by Неизвестный
I blushed. ‘Well, what of it?’
‘Grandpa Lambert was pretty generous. So I can buy you a ring, or I can build you a house. Right here.’
I lay back on a nylon sack stuffed with Luke’s shirts. The sky above was dazzling. He laid his head beside mine and our ears touched, our jaws aligned.
‘Casa,’ I whispered.
It took seven months to build the house. We rented a garage apartment in town, and as Luke puzzled over blueprints at night, he looked older and more responsible than the bass player I’d met in college; for the first time I could imagine us one day being middle-aged, drinking wine together by a fireplace, studying the first faint furrows on each other’s foreheads, joking about the reckless nights of our youth.
‘Sarah, look at how you have to angle the ceiling beams to bear the weight of the roof.’ Having majored in engineering, Luke harboured a deep respect for geometry and design. He decided to build me a painting studio with floor-to-ceiling windows and a skylight; it would be attached to the back of the house in order to share plumbing with the kitchen and have its own kitchenette and bathroom, but it would have its own entrance from the outside so that I could have some privacy.
This is also important.
His band mates came to set the timbers and frame. But Luke, alone, hammered in the siding, laid the roof, put up the Sheetrock. I helped with the plaster and sawed logs for the porch rails.
‘You would have kicked ass on the frontier.’
‘Luke, as far as my family is concerned, this is the frontier.’
The night we unpacked the last of our belongings – boxes of our college notebooks, ceramic bowls and vases I had made before abandoning pottery for painting, Luke’s bass and speakers – we invited over the few local friends we’d made – the lumber merchant and hardware dealer, the contractor who installed the kitchen cabinetry and plumbing, the electrician – and their wives. Older people who were pink-faced from years in the Ozark sun, delighted to see a young couple setting up house.
‘This, darlings, is a house you can grow into,’ the lumber merchant’s wife said with a wink.
Luke found work as a river guide, taking out canoes and kayaks for weekenders down from Kansas City or up from Little Rock, and I found a part-time receptionist job at a doctor’s office, which left my afternoons free for painting. Before dinner, Luke would go for a long run, and sometimes I’d join him, and then we’d shower and sit on our front porch, feet propped on the log rail, our heads wet, drinking beer and watching the sun set above the mountains, amused and amazed that this was our life.
Most of our friends were in law school or medical school, or had headed west to join the dot-com boom. They worked long hours and regaled us over the phone with tales of their dating disasters. Luke and I had each other. We’d built a house.
Our lives felt full, settled, except that after our families came to visit that first year, we rarely had company. No one passed through Eureka Springs. And so the downstairs guest room stood empty.
Luke could have set up his amp and bass in there, but he didn’t. I hung some paintings on the wall, but my supplies remained in my cluttered studio. We put nothing in the dresser drawers, or the closets. The room, strangely, seemed to be waiting for something.
One night, as we were going to sleep, I studied my foil pack of birth-control pills.
‘Luke –’ I began.
He could see me struggling, and took the pack from my hand. We had been married two years.
‘I say we flush these fuckers,’ he said.
Derek arrives on my doorstep in mid-August with evacuation orders. He works in the Gila Wilderness on a saw team – the sawyer saws off unburned brush, then the swamper throws it across the fire line. Derek and his partner Mike used to swap jobs every time the saw needed a new tank of gas. Until one day, Mike, distracted by a fight he’d had with his wife, cut a tree with a hang point, not a hinge; it fell with a fast pivot and crushed Mike’s ribcage before he could escape. While Derek held Mike’s hand, waiting for the medic and talking to keep him conscious, the blood loss killed Mike. Derek has been grounded until the crew psychiatrist deems him fit to return to the fire zone. I know all the fire crew by name and speciality; I know their voices, but not their faces. In my lookout tower, I listen to them on their radios. The day Derek was with Mike, I heard him shout for the medic, talking Mike through his last breath, then weeping. This was three months ago.
‘Macon is close,’ Derek says. ‘They told me they’d radioed your station but that you hadn’t responded.’
‘The winds are shifting,’ I say. ‘It won’t come this far.’
He looks up at the sky. He is short and stocky; he has the build of a boxer. ‘You’re probably right. But I’ve got nothing better to do than get you out of here. I can give you thirty minutes to pack up your valuables, then we hit the trail.’
‘There’s nothing to pack.’
He stares at me, then walks back to his horse and mounts the saddle. ‘Hop on.’
We ride silently through the woods, watching smoke rise in the distance. The air is hot and dry. Two miles from the cabin, we stop at the stream to water the animal.
‘I hear you’ve been out here a few years,’ he said.
‘Going on six.’
‘And that you don’t much leave the park. Lost your taste for humanity?’
‘Just strip malls and traffic jams.’
‘Can’t argue that.’ He sits on a rock and pulls out an apple and knife. He quarters it and hands me a slice, then offers one to the horse. ‘It’s the going back and forth that always gets me. Sometimes we don’t sleep for days, don’t shower. We breathe smoke all day and hike right into the thick of a fire. Can’t really finish up and wander Kmart on the weekend. Like trying to re-enter the atmosphere; the skin just wants to jump from your face.’
‘It’s been an active season,’ I say.
He nods, and then his gaze settles on his boots. I regret my remark. He is thinking of Mike.
‘Are you from these parts originally?’ I ask.
‘Phoenix. My grandmother was Apache. Chiricahua. She lived in a wickiup with a big domed straw roof. All anyone is supposed to want in life is a roof over their head. I hate roofs.’ He turns and strokes his horse’s face, nodding to the animal as though they have discussed the matter many times. ‘Roofs literally make me sick. Perforated ulcer. There’s a doctor in Albuquerque wants to study me.’
‘You like being up in the trees.’
‘Even if there’s fire right below. My wife said I must have been a monkey in a former life. Before she decided I was an ass in this one.’
I laugh, and look at his ring finger.
‘She gave you the boot?’
He smiles. ‘With a steel toe.’
‘I’m sure you deserved it.’
‘Well, she wanted a roof over her head.’ He looks up at the sky. The wind has shifted. ‘There goes Macon, running the other way now, just like you said.’
‘Then I can go home now.’ I stand and head for the horse.
He watches me, without moving. ‘You’re not scared of the fires?’ he asks.
‘Not scared,’ I say. ‘Terrified.’
According to the Cherokee, Grandmother Water Spider spun a bowl and placed it on her back to steal fire from the land of Thunders and Light. It was the Rabbit, claim the Algonquin, who pilfered fire from an old man and his daughters. The Apache say it was the Fox who stole fire from the fireflies, tying bark to his tail to catch their flame, then running away, igniting brush and wood along his path, spreading fire across the Earth.
The record of mankind was written with fire. Prehistoric hearths scorched cave roofs, leaving traces of human habitation for millennia; the charred remains of rabbits and bison settled in the earth, awaiting the shovels of palaeontologists.
Fire is history.
‘I’m here to evacuate you again.’
‘No you’re not. Nothing’s burning within twenty miles of he
re.’ Derek stands on my front porch; it is a week later. He is clean-shaven. His black hair gleams with some kind of gel.
‘An unofficial evacuation,’ he says.
‘You’ve gone rogue?’
‘There’s somewhere I’d like to visit. Call it a destination evacuation.’
I can see the determination in his face; I can see how this mission, this small adventure, has for the time being subsumed his grief.
‘Aren’t you supposed to be on leave? Or working the station?’
‘They’ve already grounded me.’
‘Well, where do you want to go?’
He is already walking back to his horse, mounting the saddle. A cooler is tied to the horse’s flank. ‘You coming?’
The sun sits low in the sky as we slowly descend the hill; when the ground levels and the trees clear, Derek gives the horse a kick and the animal tears loose across the grass. The wind is warm on our faces. As we pass a fire site from two years ago, Derek halts the horse to examine a field of black stumps. ‘This one . . .’ he says, his silence conjuring a momentary sea of flames.
By the time we arrive at the monument entrance, the gates have closed. ‘Hold on.’ Derek urges the horse into a run and then a long jump. The cooler rumbles. I am briefly lifted from the saddle, and I don’t want to lose my balance but avoid lingering in a hug. I’m grateful when we slow for the approach to the cliffs. In five years I have never been here, but I know what we are looking at. Almost a thousand years ago, the Mogollon people roamed this wilderness, taking shelter in the cliff-side caves. With stone axes they felled pines to use as roof beams. Dozens of ceremonial rooms and homes were built into the cliffs.
Derek ties up the horse and we approach on foot. He rests the cooler on his shoulder. The landscape is silent but for the sound of the rocks beneath our boots.
We pass a pictograph – a red stick figure of a man walking – and examine it silently. It looks like a child’s drawing.
‘Take your pick,’ he says. ‘Cave one through five.’
‘Three.’
We duck and enter sideways. Then we are standing in a massive stone room, looking up at ancient beams.
I put my hand on my hip. ‘I thought you hated roofs.’
He smiles and from the cooler tosses me a beer. He sits and opens a can for himself, then cuts a salami in thick slices and lays them on pieces of bread. He cubes a chunk of pimiento cheese and lays it on a bandanna between us. The view from inside the cliff is somehow more stirring than looking at it from the outside. I can imagine living here one thousand years ago, looking out at these wilds every night, hiding from the wind. I wonder what version of myself would have emerged if I had lived then; would I have had more courage?
‘You’re not from around here,’ Derek says.
‘Boston. Born and raised.’
‘Are your people still there?’
I like this phrasing: your people. Family, friends, distant cousins, tribes. I say, ‘Yes,’ and do not need to elaborate.
Soon we have finished the salami and the cheese and the bread. He pulls two more beers from the cooler, and when he hands mine over, he clears away the bandanna with the pimiento scraps and repositions himself closer to me.
He thinks it would be wrong to make a pass; I see him struggling with this. He is, technically, supposed to be protecting me. But I like him. So I lean against his arm, and he seems pleased.
‘They found bodies here, you know,’ he whispers.
‘Is this the time of night when you try to scare the girl with a ghost story?’
‘Scout’s honour. They were mummies. They’re gone now, of course. A hundred years ago, they found the mummy of an infant in one of the caves. They named him Zeke. That’s how this place got famous.’
I try to calm my breathing, and Derek mistakes the meaning of my silence.
‘It’s true,’ he insists.
I consider how Derek flaunts honesty, as if it is a badge permitting entry into the darkest of stories.
I close my eyes and rest my head on his chest; he kisses my scalp and soon my mouth is searching his. In the warmth and tangle of our bodies, my mind releases its hold on all memory, like a shoe kicked to the corner of the room.
Derek pulls himself up from me. ‘I don’t have anything. But it would look pretty bad if I carried rubbers when heading off to fight fires.’
‘Agreed.’
‘Should I stop?’
‘Don’t worry. I’m tied up.’
He looks taken aback, but says nothing.
In winter, halfway to the hospital in Little Rock, Emily Anne Lambert was born.
The first months were like a fever dream; days slid into the swirl of night; my body was her captive. At the slightest cry from across the room, milk rushed my breasts. She latched on to me, gasping, in a fit of madness, then drank greedily; afterwards, conquered, spellbound, I gazed at her red-lipped face. Leaning in to smell her breath – sweet and sour – I’d press my mouth to hers.
My happiness was so deep I was afraid to speak of it.
Luke offered to watch her so that I could leave the house and glimpse the real world, but I refused. I wrapped us in blankets and in the grey afternoon light she nursed on the porch; day after day we watched the winter days slowly lengthen, until, in March, I put her in the car seat for the first time and we went for groceries.
The world looked different; in every face I passed – the man slicing ham at the deli counter, the distracted cashier, the boy who wheeled abandoned carts across the parking lot – I imagined the babies they had once been. At the post office, the sight of an old man hobbling on a cane, struggling to open the door, struck a blow to my heart. He is all alone, I thought. He is looking for his mother.
As my body healed from the birth and the awkwardness of pregnancy withdrew into memory, I began to doubt that I had ever made Emily. She giggled when I sneezed or coughed, grinned at pictures of dogs; with Luke she batted her eyes and tugged at his ear lobes, squealing when he entered the room. She was a person. And I couldn’t help but think that she must have always existed; perhaps, I told myself, she’d been waiting to join the world and thought Luke and I seemed a good arrangement.
Like old furniture making way for a grand piano, Luke and I shifted our former selves around Emily. Cigarettes and sleeping in were abandoned. Luke swapped his amp for headphones, and took up cooking. He grilled eggplants, zucchinis, slices of tomato sprinkled with Parmesan. I set aside my canvases and threw what energy I had into painting murals in her room; with balsa wood I built a mobile of Matisse’s dancers. The baseboards of the house became a sea-blue horizon of turtles and sea horses and zebra fish. Luke bought her a baby drum set. A baby guitar. A baby bass.
My days were filled with the scent of apples baking for her lunch; the juice of mashed blueberries stained my fingertips. I pinched bananas and slid pieces onto her tongue, watching her eyes widen and her legs kick with excitement. Everything was new for her; each day held a first.
At night, when she had finally surrendered to sleep, I would lie awake wondering what her world must seem like. Did the chairs and tables she zigzagged through hold meaning? While she lay in her crib, did she dream of the living room? Did she recall, like a trip once taken to Paris, the night we roused her from sleep and carried her outside for the meteor shower? Did she fear the staircase? Long for the porch? Did she know there was a world beyond our house?
I, certainly, was forgetting.
‘Diapers, bottles, soiled blankets – I don’t know. None of it bothers me,’ I told Luke. ‘Betty Friedan would be appalled.’
‘You’re in the honeymoon phase. You’ll miss your work soon enough.’
I didn’t, but during Emily’s long naps I set up the baby monitor and forced myself to wander into my studio and prop up a canvas. For weeks I stared at the blank surface, while household tasks – boil and purée peas, buy more diaper wipes – crept into my head. Fearing I’d never again concentrate, I resorted to my freshma
n method, taping a landscape postcard to my easel – one that Luke had sent from Alaska years earlier – so that I could finally begin putting down colour.
Within weeks, this daily struggle had transformed into an obsessive escape, the perfect counterpoint to the chores of parenting, and by the time Emily turned one, I was painting better than ever. The deep reserve of emotion that motherhood had brought me now spilled onto my canvases faster than I could understand. The process was exhilarating, and exhausting. Often, I curled up on my cot and slept.
So there was nothing particularly notable about the Tuesday afternoon in October when I put Emily down for her nap, then carried a cup of tea outside, sat on the porch for a few minutes, and headed drowsily into my studio. I hung the usual white shoelace from my studio doorknob, a signal to Luke that I was napping.
He had phoned that day to say he would head home early, as he often did when he had no afternoon boat rentals. He said he’d go for a run and then wake Emily and get dinner started. I could relax.
On the cot I flipped through a magazine – I don’t recall which one – until I drifted off.
What I now know was an hour later, I awoke choking on smoke.
We are in my cabin, on the bed. It is midday, overcast; the sky has been grey for hours. It is one of those days where dusk swallows dawn.
We have been talking about movies, and old-time movie stars. Derek has never heard of Greer Garson, my favourite, so I am listing her films. He shakes his head. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘You’re dealing with a hick. I know Marilyn Monroe, and the one who was in Go West, Young Man.’
‘Mae West,’ I said. ‘You know the ones with big boobs.’
I have lost track of how many days we have spent like this. I know only that we have begun to run out of banter; our bodies are too exhausted to fill the silences. We lie naked in an awkward limbo, each wondering if we should say goodbye, or ask something that matters.