Her mother pulled her away. “We can’t wait any longer.” Her voice was distracted and she swiveled her head nervously. The girl understood—another adult intuition—that this was how her mother must have looked crossing the border from Mexico : this animal fear in her. “I would wait for him, you understand? For Carlos. But there isn’t time.”

She folded the sheet with their meager possessions in it and carried the bundle out to their tiny single-engine motor launch. It was hardly more than a canoe with an engine bolted to it, and it wallowed under the load. Their shack backed onto a small tributary feeding one of the larger canals, but the ordinarily quiet water was already crowded with boats. In some of them the people were weeping. The girl wondered what catastrophe this was that had overtaken her life. The ashes came down like snow around her.

Her mother led her back into the shack one more time. “You look around,” she said. “Anything you need or can carry, you take it. One minute! Then help me with the rest of the food.”

The girl picked up an old flea-market doll, the first toy she had owned. She didn’t care much about it now. But it seemed like the kind of thing she ought to take. She tucked it under her arm, satisfied.

It was then that Carlos came home.

He pushed through the door laughing a screaming, drunken laugh. Instinctively the girl slipped into the gap between the kitchen door and the wall. The smell of new plaster was suddenly pungent in her nostrils. She squeezed her eyes shut. She covered her ears.

She heard it all anyway.

Carlos had left work early. The whole morning shift had been dismissed because of the fire. They assumed it was a joke at first; they went to a bar by the tidal dams and began to drink. But then the fire spread until most of the industrial buildings were burning, and it was obvious then that something terrible had happened and was continuing to happen. One by one the men joined the growing exodus toward the south. Carlos had battled through the crowds with a bottle in his hand. The bottle was still in his hand now, but empty.

He was very drunk and very frightened. The girl’s mother tried to soothe him but the fear was in her voice, and Carlos must have recognized it. “We’re leaving,” she told him. “We can follow the canals to the mainland. There’s time. There’s still time.”

“The canals are full,” Carlos said. “Nothing’s moving. The canals are fucking burning. Is that what you want?”

“We can walk, then—”

“Walk! Have you seen it out there?” He waved his bottle recklessly. “The fire’s coming too fast. There’s nothing we can do—nothing!”

And he was probably right, the girl thought dizzily. She could hear the screams coming from the pontoon bridges only yards away.

“Then why come back here?” the girl’s mother said. “Why torture us?” Fear and a kind of petulant outrage mingled in her voice. “To hell with you! I’m leaving! We’re leaving!”

But Carlos said they would die together because they were a family and because he was afraid to die alone. Then the fighting began. The girl listened, paralyzed. There was a terrible dull thudding noise, the sound of fists on flesh. She couldn’t help herself: she stepped out from behind the door.

Her mother was moaning; her face was bruised. Carlos had pushed her against the kitchen table and hiked her dress above her thighs. The fire burning so close, and all he could think to do was rape her. It made the girl angry, and for a moment she forgot her fear. “Stop it!” she cried.

Carlos looked around.

The alcohol and the fear had done some terrible thing to him. His face was livid, choked with blood. His eyes were all whites. Seeing him, the girl experienced a kind of awe at what he had become. “You,” he said. And went to her.

His hands mauled her. His hands tore at her clothes. She experienced a sudden lightheadedness that seemed to lift her out of her body; she floated aloof from herself and was able to see Carlos, the window, the ash-laden sky, all with a strange and curious impassivity. His hands were to blame, she thought. It was his hands she hated. Carlos was probably innocent. Her mother had said as much. My fault, she thought. She had seduced him. Worse, somehow she had seduced his hands.

She could not clearly see her mother, who lay stunned across the peeling tiles. She did not see, therefore, when her mother roused from her stupor and blinked at the act that was proceeding before her, stumbled in horror to the wooden cabinets by the sink and drew out a knife from the cutlery drawer. The girl was not aware of anything much until Carlos gasped and stiffened above her and then rolled away. His blood, mysteriously, was on her dress. Carlos lay noisily dying, his hands closing on air. The girl’s mother looked down at her with eyes gone as wide as an animal’s. “God help us,” she whispered. “Come on now.”

They ran to the motor launch, but the press of boats in the tiny canal had beaten it against its moorings until it listed into the water and capsized. They gazed at it only a moment. The fire was close enough to smell. It was a sour, rubbery smell. It was acrid and hurt the girl’s nose. Smoke eddied down the canal among the boats and beneath the pontoon bridges crowded with refugees. People were everywhere, fleeing. They had not yet panicked, but she could tell panic was only moments away. And then they would begin to push and run, the girl thought, and what then? What then?

Her mother tugged her forward. They had nothing to carry. Their possessions were all lost. Carlos was lost. Carlos, if he had not already died, would surely perish in the fire. A secret part of her exulted in that, and another part of her recorded the exultation: she had been the occasion of his death and, worse, his death had pleased her.

They traveled a half mile to the south and east with the fire on their heels—a burning as vast as the girl had ever seen, and the fire ’copters helpless in the face of it— before the crowd began to panic. The girl’s mother lifted her up and carried her for a time, but she was heavy and her mother was no longer a young or healthy woman. They toppled together against a mesh-wire restraining fence. More bodies fell against them until the fence gave way at last and dropped them into a waste canal. The girl sank deep into the foul water, and she might have died there—wanted to die there. But it was as if she had become two people. Her body strove for the surface. Her legs pumped, her lungs gasped for air, she splashed until she saw the flames licking up behind her. She dog-paddled down the mesh- and concrete-lined canal until she could scramble up a pontoon and rest there, gasping.

She looked for her mother, but her mother was gone.

Her mother and Carlos. Both gone.

It was, of course, her fault.

The fire too. She might have willed it into being. She had wished for it often enough, she realized now: an apocalypse to devour Carlos and erase her untimely adulthood. And wishes count. “Be careful what you wish for,” her mother used to say. “You might get it.”

The heat was agonizing on her face, the massed screaming of hundreds of voices awesome. The little girl realized that she was talking to herself. “If wishes were horses.” Under her breath, low and staccato, as she joined the fleeing mob. “Then beggars would ride.”

Knees jostled her. Once, a woman tugged at her hair in an effort to climb around her. But she moved steadily and without panic. If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. If wishes were horses … If wishes…

She walked herself into unconsciousness in the guilty knowledge that she should have died in the fire. In some real sense she did die then. The thing she had been was dead. Be dead, she thought; be dead with Carlos; be dead with Mama. She willed herself to die. And died, though her body sustained her through the crush of frightened adults. The hours that followed were obscure and anarchic, but it was enough to know that she had awakened, her face singed hairless and her lungs thick with fluid, a fever raging in her—but alive—in a Red Cross camp on the mainland. She was a new creature now, blank and anesthetized, without history, nameless, with only a single certainty: that she was not a good girl and never would be.