Read Lucky for Free Online Page A

me.
    I was returning home.
    My life was over; my life had just begun.

THREE
    Paoli, Pennsylvania, is an actual town. It has a center and a train line named after it, the Paoli Local. It was where I told people I was from. I wasn't. I was from Malvern. Or at least that was my mailing address. But actually I was from Frazer. I grew up in an amorphous valley of converted farmland that had been divided into treeless lots and sold off to developers. Our development, Spring Mill Farms, was one of the first to have been built in the area. For many years it was as if the fifteen or so original houses had landed in the midst of an ancient site of a meteor crash. There was nothing, save the equally new and treeless high school, for miles around. New families like mine moved into the two-story houses and bought sod or small, whirring seed spreaders that the fathers walked back and forth across the dirt lots as if they were the most disciplined of pets. Heartsick at her inability to grow anything resembling the lawns in magazines, my mother opened her arms wide to the advent of crabgrass. "To hell with it," she said. "At least it's green!"
    The houses came in two options: garage sticking out in front, garage tucked to the side.
    There were two or three color options for the shingles and shutters. It was, to my teenage mind, a wasteland that involved endless trimming, mowing, planting, weeding, and keeping up with the neighbors on either side. We even had a white picket fence. I knew every picket, as it was my sister's and my job to crawl around on our hands and knees and use manual clippers on the grass that the mower couldn't reach.
    Eventually other developments cropped up around us. Only the original residents of Spring Mill Farms could distinguish where our development ended and the others began.
    It was back to this collapsing Chinese fan of suburbia that I went after I was raped.
    The old mill, for which my neighborhood was named, had not yet been restored when I was a teenager and the mill owner's house across the street was one of the few old homes in the area. Someone had torched it and the big white house now had black holes for windows and a green wooden railing that was charred and falling-in in places.
    Driving by with my mother, as I did every time we went out of the development, I was fascinated by it—its age, the overgrown weeds and grass, and the marks of the fire—how the flames had licked out of the windows and left black ash scars above their rims like crowns.
    Fires are something that seemed part of my childhood, and they beckoned to me that there was another side to life I hadn't seen. Fires were horrible, no doubt, but what I became obsessed with was how they seemed, inevitably, to mark a change. A girl I had known down the block, whose house was struck by lightning, moved. I never saw her again. And there was an aura of evil and mystery around the burning of the mill house that gave flight to my imagination every time I passed.
    When I was five, I walked into a house near the old Zook graveyard out on Flat Road. I was with my father and grandmother. The house had been ravaged by fire and was set far off from the road. I was frightened but my father was intrigued. He thought that we might scavenge things inside that would add to the boxlike home he and my mother had just moved into. My grandmother agreed.
    In the front yard some distance from the house was a half-charred Raggedy Andy doll. I went to pick it up and my father said, "No! We only want salvageable things, not some child's toy." I think that was when it struck me, that we were walking into a place where people like me—children—had lived, but didn't anymore. Couldn't.
    Once inside, my grandmother and father got down to business. Most of the house was ruined; what was any good was so blackened by smoke as to be unsalvageable. There was furniture, still, and rugs and things on the wall, but they were black and abandoned.
    So they decided to take the