The End of the Fire
There were thieves everywhere. Thieves pillaging the ruins of the grand houses; thieves stealing from the refugees in the park. Tan, LowNaa, and Lifang guarded their curbside kingdom. As evening came on, they hauled their foodstuffs, pans, and firewood—everything short of the stove itself—into the house. Tan lifted the iron lid off each burner and brought them in too, lest folks take them to cook over their fires in the camps. Cups, tin, kindling, soiled cotton, all came inside.
After dark, boys and girls from the camps were sent out to scavenge. They plucked horse hooey from the road for their families to use as fuel, and whatever else of value they could find.
The evening was also the time when Tan and I did our reckoning. Tan’s magic meat had been stricken from the menu, and we were down to serving rice and beans. Tan, whose genius lay in exotic sauces, threw together a Cantonese version of Boston baked beans. The recipe would prove our salvation—for now. People went mad for it.
I perched at the top of the stairs with my back against Rose’s front door and waited for Tan. It was the first time I’d stopped all day and a bruised weariness sat heavy in my bones. So far, I’d reconciled the mess in Rose’s room and in some of the rooms on the main floor. I’d taken stock of the larder—what we had and didn’t have of food, water. I had put aside a little bit of money I’d found in some spilled drawers. But there was much still broken inside the house and out, and too much I didn’t know.
As long as I worked, I kept my worry at a distance. But sitting on those steps brought it on. I thought of Morie—her death a heavy, sharp stone lodged under my ribs. I wondered if it was true that a soul hovered three days on earth before moving on. And if so, it had been three days, though it seemed a good deal longer. Part of me was still a child, with a child’s sense of time mostly lived in the present. Or had been, before the quake. Now I was counting the hours by how many rooms needed fixing, and how much food and water we had on hand—with the only clock that mattered being the unyielding fire advancing toward us, house by obliterated house.
I was tired and thirsty. My hair, clothes, even my skin had thickened with smoke. My burning eyes continuously seeped tears. Hugging my knees as I waited for Tan, I looked across at Lafayette Square and wondered when the fire was going to reach us. And if the fire reached the house, and beyond, to the ocean, were we all going to die. I didn’t want to die, that’s for sure. And it occurred to me that for all her sorrows, Pie was lucky to have been kissed before the world ended, even if it was by that noodle James. I decided I wasn’t about to die, yet I would likely never be kissed, and I wiped my tears with the heel of my hand.
Tan came up the steps with my supper. In those first days, we ate, if we were lucky, one meal a day. Tan served me, as he served himself, from a bowl, though instead of chopsticks he brought me a fork.
If Morie could have seen me, shoveling my food. Well, I ate like the beggar I always felt myself to be—all the while sneaking glances over the rim of my bowl at Tan’s unreadable face and beyond him, at the tents on the hill and the smoke-filled sky above. There was no denying it, Tan’s food tasted sublime, and for those few minutes I forgot my sorrows.
When I finished, he took the bowl from me and handed over his silk purse stuffed with pennies and dimes.
“What’s not here?” I asked. Tan repeated the show of turning out the pockets of his silk pants. A few coins tumbled to the ground, his humble share.
On a whim, I asked to see his hat, the fez that never left the top of his head.
He crossed his arms and evinced his most sour face for my benefit.
I didn’t react. I hadn’t thought about the hat till the words leaped from my mouth, and having asked for it, I held still.
Tan removed the fez with great sorrow. As if I were shaming us both by asking him to do such a dishonorable thing. His black hair beneath the hat was greasy, parted down the middle. He handed the fez to me and turned his back.
Inside the crown, he’d sewn a pouch. I felt with my fingers the coins, warmed by his head and tightly packed. All day Tan had been wearing stolen money on his bean. When I tugged on the thin silk string knotted at the pouch’s throat, coins splashed into the bowl of my skirt. So many pennies and dimes—at least a third of the take.
“Damn you,” I said.
Tan pretended not to hear me, though he couldn’t hide the shiver that passed through his raggedy bones.
For the first time since the quake, I was afraid. I had no idea what role I should play in this game with Tan. But it seemed that whomever I chose to be, I would be forever.
I gathered the part of my skirt with the coins in my fist and slowly, unsteadily climbed to my feet. I carried the whole lot—hat, money, fear—up with me to my attic room.
And there I stayed.
Later on, when Pie came up to bid me good night, she found me kneeling on the rug, the coins spread out in front of me.
“I saw you had your lamp burning,” she said, hugging herself with her shawl. “It’s freezing up here. You should come sleep with
