SIX YEARS EARLIER
NATALIA WOKE UP. ALTHOUGH everything felt so wrong, she wasn’t sure that that was what was really happening. She couldn’t even summon the energy to open her eyes. Maybe she was still having a dream. A nightmare. Where was she? She wasn’t even exactly sure who she was.
Something plastic had been pushed past her lips and jammed down her throat. There was no word for what it felt like. Like she was suffocating, but also like she had put her head out the window of a speeding car and opened her mouth wide. Every few seconds, the noisy hiss changed in a two-note rhythm. Whoosh-whoosh. And each time, the thing down her throat twitched.
One thought filled her mind. Get it out! She began to scrabble at whatever was stuffed in her mouth, but her hands felt stiff and oddly muffled. Forcing open her swollen lids, she saw she was lying on a white bed in a white room. Her hands were also white—splinted and wrapped in thick layers of bandages until they were as useful as fat white paddles. Still, she tried again to dislodge the foreign thing choking her.
Someone grabbed her wrists. “It’s okay, Natalia,” a stranger’s voice said. A woman. “You’re safe.”
Natalia. That was her name. Everything came back in a rush. She remembered flinging herself after her brother when he had twisted himself from her hands. But when she tried to ask about Conner, she realized she couldn’t make a sound, not even a groan.
The woman patted her shoulder. “I’m afraid you won’t be able to talk for a bit. We had to put a tube down your throat to give you oxygen and medicine and to keep your airway from swelling closed.”
This had to be a hospital. Conner must be in another room.
Natalia remembered somersaulting forward. Time had slowed. The air was filled with black acrid smoke. She could not see Conner. But below her there was a sound like a slap. Her body kept turning. Just as she passed the living room window, it shattered. Shards of glass and balls of fire shot past her.
Screaming Conner’s name, Natalia somehow landed on her feet. Instantly, one of her ankles snapped and she tumbled forward. But it was as if it was happening to someone else. She felt nothing. Not the burns, not the broken bone.
She had become a ghost, hovering above it all. And then it was as if she had flickered out of existence.
Only now Natalia was back. She had survived, after all. But what about Conner? She began to thrash, desperate to say his name. Desperate to hear it. To hear him.
The nurse was still talking, but about nothing Natalia cared about. “You breathed in a lot of smoke and gases, but we should be able to remove the breathing tube in a day or two.” Her voice became a falsely cheerful lilt. “Your parents are going to be so glad to hear you’re awake.”
It felt like one of those nightmares where you try to run but your feet find no purchase. Where was Conner? Natalia ripped one hand free from the nurse’s and began to hit the bed. Why wasn’t the nurse telling her the most important thing?
But part of her kept replaying the sound she’d heard before she landed. Like a slap.
“I’m just going to give you a little something in your IV to help you sleep, Natalia. To help you heal.”
Slowly, Natalia stopped fussing. When the darkness came, she welcomed it. Her last thought was of her little brother’s chubby hands.
An hour or a day or a week later, she woke up again. When she forced her eyes open, her parents were sitting next to the bed. They were dressed in clothes she had never seen before, ill-fitting and wrinkled. The skin around their eyes looked bruised. They started up when they saw she was awake.
The breathing tube was still in her mouth. But when her mom looked in Natalia’s eyes, she saw her question.
“I’m so sorry, honey.” And then her mom was ugly-crying, snot and tears streaming down her red face. “I killed Conner, and I thought I’d killed you, too.”
Natalia twisted her head from side to side. Her mom wasn’t guilty of anything. It was Natalia’s fault. All of it. Her fault for urging her mother to go back to the store. Her fault for persisting in trying to light the stove. Her fault for not getting to her brother sooner, or figuring out how to safely get him out. Couldn’t she have tied a bedsheet under his arms and then tied that to another sheet and lowered him to the ground?
She wanted her parents to scream at her. To tell her she was not their daughter anymore. Even though her dad didn’t say anything, didn’t do much more than bite his lip and look at the floor, she could tell he didn’t blame her, either.
Which was almost worse.
“I should have gotten that burner fixed,” her mom continued in a high, strangled-sounding voice. “I should have guessed you would try to help me by starting the pasta water. The fire captain told me modern houses have so many things made of plastic and chemicals that they burn really fast. He said that, thirty years ago, if your house caught on fire, you still had fifteen minutes to get out. Now you’re lucky if you have three.”
Two days later, Natalia was in surgery. The worst of the burned skin on the back of her legs was surgically removed and replaced with a thin layer of healthy skin harvested from her inner thighs. The remaining burns had to be frequently scrubbed to remove dead and dying tissue. Even on painkillers, it was agony. She spent a total of six days on the burn unit, three of them on a ventilator. Days after it was removed, she was still coughing up black mucus. Her days in the hospital were filled with dressing changes, physical therapy, occupational therapy, and as much sleep as she could manage.
Only sleep offered her a reprieve from the terrible reality. Not only was Conner dead, but she slowly figured out their whole house was gone. Their clothes. Books. Appliances. Furniture. Photos of her dead grandmother. Letters from her great-great-great-grandparents. All turned to ash.
On the seventh day, she went home to heal. Only there was no home. Just an apartment filled with hastily purchased IKEA furniture and an odd assortment of stuff people called donations but really seemed like things they just wanted to get rid of.
There were still two months left in the school year, but Natalia didn’t go back to fifth grade. She couldn’t. In fact, she couldn’t go out in public at all. Burns were basically like open wounds, the doctors said, putting her at high risk for infection. The skin was the biggest organ of the body, they told her. It was responsible for keeping the fluid in her body, while keeping out bacteria and viruses. It also helped a person maintain a steady internal temperature.
Natalia also knew that your skin was the first thing people saw when they looked at you. And it allowed you to touch. To feel things.
Only she was determined to feel nothing. If you felt things, if you cared about people, then you could get hurt. She couldn’t help caring about her parents, but she withdrew from her friends and was careful not to make new ones. She wasn’t rude, not exactly. Just detached.
For most of sixth grade, Natalia had to wear compression shorts under her clothes to try to smooth the scars on the backs of her thighs. It only partly worked. The skin there still healed tighter and rougher, the texture and color different from the soft white skin around it. The scars looked like she felt. Like she was the rougher, uglier person surrounded by other people with soft, easy lives. People who had no idea how quickly everything could go wrong. How you could lose it all. Lose it all in a heartbeat.