by Jessica Raya
I got in my car to go home. As I started the engine, Dad leaned down to ruffle my hair. “I wanted you, kiddo. It just took me a while to know it, that’s all. So don’t you ever question that.”
“I won’t,” I said. It was a promise I’ve kept for the most part. I could spend my life digging around for people to blame. I’d find plenty of fool’s gold that way, if I wanted to. I prefer my Jasper rocks.
With Mom it was harder. When I finally confessed to the fire—my fire—nobody wanted to hear it. The Place had been demolished long ago, along with any evidence. Both the police and the developers preferred to let it be. Digging up the past would only complicate the present. They were right. Once it all came out—The Place, Troy, Dr. Winkelmann’s—Mom would devote whole days to staring out the kitchen window again. This time I guessed she was looking for the daughter she thought I’d been.
Then one Friday afternoon, she turned around and said, “Let’s drive somewhere.” We didn’t talk about it, we just threw a bag of clothes in the car and drove. We took back roads and scenic routes, kept going until it got dark. We found motels with swimming pools and diners with jukeboxes, ate too much, and went to sleep with wet hair. Then we woke up and got in the car and did it all again. Nothing was going to stop us from seeing those trees.
On the way home, we passed the road cut. Gazing out over a sleepy Golden, thousands of houses stretching to the hills, I thought about all the families they contained. Some were happy. Some weren’t. Some had lost a parent or a child. Some didn’t know all that they’d lost. But everyone was still going. Little bursts of lamp and TV light told me so. I said a prayer, the only way I knew how. I found a star in the sky and made a wish. A week later, Jamie Finley left for Vietnam. As Carol liked to say, “God hears all prayers. He just doesn’t always answer them.”
Melanie came to see me before she was sent away. There was an aunt in New Jersey willing to take her in and help with the arrangements. After that was anyone’s guess. Plans were being made without her. She still didn’t talk about the baby. She said she would come see me when it was over, but she never came back to Golden. Moody left town shortly after she did. Vera doesn’t know where he went, but I like to think there is a bakery somewhere out east where you can buy little drops of heaven anytime you want.
Carol was sent to a hospital in Buenos Aires run by nuns who agreed to care for her for the rest of her life. The State of California was more than happy to let her go. She was God’s problem now. She never spoke or wrote another word. Her fingers were too badly burned to save. She can talk, but refuses to. I’ve been told she communicates by pointing to words in her Bible with a pencil in her mouth. For everything else, she has her nuns.
The rest of us were scattered like refugees across the Golden school system. I gave up home ec, to the relief of Mrs. Maxwells everywhere, and took up choir. I couldn’t carry a tune but at least no one got hurt. I buckled down, sights set on colleges in towns where it rained once in a while. I started swimming again, did lazy laps with Mom in the evenings sometimes. By then my skin had calmed to cotton-candy pink. Baby skin, Mom called it. I slathered on the sunscreen. There was a store-bought sheen to me that I was eager to protect.
As the months passed, the nightmares came less and less frequently, though they were just as potent when they did. I dreamed I was being burned at the stake. I was shredded to pieces by rusty kitchen knives. I was held underwater by a thousand hands. I screamed sometimes, Mom told me. I’d wake up with a damp cloth on my forehead, her voice soothing in my ear. My doctor said the anxiety was normal, that the mind was slower to heal than the flesh. My body had rushed ahead of my brain again. He’d seen something similar in soldiers coming back from Vietnam. Try to relax, he told me. Settle into your old routine. I told him about the lighters. “You might want to find some new hobbies,” he agreed.
—
Nixon beat McGovern. Roe beat Wade. The war ended. Some things stayed the same and some things got better, not by giant leaps, but by small human steps.
For a long time, people called the house at all hours. Reporters, lunatics, well-wishers. Mom finally had the number changed. The flood of mail was redirected to a PO box. She collected it every Friday and helped me decide what to keep and what to toss. People sent tear-stained letters about things they’d done and regretted or not done and regretted more. They asked for my advice, my forgiveness, a blessing from the girl who’d saved a living saint. I replied to as many as I could. They thought I was a hero, though it seems to me that heroes are the ones who need our prayers.
What surprised me were the items they sent. The photos of loved ones who’d died, the locks of hair, the baby teeth. I kept them in a shoebox under my bed. Mom said they were morbid, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw these strange gifts away. When I was little and Dad talked about the aftermath of a disaster, it made me think of the remainder left over from my long division exercises. Later, I thought how funny that was, how childishly I’d seen the world. But I’d been right all along. The aftermath is what remains.
Like Mr. Galpin, widow, misplaced father, vice-principal. When he came to see me in the hospital, he told me about the night his wife and daughter died. I’ve never repeated that story to anyone and I never plan to. Knowing something like that is like being given a glass egg. You don’t pass it around. You wrap it in tissue and put it in a box and set it on the shelf of your teenaged heart.
Or Jamie Finley, the first boy I ever loved, who went to Vietnam and never came back, a hero too many times for one young life. He wrote me seven letters before his helicopter went down in the Andaman Sea. I have them still.
Carol, that tiny girl who contained so much anger and sadness. Carol Cloister. Jesus Freak. Patron saint of teenaged arsonists. One Saturday, sifting through the envelopes and tiny boxes, I found a postcard with an illustration of Saint Lucy, who was stabbed to death because she could not be burned. It bore a stamp from Argentina, my name written in purple ink by an immaculate hand. Was it an apology? A thank-you? Whatever it was, it was her story, not mine. I didn’t want to be a martyr and I was certainly no saint. I preferred the Sisters’ story of the phoenix, a mythical bird that sets herself on fire every thousand years so a new phoenix can be reborn from the ashes. Still, I put the postcard in the shoebox with other people’s baby teeth. My ninth grade chemistry teacher told us that you measure the strength of covalent bonds by how much heat you need to break them. But, of course, heat bonds things too.
And what about Elaine Johnson Fisher? Swan diver, college dropout, diehard Democrat, doting grandmother, abysmal cook. I keep her ashes in that old enamel box on my bookshelf, surrounded by her wild women, and a photo of us on the windowsill above my kitchen sink. It’s from our day among the redwoods, taken for a dollar by an industrious hippie with a Polaroid camera and no shoes. In it, Mom and I stand together in front of a great tree. The sunlight is yellow on its bark, the forest around us glows like fire. I am holding her hand. I smile widely, but my chin is tucked. I am still learning that we all have scars. If you search that photo for mine, you won’t be disappointed. Don’t search. See instead our sunlit faces. See how brave and lucky we are. We are all just dumb kids—me, her, him, everyone. But we are phoenixes too. We flap our wings and caw at the stars. Some days we even remember that we can fly.
Look at us. Look at us.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First thanks must go to my readers, whose praise for a very early draft gave me the courage to plod on. Thanks to my sister, Danielle Rockel, who wouldn’t let me stop plodding when I wanted to, and to my parents, Elizabeth Rains and Al Hyland, who gave me a room with a view where there was little to do but plod. Thanks also to my fellow chickens at the Castro Writers’ Coop and to my personal cheerleaders, Christie Rae and Masa Takei. You know the importance of friendship and bubbly, and supply both in a bottomless cup. And to the outstanding team at McClelland & Stewart, who mid-wifed this manuscript into print with speed and grace—tribute must be p
aid. A debt of gratitude is owed to my agent, Carolyn Forde, for seeing what I did in this story, and to my wise and tireless editor, Anita Chong, for helping me see so much more. Finally, eternally, thanks and love to my husband, Hugo Eccles, for inspiring me, and doing the laundry, and helping me see more in everything.