What was left was the blackened ground and the toxic burnt-tarp smell and the ash in the air. And her, and me, and the sun beginning its rise in the distance.

She cried and I didn’t. She covered her mouth, maybe because of the smoke and maybe because of the horror.

“We loved him so much,” she said. “He took such good care of us for so long, and now he’s gone.”

But he was never good to us. I never loved him. I searched her eyes for the truth. Where was my mother? Felt the weight of another trick being played on me.

___

The next night we fell asleep in a shelter. Two cots side by side in a large room full of sleeping women and girls. I woke to her shaking my shoulder in the dark.

She was my mother. It was the two of us again. Once, I’d been smaller than a speck of dust but she’d loved me.

“Why didn’t you save him?” she asked.

“I saved us,” I said.

Her face crumpled in pain, in fury.

She grabbed me by the shoulders, dug her fingers in, shook me hard. She kissed me on the mouth. And then she was gone.

Morning came, with bruises on my shoulders.

She never returned for me.

It was an electrocution, a shattering.

I shut my eyes. I bit down hard. But not even that could help. I heard my own cries, felt my knees giving out.

“Not yet,” she said. “Hold on. I have more to show you.”

But how could I endure it?

I could die, I thought. I could let it consume me.

But I had so much to lose, so much I’d come to love. It broke my heart, the thought of leaving them forever. Goodbye, Lee. Goodbye to the flowers and the soft grasses. Goodbye, Julia’s arm linked in mine. Goodbye to Terry’s sincerity, his doubts, his warm bread, and his deep laughter. I’d taken too long, I guessed. I hadn’t acted when I’d needed to, and now my chance was over. I would never be golden. I thought of Billy, teaching me to make butter, making me laugh. Liz, taking care of me, her body against mine in the tub, her press of cotton against my cut.

Somehow, my knees steadied, even as the pain coursed through me. Even as I trembled, tasted blood in my mouth, a strength I hadn’t known rose up. For them, my heart still beat steadily. For them, I could withstand anything.

When you feel the hurt begin . . .

“I’m ready,” I told my ghost again, and this time I was telling the truth.

One . . .

My mother, when we still lived with Grammy and Grandpa,

tiptoeing into our room after her shift,

kissing my forehead.