"I'm here," I said. "Eyes shut. Here it comes."
I poured. I poured slowly at the crown of her head and let it run back and down, the way the stylists do it, the way I'd watched them do it while I sat in the waiting chairs at Supercuts with a magazine I wasn't reading. The goop came off in thick pale ropes and swirled down the drain, which still worked, because drains don't need pressure, only gravity. I emptied the pitcher. I filled it again from the stockpot and the toilet tank and poured again. I said things I don't remember. Pia told me later that I said "you're okay, you're okay, you're okay" so many times that it stopped sounding like words and started sounding like the noise the dishwasher makes.
By the third pitcher the smell was fading. By the fifth she'd stopped crying and started shivering, and I put a dry towel over her head and let her sit back against the vanity cabinet while I went down for more. I drained the water heater until the stream turned to a dribble and the pot was half full of brown sediment, and then I got the two gallon jugs of distilled water out of the garage that we kept for the steam iron, and used those too. Altogether I must have poured fifteen gallons over my daughter's head in a quarter of an hour.
When I finally lifted the towel, the back of her neck and the skin under her hairline were an angry, blotchy pink, like a sunburn from the wrong side. Her hair had gone the color of a traffic cone in some places and the color of straw in others. But nothing was blistered, as far as I could see, and when I asked her how it felt, she thought about it, and said, "Like a really bad sunburn. Not like fire anymore. Like a sunburn."
"Okay," I said. "That's better than fire."
"I'm sorry," she said, and started crying again, differently. "I'm so sorry. Mom said to wait and I didn't wait and Jovie said it would be fine, she does it all the time, and I watched like four tutorials, I did everything they said, I did the strand test, I did everything right, it's just that the water stopped."
"I know," I said. "I know it did. You didn't make the water stop."