Rose couldn’t detect any flames, only smoke clouding the can. The air felt cool against her cheek. She pulled her jacket tighter, but she tasted the char in the back of her throat and it warmed her, reminded her of a time long ago, falling asleep in front of the great tiled stove fed by coals—the kachelofen, it was called—at her oma’s house, wanting, more than anything, to stay tucked in the tiny chair by the fire.
As Mary urged the flames on, Rose felt light-headed, heady with the knowledge of a secret that women like Mary carried around with them. She wondered if her mother too burned evidence of her monthlies. Rose couldn’t picture it, couldn’t see Mutti kneeling over a dirty can like this, couldn’t imagine where in their high-ceilinged apartment she would do such a thing.
Then a reckless thought came to her. It didn’t matter what her mother did. Rose felt iciness hollow out her insides; it seemed a horrible betrayal. Rose thought of the postcard, she thought of all those letters from her mother written on tissue-thin purple stationery (stored in a biscuit tin with a royal seal in her wardrobe), she saw Mutti putting on a pair of chandelier earrings, tightening her jacket with the rabbit-fur collar the night she left. Rose, turning away from Mary and the bucket and the smoke, thought about how she too was becoming a woman. But she was not becoming her mother. She never would be. This thought filled her with such a strange, sad, tangled mixture.
Would Rose burn her napkins twenty years from now? When she was grown up, when she was already old and married, with kids of her own, was this what she would do? But the questions made the iciness inside gust upward. How could she answer? For so long she told herself that she was going back home. But now?
Her parents would come here, she told herself with renewed resolve. They would all be here. They would make England their home. She was still a stranger, and yet the place and its ways were not unfamiliar. She hadn’t wanted to belong here, but here she was.
One day this would all seem like a long time ago—Mary, the Cohens, the strangely damp taste of smoke against her lips, the drumbeat of dislocation, this newer feeling of being on the cusp of something. She would tell Mutti about it. This afternoon would exist as a memory, a story she might tell.
Rose peered over the side of the bucket. The mashed papers were sooty, gone hoary gray with ash and burns, turned into something else entirely.
“It’s even harder with proper napkins,” Mary muttered, peering into the can. “But this is what we do here in England.”
Flush with the possibilities of what was to come, Rose barely registered her words.
5
Los Angeles, 2006
One mid-October afternoon, nearly two years after Lizzie arrived in L.A., some kids at school noticed a pallid cloud hovering over the ridge. It was thick, but diffuse somehow. It seemed not to move. The air was uncommonly warm and restless, the Santa Anas in full blast.
“It’s fog,” someone said. It was lunchtime, and the school alley was choked with everyone buying Mountain Dews and Fantas and chips and quesadillas off the taco truck.
“It’s smoke.” Duncan Black rolled his eyes. He lived in Malibu with his father and considered himself an authority on such things.
“It’s past Temescal. It’s at Will Rogers.”
Another boy was talking about how in the last big fire, his best friend’s cousin’s house burned down. “He says it was one of the best things that ever happened to him. They stayed in some sweet-ass hotel down on Wilshire, then he got everything new—everything!—clothes and skateboards and a new set of Blue ?yster Cult records and even some dumb baseball cards he’d had since he was, like, seven. It was sweet, man. Insurance paid for everything.”
No one paid attention. Everyone was looking up at the grayish yellowing cloud, which was unmistakable but not necessarily unusual—it looked more like smog than anything else.
“Where are the flames? You can’t see the flames,” Cori Carpenter said.
“Dumbfuck, of course you can’t see the flames yet. It’s not some fucking movie,” Duncan said with disgust. “Trust me, it’s smoke and it’s coming this way. We’ll be out of school in two hours, tops.”
Kids were filling the air with questions—Is PCH closed down? What about Topanga? How is my mom going to get here? They were nodding and talking and pushing closer to each other, a moving cloud themselves. All Lizzie could think was My house, my things. She thought of her photos and letters and the Mel Gibson collage that Claudia had made her for her fourteenth birthday and her mother’s Connecticut College sweatshirt and the old Mademoiselle that featured a picture of her mother from the summer Lynn worked there, and The Bellhop—oh God, The Bellhop. Lizzie was feeling that familiar sickly sensation; nothing was under her control. Where was her father? No, she whispered to herself.
It took less time than Duncan had predicted. Within the hour, they were gathered in the school gym, told about mandatory evacuations. They were awaiting parents, awaiting friends, held captive until an adult came to claim them.
When the gym was nearly emptied out, Lizzie remained huddled in a corner, convinced that she was going to spend the night on this spongy flesh-colored floor that emitted a weird gaslike odor. She would never see her house or her family again. Then a distracted-looking Max hurried in, Sarah rushing to keep up with him.
Max had picked Sarah up at her elementary school first. He was taking them back to his house in Venice in his battered VW Bug. Joseph was up at the house packing and “watching things,” Max said as he jammed the car key into the ignition, the engine sputtering to life. “He’ll meet us soon.”
In the backseat Lizzie opened the triangle window, nervously scanning the sky.
As Max drove, he tried to distract them, talking about the old amusement park, the Venice of the West, it was called. One hundred years ago, there were gondolas for the canals and dance halls and arcade games and a huge swimming pool with a mechanical wave machine. Lizzie nodded, though she couldn’t picture it. Just let my father be safe, she repeated to herself. They got to Max’s house and Max convinced her and Sarah to go down to the boardwalk. It was hot and crowded with roller skaters and skateboarders and bodybuilders and people eating churros and corn dogs on sticks, people who seemed to have no idea about the fire less than ten miles away. Max bought them ice cream—strawberry in sugar cones—and despite her initial reluctance, Lizzie devoured hers.