Charlie Starts a Fire at Albany Airport

Charlie Starts a Fire at Albany Airport is the episode in which seven-year-old Charlie McGee, trying to help her injured father, uses her power on pay phones and then unintentionally sets a serviceman on fire. The scene turns a desperate search for money into a public emergency, while exposing the conflict between Charlie’s fear of her ability and Andy McGee’s hope that what happened may be a change for the better.

Causes and Background

Charlie is alone in the airport concourse after midnight, wearing red stretch pants and a green rayon blouse, with shoulder-length blond hair. She passes through a place where an unaccompanied child can go unnoticed; no one stops to ask whether she is lost. The narration establishes both her vulnerability and her determination: she does not know exactly where she is going, but she has a fair idea of what she needs to find.

Her father is hurt and has told her they need money. When he is in this condition, it is difficult for him to think, and he needs quiet and sleep until the pain passes. Charlie also believes the men from the Shop may be coming after them. In her understanding, they want to take the pair apart to discover how they work and whether they can be used. The immediate need for cash is therefore bound up with the larger threat of pursuit and her father’s inability to act.

Charlie’s hesitation at the phones comes from a rule imposed on her since early childhood: she must not use the Bad Thing. She fears that she cannot always control it, and that it might injure her or other people. Her thoughts return to the time she hurt her mother and heard her scream. That memory makes the power frightening not only because of its possible scale, but because Charlie associates using it with having caused pain to someone she loves.

The Pay Phones

Before reaching the phones, Charlie takes a paper shopping bag protruding from a trash basket. At the end of the concourse she finds a bank of pay phones. She looks around from inside a booth, pretending to speak to her grandfather and telling an imagined listener that she and her father have arrived safely. The performance gives her a way to check whether anyone is watching. A woman nearby is using a flight-insurance machine with her back turned.

Charlie shoves one of the phones. The effort is slight, but the machine responds: coins pour out of the return slot and scatter across the floor before she can get the bag underneath them. She hurriedly sweeps up what she can, repeatedly looking through the booth window. The coins turn the phone into more than an ordinary fixture of the concourse: Charlie’s small push makes it yield money, but the spectacle also exposes how readily her power can alter the surrounding world.

She moves to the next booth, where a serviceman is still talking on the phone with the door open and a cigarette in hand. Charlie shuts the door, cutting off his voice, then makes the phone give up its change as well. This time she positions the bag correctly, and the coins fall inside. The successful second attempt gives her money, but the ease of the result sharpens her unease about enjoying the act of pushing things. Her practical need and her fear of what the power might become are present in the same small transaction.

The Fire and the Public Emergency

The scene shifts to the serviceman, Eddie Delgardo, as he sits smoking in a hard plastic chair. His resentful daydreams about Sally Bradford and his plans for leave are interrupted by warmth coming from his feet and a smell that seems to be something singeing. He notices Charlie nearby with the paper bag, but his attention settles on the heat. When he looks down, his shoes are on fire.

Eddie leaps up and runs across the concourse, trailing smoke as the cuffs of his uniform catch. The women’s restroom is closer than other places to escape to, so he charges inside. A woman emerging from a stall sees him and screams; voices rise from the occupied stalls. Eddie prevents a toilet stall door from swinging shut, climbs into the toilet feet first, and produces a hiss and a billow of steam. The incident has carried Charlie’s private, feared power into a crowded public space, where bystanders and airport security can no longer overlook it.

Two security guards enter the restroom. One has drawn his gun and orders the person inside the stall to come out with hands on his head. Eddie snarls back that they should wait until he can put his feet out. The exchange ends the immediate danger to him in grotesquely practical terms: the guards confront a man trying to deal with burning feet, not an attacker. The fire’s consequences are comic in their sudden disruption, but the risk that Charlie herself recognizes is real.

Charlie and Andy Afterward

Charlie returns to Andy crying. He puts an arm around her, though his own thoughts are badly impaired by throbbing pain, and tells her that Eddie is all right and has been taken to the security office. He asks what happened. Through her tears, Charlie describes overhearing the serviceman and forming the impression that he was trying to deceive the woman on the other end of the call. She says the fire happened before she could stop it and fears that she could have hurt him badly.

Andy’s answer reverses the emotional direction of the scene. Charlie regards the incident as a frightening loss of control; he tells her to lower her voice and says that he considers it the most encouraging thing that has happened in some time. The text does not yet explain that judgment, but its placement makes the contrast decisive: the same event that confirms Charlie’s fear also gives her father a reason for hope. The airport episode thus joins immediate survival to the longer struggle over whether Charlie’s power can be understood, restrained, and lived with.