“Hey,” the little girl said. “I’m watching this.”
“I know you’re watching it,” Marilyn said. “And you can watch it just as well with the sound a little lower. And you can hear it just fine that way. I know you can. I have old ears, and I can hear it perfectly well all the way in the kitchen. You have young ears, and you’re sitting right in front of it.”
The girl sighed, and mumbled something unintelligible under her breath. Marilyn assumed it was some sort of quiet sass, and that the little girl was testing the concept of old ears.
“Don’t be like that,” Marilyn said firmly, though in truth she didn’t know what had been said.
“Well, your ears aren’t that old, then.”
It irked Marilyn to be tested in that manner, and she opened her mouth to say something about it. But at that moment the knock came at the door.
She walked quickly to answer it, hoping it was eggs. Sylvia and the girl had taken to eating Marilyn’s eggs, because they were better. Even though she had asked them not to. And now her carton was gone, leaving only a few stray eggs of the supermarket variety, which no longer sounded like anything Marilyn wanted to eat. And besides, they had been sitting in the fridge for weeks.
She had been spoiled by freshness.
She threw the door wide and was pleased to see Stewie standing on the landing with a carton cradled lovingly in his arms.
“There you are,” she said.
She sounded even more pleased to her own ears than she had realized she felt. For a moment she questioned herself as to why she would feel that much emotion around the subject. Because she was glad to see him up and around again? Because she enjoyed his little visits?
The last one seemed like a bridge too far, so she dismissed it and chose to believe she was only hungry for those superior eggs.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “People always say you can set your clock by me. But I think really they should say calendar, not clock. Because I don’t always come at exactly the same time. I just always come on the day they’re expecting me.”
“How have you been feeling since I last saw you?”
He cut his eyes down to the brick of the door stoop. He clearly was not a fan of talking about his emotions.
“I don’t know,” he said.
She thought it was interesting, and possibly significant, that he didn’t add the usual “ma’am” at the end.
“How can you not know?” she asked, half standing outside herself and wondering why she was pushing him. “You’re you. You’re inside yourself. You must know what it’s like in there.”
For a moment he only shuffled his feet, continuing to look away from her face.
Then, hesitantly, and in a voice quieter than usual, he said, “I know what people want me to say when they ask that. They want to hear it’s all better now, but I don’t like to lie, and they don’t really want to hear what I want to say, so I just say I don’t know.”
“I wanted to hear whatever is the truth,” she said.
He raised his eyes to hers. Fleetingly. Hopefully. Then he quickly looked away again.
“You sure? Because nobody else does.”
“I’m positive. I know all about grief. I know it takes longer than most people want to believe. I know you’ll still be feeling it after everybody else has decided it’s time to move on. It’s not a straight line.”
“I didn’t understand that last part, ma’am. I didn’t think it was any kind of a line.”
“What I meant to say . . .” She looked past him to the sun beating down on the lake, causing the surface of the still, sluggish water to sparkle like scattered gems. “. . . is that people think it gets a little better every day. But it doesn’t. It doesn’t go in only one direction like that. You’ll go along for a couple of days thinking you feel better. Thinking you’re able to cope a bit more. And then some little thing happens, or maybe nothing at all, and it comes back around. And you get dropped right down into a big pit of it again, maybe without even knowing why. It seems to go in cycles instead of in one straight line. Now do you know what I mean?”
“Yes, ma’am. I think I do. And I think you’re—”
But he never finished the sentence.
Much to her alarm, he flew past her, bumping her roughly, and ran into the house. It brought a flare of anger in her, because she had just grown to trust him. She had come to think of him as polite and predictable. But this was simply outrageous.
“How dare you?” she called after him, her voice a bellow of rage. “I did not say you could—”
But by then she had spun around to watch him go. And she never finished the sentence, because by then she saw the smoke.
A thick cloud of it had drifted toward the living room, just visible outside the doorway into the kitchen. It smelled acrid and dangerous, and she wondered why the smell hadn’t alerted her sooner. Must have been because she had been standing mostly outside, breathing outdoor air. But she only entertained such thoughts in a distant, disconnected way as she ran into the kitchen.
The boy had the flaming cast-iron skillet by the handle, and was running with it.
He dropped it hard into the empty sink.
In her panic, Marilyn opened her mouth to shout, “Don’t run water on it!” Water on a grease fire would only cause a near explosion. And there were curtains on the window above the sink. Filmy, flammable curtains.
But somehow her voice wasn’t working.
The boy didn’t run water on it. He grabbed a pan lid from the dish rack beside the sink. It was a lid for a bigger pan, which was good. He wouldn’t have to hold it there, his poor small bare hands in the flames, to center it just right. He dropped it over the flaming pan, and jumped back.
Everything went silent and still for a moment.
It was over.
Marilyn breathed deeply.
“I could have burned the whole house down,” she said on a rush of breath.
“No, it was my fault,” Stewie said.
He turned to face her, his hands slightly extended. One, his right hand, had already begun to blister.
“How can you say that? It was my fire, and you put it out.”
“But I made you forget you had something on the stove. I came to the door and then I was talking too much, and I made you forget.”
Marilyn only stood still, feeling slightly dizzy. Exploring the weight and the scope of the bullet she had dodged. Even a small fire might have caused Sylvia to deem her an unsafe and unsuitable babysitter for the girl. And babysitting was the only reason she was allowed to live here. She would have lost the roof over her head.
A big fire might have brought the police. Some kind of investigation, anyway.
She looked at the boy, who was staring at his burned right hand.
It was a good story. Someone came to the door, and that’s why she forgot the frying bacon. That’s what she would say if anyone asked. Maybe she could even rewrite history in her own head. Erase the fact that by the time he had knocked on the door, she had already forgotten she had something on the stove.
She unstuck her feet and raced to the refrigerator, which had a dispenser in its door for water and ice. She pressed in on the lever and allowed three or four ice cubes to drop into her hands.
Marilyn placed them in the boy’s right hand, wrapping her two hands around his smaller one and just holding it that way for a moment.
She stood breathing for a time, trying to settle her heart.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she said.
“But I knocked on the door.”
“Yes. But it was still my responsibility to remember. Now hold that ice for a minute. I have to open all the windows and air out the kitchen before the smoke detectors go off. Stand right here while I do that. Then we’ll do some first aid on your poor hand.”
But still she stood a minute, holding his hand around the ice. Not really wanting to let him go. In her peripheral vision she was barely aware of the little girl standing in the kitchen doorway, watching. But she paid that situation no direct attention.