Roadmap to a Fire

by Ashley Bethard

The thing about maps is this: If you don’t know where you’re going, you need to find out where you are. My father taught me how to read maps. Open the road atlas. Use the index to find where you are on the grid. Always a letter-number combination: E54, A5, C28. Trace your finger along the winding lines. The interstates like arteries, carrying the bulk of traffic. State routes and county highways branching off, smaller and smaller, like spidery capillaries. 

I am not Catholic, and my mother is lapsed. I have memories of church with my grandmother, pulling down the kneeler, my eyes traveling the room, following the rituals of movement and sound. Open the hymnal. All rise. Open your mouth to sing. Please kneel. Cross yourself. You may be seated. What are we ever doing but building warmth, creating a fire to huddle around?

I don’t have a religion of my own so I take up the search in literature. I find my brother and I myself and him and us in other words and stories: Francine Prose’s Goldengrove. Margaret Atwood’s “This is a Photograph of Me.” Both have lakes. Water was his element. The Sandusky shoreline along the bay, close to where the bay meets Lake Erie, was his place. His death, a heroin overdose, its own sort of drowning. 

What happens when we juxtapose? Do the unrelated become related based on their placement? Do they share energy, tossing it back and forth, creating a link where one didn’t exist before?

I sat at the bottom of the stairs for a while and stared at my hands. I couldn’t remember the last time he told me that he loved me, unless I told him first. 

A few months after his death, I went through photos on my phone. I was looking for images I took the week he died. I was looking for photos I took of my crying face as I lay in bed, my skin red and puffy, a wound. Of my naked body curled into itself in a bathtub. Of my feet in the field where we ran as children. My brother’s apartment, as he left it when he died there: half-empty cup of coffee. A bowl of vegetable soup. A vase with flowers rotting, the browning petals collecting at the base. 

The photos were gone. A technology failure had resulted in the complete loss of years of data—photos, text messages, iPhone notes. A bloom of panic spiked my gut, wending its way through my body. I went into different apps. I checked my text messages, hoping some photos he shared with me would be intact. The texts were gone, too.

I trusted my phone to be the reliable memory, knowing mine was not. But its memory was fragile, too.

Every time I remember him, I conjure the same static image: a photo of my brother holding a fish in front of a maple tree at our childhood home. He is smiling. He wears a Ducks Unlimited T-shirt and jean shorts, white socks and sneakers. He must be about nine. I don’t remember this moment. The memory is a false start. A path that disappears beneath my feet. The photo has turned into a thing that obscures. I cannot see into it, and I cannot see past it. 

My father taught me to make fire. How to read it. How to add oxygen, little by little, until the crackle of flames turns to a roar. He’d hand me his leather gloves, oversized for my hands. I would put them on, a young girl using a man’s tool, working doubly hard to pack the newspaper into tight, little balls. 

Now I go through the motions in my head. I’ve done it half-asleep in the middle of a frigid winter night. Set the balled newspaper close together in the middle of the stove. Gather the kindling—small sticks, raw edge scraps fallen away from cut trunks. Arrange in a crosshatch grid on top of the newspaper. Strike a fireplace match. Light the newspaper in several different places. Wait. Observe. Then you’ll know to feed or starve it.

One summer day when we were kids, my brother and I were running through my uncle’s woods with my cousin. We went deep, and were unfamiliar with the terrain. My cousin got spooked, or maybe she was playing a joke, but she opened her eyes wide and said, we need to go back. I didn’t get the chance to ask why before she turned and sprinted up the steep, rocky path winding through trees, the foliage thick enough to hide in. I ran after her, my legs almost as long as hers, able to keep up somewhat.

My brother cried out. I turned and looked. He was farther behind, but the look on his face is seared into my memory: face red, eyes slits, tear-streaked cheeks, his mouth open in a scream, a red wound. His terror was visible. It shimmered against the day’s heat. I ran back to him, found that he was caught in a thornbush. 

In the three years since my brother’s death, the memories have become twofold: more obscured, and more holy. They alternate between the black and the religious vision. I don’t expect anyone to understand anything, other than the fact that it doesn’t hurt any less.

Some days a metaphor is all I’m good for. Some days I cry. Every day, I miss him. Some days I balk at form. At this need for everything to have a place, a home. But it’s not like that, I want to say. It’s not like that at all.

My parents gave me his journals. I spent the weeks after his death combing through them for clues, for some sense of his mind during the last weeks of his life. But nothing made sense to me. Entries jumped around from month to month. Sometimes year to year. Some weeks were documented across three different journals. What I have come to accept is that maybe there is a logic to this for him. Or there is no logic at all. 

I store the journals in a box, tucked away on a shelf in the basement. I do not organize them. How would I?

There’s a saying in poetry: explode the line. Something about violent possibility. Something about love. The structure is different now. It will not hold. The landscape, decimated. I survey the damage, find it hard to take in. 

I want to ask my father: Does he have a map for this loss? Is there a way to trace a line back to this gaping hole in our family? A physical place, an edge to stand on, so we could peer into the blackness? That would at least feel like proof. It would have left a mark.  

What about people as monuments? I think of all the places I once had reason to go, but don’t anymore. How is a place any different than a dusty box of journals stored in a room I rarely step into? 

That alphabet sits and continues to sit. That box will keep collecting dust. Some things are swallowed by the ocean. They land soft. They’re cradled and buried by the sand floor. There are places in my mind I keep locked. There are places on earth I’ll never go.

When we were children, sometimes we’d sleep in the same bed. We’d create a large nest out of sheets and blankets, a nest that resembled a half-shell, and we’d curl into it next to each other. We would fall asleep pretending we were in the ocean. All dark, amidst a sea of blue comforter, we slept. 

I hate grey days overrun with rain, but I learn to appreciate them in the right context. I build a fire in the woodstove for my mother. Put on the leather gloves. Carry in the armful of wood. Ball up last month’s newspaper. Separate the kindling. Flick the lighter. Close the door, pull the vent nearly halfway open, cross myself. Pray. As if this is something requiring god’s intervention. I create his voice in places he can’t be. Memory is building our own ghosts to keep us company, a fire to displace the raw. I can deal with the springtime chill as long as there’s warmth. 

Published February 23rd, 2020