“None of your business,” she said. Their mother, I figured.
I wanted to learn more about her, from people who had actually been raised by her instead of Madison’s vague asides. But I also didn’t want to know a single thing about her, because it would make me compare myself to her every time the children set their bedsheets on fire.
Finally, Bessie and Roland stepped into the house. “Oh, wow,” Roland said, testing the sponginess of the flooring. “This is cool.”
“Isn’t it?” I said, letting my feet softly sink into the material.
“And look at all those cereals, Bessie,” Roland said, pointing to a pyramid of individual boxes of sugary cereals, and I understood his excitement, having lived a childhood where the cereal was off-brand, giant plastic bags that were twenty percent pulverized corn or wheat. But Bessie was walking up to a tall bookcase, filled with every Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys book in existence, lots of Judy Blume and Mark Twain and all manner of fairy tales.
“These are for us?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I told her. “I can read you any book you want.”
“We can read,” Bessie said, her face reddening at the idea that I might have thought that she couldn’t. “We read all the time.”
“That’s all we do is read,” Roland said. “But Pop-Pop and Gran-Gran didn’t have any books for kids. It was so boring.”
“What did they have?” I asked.
“Books about World War Two,” Bessie answered. “Two different books about Hitler. Wait, four books about Hitler. And other books about Nazis. And books about Stalin. Patton. People like that.”
“That sounds awful,” I told her.
“It sucked,” Bessie said.
“Well, you can read all these books now,” I told her.
“I read a lot of these already,” Bessie said, inspecting the spines, “but some look pretty good.”
“That’s great. And we can get more. We can go to the library and get whatever you want.”
“Okay,” she said, nodding her approval. She looked at me. “And you can read us a book at night. If you want to, we’ll let you read us a book before we go to bed.”
“That’s great,” I said, and I could feel our lives normalizing, a kind of routine forming.
“Do you want to put on some clothes?” she asked me, and I realized that I was still in my underwear.
“Shit—I mean, shoot—yes, I do want to put on some clothes,” I told her, but I was afraid to leave them alone. As if she read my mind, Bessie said, “You can go change. We’re okay. We’re really okay right now.” I nodded, and then I was running up to the second floor, counting the seconds, afraid that if I was gone longer than a few minutes, I’d come back to find them digging a tunnel to freedom. I pulled on some jeans, slipped into a T-shirt, and then ran back downstairs in less than forty-five seconds, and they were still there, Bessie making a stack of books that she wanted to read and Roland sitting on the counter, wrist-deep in a little box of Apple Jacks. Bessie opened up one of the new books and smelled the pages. Roland smiled at me and his mouth looked unspeakable, all these little bits of cereal like glitter in his teeth.
This was how you did it, how you raised children. You built them a house that was impervious to danger and then you gave them every single thing that they could ever want, no matter how impossible. You read to them at night. Why couldn’t people figure this out?
And then I realized they were still in their smoky clothes from the fire in the driveway, and I felt like a slob and an idiot, and I had no idea how I’d keep them alive. This was the wave of childcare, I supposed, real highs and lows. My mom had once told me that being a mother was made up of “regret and then forgetting about that regret sometimes.” But I wouldn’t be my mother. How many times had I told myself that, and how unnecessary had it always been? There was no regret for me and these fire kids. Not yet.
I whistled to get their attention, and both kids slowly turned in my direction. “Let’s get you dressed,” I said, “and then we need to talk about some stuff.”
“Sad stuff?” Roland said. They were the same age, but Roland seemed younger, having the benefit of growing up with a sister who would bite the shit out of people’s hands in order to protect him.
“No,” I said, slightly confused. “Not sad stuff. Just normal everyday stuff. We’re going to be together all the time. We just need to talk about stuff.”