Read The Arsonist for Free Online

sounded almost bemused by this fact, as if it had occurred to him just this minute that perhaps this was strange, that perhaps he ought to know.
    She looked at the dashboard. It was past eleven. They should have been at the house now, getting ready for bed.
    “How … what do you mean? How can you not know?” She felt a rising impatience that she tried to keep out of her voice, but she could hear herself, hear that she wasn’t successful.
    “I … I must have … taken a wrong turn somewhere, I suppose.”
    “But how long ago, do you think?” She’d gotten her voice under control. “How far back?”
    He looked at her again, his mild, handsome face emptied out, blank. “I don’t know.”
    Okay , she had thought then in the car. This is it . His failing, the thing they’d both been aware of in less critical moments, that they’d talked around, gingerly, over and over. The reason, after all, for him to be retiring,for their move—the negative student evaluations, the trouble sustaining his latest book. And for her, the increasing sense of an absence in him. Here, distilled, made pure and clear and undeniable.
    Where the hell were they?
    “I think you should pull over when you can,” she said, as gently as she could. “Slow down.” The car slowed, instantly. They crept along. Within a few miles she saw a spot ahead where the shoulder on the right widened a little. “There,” she said. “Up there.”
    He slowed more and pulled over. Gravel crunched under their wheels. The headlights met an impenetrable wall of forest—trees, shrubs, undergrowth—all a surprising vivid green in this flat, harsh light.
    “I’ll drive,” she said. “Put it in park.” He obeyed her. She got out and came around behind the car. The air was cool and full of night noise. It smelled of pine, of earth. As she came to the driver’s-side window, she looked down at him. He seemed frozen, his hands still on the wheel. When she opened the door, he looked up at her, a scared child, and then quickly turned away to fumble with his seat belt. He unsnapped it finally and got out.
    “You go around to my side,” she said. She hoped her voice was kind. That was what she intended, anyway.
    He did as he was told, and they both got in and put their seat belts on. She slid the seat forward a few inches and put the car in drive. She swung it out onto the road again.
    They’d keep going. It made as much sense as turning back. Sooner or later there would be something she’d recognize. Or a town, with road signs, arrows with mileage pointing to some place she knew. They had to be within an hour or so of Pomeroy in one direction or another. It would be all right. They’d get there, she told herself. She’d get Alfie to bed, and then she’d let herself think about this.
    Six or seven miles later, the speed limit dropped to thirty, then twenty-five, and they were in the village of North Winslow, only forty minutes or so from the house. “ Here we go,” she said in relief. She looked at Alfie, but his face was as blank as before.
    He had stayed that way even as they swung into the long driveway at the farm, even as she turned the engine off. She had to speak to him to get him to take his seat belt off, to open the car door.
    When he’d used the bathroom and gotten into bed, she spoke to him as you would to a child—reassuringly, soothingly. She kissed him good night and said she’d be in herself in a little bit, she was just going to have a drink and unwind from the drive.
    And now here she sat, on the porch, the night noises quietly riotous around her—the peepers’ steady cheerful churning down by the pond, the odd owl hooting. She’d heard a distant cry as she sat down—an animal, caught, killed perhaps. The chair itself made little noises of dry protest when she moved in it.
    He would be fine tomorrow, chances were. This was the worst it had ever been, but he had never not bounced back , as she thought of it. He would again,