of Helen’s shadow has changed me. She says I act more like I’m in high school than most people my age.”
“Bridget’s a bitch,” said Maggie, getting up and walking out.
That was when she had known that the next time there was a fire, she would be there.
But she never suspected that she would strike the match and start the fire. Richard had handed her the box of kitchen matches, his eyes flat, and when he had said, “Your move, Maria Goretti,” she knew there was no way back to the way things had been before, to the times of Indian clay in the creek and Ouija boards. She sniffed the air and thought that the scent was an amalgam of what had been and what was still to come, of the old smells of cut grass and plastic toys and stew cooking and the faint ripe odor of standing water, and the new smells of plaster and linoleum, cement and concrete, all nice smells somehow. Sometimes she tried to close her eyes and imagine the field the way it had been only two months before, its reeds hiding the earth and the field mice and the occasional discarded soda can. And when she did, she could envision a field, but it was her imagined idea of one, like an illustration in a book, perfect arcs of gray-green laid on a bias, and not what had really been there at all. She wondered sometimes whether she was doing the same thing to her memories of her own life.
“Your turn,” Debbie said.
Maggie knew why Debbie was angry. The day before, they had visited Helen in the city. They had put on summer dresses, because they always wore dresses when they went to the city, and they slipped out of the Malones’ front door, which was only used by salesmen and for important parties, while Mrs. Malone was busy warming a bottle for the new baby. Maggie carried an umbrella. It was still wet from the day before, and the day before that. It had been one of the rainiest summers on record, Mrs. Malone said. The weather was making all the mothers feel that perhaps they would lose their minds. “I’ll make you a deal,” Mrs. Malone had said to the children one morning at breakfast, after Maggie had spent the night. “I’ll stay out of your hair until Labor Day if you’ll stay out of mine.” No one stopped eating. The baby was in a corner, sucking noisily on his hand. He was a large boy, with no hair and an enormous mottled face. It often occurred to Maggie that what passed as an offhand remark from Mrs. Malone would have been a turning point for either of her own parents.
For days at a time there had been no work on the development, and water ran down the raw brown slopes that stood for lawns in great streams, until ridges were worn into them and piles of silt lay in front of all the new houses. The ones that were only framed in turned a henna color, and the water in the basements grew stagnant on those rare afternoons when the sun shone. Even the negligible little creek, which Maggie and Debbie had been able to negotiate with one good broad jump since second grade, rose and covered its steppingstones, sloshing aggressively up over its banks and whirring around the stanchions of the railroad trestle. After the fifth day, three workmen from the county public works department had come and stared silently at the foot of one of the stanchions, where a narrow groove of earth had been worn away to a depth of three feet. They brought a dump truck full of gravel and filled it in. Maggie was so bored that she went outside to watch; she had put on her yellow slicker, and her wrists poked like sticks from the wide sleeves. She had outgrown it in three months, and outgrown, too, watching workmen shovel stones. Sometimes she took the nail Bruce had given her out of her jewelry box, placed it in the palm of her hand and looked at it, as though at any moment it would turn into something else. When Connie was home, Maggie tried to stay out of her way. When her mother was gone, Maggie stayed in her bedroom, peering out through the window, looking for fires in the rain.
Maggie and Debbie had taken the subway to Helen’s building, walking three blocks