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I raced down the hallway and pounded on the door of my sister’s room. There was no answer, so I ran in and found her, sleeping like she always did, kitty corner across the bed, the sheets in a knot around her legs.
“Zilla!”
She woke up with a start. “What? What’s . . .”
“You didn’t put the fire out. We have to go.”
“Fire?” Her hair was sticking up in a wild rooster tail over the back of her head, and I wanted to kill her and hug her all at the same time.
How, I wondered, could she do this to me?
I grabbed her by the wrist like she was a little girl and yanked her out of the bed. Furious and scared.
“Oh my god,” she said. “That’s smoke.”
“Yeah, Zilla. You didn’t put out the fire.”
“I did. I swear . . . Poppy, listen. I did. I put it out.”
“Clearly not.” We ran down the stairs into the kitchen. Outside the sliding glass doors, it was a wall of flame. Red and orange, licking at the bright black sky. It was so hot in the kitchen, smoke thick at the ceiling and getting thicker every minute.
And loud. So loud. I remembered the fire in our childhood home, screaming at Zilla but her not hearing me over the sounds of the fire eating the wood of the house we grew up in.
It was all of that. Again.
“Holy shit,” Zilla said, beside me. “I swear I did not do this.”
Smoke was coming in through the seam in the patio doors, and I had the feeling that the glass wasn’t going to stand all that heat, just as it cracked in one huge catastrophic fission from one corner to the other.
I grabbed my phone from the counter where I charged it every night.
“Go!” I shouted at my sister just as the sound of the house alarm could be heard over the roar of the fire outside and my own internal screaming.
“Poppy?” It was Theo coming in the front door.
Oh my god. The relief was astounding.
“We’re here!” I shouted and pushed my sister towards the front door. “We’re okay!”
“I called 911!” he shouted. He was standing in the doorway, wearing grey sweatpants and a t-shirt and nothing else. He didn’t even have shoes on. “You need to get out of this house!”
I followed Zilla out the door, and Theo grabbed my elbow. “Is there anything you need to grab? Documents? Anything important?”
In case the house burned down before fire trucks could get here. This house had not a single thing in it that I cared about. Not a single thing. I thought of that banker’s box from the lawyer, but it was just paperwork.
“No,” I told him.
He nodded, like he understood and put his arm over my shoulder, and we ran out into the lane. It felt like years, but it was probably only a few minutes before we heard the sirens.
“Poppy,” Zilla said. She stood in front of me with red-rimmed eyes and wild hair. “I swear to you, I put out the fire.”
Some things are worth the consequences. She said that earlier tonight. As well as all the shit about Caroline and how the house was a prison.
“You don’t believe me?” she asked, and she didn’t sound angry. She sounded hurt. She looked hurt.
“I don’t know what to believe,” I told her honestly. Tears from the smoke and from my baffled heart and our bruised past welled up in my eyes.
Zilla licked her lips, tears in her eyes too. “I know . . . I mean, I guess I understand that I deserve that in some capacity. But you know I’m good right now. I’m on my meds. I’m stable. I’m going to fucking nursing school, Pops. I’m not a person who burns down houses anymore.”
The sirens were no longer in the distance. They were deafening as the trucks made their way into my little cul-de-sac. Theo herded us out of the way.
“They’ll have questions for you,” he said to me.
“I don’t have any answers.”
Over my shoulder his arm tightened. A strange hug, and I leaned into him. A strange hug back. And then he stepped forward to go talk to the firefighters pouring out of the trucks, and I was so grateful that he was going to answer questions, because I was terrified of the answers I had.
“Poppy?” Ronan’s accent pulled me away from my sister. I took a step to the side to find him standing in the shadows. His face all pale angles in the gloom.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, astounded to see him. He was dressed in a dark overcoat with black gloves on his hands. He smelled of smoke, though I imagine the whole neighborhood did.
“I heard the sirens.”
“It’s four in the morning.”
He didn’t answer. “Are you all right?”
