Flames

by Alaina Symanovich


The Cook Forest vacation is a bloated sun above all my childhood memories.  I can’t look back at my life without it burning me.  I can’t see anything apart from its light.
 
In my memory, the third night of Cook Forest is the center of everything.  My dad rubbed his palms together over his plate, shooting my mother and me a wily smile.  “Let us,” he announced, “eat lettuce!”
 
My mom and I groaned, scanning the diner to see if anyone had overheard.  The lone waitress had gone back to the kitchen, and the gray-haired man across the room looked enamored with his meatloaf.  Not many travelers passed through the forest after dark.
 
“I wouldn’t call that lettuce,” Mom said, gesturing toward Dad’s deep-fried seafood special.
 
Dad pointed to the wad of curly parsley that cradled a decorative lemon wedge on his plate.  “Rabbit food,” he said.  “For rabid hunger!”
 
I rolled my eyes, stabbing a rectangle of ravioli off my plate.  The red sauce was runny, and too hot; it puddled around the pasta instead of covering it. 
 
“Why couldn’t we have just eaten at the inn?” I grumbled.  I was picturing my best friends from home having the time of their lives without me.  Just then, Hadley and Marie were probably at a sleepover, reading Seventeen and watching MTV and worrying about what high school would be like. 
 
“Everything at the inn was too healthy for your father,” Mom said.  She took a swig of her beer.  She didn’t usually order beer.  “It wouldn’t have properly clogged his arteries.”
 
Dad smiled and popped a bite of fried catfish into his mouth.  “I’m just grateful for a break from that vegan tofu crap,” he said, chewing with his mouth slightly open.  “Finally—flavor!”
 
Mom grimace-smiled through another swallow of beer.  “You poor thing.”
 
Mom moved out the day we got home from Cook Forest.  When she and Dad broke the news to me on the drive home, I noticed she’d already taken off her wedding ring.
 
I suppose that’s why I became a private investigator.  I specialize in loss: lost money, lost spouses, lost faith.  I always tell my clients the same thing: “I’ll see what I can do.”  It’s a wordplay my dad would approve of, if he were still alive.  I will see what I can do—whether I can do it, that’s the tricky part.  Plenty of my former cases tell the same story: I saw my client’s problem, saw it in stunning illumination, saw it as the boiling heart of my universe—and sat back and watched it implode.  Like Galileo, blind from staring at the sun, I’m a pro at watching lives go up in flames.