Lindy still looked red and raw, but better than she had a month ago, when Jillian visited her at the hospital. At that time she’d been on a ventilator and wrapped in bandages. Being on the burn unit was like being in a nightmare. You could hear children screaming, like they were being tortured. Which they kind of were. Being burned was pretty much the worst torture ever. Lindy had had some skin grafts where the burns were the worst, and would have more surgery, including plastic surgery, but she would likely always be scarred inside and out. She was on all kinds of medication for pain and itching.

Kaye was on medication too. She looked terrible these days, skinny and sad. Her hands shook and her eyes darted back and forth, as if she was constantly on the lookout for unknown dangers. “I almost lost you,” she told Lindy all the time, patting her like a baby where she wasn’t burned, and Lindy let her, without complaint. When she asked Lindy if she would ever forgive her, Lindy told her there was nothing to forgive. “It was my fault I was in the house. I snuck out. It was my own fault,” she said, drawing on a maturity she seemed to have acquired during her weeks in the hospital.

“What’s wrong with your face?” Rebecca Thompson asked. “Rebecca!” her father said, shushing her, and Lindy, being Lindy, said, “What’s wrong with yours?” Then she gave Rebecca her pick of the American Girl dolls for fifteen dollars. The Odinga sisters hauled away her purple beanbag chair and Amanda Giannangeli held her pink chandelier over her head like a sparkly hat. Moms scooped up great armfuls of children’s clothes from the piles spread out on blankets on the grass.

Jillian lay on Lindy’s bed—too big for Lindy’s room down on the island; Mark lay beside her, like they were an old married couple.

“Eight dollars,” Lindy said to Nora McConnell, who wanted the flowered pillows Jillian and Mark were using to prop themselves up on the bed, their sketch pads resting on their legs.

“But I said ten dollars,” Nora said. She was seven, and missing so many teeth it was hard to understand her. “I said I’d pay ten.”

“Five dollars, and that’s my final offer,” Lindy said. Nora snatched the pillows from behind Mark’s and Jillian’s heads without another word. Their heads thumped down on the mattress. “Hey. You made me mess up,” Mark said.

He and Jillian were drawing pictures of squirt guns. Well, squirt creatures. Suzanne had told them she’d pay them for any designs she turned into squirt guns for Squirts for Squirts, her company that she was working on while she was on bed rest, waiting for the baby to come. Mark was designing a dragon gun that spat water instead of fire, Jillian a spitting frog.