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by two tall eucalyptus trees whose long, scythe-shaped leaves give off fragrant menthol. The wood of the deck is faded and pocked. As it creaks and groans beneath us, I suffer a moment’s anxiety at how sturdy the whole contraption is.
    Marly stands, her back to me, blowing smoke rings into the distance. “I loved it here.”
    “ Me too,” I say. “Remember when your gram let us wear her old vintage dresses if we’d read Shakespeare scenes to her?”
    Marly claps a hand to her mouth, smiling, an eyebrow—dyed dark, I see—rises to a delighted arch. She lifts a hand theatrically into the air. “The quality of mercy is not strain’d/ It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest/ It blesseth him that gives and him that takes…”
    “ Wow, that’s impressive. I don’t remember any of it.”
    Any of it. For a second, I ’m ready to ask her: what do you remember of that night , but Marly’s lips veer into a pout, a cloud shading her face, like she’s had a terrible thought.
    I feel unsteady for a moment, dizzy, then it passes.
    Marly’s voice is soft when she speaks again, “Gram was the only one, you know, that I listened to, told things to. That I trusted. Other than you. But I haven’t been able to cry yet.”
    Her grandmother was a woman who spoke in hyperbole and hugged tightly. She gave us sips of champagne, made us ice cream sundaes, and let us sleep under the stars. Marly ’s tone suggests she has more to say, but she doesn’t offer and I don’t press it. She stubs out her cigarette at last. “Come on, I want to show you something I found yesterday.”
    I hobble after her, back downstairs and inside her grandmother ’s bedroom, which she’s mostly packed up. All the perfume bottles of my memory are gone, the curtains pulled down to show layers of dirt on the window, and the closet is emptied. From an open box she pulls out a thick, dark green album and lays it on the bed. When she opens it, grainy old photos with rounded edges spill out, the kind of miscellaneous family pictures my mother no longer leaves in plain sight. I often wonder if Ma keeps them under her bed and pulls them out to remember her little angel.
    “ Ah-hah!” Marly plunks her manicured finger down on a page. There we are, two spun sugar darlings, our skin fresh and glowing, our cheeks flush with summer sun, at age seven in yellow bathing suits, dipping our feet into a kiddie pool with looks of surprise on our faces, as if the water must have been icy. My face is a lightly freckled peach, my eyes a lovely, lucid green. Then another: Marly and me holding giant wheel-like lollypops with Mickey Mouse ears at Disneyland—her gram took us; Marly and me vamping for the camera circa 1990, wearing red lipstick, high heels and mini-dresses, mouths open in croons to Madonna.
    “ Oh, I just love this one, look!” Marly peels away the plastic coating and lifts a photograph of our faces pressed cheek to cheek. Our eyes are closed, mouths cracked in grins that reveal matching gaps where teeth had fallen out. It’s been years since I’ve looked at photographs of myself before the fire. I’ve grown accustomed to the rough landscape of my skin, the gradient colors of my patchwork self.
    The beauty of that other me is so real I feel it like a thumb gouge to the diaphragm. My chest is tight, as though once again stuffed into the pressure garments I wore for years, air catching in squeezed lungs. I push myself away, maneuvering off the bed, and bang my shin against the frame. Marly calls after me, but I scurry out the door, away from the image of that younger self.
    I find myself at the backdoor off the kitchen and out into what was formerly a tame garden. Now it is a wilderness. It takes me a minute to realize what I’m staring up at—the ancient oak tree, its tree house long since burned to cinders, its trunk scarred with great black char marks from the night that razed me to the core.
    My breath