Nothing to See Here (64)

“I saw it,” she finally said. “In this kitchen. I saw the little girl catch on fire.”

“When they were still living here?”

“Yes,” she said. “Just before Senator Roberts sent Mrs. Jane and the children away, when they were fighting all the time. The girl, Bessie. She came down and asked for something to eat. And then Senator Roberts came in and said that she couldn’t have anything until dinner. And she yelled that she was hungry. And Senator Roberts grabbed her arm and said that he made the rules, that he decided what was best for everyone in the family. She just burst into flames, and Senator Roberts jumped away. He stared at her. The smoke alarm started going off. I took a pitcher of water and poured it on the girl. Still on fire. I filled it up and poured it again. Still on fire. And then another. And she finally stopped burning, no more fire. And the girl looked completely fine, very red but not crying. Then Mrs. Jane shouted from the living room about the smoke alarm, and Senator Roberts said that I had burned a grilled cheese. Now, that I did not care for.”

“Yeah, that sucks,” I replied.

“He took the girl upstairs. When she came back down, wearing new clothes, her hair still damp, Senator Roberts was nowhere to be found, and she said that she’d like a grilled cheese. So I made her one. I made her two, I think. And that was it. Not long after, they were gone.”

“Did Jasper ever talk to you about it?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I received a generous raise, though,” she said. “So much money.”

“This family,” I said, shaking my head.

“No worse than any other family,” Mary offered. She shrugged.

“No,” I admitted, “maybe not.”

“You want to keep the papers?” she asked. I remembered that the kids were back in the guesthouse, waiting for me.

“Save them for Jasper,” I told her. “Maybe he’ll want them for his scrapbook.”



“Will Timothy come live with us?” Roland asked.

I hadn’t fully considered it. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe.” What would it matter? Another child in the bed, another set of lungs taking in air, holding it, and releasing it. I wondered if Jasper had fathered any children out of wedlock. Should a note be sent to the mothers of those children? A pamphlet? The guesthouse would become a home for wayward children who spontaneously combusted.

It made me happy, after everyone had seemed so convinced that Jane was responsible, that it was Jasper’s fucked-up genes that had made this happen. It made sense to me, these privileged families turning inward, becoming incestuous, like old royalty. It was bound to happen. It was all on him. And yet it worried me a little, that if Jasper knew without a doubt that he made these fire children, what would he do to them? How much of himself did he see in them? Too much or too little seemed dangerous to me.

We just waited for them to come home. I had no idea how long it took to drive from D.C. to Franklin, so we tried to go about our day, but whatever I came up with—math flash cards, Silly Putty, animal masks—I’d catch the kids staring off into space. Their skin was splotchy, warm to the touch, but the fire never came to the surface, as if they were holding on to it for when they really needed it. Or maybe they had burned themselves out the day before. I should have been keeping notes, doing scientific research, wearing safety goggles. There was so much that I should have been doing, that I could have been doing, but not a fucking thing made sense to me. I just fed them, made them wash their hands, listened to whatever nonsense they wanted to tell me. I took care of them, you know?

We were outside on the basketball court just as dusk began, the light all red and golden and perfect. Bessie was trying to hit five free throws in a row, and when she did that, she made it six, then seven. She had a nice shot, a little janky, but we could work with it. Whenever she tracked down the ball after a miss, she practiced dribbling between her legs, taking these weird strides, keeping her head up like a general surveying the battlefield. With her hair and her determined scowl, she looked like a punk rocker, like apocalypse basketball. Roland was on the other side of the court, throwing up underhanded free throws and hitting a lot of them, like Rick Barry, though the kid seemed to be putting no thought or effort into it, which, of course, also made me happy.

I called them over for a game of H-O-R-S-E, the three of us lined up single file. Before they had time to blink, Roland was out and Bessie was at H-O-R-and I was pristine. I knew kids, just like adults, wanted to win at everything they ever did, but I thought this was good child rearing, to show them how difficult it is to be good at something, to rejoice when you made small improvements. The kids didn’t seem to mind, liked watching me line up the hardest shots and effortlessly knock them down.

“How much longer is summer?” Bessie asked me.

“Still a while to go,” I told her.

“What will you do when it’s over?” she asked.

“I haven’t thought about it,” I replied, and it was true that I really hadn’t. “I haven’t had time to think about it. I’ve been thinking about you guys.”

“Where will you go?” she asked, not letting it go. “Will you stay here?”

“No,” I admitted. “I’ll probably go back home.” I thought about my mom, that room in the attic, and I wanted to cry. But I had money now, though I hadn’t checked my bank account since I got here. I could get my own place. A decent apartment, something with windows, where normal people congregated.