Burning House by Ann Beattie

of miles away, he had eaten French toast—that was what he always ordered at the Empire. I couldhear the piano playing, see our reflections in the shiny black tabletops that gave us fun-house-mirror faces. A chic, funny place, no place Holly would ever sit with Ash. What he was asking her to do, in the letter, was to be with him. “They’re probably poisoning you against me,” he wrote, “but they don’t know everything. They’re in the country with you, but they’re city people. They’re the kind who cut before they’re even sure the bite was from a snake. They’ll try to soothe your wounds, but in the end they’ll get you. I know that there isn’t much for you here, but if you could come down for just a little while, the distance from that incestuous world might do you good. I don’t think children are interchangeable, but there’s time in life for more than one thing. I’ve just read a book—here’s something your sophisticated friends would like—I was reading a book and I found out that because of the way space curves, there are stars that everybody thinks of as twin stars, but they’re really the same one. Are you sure that I’m the naïve country boy Jane and your brother want you to think I am? Come down here, just for a week, and stand at the back door with me when the breeze is blowing and my arm is around you and look up at the sky. Then say yes or no.”
    A cardinal was in the road. A brightly colored, male cardinal. It stood there like a vulture—a vulture ready to feed on an animal that had been killed. But nothing was dead. The bird was small for a cardinal. No more a real omen than the little piece of paper you pull out of your fortune cookie that misspells something you should believe.
    “Ash,” I whispered. “How could you?”
    I put all the mail in the mailbox but his letter. I ripped that to pieces as I crossed the road. The cardinal flew away. The bee that had been buzzing around me disappeared. The letter was ripped into pieces as tiny as confetti by the time I dropped them in the mud, by the stream, looking behind me for tiny white pieces I might have dropped, as guilty as amurderer whose knife drips blood. He didn’t deserve her. He really didn’t. That was no illusion; it was a dirty trick that if space curved, you thought that one star was two.
    Todd’s MG bumped slowly into the driveway. He held up something round and shiny. “Got this at a lawn sale,” he said. “Can you believe it? Paella for a hundred, or we could take a bath in it. You know that Degas painting? The woman in the tub?”
    I went in and poured some vodka over ice. I sat on the porch, shaking the glass. On the lawn, Todd was cleaning the gigantic pan with steel wool, washing away the dirt with a strong spray from the hose. I remembered making love to Jason at the end of the dock. Diving into the water. The long white hose that stretched from the back of the house to where the boat bobbed in the water—the East Hampton equivalent of the snake in the garden.
    Simple, fortune-cookie fact: someone loved Holly more than anyone had ever loved me. Linda called again, four days later, and there was no second message from Jason. I hadn’t really expected one.
    Linda had sprayed the plant. The plant was sure to recover. She said she took it out of the sun for a few days, because the combination of light and chemicals might be too much.
    Holly and I were mistaken for sisters, but she was more beautiful. Our long blond hair. Slender bodies. The way, in the city, people would smile at us with the same lack of embarrassment people have when they smile at twins. Oddities. Beautiful exceptions.
    When I found out that I was pregnant, I had thought first about amniocentesis, because a first cousin had had a baby with a slight birth defect. My first impulse was to protect that baby in any way I could. At the end, I had just thought about what it would feel like to have my cervix pricked, the baby sucked out. That crazy