Bonfire of the Latter-Day Saints
The doorbell rang in two bright bursts. The home health aide, Nora, whom she had unceremoniously dismissed exactly two weeks before, always pressed the doorbell once. And her mother, who had finally departed four weeks before Nora, cheerily rang three times instead of using the spare key she kept in her wallet.
But today it was two rings, and so she opened the front door just enough that the security chain pulled taut, exposing only the left side of her face.
“Hello.” Freckles splashed across his nose and cheeks, bright red hair. He wore a white, short-sleeved button up shirt and black trousers. She’d seen him before, out the window: he was usually with another boy, dressed similarly, walking up and down her block. Sometimes they rode bikes, their white shirts stained with sweat in the summer heat. He reminded her of a doll she’d had as a little girl. She searched her brain for the doll’s name, with yarned red pigtails and a button nose.
She had forgotten so much since the bonfire. Not just what happened that night, but so many things before it, so many things she used to know. For three of her final days in the burn ward she tried to remember the formula and significance of the Pythagorean Theorem, something she’d not thought about or needed since high school but could not bring back to her memory. Instead, she saw snapshots of things she wanted to remember in quick, meaningless flashes. A labeled triangle, Stephen’s lips spelling out something she couldn’t read, chopped leaves of cilantro falling out of the arepas she and Laurie used to buy in the Fashion District.
“Hello,” she responded. Her voice startled her. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t spoken to anyone since Nora left: she took a taxi to the rehab center almost every day for some combination of surgical consultations, occupational therapy, physical therapy, and follow up appointments; but she hadn’t spoken to anyone about anything that didn’t involve her skin and limbs and insurance since long before Nora was gone.
“Hello,” he said again. He stumbled for a moment, as if he needed to restart himself, and she wondered if the crack of daylight in the door exposed more of her face than she intended. “My name is Elder Young, and I was wondering if you have ever asked yourself, where did I come from, why am I here, and where am I going after I leave this earthly life?” He looked right into her eye, this tall, strange boy, intense and benign all at once.
“I guess,” she said. The last two questions—why she was here and where she was going—had burrowed their way into the front of her mind during the early weeks of her recovery. When she’d been brought out of a medically induced coma, confined first to the burn ward at the USC hospital and then to Ranchos Los Amigos rehab center, she had endless time to let such questions swirl in her mind. The thoughts didn’t bother her, not existentially anyway, but more practically. What would she do now, with a body half-burned; and where would she have gone, if she hadn’t woken up?
“May I come in?” Elder Young asked. He was at least ten years younger than her, she surmised. The bonfire incident sounded like something that would happen to someone Elder’s age, a high schooler or college student, not someone on the late side of thirty.
“Your name is Elder Young?” she asked. “Your parents named you that?”
“Yes,” he said, and then quickly, “well, no. I mean my name is Matthew, but all of us are called Elder.”
“All of who?”
He smiled again, a broad, confident grin. She’d never smiled like that, she thought, not even before the bonfire. “I can tell you all about it. May I come in?”
“I’m not …” There were dozens of ways to describe what she wasn’t, but the one that was top of mind was clean. Her house was not only messy but dirty. She hadn’t washed her hair in longer than she could reliably remember, and she could smell the grease and oil in it. Her last body-shower had been the day before yesterday at the rehab center, when they had debrided her skin again, something that she still wailed through no matter how hard she tried not to. “Things aren’t cleaned up. And I haven’t showered yet,” she said.
“That’s fine,” Elder Young said. “I don’t care about things like that.” He continued to smile at her as she continued to stand in the doorway, long enough that she finally cast her eyes away. “I’ve seen you before,” he said. “In the neighborhood, I mean. I’ve seen you when you’ve been coming and going.”
Her eyes widened at first. She’d liked to pretend that no one caught glimpses of her newly mangled body; but she remembered she’d seen him before, too, when she spent long afternoons peeking out the curtains of her front window, even then only daring to open the cloth enough so she could see out with her left eye.
“Usually I cover myself up when I leave the house,” she said. With her mother and Nora gone, she took taxis to her doctor’s appointments, and when she left the house she draped herself in scarves to protect the neighborhood from her raw, melting skin. Twice in the last week, however, she’d opened the door with nothing more than normal clothes, rushing out to the mailbox as if on a dare.
“I know,” he said, “but I’ve seen your face before.” His eyes seemed so big to her then, brown and kind.
“Okay,” she said, and closed the door just long enough to unlatch the security chain, then let him inside. He’d said he didn’t care about the mess, but his eyes briefly blinked wide when he took in the living room. Still, he’d not even flinched when seeing her whole face. She gestured to the couch, where he sat after swinging his backpack off his shoulders and onto the ground next to him. She pushed some dirty clothes off the accent chair next to the couch and sat down.
“I was wondering if I could give you a brief survey and talk about some of the questions I presented earlier,” he said, and she could tell he’d rehearsed this.
“You’re a missionary,” she said, and like the Pythagorean Theorem and the last thing Stephen said to her before she descended into the fire, she knew what he was, she knew more than she could remember, she just couldn’t place it. One of the nurses at the rehab center told her that, even though she hadn’t sustained a head injury at the bonfire, her brain would need time to readjust.
“I am,” he said. “I’m a missionary with the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints.”
“Mormon,” she said, then smiled, proud that she’d yanked something out of her neural recesses. “Where are you from?”
“Utah,” he told her. “I know what you’re thinking, that all Mormons are from Utah. I mean, I guess we are. Technically, everyone came out of Utah after Brigham Young, but there are lots of people who don’t live in Utah. I have a lot of cousins in Idaho.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Where are you from?” he asked, because Los Angeles is the type of place that nobody and everybody was from.
*
When she first woke up, three and a half weeks after the bonfire, she couldn’t talk because of the tube in her throat, and she couldn’t write because of the layers of bandages around her right hand, so all she could do, in her brief periods of lucidity, was wonder what all had changed. Once the tube came out, and her parents finally consented to leaving the room for a while, Laurie sat next to her bedside.
“Where’s Stephen?” she asked. She’d wondered if vocal cords could burn, if her voice was different because she’d physically changed, or if her voice was the same, but the way she heard herself changed.
“He came a lot the first week you were here. They only let family in your room, so he just sat outside.”
Laurie said enough for her to understand she didn’t want to know more, even though her chest ached for him. A few days later—she supposed it was a few days, but time had a strange fluidity and there was so little daylight that came into her room—she asked Laurie again. “Where’s Stephen?”
“In Michigan,” Laurie admitted, and put a hand cautiously toward the bed, toward her bandaged hands and fingers, which no one could yet touch besides nurses and surgeons.
It took a few more rotations of daylight and doctors and visits from Laurie to ask, “When is he coming back?”
“He moved back home to Michigan.” Laurie had hardly taken a breath before she added, “I think he just couldn’t—”
“Don’t,” she said.
*
“Oregon,” she told him, and the word felt funny on her tongue, her childhood there so many lifetimes ago.
“I’ve never been to Oregon,” Matthew said. She decided she’d think of him as Matthew. “I’ve heard it’s pretty, though.”
“I guess,” she said. She looked up at him, met his gaze, trying to see what he thought of her raw and scarred face; her exposed, oozing hand. She still could find no evidence that it made him uncomfortable, not even a fleeting wince like her mother gave whenever the bandages came off. “I don’t really feel like taking a survey.”
Matthew smiled, closed-mouth this time, and seemed to relax. “That’s okay,” he said.
“I think I know about Mormon missionaries,” she said, and looked at her good hand. “I can’t remember from where. But I like trying to remember things.” She didn’t know the last part was true until she said it, and then realized it was all that she’d wanted during her long, empty days—the ones that weren’t spent wrapping and unwrapping her body, stretching her tight, painful skin; re-teaching her joints to bend.
“What do you remember?” he asked, his posture cautious.
“I think you go … in college? Everyone goes?”
“That’s right,” Matthew said, at ease again. “Everyone’s supposed to try. Especially boys. We go when we’re nineteen, girls usually go when they’re older.”
“So, you’re nineteen?” she asked. His smile was shy this time.
“I turned twenty last week.”
“Happy birthday.”
“Thanks,” he said. He cleared his throat and she thought he might be uncomfortable, but he kept looking at her. “How long have you been … like that?” he asked, then added, “if that’s okay to ask.”
Her instinct was to nervously tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, but her hair was pulled back in that oily bun, where it had been since Nora left. She’d learned how to do most things by herself in occupational therapy, but not all of them: at least she could tie her hair behind her head.
“I guess it’s okay,” she said. “It happened in October.”
*
When she woke up, they told her the rough outline of the incident: she’d fallen into an illegal bonfire on the beach, right side first, and Stephen had grabbed her left arm and pulled her back before she went all the way in, but not before half her body had been consumed in flames.
She remembered going to the bonfire: it was Friday, and a group of them headed down to the beach where they often went to party late into the night. When she first moved to LA, what felt like a hundred years ago, they’d all found each other in the sea of college classes and production assistant jobs and waiting tables and going to auditions; but now their group had winnowed as people got real jobs and met real partners and had real babies. Only the burnouts remained. She’d floundered so much in the last decade: her ever-precarious status with Stephen and the odd jobs she’d taken as she tried to get into video editing, the money her parents still quietly transferred to her bank account to help her make rent each month. When the bonfire happened, she’d worked at the front office of a real estate agency; now it seemed unlikely she’d ever return to either video editing or reception work.
Everyone politely excluded from the official record the details that surely contributed to how a grown, then-able-bodied woman could simply fall into a bonfire. She and Stephen had been bickering with each other all night; all year, really. She remembered that much, that Stephen made his umpteenth threat to just move back to Michigan without her, that he’d declared he never imagined being with someone who so fundamentally lacked ambition. She’d been rolling on Molly that she loudly insisted wasn’t working, even as the flames seemed to bend in an inviting dance and the night started to swirl. She remembered a wretched scream emanating from her throat, but she wasn’t sure if it came before or after she sank into the fire.
*
“What does it feel like?” Matthew asked. He leaned forward a little, putting his elbows on his knees; now even closer to her. She was used to feeling like a pariah whenever people had to see her. But Matthew was at ease, so much so that the only thing she felt intolerably self-conscious about was her dirty hair.
“Tight,” she said. “Like when you try to open your eyes in the morning and have bad allergies, except also painful. Sometimes bloody.” He nodded, transfixed. “And they have to scrub everything off you to help the skin heal. And on the parts of your body that aren’t already fucked—” she saw his eyes widen at the word— “they cut off to make new skin for the burned parts of you.”
“I’m sorry,” Matthew said. “It sounds awful.”
She knew it did sound awful, and that it was objectively so: in the burn ward they’d told her that as a matter of routine they put all burn patients on antidepressants, that it was a foregone conclusion that the life-altering nature of their injuries would wreck them internally. “It’s true things will be different,” a social worker who came to her room a few times a week told her. “Your life will look very different, but you still have a life. And it’s one that can be just as rewarding and fulfilling as the one you had before.” That statement, more than anything else, had undone her.
“It could be worse,” she said to Matthew. She’d averted amputations and they’d saved her natural hairline and her nose. He smiled.
“Was it in an accident?”
At first, she wanted to say that all burn injuries were accidents, and everyone referred to the bonfire as an accident, but she could remember those brief, tempting licks of the flame in front of her, the rolling hiss of the fire, the fury that raced between her eyes and Stephen’s.
“I don’t remember all of it.”
“That makes sense,” he affirmed. “What do you remember?” He rested his chin on the clasp of his hands now, hands rested on forearms rested on elbows rested on knees, a body working as it was intended to. Matthew’s bold assumption that it always would.
“We were playing ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’” she said, and laughed. She remembered that the song felt like it was going on forever, that she was living inside of it, even as she and Stephen shouted at each other; their fight so tired that none of their friends even paid attention.
“I also remember,” she said, excited, “about missionaries. Two.”
“What?” he asked, startled.
“Two years, right? Your mission is two years?” He smiled again and she realized that his confident grin was also goofy.
“That’s right,” he said. “For girls it’s eighteen months.”
“Why shorter?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I think maybe because most of them want to get married.” He glanced down at the carpet. “Are you married?”
“No,” she said. “Never.”
“It’s … hard to tell how old you are,” he said.
She debated what to tell him, whether to lie by a dozen years on either side. “I’m thirty-three.” She smiled a little sadly. “Hard to imagine anyone would marry me now.” It had been hard to imagine before the bonfire, too.
“No!” Matthew said, and his urgency sounded genuine. “Of course someone will marry you.”
A strange peace washed over her, a little like the first waves of morphine administered in the hospital. It felt like disappearing into indifference, although in this moment she felt firmly grounded in the space around her. She looked at him as hard as he was looking at her, stared at his burst of hair that was both moppish and neatly trimmed, like he took care to cut it regularly but didn’t understand the shapes or angles of a proper haircut. She remembered something else.
“Did you know that orange didn’t used to be a color? That it was always just called red? And that’s why people with orange hair are called redheads,” she said. Where had she learned that? And why?
“My mom calls my hair orange,” he said. “I have two younger sisters with dark red hair, and she calls them her redheads and me her orange head.”
“That’s sweet,” she said, and imagined Matthew’s mother running her fingers through her son’s orange hair. “My mom used to say that sometimes my hair looked red in the right light. But it was really just kind of a dirty blonde.” She saw his eyes jump up, toward the mess on her head. “Now it’s literally dirty blonde. It’s disgustingly dirty, I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry,” he said, but she felt enough shame to look away from him.
“I actually can’t wash it by myself,” she said. “My fingers kind of don’t work, at least on my right side, and I can’t figure out how to squeeze the shampoo bottle with just the one hand.” She shook her head as she spoke, fixing her eyes on a spot on the carpet. “Anyway,” she said, “don’t you want to tell me about Jesus or something?”
Matthew sat up straight and scratched the back of his head, and she envied how clean his hair must feel. “Kind of,” he said. “You know one of the other main things we’re supposed to do—that missionaries are supposed to do—is help people out.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like help people pull weeds or paint their garages or whatever.” The first, long buzz of silence entered the room between them. “So, I can help you out, if you want. If you need help around the house or … with things you can’t do yet.”
“You’re going to help me wash my hair?” she laughed.
“I could, if that’s what you need help with,” he said.
“You’re going to, like, get in the shower with me?” she asked and was less astonished by the idea than she might have been a year ago; she’d spent many of the last months with her body and its insides exposed to strangers.
“No!” Matthew said, and his face flashed red. Against the orange swirl of his hair he looked, briefly, like fire. “In the sink or something. Like at Great Clips.”
A hundred people, if not more, had touched her since the bonfire, applying and removing wound dressings, scraping out layers of skin to avoid infection, positioning her body for basic hygiene; but every contact was clinical. Even her mother had shuddered when helping her put on compression garments.
The thought of Matthew, with his long, young fingers; his eager, freckled face, touching her because he’d volunteered for the task with no sense of duty or promise of pay, filled her with a long-lost feeling she’d forgotten how to name.
“Okay,” she said. “We can use the kitchen sink.”
“Okay,” Matthew said, his voice bright and his eyes alive.
*
Sometimes she tried to imagine Stephen visiting her at the hospital. She tried to imagine him thinking of her from two thousand miles away. But all she came up with was the look on his face the night of the fire, a calamitous twist of bored and gone. She could remember that face in the seconds before the fire, the way his lips barely moved, but not what he said.
*
Matthew tested the temperature of the water, running his fingers beneath the faucet until it was lukewarm. “Is this good?” he asked.
She put her left-hand fingers under the stream. “Perfect,” she said. She leaned forward over the sink, and Matthew stood behind her, holding the sprayer head in his right hand. First it was just the water, trickling down the nape of her neck and then running through the dirty tendrils of hair.
Then Matthew put his free hand on her head, working his fingers through the strands of her hair alongside the water. She felt her throat close and her eyes fill, and she was quietly crying, taking deep inhales through her nose so that Matthew wouldn’t notice.
“Do you want to keep your head there while I put the shampoo in, or stand up?” he asked.
“I’ll stay here,” she said, and held her breath while he gently lathered soap through her hair, his fingers swirling against her scalp. Nora used to aggressively wash her hair, her fingernails scrubbing into skin. But the pads of Matthew’s fingertips were soft and careful against her scalp. He moved them in circles around her head, starting at the base of her neck and massaging the roots of her hair. He inched forward over her skull until he reached her hairline, and then his fingers barely skirted either side of her forehead. The clean, pure side; the bumpy, burnt half.
“It feels soft and jagged,” he murmured, almost so quietly she couldn’t hear.
Her doll’s name, Pepper.
He began to rinse her hair again and said, “Tell me if any gets in your eyes.” She wondered what he would do—stop and wipe the shampoo away, like you might a little child? She pictured those boyish, gentle fingers on her cheekbones. He ran his hand through her hair, helping the suds out, and she felt his fingers move toward the curves of her fresh scars.
She opened her eyes and watched the suds drip into the sink, the soapy bubbles thinning out into long streaks of water.
Two.
She stood, even as Matthew continued to spray water against the back of her head.
“Two,” she said, turning to look at him. “Aren’t there supposed to be two of you? Everywhere you go?”
Matthew shook his head, though if it was in disagreement or disbelief, she couldn’t tell.
“You aren’t supposed to be alone. There should be two of you.”
Matthew shook his head again and dropped the sprayer into the basin. Their eyes met and they were paralyzed in a stare. She thought she could see the reflection of a flame dancing in his pupils, thought she’d already lived this moment once, with Stephen, this long, ambiguous gaze, pregnant with a dare.
Matthew’s face crinkled and he drew in a breath so deep and quick she thought he might cry. She felt it happening before she understood it, her fingers reaching for his hand, damp and decorated with tiny bubbles of soap. She pulled his palm to the burnt side of her face, pressed it against her skin. Her scars had no sensation, but she could still feel the tender warmth of his touch.
Matthew kept his hand there, even after she let go. His eyes still held hers, though the intensity had faded, those flames extinguished. “I think I jumped,” she said, her voice crackling, as he moved the pads of his fingers over the fragile contours of her cheek. Matthew closed his eyes and inhaled hard through his nose, and she wondered if he would cry or yell, but instead, a small smile fell onto his lips.
A.M. Henry is a writer and consultant living in the mid-Atlantic. Her work can also be found in LampLight Magazine, The Citron Review, and Passengers Journal.
