by Laura Bickle
I glanced back at Will. He put his hands in his pockets and stared down at the dirt. “Look, Di. I dunno what’s going on there, but I’m not that kind of guy.”
“I know.” I knew that he wasn’t. Will was the kind of guy who could be a friend, but not a boyfriend. At least not a boyfriend for me.
I pressed my hand to my eyes. It seemed that no matter how hard I tried to do what was right, I was destined to lose everything.
CHAPTER 20
IT WAS FUNNY HOW I’D thought that nothing would ever change here. I’d expected everything to remain the same forever. There was a peculiar kind of arrogance in that. I felt unmoored, now that it was changing, slipping through my fingers. Past was gone. Home was gone. Future was uncertain. All I had was the moment.
Suspended between earth and sky, I lay in my tree house. With my hands laced behind my head and eyes shut, I listened to the leaves rustle. I sometimes reached into my violin case, played a few notes, but I’d lost the inspiration for it. I only wanted to listen to the wind, not the thoughts in my head.
But they came anyway. I’d taken the box of Grandpa’s ashes and placed it on my nightstand. I wondered if his ghost would visit me in my dreams, but I didn’t see him. I didn’t see Julie in my dreamscapes, either. Instead, I slept an exhausted, dreamless sleep, awakening with a terrible weight on my chest that turned out to be the cat.
My father had been transferred to Pittsburgh, and my mother had gone with him. I had agreed to stay behind and come up the following weekend. The house felt empty, except when Rhiannon paced the floors late at night, calling. I didn’t know if she was calling for Julie or my father.
I’d heard nothing from Jason. He hadn’t called or come by the house, and he wasn’t at the hospital when they transferred my father. I’d taken him for granted, expected that he would always be there. And I didn’t know how to fix things.
I had not been back to work. I expected to go back tomorrow. I didn’t know how I would handle the guilt of that, of looking Peters in the eye and making his coffee, knowing what I’d done.
But I felt oddly still. Now that everything had been stripped away, all that was left was a hollow core. But it was a stronger one than I’d thought.
I drowsed in the morning sunshine, feeling it filter down through the leaves. There was a peculiar medicine in this silence that soothed my heartache.
That silence was shattered by a loud, echoing crash.
My eyes snapped open. At first, I thought it was thunder. But it was all wrong. It was too sharp, too brittle, with a splitting echo in a cloudless blue day. The blue sky seemed to gray, and dust shivered down on the leaves.
I sat bolt upright, my heart in my mouth.
This was the sound of explosives. Mountaintop blasting.
Afakos.
I scrambled out of the tree, gripping my violin case. On the horizon, smoke trickled from Sawtooth Mountain. It was too soon…how could they have begun? I’d thought I had weeks or months before the blasting started, for Will to take my evidence to EPA.
I ran.
I ran for the car, throwing my violin case in before me and backing out of the driveway at breakneck speed. I didn’t waste time getting my purse or locking the house. None of that mattered. Sawtooth Mountain was being blasted, and I had to find Afakos.
Not just for his own sake, but for the sake of the miners.
I tore down the pavement at seventy miles an hour, faster than I’d ever flown along these roads. I only slowed down when I reached the gate of the mine, my tires spewing gravel.
I drummed my fingers impatiently while the guard opened the gate. I waved my ID and keycard, and he let me in. I zipped to the back of the parking lot and climbed out. I slung my violin case over my back, dimly wondering if the music could summon or soothe Afakos, depending...
Smoke rolled down into the parking lot, bitter as gunpowder. And dust in the air. It coated the back of my tongue and throat. I ran to the foot of the mountain, where there were barricades across the forest road, blocking my path. An orange sign warned: “BLASTING ZONE.”
I rushed up to the first barricade, threw my leg over it.
A figure in a bright orange vest and hardhat ran up the hill. I recognized Jason’s voice: “Di...you can’t go in there!”
“You have to stop this!” I yelled.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Please,” I begged him. And I realized that was the only time I’d ever asked him for anything, beyond our night in the tree house.
He reached for me. “Come back.”
I slipped over the barricade and ran. I was faster than he was. I’d been outrunning him since we were children. My feet bit into the dirt and gravel, and I plunged into the forest undergrowth. My breath whistled in the back of my throat, and I climbed up, up, where the dust was thickest and where I could hear the roar of machinery.
I smelled fire.
The red dust grew so thick I couldn’t see the tops of the trees. I pulled the neck of my t-shirt over my nose and mouth, and my eyes watered. Grit settled on my skin and in my hair. It felt like another planet here, as if a red cloud had gathered too close to earth. A red cloud turning black with smoke. A doe and her speckled fawn ran past me, terrified, crashing through the undergrowth. I could see the flick of their white tails as they fled.
I heard a terrible roar as I climbed. At first, I thought it was another blast, but this was different. This was like a raven howling with a lion’s voice. It lifted the hair on my arms and shook me to the core.
“Afakos!”
I ran toward it, my lungs burning and briars scraping my arms and face. In the muddled air, I felt a dark shadow cross overhead, like a buzzard come too close. And then...screams.
Not the unearthly dragon scream, or even the sound of blasting. These were human screams. Men.
Something bright plunged downhill, like a falling star. It was beautiful, haloed in orange flame in the smoke as it screamed.
“Oh, my God.”
And I realized what it was: a man on fire. I stood helplessly as he streaked like a comet down the side of the mountain. He left in his trail the smell of smoke and burning meat. He wouldn’t make it to the foot of the mountain alive.
I turned my gaze skyward. Afakos had declared war. I hadn’t known what that meant, at the time.
I was beginning to have an inkling.
I clawed my way up, my hands winding in thistles and poison ivy. Blistering heat pressed against me, while thick smoke choked off the sky. The orange glow of fire crowned the mountain.
A deafening thunder rolled under me, over me. I clamped my hands over my ears. The blast wave compressed my chest and drive the breath from my lungs. Dirt spewed in my face, and I was momentarily blinded. My hearing shut down as the earth roared beneath me.
I pushed myself up, gasping. How could they still be blasting?
Unless...they were trying to defend themselves.
I pulled myself up to the summit on hands and knees. I tasted blood and felt my hands scraped raw. I couldn’t hear anything through the ringing of my ruined hearing, just the scrape of my breath and the thud of my heart.
Through the smoke, I could see fire, red and pure. The figures of men and trees wilted before it. This was not the work of the blasting. This was Afakos.
He stood in all his magnificent glory at the crest of the mountain, his wings outstretched. Fire glistened through the webbing of his wings and reflected in his eyes. He roared fire and light, like the corona of a sun in a black eclipse. Heat shimmered from him, from his anger.
It looked like hell. A glorious, wrathful hell.
I stood dumbstruck, amazed. Men screamed into radios. One climbed into a truck, but its tires had melted to the ground. It lurched forward, stopped.
Afakos turned his terrible eye to it and breathed fire. The flame curled like a living thing, encircling the truck and reaching inside for the driver.
It was then that I knew the terrible po
wer Afakos wielded. How he’d willfully kept it in check. How he could destroy all of us. We were like insects to him.
“Afakos!” I screamed, though I couldn’t hear myself.
He turned toward me, his snakelike head whipping around. Flame and smoke curled between his teeth. His nostrils flared. I thought he meant to incinerate me with the others.
“Afakos, please. Have mercy on us.”
I fell to my knees before this terrible and wrathful god. I fumbled for my violin case. I pulled the violin out. With bloody fingers, I closed my eyes and began to play. I played the folk song Grandpa had learned in Nam. I could hear it in my head, but not from the strings. I could feel the crackle of fire around me, taste the ash and acrid smoke. I felt my hair lift from my neck in the backdraft of the flame. The heat seared my watch into my wrist and burned the button of my jeans into my belly.
Darkness blotted out the light. I looked up, saw the dragon looming over me. Flames surrounded us, and I coughed. It was soundless to me, but I could taste the soot in the back of my throat. The fire raced toward the forest and ignited it.
Afakos swept his wing over me. It felt like hot leather, suffocating and close. The scales of his body moved against me. I wrapped my arms around my violin in a fetal position. He gathered me to his chest. I felt the fire trickle and sweep over us, like hot rain, tapping and boiling against the surface of his wing and illuminating the delicate veins and arteries there. His heartbeat was thunderous against my skull, so loud and strong it obliterated mine.
I spoke to him, though I had no idea if he could hear me. In fits and gasps, I told him that I’d tried to stop this. That I was sorry.
I should’ve been horrified by what he’d done. But trapped in that soundless womb of heat and light, I felt only a soft sense of stillness. I felt the rhythm of the dragon’s heartbeat and the song of the fire. I felt them without hearing them, each luminous note and transcendent pause.
It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever experienced.
Gradually, the light receded into darkness, and the terrible heat abated. Afakos lifted his wing. Cool air slipped raw over my skin, and I struggled to sit.
The violin strings had burned into my palm, and I hissed as I pulled my hand away. The skin came apart in sticky strings. My hands and arms were red as a sunburn.
Afakos touched my chest with his nose. I stroked the flat space between his pale eyes. He blinked at me.
He had saved me from the fire. For no good reason, other than a very human sentimentality.
“Thank you,” I told him.
He unwound himself from my body, looked to the smoky sky. His claws flexed into the ground for a moment. His wings beat the air, and then he lifted away, into the ashen sky. His shadow seemed no more than that of a bird as he receded, and I lost him altogether.
Lying on the charred earth, I waited for Jason to find me, and he did. He was wearing a respirator and a fireproof jacket. I smiled. He looked exactly like the hero he resisted being.
He gathered me in his arms and said something to me. I had no idea what.
I learned later that he was asking if I was alive.
Because I was the only one who’d survived the flash fire on the mountaintop.
After the fire, I entered a long period of waiting. I waited on a white bed in the hospital as the doctors and nurses salved and bandaged me. The hand seared by the strings was wrapped in some particularly stiff stuff. It didn’t hurt. Not yet. I expected it really would when I regained some feeling in it. I tried not to imagine what that meant for playing violin.
Instead, I stared at the television. I had the mute button and the closed captioning on, so that I could know what was happening. There were intermittent news stories about some faulty explosives at the mine and a wildfire. It had quickly been contained, but it had run down the mountain, destroying the construction trailer in which I worked and part of the nearby nature preserve.
And there had been deaths. Five of them. I couldn’t look at the pictures of the men who’d died on the news. They were my fault. My fault for not blowing the whistle sooner, for not averting this terrible tragedy. And I knew that, as long as I lived, I would carry that burden with me.
I was asked what happened. A lot. By various people who wrote their questions down on paper—I couldn’t hear them over the ringing in my ears. I always told them the same thing—that I’d seen fire from the house and come running because I thought someone needed help.
Stupid girl. Their thoughts were clear in their eyes. That was okay. I could let them think that.
Mr. Peters had come by and brought flowers. I could tell he thought the same thing, though perhaps for different reasons. My mother came from Pittsburgh and cried. I didn’t understand a thing she said. But Doctor Morgan wrote me a note that said my father was doing better. Pittsburgh was including him in a study about lung functioning that could probably really help him, and would likely cover the costs.
I sat in my silence. My skin peeled, and I was good about not picking at it. My hair smelled singed. I read a lot of magazines about celebrities and slept. I wished I could go back and do it all differently. But I couldn’t turn back time, no matter how much I willed it.
Will came to see me. He was taken aback, nervous and fidgety, and he didn’t stay long. Once I demonstrated that I couldn’t hear him, he wrote me a note:
Got your info to EPA. I didn’t mention your name under an anonymous whistleblower program. Got an injunction. Don’t think it matters much now, though.
Thanks. Get better, okay?
I nodded at him. He tore the note up and smiled his brilliant crusader smile. When he left the room with his hands in his pockets, I knew I wouldn’t see him again. I found him fascinating. But he was the kind of guy you could care about for a season, perhaps. Until he moved on. His love was his work, and there was no hope even contemplating more than that.
Jason was there every day. He brought me ice to suck on from the cafeteria and cold wash cloths for my forehead. He spent a long time scribbling on a tablet:
I’m sorry. I thought you and that guy were a thing. I was wrong. I should’ve trusted you. I know who you are, and I know you would’ve been honest with me.
I am an ass.
I laid my hand on his cheek. “I forgive you,” I said. But I couldn’t hear my own voice.
He scribbled again:
I quit mining.
A lump rose in my throat. “What are you going to do?”
Be here with you. I’ll pick up trash by the roadside or something until the forest ranger test is open again. Doesn’t matter. As long as I can be here with you.
I hugged him. He still smelled like fire.
I could read his lips enough to know when he said: “I love you.”
I told him I loved him back.
Eventually, they let me go home. My mom fussed over me like a chicken with an egg in the nest. Rhiannon slept in my bed. Her soft fur was a pleasure to pet. Gradually, the redness on my skin receded. I still had a mitten of a bandage on my left hand. And I eventually looked in a mirror, in the ornate silver one Afakos had given me.
My hair was darker, burned short and brittle. My skin was darker, too. I’d developed some odd pigmentation and blotchiness. Maybe it would go away. Maybe it wouldn’t.
The ringing in my ears remained. It faded a bit, and if I concentrated, I could hear what people said if they were looking directly at me. The doctor said it would likely improve. No guarantees when or to what extent.
I was still in a soft state of shock when I went to my tree house with my violin for the first time since the accident. The climb was slow, and I favored my bandaged hand.
I thought I would try to play left-handed. I grasped the bow of my grandfather’s violin with my bandaged hand and clumsily tried to work the strings with my right. My own had been warped and ruined in the fire, strings popped and pegs singed. But the bits of a tune unraveled from my grandfather’s violin. I could feel the vibrations in
my chin and the bit of music in my head and in my ear: Sting’s “King of Pain.”
It was a dirge for what had been. For Afakos. For Grandpa, and Julie, the dead men, and all of us left behind.
I was so absorbed in the music that I nearly dropped the bow when I felt the tree bend and flex.
I stared up in astonishment when two milk quartz eyes peered down at me from a black shadow intertwined with the tree.
“Afakos!”
He snaked his neck down to me, and I threw my arms around him. His voice vibrated in his throat.
“I thought you were gone.” I pressed my cheek to his cool scales.
“Almost,” he said. “There are enough people crawling over the mountain to make it nearly intolerable.” He huffed, and the air disturbed what was left of my hair.
“I think your home is safe, now.” I told him about the permit failing. “If you want to go back, that is.”
His wings swished air as they adjusted his weight in the tree. “I may yet go...perhaps north. I’ve not migrated since I crossed the ocean.” His gaze slid to the horizon. “But I think I should sleep for a few years. See if home looks different ten or twenty years from now.”
I felt a pang in my chest imagining him gone. “So you came...to say goodbye?”
“Yes.” He cocked his head. “I wanted to see that you were well. And to give you something. A small thing, for what you’ve given me.” He extended one of his clawed paws.
Tears welled in my eyes. I held out my hands.
I expected him to give me one of the tarnished headlights, or dolls, or aluminum cans from his collection. I would’ve clutched it to my chest and treasured it for all of my days.
He clumsily dr`opped something shiny into my open palms. At first, I thought it was a chunk of quartz, a rough rock large and heavy as my doubled fist.
I lifted it to the light, and my heart lurched at the way the sun sparked off it in brilliant refractive angles entirely unlike quartz.
It was a diamond. A massive, raw, clear diamond.
“Afakos…” I whispered. “I can’t take this.”
But he was already climbing to the top of the tree like a shadow receding in sunshine.