The Undoing

Celia was sweet that day, eager as a child. She showed him through the rooms, each one littered with sawhorses, hand tools and buckets of paint. An unwieldy industrial sander was sitting in front of the fireplace. Wrappers from someone’s lunch lay crumpled on an overturned pail by the window. But as she described their plans in detail, Julian began to see it come alive.

“I like this place,” he said, looking around. “Good bones.”

Her face lit up.

“It’ll be beautiful when we’re finished,” she said. Then laughed, ducking her head. “Or, not beautiful exactly, but handsome. Proud of itself, you know? The poor thing’s been sitting up here alone for as long as I can remember. I want to fill it up.”

“You talk about the hotel like it’s a person,” he said.

She ran her hand down the sanded banister.

“Not a person, exactly. But personal.”

Afterward they went outside to sit on a slatted pine bench overlooking the river. A breeze moved through the aspen, rustling their coin-bright leaves, and from overhead they could hear the wind sighing through the pines and the occasional caw of a hidden crow. For a while, Celia was silent. Then she said she liked the sun.

“You’re not very tan, though,” he said.

“No. I only get freckles.”

Her skin was lovely in the clear light—a smooth, velvety white like the petals of a speckled flower.

“You bought this place together?” he said. “You and Eric and Rory?”

“On paper, yes. But it’s Eric’s money. His dad died a couple of years back and left him what he had.”

“You all went to the same school, I think Rory said.”

“He and Eric were in the year ahead of me.”

“Did you enjoy school?”

She considered a moment before replying.

“No.”

“Why not?”

Again she paused, thinking it over. “It’s too hard to know what the teachers want you to say.”

“They want you to say what you think.”

“Do they?”

She was quick with that, her eyes wide-open. For the first time, he began to see the guile of this girl.

“Sometimes,” he said.

They sat for a while in companionable silence. Celia didn’t rush to fill it. She was quick to catch a mood, poured herself into it like water.

“Have you always lived here?” he said.

“Since I was four, when my dad and Rory’s mom got married. He came out here on a contract to do some construction work on a new hotel—actually it was the Adelaide, one of the Vaughn properties. Didn’t you say you were staying there?”

Julian nodded.

“Beautiful, isn’t it? One of the best views around, I’ve always thought.”

“You like it up here?” Julian said. “You’re happy?”

“Yes.”

It struck him then how rare it was to receive monosyllabic responses. Most people would say, “I love the mountains” or “It’s home” or “The skiing is amazing.” This girl was content to simply say “Yes.” But her replies had weight, a forceful impact. She really meant yes; it was a firm and definite assent. She gazed down at the water, nodding gently.

Her placidity surprised him. With her wild tangle of hair and gypsy’s clothing, he would have suspected a more nomadic spirit. But Celia never expressed—to Julian, at least—a desire to travel. She sat next to him in the sunshine with her hands folded in her lap, that sweet faraway expression on her face, as if she’d left her body unattended while her mind was elsewhere.

Impossible even now to imagine a girl like that with a gun in her hands.

Julian’s gun.

He passed now through the hollow vestibule, up the curving staircase to Celia’s room. His footsteps made a slow heartbeat of sound as he came through the door, which in turn gave a tiny scream on its hinges, but when he paused at the foot of the bed—silence.

He opened his suitcase, felt around under his clothes and pulled out an old book of poems. The pages fell open to the verse that had been running through his mind since they’d arrived last night in his car. He read through the poem to the last stanza, the only one he couldn’t remember:

And so I contentedly live upon eels,

And try to do nothing amiss,

And I pass all the time I can spare from my meals

In innocent slumber—like this.

He ran his hands over the pages, the delicate drawings. Then he ripped the pages from the book, tossed the cover on the bed and twisted the papers tightly into the shape of a cone. He set this aside, uncapped the gas can and doused the bed. He splashed gasoline on the walls, opened the window, soaked the curtains and the carpet. The rest of the gasoline he carried down the hall. He turned the can upside down as he descended the staircase, leaving a small pool of fuel on the old floorboards at the bottom and another on the smooth leather cushions of the sofa. The fumes rose to his face, toxic and fragrant as perfume. He tossed the gas can aside and went back upstairs.

He retrieved the paper cone, pulled a lighter from his pocket and flicked it at the tip of the pages. Flames licked at the edge of the paper and bloomed from the cone, a fiery bouquet. At a touch, the fire sprang across the covers in looping lines that melted into a pool of blue-tipped flames. He backed away slowly, the heat rising over his skin in breathy gusts.

The tune continued to trail through his mind, fragmented and disconnected: Oh, I used to pick up and voraciously chew, the dear little boys whom I met...

From the end of the hall, he heard the room ignite in a groaning rush. A few seconds later, the first flames leaped through the open door. He dropped the fiery cone at the foot of the stairs and watched as the fire retraced his steps, up the curve of the staircase and into the hall.

He went outside and stood looking up at the old hotel. The window at the end was bright orange, the first long flames licking at the window frame as the smoke began to roll in thick clouds from the front door. An image of himself filled his mind. Walking through the burning doors, up the staircase, down the fiery hallway to Celia’s room. He would lie down in a bed of flames and rise again like the Blackbird, like a phoenix straight to the sky, absolved and reborn.

But even at this distance, the smoke was acrid and sharp in his lungs. People didn’t burn to death quietly; they went screaming and flailing.

He thought of Rory and Eric, who had died here with Celia. Their faces had dissolved in his memory, features interchanging in his mind’s eye. He’d almost forgotten now what their voices sounded like, couldn’t always be sure which conversation had taken place with Rory and which with Eric. They had become a single entity, two halves of a whole. They had lived and died and were remembered as they had lived: together.

Rory and Eric would approve of what he’d done. The Blackbird belonged to Celia. Julian was returning it to her, sending it heavenward on a cloud of billowing smoke.

It was the only apology he could think to offer.

January 11, 2009

CELIA WAS BURNING. From the minute he walked into the room and settled his gaze on her, from the first sunshiny flash of teeth in his smooth, tanned face, the squeak of floorboards under his weight, getting closer. From even before that. Years before that. This longing had simmered in her belly since childhood, when she would admire the straight line of his shoulders and the thrilling vertical channel between the muscles of his abdomen, and feel some unnamed stirring that made her long for the bright swing of his attention, as if without it she were standing underdressed in a storm. Now the fire raged between them in waves of all-consuming heat. It was him inside her, both of them in the heart of the Blackbird, a crackling hot inferno that exploded down her thighs and raced beneath her skin and tore through her throat like a flame.

In the hour before her death, Celia had never felt more alive.

* * *

If Celia ever had to explain what it was like to be living out her childhood dream, she would talk about the walls. Miles and miles of walls, the Blackbird had, and every one of them covered with wallpaper or cheap vinyl paneling, or spiderwebbed with tiny cracks, or pockmarked with holes in the plaster or the doors. Sometimes, as here in the kitchen, all of the above. She imagined the listener—a sympathetic motherly type like Mrs. Kirby at the post office—who would someday come to stay in one of the rooms they were renovating. You wouldn’t believe such a small hotel would have so many walls, Celia would say. I never thought we’d see the end of them.

Some of the rooms had been too much for her. In Two, she’d seen right away that the wallpaper was not going to budge and had papered over it with nubby grass cloth the color of summer wheat. That was Rory’s room, calmly masculine, with a punched tin lamp and curtains made from lengths of painter’s cloth, a pinstripe in chocolate brown that Celia had sewn around the edges.

“I’m still gonna throw my socks on the floor.” Rory had run his hand over the walnut dresser and the Hopi blanket across the foot of the bed.

“You can lead a boy to a hamper,” said Eric, whose room even in high school was aggressively neat, “but you can’t make him use it.”

In Eight, where Julian Moss was staying, joined some nights by Kate, Celia had started strong but been foiled halfway through. Some of the wallpaper glue had hardened over time to the color and consistency of amber, and no amount of chemicals or steam would remove it. She was forced to leave the clover-green wallpaper in ragged vertical patches, but had discovered by trial and error that she could glaze those walls with a tinted wax and leave them as they were, with the pine boards showing through the strips of paper. The effect was strangely pleasing. She hung a huge copper clock over the headboard and some unframed oils on the walls and moved on to other projects.

The kitchen, though, was special. It was Celia’s space, her private sanctuary, a big shabby square room with open shelves above and cavernous cupboards below, and for this room nothing would do but walls of robin’s egg blue. She had stripped every last shred of the wallpaper here—a tedious, finicky job that took a solid week—and now the cans of paint stood ready on the floor, the dishes and crockery shifted to the countertops in order to clear the space. Tomorrow she would open the first can of paint and roll it over the naked wall, a luxurious task she had long anticipated.

She scooped up a dollop of spackling paste and pressed it into a nail hole next to the pantry door frame, smoothing it over with the end of the putty knife. She stood back to inspect her work, pushing a strand of hair from her forehead with the back of her hand.

Miles of walls. I had help, of course. I had Rory and Eric.

Always when she thought of her stepbrother and his best friend, their names went in that order. Said quickly, the syllables blended into one word: Roreneric. You couldn’t say them the other way around. She wasn’t sure why.

Rory and Eric could do anything. Together they’d repaired the roof, sealed the windows, replaced the gutters and the faucets, refinished the floors. Huge, impossible jobs, but they tackled them together, cheerful and undaunted. Celia would hear Eric’s tuneless voice ringing through the old hotel, the beat of his music thundering from the stereo: Do ya, do ya want my love, baby, do ya do ya want my love... A crazy falsetto, cracking over the high notes, punctuated by Rory’s rumbling baritone urging him to keep his day job. Eric would laugh, cranking up the volume just to piss him off. They filled the empty rooms with the sound of power tools, hammers, the clatter of boards and nails, heavy thumps of their boots on the floor. The most beautiful sounds in the world.

Rory and Eric. Their names formed an impression in her mind that was less about the way they looked than about the way they felt, their dual presence like a pair of moons swirling elliptically around her: one near, the other far, then switching, accelerating, swinging away and moving heavily back. She felt the weight of them physically, a cosmic tug that kept her always wobbling slightly off balance.

No one who knew them casually could believe they’d be such good friends. Eric seemed like the antithesis to Rory’s golden-brown solidity. His pale skin was the canvas for a collection of tattoos, an ongoing attempt to illustrate his identity in a way that Rory had never needed to do. Eric was dark, pierced, mercurial, with an IQ approaching genius and a blatant reluctance to use it, as if he were too smart even to think up the things that would challenge him, too smart to keep his own brain ticking. He could easily have become frustrated with Rory, who had struggled for years with undiagnosed dyslexia and hadn’t read a book cover to cover in his life. But Rory was not unintelligent, and he had a commonsense canniness Eric lacked. When Eric wandered off course, Rory provided ballast.

Celia set down the spackling paste tray and made a wide stretch. A hot ache pressed at the back of her eyes. She had lain awake the night before, her thoughts all scraps and snippets: a flash of someone’s face, a fragment of conversation, memories like the pieces of several different puzzles all laid out on a table, impossible to assemble. At dawn she rose and went up the narrow back stairs, through the dollhouse door to the attic—a long, slanted room with one dingy window at either end and a century’s worth of accumulated junk, once so thick you had to turn sideways even to get through the door. Over the months they had sifted through it, had carried down pieces of furniture, paintings with cracked frames or rips in the canvas, boxes of books and musty old clothes, an enormous elk’s head mounted on a wooden plaque. Eric had hung this in the kitchen, as a joke, because Celia didn’t eat meat—which had upset her at first because she didn’t realize it was a joke and thought he meant for it to stay. But he took one look at her face and laughed, kissed her head and hauled the poor thing down to the truck with the other flea market items.

From the mudroom, she heard the door open and close, a thud of boots on the floor and the nylon whisk of someone’s coat. A moment later, Rory came through the kitchen door, pulling off his cap as he ducked beneath the lintel. The ends of his hair were dusted with snow, his eyebrows threaded with ice. His bootless feet in purple socks made no sound, but the floorboards creaked a little under his weight.

He looked around the room, hands slung low on his narrow hips.

“Looks like a bomb went off in here,” he said.

Celia held up the tray. “I’m spackling. It’s a dirty job, et cetera...”

Rory hunted briefly for a glass, settled for a coffee cup and went to fill it at the kitchen sink. He drank off the water in five or six long swallows, his head tipping slowly back, then refilled the cup and stood with his hip leaning against the counter.

“Finally got the shed organized,” he said. “And I hung the new door. You would not have appreciated the spider situation out there.”

“Body count?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Yikes.”

Rory grinned. Nothing fazed him. Spiders, leaks in the roof, faulty plumbing, snarls of electrical wire. He tackled every job with the same easygoing confidence; it was all in a day’s work, whatever the day might bring. He had a way of jollying Celia and Eric along, his blue eyes crinkling around the corners, mouth curving open around the white gleam of his teeth.

Captain America, Eric called him. Here to save the day.

And Rory did seem unambiguously heroic at times. He radiated good intention and that comforting solidity a strong person brings into the room. It was almost impossible to imagine a situation Rory would not be able to handle, or that anything awful could happen while he was around. He made everything seem simple.

Celia waited while he drained his cup for a second time and set it in the sink. Now would be the time to bring up the topic of Julian. Knowing Rory—and her own inability to articulate the problem—this conversation could take a while. “I’m glad you’re here, because I want to talk to you.”

He came through the pantry doorway. She felt him approach and knew without turning her head that his mood had shifted. His cool cheek pressed against her temple.

“You can talk, but I’ll hear you much better in twenty minutes.”

He took the tray from her hands and set it aside, slid his hand around her head to turn her face to his. His mouth opened over hers, cold inside as if he’d been eating snow. His teeth felt sleek and hard under her tongue.

She shivered. “You’re freezing.”

“Warm me up, then.”

“Here? Don’t we know better than that?”

“Yeah, we definitely do,” he said.

She expected him to lead her out of the pantry and up the winding stairs. But he slipped his hand around her wrist, thumb to forefinger like a bracelet.

“They won’t be back for a while,” he said. “We have time.”

He pulled her against him so she could feel his erection at the small of her back. He traced the line of her neck with his lips and teeth, buried his nose in the hair behind her ear. His hands began a slow descent down the front of her body, then up again, under her sweater, a ticklish chill across her ribs. His palms were rough and calloused, so big that with both his hands over her breasts it felt as if she’d added a layer of chilled fresh clothing.

She sighed and turned her cheek to his lips. Easier—much easier—to set aside the conversation about Julian and just go along. Later she would tell him everything and they would figure out together what to do. It could wait a few minutes longer.

He reached down and unbuttoned her jeans. Hand-me-downs from Kate, painting clothes, so baggy that they dropped to her hips before Rory had even touched the zipper.

“Don’t turn around,” he said.

* * *

The lifts had been running sporadically all afternoon, stopping and restarting as inexperienced skiers skidded over the ice trying to round the tight corner at the end of the ramp. A wall of clouds poured like wet concrete across the sky and hardened around the mountaintop, leaking tiny pellets of hail that stung Eric’s cheeks and clattered over the vinyl seat of the chairlift.

He shouldn’t have come out today. It was Julian really who wanted to ski. He said that Kate was getting clingy and he needed a third wheel.

“I keep thinking I’ve got to cut her loose, but I’m not ready to have that conversation. I need a reason to procrastinate. You know how it is.”

Eric wasn’t eager for the day. There were a hundred projects waiting for attention at the Blackbird, and he’d barely gotten home after almost a month away. He’d felt guilty about it this morning, but Celia had only kissed his cheek and told him to go, have fun, nothing was so urgent that it couldn’t wait another day.

He had explained his reluctance to Julian as they sat in the mudroom pulling on their boots.

“Stay if you want, man,” Julian said. “But if she’s telling you to go...”

Outside they could hear the thud of Rory’s ax chopping wood. From the kitchen, the splash of running water and the clatter of dishes. Eric hesitated, elbows on his knees. Julian had paid for his trip to Alaska, for the cabin and the helicopter and the tickets and the food. It seemed ungrateful after only a few days back not to do him this one favor in return.

His thoughts spun in circles: go, don’t go, a dozen chattering reasons for and against. Impossible to think through the noise.

Julian got to his feet and pulled his cap down over his ears.

“In my experience, if a woman really wants to put you to work, you’ll know it. Today you’re getting a pass. I’d take it if I were you.”

He opened the door in invitation. A gust of frigid air blew into the room.

“Arctic,” Eric said. “Go ahead. I think I’m gonna add another layer.”

“Sure you are.”

“Give me five minutes. I’ll meet you at the bottom of Prospect.”

Julian went out, shaking his head.

Eric sat for a minute after he left, listening as he said goodbye to Rory. When the sound of chopping resumed, he kicked off his boots and went into the kitchen, where Celia was drying the last of the breakfast dishes. She was wearing a cotton nightgown and an ancient, enormous cardigan of moss-green wool. Her hair trailed down her back in a day-old braid.

He stole up behind her and slipped his hand under the sweater to cup her breast.

“Come upstairs,” he said.

The side of her cheek curved upward as she turned off the faucet.

“I’ve got exactly one hundred and forty-two things to do today,” she said.

“Hundred and forty-three.”

He kissed her warm ear. She tucked up her shoulder and turned to face him, smiling, but with one hand flat to his chest.

“Later, okay?”

“That’s what you said last night.”

She wobbled her head, acknowledging this.

“Are we fighting?” he said.

“No.”

“Then come upstairs and prove it.”

A flash of impatience crossed her face, so quickly he couldn’t be sure it had been there at all. She had pressed a kiss to his cheek and shooed him along, and he’d let himself be sent away because of the kiss and the smile—but now, on the stalled ski lift, it was that swift exasperation he couldn’t get out of his mind.

He tried to remember the tools of self-control: Think before acting. Count to a hundred, or five hundred. Talk it out. Call for help if you think it’s going sideways.

He peeled off a glove with his teeth and pulled out his cell phone. He dialed Celia’s number. It rang four times and went to voice mail. And not even her voice, but the canned response the cell came with.

He shoved the phone back into his pocket.

One, one thousand, two, one thousand, three, one thousand, four...

The lift hummed to a start. It traveled a few yards, then stopped again with a jerk that set the chairs swinging. Eric could just make out the lift operator in his box at the top of the run—only forty yards to go, but it may as well have been a mile.

“Goddamn it,” he muttered.

Julian sat back comfortably, his arm around Kate’s snow-dusted shoulders. If Eric was there to circumvent trouble with Kate, he was doing a fine job; she had been bubbly and easygoing all day, in spite of the weather.

“No point stressing, man,” Julian said. “You have somewhere else to be?”

Eric ground back the answer with his teeth. Though they’d been sedentary for almost an hour, his heartbeat was tripping like a snare drum. His eyes burned with cold, with the chain of sleepless nights that had started in Alaska and continued at the Blackbird Hotel.

From his breast pocket he pulled out a flask of whiskey, unscrewed it and took a burning slug. Julian and Kate waved it off, so he took a couple more swallows himself, then more after that since the flask was nearly empty.

The exchange with Celia nagged at him, became tangled in the threads of previous conversations, as if the words had come untethered from their context. He couldn’t remember who said what, or when, or whether certain comments were a response to something someone else had said. He couldn’t put the pieces together. He couldn’t think. That was the problem—he couldn’t think. His mind was a freight train, fast and unsteerable, pushed by its own weight and momentum with Eric like a panicked conductor trying to keep the fucker from jumping the tracks.

He stared into the whiteness, rocking back and forth with the energy leaping in his chest.

That impatience on her face. She wanted him to go, didn’t she? Wanted to be rid of him. He remembered standing in the hallway—was that last night or the night before? He couldn’t be sure. But definitely he remembered standing in the hallway with his hand on the doorknob, and finding it locked.

At least...he thought he remembered.

He blinked into the snowstorm. On every side, the snowflakes whirled and dissolved into a fine white mist, like a cloud.