It was really Priss who couldn’t let it go. Priss had been her friend for so long that Melissa didn’t even remember herself without the little girl that lived under her bed. Even her parents accepted Priss as a permanent fixture of their lives. She even got a present at Christmas. Priss was there when no one could play, when she was scared at night, when her parents argued—which wasn’t that often but really bad when they did.
What had her parents argued about that night? Money. What exactly about money, Melissa couldn’t even remember. Something her mother, Jessie, had bought, not discussing it with her father, Ramon, first. He had a bad temper, and Mom wasn’t one to back down either. It started over dinner where they kept their voices tight and controlled because Melissa was there. But when she went up to do her homework, their angry voices wafted up. It went on.
When her mother came to say good-night, Melissa could see that she’d been crying, her eyes red, her smile fake.
“Are you okay?” she asked her mom. Sometimes her mom came and slept on the floor of her room. Tonight might be one of those nights.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Married people argue sometimes.”
“About money.”
Her mother offered a little laugh, pushed a wisp of hair away from Melissa’s eyes. “Arguments are almost never about the thing they’re about.”
Melissa understood that, and didn’t.
“But it’s okay. We’ll work it out. We always do, don’t we?”
Priss was under the bed, had been since Melissa had come up to do her homework. As she got older, she saw Priss less and less often.
After the yelling died down, and Melissa lay in her bed, Priss wouldn’t stop talking about those matches. Not that she talked exactly. It was kind of like an idea in Melissa’s head that was there because it was in Priss’s head. Later, she would try to explain this to the battalion of doctors she saw, until she realized it just made her seem strange and she should stop talking about Priss and her ideas altogether.
Downstairs, Melissa took the matches from the drawer in the kitchen and brought them to the living room where she thought she would light the candles.
Honestly, that was the last moment she remembered clearly. She knew that the flame caught on one of the drapes, and that it went up with a horrifying whoosh, a terrible exhale of breath. She remembered that she didn’t scream, because she was so afraid that she would get in trouble. The fire, just like her mother had warned her, leaped from one thing to the next. She just watched, mesmerized by its acrobatics, its swiftness, its unapologetic swallowing of everything it touched. Both her parents died that night from smoke inhalation. Melissa was rescued by firefighters. And she never saw Priss again.
Apparently there was something about the construction of the house, something faulty in the drywall that turned it into a tinderbox. And there was a huge life insurance policy, which Melissa’s grandparents were careful to save and invest for her.
No one ever blamed her exactly for what had happened. A terrible mistake, the shrink said, an accident. But sometimes when she thought Melissa wasn’t looking, her grandmother watched her with such a look of sadness and confusion. What would it be like to raise the grandchild who accidentally killed your only daughter? Melissa would wonder later when she was older, had years of therapy, was less myopic. But both her grandparents were gone by then.
When she met Jack on Torch, she had no living immediate family, a loving circle of friends—who all had their own families now—some distant second cousins who sent cards at Christmas. But the truth was that she was terribly lonely—obviously. There would be no other reason to enter into the morass of online dating.
The world, it’s a chaos, he said. Can’t you feel the precipitous decline?
All you had to do was turn on the news to know that it was true. Most people were sleepwalking, anesthetized by their games, social media, sports obsessions, permissible upscale addictions like food and wine. The world was coming undone, and most people were more interested in cute cat videos.
I have a place we can go. Not forever. Just a break.
Of course she said yes.
She popped the lid on the cola can she had in the center consul. It was warmish, but it was the blast of sugar and caffeine she needed.
Melissa kept driving on the dark, winding road. It couldn’t be much longer now.
nineteen
Now
I’ve barely slept as the sun rises, the light through the blinds painting my bedroom pink. I draw in a breath, reach for my phone. No more texts from you. I’m relieved—and bereft.