wondered if this was the way her mother felt when she was expecting a baby. If it was, she would never ever have children.
They were out in the development, in a two-car garage. The big square empty space was filled with boxes: a No-Frost refrigerator, a No-Rinse dishwasher, a host of other appliances and fixtures in corrugated brown cardboard. The younger kids had been having a field day, turning empty boxes into tunnels, caves, houses, hauling them out of the big refuse pile to one side of the development and dragging them home as their mothers screamed from the kitchen windows “You take that right back where you found it.” Damien had started collecting scraps of Formica, little punched-out circles and half moons where the kitchen installers had carved out holes for plumbing pipes or planed the edge of a counter into a curve. He had a big box full in his room, amid his butterflies and cacti, and sometimes he would take them out and look at them, feeling the smooth surfaces, even sniffing them, and smiling. “You’re nuts,” Terence said.
Maggie had gone to get Debbie after dinner, but Mrs. Malone had said she was not at home. “Did you two girls have a fight?” she added, frowning.
“Not exactly,” said Maggie.
“You come inside and have a Popsicle and tell me about it,” Mrs. Malone said, but Maggie had gone off by herself to the development. She knew exactly where to find Debbie and the others. She could smell them now, like a tracking dog; she could smell the accelerant and the sulfur.
The second fire had, like the first, flared and died. The third and fourth had happened when she was not there; one had leveled the walls of a closet, the other had left a black hole the size of the gym’s center court mark on the bedroom floor of a house that was barely a frame. She had become accustomed now to not being able to find Debbie when she wanted her, to discovering her at the pool, giggling behind her hand with Bridget Hearn. They would fall silent, their faces flat, as soon as Maggie appeared. It was halfway through the summer, and Maggie felt that the structure of her life had tumbled down around her, her safe haven at the cemetery somehow strange and unsatisfactory now, her invincible grandfather wasting away amid the white of his hospital bed, her parents absent in spirit and sometimes in fact, her best friend a stranger. She had only found out about the third and fourth fires because Joey Martinelli had told her mother one afternoon when the two of them were in the kitchen having coffee and didn’t realize that Maggie was in the house. When Maggie had come downstairs for lemonade, quiet in bare feet, her mother had leapt from her chair like a mouse caught in a spring trap, and Mr. Martinelli had been so discomfited that he had asked her how school was. Maggie had felt like an intruder in her own kitchen, and, lying on her bed afterward, had wondered if she would ever belong anywhere again.
She had gone over to the Malones’ that same afternoon, and found Debbie in her room, lying on the bed, still pink from a day at the club. Maggie had lain down on Aggie’s bed, too, and they had talked in a desultory fashion for a few minutes before lapsing into silence. Finally Debbie had cleared her throat. “I think before you come over you should call and see whether I’m here,” she finally said. “And make sure I’m here alone and not already with somebody else.”
Maggie had continued to stare at the ceiling. There was a crack that ran across one corner that she knew as well as she knew her own face in the mirror. She traced it with her eyes, back and forth, back and forth.
“Sometimes I might be with other people,” Debbie added. “There are things that I’m interested in now that you’re not that interested in.”
“Like what?” Maggie said.
“How should I know?” Debbie shot back. “Maybe we’re maturing at different rates. Bridget says she was friends with Gigi McMenamin for years and years and then they stopped being friends because Gigi just wasn’t interested in doing anything. All she wanted to do was hang around the house and read.”
“I know what you’re interested in,” Maggie said. “You’re my best friend.”
“Maybe I’m interested in other things now. Maybe I’m changing. Bridget says that being out