Flash Fire (6 page)

It was pretty easy to skip the real children, however.

Elisabeth ate both cupcakes. She wanted to belong to a family where they had purple and yellow and aqua colored sugar cereal around. When she grew up, fresh fruit would never cross her threshold, and as for foreign vegetables, she would pay the supermarket not to carry them. She would eat Twinkies and Sno Balls and lots and lots of salty greasy potato chips.

Overweight made Mom tremble. She liked best the people who stopped eating after one bite of dessert and sat quietly through the rest of the conversation without ever touching that chocolate again. These people had discipline.

Elisabeth didn’t want discipline. She wanted a pet. Specifically, one of Danna Press’s kittens. She’d asked her mother, but as far as Elisabeth’s mother was concerned, pets were just hair on your couch and fleas on your ankles.

Elisabeth Severyn slid into a nightmare where her parents rescued the things that count, and she was not one.

A deer joined her in the thicket and woke her from the dream.

It was scary and spooky and perfect.

The deer was small and blond. Its eyes were immense. Its flanks heaved. Elisabeth sat entirely still. She could not believe her good fortune.

Perhaps my real skill will be with wild animals, she thought. Perhaps I’ll make great films in Africa, or soothe gentle beasts, or learn how dolphins talk.

The deer saw her and was not afraid.

Ohhhhhh, thought Elisabeth, loving the deer.

It did not occur to Elisabeth that the deer had far greater things to be afraid of.

H
ALL PADDLED OCCASIONALLY, GETTING
new angles on Pinch Mountain. Its fuzzy watercolory look never changed. Hall never saw an animal on the mountainside. He always looked, thinking that surely a deer or coyote must appear. But they never did. Of course, maybe from here, what, a half mile away, or something, they blended invisibly.

Today was different.

Somebody had thrown a basketball up there. Or something orange. Hall couldn’t imagine how they’d done it. Or from where.

The swimming pool was practically boiling. Plus he was turning pruny from being in the water for so long. If he had to run from a fire right now, he’d be so waterlogged it wouldn’t even singe his eyebrows. This was not turning out to be a restful afternoon. The whole world was hotting up. California was letting him down.

Letting him down.
He was always hearing that phrase. Just the other night, Dad had used it about Matt Marsh.

Matt Marsh had been one of the spectaculars: good in sports and school, popular with kids and parents, clever at technology and music, and, of course, handsome and cool. And what happened? After a few semesters in college, Matt dropped out for a job in one of the more boring suburbs down in the Valley — a flat omelette of a place where people with personality didn’t go, and if they went, after a few months they had no personality left.

Matt Marsh not only moved to this pathetic part of LA, he became a firefighter, washing his little truck, folding his little hose, memorizing his little manual. Once you were a firefighter, that was what you were: a firefighter. You couldn’t rise like a meteor to splendid success on another level, become a vice president or a producer.

It was okay to do clerical work before the casting session that would make you a star. It was okay to bus dishes between auditions. But it was not okay to choose something forever that went no place.

Matt Marsh, of all people. Nobody even talked about him anymore. He might as well have been dead, and his parents were embarrassed.

“They gave that kid everything,” Hall’s father had said sadly just the other night, “and look at how he turned out.”

It was scary, hearing about guys that let their fathers down. Hall was desperately afraid of not pleasing his father. How was he supposed to tell Dad he wanted to help little guys like Geoffrey turn into people? “Maybe Matt’ll save lives,” Hall had pointed out.

“If you or Danna did something like that, I’d be frantic,” said Mom bluntly. “I expect great things of you.”

So it was not just Dad. It was Mom, too, expecting great things of Hall.

Hall swam one slow-motion lap, floated on his back, and in rolling over caught a glimpse of the rusty orange basketball again.

It was larger.

More orange.

B
EAU AND ELISABETH’S MOTHER
was on the treadmill. Her two best friends were on treadmills on either side of her, Joy listening to a motivational tape and Suze telling how her ex-husband number two was now ending his marriage number three and should Suze begin dating him again?

This was far more interesting than the problem Wendy Severyn had: her daughter. Thinking about Beau was delightful. Thinking about Elisabeth was depressing.

You were supposed to accept your children as they were, but when the child was Elisabeth, hiding out in thickets or reading at the back of closets instead of giggling with other little girls…oh, why couldn’t Elisabeth have a real life? Wendy Severyn resolved to invite a new child over every day, one after another, no matter how much her daughter or the guest whined about it. There had to be
someone
who’d want to be friends with Elisabeth.

“The fires are spreading,” said Joy suddenly.

“You’re listening to the radio?” said Wendy. “I thought you had a tape on.”

“The fires fascinate me. I can’t get enough of them. The power of nature is still here, no matter how we try to put a lid on it. The awesome strength,” said Joy reverently, “of untamed nature.”

Wendy Severyn hated nature. Nature meant bodies that got old, and Wendy intended to beat nature and keep her body young.

“Wendy,” said Joy, “it just hit Grass Canyon.”

Grass Canyon was a very long road. The fire was not necessarily anyplace near Pinch Canyon. Anyway, Aden had said not to worry. Wendy had enough to worry about, what with turning Elisabeth into a child she could be proud of.

Suze acted as if the fire was already in Pinch Canyon, for heaven’s sake. “Your driveway is awfully narrow, Wendy,” said Suze. “And those switchbacks? You couldn’t even use a regular moving van, remember? I doubt if firetrucks can make the corners either.”

The treadmill kept moving. You could not stop your pace because the ground beneath you did not stop its pace. So Wendy went on running and running and running. “Beau is a sensible boy,” she said. “I’m sure he’ll know what to do. If only Elisabeth were a sensible girl.”

“Poor you,” Suze commiserated. Suze’s two daughters were lovely little copies of Suze, which was so unfair. By rights, Elisabeth should have been a copy of Wendy.

Wendy turned the dial to make the treadmill go faster. If she were really running, she wouldn’t be able to think about anything at all, and wasn’t that what meditation was all about? Emptying your mind?

Wendy Severyn did not know that even Beau, who loved his mother, believed she had a head-start on an empty mind.

F
OR FIRES, THERE IS
a verb that you use differently.

Flower.

A little fire can “flower” like a rose-opening to the sun. It spreads, and its petals cover the ground. It tosses bouquets to the bottom canyon layer of sumac and brush, and that “flowers,” too, and all around, more places “flower” until you are in a garden of wildfire, instead of a garden of wildflowers.

Some fires not only flower, they throw. They pick up burning logs and toss them ahead. These are fire whirls, giant smoke rings with a down-draft of deadly gases. Their center temperature can actually reach two thousand degrees.

In the dips and gullies and hills beyond Pinch Mountain, the fire played all its games. Here it slowed, and there it died. Here it leaped a huge space and there it pivoted and went back where it had been.

The wind blew into the fire’s waiting mouth. The hotter the fire, the more oxygen it ate, the quicker the wind refilled the supply, and the hotter the fire became.

Behind Pinch Mountain was a narrow crevasse. Not a canyon, really, because it didn’t open onto anything, just a slot in the earth. The fire fell down into it and the crevasse “blew” — a bomb exploding behind Pinch.

H
ALL AND DANNA’S MOTHER
and father worked in the same studio. The studio was its own world, with deadlines and demands, absolutes and restrictions, hopes and fears. Like a hospital ward, it completely enclosed its people from other worlds. They forgot everything, swamped in the task at hand.

Oddly, here in a world utterly ruled by television, no television was on.

Mrs. Press had a watch that did everything but write the scripts for her. Its alarm went off at regular intervals so she could be in touch with the children. Otherwise she’d forget them. It wasn’t a matter of forgetting to call — she literally forgot they existed.

Sometimes when she was really immersed in a script, the people who lived on the page canceled out the people who lived in her house, and she would actually find herself wondering who Hall was, or who Danna was, and why. She believed that her children did not know this.

Over and over, Mrs. Press told herself that the kids were fourteen and fifteen now, they were responsible, they were good, they knew the rules…but today she worried. It was unusual for Jill Press to worry. She had brought up these children solidly; they did not wander from the yard and they did not wander from her rules.

This afternoon, there was a nag at the bottom of her heart, a constant low-level anxiety that she was doing something wrong. But her husband had just called. It was absurd to be calling again.

Absurd or not, Jill Press took her cellular phone and went to another room to call. (Danna got very cross if her parents talked to her in front of people, although Hall never noticed these things.)

She wished she could be home, teasing the kids, going horseback riding with them, peeling Hall away from that creepy little Aszling kid.

She thought of dinner, which once again the four Presses were not going to have together. Danna would have Frosted Flakes followed by several ice cream sandwiches. Hall, so mature in most ways, was a toddler for food: He’d mix Sugar Smacks, BerryBerry Kix, and Cocoa Krispies. Mrs. Press had met families who claimed the children loved sprout sandwiches and tofu casseroles but her children, personally, were into sugar.

Once out of the conference room, she felt foolish. Fourteen and fifteen was not four and five. She couldn’t have better kids. What was her problem here? Did she think they were going to go out and get hooked on cocaine this afternoon? She was just itchy from too many meetings. It was affecting her like a rash, that and the fires and the Santa Ana winds.

She went back into the meeting and was relieved that she hadn’t bothered the children only minutes after the last check-in.

E
LISABETH AND BEAU’S FATHER
also sat in a meeting. There were seven men and four women at this meeting and he was annoyed at every one of them. Why must they talk so much? In the case of some of these people, why talk at all?

There were people in this world who should not have been provided with mouths.

He was sitting between two of them.

The talk was of the fires, but only what the fires were doing to network advertising income. Fire raged in a dozen places: Glendale and Laguna Beach and Pasadena and Ventura. Nobody knew how any fire had started: lightning, cigarettes, arson, sparks from dragging broken mufflers of passing cars. Now, in the high wind, with the land and the scrub preheated, fire seemed to be starting itself.

In this group, nobody cared how the fires started. They had bigger things to worry about. Car dealers, for example, didn’t like to advertise during broadcasts of fires that were consuming their customers.

Mr. Severyn glanced at his watch. This meeting could last until six or even seven. He was not a homebody. Getting home in time for dinner was not something that normally ran through his mind, but these fires were getting on everybody’s nerves. They’d gone on too long and there were too many of them.

Pinch Canyon was safe. The neighborhood association paid a security guard and if something happened…

But he felt a queer pounding in his chest. A sort of primitive awareness. It was not like Beau to phone him at work. Beau knew that was reserved for emergencies.

In the complete lack of privacy at this hostile meeting, Aden Severyn allowed himself some very private thoughts. He was angry at himself for the whole nonsense over Michael’s ashes. He did not believe in a life after death, and he certainly did not believe that Michael inhabited those ashes sitting in that cardboard box on the mantel.

He’d seen Beau’s eyes flicker toward the box every time he went through the room, seen his son flinch just thinking about them.

He’d seen Elisabeth design a detour for herself so she didn’t have to pass the fireplace. The whole family had moved its activities to the far side of the house, as if they really did intend to bury Michael up there, and would always skirt the graveyard.

He had to talk to Beau. And for that matter, to Michael himself. It was strange how death had brought Michael into his mind as life never had.

Mr. Severyn’s chest actually hurt. The possibilities were: heart attack (in the advertising industry, people had heart attacks quite regularly); indigestion (considering what he had had for lunch, this was very possible); and panic.

Those fires are miles away from the house, he told himself.

He heard his own thought: not
miles away from the children,
but
miles away from the house.

A creepy damp wash, like a muggy day, slid up his entire body, enveloping him in what was either a stroke or a warning of one. He said, “I can’t sit here. The fires worry me. I’m going home to be there with the kids.” He liked that sentence.