Excerpt: TEN THINGS THAT WON'T BURN

Once you turned at Hollis Park and left the safety of Barthrow proper, you could already tell something was different. Leastways you could if you knew the area, and nobody ever came up Hollis way if they didn’t already know the area.

You couldn’t see the ashes yet, and you couldn’t smell the timbers of burnt black wood that seemed to reek more of ruin and heartache every time I went back to see them. But once you turned at Hollis Park, with the swing set to your right and the road to Merry Orchard spilling up the hill in front of you, you could spot a gap on a horizon that used to always be full straight across.

Merry Orchard wasn’t an orchard, and it wasn’t very merry, at least not according to the grown-ups who lived here. Grown-ups in Merry Orchard liked to talk about how their kids were going to get out of this place, how their grown sons and daughters had gone off to college and didn’t visit anymore, but, “Buddy, they made it out, and that’s all I ask.”

The kids, though, the ones not old enough yet to have run off and “gotten out” – to the kids, Merry Orchard was very merry after all. We had a whole two trailer lots stuck together that didn’t have trailers on them, grown up with weeds and vines and thickets and the juiciest blackberries you’ve ever picked, plump and ripe and sweet and stuck together like grapes in bunches.

We used the empty trailer lots more than we ever used Hollis Park. Hollis Park was where the teenagers hung out, and some even older than teenagers, skinny women with tangled hair and men in ball caps and undershirts, meeting by the crooked slide to hold secret swaps and sales of things the moms hoped we kids didn’t know about.

We’d been warned away from Hollis Park for so long that we didn’t even try to use it anymore, and because we didn’t use it, nobody ever bothered to clean it up. The rusty swings were ancient and shrieked in agony when you forced their chains to do anything besides hanging stiffly like skeleton arms. Two of the three seesaws had cracks up the middle so they pinched you if you sat on them. The third was missing half its seat, so the person on that end had to be extra heavy to get their end to go down, or you had to pile three or four kids together on that end and it was impossible to get three or four kids in Merry Orchard into a peaceful enough state of mind to unite for a common cause.

We played up on the empty lots instead, because the things we found up there were a lot more fun than the toys on Hollis Park. We played make-believe up in Merry Orchard long past the ages most kids would have stopped playing make-believe. I think that was probably Ivy’s doing, as Ivy was the best there ever was at playing make-believe. When it was her turn to be the tornado, she blew your hair across your face. When it was her turn to be the cowboy, you could hear the gunfire and you wanted to hole up in the saloon until the battle in the streets was past.

So to us kids, the ones who knew Merry Orchard, it was especially obvious from the mouth of Hollis Park that things had changed. There shouldn’t have been an extra empty space and I wondered how long it would be before the remains of trailer number 4729 would be removed, before kids would start playing in the empty spot just like they did up top. Whether Anson would be one of them.

Isaac and me stood next to the swing set, elbow to elbow. He’d parked his car beside the old sandbox, the one that was empty of sand and had been as long as any of us could remember.

“No point in getting the neighbors all stirred up,” he said, remembering, no doubt, how interested the landlady and everybody else got when they heard the engine of a strange car straining up the hill.

Isaac hadn’t been back since the fire. Not that he hadn’t wanted to come, but first Mom told him it would only upset her if he had to be witness to the ruin like the rest of the family, and especially if it upset him enough to hurt his grades or put him off his studying. And then he had a final to study for and he couldn’t get here. And then summer classes started and he decided he had to stay for those to make up for the final he flunked even though he hadn’t come to see the ruins and he didn’t have anything to blame, not like I had the fire to blame for my nearly flunking algebra.

And then here we were on the fourth Wednesday after the fire, and this was the first time Isaac had a reason to step out of his comfort zone and come face to face with the destruction that had thrown the rest of us into the hellish tailspin we referred to as summer vacation.

I kept my eyes fixed on the gravel. Gray stones set into thick clay-like dirt, yellow here, not red like at Granny Goforth's down south. The gravel had white spots where it had chipped and scraped against itself, probably for years, since the landlady of the trailer park, Mrs. Mullins, didn’t put out a lot of money or time these days on keeping the trailer park looking new.

Past the gravel and the tips of my penny-loafers, I saw lengthening grass that no one had bothered to mow since Solstice. Isaac made a disapproving noise under his breath. Mowing was always his job when he lived at home with us. It had fallen to me, after, but I wasn’t very good at it, steep as our lot was, and Dad had to help me. I envied Isaac his steel-hard muscles and his bored nonchalance when it came to feats of strength and exertion.

The front walk was chipped, but that was from before. And the front porch steps were still standing, red and slightly warped, paint chipping off in peels the size of potato chips. If I concentrated very hard just on the second porch step, I could picture me standing on it, hollering for Ivy to come in for our favorite TV show.

The third porch step was burnt in half, and beyond that, there was chaos.

Part of the metal siding along the front was intact, but even that part was warped and had holes burnt in it. It stopped halfway up and the charred rib bones of the trailer stretched up into the sky, where no ceiling hung anymore. The floor was burnt down to the underpinning and there was a dirt and mud floor underneath the remains of our floral couch, our striped armchair Grandma had given Dad back before she cut him out of her life. The furniture was mostly springs, and wet piles of yuck and stuffing that never seemed to dry.

Isaac hung back, on the second step. He whistled low and his hand stretched after me as I tried to step into the mess. He squeezed my forearm but didn’t say anything else.

“I’m fine, Isaac.” One thing I'd learned this summer was how to lie.