Even weighed down with Frank, Mimi reached the front yard before I did. We heard a terrific crash then and all the lights in the house went out. “The gate,” I said to Mimi, and ran down the driveway to open it manually so the firefighters could get in. While I waited for the fire trucks I looked up toward the house. The side angled toward the Dream House reflected the conflagration, making it seem twice as big and the yard out front twice as dark. There was just enough moonlight for me to pick out Mimi’s wraithlike nightgown, a paper cutout against the black background of grass at night. The chunk of darkness where her shoulder should be must have been Frank. I was amazed that she still held him. My arms would have given out long since.
Up where the driveway ended, part of the eucalyptus that stood alongside the Dream House had fallen across the yard and into the shade tree outside Mimi’s office. Now Frank’s favorite perch and repository for random artifacts was burning, too. The Hula-Hoop’s circle and the lollipop shape of the tennis racket were dark against the flames for the moment it took them to catch. Where was the machete?
Then firefighters were streaming up the driveway, dragging hoses. “Is everybody out?” one of them asked me. He turned out to be the captain.
“Yes,” I said.
“Everybody everybody?” he asked.
“Yes. Everybody.”
“Where are they?”
“Front yard.”
“Good. Stay there with them.”
I REACHED THE two of them just as a flaming branch of the shade tree fell away from the trunk and crashed through Mimi’s office window. The curtains went up in a flash and we could see fiery bits of paper spin upward in hot drafts. Mimi dropped Frank and lit out for the house. I started after her, but then Frank flashed past me on his mother’s heels. I grabbed him around the waist and left it to the firefighters to catch Mimi.
When Frank and I caught up to them, Mimi and a fireman were arguing. “Lady, I don’t care if you left your book in there,” the fireman was saying. “Buy yourself another book. I can’t let you go back inside.”
“You don’t understand!” Mimi tried to twist free of him.
“Mom. Mother. Mama. Mimi. Ma. Mommie dearest.” Frank was yelling every variation he could think of to get her attention. Recognizing that the fireman would make the perfect lectern, Frank had shaken me off somehow, scrambled up his back, and put an arm around the guy’s neck for balance. “We’re all in this together, Mama!” Frank shouted. “You and me and Alice. If your book burns, my book will burn and Alice’s book will burn. Are you listening to me? What did I just say?”
The fireman was so distracted by Frank’s chokehold that Mimi was able to duck his grip. “Alice’s book will burn? Frank, what are you talking about?” She plucked her son from his perch and stood him on the grass in front of her. “What book?”
“The book she keeps under her mattress. She writes down everything that happens. I’m always eager for the newest installment. It’s like I’m living in nineteenth-century New York, waiting on the docks for the latest chapter of Dickens to arrive.”
Even a person as tiny as Mimi can look terrifying against a backdrop of swirling flame. “You’re writing a book, Alice?”
“It’s not a book,” I insisted. “Just some notes for Mr. Vargas.”
“Isaac asked you to spy on me?” She pressed the heels of her palms into her eye sockets, then started pounding her forehead with her fists.
“Mother, you stop that right now,” Frank said. “How many times do I have to tell you that hitting your head is bad for your brain?”
Mimi picked him up, stamped his forehead with a kiss, then handed him off to me. “Take him. Whatever you do, don’t let him go,” she said, and bolted for the burning house.
She put up quite a fight when the fireman caught her the second time. It took him plus a couple of paramedics to subdue her. Two of them held her arms and legs while one gave Mimi a shot to calm her down enough to get her in the ambulance. Once she was strapped in, the fireman dashed back to us. “Are you two Alice and Julian?”
“Alice and Frank,” I said.
“Is Julian still inside the house?”
“Julian is my uncle,” Frank said. “He’s dead.”
The fireman’s eyes widened. “In there?” But Frank had turned into about four and a half feet of board lumber and lay unresponsive on the grass.
I touched the fireman’s shoulder to turn him away from Frank. “Suicide,” I said, speaking softly so Frank couldn’t hear me. “Long ago. She was with him when it happened.”
“Got it. I’ll pass that along to the paramedics.”
When we turned back to Frank the kid was shivering. Because California is a desert climate, when the sun isn’t shining directly on you it can get pretty chilly. The fireman brought us one of those shiny aluminum astronaut blankets they hand out to disaster victims. I wrapped Frank up tight and sat on the grass with him in my lap until he stopped shaking and loosened up again enough to talk.
“Alice,” Frank said after the firefighters started rolling up their hoses. “She’s finished her book. Things will be better now, right?”
“Right,” I said. “Go to sleep.”