BURNING

     “I don’t ‘ant to,” he said.

     “What else can you do?” she replied.

     “I can’t do anything,” he said, irritated.

     “You can, you can still do things,” she insisted, “still walk, eat, watch movies, do things that please you.”

     “Things,” he said.  “I don’t ‘ant to do ‘things.’”

     “Don’t’ be difficult, dear,” she placated.

     “I’n sorry to de dithicult,” he said, shifting his weight on the bed.

     “You’re just in a mood.  It’ll pass.  Can I get you something?” she asked.

     “No,” he said sullenly.

     “You’re not going to lie there all day, are you?”

     “I’ll lie here as long as I ‘ish.”

     “You’ll get bored.  You always get bored.  Then you take it out on me.”

     “You’re a good sdort,” he said.

     “I love you,” she said, and she could tell there was a smile on his face.

     “I know,” he said, but he didn’t say he loved her, he never did anymore. 

     “Can I get you something?” she asked again.

     “Nayde the hand gun,” he said.

     “I don’t like it when you talk like that.  Can’t you give it up?  Why must you?  You just do it to hurt me.”

     “I don’t nean to hurt you.  I’n the un that hurts, renender?”

     “You don’t let me forget.”

     “I don’t nean to hurt you,” he repeated.

     “Then why do you?  Answer me that.  Why do you?”

     “Stodt it,” he said, irritated.  “Go a’ay.  Do ‘hat you hathe to.  I’ll de OK.”

     “Are you sure?”

     “I’n sure.  Dring ‘e the newsthather,” he said, then closed his eyes, as though he were blocking her out, dismissing her. 

     She hated it when he dismissed her like that.  Closing his eyes.  It was the gesture.  She would have liked to toss a glass of water on him, but she knew it would hurt.  He was still sensitive.  His body was burned all over.  His face was gone.  No nose or lips or ears, no hair, just caved-in wrinkled scars for cheeks.  Only his eyes were the same.  They survived somehow.  The eyes.  When so much was burned, how they survived was a miracle.  But they looked at her with so much feeling they destroyed her.  She couldn’t bare to look at him.  It was too painful.  What she saw in those eyes ruined her.  Mostly, she saw in them his recognition of her revulsion and then she saw the rebellion, rebellion against her, against everybody, but especially her, and then the defeat.  It was the defeat, what he was telling her now in all but words, that crucified her.  It was deliberate, she knew.  Asking for the gun was his way of telling her that he was the cross she had to bear.  It was like he was daring her to leave him, almost demanding it, so he could add that to everything else.  She didn’t know how she could live like this anymore, but she didn’t see any way to end it, any way that would leave her her dignity, in her own eyes as well as his.  It mattered.  But he was a cross.  Good lord.  He was.

     She brought him the newspaper.  He reached for it with his claw of a hand, and when he took it, his arm fell to his side with the weight, and the paper falling across his hip caused pain.  She could see the wince, but he said nothing.

     “Sorry,” she said tonelessly.

     “Yea,” he said.

     “Won’t you take some tea?” she asked, trying to seem pleasant.

     “No, I’ll get ut later,” he said, lifting the paper and ignoring her.

     “If you want anything,” she began to say, but he interrupted,

     “I ’ant to de leth alone.”

     “Fine,” she said and turned to leave.

     “’ait,” he called as she reached the door of the bedroom he now occupied alone.

     She turned and looked at him, waiting, as he asked, shifting her weight from her left to her right leg, an unintentional gesture whose meaning she could see he read well.

     He looked across at her and, the hole in his face that used to be his mouth hanging open, his teeth all exposed, shook his head. 

     “Nether nind.”

     “What, what is it?”

     “Nothing, nether nind,” he said, dismissing her again by holding up the newspaper.

     She came back to the bed and said in a soothing voice,

     “What is it, dear?  Something, something else?”

     “Sonething I ’anted to say, dut I just thought detter o’ it.”

     “Tell me,” she said, gently, coaxingly.

     “No.  Another tine.”

     She looked at him.  She couldn’t help but to pity him.  Pity is all that was left in her for him.  She thought maybe that was it, what he wanted to talk about.  There was something in his eyes that suggested it.  But maybe she was wrong.  There was a time when she could read him, when she could intuit from his expression what he was feeling or thinking, but not anymore.  Sometimes she thought she saw things in his eyes, but she could never be sure she read him right.  Things flashed in his eyes that sometimes scared her, unfathomable things.  The rebellion, the defeat, these she could fathom.  She could hear them in his voice as well as see them in his eyes.  But the unfathomable things, these came in moments of quiet, when he wasn’t aware she was looking.  She would try to imagine what it was like, what he endured, but she always failed.  Some things she couldn’t imagine.  There were a lot of things she couldn’t imagine about him now.  He was not just physically different.  His thoughts were different, his feelings, attitudes—it was like he died and whoever or whatever occupied his body was a stranger.

     A year had passed since he rushed into the burning building.  Before then, their lives were starting to braid into a real marriage.  Defying her family, she had married him after knowing him only a few months.  He was her choice among three men she was seeing regularly.  He was not the best looking though he was clearly the superior of the three.  Long before she was born her father had scraped enough money together to open an appliance store.  He had succeeded so well that by his third year he had opened a second store.  By the time she was in high school, her father owned a chain of stores all over Long Island.  She went to college and worked for her father in the home office.  The other two men who courted her were her father’s employees, nice, round MBAs with clean manicured hands, scrubbed faces, and an interest other than romance. 

     But he, he was a carpenter, a tall, black-haired, muscular twenty-five year old with ambition to build.  She met him one Saturday morning on the pier where her family kept their boat.  He was rugged and windblown, carrying a bucket filled with crabs and his scoop net and bait lines.  She peeked into the bucket as he was passing, and he stopped to show her the crabs.  They talked, and she accepted an invitation to join him in a crab feast that evening.  Three months later they were married.  He did not spurn her family’s wealth, though he wouldn’t accept help from her father.  He took work where he could and slowly began contracting on his own, taking on apprentice carpenters and teaching them as they worked together. 

     Their first years were passionate and rocky.  He worked hard and she played hard, spending her father’s money.  It was the memory of that, she thought, she sometimes glimpsed in his eyes, his face no longer capable of expression, itself being merely hideous—memory of her being gone when he came home after a twelve-hour day, and  then the furious possessiveness and lovemaking when she did come home.  The years brought accommodation and ultimately satiation, and then the trouble.  He always had a streak in him, she thought, as she turned away, determined not to let his refusal to say upset her, since she knew that was part of what he intended by calling her back.  She paused at the door and turning back, said,

     “You always turned on me when I wasn’t there when you wanted me.  Now I’m always beside you, and you turn on me.”

     He looked up and let the paper fall to his knees.  Its weight was a searing pain, and he winced, clenching his teeth.  She saw it but didn’t feel sorry.

     “I didn’t turn on you,” he said.  “’hen you ‘eren’t hone, it ‘as like a hole in ny life I had to thill ut again when you did cone hone.”

“Furious,” she said.

“It had to be thilled or there ‘ould de nothing.”

“Furious,” she said again.

“Dut you took it.”

“Furious,” she only said.

“Now, it’s not you,” he said, ignoring her repetitions.  “Ny life is a hole, and it can’t de thilled.  Not anynore.”

     And to make his point, he pulled his scarred fleshless cheeks back, as though to smile, revealing his teeth.  The image was more than hideous.  She seemed almost to swoon. Catching herself on the door jamb, she rushed out and he was alone.

     She couldn’t leave him.  If he died, she would be grateful.  But she couldn’t leave him.  What he did made leaving him impossible.  When he asked for the gun, she knew it was to torment her.  She wouldn’t let him triumph over her that way, anyway.  Giving it to him would be an admission, and she didn’t want to admit to what she really felt.  She thought about leaving him.  And when she thought about it, she would see him coming out of the flames.  And then she would feel the agony all over again.  He was brave, she owed him that.  Their lives were starting to work after eight years of marriage.  That was the number she had in her mind as the make or break number.  She remembered a conversation she overheard between her mother and father about her mother’s brother.  He had been married a few years to a woman the family was certain would never be faithful.  Her mother had said that everyone was wrong about her, and her father had said, “Give them eight years.  If a marriage makes it to the eighth year, then you can say it will last.”  That number stayed with her as the mark of the success of her own marriage.  Somehow, she had hung on till the eighth year, though she never doubted his faithfulness.  It was her own she doubted, but she held on and made it. 

     She was getting dressed to leave when he came into the bedroom, their bedroom, where they once slept together, but which was now hers alone.  She looked at him.  His walk was cautious and slow so as not to make his garment rub through the light protective gauze that was adhered to his skin by a coating of vitamin-enriched cream the nurse who came every morning applied to all the burned surfaces. 

     “I ‘ant to say dethore you leathe,” he said, “I’n sorry.”

     “Sorry?” she said, perplexed by what seemed suddenly urgent to him.  “For what?”

     “Thor ethrything.”

     He turned painfully and stiffly, taking careful steps back to the door.

     She held the slacks she was about to lift her left leg into when he came in and stared at his retreating back. 

     “Don’t,” she said.  “Don’t go.  Sit on the bed.”

     He paused and stiffly turned. 

     “No.  You go.  Don’t ‘orry adout ne.  I’n all right.”

     She threw the slacks on the bed and went to him, putting her hand gently on his arm. 

     “You don’t have to be sorry for anything,” she said.

     She could see he was upset.  It was hard for her to look at his face.  She couldn’t read anything in it at all.  But she could see it in his eyes.  They were in town, walking to their car from the restaurant, when it happened.  A young woman came running into the street from the door between the shops that opened on the stairway that led to the apartments above.  She was screaming hysterically.  Her baby was in its crib and she couldn’t get to it because of the fire.  He ran in.  A moment later, the upper floors exploded into flame.  He reappeared a few moments later, his body engulfed in flames, holding the child wrapped in a blanket.  He fell to the pavement, the bundled child rolling away, and she now began to scream.  A man rushed to them, stripping off his coat, and smothered the flames on her husband, whose face and hands were already burned black.  The rest happened in a daze: the sounds of the fire engines and then the ambulance, the police, the crowds gathering across the street.  She could remember little of the next hours.  Only the image of him on fire coming through the door with the bundle under his arm, like a football, stayed vivid in her mind.

     “I an,” he said.  “I’n sorry thor ethrything.  Ut thinish dressing.  You should go.  I’ll nake nyself sone tea.  Don’t ‘orry.”

     She was worried.  This was the first time since his return from the hospital he has come into their bedroom.  It bothered her that he shunned the room.  Even though she couldn’t look at him without wincing, she wanted him to want her, to need her.  She thought it was his refusal of these that he was apologizing for.  So she said it straight out,

     “For wanting to be alone?  Is that what you’re sorry for?”

     “No,” he said.  “I’n sorry thor not dying, that nostly, and thor lithing like this.”  He held up the remains of his hands as though to show them to her.

     “You can’t be serious,” she said. 

     “I an.”

     “I’m not leaving with you in this mood,” she said, pulling her slacks off the bed and stuffing her legs into them.  “We’re going to go somewhere together.  We’ll take a ride to the beach.  You don’t have to get out of the car if you don’t want to.  You can see the surf from the lot if we get close enough.”

     He stood, his back rigid, looking at her. 

     “I’d like that,” he said.

     “We’ll fix a cooler, too,” she said, “and bring ice tea and maybe some cheese and an apple.”

     “I’d like that,” he said again.

     He couldn’t get out of the car because of the wind on the beach, so he sat and looked through the window, and they talked.

     “I snatched it thon the thire,” he said, lost in his thoughts.  “Though it cost ne, sonething was sathed thor eternity.”

     “Someone,” she corrected.

     “Hnn?” he intoned, coming out of his reverie.

     “Someone,” she said, “someone was saved for eternity.”

     “Exactly,” he said.