Weather Woman

by Cai Emmons

  “I’m not a scientist anymore, don’t you see that? I probably never was one.”

  “Oh, you were. You certainly were. And I’m quite sure you still are.”

  “I may not have research proof, but I have experiential proof. I’ve done these things many times.”

  Diane rattles her head, emitting a low guffaw. “Honestly. What do you expect me to say? Did you come here thinking I would take this on faith? You know me well enough to know that’s not possible.” She sighs and a moment of silence ensues. “How long have you believed this—that you can do these things?”

  “Only this summer. Since June or so.”

  “Why then? What happened?”

  “Nothing specific I know of. I had a virus back in May. For a while I thought that might be it, the drugs I took. But I have no idea. No, actually I do know something—maybe I was always destined to be this way. I look back at myself as a child and I think I already had a sense of clouds and weather that was different from other people.”

  She can’t stand to look at Diane’s face, her look of defeat. She didn’t come here to vanquish Diane, only to solicit her help. “Haven’t you ever known something for sure that didn’t require research and proof?”

  “I can’t say I have. It’s not in my nature. I’ve never been religious in the least. And I’ve never believed in a thing if I didn’t understand why it was.”

  The anger is unmistakable, falling from Diane like dried scabs and, while Bronwyn is usually set back by anger, it now gives her license, a ballast against which to push back. Her gaze remains steady—Diane is the one who keeps looking away.

  “I’m not saying that trying to prove things is wrong, but sometimes it isn’t necessary and it’s a waste of time.” A stronger gust of wind pushes the swing back and forth, as if an invisible child is listening. “By the way, the breeze that kicked up a little earlier, I did that. I brought it on.”

  “Oh, for god’s sake, how am I supposed to respond to a statement like that?” Diane gets up and paces the short distance to the fence and back. “I’m not getting the full story here. There has to be more—a larger context, please.”

  “It might be outside your experience, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

  “Bronwyn, please, just tell me everything.” Diane angles her chair and sits, now facing Bronwyn. “It seems to me there must be something you’re not saying. Have you had some kind of accident? Have you joined a cult? Has something happened to you that I haven’t heard about?”

  “I’m telling you the truth as I know it. But you’re not hearing me.”

  “I’m trying to be reasonable.”

  Bronwyn shrugs, rises.

  “Don’t go, please. We can get to the bottom of this.”

  “I don’t think we can.”

  Bronwyn covers the fifty feet of back yard in a swift walk-run. She can barely breathe. She might as well be taking flight from the troposphere. On the deck she turns to see Diane watching her, standing rock-still next to her Adirondack chair. The breeze still waltzes in the treetops—one-two-three, one-two-three, its pattern mocking. See that breeze. That’s my breeze. You love that breeze, don’t you?

  Bronwyn inhales the deep breath of a yogi, allows herself to be lifted and absorbed, and in the hum and heat she tamps the breeze to stillness again. Later, after a period of time infinitesimally short or incalculably long, she returns to the deck. The day has become silent and hot and glum again. Diane, sitting now, has craned her neck back so her face is skyward. Resigned? Imploring?

  Bronwyn turns away and passes into the house and exits through the brass-knockered front door. Only when she reaches her car several blocks away does she notice she’s trembling.

  28

  The porch door slammed shut in anger, and Bronwyn has vanished, leaving Diane sucker-punched in a day that is improbably hot, improbably still. No questions at all have been laid to rest, and the anxiety of the past week has been replaced by a gumbo of worse emotion.

  Indignation. Bronwyn has apparently been moving in this strange direction—whatever it is—without feeling any need at all to include or alert Diane, even after all Diane has done for her, even after Diane has beseeched her to return to grad school and rejoin the ranks of working research scientists and would do anything to make that happen. Of course it’s possible, or even quite likely, that this “strain of thinking” that has beset Bronwyn played a role in her leaving the graduate program in the first place.

  Fear. Generalized and nonspecific. Bronwyn did not appear to be “cracking up” in any of the usual ways Diane has seen people go—social withdrawal, bad hygiene, dissociation—but who knows how she’s been behaving when Diane isn’t around? And surely psychosis can emerge in any number of ways. She hates to think of Bronwyn presenting herself in public as she did today, subjecting herself to more and more ridicule, scarring her reputation as a researcher and making a return to academic science unlikely.

  Shame. Though she has championed Bronwyn and helped her out, she has not prevented this from happening, or seen it coming. It calls her judgment into question at the most fundamental level. She hates to think of all the times she has defended Bronwyn in the presence of people who have found her a bit odd. Have those other people seen Bronwyn more clearly than Diane herself has?

  Sadness. Terrible sadness, cohabiting with her in this chair, taking up too much space. Bronwyn. Her Bronwyn. Her project for so many years. Her protégé. Almost her daughter. She has loved Bronwyn as much as she has loved her husbands.

  She is scheduled to have dinner with some dear old friends, two couples, not a scientist among them. A museum curator and a sculptor; an attorney and a librarian. She doesn’t mind being the only uncoupled person at the table, she likes that she and Joe are independent enough and confident enough with one another that they do not find such arrangements threatening—she could never be married again to anyone who felt otherwise—but being the fifth person with two couples often means the conversational focus turns to her, fine on most occasions, but not tonight. How could she discuss with them what has happened today? She wouldn’t know how to position the narrative. Would she describe Bronwyn from a safe distance, thereby ridiculing her? Or would she try to take Bronwyn’s perspective, standing by her, and thereby subjecting herself to ridicule? Not that her old friends would ridicule her openly—they’d only get to that later, shaking their heads ruefully in the privacy of their bedrooms—but they would be embarrassed for her. She can picture them looking away, dabbing their mouths, excusing themselves to the restroom.

  Yet how can she get together this evening with anyone and not discuss what has happened today? She’ll have to cancel. She’ll go back to Maine, crawl into bed with Joe, and take solace from his caresses. They’ll talk it over. He’ll have thoughts on how to proceed from here though they won’t necessarily match hers.

  The air is still smothering and stagnant, and the heat has brought on a migraine. She stares at the tray of iced coffee and tries to convince herself to get up and go inside and take some ibuprofen and get on with things. Every tissue in her body feels bloated and almost moribund; her wrists and ankles have stiffened as if she’s about to be enshrined, turned into a specimen for people of the future to examine, a person who was suddenly frozen in the stream of life due to extreme heat and a shock to the system, like the people of Pompeii. Oh, for god’s sake, what lurid thoughts. I’m becoming as crazy as Bronwyn.

  She tries to imagine staging an intervention with Bronwyn, as people do with their drug-addicted children. But Bronwyn, of course, is not her child. There is nothing legal between them. And even if there were, Bronwyn is not a minor. Diane shudders again, remembering the tide of anger that spirited the girl away. How quickly anger spreads from person to person. She feels shades of it herself, but will not succumb. She goads herself up and, once standing, teeters in a moment of vertigo. When it passes, she empties the pitcher of coffee into the grass. The ice is already demolished by heat. The
tray is heavier now and she carries it back to the house with mincing steps, bowed by heat and headache.

  She isn’t easily shocked, never has been, but there have been times, oh yes indeed, when life has surprised her, when she came to understand that the appearance of what was happening concealed a deeper truth.

  There was the time her sister Reena, ten years Diane’s senior, told Diane that their father was not actually Diane’s father. Diane, the youngest of the nine siblings, was six when Reena, the oldest, told her this. Because she and Reena were arguing when Reena said what she said, and Diane understood, even at that young age, how Reena might have said anything to hurt, Diane rejected the statement. But she filed it away and thought of it often. Two years later Diane asked her mother about it. Her mother scoffed, and denied the allegation, and made it clear she would not discuss it further. So Diane went back to Reena, and demanded to know more, and Reena, who’d been dying to say more all along, came forth with convincing evidence, delivered without a mote of anger.

  Once, during a grownup party when the kids had been banished to the basement, Reena came upstairs and saw their mother kissing another man, a man with very black hair and tan skin, the husband in a couple who visited the house regularly. After that Reena, on the lookout, saw all sorts of kissing incidents between their mother and the dark-haired man, and once, when Reena was home from school sick she heard, through the wall of the bathroom, her mother and the man making love. Then, most tellingly, their mother swore Reena to secrecy, knowing Reena had seen and heard things she ought not to have.

  Diane herself had no recollection of this man. Reena said he stopped coming to the house by the time Diane was born. It didn’t take long for Diane’s conviction to catch up with Reena’s. Of course she was not her father’s child. They were nothing alike. Their father was smart enough, but his habits of mind were sloppy. He was often illogical and he contradicted himself. He did not value intellectual rigor. He was a man who valued social success over all else. On his job as a construction foreman he wanted to be liked as well as obeyed. In the neighborhood and in the family he wanted people to come to him for advice. Then there was the issue of Diane’s appearance. The rest of the siblings had long, freckled faces and sandy hair, but Diane’s face was round and olive-skinned, and her hair was a glossy blackish-brown. Gradually, she began to separate herself from the others. This is what I am; this is what I am not.

  So, that was a big life surprise, though not shocking exactly, because she was a child then and still finding out what was true and not true, her views of the world still in flux. The “incident” at UCLA, where she had her first academic job—what she and Joe refer to as The Fiasco—was far more shocking to her, because she was an adult then and she thought of herself as discerning and not easily duped, and she believed most people were honorable. She and John Fiorini had been friendly colleagues, or so she thought. They had been on data-gathering expeditions together in the Arctic and, while they were working on different projects, they used some of the same data and often discussed their findings. So when she saw that he’d tweaked the data for a publication in The American Journal of Atmospheric and Climate Science (a long-term study on the permafrost), she was horrified. She went to him right away. What’s up here? she asked him. I know this data, I’ve used it myself He didn’t look nervous; in fact his expression was almost smug. It was peer-reviewed, he said, and it passed muster. As if that were exculpating. Of course we all want to sound the climate change alarm, but not this way, for god’s sake! Don’t you see where this leads? How did he think he could get away with this? Didn’t he realize he’d eventually be discovered? You couldn’t just lie about data and get away with it. But she could see that he wasn’t about to confess any wrongdoing, not to her, not to anyone.

  After some soul-searching she went to the department chair and divulged what she knew. He appeared alarmed and promised to investigate. Then, unable to stop herself she went to the journal editor, who reiterated that the peer review had not revealed any problems. But there are problems, she insisted, I know this data. Finally, grudgingly he said he would look into it. Why was no one else as outraged as she was? It sickened her. Then she began to uncover who knew whom, a disgusting chain of cronyism. One of the peer reviewers was an old classmate of Fiorini’s. Someone on the board of the journal was a relative of his. Another guy at the journal was a good friend of the department chair’s. The blatant lying and cover-up in a field that required transparency and objectivity—all of it repulsed her. Three months later she was asked to resign. She would be highly recommended, she was reassured. Her research, everyone said, was impeccable.

  It was during that same nightmarish period that she and her ex-husband parted ways. He had been urging her to drop her mission to expose the truth and instead face the facts about how the world worked. She couldn’t believe he would take such a position when he was also a scientist. She wasn’t remotely tempted to accept that such deceit was the norm. Her respect for him plummeted, and the whole incident served as an awakening that strengthened her commitment to scientific truth and accuracy.

  Now this—Bronwyn’s absurd claim. This is the third big shock of her life.

  She has been standing at the kitchen counter for altogether too long, staring down into the flecked black granite, mesmerized, as if gazing into a hole tunneling straight to the Earth’s core. An image is stuck in her head that she can’t dislodge: Bronwyn on the deck staring back out over the lawn in a wide-legged stance of defiance. She felt no need to work out their differences. Her entire body announced that she no longer needs what Diane has to offer. Diane aches, already missing her.

  29

  The city of LA is draped in a raiment of saffron smoke and the panic is palpable. Two fires are burning out of control, one in the Verdugo Mountains just east of Glendale and Burbank, working its way west to the San Fernando Valley, the other in the Topanga wilderness. The two move in concert like loosely coordinated gangs, determined to obliterate the city.

  As Bronwyn drives the streets her pores dilate with the press of the fires’ distant kinetic energy. She has come here with purpose, fueled by the disastrous meeting with Diane, determined to put her skill to use in bringing these fires under control. Having a goal has enlivened her as never before, and she feels her power as a muscle, strong as the calves of a marathon runner. In the days before coming here she dreamed her head was sprouting flames like Medusa’s skirmishing snakes, snakes with bellicose voices, hectoring, unbridled, reaching high enough to lick the sky. During the daylight hours she conducted a series of tests and discovered she had some skill with fire too.

  In her motel room at the Sunlight Inn off Sunset Boulevard she studies LA’s topography, its mountains, its cuneal canyons, its expanses of flatland. What a vast project this city is with its circuitry of freeways. Wherever she goes, she sees only fuel. The bungalows, the fire-friendly eucalyptus, the once-irrigated vegetation now gone dry. She is trying to be methodical and resist the impulsiveness that has ruled her of late, but even through the motel room walls she feels the fire’s pull, Svengali-like and irresistible. She reads the Cal Fire reports but they only tell her what her body already knows.

  The question is, where to position herself to best advantage? She needs to find her way close to the blaze so she can stare into the flames and learn them intimately before attempting to knock them back. Her lawn experiments have shown her she can have impact here, but she also fully expects this is an operation that will take sustained effort and time, unlike her shorter efforts with wind and rain and tornados. Each of the fires covers a huge number of acres; each will require a separate attack.

  She prepares as systematically as she can, Diane’s voice still an irksome, doubting chitter in her head. Maintaining her energy is paramount. She has purchased a stash of protein bars, and she makes herself eat one every two hours. She goes out again in her tinny rental car, bold and cautious. The air is smoky and she can almost feel its particulates abradin
g her lungs but, needing direct contact with the air, she will not wear a mask.

  For two full days she does nothing but drive, keeping the window open, sniffing the exhaust and sulphur and briny salt, observing the neighborhoods, getting a feel for the place. Inland first, past the La Brea Tar Pits, to Huntington Park, Florence, Walnut Park, Inglewood, Culver City. From there to the coast, Marina del Rey and Santa Monica, taking the Pacific Coast Highway north past the Getty. People around her drive like caged rats, erratic, mad, honking without provocation. Their eyes are constantly on the move, scoping out danger in all its forms. Danger might be a wisp of smoke, a spindle of flame; it might be the person in the next car, an arsonist, or someone cracking under the pressure. Some people wear white medical masks to avoid inhaling the soot so the city appears plague-ridden. It is a kind of plague. Like viruses, fire replicates itself quickly and defies human control.

  She notices so much eating! People devour food as they walk, as they drive. Is this the norm here? LA is certainly known as a place of large appetites, but this, this is extreme. And then she understands. You’ve cut back your brush, you’ve soaked your roof, you’ve packed a bag should you have to evacuate—what else can you do? The fire will call the shots. There is only hope and a prayer. You exert control where you can. Some go to the gym, others indulge their appetites. Crisis brings out an insatiability, an extreme need for more of everything. Big Macs, ice cream, no doubt sex. She tries to find tenderness for these beleaguered residents, though the city itself—its miles of concrete and overabundance of cars—repels her.

  As for herself, she feels like a fugitive—from the East, from Diane, from academia and science. She feels liable to be mistaken for something she is not. She might even look like an arsonist herself, with her dark glasses and her volcanic, fire-colored hair stashed under a baseball cap.