I took off my muumuu, which was so easy to remove, by the way, and then I used it to cover my hands and gently lower the children to a squatting position on the ground. “Hey, Bessie. Bessie? Calm down now, okay?” She was rigid, and so was Roland, but the fire was just rolling across them, yellow and red, like what you’d draw with a limited supply of crayons.
“Can you turn it off?” I asked, almost whispering, but they weren’t listening. So then I started smothering the flames with the muumuu, which caused it to smolder and spark. I patted the children all over their arms, their backs, on top of their little heads. I went pat-pat-pat-pat-pat and kept whispering, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.”
I could feel the heat, but I just kept lightly tapping them, and the fire seemed to finally die out. As if they had been holding their breath the entire time, Bessie and Roland each took in a deep gulp of air and then sighed, suddenly sleepy. I leaned against them and they kind of slumped onto me. And Carl finally ran over and scooped them both up, one in each arm, and put them back in the van, gently closing the doors.
I stood up, confused. I realized that I was in my bra and panties, but either people were being really polite or it didn’t matter because we’d just fucking watched some fire children do their thing. Carl and I had already seen it, knew it was real, so we both snapped out of it quicker than the Robertses.
“My god,” Madison finally said. She hugged Jasper, as if she only now believed him and was sorry for doubting him. I looked down and realized that the teddy bears were lying on the driveway, their fur burned black.
“Sir,” Carl said, “you tried, and I respect you for that, but it’s time to think about real solutions to this situation. I have a few options.”
“What?” I said. “That was an accident. They don’t know what’s going on. Look at the size of this house. Madison? Right? Wouldn’t you be freaked out?”
“They caught on fire,” Madison said.
“I’m sorry,” Jasper said. “I don’t know what I thought was going to happen.”
“Sir?” Carl said, waiting for the word. He was jingling the key to the van.
I felt like the only sane person, and I was in my underwear, holding a ruined muumuu that I’d stolen from a sleeping old lady. “This isn’t fair to them,” I continued. “You have to give them a chance. I can help them, okay? I can figure this out. It’s not that big of a deal, honestly; like, I can already see how to handle it.”
“Lillian, please,” Carl said.
“She’s right, though,” Madison finally said. “Jasper, she’s right. We have to give them time to acclimate to this, to get used to us.”
“I don’t want any harm to come to you or Timothy,” he said, and then, as if remembering the kids in the van, “or to those children.”
“You got that house ready for them, right, the slave quarters—oh shit—sorry, the guesthouse. Okay? You’ve made a place in your home for them. I can help them.”
“Sir, she has no training—”
“CPR, Carl, okay? CPR and . . . other stuff,” I said.
“We let them stay,” Jasper said. “They’re staying. They’re my children. My son and my daughter.”
“This is right,” Madison whispered to him, rubbing his back. Jasper was sweating, the linen not doing a damn thing for him. “Family values, okay? Personal responsibility? A better future for our children?” She was saying these things like she was reading them off of huge billboards along the road. Or like she was coming up with campaign slogans.
“They’re staying, Carl,” Jasper said with some finality. He became senatorial for that moment, standing up straight. Not quite presidential, but maybe vice-presidential.
“Yes, sir,” Carl replied, so formal, returning to the back of the van and throwing the doors open. I ran in front of him, kind of nudging him aside. And the kids were sitting there, half-lidded, as if a little drunk.
“We keep getting your clothes messed up,” Roland said. He was really staring at my body, but things were too weird to worry about that right now.
“I don’t care. I don’t care at all,” I told them.
“We heard you,” Bessie said. “We heard . . . all that.”
“Oh,” I said, not really remembering what had been said.
“We’re staying?” Bessie said, and it sounded like she really wanted the answer to be yes.
“Yeah,” I told her.
“And you’re staying with us, right?” she said.
“I am. I will,” I said.
“So . . . we’re home?” Roland said, so fucking confused. Both children looked at me, their huge eyes fixed on me.
“We’re home,” I said. I knew it wasn’t my home. And it wasn’t their home. But we would steal it. We had a whole summer to take this house and make it ours. And who could stop us? Jesus, we had fire.
Five
When I took the children to the guesthouse, Roland said, “This looks like TV,” and I asked, “You mean like a television show? Like a kids’ show?”
“We don’t have television,” Bessie said. “Mom won’t let us watch television.”
“But we can watch it now?” Roland asked, like it was just dawning on him.
“Oh, yes,” I said. I imagined that we’d watch a lot of television, or I had before I’d actually met the kids. Now I felt like Bugs Bunny would hit Daffy Duck with a hammer and Bessie and Roland would burst into flames. “Well, with some regulations,” I continued. “Only a little bit a day.”
The kids still wouldn’t go in. The door was open, but it was like they were vampires and had to be invited in. Or maybe the house was so pristine, so colorful, that they were afraid of destroying it immediately with what was inside them.
“Are you worried about something?” I asked.
“No,” Bessie said, irritated. “We’re just thinking.”
“About what?” I asked. Their mother, I figured. Their father, maybe.
“None of your business,” she said. Their mother, I figured.
I wanted to learn more about her, from people who had actually been raised by her instead of Madison’s vague asides. But I also didn’t want to know a single thing about her, because it would make me compare myself to her every time the children set their bedsheets on fire.
Finally, Bessie and Roland stepped into the house. “Oh, wow,” Roland said, testing the sponginess of the flooring. “This is cool.”
“Isn’t it?” I said, letting my feet softly sink into the material.
“And look at all those cereals, Bessie,” Roland said, pointing to a pyramid of individual boxes of sugary cereals, and I understood his excitement, having lived a childhood where the cereal was off-brand, giant plastic bags that were twenty percent pulverized corn or wheat. But Bessie was walking up to a tall bookcase, filled with every Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys book in existence, lots of Judy Blume and Mark Twain and all manner of fairy tales.
“These are for us?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I told her. “I can read you any book you want.”