Red Hot Abandonment, Sydney A. Boone [best novels to read for beginners txt] 📗

Red Hot Abandonment


The day I started to believe in God was the day I laughed the loudest I’d ever laughed. It was one of those ironic laughs that comes from the back of your throat; a tortured, involuntary laugh that brings tears to the corners of your eyes.
I laughed because I felt like Job; this had to be a test. There’s no way this could be real life.
But it was. I laughed at God, at chance, at reality, as I sat, shivering, on the tire-swing in front of the house I’d lived in my whole life: it was a Victorian house, painted with what was now a yellow, obviously taken prisoner by the sun and destructive weather. It had thick columns on the front wrap-around and lights to illuminate the doorway. Although aged, its brilliance was as intimidating as looking directly into the sun, especially on bright days when light reflected and bounced off the windows.
But all the sunny yellow in the world wouldn’t sway me from depression on that day. That day was the day that my father left my mother, or more importantly, the money left the bank. I loved my father, I did, but it was out of civil duty more than anything. I felt that duty when I found the crumpled note on my pillow that morning. The first three seconds of my reaction were reserved for sadness and then I quickly moved on to the more rational emotion, anger. The first three lines were:
Dearest Diana, I love you very much. This has nothing to do with you and know that you will always be in my heart. My reasons for leaving are too difficult for you to understand now, but as you grow into a young woman you will see why I had to…

And it continued with a paragraph blaming my mother, then an entire page of apology-masked excuses and a promise to call later when he had “arrived safely” to his unmentioned destination, and it ended with “See enclosed.” There was a check for fifteen hundred dollars. Was that supposed to clothe me, feed me, love me, and pay for my college tuition? He ran off with his personal savings and left my mother, my sister and me to rot, and the only consolation I got after receiving the news that the rest of my adolescence would exist only in poverty and helplessness was a goddamn letter and a check that my well-educated father forgot to sign.
The irony of it all made me laugh, almost uncontrollably, and I heard it echo through my cell phone to the ears of the party on the other line, ears that probably were not even listening.


After rereading the letter and essentially my financial end, I grabbed my jacket and slipped my hand into its pocket, rubbing the engraving on the only lighter I’d ever owned. It wasn’t engraved professionally, if you could even call it an engraving. My friend had bought a three-pack of lighters when he started smoking two years ago, and gave me one of the extras. The night he gave it to me, to make it truly mine, I had tried desperately to leave my mark on it by carving a D into its side. Although it was barely legible, its mark was wide and deep, and a comfort to me whenever I rubbed my thumb against it.
I took that lighter when I went to discard the letter. I could have cut it up, buried it in the snow, or just thrown it in the can, but I wanted more than anything to make that note disappear completely, to reduce it to nothing as if it had never existed. I stepped out onto my Victorian porch, whipped out my lighter and sent the edges into flame: the outer edges blackened and curled, burning rapidly despite the fast-falling snow.
When the flame crawled within an inch of my thumb and forefinger, I released the letter where it sparked and fluttered over the edge of the porch railing, subsiding into the wet earth. I turned on my heel, not looking back to be certain the snow had extinguished the flame.
This act of destruction made me more uneasy than I had anticipated. Always an anxious kid, I had my remedies. My parents had tried medicine, therapy, and an unending list of house rules that ended up only enhancing my anxieties instead of containing them. Nothing had worked until in my early teens when my boyfriend handed me a cigarette and looked at me expectantly. I took it. Not loving it but recognizing its ability to calm me, I had since stored a pack in my top drawer in case I ever needed to relax.
I yanked on the drawer’s handle as I stumbled into my room and shook the box. Three left. I took the middle one and used my engraved lighter to scorch its tip. I took a deep breath. Didn’t feel better. I thrashed in my bed in an effort to find comfort but knocked over the glass of water that sat on my bedside table instead. Ignoring it, I continued smoking, thinking of my father: Where had he gone? What had he been thinking, leaving two kids behind, especially in this economy? And besides, didn’t he love us? It was something I wanted to find out but didn’t know how.
I fell asleep wondering how I could find all the answers and woke up to the smell of smoke. Half of my childhood memories were blackening and folding in at the corners: my honor roll certificates, my first doll, my yellowed wallpaper. My fish, Martin, swam in circles near the top of his bowl, instinctively alarmed. Letters, cards, blankets; the flames relentlessly glossed over everything within reach. Martin was drinking, gulping at the water as I gulped for air right along side him. But I couldn’t leave without my hard-back classics, my elementary art projects, my jewelry box. Nothing would be spared.
But I was hot. My chest was closing in on itself, compressing my lungs and making it impossible to breathe; I fled, just like my father, but this time out of necessity rather than selfish greed.
I slipped out the door, glancing at Martin in his aqueous home next to the book shelf, hoping I hadn’t destroyed absolutely everything I loved.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw my once anxious, spastic goldfish hovered near the crown of the bowl, perfectly still, belly-up under a layer of ash.


A jerk. A jolt. A voice?
“Diana…Diana…Diana.”
I felt my eyelashes violently hit the tops of my brow bone, letting me know my eyes were wide open. When my vision came I saw a ceiling, my ceiling. My cream-colored ceiling. I craned to my left to see faded wallpaper with no trace of smoke.
“Diana…wake up. I am hungry.”
“Julie?”
“I want cereal, please,” my sister, Julie, was standing to my right, her feet inches from the little lake created by my thrashing. My cigarette, apparently from the night before, lay extinguished in the water. Since when had I been lucky?
“Coco Puffs, please,” my six-year-old sister was rambling, totally ignorant to the horror that could have occurred.
“Julie, where were you last night?”
“A sleepover at Katie’s house. Why?” She had been away, my mother at a benefit dinner; I was alone and could have met my end last night had my floor not been accidentally layered with a glassful of slick water.
“I’ll be down in a second, Julie.” She scampered off.
I looked at my yellowing wallpaper. The cards, the blankets, stuffed animals, memories, perishables. All the things I would have lost. Instinct made me shudder.
I scooped up the cigarette Julie had thankfully neglected, and got a rag to mop up my savior. I rung out the towel and quickly got downstairs to watch Julie. My mother was at work early even on the weekends so we had the house to ourselves most of the time. Our house. My house. The cool, intact, sturdy house I’d lived in my whole life, the one I shared with beautiful Julie and my loving mother.


Days earlier, back on the tire-swing, irony had tickled the back of my throat when my father assured me of his safety and asked how I was doing.
He hadn’t laughed with me. Seconds after the bitter laugh had left my lips it had fallen, and without meaning to I let the stiffening silence bounce through the phone cord and into our ears, where I knew it would be staying for a while.
A few more seconds passed as I pushed myself on the swing.
“Diana? Diana, are you still there?” an impersonal voice beckoned.
As angry as I’d ever been and still unfathomably shocked, I could find no words. After my fire-driven dream I would learn to appreciate, to forgive, to forget, but even before my revelations, a primal instinct revealed what would become of my father and I, and the instinct drove a distinct chill up my spine, stopping at each vertebrae to catch momentum.
“Diana?”
I know now that it was the same chill a child gets when she feels the sting of a Yellow Jacket, watches it diffuse from her poisoned skin, fly away, and live to see another day because it’s the only bee that never dies, the one bee that is never punished, the one that never pays its dues.


—Sydney Boone, 2009