It was weird to watch them let the place burn. I mean they turned the hoses on it and all, but they weren’t fighting to
save
anything now. Not really. Then I remembered something. I jumped up.
“What is it, Cookie?” Soula called after me. I didn’t answer. I ran through the river of water to get to the fire truck that’d parked beside the mini-mart.
“Hey!” I called up to the cab. I grabbed the chrome bar and pulled myself up to the window. “Hey! I gotta talk to you. Please!”
“We’re on a call!” the fire guy said sternly.
“It’s about the electrical connection! The trailer is hooked up to the Laundromat next door. You’ve got to make sure they pull it!”
The guy practically knocked me off the truck when he swung the door open. He hit the ground running in his big boots. He splashed across Freeman’s Bridge Road and disappeared behind the trailer. In a minute he was standing there again smiling at me and giving me a double thumbs up with his big gloves. I knew that’d be the best thing I’d see that day. The Heads and Roses had been spared.
“It was good you told us about the electrical connection to the other building. That was smart, kiddo.” One of the fire guys gave my head a pat.
“Yeah, I’m a real genius,” I mumbled. All I could think of was the taco pan and how many days I’d let it sit.
“Looks like it started in the kitchen,” the fireman said.
“It did. There was a pan of oil on the stove. I was trying to make cocoa. I must have turned the wrong burner up to high.” I wondered if I could get arrested for that and end up in a reform school or something. But so far, nobody seemed particularly mad at me. I stuck a finger between the bars of Pic’s cage and she took it in her paws and sniffed it.
Gosh, what trouble I must smell like today.
“You prevented a double disaster,” the fireman added, glancing at the Heads and Roses again. Then he smiled as he looked up at the sky. “Ah. Here it comes. Rain’s gonna help.”
I blinked as the drops started to fall.
E
lliot arrived and immediately handed out coffees to the firemen. He moved Soula and Piccolo inside. Me, I felt stuck. Everyone tried to get me to go in. They said I shouldn’t be out there in my bathrobe with bare feet and bare legs (plus I was bare underneath that robe, too), but I really couldn’t feel anything. I watched the fire guys tie and haul the smoking black carcass of the trailer farther away from the Heads and Roses. Elliot brought me a pair of Soula’s slippers. One of the Hose 6 guys put a heavy rubber coat over me and a paramedic asked me to hold some ice between my hands—just for a little while. I thought I was going to sink into the ground.
Mr. and Mrs. Rose arrived to check on the Laundromat. Their plaid pajama legs stuck out below their winter coats. They cupped their hands over their noses as they looked at the charred remains of the trailer. The stink could’ve made the vomit rise in the toughest of stomachs.
The early customers who were always at the corner in the morning stopped to eye the scene. A few cars pulled into the minimart lot. One lady arrived in a gray car and sat there talking on her cell phone with a clipboard across her steering wheel. She looked up at me every once in a while but never at the dead trailer.
Can’t you see there was a fire? I thought. I sighed into the raining sky.
Minutes later, Grandio pulled up in his white car and stopped with his tires right next to my toes. “Addie! Girl! You okay?” He shielded his brow from the rain.
I nodded. “How did you know? Who called you?” I said.
“I called him.” The lady from the gray car stepped up next to us. “Addie, I’m Mrs. Casey. I’m from the Department of Youth and Family Services.”
I whirled and looked into the minimart. Soula was seated in her chair at the front window. She caught my eye, then looked down into her lap.
“Addie,” Mrs. Casey spoke again. “How long has your mother been away?”
I knew Soula had ratted me out. She knew Mommers had been gone too much and now the state knew too. And I had a Mrs. Casey on my case.
“Forever,” I said. “She’s been away forever.”
I turned toward Grandio and sighed. I knew I’d be going home with my next of kin.
“Can you keep Pic for a while?” I set the cage next to Soula. “Grandio will put up a fuss and he’s already upset.” I gazed out the window.
“Of course I will, Cookie. You know I will.” Soula started to cry. She fiddled with the bent section of Pic’s cage. Tried to pop it back out again. “I’m sorry about …” She glanced toward Mrs. Casey’s car. “I couldn’t see what else to do, Cookie. Truth is, I should have called them long ago.”
“I know,” I mumbled. I should have hugged her, should have told her everything was okay. Instead I said, “Thanks for taking Piccolo. I’ll see you soon.” I ran out the door and got into Grandio’s car.
I sat waiting for him while he talked to the fire guys. My hands still hurt from the heat or ice, I wasn’t sure. I could smell smoke in my wet hair. My damp bathrobe started to feel cold on my skin and my insides were slush.
Poor Soula.
It wasn’t enough she was sick. I’d put her in a bad position all those months. Now she felt terrible and I felt terrible.
Finally, Grandio got into the car. “Jaypers, girl. We’re all fogged up! Why didn’t you turn up the blower?” he said.
He cleared the windshield with his hand and put the car in gear. We rolled slowly forward. I turned to look back at the minimart. The clouded window made it hard to see, but I could tell that Soula was at the glass door hugging Piccolo’s cage and watching me go.
I concentrated hard as I drew four big letters in the fog on my window. I was careful to reverse them: H-E-R-O.
I hoped that Soula could see.
“
D
wight?” I cleared my throat and waited. Grandio stood nearby, waiting to take the “ phone.
“Addie? Is that you?”
“Yes. Sorry to call so early,” I said. Grandio gave me a nudge.
“Everything all right?”
“Dwight, I burned down your trailer,” I said.
“Sweet screamin’ jeez— You all right?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Denise okay?”
“She wasn’t there.”
Grandio huffed and mumbled. “Not there, all right!” I covered my ear, tried to block him out.
“Wow. So what happened?” Dwight asked.
“It was stupid. I’m really sorry. I was being stubborn. There was a pan on the stove and I—”
Grandio took the phone. “Dwight, this is Jack here. Yeah, they say—”
He told Dwight everything while I sat at the old farm table in my soggy bathrobe. Eventually, I tuned out. I picked through a shopping bag of stuff Mrs. Casey had given me. (She had come to the fire prepared.) There was a T-shirt, a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans, a 3-pack of underpants, some socks and a sports bra. I thought about some of the things that were gone now, lost in the burned trailer forever: a bank card—melted now; an electric blue duffel—incinerated; a vocabulary book—probably in ashes.
“Addie,” Grandio held the phone out to me. “Dwight wants you back.”
“Wants me back? Oh.” I took the phone.
“Addie, I just want to make sure you know, the trailer means nothing. Nothing at all. All I care about is that you’re okay. Got it?”
“Got it,” I choked.
“Okay. We’ll be down later tonight. All of us.” I set down the phone.
“Well, girl,” Grandio said, “better go get yourself warmed up in the shower.”
“Right,” I said. “My second one today.”
That night, everyone seemed to be in such good moods. Grandio was enjoying having a crowd to cook dinner for. Besides, he was mush in Hannah’s presence, and she was helping him in the kitchen. The Littles climbed all over me. They asked about the fire and kind of inspected me as if there should be something visibly different about me after what had happened. Dwight was making jokes. “I don’t care about the trailer,” he said. “But you could have invited us over if you were going to have a bonfire. We could have roasted wieners and marshmallows, kid!”
The laughter made me relax. Soon the whole crazy day started to slip away like an old skin and all I felt was tired. I sank into the couch. Dwight would hardly leave my side, and I found myself leaning sleepily toward him—going for his arm again, the way I always used to. “Sorry,” I said, righting myself on the couch beside him. He pulled me back over without a word and sat twirling a strand of my hair in his finger until they had to leave.
H
elena and her mom drove a big box of secondhand clothes out to Grandio’s farm three days after the fire. The room mothers from my old school had taken up a collection. I say
old
school because now that I was living at Grandio’s, I was being reenrolled at Borden again. My old school had become my new school and vice versa.
“Some of the stuff in the box is kind of lame,” Helena whispered as she leaned toward me. “But some of it’s good. Robert’s older sister sent some things. She gets good stuff and I think it’ll fit you.”
I had about four minutes to show Helena around the farm. Her mother stood on the front step with Grandio, but they were shuffling their feet the whole time like people trying to think of something to say. I didn’t have too much hope of seeing Helena again, but we both pretended that we would.
Meanwhile, I heard just bits and pieces about Mommers. I was pretty sure Mrs. Casey had figured me for a liar when I said I didn’t know where Mommers was staying. But it was the truth. Heck, I didn’t even know Pete’s last name. But somehow they found her. Grandio told me that. He explained that she was not permitted to visit me just yet, and I think she might have even been taken to jail, at least for a while. I didn’t ask. I knew that courts and agencies would make all the decisions. Mrs. Casey would come around when she had questions for me.
After supper that night, I talked to Grandio.
“I really miss Piccolo,” I said. “And …um, I really think it’s too much to ask Soula to keep on taking care of a pet when she isn’t so well, ya know?”
He looked up from his paper. (He had a habit of reading at the table.) “Where we gonna put a mouse?”
“Hamster,” I said. I got up from the table and set my dishes in the sink. “I’ll keep her in my room,” I promised.
Grandio scowled as he thought. I hooked my fingers into the belt loops of my Mrs. Casey jeans and waited for an answer.
“Those little rats are nocturnal. It’ll keep you awake all night. How about we put her out in the barn or the coop? She’ll like the straw,” he suggested.
“Piccolo isn’t used to that. She won’t bother me at night. We shared a bunk in the trailer. She needs something …familiar. She needs me.”
Grandio let a few seconds grind by. “Saturday, then. We’ll pick her up.”
I let my breath go.
“
H
i ya, Elliot!” I made a grand entrance at the minimart like a celebrity returning to her stage. “ “I’m back for Piccolo. Grandio’s running errands and says I’ve got forty five minutes to visit. Where’s Soula?”
Elliot’s face was hanging sort of plain and expressionless. He gave me a weak smile and whispered, “We lost her, Addie.”
I leaned forward. “You lost Piccolo?”
“No. We lost Soula.”
“What? Elliot? You’re joking, right?” I spoke slowly. “Like …uh …how could anyone lose something as big as Soula?”
“No, kiddo. I’m sorry. I mean she died.”
It must have been me who screamed. I felt it in my throat. I rushed to the Greenhouse, sure I’d find her there in the papasan chair, shaking out a chuckle the way she did. All I found was the chair—empty, like a nest. All her things—all Soula’s bright, crazy, colorful scarves and big dresses—hung still in the open closet. Her nail polish bottles—hot pinks and cherry reds—stood like little toys on the vanity. Elliot had come in behind me. He gave me a hug when I turned around.
“Was it because of me? Was it the fire?” I asked. “Did that day kill her?”
“No, no, no. She was just so sick,” he said.
“Oh, Elliot. I can’t believe it. I thought I’d come back and give her this humongous hug and …”
“I know,” he said. “Addie, you should just let it out. The waterworks, I mean. You’ll feel much better.”
Boy, that was all I needed to burst the dam. Elliot opened me up a minipack of tissues.
“Here ya go.” He handed them to me. “I’ve gone through at least ten of these myself and I’m not done yet. She’s left a big empty spot in this poor heart.” He thumped his chest.
I think I cried for everything that day. For Soula, for the fire, and for how much Elliot hurt. I cried for being mean to Dwight and for not being with him and my little sisters. I cried for Mommers and for not knowing what would happen to us all.
Later, Elliot poured me a hot chocolate and brought Piccolo over to me. I sat on a milk crate with the cage between my feet. Elliot sat on Soula’s old busted down lawn chair. We sat looking out across the street at the empty black patch where the trailer had stood. I could see the grassy slope that led up to the train. It was greening up with springtime almost like it was repairing itself.
“What happened to seven down and one to go?” I asked him.
“She never had the last one. To tell you the truth, I think the battle was over a while ago. But none of us wanted to say so.”
I blew my nose and went for another tissue.
“Do you think it was those brown fields, Elliot? Is that how Soula got the cancer? Do you think it was the gasoline tanks?”
“We’ll never know,” he said, shaking his head. “No one can be sure. There are mysteries in life, kiddo. And some of them just plain stink. But you should know that when it came time, she really needed to go. She wanted to go. Oh, and she left you something!” He bounced up, went to the cash register, and pulled a fat envelope out of the drawer and handed it to me. I hesitated.
“Should I open it now?”
“Sure.”
The bulk of it was money—a lot of green bills. I could just about see Soula’s hands, her hot pink nails slipping bills into that envelope. It made me dizzy to think about it. I didn’t count the money. I was interested in a handwritten letter that was wrapped around it. I unfolded it.