Chapter 1

The kid stopped coloring in the middle of a stroke.

"You've got the same arm as my dad."

I had a blanket still in both hands. Dry wool, Red Cross stamped on the corner, the last one on my stack. I'd been handing them out since the gym opened at nine the night before, and my shoulders had that dead ache you get from reaching down to cots.

Cot fourteen. Left side of the aisle, past the second pillar, where the ceiling tiles had gone brown in a long stain shaped like the state of West Virginia.

"Say that again," I said.

He didn't look up right away. He was maybe eight, missing a front tooth, black hair with one cowlick standing straight up like it had its own opinion. He had an Ottaway Fuel & Grain giveaway shirt on, three sizes too big, and one sock.

He tapped his own left forearm with the flat of his crayon. "Dad's is on the other side."

I remember the generator hum getting loud in my ears. Diesel smell coming off the loading doors. Somebody's baby crying over by the showers. Names chalked on the board behind the bleachers, forty-one of them, and every time the door opened, everyone in that gym looked up.

I set the blanket down on the end of his cot. Then I pushed my right sleeve up past my elbow, slow, like I was doing it for somebody else's benefit.

The scar runs from my wrist to my elbow. Thick, ropey, the edges fanned out like a cheap firework. I've had it since I was six years old. Six years old, March 1994, Coon Hollow Road, and in thirty years in Kessler Bend, not one living soul had ever asked me where it came from. People look away from a thing like that. That's the polite way here.

"That's it," the boy said. "That's Dad's."

"Your dad's name?"

"Ren." He said it like I should already know. Then he twisted on the cot, dug the clipboard out from under his hip and flipped it over. The back was a shelter intake form, and he'd drawn on it in crayon - a box house with smoke coming out of one corner, a fence line, and past the fence a squat rounded tank with a dark seam down its side.

"That's our old place," he said. "Before."

I don't know how to explain what happened in my chest. Kerosene. Not diesel, not woodsmoke. Kerosene, sweet and oily, so strong it felt like a hand over my mouth. I've smelled it my whole life when I think about that night, and I've told exactly two people, and both of them were doctors who wrote the word "nightmare" on a chart when I was nine.

The fire was ruled electrical. That's what my mother told me. That's what everybody told me.

"That tank's not on our property," I said. "That's the other side of the fence."

Eli shrugged. "It leaked. Dad said it leaked and everybody knew." He went back to coloring like he'd just told me the score of a ballgame.

Somewhere behind me, boots came up the aisle, wet and heavy, and they didn't sound like Guard boots.

I turned around.

He was backlit in the door under the outside work light, water running off him in sheets, a swift-water dry suit peeled to his waist, gray T-shirt stuck to his ribs, headlamp pushed up on his forehead. Mud to his collar. He'd been on the river since two in the morning, I found out later. He stopped at the end of the cot row like he'd hit a wall.

He was looking at my arm.

Not my face. My arm.

I've been looked at plenty of ways. I know the difference between a man looking and a man remembering.

He walked the aisle. Slow. He got to my shoulder and stopped and without saying one word he rolled his left sleeve up to the elbow.

Same starburst. Same fan of edges. A little shorter than mine, but the same hand had done it. Same fire, same night, same house. Later they'd say different arms, left and right, because he'd been turned away from me in the crib, curled into his own elbow, and I'd been reaching.

I heard my own voice come out flat. "Who are you."

His jaw worked. "Ren."

"Ren what."

"Ren Ottaway," he said. "That's not-that's the name they gave me." He looked at our two forearms, side by side in the yellow light. "They told me you died in the fire."

Somebody had taken the crayon out of Eli's hand. I think it was me. I think I put it in his palm and closed his fingers around it, because that's what my hands do when the rest of me has gone away.

My phone was in the pouch on my belt. I got it out. My thumb wouldn't work right, so I had to do it twice.

Pinewood Rest answered on the fourth ring. The aide said hold, please. I stood in the middle of a flood shelter with a stranger's forearm against mine and listened to the rattle of a nurse's cart, and then my mother's breathing came on the line, thin and wet.

"Marge? It's Willa."

"I know it's you." She sounded tired. Not surprised. That's the part I keep coming back to. Not surprised.

"Mom." The word cracked in half. "There's a man here. He's got the same scar I do. He says-"

The pause went on so long I checked the screen to see if we'd dropped.

Then my mother said, "Then you already know what I did."

The phone was still lit in my hand.

My forearm was still bare.

And Ren was holding something out to me in a Ziploc bag, folded twice, edges gone soft.