“No, not much. Not all that much. More since Mom died,” Bessie offered.
“What would your mom do to keep you guys from catching on fire?” I asked.
“Push us into the shower,” Bessie said, seeming to think of this as an injustice, squeaky shoes and damp underwear.
“She made us get up real early, every morning, no matter what,” Roland said. “She said it was better when we were a little tired. And she made us do tons of chores. And lessons. All these lessons with pencil and paper. And she would fill up the tub with ice cubes and cold water and we’d have to get in it.”
“She kept the house real cold,” Bessie said, “even in the winter. But—” She looked away, embarrassed.
“But what?” I asked.
“But I don’t think that it really helped,” she finally said, the whole time looking at Roland like they held a secret. “It doesn’t matter if we’re hot or cold when things are okay. It doesn’t matter if we’re around a fire, like on the stove, but Mom thought it would make us think about fire and then it would happen. But it’s not like that. Not really. It doesn’t matter except when we start to catch on fire.”
“And can you stop yourself?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” Bessie admitted. “If Mom was around, she’d see it happening and get so freaked out and try to make us stop, but that would make it worse. But if Roland and I are by ourselves, and we feel it happening, sometimes we just make our minds go blank, and it stops. Sometimes.”
“Okay,” I said, like I’d cracked some spy code and was going to win a million dollars. “So we’ll watch for it and then try to help you calm down.”
“What’s all that?” Roland asked, pointing to the sprinkler system, which brought me back to reality.
“That’s in case of a fire,” I told him. “For emergencies.”
“Mom got rid of smoke alarms,” Roland said. “They went off too much.”
“Well,” I said, thinking, “the sprinklers are there to keep us safe.”
“The fire doesn’t hurt us,” Bessie said.
Well, I realized, it was to keep me safe. It was to keep the house safe. It was to keep the house where Madison and Jasper and Timothy lived safe. I thought of a little smoke, the sprinklers going off, everything soaking wet, all the electronics and books ruined. I thought about that happening once or twice a day.
“Maybe I can get Carl to turn them off,” I offered, and the kids seemed happy with this possibility.
And then, as if by magic or perhaps the possibility of constant, invasive surveillance, Carl’s voice echoed through the house. “Hello?” he asked. He was downstairs, and I imagined him holding a fire extinguisher like the hero in a bad movie.
“That’s Carl,” I said, and the kids nodded.
“He’s a real square,” Bessie said, and I wanted to hug her so tightly.
“Who is he?” Roland asked. “Is he your boyfriend?”
“God, no,” I said, almost laughing. “He’s like my manager. Or, no, maybe we’re like coworkers with way different responsibilities. Or—”
“Lillian?” Carl now shouted. I had kind of forgotten that he was there.
“Yeah?” I shouted back.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“Everything is fine,” I said.
“Could you come downstairs?” he asked.
“Us too?” Roland shouted.
“No!” Carl shouted, but then he corrected himself. “You guys just stay up there for a second while I talk to Lillian.”
“Do you want us to come with you?” Bessie asked. I had a hard time looking at her and not seeing waves of flame erupting from her skin. I simply shook my head. “I’m okay,” I said. As I walked out of the room, I peeked my head back in and said, “If you feel it coming, run to the shower and turn it on, okay?” The kids nodded, and I felt like this was a kind of test, to let them out of my sight, to feel them above me, to hear them breathing.
Downstairs, Carl was on his knees, sweeping up cereal crumbs with a dainty little broom and dustpan. He looked up at me. “Seems like they’re settling in,” he said, and I felt a little judged.
“They haven’t caught on fire again,” I told him, a little proud of myself.
“We’ll see how long that lasts,” he replied.
“You heard Jasper, right?” I asked him. “This is happening. You’re not getting rid of them.”
“So?” Carl asked.
“So help me, okay?”
“I will help you, Lillian,” he said. “I’ll help you make the right decisions.”
“For instance,” I said, ignoring the little ways he dug into me, “we have to turn off the sprinkler system.”
“It was two grand to install that system,” Carl replied, like it was his fucking money, like Timothy’s stuffed animal budget wasn’t four times that amount.
“How much did all these electronics cost?” I asked. “How about the books, the clothes, the bedsheets? Those kids caught on fire twice in a single day, right? This house will be like a constant rainstorm if you keep the sprinkler system on.”
“So I turn off the system,” he said, “and then what happens when they catch on fire again?”
“Carl, please. Carl? Please. I will put them out.”
“Twenty-four hours a day? What about when you’re asleep?”
“Twenty-four/seven. I’m a light sleeper. I have a plan, okay?”
“All right,” Carl said. I think maybe he now had a sense of how powerful I was. The children were mine, and that gave me something that he didn’t have. “All right, I’ll shut it off. But that’s our secret. Senator Roberts needs to think that there are true safety measures in place.”
“I’m not going to tell Jasper. Holy shit, do you think I would tell Jasper?”
Carl looked at me with some measure of sincerity. His posture changed, just the slightest slackening. “Lillian, honestly? I don’t know what you will or won’t do. But my livelihood is now connected to yours. So we work together. Agreed?”
“That’s great, Carl,” I said, kind of meaning it and kind of making fun of him. “I’d like that.”
“Now, the reason I came over here was to say that Mrs. Roberts thinks that perhaps having a family dinner might be too overwhelming for the children, not only Roland and Bessie but also Timothy.”
“Okay,” I said. So this was how it would work, a line demarcating us and them. I wondered if Jasper would ever see the kids again. I wondered if Madison and I would still hang out, and I figured that we still would, but in different ways.
“You’ll be okay making them dinner here?” Carl asked.
“Sure. No problem,” but I wasn’t quite sure of the mechanics of it. I was used to microwaving something and eating it over the trash can. And, over the last week or so, I’d gotten used to Mary making the most amazing meals that I couldn’t stop eating. I would miss Mary so much, now that I was fully banished to this guesthouse. I wanted the children to meet her.
“All right, then,” he said. He turned but then suddenly turned back. “Do you see that phone?” he asked, pointing to the wall-mounted handset next to the refrigerator. I nodded. “If you ever need me, no matter what time it is or what it’s about, pick up that phone and push one-one-one-one. Okay?”