Paradise

by Lizzie Johnson

  “It’s all gone,” she said. “Holy shit.”

  David exhaled sharply, but she didn’t register the sound. For a moment, Rachelle was gone too. She was remembering the weekend trips with her children, drives with Chris to the aquarium in Monterey or the science museum in San Jose. Their annual summer vacation to Pismo Beach, where the ocean lipped the horizon and Aubrey stuck her toes in the chilly surf. Chris’s move to Paradise for her, certain he would hate it. The ease with which the community had won him over with its green-layered mountains and small-town geniality. Vincent’s PeeWee team, undefeated for two seasons, which surprised no one, because Paradise was a football town and indoctrination started early. The wedding dress that she had carefully preserved, packed in a box and stored in the attic above the garage, Aubrey dreaming of wearing it someday. All the things Rachelle had sacrificed—her own intuitions, her own feelings—so she could put her family first.

  It hadn’t been easy. Something had been off in her first marriage, to Mike, but she’d ignored it for a long time. She loved her husband and adored their children. How could anything be wrong? She posted photos on Facebook from the Sacramento Zoo and at the Aquatic Park Swimming Pool in Paradise. With her “two favorite boys” on Father’s Day: Mike, wearing a baseball cap embroidered with WORLD’S GREATEST DAD, cradling their son in his lap. When Rachelle campaigned for a seat on the local school board in 2012, Mike had helped make the signs, stenciling her name in white against a blue background. He attended every debate, smiling at Rachelle from the audience. Both Rachelle and Mike were ambitious and loved debating politics, sparring from separate patio chairs on their deck overlooking Butte Creek Canyon. Always scrappy and good on a budget, Rachelle had asked a friend to style her hair into an elaborate up-do for the Election Day victory party. She and Mike had been so happy.

  Rachelle had taken the divorce hard, struggling to regain control of her finances and find a new place to live. After moving into her grandparents’ home on Pentz Road, she had started buying cheap white wine by the box to take the edge off. She stashed it in a desk drawer at work. Soon she was showing up drunk to school board meetings. After one particularly embarrassing session, Rachelle resigned her seat and checked herself in to a rehabilitation program. She was determined to get better. Slowly, in fits and spurts, she did. During her stint in the Santa Cruz program, Rachelle purchased a green mug from a local coffee shop. In white letters, it read IT’S ALL BETTER IN HERE. Years later, Rachelle still sipped her coffee from the mug every morning, a daily reminder of how far she had come; it was a permanent fixture in the cupholder of her Suburban. Rachelle’s father had always told her that it didn’t matter how many times she fell on her face—what mattered was that she got up again. Rachelle had taken his advice to heart: She maintained her sobriety and was open about having hit rock bottom. She had looked toward the future, set goals, and built a new life with Chris.

  Now she was looking at that life in ruins. The dogwood tree in what used to be their backyard was a blackened stump. Every spring, Rachelle had mailed its cream-colored buds to her family back in Fresno. She remembered how the tree had sheltered her on that night the previous spring when she had clutched the pregnancy test and learned that a baby was coming. Her son was finally here, but he had come into a world that Rachelle didn’t recognize. Everything she had worked for had burned to the ground or been lofted into the air, spilling into the atmosphere in poisonous puffs.

  * * *

  —

  NEARLY SIX HOURS AFTER leaving Feather River hospital, David pulled back in to its parking lot. While they had been stuck in traffic, the fire had swept west across Paradise, just missing them. Under the emergency room overhang, doctors were triaging other people who had tried—and failed—to evacuate, like Rachelle, and preparing to move them to the helipad. The lower wing of the building was on fire, and so were the outbuildings: marketing, human resources, the central utility plant. The cardiology department had been lost. One of the emergency room nurses had broken her foot while trying to outrun the blaze, and she hobbled in an orthopedic boot. The Toyota Tundra driven by the ICU manager had toasted like a marshmallow, its sides crisped brown. Staff arranged straight-backed chairs and couches from the waiting room on the helipad, an open space circled by beige landscaping rocks where they might be safe. The rows of seats faced each other, as precise and orderly as they had been indoors, but they’d traded the fluorescent hospital lighting for an ashen sky.

  The backup generator had caught fire earlier in the day, and without power, the toilets inside the hospital had clogged and flooded. A scattering of plastic buckets, where people could squat to relieve themselves, sat cordoned off by sheets. Deputies pushed elderly women from a nearby nursing home across the parking lot in wheelchairs. Thin white sheets were draped over their heads and shoulders like keffiyehs. Beneath one sheet, a woman wore a red crocheted hat and cradled a goldendoodle in her lap. Ben Mullin, the cardiopulmonary supervisor who had been sheltering in the tunnel, preparing to breathe noxious gas, had emerged when he noticed new people arriving at the hospital seeking medical assistance. He recognized David’s white Nissan and went over to give him a hug. David broke down in his arms, gasping and sobbing.

  A pediatrician rushed over to Rachelle and listened to Lincoln’s heart and lungs. The hours-old baby blinked and tried to wriggle away from the cold stethoscope. The pediatrician instructed Rachelle to stay in David’s sedan—he didn’t want the baby to inhale any more smoke. Rachelle was too exhausted to protest. They had spent hours trying to escape, only to end up right back where they had started.

  Meanwhile, Chris was circling the parking lot at Enloe Medical Center in Chico. He had finally made it downhill, but he couldn’t find a place to park. Every evacuee with the slightest ailment had shown up at the hospital seeking help. Chris’s twenty-four-year-old daughter lived three blocks away, so he gave up and drove to her house. She pulled him into a hug and guided him into her kitchen, where Chris drank a glass of cold water and tried to catch his breath. His phone lit up with a text message from a friend, who had received word from Rachelle. “Don’t worry, they’re at Feather River hospital,” it read. “Everything is going to be OK.”

  Chris blanched. How could Rachelle and the baby still be in Paradise?

  OBSERVATION: SARA’S CALL

  Cal Fire dispatcher Beth Bowersox recognized the voice on the line as soon as she picked up the call. Her neighbor Sara Magnuson had called 911 hundreds of times during her slow slide into dementia. At one point, she was ringing the emergency line ten to twelve times a day, complaining of chest pain or claiming a burglar was breaking into her house. The seventy-five-year-old loved Christmas and kept twinkle lights strung along her eaves year-round; one strand, draped across her front door, tapped the frame when the wind blew, making it sound as if someone was working the lock.

  From across Drendel Circle, Bowersox would watch Sara retreat into her home, appear in the driveway ten minutes later, and go back inside again, apparently at a loss as to why she had come outdoors in the first place. Her husband, Marshall, had run a jewelry business from their home until his death in 2013. Without him, Sara hadn’t known how to take care of herself. She saw and heard things that no one else did. To the irritation of neighbors, she regularly set off her car alarm in the middle of the night to fend off imaginary “Nazi” dogs. At Sara’s request, PG&E workers had stopped by several times to check her gas meter; she had reported that her gas was leaking, though it never was.

  Sara had few family members willing to help out. She had last talked to her brother, who lived in Phoenix, eight months earlier. He found Sara “difficult to get along with.” After she’d been caught driving without a license, her car had been confiscated, and she couldn’t afford to recover it from the impound lot. In recent months, Bowersox had beseeched Lauren Gill to put a conservatorship over Sara. She was a danger to herself. But as much as Sara’s antics a
nnoyed Bowersox—and everyone else on their cul-de-sac—she also felt sympathy for the elderly woman, who spent so much time alone. Looking out the front window of her bungalow onto Sara’s home, Bowersox couldn’t help but think of how scared she must feel navigating the world every day.

  Earlier that morning, their neighbors had twice tried to evacuate her. “I’m fine,” Sara had insisted, fierce as ever. The septuagenarian’s signature look was tight leggings and low-cut tank tops that enhanced her cleavage. Bowersox had always admired Sara’s confidence. But it meant that Sara didn’t understand that an out-of-control wildfire was at her fence line. She refused to leave. By the time she could process what was happening, it was too late. Now she called the 911 line for help. “Nobody’s left,” she whispered to Bowersox. The power had been turned off, and Sara’s house was dark. The woman was curled up in her bathtub, afraid.

  “Sara, I need you to get out,” Bowersox told her urgently. “I need you to run. Start walking out of the house. Maybe you will see a car or a fire engine. But you cannot stay in your house. You need to leave.” Sara wouldn’t—or perhaps couldn’t—follow Bowersox’s directions. She might not have understood. Soon after, the line failed.

  Bowersox labored to breathe, her shoulders heaving. Tears filled her eyes. She stepped away from her pod. She couldn’t bear to answer another call. People called 911 expecting first responders to save them, but more and more on this grim morning, there was nothing they could do. After a few minutes, Bowersox wiped the tears from her cheeks. She had no choice. Gulping back sobs, she put on her headset and answered another call from another person she couldn’t help.

  CHAPTER 13

  NO ATHEISTS IN FOXHOLES

  The ambulance crew huddled in the darkened garage of the house on Chloe Court and tried to come up with a plan. The family who owned this house had just moved in; the space was strewn with stacks of cardboard boxes and a tangled nest of bicycles. Amid the clutter, three patients rested on foam backboards on the concrete floor, sheets tucked around their bare feet. Red triage bands around their wrists marked them as the patients in the most serious condition. Tammy planned to help them, but she needed to say her goodbyes first. She climbed back inside the remaining ambulance to make her calls, settling next to the man with cerebral palsy, who was too large to move. Gazing out the ambulance window, Tammy saw that a house on the cul-de-sac had caught fire.

  Tammy called her twenty-four-year-old daughter, Clarissa, the baby she had birthed the winter of her senior year. She had nursed her while studying for final exams and still managed to walk down Om Wraith Field with her class at Paradise High’s graduation. Tammy had looked for her daughter’s chubby face in the audience, hoping that the baby’s future would be different from her own. She had married the girl’s father at a park in her native Los Angeles the summer before, borrowing a white dress for the occasion. Her pregnant belly had pushed against the fabric. Tammy’s family hosted a potluck afterward. It was her mother, after all, who had insisted they marry. A recently born-again Jehovah’s Witness, she would support her daughter in making this transgression right, though she refused to do anything more than help with the wedding.

  Once they were married, Tammy had moved into a one-bedroom apartment with her new husband, who was two years older, and Clarissa. The bedroom barely fit their double bed and the baby’s crib. Tammy worked after school and on weekends at a restaurant called La Comida; her husband worked at Round Table pizza. They struggled to pay the bills. Tammy had once called her mother, crying: “I don’t have money to go get cough syrup for Clarissa.” Her mother maintained that she wouldn’t help. Later that evening, though, Tammy found the medicine and some bagged groceries on her front porch.

  Tammy had tried to foster a closer relationship with her own daughter. She was more generous and open with Clarissa, treating the teenager and her friends to pedicures, and when Clarissa entered high school, taking her to the midwife’s office so she could make educated decisions about her body. Now, in between sobs, Tammy told Clarissa over the phone how much she had loved her and how hard she had tried. “I’m not going to make it out of this, and I’m so sorry,” she said, begging her daughter to leave Paradise without packing. “You need to leave now. The time you thought you had—you don’t have it. Please just leave.”

  Next, Tammy called Savannah, who was about three years younger than Clarissa. After her birth, Tammy had felt the loss of her youth—she had skipped straight from high school to a household in which she was a wife and mother of two. At twenty-four, Tammy was working three jobs: as a housekeeper, an obstetrics technician at the hospital, and a cocktail waitress at the Crazy Horse Saloon, a nightclub in Chico known for its strong cocktails and mechanical bull. (Wednesdays were Buck Nights.) Her husband had gotten a new gig at a car parts store. Tammy would bathe their girls and read them books, then leave for the nightclub after they had fallen asleep. She would return home at 2:30 a.m., only to wake up a few hours later for her 7 a.m. shift at Feather River Hospital. She and her husband, rarely home at the same time, drifted apart, their relationship reduced to that of roommates. It wasn’t long before they separated.

  She was sorry about the divorce, Tammy told Savannah now, and for the chaos that came afterward—starting with the irascible man she had met at the saloon after splitting from their father. Clarissa and Savannah were ten and seven when she found out she was pregnant with his son, Brayden (now fourteen), then his daughter, Allyson (now thirteen). Tammy had stayed in the relationship for more than seven years; she didn’t know how to survive without him. And yet he was emotionally abusive, which Savannah had taken especially hard. By the time Tammy was thirty-six, when she found out that she had gotten into her dream nursing program at Butte Community College, her relationships with both her boyfriend and, more important, her daughter Savannah had seriously decayed. Another father figure followed, another pregnancy. Tammy graduated from nursing school with four-month-old Brooklyn in the audience. That month, she sent out announcements celebrating the birth of her fifth child, Clarissa’s high school graduation, and her nursing school graduation.

  Tammy had wanted to be a better mother, she told Savannah. She apologized for all the ways she knew she had failed and asked Savannah to be there for her younger siblings. She had to go, Tammy said, but she was proud of her kids. “I love you,” she repeated, until she was certain that her second-oldest daughter felt it.

  And finally, with a nervous sigh, Tammy called her own mother, who was on vacation in Oregon. They worked in proximity—her mother was a nursing supervisor at Feather River hospital—but in recent years, their relationship had grown even colder. After Tammy’s stepfather died, her mother had remarried and become more involved with her church. These days, she and Tammy barely talked. Still, Tammy remembered the pride in her eyes when Tammy had been given the Daisy Award the previous year. The prize recognized one nurse every trimester for dedication and professionalism. Tammy had been nominated after coaching a first-time mother through a difficult labor. “I have never felt such genuine love and compassion from a complete stranger before,” the mother wrote in her nomination letter. “Tammy’s love for her job was so evident in her every action towards me. Her motivating words got me through something I was beginning to feel was impossible. My favorite phrase she used was ‘Get mad and push her out!’ ” Tammy had won the award after just three years; there were nurses who had been on the floor for three decades and never received it. At the informal ceremony, hospital officials clapped and cheered while Tammy scanned the sea of faces for her mother. “I hope that I’ve made you proud,” she told her mother on the phone. She said she was sorry for how much she had put her through.

  In each of her conversations, Tammy apologized, again and again. For the family outings she had canceled, the whim of a vindictive boyfriend derailing an entire afternoon. For the relationships she’d had with men who emotionally abused her and her children. For the broken
family that her children had had to endure—for the hectic schedules, the shuttling of five kids to and from the houses of three different fathers. For the nursing study flashcards that Tammy always kept in her Jansport backpack and pored over during her son’s baseball games. For the recordings of medical terms she’d subjected her children to as she tried to memorize them during rides in her Suburban. For the years that Tammy had been there, but never really there, as she worked her way through nursing school.

  It had taken Tammy a long time to realize that she didn’t deserve to be treated as if she was nothing, that even with the stretch marks on her stomach from five pregnancies, she was beautiful and kind, worthy of love. She wished she had met her current boyfriend sooner. He was a local police officer who took Tammy out for steak on their first date and treated her with respect. Funny, with the best smile, he was also a good role model for her children. She was happy that she had finally achieved her dream of becoming a nurse, she told her family, but she was sorry that whole decades had passed before she had done something meaningful with her life.

  * * *

  —

  THE SKYWAY WAS a ribbon of hope—at least in the minds of residents, who stubbornly clung to its promise. If they could just edge their vehicles onto the town’s widest road, they believed they might stand a chance of survival. Jamie should have been safe here—but why was traffic not moving? He crawled forward a few more excruciating feet, nosing downhill. One lane over, he recognized a few of the colleagues who had departed Heritage with patients in their backseats. They had gotten a head start, leaving an hour before Jamie, but they hadn’t made it any farther. Their faces glowed, illuminated by their cellphone screens, as they scoured social media for information. They glanced up only when electrical transformers burst with a bang atop distribution poles. Everyone was on edge.