The boy shakes his head No and retches again; Harry holds him for minutes, one hand clutching his hair, the other around his chest. He is holding him up from sinking into the earth. If Harry were to let go, he would sink too. He feels precariously heavier on his bones; the earth pulls like Jupiter. Policemen, spectators, watch him struggle with Nelson but do not intervene. Finally a cop, not the interrogating one, does approach and in a calm Dutch voice asks, “Shall we have a car take the boy somewhere? Does he have grandparents in the county?”

“Four of them,” Rabbit says. “Maybe he should go to his mother.”

“No!” Nelson says, and breaks loose to face them. “You’re not getting me to go until we know where Jill is.” His face shines with tears but is sane: he waits out the next hour standing by his father’s side.

The flames are slowly smothered, the living-room side of the house is saved. The interior of the kitchen side seems a garden where different tints of smoke sprout; formica, vinyl, nylon, linoleum each burn differently, yield their curdling compounds back to earth and air. Firemen wet down the wreckage and search behind the gutted walls. Now the upstairs windows stare with searchlights, now the lower. A skull full of fireflies. Yet still the crowd waits, held by a pack sense of smell; death is in heat. Intermittently there have been stat-icky calls over the police radios and one of them has fetched an ambulance; it arrives with a tentative sigh of its siren. Scarlet lights do an offbeat dance on its roof. A strange container, a green rubber bag or sheet, is taken into the house, and brought back by three grim men in slickers. The ambulance receives the shapeless package, is shut with that punky sound only the most expensive automobile doors make, and—again, the tentative sigh of a siren just touched—pulls away. The crowd thins after it. The night overflows with the noise of car motors igniting and revving up.

Nelson says, “Dad.”

“Yeah.”

“That was her, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“It was somebody.”

“I guess.”

Nelson rubs his eyes; the gesture leaves swipes of ash, Indian markings. The child seems harshly ancient.

“I need to go to bed,” he says.

“Want to go back to the Fosnachts?”

“No.” As if in apology he explains, “I hate Billy.” Further qualifying, he adds, “Unless you do.” Unless you want to go back and fuck Mrs. Fosnacht again.

Rabbit asks him, “Want to see your mother?”

“I can’t, Dad. She’s in the Poconos.”

“She should be back by now.”

“I don’t want to see her now. Take me to Jackson Road.”

There is in Rabbit an engine murmuring Undo, undo, which wants to take them back to this afternoon, beginning with the moment they left the house, and not do what they did, not leave, and have it all unhappen, and Jill and Skeeter still there, in the house still there. Beneath the noise of this engine the inner admission that it did happen is muffled; he sees Nelson through a gauze of shock and dares ask, “Blame me, huh?”