Wildland

by Rebecca Hodge

  Sara frowned, but she merely gave Kat a glance and said, “If you find it upsetting, Mom, speak up.”

  No way could this drive be more upsetting than the memories Kat already carried. “It’s weird—despite it all, I miss that raggedy little cottage. The quiet. The birds in the morning. The view all the way to the horizon, with no buildings anywhere in sight. Hard to believe it’s all gone.”

  Malcolm nodded. “There’s something special about an unobstructed horizon, isn’t there? The polar explorers discovered they could even see things beyond the horizon—something about the frigid temperatures causes images to reflect into the sky from enormous distances. Like seeing into the future.”

  “That sounds like magic.” Kat liked the idea of seeing beyond expectations. The sky functioning like a giant crystal ball. “Speaking of the future … does this new house you’re moving into have room for a dog? Tye needs a home, and he and Nirav were inseparable at the picnic.”

  Malcolm tipped his head to one side. “We’ll have plenty of room, and Nirav would be happier than I can even find words for.” He paused. “You know, Nirav and I will be living in Falls Church, near my office.”

  “Falls Church? That’s right around the corner from me.”

  “That hadn’t escaped me. Kat, listen, regardless of what you end up deciding—treatment, no treatment, whatever—I want you to stay a part of my life and Nirav’s. By saving Nirav, you saved us both. We can help you in return. I know we can.”

  Sara glanced in the rearview mirror and gave Malcolm an appreciative smile. Kat turned away, afraid she was going to break down and start crying. She’d been dreading a good-bye, and her relief at not yet having to navigate that moment took her by surprise. Malcolm’s steady support had already been a lifeline. It had been the memory of his words that had given her strength and tipped the balance for her in that moment of decision in the pond. “That would be wonderful. Thank you.”

  “Good. One condition, however. You have to stop thanking me.”

  Kat laughed. It felt like it had been a long time since she’d laughed. “Okay, it’s a deal. And I’m glad you’ll take Tye. I’ve decided to keep Juni with me instead of handing her back to Sara.”

  No way could she give Juni up now. A nagging inner voice pointed out that this was a commitment she couldn’t follow through with indefinitely, but she shoved the reminder aside. Sara had promised to step in when the time came. Kat reached over and squeezed Sara’s hand.

  The road got steeper, and at first, everything appeared unchanged—green trees, blooming wildflowers, unruly grass. The rains had vanquished the drought. Water flowed through every gully, now that they no longer needed it.

  Robins and sparrows flitted by, and a squirrel dove into the underbrush as they approached. Small drifts of ash edged the road where the rain had washed past, the only visible evidence of the fire. But ahead on the mountainside was an unsettling contrast, a black swath of burned land at the higher elevations, a path wiped clean.

  They reached the abandoned pastureland. “Over there is where we found Tye,” Kat said to Sara. A week and a half ago? It felt like years.

  They turned onto the gravel road, and Sara slowed to a crawl, dodging deep ruts left behind by heavy firefighting equipment. At the first bend, Kat caught her breath, her dismay taking her by surprise. The two sides of the road looked like they belonged on different planets. On the right, Malcolm’s cottage stood intact—coated with ash and streaked with soot, but otherwise solid. His car stood in front, thickly shrouded in gray. On the left, where Scott and Lily’s pretty cottage had been, there was only a blackened expanse, and the sight made Kat’s skin crawl. A bulldozed trench of churned dirt paralleled the road in front of Scott’s house, a firebreak that had saved one house but given up the other.

  She reached for Sara’s hand. Houses weren’t supposed to simply disappear. The world needed to be more stable than that.

  “Oh my god,” Sara said. “It’s all just … gone.” Her face was sheet-white. Kat reminded herself that of the three of them, Sara had known least what to expect.

  “It’s like Scott’s cottage was never here.” Kat could make out parts of the stone foundation beneath heaps of ash and cinders, and the remnant of what might have been a stove hulked farther in. Those were the only identifiable bits.

  The contrast between destruction on one side and survival on the other was stark. Kat’s choices in the fire had been equally black and white: life on one side, death on the other. It was a blunt reminder that her final decision about cancer treatment still loomed. Her throat tightened, and she had trouble swallowing. Sara had been right. Coming here was going to make her nightmares more vivid.

  But this was her only chance to face it.

  “Can we go farther up the road? Stop on the way back to pack your things, Malcolm?” Maybe the destruction was not so complete higher up. She hadn’t grabbed even a single photograph out of the boxes she’d brought up for the scrapbook. There might be something salvageable.

  Sara looked startled. “I’m not sure how far we’ll get.”

  “I’m curious myself,” Malcolm said. “Worth a try.”

  Sara nodded and put the car in gear. They once again crept uphill. Both sides of the road had burned here, and it looked like a post-apocalyptic pen-and-ink drawing, all color erased along with all life. Charred tree trunks with jagged stubs of burned branches jutted from heaps of scorched debris, and a thick layer of powdery ash masked the ground. It looked nothing like the forest Kat had walked through.

  She found it hard to breathe, the air clear but the smell of smoke and charred wood still seeping into the car. She grabbed her armrests as the road got worse, tossed back into that horrifying drive with the children down the abandoned road, her pulse racing.

  The SUV struggled across the bridgeless gulley, their route roughly graded by the bulldozers that had passed during the firefight, and they zigzagged up the long series of switchbacks, dodging debris. Before Kat was ready, Sara stopped the car, her hands tightening on the wheel. She didn’t say anything, and Malcolm, too, was silent. The stone foundation and heaps of burned rubble to their left said it all.

  “Oh, no.” Kat got out, the slam of the car door sending eerie echoes over the dead landscape. She walked around the front of the car, her sneakers kicking up puffs of ash with each step. The smell of stale smoke rose from every blackened surface, and a flicker of fear clawed a path inside her chest. She wrapped her arms around herself, suddenly ice-cold in the midst of the June heat. If she and the children had stayed here instead of fleeing …

  Malcolm came and stood beside her as she turned to inspect the valley, the view she had once thought perfect for a postcard. Ash covered the stone bench where she’d first seen Malcolm and Nirav, and a thick layer of soot caked the rocky tumble below her. Everything beyond it was black and twisted. Dead. “I can’t believe I was down there.”

  Those moments when she’d known death was close came rushing back, and she fought against rising panic. She concentrated on a single curling flake of ash, rocking gently in the breeze, and tried to anchor herself.

  Malcolm touched her gently on the shoulder. “It’s okay. You’re safe. You’re alive.”

  He was right. Focus on now.

  They all moved uphill to stand beside the remnants of the house. Kat stepped into the heaped debris, heedless of her aching feet and blackening shoes, her eyes cast down, searching for anything recognizable.

  Sara picked up a deformed chunk of metal and glass that might once have been a living room lamp and tossed it aside. Where the kitchen had been, the porcelain sink had cracked into three great chunks. The refrigerator, its outer skin cracked and peeling, lay on its side, its door open, its plastic drawers melted into shapeless blobs.

  Nothing of Kat’s.

  Everything she had brought for her month here was gone. Most of her losses were inconsequential, but the scrapbook boxes were irreplaceable. Photos, souvenirs, memories. Logically, she
’d known everything had burned, but seeing the hopelessness of salvaging anything filled her with regret. She had envisioned this gift to Sara so clearly, passing on history like handing off a baton from one generation to the next. All she could give her daughter now was a heap of ashes. The stale smoke that coated her tongue tasted like failure.

  “Sara.”

  Her daughter stopped picking through the rubble and straightened.

  “I’m so sorry. There’s something I’ve been afraid to tell you.” Here, amid such destruction, she could no longer avoid serious topics. She had to tell her it was all gone.

  Sara blanched and came to stand next to her. “What is it, Mom?” The strain in her voice made her sound like a stranger.

  “I thought since I had four weeks here on my own, I would finally sort through those boxes of memorabilia I’ve saved all these years. I brought them to the cottage. All of them. Your baby pictures. Your schoolwork. Your father’s high school football clippings. Things that belonged to Oma and Opa.”

  The magnitude of what had been lost pressed down on Kat’s chest. That snapshot of Sara at the lake when she was three and found herself face-to-face with a frog. The second-place ribbon from Sara’s fourth-grade spelling bee. The program from her high school graduation, the one with photos of all her classmates.

  Kat wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She’d lost so much more than just boxes of stuff. “I wanted to take it all with us when the children and I left, but there wasn’t time. I’m so sorry. I didn’t grab a single picture. It’s all gone. All of it.”

  Sara looked at her for a long moment, utterly expressionless. “That’s what you were afraid to tell me? That boxes of photos were burned?”

  Kat nodded, confused. Sara seemed puzzled, not upset.

  Before she could sort it out, Sara started laughing. “Mom, I thought you were going to tell me the doctors had told you something awful. Burned papers? That I can live with.” She leaned forward and kissed her mother on the forehead, an astonishing gesture of affection that delighted Kat. “You don’t get it, do you?”

  Kat shook her head. The scrapbooks. The path she had planned to use to strengthen her connection to her daughter. Sara acted like she didn’t even care.

  Sara took Kat’s undamaged hand in hers and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “The only thing I needed from the fire is you. You, Mom. I know we haven’t been seeing eye to eye lately, but when I got that phone call, saying you were here in the hospital …” She broke off, tears spilling down her cheeks, the first time Kat had seen her cry since Jim’s funeral. Kat reached for her, and they clung together for long minutes. This was the same closeness they’d shared for a moment the day Sara brought Juni to her, and this time, Kat could believe it would last.

  A screech caused her to pull back and look toward the bedroom, where Malcolm was lifting a long piece of twisted metal out of the wreckage. Part of a bed frame. “Stop,” Kat said. “The fire has taken it all. It doesn’t matter.”

  He set aside the piece of frame and rejoined them. “Not much left, I’m afraid. As bad as a bomb site. I did find this, however.” He held out his hand, a blackened object on his palm.

  “What is it?”

  He placed it in her hand, an odd lumpy shape. Sara gasped, but Kat had to stare at it for a long moment before she recognized what she held. The last thing she would ever have expected to see again—her pendant of petrified wood. “Malcolm! How in the world did you find it?” She’d lost count of the number of times she’d reached for it and been startled by its absence. Finding it felt like some sort of omen.

  Soot covered the disk, and zigzags of silver crisscrossed both sides where the chain had melted onto its surface. But the pendant itself, fireproof stone, was intact.

  “It was over there in what used to be the corner. Same area as a half dozen drawer handles.”

  “I left it on the dresser. Didn’t grab it when I got dressed that morning.” She gripped the pendant hard. Stay tough was the pendant’s message. Well, she had done exactly that, even without the necklace to remind her.

  The second meaning of her mother’s gift was don’t believe in fairy tales, but finding such a small and precious thing in the middle of all this destruction was pure magic. Perhaps faith in fairy tales wasn’t always foolish.

  Kat ran her thumb over the pendant the way she had hundreds of times in the past, but instead of gliding over the polished surface, her skin caught against lumps of melted chain. “Do you think a jeweler could get the clumps off?”

  “If they melt the silver again, they can probably remove it,” Sara said.

  “But …” Malcolm’s voice faded. “Do you really want it back the way it was?”

  Yes, of course. Exactly like it used to be. Kat caught herself before she spoke the words out loud. Exactly like it used to be—but now, nothing was the same.

  The pendant—changed but surviving. Malcolm—scarred but moving on despite it. The person she used to be. The stranger she was now.

  This was the problem, the reason it was so difficult to know what to do. The fire had changed her. She turned toward the other two and tried to put her turmoil into words.

  “Everyone tells me I saved two children. The nurses. The doctors. The story has spread.” Her voice shook, and she rubbed the pendant again, hard, the raised barbs of silver piercingly sharp. “They say I’m a hero. Jennifer even thinks I deserve her prayers.” She looked into Malcolm’s calm eyes and Sara’s puzzled ones, willing them to understand. “I remember every moment of that terrifying escape. But I’m having trouble believing it was really me who did all that.”

  Something fragile tore loose inside Kat’s chest, as if her center of balance shifted. She had stood right here, on this spot, when she decided she owed it to the children to try and fight. Did she now owe it to herself? That moment of decision in the pond. Grabbing hold of the rope. She’d come to these mountains to resign herself to death, but in that moment in the pond, all she could think was not yet, not yet.

  Images crowded in—Nirav clinging to the edge of the cliff, Lily hanging on to Tye in the leech-infested pond, Juni pinned under the fallen tree, but fighting anyway. None of them had given up. Unlike her nightmares, these memories were real, and they didn’t end in tragedy. She had saved herself, saved the children, saved even the dogs. She had cheated fate.

  “The stars above us govern our conditions.” The quote came, unbidden. It wasn’t until she saw Malcolm shake his head in disagreement that she realized she had spoken out loud.

  “The only line I memorized in high school is the opposite of yours. It is not in the stars to hold our destiny, but in ourselves.”

  Kat tilted her head to look at him. “That implies I have the courage to write my own script.”

  “If you decide to keep fighting your cancer, it will be the woman who confronted that fire who’s leading the charge. And I’ll back you every step of the way, in whatever role you want and need. You’re not facing this battle alone.” In the look he gave her, Kat could see the staunch determination of the man who had led injured comrades out of frigid mountains. Someone she could rely on.

  “Mom, it’s what I’ve been saying all along.” Sara’s voice was shaking, but it carried all the love and commitment she’d shown during the past week in the hospital. “You can do this. Not for me. For yourself. Please.”

  Kat felt as if she stood onstage before an audience, struggling for the next line. She stared at the burned expanse. Gray on gray on black. Her eyes shifted, looking beyond the damaged mountainside. In the distance, the deep emerald green of untouched forest. White clouds embedded in a flawless sky.

  Our destiny in ourselves. The long smooth line of the horizon beckoned, and with an unexpected sense of lightness, Kat saw an image of her future hovering there.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  No book is written in isolation, and that is particularly true of a debut novel. This story would not exist without the patient support of my amazing writin
g group, the Iron Clay Writers: Nancy Peacock, Agnieszka Stachura, Claire Hermann, and Barrie Trinkle. Dear friends, you’ve encouraged me through draft after draft. Chapter by chapter, your skill has ensured I didn’t drift too far off course.

  Heartfelt thanks go to those who’ve worked to transform my manuscript into an actual book. At Spencerhill Associates, Nalini Akolekar and Ali Herring. You believed in this story from the start, and your persistence in seeing it through to reality made me believe as well. At Crooked Lane Books, Chelsey Emmelhainz, Ashley Di Dio, and Jenny Chen. Chelsey’s keen editorial eye made this story shine, and Ashley and Jenny helped fit all the pieces together.

  Kathleen Furin, of Author Accelerator, helped ensure that Kat’s emotional journey was firmly on the page. Tahra Seplowin’s feedback pulled Malcolm forward into his proper place. Margie Lawson’s voice lives always in my head, patiently insisting you can do better. Jessie Starr’s feedback on an early draft shifted the whole tone of this book. Thank you all.

  The Women’s Fiction Writers Association has been an invaluable source of information, opportunities, and friendship over the years, and the North Carolina Writers’ Network has provided workshops and valued connections to other local writers.

  Thanks go to all the family, friends, and colleagues who’ve cheered my writing from the sidelines. Particular thanks go to Angie Morris, Amy Jones, Corny Motsinger, and Kimberly Hayden. Thirty years of firm friendship is a gift I do not take lightly.

  For information on forest fires, I relied primarily on Fire in the Forest, by Peter A. Thomas and Robert S. McAlpine. Any mistakes that have made it into print are my own.

  Last, but definitely not least, thanks go to my husband, George, and my sons, Austin, Daniel, and Carson. For decades, you have lived with someone who spends significant time creating fictional worlds. Your patience and support keep me properly anchored to the real one.

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

    1.  At the beginning of this story, Kat is struggling to decide whether to agree to another round of treatment for her cancer. If you were in her situation, what would you do? Is there ever a point where you would decide to stop treatment?