The Gray House

“Also I would come here to have a good cry,” Ginger says. “Once a week, like clockwork.”

“So would I,” I say. “Until I found out that just about every other inhabitant of the House came here too for the exact same purpose.”

She smiles. The smile transforms her into a completely different person, unfamiliar now, but one that I seem to have known a long, long time ago.

“Yeah,” she says. “I always bumped into one or another of them and had to close my eyes and pretend it didn’t happen. The most freaking private place in the whole House!”

“There are no private places in the House.”

“There sure weren’t back then.”

She opens the backpack and takes out a pack of sandwiches—“Oh, by the way, I’ve got . . .”—and freezes, watching Tubby. He crawls closer to the fire, eyeing it intently, and there’s a wood chip gripped tightly in his clumsy paw. He’s angling to throw it in, a very complicated matter requiring a great deal of effort and concentration. We observe him swaying as he stretches his arm and even his lips forward and carefully drops the chip. And immediately shrinks away in fear, as if the tiny chip would cause the fire to flare up to the skies. It doesn’t flare. Tubby looks sideways at me, then at Ginger, and resumes his monotonous droning, now signifying joy and complete agreement with the world.

The wind is blowing smoke straight at me. I shut my eyes tightly and roll over closer to Tubby. Sit down on the edge of the coat and put my rake over his pudgy shoulders. Then we watch the fire dying down. Ginger settles on Tubby’s other side.

“I’m not giving him the sandwich,” she says.

I voice agreement. Of course we shouldn’t give Tubby any sandwiches. Nothing exists for him now except the fire. Anything we can give to him will immediately end up in it, because no dinner can possibly approach the happiness of feeding another, especially if that other is Fire, a powerful deity of whose actual power Tubby is only dimly aware.

So that he wouldn’t get upset because of the fire dying, Ginger tells him about the embers. How they’re beautiful too—“like little red stars,” she says, and Tubby nods, affirming the similarity.

“I’ll make you another fire tomorrow, just like this one,” Ginger promises.

“Why are you doing this?” I ask. “He might get used to it.”

Ginger doesn’t answer. So let him, I hear in her silence. I will bring him here every night, and make fires for him. Let him feed wood chips to them and sing. It’s no use thinking about the time when I won’t be able to, when there won’t be any “here.” That’s the last thing I want to think about right now.

“Haven’t you tamed enough people, Gingie?” I say.

There’s nothing but tenderness in my question, I understand her too well. I understand how it must be impossible—not taming when you love being loved, when you acquire little brothers for whom you are then responsible to the end of your days, when you turn into a seagull, when you write love letters on the walls addressed to someone who never would be able to see them. When, despite your complete certainty that you’re ugly, someone still manages to fall in love with you, when you pick up stray dogs and cats and chicks who fell out of their nests, and make fires for those who didn’t ask you to do that.

She gives me a quick glance and looks away. Because I too am one of those who was tamed long ago. I’m lucky that I didn’t end up helplessly and hopelessly in love, needing constant care. That the responsibility for me has been partially shifted to Mermaid, who in a certain sense has managed to outgrow Ginger. But still I’m one of us, of those who are forever under her tattered seagull’s wing.

She leans toward me and we embrace, touching foreheads over Tubby’s head. Just for a moment, then she shifts away.

“You’re mad because of Noble,” she says. “But I can’t . . .”

“I’m not mad.”

“And Smoker . . .”

“Oh, forget it.” I laugh.

She doesn’t care how many people witness her fights with Noble, doesn’t care who Blind is with if he’s not with her. It’s all the same to her whether she’s clothed or naked, a girl or a boy, she’s a social animal, the kind that is best adapted to life in the House. Smoker is right at least in that—Ginger is a monster, like many of us. Like the best of us. I’ll be damned if I’m ever going to hold it against her.

She nods and gets up. It’s almost dark, and the embers are barely smoldering. Tubby must be cold. He fidgets in his romper, grunting quizzically.

“We’re going,” I say. “We’re almost gone.”

Ginger puts him on my shoulders. We don’t have to tie him down, he’s used to riding on someone’s back and usually holds on very tight. She picks up the coat and the backpack and stamps out the last remaining embers.

Tubby coughs significantly.