Rooms(55)

And then there was fire and she knew it was fire because Trenton kept saying it and also because she’d seen it before, in Nana’s house in wintertime and also this one time Mommy tried to cook dinner and something happened and then there was fire on the stove. And Mommy screamed stay back, Amy, stay back, and pressed Amy back far against the wall while she sprinkled white stuff on the fire to make it go away.

So Amy stayed back and didn’t make a sound because that was what Mommy told her to do and because she didn’t want Trenton to be mad. She pressed her knees to her chest and stayed small, and quiet.





ALICE

In The Raven Heliotrope, I wrote a scene about a fire: the palace of the Innocents burns down after it’s raided by marauding Nihilis. The Innocents outsmart them and flee through a hidden tunnel to safety. They use magic to lock the palace doors, entrapping the Nihilis, and Penelope asks her pet dragon to burn the whole place down, so the Nihilis can’t desecrate it. The fire was like white ribbons, reaching into the sky. I was very pleased with that sentence, and especially pleased with that image, of the white ribbons.

These flames aren’t like ribbons at all. They’re like mouths, like greedy fingers, like something alive: leaping, running up the walls, swallowing boxes and broken furniture.

“Are you proud of yourself?” Sandra’s voice is like the hiss and pop of the flames. “You’ll kill them all.”

I can’t answer. I can’t speak at all. I’m breaking apart on billows of smoke: memories are floating up from distant, buried places. Throwing up, day after day, in the toilet, clutching the porcelain for support; sheets stained with blood and water; the willow tree running its long thin fingers along the ground, as though searching, searching for something.

“What’s going to happen?” The new ghost sounds like she’s about to cry. “Are they going to burn? Are we going to burn?”

Trenton has managed to extinguish the blanket. But the fire has already spread too far. It jumps from surface to surface, skates across the old wooden bureau, hooks onto the low-beamed ceiling, and starts its climb.

Katie is on her hands and knees, looking for something. Trenton tries to pull her backward, toward the stairs. She wrenches away from him.

“My phone,” she says. She is wide-eyed, sweaty. “I need to find my phone.”

“Forget about that.” Trenton, coughing, grabs her elbow, but she shakes him off again.

“Do something,” Sandra is practically shrieking. “You got them into this mess.”

I open my mouth; my voice is the sound of smoke. “It’s too late,” I say.

Murderer. The word reaches me faintly. Sandra’s voice, or a voice from long ago, from beneath the willow tree.





AMY

Amy’s throat hurt and she was hot, and she wanted to run downstairs and get in bed, and she wanted her mommy. But there was no way out. Everything was on fire, and she couldn’t see, and she couldn’t make herself any smaller, but the fire was sniffing around her shoes like a mouse except it wasn’t a mouse, it was something that would kill you.

Amy was going to die and go in the ground and maybe she would never, ever wake up.

She began to cry. And crying hurt her throat even more, which made her cry harder. She was all alone in the dark and the fire, and she was going to go in the dirt and there would be bugs there. She curled up in a ball on the floor and tried to be so small even the fire wouldn’t find her.

She was the best hider. Mommy always said so.

It was very hot, like Mommy had put too many blankets on the bed.

She was tired.

Something moved. Someone shouted.

Amy’s eyes were heavy, and it took her a long time to open them. The girl, the dead girl, was looking at her through smoke thick like dark water.

“Oh my God,” the dead girl said.

The dead girl went away, and Amy closed her eyes again. But then the dead girl was back, somehow. She’d walked straight through the fire. Maybe because she was dead and she wasn’t afraid.

The dead girl was lifting Amy. Amy wanted to ask what it was like to be dead, but she couldn’t make her tongue move and her head hurt too bad and she was so tired.

“Shhh,” the dead girl said. “It’s okay. You’re going to be okay.”

Her hair smelled like flowers.





MINNA

It took Minna two days to work up the courage to climb up into the attic and assess the damage; then she did it only because her mom reminded her they would not be in Coral River much longer. When she finally managed it, she thought for one confused second it must have snowed. Then she realized it was cottonseed. Cottonseed and bird shit. The roof was partly gone. Sunlight filtered down over the charred wood, the burned remains of old cardboard boxes and termite-riddled furniture, whatever had been stashed up here, all of it covered in a layer of white. Even now she could see the drift of cottonseed across the blue sky. A raven was hopping around among the rubbish, pecking, turning over scraps with its beak.

“Get out of here,” Minna said, aiming a kick in its direction. It startled and went flapping, a blur of dark wings, into the sky.

Toadie appeared next to her a second later, carrying latex gloves and a box of 39-gallon industrial trash bags, like the kind Minna used for raking and carting leaves. “Looks like you got carpet-bombed,” he said, toeing a bit of white-streaked wood with a shoe.