Gasp (Visions) - Lisa McMann Page 0,7

up in flames, yet there they are, bricks scorched but no sign of interior flames so far. We turn back and stare at our restaurant . . . and our home.

The firefighters’ shouts grow louder. They begin to push back from the building, and with a roar and a rush of gasps, the roof falls in on everything we own, everything my parents have worked their entire lives for, everything my father has collected and hoarded for the past ten years. The sparks fly like shooting stars into the night sky.

• • •

We stay all night.

Not because we have nowhere else to go. We stay because our parents won’t leave, and we won’t leave them.

My father’s face is like an old worn painting, gray and cracking. He looks eighty years old today as he watches, mourning his business and his precious hoards of recipes and treasures. My mother fusses over us for a while, telling us not to worry. Telling us that we’ll get more clothes, of all things—right there in the middle of the parking lot, with her whole life crashing down in front of her, Mom is worried about us being upset that we have nothing to change into. How does one become this person? I don’t know.

I don’t think my father even notices that Sawyer is there, bringing blankets and food and water and collapsible sports chairs from neighbors and I don’t know where else so we can sit down on something other than the cold cement curb of the parking lot. My mother notices, though. When he shows her the chair, she puts her hand on his arm, thanks him with her wet eyes, and sits. He nods and presses his lips together, and I realize how much it means to him to have her approval.

Sawyer hovers nearby. Rowan, Trey, and I all sit together in birth order, thinking about all the things we’ll never see again, and every once in a while stating the obvious: “Everything is gone.” But it’s not everything. It’s weird. I have my boyfriend, my siblings, my parents. I’ll miss the pillow I pretended was Sawyer. My favorite pajama shirt. My hairbrush and clothes and makeup. But I realize there isn’t much else up there that’s all mine. Certainly there was no space up there that was all mine. These people—this is what’s mine.

I look around, realizing Tony has gone home. “How did it start?” I ask Rowan after a while.

“I don’t know,” she says.

“But you were in the kitchen, right?”

“Yeah. But it didn’t start there, or we might’ve been able to put it out. Tony and I grabbed fire extinguishers as soon as we heard the smoke alarms, but it was already too late and we had to get out of there.”

Weird. I heard my parents warning us about fire hazards in the galley so often that I figured restaurant fires must always start in the kitchen. “I guess they’ll investigate.”

Rowan shrugs. Nothing is important right now. I look at Trey and he looks at me, and I don’t know what to say or do. Nothing is adequate to express how I am feeling. As we turn our eyes back to the smoldering remains of our lives, I hold his arm and rest my head on his shoulder, and we speak at the same time.

He says, “Happy birthday.”

And I say, “Did you make out?”

And we look at each other again, absolutely beside ourselves with the strangeness of this all.

“Thanks,” I answer. “Best one yet.”

“No,” he says. “But he touched my face and kissed me.”

And that’s the thing that makes me start to cry.

Eight

In the morning, Sawyer reluctantly leaves to get ready for school. Neighbors and people from my parents’ church come with clothes and food, and we don’t know what to do with it all. We put it in the meatball truck and try to figure out where to go from here. There have been offers, but no one is able to put all five of us up together for more than a few nights. I guess hoarders don’t tend to have a lot of friends.

Is it wrong that I’m okay with that?

Is it wrong that I don’t want to go live in some other person’s house?

Now that the fire has been mostly out for hours, the lack of flames helps Dad focus. “We’ll go to Vito and Mary’s,” he says. My uncle Vito and aunt Mary, our hostess, have four kids. The oldest, my cousin Nick, occasionally works—worked—for the