ACCELERANT. THE RESEARCH she’d started at school had been cut short, but she knew alcohol was an accelerant. The fire had its taste of Mommy—yummy, yummy, mumsig—and wanted more. The fire wanted to eat her!
It was clear now. The spell of Vengeance and Attack made Mommy stumble. The spell coated her with alcohol. Fire accelerant.
It was up to her to do the rest.
Mommy pulled up her feet, shrinking into the corner of her chair, eyes big and afraid. Hanna kept her spell focused, directed at Mommy through two outstretched fingers, and mouthed the words. Suffer and cease to be. Suffer and cease to be.
She prodded the flames with her stick. Fished for a burning branch. And flung it out of the copper pit.
Mommy screamed as it landed in her lap. She scrambled out of her chair. Fell. Pushed the burning branch away with her bare hands.
Hanna used her stick like a shovel, gripped in both fists, scooping out burning embers. They landed on Mommy’s legs. Her foot. Mommy squealed and kicked, trying to wriggle away.
She swept more embers out of the fire, hurling them at Mommy.
They attacked her like vampire lightning bugs.
Mommy howled and cried.
The tip of her stick glowed a molten orange, and Hanna knew just what to do. Mommy’s hands were flapping at her pants, trying to extinguish some burning threads. Hanna aimed the stick right at Mommy’s eye, but at the last minute Mommy looked up and Hanna’s aim went awry. She plunged the fiery stick into her cheek, where it made a sizzling sound. Mommy screamed, and wrenched the weapon from her hands.
In the next instant Daddy was there, a bowl in his hands. He tossed it on Mommy, on the fluttering, enflamed bits.
He picked up Hanna. And threw her.
She came back to herself, as the cool air sailed past.
Had she gotten too close to the fire? Was Daddy saving her?
She landed splat on a muddy patch of grass and rolled. Stunned. Something tore inside her wrist, the one that she’d held out to break her fall. Her thumb was going to come loose and fall off. She screamed.
But Daddy and Mommy didn’t run to her.
Instead, Daddy ran to the table and grabbed the Brita pitcher. He poured it on Mommy and stomped on the embers. Mommy wailed and curled up in a ball.
“Where does it hurt?”
“My face! More water!”
Daddy lifted Mommy into his arms and dashed into the house. Hanna held her left arm against her chest, still sobbing, and trailed after them. She almost whimpered “Daddy,” but it sounded like a broken-up, tear-filled squeal.
She couldn’t understand what happened. The spell had gone so well. And she did it all herself, without Marie-Anne. It was almost finished, Mommy had been squirming on the ground, about to catch fire. And then Daddy ruined it. It wasn’t possible he could love Mommy more than her. Was it? He threw her. Threw her away.
“Why?” she cried through her tears, her French accent abandoned, but neither parent heard her.
Daddy put Mommy on the big table and wiped at her with wet dish towels while Mommy held a wet cloth to her face and wept. Her head fell against the table and Daddy yelled, “Should I call nine-one-one?”
Mommy shook her head, but couldn’t stop crying.
The drama of it scared Hanna a little, her parents in such disarray, their movements so out of control. She blinked and blinked while hugging herself with her one good arm.
As Mommy started to wiggle out of her ruined pants, Daddy helped and yanked them off.
“This spot here.” She pointed above her knee. “And my hands.” She used her elbows to push herself into a sitting position, and let Daddy wrap the wet cloths around one hand, then the other.
Daddy scrambled in the cabinets until he found more dish towels. He plunged them under the kitchen tap, moving in clumsy jerks, like a strange creature she’d seen on Star Trek, jolted by bolts from a laser gun. He looked nutso whacko and she didn’t like it.
He wrung the wet rags over Mommy’s exposed skin, then draped them on her leg. “Are there more burns?”
What a mess he was making. Mommy wouldn’t like it. Even Hanna felt the urge to rush in and sponge the water off the floor. She jumped up and down a little—look at me, look at me! Another whimper escaped her throat, but Mommy and Daddy still acted like she wasn’t there.
“My face.”
“We should go to the emergency room.”
Mommy shook her head. “Urgent Care, it’ll be faster, and it’s not … I don’t think they’re too bad …”
Hanna crept in closer. Mommy wasn’t crying so much anymore; she lifted the compress off her cheek and showed it to Daddy. “Is it okay?”
“Holy shit …” Daddy couldn’t stop zip-zip-spazzing. “We need to get to the doctor’s!”
“Is it that bad? Oh God! I’m not going anywhere without pants—grab me some shorts?”
Daddy charged up the stairs. That’s when Mommy finally noticed her. At first Mommy froze, big-eyed and ready to flee. Hanna inched over, mewling a bit, clutching her arm beneath the swollen part.
“Hanna? Are you hurt?” Mommy swung her head around, like she couldn’t decide which way to go—she looked up the stairs, toward the front door, and finally back at Hanna. As she gazed at Hanna her face went from frightened to concerned. “What were you doing …? Is it broken?”
Hanna stood beside the table and extended her arm. Her wrist had fattened into a plummy bulb.
Mommy’s mask slipped off and her gaze turned hard, mean, like she couldn’t pretend anymore that she wasn’t really Bad Mommy. “That’s what you get … Hurts, doesn’t it?”
The stairs rumbled as Daddy thundered down.
“Hanna’s hurt,” Mommy said. Her face flipped back to normal then, the way she got whenever Hanna had a fever or a tummy ache.
“What’s wrong?”
“Her wrist, I think it’s broken.”
Daddy’s eyes and mouth popped like an alarm.
“Get her an ice pack …”
As he handed Mommy the shorts, she had to put down the cloth she’d kept against her face. Hanna gaped at the wound on her cheek as Mommy shimmied into her clothes. A big fat circle, black and red, and Hanna thought of the erupting mouth of a volcano. Daddy, poor Daddy, couldn’t stop the panic mode. He leapt to the freezer and grabbed up a dry dishcloth that had slipped onto the floor.
“I’m so sorry—”
“What happened?” Mommy asked.
“I wasn’t thinking, I just … I had to get her away from you.” He turned from Mommy to Hanna. “Baby, I’m so sorry!” Daddy gently wrapped the towel-covered ice pack around her wrist. “Holy shit, I can’t even believe this is—”
“Honey, it’s okay, we’re okay … But we can’t leave with the fire going.”
Daddy, all-a-shambles, hurried out back and used the hose to put out their little fire. He scrambled back in, carrying a few plates of food that clattered when he shoved them on the counter. Hanna still didn’t like how zonkers he looked, out of control and barely aware of what he was doing.
“Okay, everybody ready? Hanna, lilla gumman, I’m so sorry …”
Hanna wanted him to pick her up and carry her to the car. But he carried Mommy instead. She whimpered. The ice pack made it worse; her wrist still throbbed but now it pulsed in sharp, frozen shards.
“Come on, Hanna,” Mommy said over her shoulder. “I know it hurts, but we’ll be at the doctor’s really soon.”
It only took a few minutes to get there, and Mommy spent most of that time being rather good Mommy-like and saying over and over that everyone was going to be okay, take some deep breaths, and she didn’t sound mad or even like she was hurting. Sometimes Daddy had to brake really hard because he was driving very fast.
The sign—Shadyside Urgent Care—looked bright against the darkening sky. The parking lot was pretty empty.
In the waiting room, Daddy put Mommy in one of the very ugly olive-green chairs and rushed to the desk and spoke so fast about “his wife” and “his daughter” that Desk Lady asked him to slow down.
Desk Lady said it would just be a few minutes. Daddy sat on Mommy’s other side, filling in paperwork, leaving Mommy in the middle. Her eyelids fluttered as she pressed the folded cloth to her cheek and gripped Daddy’s forearm with her free hand. She was as colorless as the cloth.
“I can’t believe she would do this,” Daddy said.
Hanna knew he was talking about her, and frowned very big so her lip stuck out. She’d failed again. As he scribbled on the papers, Daddy sometimes glanced at her, his face a puzzle of mismatched pieces. Hanna wanted to tell him that she’d tried, she followed the will of her spell. But Mommy was so much stronger than she’d anticipated. She didn’t burn up like the confetti or the drawing. She didn’t poof disappear into a cloud of ash. The spell wasn’t supposed to cause crying and stupid ouchies, it was supposed to make her gone. It was supposed to free Daddy, yet somehow he was in more pain than either of them.
He handed Desk Lady the clipboard and sat back down in a huff of too-long limbs.
“Don’t be too angry with her …” Mommy gripped his hand. Her eyeballs wobbled around and Hanna inched away from her, afraid Mommy was going to throw up. “She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t understand right from wrong. Good from evil. To her, what’s play is real and what’s real is play. There’s no point in being mad if she doesn’t even understand.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
It was weird, the way they looked at her, talked about her. Like she was someone else. Or someone who shouldn’t be able to see and hear them. Hanna looked down at her legs, her smudged shirt, worried she might have turned invisible. But she could still see herself, and hear everything Mommy and Daddy were saying. She snuffled back her tears.
“Something’s wrong inside her. Some chemical thing. Something got twisted,” Mommy said.
“How do we fix it?”
“I don’t know.”
They called Suzette first and brought over a wheelchair when they realized something was wrong with her feet. Daddy wanted to follow Mommy, and Hanna thought they were going to abandon her in the waiting room.
“Stay with Hanna,” Mommy said. “You’ll have an X-ray, baby—it won’t hurt, and then they’ll see what’s wrong with your wrist, okay?” And they wheeled Mommy away.
She moved over to be beside Daddy, though what she really wanted was to sit on his lap. No. What she really wanted was for him to scoop her onto his lap and murmur all the sweet things that made her feel bloomy and good. But he didn’t. He gazed at her, his forehead and eyebrows wrinkly with anguish.
“My lilla gumman …” But he sounded a solar system away. She looped her right arm around his bicep. Together? We’re okay? She loved him so so much. “We’re going to make sure you get the help you need, okay? So you’ll be okay?”
She nodded. Her hand didn’t even hurt that much anymore.
After they did the X-ray, she sat on the paper-covered table and was very glad Daddy stayed so close, shoulder to shoulder.
“Good news,” said Dr. Something as he bustled through the open doorway. “It’s not broken. Just a sprain.”
Dr. Something spoke with an accent much stronger than Daddy’s.
Daddy breathed a big gush of relief. The doctor turned on him for a moment with his very dark eyes. But for her, his eyes went smiley again.
“So, I’ll just wrap it for you, in a big stretchy bandage.” He started at a point below her wrist and wrapped it around and up and over her thumb and back down and around. “So, let me guess—did you fall off your bike? Or was it some other daring feat of bravery?”
Hanna liked the way the bandage felt, all snug and secure around her sore wrist.
“She doesn’t talk,” Daddy said.
“Oh. Ever?” He gave Hanna a big teasing smile, like that would unlock her years of withheld words.
“No. Well … not to me.”
Dr. Something looked at Daddy, very very not smiling. “I understand your wife was brought in too? Some sort of accident in the backyard?”
“Our fire pit.”
The doctor nodded. “So … What happened with your daughter?”
Daddy hesitated. “Part of the same accident.”
Hanna didn’t like the way the doctor was two people rolled into one—lighthearted with her; super serious with Daddy.
“So, I suppose since she doesn’t talk, Miss Hanna can’t explain her side of the story. That’s very convenient.”
The two men stared each other down like a pair of cobras.
Daddy shifted his weight, moving in closer to Hanna. She was very glad he knew she was on his side. She couldn’t even stay mad at him for throwing her because he was still under Mommy’s spell.
“I didn’t hurt my family,” Daddy said, his jaw tightening.
Hanna’s mouth dropped open; she didn’t realize that’s what the doctor was hinting at. But she snapped it shut and scowled at the doctor. She threw her arms around Daddy and he picked her up, carrying her on his hip.
“Okay, but you understand it’s part of my job to make sure—”
“Is she ready to leave? It’s past her bedtime.”
Though she wasn’t tired, she laid her head on Daddy’s shoulder, pretending to be sleepy. He was still and always her most favorite person and Dr. Something didn’t have a clue about the who or why of their botched execution.
“They’ll print up aftercare instructions for you when you check out.”
Daddy strode out and Hanna liked being in his strong arms. He’d regained his strength—for her. Fully back on her side. She loved how deep their understanding was. They could each make little blunders, but in the end they were a team.
Now what were they going to do about Mommy?