Lightning

of suicide for her, an externalization of the inner fire that had been consuming her for years.
    Please, God, she was alone in the room when she did it, please.
    Gagging on the stink and taste of destruction, Laura turned away from the fire-blasted room and stepped into the third-floor corridor.
    "Laura?"
    She looked up and saw Rebecca Bogner. Laura's breath came and went in wrenching inhalations, shuddering exhalations, but somehow she croaked their names: "Ruth… Thelma?"
    Rebecca's bleak expression denied the possibility that the twins had escaped unharmed, but Laura repeated the precious names, and in her ragged voice she heard a pathetic, beseeching note.
    "Down there," Rebecca said, pointing toward the north end of the hall. "The next to the last room on the left."
    With a sudden rush of hope, Laura ran to the indicated room. Three beds were empty, but in the fourth, revealed by the light of a reading lamp, was a girl lying on her side, facing the wall.
    "Ruth? Thelma?"
    The girl on the bed slowly rose—one of the Ackersons, unharmed. She wore a drab, badly wrinkled, gray dress; her hair was in disarray; her face was puffy, her eyes moist with tears. She took a step toward Laura but stopped as if the effort of walking was too great.
    Laura rushed to her, hugged her.
    With her head on Laura's shoulder, face against Laura's neck, she spoke at last in a tortured voice. "Oh, I wish it'd been me, Shane. If it had to be one of us, why couldn't it have been me?"
    Until the girl spoke, Laura had assumed that she was Ruth.
    Refusing to accept that horror, Laura said, "Where's Ruthie?"
    "Gone. Ruthie's gone. I thought you knew, my Ruthie's dead."
    Laura felt as if something deep within her had torn. Her grief was so powerful that it precluded tears; she was stunned, numb.
    For the longest time they just held each other. Twilight faded toward night. They moved to the bed and sat on the edge.
    A couple of kids appeared at the door. They evidently shared the room with Thelma, but Laura waved them away.
    Looking at the floor, Thelma said, "I woke up to this shrieking, such a horrible shrieking… and all this
light
so bright it hurt my eyes'. And then I realized the room was on fire.
Tammy
was on fire. Blazing like a torch. Thrashing in her bed, blazing and shrieking…"
    Laura put an arm around her and waited.
    "… The fire leaped off Tammy—
whoosh
up the wall, her bed was on fire, and fire was spreading across the floor, the rug was burning…"
    Laura remembered how Tammy had sung with them on Christmas and had thereafter been calmer day by day, as if gradually finding inner peace. Now it was obvious that the peace she'd found had been based on the determination to end her torment.
    "Tammy's bed was nearest the door, the door was on fire, so I broke the window over my bed. I called to Ruth, she…'s-she said she was coming, there was smoke, I couldn't see, then Heather Doming, who was bunking in your old bed, she came to the window, so I helped her get out, and the smoke was sucked out of the window, so the room cleared a little, which was when I saw Ruth was trying to throw her own blanket over Tammy to's-smother the flames, but that blanket had caught f-fire, too, and I saw Ruth… Ruth… Ruth on fire…"
    Outside, the last purple light melted into darkness.
    The shadows in the corners of the room deepened.
    The lingering burnt odor seemed to grow stronger.
    "… and I would've gone to her, I would've gone, but just then the f-fire
exploded
, it was everywhere in the room, and the smoke was black and so thick, and I couldn't see Ruth any more or anything… then I heard sirens, loud and close, sirens, so I tried to tell myself they'd get there in time to help Ruth, which was a l-l-lie, a lie I told myself and wanted to believe, and… I left her there, Shane. Oh, God, I went out the window and left Ruthie on f-f-fire, burning…"
    "You couldn't do anything else," Laura assured her.
    "I left Ruthie burning."
    "There was nothing you could do."
    "Left Ruthie."
    "There was no point in you dying too."
    "I left Ruthie burning."

    In May, after her thirteenth birthday, Thelma was transferred to Caswell and assigned to a room with Laura. The social workers agreed to that arrangement because Thelma was suffering from depression and was not responding to therapy. Maybe she would find the succor she needed in her friendship with Laura.
    For months Laura despaired of reversing Thelma's decline. At night Thelma was plagued by