One minute I was at my desk, looking out the window, and the next, someone was at the classroom door, calling out my name. His face was a blur, as if his features had been crafted of putty, and I realized as I approached that I did not know him.
“There was an incident at home,” the man said. “No one was hurt,” he added, as the words were settling into my head, “but you need to leave school early today.”
An incident, I thought, and while I knew the word, I could not grasp just then what it meant.
A couple of older kids were waiting in the office to escort me home. Neighbors. High-school kids who were done with school for the day. They looked at me from the sides of their eyes as we walked, but wouldn’t say what happened, even when I asked.
“We’re not supposed to tell,” they said with puffed-out frowns, and I knew that they were feeling full of themselves, could see that the weight of their knowledge was like loose change jingling in their pockets. They looked at each other as they walked and I began to hate them for their secret. I decided to stop asking and instead simply picked up my pace, finally breaking into a trot.
“Don’t worry,” they called, their voices taking on the tones of high drama, “it’s nothing too bad.”
It wasn’t until I’d rounded the corner from Webster Avenue to Lamont Place that I saw the fire engines lining the street.
A fire, I thought. There’s been a fire.
An incident.
The street was filled with people who had gathered and stood huddled and staring at the dark smoke coming from the windows of our house. I was welcomed into the crowd with pats to the shoulder and hugs. “It’s okay,” everyone kept saying, “things will be just fine.”
I watched as firemen went in and out of the house, then followed the smoke to its source, took in the bashed-in windows and black stains running down the gold shingles.
Steph walked over and told me what had happened.
Lisa had been working on crafts. She’d been on a craft kick for months, in fact, using matches to burn the edges of pictures of Holly Hobbie or speckled fawns, then shellacking them to hunks of wood and mounting them onto walls. She created plaques to hang in her room and anywhere else she could find space. That day, it seems, she’d laced up the edge of some cute thing, thrown her match into a wastebasket, then gone downstairs for a bath. While she bathed, the match rekindled itself and started a fire.
I looked around for my oldest sister. Lisa was nowhere in sight. Steph said she’d been crying.
“Why?” I asked. Nothing ever seemed to bother Lisa. She walked around the house with a stiff back and a dark look. I barely spoke to her for fear of incurring her wrath, and had not seen her cry since Albion so many years before, when the kids on the bus had teased us for being poor.
“She feels guilty,” Steph said. “All our stuff is ruined, and she thinks it’s her fault.”
I looked at the house again as things began to be hauled out front. People shook their heads at our losses, and the atmosphere was heavy, until talk turned to the small Bible that had been handed out of the house.
“Everything was burnt to a crisp,” the neighbors said, “metal furniture, clothes, everything—except a Bible.”
Their eyes glowed as they began to celebrate the magic of the book’s survival. Even my mother seemed hungry for a miracle. She took the “Good News” Bible into her hands, flipped through the onion-skin pages, a smile lighting her face.