She wished she could tell him to shut up. Her hands were shaking.
“And how proud he was at graduation. He must have taken a million pictures. Look for the most beautiful girl in the room, and that’s my daughter.”
She didn’t remember any of it. She felt a sudden wrench of grief. She realized, horrifyingly, she was on the verge of tears.
“Do you think—” Her voice broke a little and she swallowed. “Do you think some people aren’t meant to be happy?” She didn’t even know what she was going to ask before the words were spoken.
Danny shuffled a little closer. They were still squatting, both of them, among the drift of ashes. It would have been funny if it didn’t feel so awful.
“Hey,” he said. “Hey. Look at me.” She managed to. His eyes were nice and brown and unremarkable, like the rest of him—one hundred percent normal. He might be the only normal person she knew.
“You’re going to be happy, Minniemouse,” he said, his old nickname for her; then he put one hand on her cheek and brushed away the dampness with his thumb, which was calloused and comfortable feeling.
Suddenly she could imagine it, and she knew that this was the answer; and she was kissing him, hard, pushing her tongue onto his, trying to get deeper, to push into him, to find the softness of that big black space where she could disappear.
“Wait,” he said, pulling away, gasping a little.
“No.” She grabbed his face, straddled him, pushed her br**sts against him. Down, she wanted to go down, into a place of quiet and breathlessness and heartbeats, into a place where she was alone and at peace.
“Wait. Wait.” This time he put both hands on her shoulders and pushed her backward. He wiped his mouth with his hand, like she was contaminated, and Minna saw pity in his eyes and felt suddenly cold. “Stop.”
“What’s the matter with you?” Her voice sounded like a stranger’s, or like a voice heard from far away: small, strangled. “Are you g*y or something?”
“I’m married, Minna.” He was still looking at her in that pitying way, like she was a child and he was breaking the news about a dead kitten.
“You said you were separated.”
“Minna . . . ” He sighed and rubbed his forehead, where he was going bald. “That’s not how things work.”
She stood up and felt the floor seesaw underneath her. She wanted to crush him, to humiliate him, to let him know how little she cared about him. She wanted to reach inside him and find what was soft and twist, and twist. “It’s okay. Everyone thought you were g*y in high school, too.”
Something flickered in his eyes. Anger. Minna felt triumphant.
But instead of yelling, he simply stood up. “See you later, Minna,” he said, in a tired voice, and made for the stairs.
“That’s why I f**ked Peter Contadino,” she burst out. She wasn’t thinking straight. It was like being drunk, like falling into a long tunnel of unconsciousness. “At prom. Because you wouldn’t. Because everyone said you were g*y.”
He paused at the top of the stairs. His spine went rigid. Now he would turn around. Now he would come back, yell at her, look at her.
But he didn’t. He didn’t say anything at all. Minna’s whole world teetered on the edge of a long second. Then Danny continued downstairs, leaving Minna alone.
AMY
Secrets were for grown-ups. That’s what Uncle Trenton said. And Amy had a secret now, and that meant she was all grown up like Uncle Trenton and like Mommy.
The secret was about the dead girl, who had a name, which was Katie. But Amy couldn’t tell anyone about the dead girl, not her name or anything else about her, like the fact that she smelled like flowers and not dirt.
“Remember, Amy,” Uncle Trenton had said. “I’m counting on you. This is big-girl stuff.”
Amy promised because she liked the dead girl and didn’t want to get her in trouble. The dead girl had carried Amy away from the fire and had stood holding hands with her outside while they listened to the scream scream of fire engines in the distance and Trenton shouted on the phone, and when Amy’s socks got all wet with dew, the dead girl helped her take them off and even took off her own shoes and socks, too, so they could have bare feet together.
“Shhh,” she said, when the trucks were so close Amy could see the trees lit up red and white and blue from all the sirens. The dead girl smiled and pressed a finger to Amy’s lips, and the finger tasted a little like smoke. “I was never here.”
Amy watched her disappear into the darkness, holding her shoes in one hand.
PART VII
THE BATHROOMS
ALICE
It has been four days since the fire, and since Sandra first decided on the silent treatment. Even though I’ve spent decades trying unsuccessfully to get her to shut up, now that she has, I find that I miss her conversation.
I went through the same thing when Ed died. I’d longed for his death, prayed for it, fantasized about it the way some people do about tropical vacations. One time, after a bad storm, we were confined to the house for four straight days; we both must have gone a little crazy. Ed was taking shots from our bedroom window at the crows huddled on the bare branches of the sycamore tree across the field, and missing every time but one; later he fell asleep, whiskey-drunk, with his arm still around the shotgun. In the middle of the night I got out of bed and stood above him, staring at that barrel gleaming sharp as a promise, staring at the shadowed blot of his head, thinking, I could do it. I could really do it. I stood there for what felt like hours, until my arms ached, until my toes were numb with cold. Then he rolled over and his face moved into the square of moonlight on his pillow and I drew back, ashamed of myself, horrified.
Then it happened. March 22, 1972. I was making coffee and three fried eggs and bacon; Maggie was living in San Francisco by then. Ed was upstairs, shaving. We’d had a bad fight the night before. He’d come home late, drunk. I’d shoved my fingers down my throat to be sick so he wouldn’t force himself on me.
I heard a heavy thud, like a sack of new dough dropping. I found him on the bathroom floor with his trousers off and a razor in his hand, and a small bit of toilet paper clinging to his chin, where he’d nicked himself and tried to stop the bleeding. He died even before he reached the hospital.
The doctors told me later it was a heart attack. It happened that way sometimes, they told me. Too much drinking, too much fat in his diet, too much stress. We’re all just a collection of wires pulled tight, charged beyond capacity—a tangle of plugs and valves, waiting for a surge to take down the whole system.