“What is that.”
He has set up, on the broad oak surface of the coffee table, a small fireproof ceramic dish ringed with a careful neat circle of river stones that I am certain he had to have hauled in from the back porch when none of us were looking. Inside the ceramic dish, a stack of cedar shavings the size of his palm. A pair of long matches. A spool of green wire. A jar of marshmallows. A second jar I am ninety percent certain contains hand-cut squares of graham cracker because Rémi does not, on principle, buy graham crackers when he can make them.
Iris has clocked it too. She kneels up. “What are you doing.”
“Watch.”
Rémi, with the supreme calm of a man assembling an Ikea bookshelf, strikes a long match against the side of the box and touches it to the cedar shavings. A small, controlled flame leaps up.
Iris screams.
“WE ARE INSIDE.”
Matteo lets out a delighted bark of laughter and folds himself onto the arm of the couch to enjoy the show.
“It is contained,” Rémi says, soothingly, as the cedar catches in a small bright tongue and fills the room with the bracing resinous scent of high-altitude air. “The stones are a buffer. The dish is fireproof. The flame is, frankly, smaller than the burner on the gas stove you cooked an egg on yesterday.”
“THE SMOKE DETECTOR.”
“If it goes off,” I hear myself say, from the kitchen doorway where I have stopped to watch this entire production unfold, “we will just blow it out with a towel.”
The room pauses, briefly.
I have, in my offhand response, given something away.
Easy, Kavanagh. Smaller words. Captain voice.
It is a small thing. A throwaway sentence. But it has, in the way these things do, accidentally let the room see somethingabout the architecture of the kitchen I grew up in, where a smoke alarm was a known seasonal hazard you waved a dish towel at like a flag of surrender, because the unit’s ventilation was inadequate and the landlord had not visited in four years and the only person under that roof who could be relied upon to actually replace a battery was, by age ten, me.
I do not love giving things away.
My household was not the household of a captain. It was the household of a kid raising four little girls who were not, in the strict legal sense, his responsibility, and learning the small domestic engineering of how to make a one-bedroom apartment with two adults in it feel survivable for a fifth child who slept on the couch and a sixth who was always cold. None of which I am, on a usual evening, accustomed to broadcasting in a room that contains a brand-new Omega with very sharp peripheral vision.
Rémi, who knows me better than anyone in this house, does not react. Matteo, who knows me better than anyone alive, lets it pass without a single word. Iris, who has known me for nine days, instead lights up.
“Oh my God, that was my whole childhood.”
She drops back onto her heels, eyes bright.
“My mum and I lived in a flat the size of a postage stamp. Two rings on the hob. The smoke detector was hardwired into the ceiling right above the stove for some genius reason, so the second she tried to fry anything, the whole alarm system went off like the building was coming down on top of us. I swear to God, by the time I was seven I had the routine down to a science. You grab the tea towel. You stand on the chair. You flap. The man across the hall would bang on the wall. Eventually, the alarm would lose interest. We would eat eggs.”
“Tea towel,” Rémi repeats, mildly, like the word is a small geographical fact.
“Or,” Iris adds, brightly, jabbing the air, “it was the good oldbeep.The dying-battery beep. Where the alarm has decided, at three in the morning, to die in increments, audibly, in solidarity. We never — and I cannot stress this enough — weneverchanged the batteries. Why does every household do that? Why is it a universal experience? Why have we all collectively agreed to live with a small mechanical screaming on the ceiling until it gives up of its own free will?”
Matteo grins, slow and unmistakable. He cuts his eyes at me.
“Hey, Pinky.”
“Yes.”
“How exactly were you going to change a smoke-alarm battery, vertically speaking, at the height of seven.”
Her face transforms.
“Excuse me,” she says, sitting up to her full kneeling height, which is approximately a foot below his sitting height, “are you about to make a remark about my stature, Matteo Santori.”
“I am simply asking a logistical question.”
