Last Girl Ghosted(40)

Be careful, Mom said, her voice tight with worry.

She’s okay, her father said gently, looking down at Melissa.

Melissa wasn’t afraid at all. The sound of it, a kind of wind, the heat on her face like a mask. At night sometimes she dreamed about it.

There was a big box of matches in the drawer in the kitchen. Her parents used them to light the fireplace, candles on the dinner table, or when the pilot light went out in the oven or the furnace.

The matches in a blue box were thick, with big red heads. A simple, quick strike, an expert flick of the wrist and the end ignited, a tiny dancer, a miniature explosion.

Melissa took the box. Her father was at work; her mother was on the phone. She’d been thinking of that pile of leaves since the weekend, imagining what it would be like in flames, how it would smell. She wondered if there were marshmallows in the cabinet. There were. She took the box, the bag of marshmallows. She’d find a stick in the yard. That was the real way, her father said, not those fancy, extra-long skewers they gave you at the hotel.

Out in the yard, the air was cool and the sky was a bright blue. She was off school because of some teacher in-service day and parent conferences that night.

She stood in front of the pile, and took a match from the box. Even the box was nice, a tidy thing that opened like a drawer. She struck one, two, three. Nothing. She wasn’t fast enough or something, the match heads crumbling into dust with her clumsiness.

Finally, it worked. It was more like a strike, quick and sure, then a drag the way she’d been doing. And there it was. A perfect little flame, happily come to life on the end of the stick. The potential of it—all the things it could do, all the forms it could take.

Melissa!

Her mother. She dropped the match and it snuffed out in the wet grass.

What on earth? Are those matches?

The look on her mother’s face was so surprised, so quickly edging to anger and fear that Melissa started to cry.

“I wanted to roast marshmallows.”

But that wasn’t the truth of it. She wanted to watch things burn. Because it was amazing how fire could reduce a solid thing to dust. It literally changed things from one form to another. And that was a kind of miracle.

Inside she got a lecture about playing with matches, and how fire was a thing that could quickly get out of control, how it raged, and could kill her, destroy their house, their neighbors’ houses. She knew that, of course. She was sorry, she said. Her mother comforted her as she cried. It’s normal to be curious about things, her mother said. But fire is not a toy.

She was sorry. She was sorry that she hadn’t had the chance to watch those leaves burn. That her mother was scared and angry. That she was in trouble. But she still wasn’t scared. And she didn’t love flames any less.

Melissa rarely thought about that day, that first day when she tried to start a fire. Because what came after it was so life-altering, so world-changing that that first afternoon was lost to her memory. It came back to her now though, as she drove away from the city, from the life she’d built from the ashes of her childhood.

How quickly it all got left behind. He’d said that was how it would be, but she wasn’t sure she believed him. He told her, Once you ditch that phone, everything that you think tethers you to your life will fall away.

Cash. A burner phone. A map—a real paper map!—marked where she should stop for gas, to spend the night. Places that took cash, that didn’t have cameras.

It’s not forever, he told her. Think of it as a life reset. When we come back, we’ll be stronger, free from the prison of this modern life.

She’d used cash to buy the car from the used lot he’d sent her to. It was older, not like her Range Rover that had Bluetooth, and a navigation computer, linked to her phone so that her email literally popped up on a screen in the dashboard.

She was nervous at first, edgy, leaving everything and everyone behind. But he was right, the farther she got, the less real it seemed. She’d never been away from her phone for so long—with its endless texts and news alerts, it’s pinging, ringing, vibrating. In the first hour on the road, she must have reached for it about twenty times.

The road was winding through towering pines.

She reached for the radio and turned it on, spinning the dial—the dial!—until a station came in. The news. Fires were raging in California, people having to abandon their homes in minutes as flames raced toward their communities. Also, after years of drought, Australia, too, was battling giant blazes that were destroying homes, nature, animals.

Still, she felt a kind of thrill in her heart when she thought about fires raging. Something she never shared with anyone until she told him. Fire. It was a natural occurrence. It was the planet’s way of cleaning away the old, fertilizing the soil, making way for new life. It was only a tragedy because we had built too many homes, done too much damage to the natural world. Because we stood too close to the flames. Even the animal populations would regenerate, if not for all our abuses. People rage and blame the fires for all of their destruction. But people are to blame.

Melissa drove and drove, getting sleepy, and wondered if she should pull over. She hadn’t stopped at the roadside motels he suggested. Instead, she’d pulled into campsite parking lots and slept in the car, used the restrooms, cleaned up with water from the sinks. She didn’t like motels; she preferred to be in her own space.