Chapter Twenty-Two
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
And so Joan would lose both her husband and her home in the same week.
Nelson arrived as Joan was evacuating—together with Lee and Jamie, they watched the brave firefighters face the burn.
It was Nelson’s first time seeing a live fire.
He felt the same primal fear he imagined animals must experience, and he wanted to cry.
Joan booked herself and the children into an extended-stay motel near JJS.
Entire wardrobes had to be rebuilt, toys restocked, and she gave Lee and Jamie cash to purchase what they wanted at the mall.
The authorities would eventually determine the fire was arson, which was fairly obvious to everyone.
It also seemed obvious who’d set the fire, but there’d been no movement on Theo.
When brought in for questioning, Theo said Lee was mistaken, that he’d merely been out for a walk, reminiscing about his father, and had encountered Lee.
All Lee could say about that night was she’d been tired.
Joan had asked Lee to try and recall more but was wary of pressing her.
As for Joan: well, she had never been a despairer, nor an overanalyzer, nor much of a crier.
She had accepted, clear-eyed, the knowledge that Bill would die and worked to ease his passing.
And yet now that Bill was gone, Joan found that she was, in fact, a weeper.
She cried all the time . She’d sat crouched, sobbing into her knees the first time she saw the exposed bones of Falling House: the charred wood, the broken glass; the waste and destruction of something uniquely precious that would never exist again.
Joan wept even more than she had after Bill’s passing, but also because the house had been Bill’s, and she’d found comfort in existing in the rooms he had, in touching the surfaces he’d touched.
So many memories of him were connected to a physical object: the navy coat he wore on their first encounter; the matching commemorative sweatshirts they’d purchased at the annual tulip show in Amsterdam.
The two of them in the white tops, Bill smiling at the camera without a trace of self-consciousness.
FLORIADE! scrawled in bright alternating colors.
And now the sweatshirts, the photos, the navy coat—all of it was gone.
Joan had cared so much about the house, she had wanted to live within its rooms and gardens for the rest of her life, but she would have given it all to Theo in exchange for it to be still standing. For Joan too knew it was Theo.
Do I even want him to be caught? she debated.
Does it matter? Does anything change? It did not escape Joan that burning down a house was a terribly violent act; it did not seem to her rational that she should bring her pocketknife “just in case” on morning walks through the park but not consider Theo, moving freely about the earth, as a threat.
Yet the truth was that something in her brain didn’t want to go further.
For the first time she understood the Lauders’ historical fondness for “sweeping things under the rug,” of hoping a large, inconvenient matter might simply disappear.
“He’s Bill’s son,” Joan told Nelson. “I don’t want anything bad to happen to him.”
“That’s a nice sentiment,” Nelson said, who was helping Joan with the authorities and insurance. He didn’t add that it was questionable whether Theo felt the same way—whether he didn’t want anything bad to happen to her .
“The only part I worry about is our safety. Should I be concerned?”
Nelson paused, as he was trained to be cautious. And yet what could Joan do? She had lost her husband and house; anything Theo could have wanted was already gone. “I think he’s learned his lesson,” Nelson said, knowing that most of the time this wasn’t actually true.
Though Theo would retain an attorney and be questioned multiple times, he would never officially be charged with the act of arson.
For most of his adult life, he’d been convinced he was singularly unlucky—that the fates, his father and mother and a string of stepmothers and siblings and potential employers and girlfriends—had all conspired against him.
Theo didn’t know why else he would have been given so much for it to come to so little; he did not understand why he was told he was attractive, and privileged, and rich, only to be fired from jobs and for girlfriends to leave him.
It should come easily. He had, after all, seen it come easily to many others.
Since childhood, he’d vacillated between logic and frenzy.
The weeks after the fire, he would enter a period of lucidity; he was fearful but calm, and as the days passed, he realized that if he escaped punishment, it would be the greatest luck of his life.
And his fortune held. There was no breakthrough in the case, no persistent investigator with time and curiosity on their hands; it was simply inaction on the part of the authorities, a combination of laziness and ineptitude, that ultimately allowed Theo to escape prosecution.
These things happen more often than the public thinks, and certainly more often to people like Theo.
On the one-year anniversary of the fire, Theo would ask Nelson to recommend a therapist. The significance of the date was not lost on Nelson, who took care to find the ideal referral, an older man Nelson knew came from an East Coast family with money.
A year later, Theo began a new career as a ski instructor in Maine.
He no longer wore tailored suits or requested the sommelier at dinner; he shopped discount stores and drove an old Toyota (though Theo would always be a little snobby—his favorite put-down, almost to the end of his life, would be “nouveau riche”).
One afternoon, when he was returning from a sailing expedition on Casco Bay, his tire blew out and he nearly rolled his truck off the side of the road.
The woman who pulled over and taught him to change a flat was named Gretchen Peters.
Many years after their first meeting, when Theo and Gretchen were on a road trip through California, he would drive on a whim to that old address in Palo Alto.
Gazing at the lot, he noted the familiar marks of fence posts in land and the stump that was once a flowering acacia.
The white birch, still standing, where he and Bill had hung a birdhouse.
As he parked, his gaze was caught by the glint of a foil wrapper in the wild grass.
What could it be, broken glass? Or perhaps that coin he’d given Lee?
He recalled the long smooth mornings of childhood, waking early and crawling into his parents’ bed.
The glow of his mother’s jewelry on the shell-shaped dish atop the bedside table in the shards of morning light.
He would never again feel so protected, so immortal.
After a minute Theo stepped out with Gretchen and, with his hand, shielded his face from the sun.
“This is where I grew up,” Theo said.