Izabel thought of the children breathing in the smoke. She leaned forward as she looked at old photos of Portland’s fire. The ornately painted tiles of the spiritual center’s floor became the backdrop to the photos on her tablet—entirely mismatched, entirely unjustified. The rain fell harder and harder on the plastic sheeting of the dome.

    Chapter Eleven

Once, Izabel and her mother got stuck at the beach in a thunderstorm. Izabel’s mother thought they could wait it out at the aquarium. Izabel stood on a step stool at the touch tank, reached into the water, and touched a stingray that came up to her fingers.

A horseshoe crab was flipped over on its back in the tank, and Izabel’s mother asked the girls who were working there, “Shouldn’t we flip the crab right again?”

The girls smiled and said the crabs did that sometimes, to rest. The girls said the crabs liked it.

But it didn’t look like it was resting, with its legs pumping and its book gills flapping.

Izabel waited for the stingray to come to her fingers again. She heard other women come up and ask the girls the same thing. Shouldn’t they help the horseshoe crab? Shouldn’t someone? The girls smiled again and repeated the same thing, as if they’d never answered that question before in their lives.

It was still pouring when Izabel and her mother left the aquarium hours later. They ducked into a candy shop and ate string licorice while they waited for the rest of the storm to pass. Lightning struck close and its thunder shook the building—the windows rattled in their frames like they were made of plastic. Izabel’s mother touched one. “Glass,” she said.

It seemed like the rain would never stop, like every street on that stretch of island would flood and they would be trapped there. So Izabel’s mother said they would run to the car. Halfway there, they were already soaked. They stopped under a pagoda in the middle of a parking lot that was normally for valets.

Lightning struck again and Izabel heard her mother count the seconds between the flash and the thunder. When it boomed, her mother nodded, pleased with the number, and they continued. She grabbed Izabel up in her arms.

Her mother couldn’t tell how flooded the street was, and when she stepped off the curb into the last street they had to cross, the water came up to her knee. She held Izabel tighter and Izabel remembered laughing. Or she didn’t remember laughing but she remembered her mother saying, “It’s not funny. This is dangerous.”