Smoke (2 page)

“My parents’ place,” Ben answers.

“But—” I stop myself from saying what should be another thing that doesn’t have to be said.

We can’t go to your parents.

We’re getting divorced.

This is what we decided, earlier that night, before we agreed to go to bed because we were too exhausted and too sad to talk about it anymore. Besides, having arrived at the big decision—
divorce
—what did the rest of it matter, really? I didn’t care who got what piece of furniture, and though Ben might have had an opinion, he still cared enough about me to acquiesce to my “Enough” and agree that we should both get some sleep if we could.

We are getting divorced.

After ten years of marriage, and six years together before that.

Divorced.

I still can’t believe it, even though I was the first to say the word, maybe the first to think it. When I’d allowed myself to ponder it before—during the worst hours of the last few months, in the moments when I’d think,
I can’t take this anymore, I can’t, I can’t
—I was sure that if I finally worked up the courage to say it, to ask for it, I’d feel relieved.

But I don’t feel that way. If anything, I feel worse. Like I
really
can’t take it anymore, only I’m not sure what it is I can’t take.

So we can’t go to Ben’s parents’ house.

We can’t.

But we do.

Ben’s parents live in a ridiculously large house three miles south of town.

The town of Nelson—regular population: 23,194; tourist population: 100,000, depending on how the economy’s going—sits in a bowl surrounded by a series of craggy, snow-covered mountains that form part of the northern Rockies. Before tourism got big, the town’s main income came from the vast cattle ranches that filled the valley. These ranches have all but closed down now, and the land’s become home to Nelson’s wealthiest residents. Ben’s parents’ house rests on the edge of a thousand acres that used to hold ten thousand head of cattle. Now it’s an excuse for my father-in-law, Gordon, to call himself a gentleman rancher.

But that isn’t being fair to him, really. Because he is a gentleman, one of the gentlest I’ve ever met, and I love him, I do. I love Ben’s whole family—his reserved mother, Grace; his awkward little sister, Ashley; his uptight, middle-child brother, Kevin. And though they might have more money than is right or fair, life isn’t right or fair. If anyone deserves to have this much money, they are those people.

But their house is ridiculously large. It really is.

As we sit in our car, parked in front of the Ridiculously Large House, we have another argument about whether we should use Ben’s key to the guest wing and camp out in one of the spare bedrooms until morning, or wake his parents and tell them we’re here. Ben wants to let them rest, but I don’t think that’s right.

“The alarm’s probably on,” I say, reminding him of something I don’t need to, which is something I hate about myself but don’t seem to be able to change. “What if we set it off? Do you want your mother to have another heart attack?”

“Of course not. Jesus. Okay, okay, we’ll do it your way.”

I put my hand on his arm. “I’m sorry. This is really hard for me. I don’t know—” I swallow a sob as I look toward the window, focusing on the side-view mirror, the slightly-closer-than-it-appears night.

“I know,” Ben says, his own voice tight. “Me too.”

“Do you hate me now?”

“No.”

“Not even a little bit?”

He takes my hand and folds his fingers into mine. “Not one little drop.”

I turn toward him. “I don’t see how that’s possible. You must at least be angry.”

“I’m not.”

He gives me a sad smile, and my heart breaks all over again.

“We should go in,” he says eventually. “Get some sleep.”

We climb out of the car, and I sling the backpack over my shoulders like I used to do in my school days. We stand facing the house, each waiting for the other to make the next move. The high-pitched rasp of grasshoppers fills our silence.

“I’ll go in first,” Ben says. “Give me a few minutes.”

“You’re not going to—”

“Tell them? No.”

“Promise?”

“I said I wouldn’t.”

I watch his back as he walks into the circle of light cast by the front porch lamps. A firefly blinks on and off, on and off, along the roofline. The smoke is fainter here, miles away from the fire. It’s only one of the night smells keeping me company, along with the aspens and the sagebrush.

Inside the house, lights turn on like dominoes. My stomach clenches, tight with worry. While I mostly believe Ben will keep his word, that he won’t bring our bad news into his parents’ house, not tonight, I can’t be completely sure of what he’ll do anymore. Waiting here, counting out the seconds like a child playing hide-and-seek, feeling the weight of the pack on my back, it feels like too many
Mississippi
s have slipped by for Ben to simply be telling them about the fire.

And so, when Ben’s mother opens the front door and walks through the dew-laden grass in her bare feet to pull me against her breast in an uncharacteristic gesture of welcome, I do what I almost never do.

I cry.

CHAPTER 2

Ring of Fire

Elizabeth

I wake in the grayish dark
from a fitful sleep.

I spent the short night searching for a comfortable position in Ben’s childhood bed. It’s big enough for two—his parents didn’t believe in the traditional twin bed—but I can’t get the fire out of my mind. I check my phone (my hand cupped over the screen so its cast-off light doesn’t wake Ben) to see if there are any new updates, if the evacuation advisory’s been lifted, if my home is going to end up being as lost as my marriage.

Part of me still can’t believe it. A fire.
A fire
. Here. In Nelson. Where I came, two years ago, to finally put them behind me.

I worked wildland fires for twelve years, every fire season since I was twenty-four years old. I started out on a hand crew, worked my way up to squad boss, and then became the arson investigator for the regional fire district. From May to September, till the temperatures dropped and the snow flew in the mountains, that’s what I did, that’s what I was. Even in the off-season, if a fire broke out somewhere and they needed the extra manpower, I’d go where I was asked.

Ben would say: “Anywhere but here.”

I caught the fire bug working a summer job as a lookout in the southwest part of Oregon after my sophomore year in college. My friend Susan had been doing it for a couple of summers, and when she had to bail because of a case of appendicitis, I jumped at the chance to replace her. It’s funny to think about it now, but several months alone in the wilderness seemed like a good idea then. My best friend had died in a car accident six months before, and I’d broken up with my first serious college boyfriend. I guess I felt like I needed to get away from everything. An obsession with Jack Kerouac—who’d worked as a fire lookout for sixty-three days at Desolation Peak—might’ve also added fuel to my fire, so to speak.

In the second week of June, I hiked through the woods with enough supplies on my back to keep me fed until a food delivery arrived two weeks later. I took up residence in a tower that gave a breathtaking 360-degree view of the most beautiful forest I’d ever been in. I stayed there for sixty-five days (take that, Kerouac), and I watched. I waited. I cried and I read and I laughed, and when the summer was over, I felt whole again. I signed up for another summer and, though I’d met Ben by then, another after that. At the end of my third summer, I realized I wanted to be closer to the action—not just spot the trail of smoke from a distance but get to know it, feel its heat, fight it, conquer it.

So I trained and studied and got strong. When I was ready, I went where the fires were. I spent a lot of time away from Ben. Eventually, it felt as if I’d spent most of my life waiting. Waiting to get back to him. Waiting to start the family we’d always wanted, to have a job I loved
and
a marriage. Waiting till the air warmed up and the snowmelt ran into the creek beds. Waiting for that first bolt of lightning or careless cigarette to set off a telltale white plume above the horizon.

Waiting for a fire to spark.

I was so sick of waiting.

But now all I can do is wait for morning to come.

I slip out of bed quietly at daybreak. I put on a pair of jeans and a warm fleece as armor against the morning chill. It’s only September 2, the day after Labor Day, and it feels like winter is going to show up early, a welcome relief from our kiln-baked summer.

In the bathroom, I run a brush through the tangles of my shoulder-length red hair, noticing the dark smudges a sleepless night always leaves under my pale-green eyes. The makeup lights around the mirror glint off the gray hairs I haven’t bothered to cover up yet.

Back in the bedroom, I write Ben a quick note on a piece of paper I find on his desk and leave it on the indentation my head made in my pillow. He’s breathing easy as I close the door gently behind me.

I leave by a side door, careful to unman the alarm first, and then I’m behind the wheel of my car, a beat-up blue Subaru Outback, driving toward what anyone in their right mind would drive away from.

As I bump along the dirt road, I run into the smoke that’s already started to spread out and settle into the valley. The acrid tang stings my nose, making it itch.

In town, there’s a ghostly quiet along Main Street that I haven’t seen in the longest time, maybe ever. Certainly not in the summer, when the tourists stomp along the wood-plank sidewalks and linger in the overpriced art stores and T-shirt shops. The town’s pretty without all the people in it. I used to know that. How could I forget?

I take the ring road around the base of Nelson Peak, and a mile north of town, I’m stopped as I approach the perimeter that’s been set up by the fire crews. It’s made up of fire trucks, utility vehicles, and the first of what I know will be an eventual forest of white trailers if they don’t get this thing under control soon.

I flash my badge at one of the patrollers from the sheriff’s office. I should’ve given it back when I retired, but I held on to it. One of many things I should’ve let go, but couldn’t quite bring myself to.

“Just want to get a look and do an assessment,” I say to the uniform. He nods and pulls the tape aside.

As I drive past him, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up in protest. Coming out here was a bad idea. In fact, keeping any ties with the life I was trying to leave behind was a mistake. If I’d cut the cord entirely, maybe I wouldn’t be here, two years later, no baby, almost no marriage, driving backward in time.

A cliché. A fucking cliché. Maybe that’s everyone’s life; I can’t tell. But I’m starting to feel as if my old life followed me here, like it missed me and couldn’t stay away.

I park my car with its nose pointed toward the fire and watch the beehive of activity. The yellow hoses heavy with water and fire retardant. The flash of axes and the whirring chain saws. A hand crew is working to keep the fire that’s still licking at the husk of what was once a house from spreading to its neighbors. The crew boss is barking orders into his radio. I can almost hear what he’s saying through the helmet I’m not wearing.

Someone taps the glass next to me. I unwind my window, letting the past roll in.

“Hey, Beth,” Andy says, his face crinkling with pleasure despite the circumstances. “You here to work the fire?”

Nelson Elementary is where we would’ve sent our kids.

I try not to think about that as I pull into the school’s half-full parking lot an hour later. Thinking like that is beating myself up. And though I feel like I deserve a beating sometimes—a metaphorical one, anyway—I need to stop administering them to myself.

I’ve never been inside the building before, but it feels like my own elementary school did, only smaller. As if I’m Alice in Wonderland and I’ve taken the pill that makes you grow larger. Even my feet feel too big as they slap against the tiled floor.

I follow the hastily made paper signs to the principal’s office, where the incident commander has set up the command center. Like an air traffic controller, the IC’s the hub through which commands and information flow to the field operations. Doesn’t matter how good your crews are or whether you have the latest equipment, if your IC doesn’t cut it, the fire isn’t going to be contained.

Her right-hand man, the operations center dispatcher, is sitting in front of a bank of computer screens. I don’t recognize the OCD, but the IC’s an old friend.

Kara Panjabi gave me my first crew job, and she’s been watching out for me ever since. Fifty-five, her perpetual smiles have creased deep lines into her light-brown face. She might seem soft on the outside, but she can out-bench-press many of the men on her crews, a feat she’s often asked to demonstrate at camp events, in the down moments.

We may have had some words when I told her I was leaving, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t happy to see me now.

“Elizabeth! I wondered when you would arrive.”

We hug. She smells like balsa wood and citronella and, always underneath that, smoke. It’s a fragrance that works its way into your skin, your hair, and even now, two years away from it, I still catch its scent clinging to me every once in a while, like a lover who doesn’t want to let go.

She releases me. “You do not call, you do not write.”

“I’ve been . . . busy,” I say, ducking away.

“You’ve been out to the site?”

“Before I came here.”

“Andy is there, yes?”

Andy’s the one who told me where to find Kara.

“Stop it.”

“Stop what, exactly?”

“Using your creepy ESP skills on me.”

Kara comes from a long line of fortune-telling mystics. She claims not to believe in “all that nonsense,” but that doesn’t mean she isn’t above using the keen powers of observation she learned at her
dadi
’s knee.

“You say that because you are envious.”