Firestarter

“Oh, honey, come here,” Norma said, and Charlie ran to her.

7

Dr. Hofferitz came the next day and pronounced Charlie improved. He came two days after that and pronounced her much improved. He came over the weekend and pronounced her well.

“Irv, you decided what you’re going to do?”

Irv shook his head.

8

Norma went to church by herself that Sunday morning, telling people that Irv had “a touch of the bug.” Irv sat home with Charlie, who was still weak but able to get around inside the house now. The day before, Norma had bought her a lot of clothes not in Hastings Glen, where such a purchase would have caused comment, but in Albany.

Irv sat beside the stove whittling, and after a while Charlie came and sat with him. “Don’t you want to know?” she said. “Don’t you want to know what happened after we took your car and left here?”

He looked up from his whittling and smiled at her. “Figure you’ll tell when you’re ready, button.”

Her face, white, tense, and unsmiling, didn’t change. “Aren’t you afraid of me?”

“Should I be?”

“Aren’t you afraid I’ll burn you up?”

“No, button. I don’t think so. Let me tell you something. You’re no little girl anymore. Maybe you ain’t a big girl-you’re someplace in the middle-but you’re big enough. A kid your age any kid-could get hold of matches if she wanted to, burn up the house or whatever. But not many do. Why would they want to? Why should you want to? A kid your age should be able to be trusted with a jackknife or a pack of matches if they’re halfway bright. So, no. I ain’t scared.”

At that Charlie’s face relaxed; an expression of almost indescribable relief flowed across it.

“I’ll tell you,” she said then. “I’ll tell you everything.” She began to speak and was still speaking when Norma returned an hour later. Norma stopped in the doorway, listening, then slowly unbuttoned her coat and took it off: She put her purse down. And still Charlie’s young but somehow old voice droned, on and on, telling it, telling it all.

And by the time she was done, both of them understood just what the stakes were, and how enormous they had become.

9

Winter came with no firm decision made. Irv and Norma began to go to church again, leaving Charlie alone in the house with strict instructions not to answer the telephone if it rang and to go down the cellar if someone drove in while they were gone. Hofferitz’s words, like a parrot in a cage, haunted Irv. He bought a pile of schoolbooks-in Albanyand-took up teaching Charlie himself. Although she was quick, he was not particularly good at it. Norma was a little better. But sometimes the two of them would be sitting at the kitchen table, bent over a history or geography book, and Norma would look up at him with a question in her eyes… a question for which Irv had no answer.

The New Year came; February; March. Charlie’s birthday. Presents bought in Albany. Like a parrot in a cage. Charlie did not seem entirely to mind, and in some ways, Irv reasoned to himself on nights when he couldn’t sleep, perhaps it had been the best thing in the world for her, this period of slow healing, of each day taken in its slow winter course. But what came next? He didn’t know.

There was the day in early April after a drenching two-day rain when the damned kindling was so damp he couldn’t get the kitchen stove lit.

“Stand back a second,” Charlie said, and he did, automatically, thinking she wanted to look at something in there. He felt something pass him in midair, something tight and hot, and a moment later the kindling was blazing nicely.

Irv stared around at her, wide-eyed, and saw Charlie looking back at him with a kind of nervous, guilty hope on her face. “I helped you, didn’t I?” she said in a voice that was not quite steady. “It wasn’t really bad, was it?”

“No,” he said. “Not if you can control it, Charlie.”

“I can control the little ones.”

“Just don’t do it around Norma, girl. She’d drop her teddies.”

Charlie smiled a little.

Irv hesitated and then said, “For myself, anytime you want to give me a hand and save me messing around with that damned kindling, you go right ahead. I’ve never been any good at it.”

“I will,” she said, smiling more now. “And I’ll be careful.” “Sure. Sure you will,” he said, and for just a moment he saw those men on the porch again, beating at their flaming hair, trying to put it out. Charlie’s healing quickened, but still there were bad dreams and her appetite remained poor. She was what Norma Manders called “peckish.”

Sometimes she would wake up from these nightmares with shuddering sudde

Charlie heard them talking in the kitchen. She fumbled for the Big Ben on her dresser and brought it close to her face. It was ten o'clock. She had been asleep only an hour and a half.

“-going to do?” Norma asked.

It was wrong to eavesdrop, but how could she help it? And they were talking about her; she knew it.

“I don’t know,” Irv said.

“Have you thought anymore about the paper?”

Papers, Charlie thought. Daddy wanted to talk to the papers. Daddy said it would be all right then. “Which one?” Irv asked. “The Hastings Bugle? They can put it right next to the A amp;P ad and this week’s shows at the Bijou.” “It was what her father was pla

Irv said, “Yeah, I think it might happen. And I tell you what might be even worse, as much as I love her. She might get the drop on them. And if it got out of control, like it did at that place where they kept her… well, there’s pretty nearly eight million people in New York City, Norma. I just feel like I’m too old to take a risk like that.”

Norma’s footfalls crossed back to the table again, the old flooring of the farmhouse creaking comfortably beneath them. “But, Irv, listen to me now,” she said. Norma spoke carefully and slowly, as if she had been thinking this out carefully over a long period of time. “Even a little paper, even a little weekly like the Bugle, they’re hooked into those AP tickers. News comes from everyplace these days. Why, just two years ago a little paper in Southern California won the Pulitzer Prize for some news story, and they had a circulation of under fifteen hundred!”

He laughed, and Charlie suddenly knew he had taken her hand across the table. “You’ve been studying on this, haven’t you?”

“Yes I have, and there’s no reason to laugh at me for it, Irv Manders! This is serious, a serious business! We’re in a box! How long can we keep her here before somebody finds out? You took her sapping out in the woods just this afternoon-”