FIRE
Mary Anne was never a country club girl. Her father was an executive at the paper mill, the largest employer in town next to the bleachery and the rayon factory. But her father didn’t play golf, and her mother didn’t join the women’s club, so she was left off the roster of girls who came out in their junior year. That meant she missed the beach weeks, and the keg parties, and the shag lessons in the afternoon that would have secured her place in the social structure of high school. She grew up in the country on a sandy road in a new subdivision in a new brick house without air conditioning instead of the country club in an inherited house with a maid.
The short summer nights in the country where she lived were sticky and full of lightning bugs and serenaded by bullfrogs from the freshwater streams that ran nearby. Every night she fell asleep with the windows open listening to the mranh mranh of the bullfrogs and watching her daddy water the grass seed in the new yard after he came home. Her little girl life was safe.
But something changed the summer she went to camp when she was twelve. Some dark cloud appeared in her mind and took the fireflies and the bullfrogs and the hot summer days peddling through empty fields of wild grasses swaying, something took those innocent moments and twisted them into fear. Not a known fear. Not a named fear. Not one that could be explained. Just creeping, cold, repetitive fear of what could happen or what should’ve happened, of what she didn’t know. In the dark with the windows open, with the bullfrogs singing, sweat sheened on her skin as she gripped the covers over her head to keep them from being pulled away. She was afraid. She was afraid of fire and vampires, of the werewolves she read about even though she knew they were only words on the pages. She lay there in the heat, panting under the covers, and praying for the angels to protect the house. She prayed that there would be no more fires.
She had seen fires. Fires pushed by the winds through the thick underbrush, sweeping toward her house. Neighbors fought the fires themselves with hoses not quite long enough while they waited for the volunteer firefighters to arrive. Rakes swept away the tinder and the kindling. The fires never came close enough to her home to be a threat, but her fear was real, so she planned. The back of the house was a short drop from a single story, but the front of the house stood a story high on a steep slope, and the thought of dropping from one of its windows into the dark night was terrifying. So at night she begged God not to let a fire happen.
She was afraid of more than fire. She feared the wide, round eyes of the cat and dog in the paintings that hung on the wall above her head, and the tiny grandfather clock her mother was so proud of that sang songs in her mind and counted her heartbeat as it went tic, tic, tic...
you are dying
you are dying
yes you are
yes you are
no one can save you
no one can save you
here I come
here I come
She feared her brother’s screaming, violent nightmares that wrenched the night in two. She’d wake to his throttling screams, his thrashing at the wall and the blankets, fighting the very demons she saw inside her own mind even while the bald light overhead scorched the room in which he slept. Her parents struggled to quiet him. Her father gripped him in his arms, assuring him that he was safe. But she knew, just as her brother did, that the demons didn’t need the dark to exist inside his mind.
Guilt consumed her. Guilt for some unnamed sin she’d committed but couldn’t remember. It racked her body in shame. In the quiet house when she was alone, she’d fall to her knees at an armchair, bury her face in the pillowed seat and scream to God for relief. Relief from the paralyzing sense that she’d committed an unpardonable sin, that she was consigned to hell without knowing why; relief that would take away the darkness that she wore like a cloak, that choked her and stole her breath. At church she was reminded she was a sinner every Sunday morning, every Sunday night, every Wednesday evening. Sin was constant. Guilt was necessary. Repentance unto salvation was the only relief, and so she repented daily and prayed the prayer that would save her soul every night, begging God to take away the demons.
Sleep didn’t take away the fear. Her sleep was haunted. Deep, peaceful sleep was rare which meant the day was filled with groggy remembrances of the nighttime terror. She couldn’t explain the heaviness in her stomach or the fear in her mind. She learned to smile when she was afraid. She learned early in life to pretend to be what others needed her to be. Happy, efficient, well-behaved, well liked. Pretending at home was easy enough. All she had to do was read. Everyone left her alone because reading made you smart, reading kept you quiet. When she read, life was was easy. The monsters died in the end. Good won. And the nightmares were just words.