Pandemonium suddenly brought me to my senses—wails, fire, smoke, laughing settlers running away, and soldiers preventing the sole fire truck from reaching us. I saw those soldiers in the distance; their languid posture seemed to say they were bored by our swelling panic as the fire spread.

Villagers converged from everywhere to extinguish the flames. Jumana and I grabbed our buckets and ran to fill them with dirt that we hurled into the inferno. It was like trying to mop up the sea with sponges, but to stand and watch the land burn would have been more painful than the burns on our skin and smoke in our lungs.

God intervened, or so everyone later said. More clouds gathered, and a bolt of lightning cracked open the sky. Rain poured. Jumana fell to the ground crying as the fire slowly died, a ground of embers hissing wherever raindrops landed. We stood there, covered in soot, rain streaking our skin black. We were waiting for the next thing—for rescuers, for settlers to return and shoot us, for lightning to set their colony alight. But there was nothing now. Only rain. I pulled the scarf from my head and wiped Jumana’s face. She finally stopped sobbing, and together we waded through the mud and char.

We went to her house to clean up. I should have gone immediately to see Hajjeh Um Mhammad. Surely neighborhood children had already spread news of the fire. I should have been there when she found out, to give her a reassuring eyewitness account of the miraculous rain that contained the fire, to tell her that only a small part of the grove was lost. But I couldn’t. Selfishly, I retreated. I could do no more than wash the day from my body.

Jumana and I bandaged each other’s burns, and we fell asleep where we sat on the sofa. When I opened my eyes again, someone was banging on the door. It was six the next morning. Jumana lifted her head at the opposite end of the sofa, our legs still tangled in the middle. It was her brother Wadee. His fiancée had called to tell him that Hajjeh Um Mhammad had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance.

I wasn’t ready for another day of turmoil. I needed more time on the sofa, doing nothing at all. Yet just as I was pulling myself together to go to the hospital, another whirlwind of news sent our heads spinning: Ghassan had just been released.