“She’s nice,” Roland said.
“Maybe,” Bessie said. “She’s weird.”
“So what do we do?” he asked.
“We just wait and see,” Bessie said.
“And if it’s bad?” Roland said. “Like at Gran-Gran and Pop-Pop’s?”
“We’ll just burn it all down,” Bessie said. “Everything. Everyone. We’ll set it on fire.”
“Okay,” Roland said.
“Good night, Roland,” Bessie said.
“Good night, Bessie,” Roland said.
They settled into positions of sleep, their bodies relaxing. It was so dark in the room. I could hear them breathing. And then, maybe a minute later, Bessie said, “Good night, Lillian.”
I lay there in the dark, the kids next to me. “Good night, Bessie,” I finally said.
And then we were all asleep, inside that house, our new home.
Six
We spent the next three days in the pool while I worked out what to do with the kids. This is not an exaggeration. Right when they woke up, their bodies pleasantly warm as they huddled against me in the bed, I would pick them up, cover them with sunscreen, just a shockingly ridiculous amount even though I couldn’t imagine that the sun would hurt them, and we would run to the pool and cannonball into the water. We played Marco Polo for hours, our fingertips so wrinkled that it seemed like permanent damage had been done. I’d take a break around lunchtime and make bologna sandwiches and the kids would eat them at the edge of the pool, the bread soggy, their hands smeared with mustard until they simply dunked them into the water. When they got tired of swimming, we lounged around under umbrellas and napped. Our eyes burned from the chlorine, but what else could we do?
And everyone left us alone. No Madison. No Jasper. Not even Carl hovering at the edges. I didn’t see any gardeners or maids in our area. We were a world unto ourselves, even though I knew it was temporary. Eventually we would have to figure something out, a way to integrate the children into the real world. I imagined a time when they sat at that huge dining room table in the mansion, eating eggs Benedict or whatever the fuck while their father read the paper and told them scores from the Braves game the day before. I imagined them walking the aisles of the library in town, picking out books, books that we could confidently check out without worrying about them catching on fire, dear lord, the rescinding of our library card. I imagined them inside the mansion, then leaving for school, then coming back home. I imagined them sleeping in a bed that wasn’t mine. Where was I during all this? Far away, right? Like, if I got the kids to this level of normalcy, they wouldn’t need me anymore. And I wasn’t sure if I was happy or sad about it. And then I felt stupid, getting worried about my eventual success as a nanny, because I was dealing with children who burst into flames, so it would probably never actually happen. I was already imagining a world where I hadn’t fucked up, where I’d saved the day. How would I make it to that world?
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.