She Talks to the Corner About the Fire

Our daughter, barely two and newly verbal, started holding conversations with the corner of her nursery. This is, we know, completely normal — toddlers talk to everything, corners included, and we found it charming. She'd babble away toward the same spot, the far corner by the window, pausing as if listening, laughing at replies. An imaginary friend before she could even say the words. Adorable.

It became less adorable slowly, through content. As her speech developed, we caught more of what she was saying to the corner, and it clustered, disturbingly, around one theme: the fire. 'No fire today,' she'd tell the corner, reassuringly, patting the air. 'Fire all gone.' 'Don't be scared of the fire.' She'd get upset, sometimes, gesturing at the corner and then at the window, saying 'hot, hot,' and needing comfort, and then returning, herself, to comfort the corner, this small child soothing an empty spot about a fire that existed nowhere in her tiny, safe, centrally-heated life.

We had no fireplace in that room. We'd never had a fire, never talked about fire, kept her from anything that could have planted it. There was no source for a two-year-old's steady, specific preoccupation with reassuring a corner that the fire was gone.

We found out why after we'd been in the house a while, from an elderly neighbour who'd lived on the street her whole life and who, when I mentioned in passing which room was the nursery, went quiet in the particular way this whole site has taught me to dread. There had been a fire, she said, in the 1930s — 1931, she thought — that had started in that upstairs room, in the night. A child had died in it. A little girl, about, she thought, two or three. The room had been rebuilt, the house passed through many hands, the tragedy fading into the kind of thing only the oldest neighbour still carries. In that room. The nursery. The corner by the window.

Our daughter, who knew none of this, who could not have known any of it, spent her third year gently, repeatedly reassuring the corner of that room that the fire was gone now, that it was all right, don't be scared, fire all gone — as though she could see, in the spot the rest of us saw as empty, another little girl, about her own age, still frightened, seventy years after the night the room burned, and had decided, in the boundless matter-of-fact kindness of the very small, to keep her company and tell her it was over.

She's older now and doesn't do it anymore; the corner is just a corner to her. We moved her to a different bedroom, gently, without ever telling her why. But I think about the other little girl sometimes, the one who was scared of the fire for seventy years until a two-year-old who couldn't have known arrived and sat on the floor and told her, over and over, that it was all gone now, that she was safe, that she didn't have to be scared anymore. I hope it helped. I hope somebody, finally, told her the fire was out.