finding Gram at Fairhaven, after the fundraiser. About the strike of the shovel against my skull. He takes pictures of the side of my head, of my hands, of the dirt under my nails from clawing my way out of the ground. And I spin it like this—that after I came to, I went back to the house and found Gram, full of remorse for what she’d done to the Millers. That she set Fairhaven on fire and wouldn’t come out. Penance, I say. I can’t tell if Anderson believes me, but it’s not like he has other stories to choose from.

“Why did she do it?” he says when I’m done. “Did she say anything about that?”

“She said she was angry with them,” I say. “For doing so well when she was failing.”

Not quite a lie, but not even close to the whole truth. I sound like I’m a hundred miles away, my voice quiet and thick. This is shock, I know. But knowing that doesn’t break me out of this bubble, this careful, deliberate calm. I’m glad for it.

“Three people dead, because of that,” Anderson spits, coming around the table to sit down again.

“Four,” I say. This matters. Maybe not to anyone else, but it does to me. “You weren’t counting her.” I want to lie down. I want to shut my eyes and wake up in a hundred years. “So what happens now?”

“To you?”

No, not to me. The police will call my mom. She won’t come back for me. I know that already. “To the land,” I say. “To the town.”

Anderson raises his eyebrows, like he didn’t think I’d care. “Nothing, to the town,” he says. “Vera was dangerous. We’re better off without her.”

I wait for the flare of anger, for words defending Gram to fill my mouth. But they don’t come. I might be better off too. Or I will be.

“And the land?”

“You mean your future inheritance?” Anderson watches me for a moment. This is nothing like our first conversation, here in the same room. Gram’s gone and he’s exhausted, and I think he’d rather be anywhere else, but there are things that need doing. Questions that need asking, just for the sake of saying he did.

“I guess,” I say. My inheritance came to me in a different form. It never occurred to me to wonder about land, or money, or anything I could touch.

“Well, there are wills for this sort of thing,” he says. “Provided Vera’s didn’t burn to a crisp. But I’d imagine you or your mom can expect—”

“We don’t want it.” What I want is for it to disappear. To never be anything again but ash. To sit there for years and years until it gets back, somehow, to what it was. “And the Millers? What will you do about them?” I ask. “It was my grandmother. You know that.”