by Dave Eggers
A woman in an orange vest was running down the street. “Mandatory evacuation,” she called out. She was out of breath.
Suki emerged from the house and breezed past her. “Bye Josie,” she said. Cindy followed her, going the opposite way. “Bye Joze,” she said. Josie said goodbye and turned to the woman in orange.
“Where’s it coming from?” Josie asked her.
“South,” the woman heaved, and pointed.
Josie followed her finger to the mountains. The sky was white, choked with smoke. “How close is it?” she asked.
“Close. You have to go north. There are buses if you need them. They’re headed to Morristown. Leaving in twenty minutes.”
“Do you know if it’s already at the silver mine?” Josie asked, but the woman waved her off, and continued down the street. She was some kind of volunteer, knocking on doors.
“Where’s the fire, Mom?” Paul asked.
Sirens vandalized the air.
“Let me think,” Josie said.
The fire trucks were heading out of town, going south, while families with cars were already speeding north.
“Come inside,” Josie said, and hustled her kids into Cooper’s house. He was on the phone again. He turned to Josie. “Half hour, tops. I’d take you but I don’t have room.”
“What do you know about the silver mine?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “What silver mine?”
She took him aside, out of the kids’ earshot. She told him about staying at the Peterssen Mine, over the hills, that they had all their belongings there, all their money and an RV, that it was their only way out of town. “You think we can get there in time?” she asked.
He looked at her like she’d lost her mind.
“Just get on a bus,” he said.
—
“What about our stuff?” Paul whispered to Josie. Cooper had packed two backpacks for them, full of food and water, flashlights and batteries, and sent them down the road to the elementary school parking lot, where the buses were assembled. Most were empty—most of the people in town had their own cars and trucks.
Josie raised her hands in the air, with a magician’s flair, and stepped onto the bus. Paul and Ana followed, and aboard they found only five seats taken, by two elderly couples and one teenager traveling alone. They sat down, Josie looked into the hills, where there was a wall of green and grey smoke, wondering if the fire had already taken the cabin, or would ever take it. She’d asked everyone she knew, and no one had any idea.
“Mom, really,” Paul whispered. He needed clarity.
Josie knew she should be reassuring her children about their prospects, but she was too stunned to put on a front. She pictured the cabin on fire, all their drawings on fire, all the games on fire, Candyland on fire, the children’s swords and bows and arrows, all the food they’d just bought. She thought of the Chateau. They had not left much there, a few items of clothing, and would not miss any of it. But it would surely be gone—if the fire came to that valley it would burn quickly and hot. There were too many trees, everything so dry, and no one there to fight off the flames.
And then she saw it. A bright yellow glow from behind the hills, as if an oblong sun was quickly rising. But it was no sun, it was the fire, and she knew it meant it had overtaken the valley of the mine. Black smoke billowed upward, and she guessed one of the machines had been engulfed, the sudden burning of some kind of fuel. The Chateau. It had to be, its tank full of gas. She thought of Stan, and how she would tell Stan, standing on his white carpet, that the Chateau was no more. Knowing Stan, he’d make a profit on it.
Then she thought of the velvet bag. All the money they had left. She had about eighty dollars with her.
“Good thing we were here,” Paul said, and Josie realized the truth of it. If they hadn’t come to town, if she hadn’t made her attempts at music in Cooper’s home, they would have been at the mine that day. Alone, without a soul knowing they were there.
“Everyone ready?” the driver asked.
The bus sputtered awake and pointed itself north.
—
“Are you done with that?” Paul asked.
Josie looked over to him. He’d moved himself to the next seat over, like some independent fellow traveler. Ana was lying on the floor, gnawing on Josie’s leg, waiting to be told to stop.
“With the music?” Josie asked, and Paul closed his eyes. Of course the music, his placid face said.
Wasn’t she on the verge of some great discovery—if not one meant for the world at least a private revelation, bringing forth the music within her? Josie watched the scenery pass, the fire trucks heading the other way, toward the trouble, and she realized, with some surprise, that the music she needed to hear, that she’d just heard, that she had brought forth, had swum in, she needed no more of it. Not right now at least. Cooper would not understand this. You’re onto something, he might say. Or would he say that? She was probably not onto something. She was more likely a woman, temporarily insane, who had been conjuring dissonant madness from a group of pliable musicians wanting free dental care. But what about staying in that town, Cooper’s town, and weaving herself into it, becoming their new dentist, their resident eccentric, amateur composer, part of the musicians’ world, raising her children there? No. Or not yet. She was free of it. She was free of so many things, the fear of Carl, the ghost of Evelyn. She would not ever feel free of Jeremy, but two out of three was a start. She was no longer fleeing anything. But that didn’t mean she wanted to be kept, handled, cared for.
“I don’t know,” she told Paul.
She could not promise that she would not do it again. She had no idea. She needed no more music, but needed to do something else, and to see something else, and she needed to make her children braver and stronger by moving. She could make no promises about what she would want to do or see in the future, and she hoped her children would forgive her for this lack of certainty, this never-settled question in their lives, a limitless sky that had the power to make them fearless, utterly indomitable, or cripple them with fear.
—
They drove for hours, over streams and through wide expanses of taiga, the sky ahead a velvet blue. Cooper had said he would meet Josie and her kids, and as the scenery passed, she became unsure this was something she wanted. She was not sure she could trust her state of mind, but after twenty minutes of riding away, she felt a familiar exhilaration, the breathless freedom of having left trouble behind. It was not unlike the feeling she’d had when she left Ohio, and when they’d landed in Alaska. Now the Chateau was gone, the cabin was gone, they were free from everything again. They knew no one on the bus, and were headed to a place where they knew not a soul.
By the time they pulled into a wide parking lot loud with police lights and emergency vehicles, Ana was asleep on Josie’s lap and Paul had moved to another seat, two rows up. This was new: until even just a few weeks ago, he never would have ceded the position of human pillow; he certainly wouldn’t be so far away from the sleeping Ana, when at any moment she might need his help. Now, though, he was looking out the window, taking in the bright parking lot scene, the police lights, the dozens of volunteers in orange and yellow rushing to and fro.
“Inside the school there,” the driver said.
Josie woke up Ana, and she led her and Paul off the bus. Paul was carrying one of the backpacks and Josie had the other.
The school was a low-slung brick building, the front double doors opened wide, a woman sitting at a folding table inside.
“Hi there,” the woman said, her voice quiet and kind, as if she knew of the sleeping horror inside of them and didn’t want to wake it.
Josie gave the woman their names, and the woman directed them into the gym, where enormous lights illuminated, in discrete sections, every service available—first aid, bedding, food. At the window where the high school normally served lunch, a variety of fresh food was being spooned onto plates. Half the gym was a grid of cots t
hat had been neatly arranged, though most were empty. A computer-printed sign advertised the services of a registered nurse. She stood by the sign, a young man lying on a cot next to her with no discernible injuries; he was leaning over the side, reading a comic book.
On the gym’s stage, a trio of kids, all under six, chased a fourth child, a yellow-haired girl wearing a cape. “Are you sheltering here tonight?” a voice asked.
Josie turned to find a man in all black, a priest or pastor.
“I don’t know. I guess so,” she said.
Josie and Paul and Ana devoured spaghetti and broccoli, watermelon and chocolate cake. They hadn’t eaten, she realized, most of the day. “Are we going to school here?” Ana asked, her teeth brown with frosting. Paul smiled and shook his head.
“No, sweetie,” Josie said. “We’re just staying here a night or two.” But she had no idea what they would do next.
She listened to snippets of conversations between the volunteers in the gym. Most of the evacuees in the gym were from Morristown or other nearby towns. Only a few outbuildings had burned there so far, she learned. An army of firefighters were working valiantly, aided by a favorable wind that had slowed the progress of the burn.
When she brought their finished plates back to the cafeteria window, Josie noticed that a woman in a black uniform, a kind of fire information officer, had just pinned up a new map of the scope of the burn. Josie scanned it for Morristown and found it, an almost imperceptible rectangle just next to a hulking red mass, the area of the fire, the color and shape of an oversized heart. On the border between the red and the white she found, in tiny type, the words Peterssen Mine, nearly obscured by an X written in red ballpoint.
Josie returned to the trio of cots she and the kids had arranged. They had pushed them together to make one loosely connected mattress. Paul and Ana were playing Go Fish with a new deck of cards.
“Someone gave us these,” Paul explained.
Josie sat on the edge of the bed, then dropped to the pillow. She looked to the ceiling, thirty feet up, a mess of ropes and beams and banners reminding visitors of the school’s better seasons.
At nine o’clock most of the gym’s lights went off with a loud crack and sigh, leaving one bright cone in each corner. Ana wanted to continue to play cards, but Paul told her they should be quiet and still, so as not to disturb the rest of the people trying to sleep.
“You guys have everything you need?” a voice asked.
Josie looked up and squinted, adjusting her eyes to the dark. It was a man, an older man with a sweep of grey hair across his eyes. He looked familiar. Josie thought of home, someone from Ohio. No. Then she realized it was the firefighter she’d met before—it seemed like months ago—the gentle-eyed man who had come upon her when the inmates had changed her tire.
“We do,” she told him, and realized he didn’t recognize her. Why he was here, checking up on evacuees, was unclear. She didn’t want to distract him from his work, or get into a conversation about just what she’d been doing then, on that road, or what she was doing now, hundreds of miles north, in this shelter. She wouldn’t be able to explain it if she tried.
—
“Rain’s coming.” These were the first words Josie heard in the morning. It was dawn, and already the gym was bustling with volunteers loudly preparing breakfast. “This afternoon,” the voice said. It was coming from outside the gym, this booming voice with this significant news. Ana had woken up with the noise, but Paul slept on. Josie led Ana silently off the mattress and into the lobby, looking for the booming voice, but he had disappeared. Still, throughout the school hallways there was talk that the worst had come and gone, that the weeks ahead would bring more rain, more cold, a wet autumn that would end the fires and purify.
They walked outside to find the sky was still the same, white and yellow and smelling acrid. Josie stepped farther into the parking lot and now saw, coming from the north, a wall of dark clouds. Back inside, Josie peeked into the gym to see if Paul was awake, but he was still splayed on the bed, his mouth open, as if astonished by rest.
When she turned around, Ana was not at her side. Josie looked through the lobby, and heard some small voices coming from another hallway. She turned the corner to find Ana at the drinking fountain with another child, this one smaller. At first glance it looked like Ana was being Ana, pouring water from the fountain onto the head of this other child, a tow-headed boy of about four.
Josie was about to tell Ana to stop when she realized that Ana was feeding water to the child. Ana had directed the child to turn the faucet on, and while the water flowed, Ana reached up, her tiny hands making a tiny bowl, and she was bringing this water to the child, most of it landing on their shirts but enough finding its way to the blond child’s mouth.
Josie walked to them, and Ana looked up at her, worried, knowing she would need to explain.
“It’s okay,” Josie said.
“He couldn’t reach,” Ana said.
“I know. It’s fine. Let’s clean up, though.”
And so the three of them found paper towels in the bathroom and cleaned the water from the floor. The boy’s mother arrived as they were finishing and took the boy back to the gym. Josie and Ana stood in front in the hallway, next to the school’s darkened trophy case.
“Do we have to sleep here again?” Ana asked.
Josie didn’t know.
“I don’t want to,” Ana said.
“I don’t, either,” Josie said, realizing this was the first candid conversation she’d had with Ana in months, maybe ever. Usually she was strategizing how to tell Ana something, avoid telling her something, parsing and obfuscating in order to get a civilized result. Now she looked into Ana’s eyes, knowing that her daughter was different, she had evolved, and she saw, too, that Ana knew. She knew that she had shed one shape and was taking on another.
“We only have eighty-eight dollars,” Josie said, looking not at Ana now but at the portrait of some champion athlete from the early nineties, a girl who was probably now Josie’s age.
“Eighty-eight?” Ana said. “That’s a lot!”
—
Paul slept through a loud breakfast, and through the activation of the loudspeakers above, which announced a series of developments, the imminent arrival of other evacuees, and more news about the rain coming from the north. When he finally woke, there was a smattering of applause from the volunteers. A grandmotherly woman brought him a bowl of homemade oatmeal, which he ate greedily as she watched.
“Well, you’re safe now,” she said to Josie and her kids, as if concluding a conversation about their prior worries. “And at noon we’re having an activity for all the evacuees. All the families will be invited to participate in a crafting workshop, and afterward to talk about their feelings. It’ll be very therapeutic. But fun, too!”
Josie smiled, and the woman left to pick up the bowls left in various parts of the gym by the dozen or so children now running roughshod through it. The gym had gotten more crowded in the last hour, it seemed, and smelled of too many humans without access to showers, too many humans sleeping in old clothes in close proximity.
Staying here another hour suddenly seemed painful—another night altogether impossible. Josie tidied up their beds and took their two backpacks, and led Paul and Ana out of the school. She had no plan in mind, but wanted to see what options there were in town. Eighty-eight dollars would buy them one day of lodging and food at a real motel.
Now a woman was approaching. “Ma’am, I forgot to ask before”—Josie couldn’t place if she’d ever met this woman, but had to assume she had—“whether or not you have access to a phone. So many evacuees either left theirs behind or can’t get coverage. But we have landlines here. You can call long-distance, whatever.”
Josie told the woman she didn’t in fact have phone access, and she and Ana were led to the principal’s office in the school. On the counter where tardy slips were usually handed out, there was a phone at the ready.
“I’ll give you some privacy,” the woman said.
Josie dialed, got a wrong number and dialed again.
He answered.
“Carl?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s Josie.”
“Oh hey. Where are you? How are the kids?”
His voice was upbeat, casual.
“You don’t know where we are?”
“I know you’re in Alaska. Sam told me. But where?”
“You do know. You sent a guy after me.”
“Wait. What?”
“Didn’t you serve me papers?” she asked.
“Serve you papers? What for?”
His voice was so bright and amused that she had to realign everything she expected to say.
“Someone served me papers,” she said, her mind racing through just who it could have been. Evelyn?
“What kind of papers?” Carl asked.
“I don’t know. I never touched them. I took off.”
Carl laughed out loud. It was a big belly laugh, the laugh of a contented man. Josie heard a distant squeal through the line, the sound of a gentle crashing wave. Was he on a beach? He probably was on a beach. “Oh wait. Your lawyer buddy called me, looking for you,” he said. “Maybe that could have something to do with it.”
“Elias? What did he say?”
“He said he wanted to give you a heads-up. I called you a few times about it. You probably didn’t bring your phone. Am I right?”
“I didn’t want you tracking me.”
Again Carl laughed, but this time there was something hurt and uncertain in his mirth. “Anyway, remember the power company you sued? Well, they countersued all the lead plaintiffs. Elias said it was a standard scare tactic, said he’d handle it.”
Josie’s heart spun. She hadn’t thought of that lawsuit in weeks.
“So the kids? They’re good?” Carl asked, switching back to a tone of brightness and levity. Was he drunk, too? Who was this happy carefree man?
“They’re good. Sorry about Florida,” she said.
“It’s okay. I understand. It probably sounded like a weird request. But the kids should meet Teresa at some point. They’ll like her, I think. She’s a child psychologist. You know that?”