The Drowning House by Elizabeth Black Page B

torn the waistband and bloodied my arm climbing through thewindow of an empty house on Avenue K with Patrick. You couldn’t call it breaking in when we hadn’t broken anything—someone before us had removed most of the glass.
    Faline shook her head at my torn dress. “Look like you been to the club with your family at some point. You and Patrick out fooling around, you couldn’t go home and change?” She complained, but she didn’t ask any questions. “Put your arm where I can see,” she said. “At least you had the sense not to bleed on the fabric.”
    I rested my arm along the enamel tabletop and watched as she washed the dried crust off with a dishcloth. The refrigerator hummed softly, the mixing bowls nested on top of it gave back their own ceramic trill. When she was done, Faline said, “You understand now I got to boil this.” When the bandage was in place, she pulled out her work basket and chose a needle. Somewhere outside, a car backfired. Faline said, “How am I going to sew with you jumping around? Hold still, while I tell you something.” She examined the thread, then licked the end. “It so happen, I have the very shade.”
    She went on talking while she sewed, and her voice soothed me the way it had when Patrick and I were small. Except Faline wasn’t recounting events from the paper. She was talking about herself. Probably she thought I was too young to comprehend or recall the details. This thing sometimes happens. No way to explain it. One love, too young, and you don’t get another chance . It was Otis she’d been talking about. Now they were together. What did that mean for me? The possibilities blazed like fireworks—beautiful, far-off. In no way dangerous.
    “You said people don’t get a second chance. And I believed you. But you and Otis, you’re married now.”
    Faline took a step back. There was an expression on her face I didn’t recognize, a guardedness, and I didn’t know what it meant.
    “Is that why you here? Baby, tell me that not so.”
    Before I could answer, the shadows around us deepened, and I realized there was someone in the doorway.
    Otis was wearing a dress shirt that covered his tattoos. It must have been two in the morning, but the points of his collar stood outcrisply, his belt buckle gleamed. I remembered something else Faline had told me.
    “You were in the army, weren’t you?” I asked.
    “The Marine Corps.”
    I nodded as if what he’d said explained everything about him. I didn’t want to admit the truth—that Otis was someone who understood how things worked, who knew how to fix or find them. Whereas I was someone who broke or lost them.
    I had never thought of Faline as graceful, but when she went to him and put her arm around his waist she seemed to glide across the kitchen floor. She fitted herself against his side—she was almost as tall as he was—and he shifted his weight slightly to accommodate her. They looked back at me out of the same dark eyes.
    I should have been happy for her. I should have rejoiced to see how the arched doorway with its double outline framed the two of them, making the pose somehow formal and definitive. Instead I closed my eyes.
    Faline said, “I suppose you planning to stay there all night.”

Chapter 10

    BOTH FALINE AND ELEANOR CLAIMED that my past—the fire and its aftermath—had been forgotten. I wondered if what they really meant was that now people remembered things differently. That was the way in Galveston. Real events were absorbed into the Island’s narrative and in time became something else. So that life there could go on.
    In the days after the fire, Eleanor, my father, and the Galveston chief of police—a nervous, balding man in a suit—all asked me, over and over, to explain what had happened. I told them that Patrick and I had taken a car and driven it to an abandoned house. I said I didn’t know how the fire started. When they asked if I knew the girl who had died, I hesitated. Then I