“Okay, okay,” the fireman said, in a low, soothing voice. “No one’s home—is that what you’re telling me?”
“But the money!” she cried, struggling to push past him. He held her steady, murmuring words he meant to be calming, but the panic had gripped her. It had curled its fingers around her heart and was making it beat and beat and beat until the blood churned in her veins in an agitated frenzy.
Delilah could see it, high in her closet: the shoebox filled with cash. Hundreds of dollars now, and all of it gone. There would be no easy escape. No brick-and-ivy buildings. No apartment just for them, light and white and empty but for their bed and their little dining table and the possibility of anything, anything in the world after this. Gone.
Delilah felt herself sliding down the side of the fire truck, felt the hot rubber of the tire on her back, the cold asphalt of the street beneath her, and buried her face against her bent knees. The fireman halfheartedly reached to pull her back to her feet and then gave up, standing close enough for her to feel the cuff of his heavy, scratchy pants against her calf. She assumed he meant it to be comforting, so she resisted the urge to scoot away. But it wasn’t comforting. The last thing she needed to be reminded of right at that second was how close she was to everything, to everyone.
Heels clicked on the street near her head, and her mother’s hysterical voice rang too sharply in the air, like a knife cutting through glass: screechy and shattering. “I’m Belinda Blue! This is my house! What is happening? What is going on?”
“There’s been a fire, ma’am.” The same fireman pulled Delilah’s mother to the side and explained in a low voice everything he knew. “We got a call only about fifteen minutes ago. Said the back of the house was on fire. Looks like an accident, though we’ll know when we get inside. We think it was started from the wires overhead.. . .”
Delilah stopped listening. She knew it was no accident.
? ? ?
In the end, the fire was put out in minutes, and the whole process felt wiltingly anticlimactic. A swarm of police and delighted, idle town officials took only a half hour to deem the fire an accident caused by overheated electrical wires stretching in unsightly ropes above the backyard. Delilah stared up at them, sagging as if exhausted and innocuously silent. Shut off for now, most likely. She had no idea how danger could have leaped from such a mild-mannered tangle of wires into her bedroom, but she seemed to be the only one left unconvinced. Her hands remained clenched into nervous fists at her sides. She startled at any small sound behind her.
Pulling out her phone, Delilah texted Gavin a simple, Call me.
She walked around to the front of the house and through the front door. The firemen had closed off her bedroom from the rest of the rooms with a thick plastic tarp. Even so, everything smelled like soot and ash and wet, dripping wood. For the time being, Delilah’s new sleeping quarters would be the living room, but nothing could be salvaged from her bedroom to put down here with her, so it looked as it always did: dim, polished, cluttered with hundreds of ceramic statues.
? ? ?
Belinda looked like a stranger, or a crazy person. Who else but a person who has lost her mind comes home to her house on fire and then two hours later smiles as she emerges from the kitchen with some sliced apple and a pill for her daughter?
“This’ll help you calm down.” She handed Delilah the pill and some water and put the apples down on the coffee table.