“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.

She hadn’t cried at all since her dad died and didn’t intend to. But seeing the evidence of the fire, the birds an occasional black blot against the sun, she felt an incredible, an immeasurable grief. Amy was safe. She knew that. The doctor had told her she would be fine—no asthma even. But Minna couldn’t stop thinking about what could have happened, what had almost happened, how close they had come.

Unimaginable tragedy. She’d heard that expression, somewhere, in an article about a mother who lost her child in an accident. But Minna could imagine it, in vivid detail, and she had been ever since Trenton called her, breathless, half senseless, two nights earlier. Fire, fire. That’s all she remembered hearing, and the sharp cry of sirens in the background. Fire.

When Amy had grabbed the phone and started to sob, Minna’s knees nearly gave out. She’d always thought that was just an expression, but it wasn’t. She actually felt her legs simply stop working, like they’d been vaporized.

Still, the fear stayed with her. She’d had a dream the night before they were all on a roller-coaster ride, hurtling through the darkness, and sparks kept grinding out from under the wheels. She hated it when her subconscious churned out such obvious metaphors.

She couldn’t even masturbate. She’d tried yesterday, in bed, in the shower, even in the study, now empty of everything but furniture, thinking that might be the problem, the source of the horrible tenseness inside of her, a swollen feeling, like she was filling slowly with steam. But she couldn’t even get close. Pleasure came in a short initial wave and then petered out. She worked her own hand so hard against her body that she was left feeling raw, with a headache from gritting her teeth.

“You okay?” Toadie said. He put a hand on her arm, so his fingers grazed the inside of her elbow. She tried to pretend it excited her and turned to him, forcing a smile.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Thank you. For helping.”

“You know I could never say no to you,” he said. He had little webbed lines by his eyes when he smiled now. He was a lot larger. But otherwise he looked just the same.

Two weeks ago she wouldn’t have said she’d been in love with Toadie in high school—prom weekend she’d ended up f**king his friend Peter Contadino in the bathroom—but now she was beginning to think that maybe he was the only person she had ever truly loved. She was remembering all the good times: the gentleness of his touch, as if he was always afraid she might shatter; staying up on his roof to watch the sun touch everything in turn, making each house, valley, and hill real again, like God bringing nameless things out of the dark. While her parents were negotiating the terms of their separation—which was just as complex and entangled as their marriage—Minna had practically moved into Danny’s house, sleeping most nights on the pull-out sofa in his basement. She remembered how she had once woken in the middle of the night to find him sleeping next to her, shirtless, one hot arm slung around her waist, his chest pressed to her back. Thinking he finally wanted to have sex, she reached for him. But he stopped her. “You were crying in your sleep,” he’d whispered, and for a moment she was rigid with embarrassment, with fear. He had stroked her hair until she fell asleep, as if she were a child; and they had never mentioned it again.

“You got a roof guy?” Danny asked, passing her a pair of latex gloves. “I got a roof guy, if you need one.”