Nothing to See Here (31)

While the kids swam, I took a break and sat at a table with a little notebook and wrote down possibilities. My list looked like this:

Asbestos?

Race car clothes?

Damp towels?

Zen meditation?

Spray bottles / garden hoses?

Live in the pool (build a roof over it?)?

Fire extinguishers (safe for kids’ skin?)?

Medication (sleeping pills? anti-anxiety?)?

Therapy (discreet)?

No spicy foods?

Spontaneous human combustion research (Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown)?



And on and on and on. If someone found this notebook, they’d have to assume that I was insane, that I was planning to set someone on fire and then, just as quickly, extinguish them. But it felt scientific, the way I was proceeding. I had the children. They caught on fire. I had to keep them from catching on fire. And, also, people did not catch on fire for no reason. Or at least they didn’t catch on fire without dying or having horrible burns. So I was imagining a solution to a problem that, technically, didn’t exist. All I could think to do was give them more soggy bologna sandwiches and just keep doing that until they turned eighteen, until we all just dried up and faded away.

“Look,” Bessie called out, and I looked at her, only to see her pointing toward the mansion. I turned. “Up there,” she said. In one of the windows on the second floor, Timothy was watching us. He was, for crying out loud, looking at us through his own little pair of opera glasses, like he was in a grand theater house in London. He was motionless, watching the children, and it unnerved me to such a degree that I finally looked away, just in time to see Bessie flipping Timothy the bird, her face twisted into meanness.

“Hey, don’t get agitated!” I shouted, and then immediately felt like a nag, like my anxiety was going to ruin them. I had to be cool. I was the cool one, or at least I’d promised them that I was.

When I looked back, Timothy had disappeared from the window. “Maybe don’t flip him off, okay?” I said to Bessie. “That’s your brother.”

“Half brother, right?” Bessie said, like this was the same as a great-great-great-great-grand-uncle.

“You have to be nice to him,” I said.

“No way he knows what the middle finger means,” she said, and Roland said, “It means fuck you!”

“No,” Bessie said, annoyed, “it means up yours.”

“Come on, guys,” I said. “Do you want a juice box?”

“We’re bored,” Roland said.

“How can you be bored in this giant pool?” I asked. “It’s, like, three times the size of your grandparents’ pool.”

“We want to do something fun,” Bessie said.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Hide-and-seek?” Roland offered.

“I don’t know if that’s such a hot idea,” I said, thinking of the children tucking themselves away in the most flammable parts of the house, all bunched up, waiting and waiting and waiting for something to happen.

“Can we go get ice cream?” Bessie asked.

“We have ice cream in the freezer,” I told her.

“No, I want ice cream at a store. I want to watch them scoop it out and serve it to me.”

“We’re still getting settled,” I said. “We should stay on the estate.”

“Can we go inside the mansion?” Roland asked.

“Not yet,” I said.

“This sucks,” Bessie said. “It sucks.”

She was right. It sucked so bad. It fucking sucked. I wanted to gather them in my arms and say, “Children, this fucking sucks. I hate it. I think I’d better be heading back home. Good luck.” I imagined stealing Carl’s Miata and hitting the road. I imagined Madison trying to raise these kids, and I enjoyed the slight twinge I felt at her discomfort. If anyone else had tried to hurt Madison, I would have murdered them, but I felt like I’d earned the right to imagine little aggressions against her.

I couldn’t help feeling like I was failing everyone. But then other times I thought maybe this was what everyone wanted from me, to simply keep the children occupied until something else could be worked out. But that would be a failure to me, to these kids. I had to find a way to integrate them into this new life, to make them just the slightest bit less feral, have them walk through a crowded mall and try on clothes without burning the whole thing down. And maybe, selfishly, I thought that if I could do these things, I’d become an expert. If some rich family in Argentina discovered that they had fire children, I’d hop on a plane and sort it out for them. I’d give lectures. Maybe write a book about the whole experience. And, Jesus, right now the book that I would write was so goddamn boring. Once upon a time, I babysat fire children and made them stay in a pool for three months. The end. I had to write a better story for them, for me, for everyone.

“What are you writing?” Carl asked from behind me, and I jumped. “Oh fuck,” I said, and the kids giggled loudly, even though they hated Carl. How had he appeared without my knowing it? I felt like maybe Carl was the kind of guy who put a lot of effort into being invisible until just the right moment. I bet he practiced walking without making noise.

“What is this?” he said, gesturing to the notebook. He looked at one of the entries, squinting as if he couldn’t believe I’d taken the time to write it down. “Zen meditation? Are you serious?”