The View From Who I Was

by Heather Sappenfield

  A set of red and blue flashing lights appeared for a second and disappeared. Corpse imagined all the firefighters and emergency workers. How loud and chaotic it must be, while for her and Angel it was so still.

  I thought how there must have been a circus of pulsing lights parked at the trailhead back home as rescue workers hauled us out. I imagined the pajama-and-bathrobe-clad occupants of the houses nearby, gawking out their windows. A scrap of our history we’d never see. Corpse rubbed her forehead, sighed, and surveyed a sky muted by the moon’s light. She thought of Dad, imprisoned in his recliner.

  Angel blew out her breath. “I’m going down there.”

  “To the fire?”

  “My cousins are firefighters. They might be down there.”

  “Oh.”

  Angel strode into the room.

  Corpse shot to her feet. “You won’t get caught?”

  She shrugged. “I miss them.”

  Corpse eyed the line of flame. “I’m going with you.”

  “You didn’t even want to run down the mountain.”

  I forced myself quiet.

  “There’s a bunch of people who have a memory of the dead me,” Corpse said. “Of the flashing lights and the rescue workers. I don’t have that memory, and I need to know what it was like. That fire there. Maybe it’s as close as I’ll ever come.”

  Angel shrugged again. “It’s a long hike. You won’t get much sleep tonight.”

  Corpse flexed her fingers, feeling all ten. “I’m starting to see things more clearly, the things that made me do what I did. But there’s so much about my life I don’t understand. I guess that’s why I was following you up that mountain. I have to start figuring out some answers. Does that make sense?” She didn’t mention that she also craved seeing Angel’s people.

  “I’ll be right back.” Angel left Corpse’s room and returned with a flashlight and two down coats.

  This time I hung close. I needed to see that fire and Angel’s people just as much as Corpse did.

  Angel kept the flashlight off till we were away from the campus. Even then, it cast a wan light the size and shape of a soccer ball. The trail descended steadily, sometimes dropping into a draw and climbing steeply out. It was hard to gauge when the rocks or sticks or whatever Corpse saw in the flashlight’s beam would arrive underfoot, so she tripped about every twentieth step.

  After an hour the air turned strangely warm, conjuring Chateau Antunes’s warm air as she’d wobbled, in that mask of bandages, down the hall toward Gabe. The night sky glowed, and a roaring sound filled it. Ahead of them reached a wall of white smoke. Shouts sounded, faint against the roar. The smoke made Corpse blink and take shallow breaths.

  The highway appeared a hundred yards down a graded hill. On its far side, weirdly enticing flames took over the night. Sheriff cars, state patrol cars, fire trucks, and trucks with Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management emblems filled the inside lane, their strobe lights slicing the dark. The roaring came from the fire, but it reminded Corpse of a river’s sound. And something else she couldn’t place.

  Angel and Corpse settled behind a clump of sagebrush. A thwapping consumed the air, and their hair swirled. A helicopter, its light a knife of daylight, dropped water from a huge, dangling sack onto the fire’s length. It turned and passed again. In its path, Corpse saw firefighter after firefighter step back and look up.

  The breeze toward us stiffened. A tall pine exploded, sending a spray of orange branches and bark. The tree swayed and fell, an arc of yellow against the night, and a scream pierced the fire’s roar. Corpse scanned the scene frantically: one firefighter lay trapped beneath the trunk, another beneath its branches.

  Firefighters rushed forward, hurling dirt onto the tree with their shovels, able to safely reach only the branches. They pried out that firefighter from a web of flame. Angel glanced at Corpse, but Corpse was fixated on the body trapped beneath the trunk.

  In Bio, during our cellular respiration lab, Mr. Bonstuber had told us that when organic things combusted, they rose as carbon dioxide and steam, invisible but for suspended soot and ash. Before her eyes, that firefighter was evaporating.

  Within minutes the fire was gnawing the highway’s edge. Two paramedics and two firefighters shot onto the pavement through a gap in the flames, carrying a yellow stretcher. The injured firefighter was jostled along, but his eyes stayed closed. Angel rushed toward the stretcher, but Corpse froze and touched the top of her head, where Ash’s crown had been.

  I was right there with her, and in our mind’s eye, that guy’s brown jacket and pants transformed to a pink dress, his bearded face to ours. Something about how he lay wasn’t right; we peered at death.

  The back of an ambulance opened, a bright geometry, and Angel returned to Corpse’s side as the stretcher slid into it. The doors slammed. The paramedics raced to the cab’s doors, and the firefighters milled in the red glow from the ambulance’s taillights as it pulled into a paved connecter between the east-bound and west-bound lanes. Its siren sounded, and Corpse covered her ears. At the road’s edge, the vehicle’s headlights swept across them.

  “Hey!” one of the firefighters shouted.

  “Sherman!” Angel called.

  “You can’t be here! It’s not safe!” he shouted.

  Corpse and Angel were in two headlamp beams that started toward them.

  “It’s me, Angel!” She walked toward the lights. Corpse followed.

  One of the lights said, “Angel! You shouldn’t have come. It’s dangerous!” and then it became a tall guy hugging her.

  “You stink!” Angel said.

  Sherman chuckled. Corpse could make out a long, serious face below the beam.

  “Where’s Kenny?”

  “I’ll get him. But then you have to go. Promise?”

  Angel nodded, and Sherman took off in a tired boot-jog. The other firefighter followed him, but walking. Angel wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. Corpse stepped beside her. A minute later, two headlamps bounced toward them again—one shorter, resembling an off-kilter car on a bumpy road.

  “Straight A!” called the shorter beam. It picked Angel up and spun her. She squealed. Sherman watched them, grinning, and then his eyes landed on Corpse.

  Kenny set Angel down, and Angel held up her hand against the light. Kenny turned off his headlamp. He was round-faced and jolly with eyebrows that matched Angel’s, and their eyes had a conversation. Corpse felt she should look away, but she gobbled up the bond in their gaze.

  Then Kenny saw Corpse, squinting in Sherman’s headlamp.

  “This is Oona,” Angel said as Sherman extinguished his light. The fire’s incendiary glow cast their faces in ghoulish shadows. I thought how all light, even the sun, was released energy. Corpse attempted a smile, but the burning guy pressed around her. The guy on the stretcher seared her gaze, and the bond connecting Angel and her cousins was a thousand pounds on her chest. Angel’s people. Corpse swayed and gulped the smoke-clogged air. Everything started to churn. A hacking cough bent her.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” Kenny said.

  Angel shrugged.

  A shout made the cousins look back, toward the combusting man. Their faces turned grim.

  “Things good?” Kenny said.

  “They’re okay. I miss home.”

  They fell silent against the fire’s roar.

  “You know that guy?” Angel said.

  Kenny shook his head, but his eyes held pain. He reached out a filthy hand and petted Angel’s cheek. “We’ve got to go.”

  Angel nodded. “Be careful,” she said to their backs.

  “Always,” Sherman called over his shoulder.

  A smudge from Kenny’s touch marked Angel’s cheek, but she wore a serene expression. She walked to where we’d emerged on the highway, scaled the hill halfway, and sat down. C
orpse stood for a minute, then settled beside her.

  Angel stared into the flames. “Just being close helps.”

  We hiked back in silence. Corpse felt the burning guy under the tree press around them, and the guy on the stretcher scorched her vision. Had Gabe and Dad run ahead of or behind our stretcher as it moved along the trail? When the ambulance slammed closed its rectangle of light, did they stand grieving in the dark? Knowing we were dead?

  Guilt and smoke churned so hard in Corpse that she stopped and puked. I hovered near her, wishing I could puke too. When she turned, Angel stood a few feet away, still gazing at the fire like it was a lifeline.

  She seemed to sense when Corpse was ready, and they moved on. Corpse cleaned her mouth on the back of her sleeve, realizing too late the coat wasn’t hers. We seemed to trudge out of a nightmare.

  Corpse pictured the water falling from the helicopter, the burning body returning to the clouds. “There’s no water here. I keep listening for it, but there’s no water. It makes me thirsty. For months I’ve been fascinated with water.” She spoke loudly so her words would reach Angel. “I don’t know why. It just seems to be whispering an answer. I can’t figure it out. It’s driving me crazy.”

  “There’s water,” Angel said over her shoulder. “Beneath our feet.” She scanned the sky. “In Navajo tradition, there’s a water god. He’s responsible for rain, sleet, snow. Thunder and lightning. Maybe he’s been speaking to you, trying to heal you.”

  Corpse thought of Circle, and I squirmed. “Maybe,” she said. “Sherman and Kenny. Are they brothers?”

  “Nah,” Angel said. “They’re the sons of my mom’s

  sisters. They live together in Albuquerque, but they’re fighting another fire near here.”

  “How many cousins do you have?”

  Angel seemed to count. “Seventeen.”

  “I can’t imagine it. That sense of family.”

  They walked in silence again.

  “Those guys were dead.” Corpse said. “It’ll kill their families.” She took a shuddering breath, coughed, and surveyed the stars. “Things are so wrong at home. My family is dying. I think my Dad’s the key. When he was ten, his family died. I don’t know how. He won’t talk about it. That was in Portugal. He was sent to live in America. I think it screwed him up. And money.”

  “Money?” Angel said.

  “Yes. Money’s like a drug for him. He’s addicted. God, it’s such bullshit. You wouldn’t believe how rich we are. We live in a freaking castle. I have my own car. A Range Rover, and not a used one. No, one right off the lot. I figured out that Mom spends the annual income of most of the families here just going to spas. We have a maid. Yet in every other way, in the important ways, we’re so poor. That’s what I figured out at the conference during William’s reading. That’s why I bolted. Does that sound crazy?”

  “A little.”

  “Your cousins are great. You’re so lucky.”

  “Lucky.” Angel seemed to weigh the word. “Maybe your dad just needs to go back to his people.”

  “Huh?” Corpse said.

  “Like my roommate. Maybe your dad just needs to visit home. Remember who he is.”

  “Oh.” Corpse started to dismiss her words, but then remembered Dad in that recliner searching the stars, or on the beach when we were nine as he peered across the sea. She considered that new nodding, how he seemed two places at once. “His people,” she said. She stopped and gazed at the flames, again the height of her thumb. “That’s it, Angel! You’re brilliant!”

  “It’s just common sense.”

  One flame flared high as Corpse thought about spring break. She ticked through ideas, and each shadowy rise of the moonlit hills before her evolved to steely gray waves that merged with the horizon. Beyond that horizon lay another continent. I kept silent, nervous as hell about what she was considering. Yet maybe I didn’t know so much after all.

  They returned to their journey back. A few points of light from the school appeared through the trees.

  “I hope the fire doesn’t reach up here. I like this place,” Corpse said.

  “Me too.”

  They came to the dorms. They went into Corpse’s room and back out to the patio. Wrapping themselves in the bedspreads, they settled into the chairs. Corpse’s legs ached. Her lungs burned. Her scabbed palms pulsed. So did her head.

  “Thanks for taking me down there,” she said.

  Angel was asleep.

  As Corpse gazed at that smudge on Angel’s cheek, I couldn’t get rid of the terrible image of Gabe and Dad staring after that ambulance. Corpse clicked through how she’d make spring break happen. Pictured Portugal and Dad and healing. After a long time her mind turned gooey, and she yawned. In the distance, the coyotes howled, a thread on the air that raised goose bumps on her skin.

  She saw again the bond in Angel’s and Kenny’s gaze. I thought about the years our family had spent avoiding each others’ eyes. Thought of our nocturnal prowling in Chateau Antunes. How the scariest dangers stemmed from love.

  Corpse woke to sprinkles against her face. Her head was cocked over the chair’s back and drops tickled her throat like intimacy. When she finally moved, her neck was rebellious and sore. Angel was gone. Corpse massaged her neck. The fire’s width had shrunk to the length of her finger.

  “Good job,” she whispered to the firefighters and police. “Good job,” she whispered to the clouds. She willed her words to travel to the paramedics and the doctors who’d saved her. Wished for the guts to tell them in person.

  She shuffled inside and closed the sliding glass door. Angel slept on one bed. Corpse settled on the other and drifted off to the rhythm of Angel’s breathing.

  Nineteen

  From Oona’s journal:

  Schauberger’s view of the world contradicted the accepted rules of science.

  —Oona

  Angel returned from bussing her breakfast dishes. Her eyes were puffy like Corpse’s, and she rubbed them. Otherwise she seemed refreshed. At peace. I envied her.

  “Do you want to see the Oasis House?” she said.

  “Don’t you have class?” Corpse rolled her head, trying work out her neck’s soreness.

  “I’m taking the morning off. Dr. Yazzie gave me permission.”

  Dr. Yazzie and Mr. Handler were deep in conversation at a table across the room. Corpse could see Dr. Yazzie’s hand in his pocket. He wore a faint smile as he watched her, and she wondered if that rock had tattled about last night. How had he ended up with that rock anyway? Did he pick it out? Was it a gift? And how could a person know if a rock was wise? Maybe he was just pulling her leg. She hoped not; she liked what that rock had said.

  They strolled across the common area and onto the road. Corpse wore her fleece against the chill. Angel wore a jean jacket, and her hair riffled on the breeze. Corpse looked around and thought how this place reversed ordinary things.

  “Angel,” she said, “who was scared by witches, maybe had a ghost in her room at the beginning of the year?”

  “How do you know about that?”

  Smoke hung in the air. That morning, when Corpse had looked out her room’s sliding doors, the fire had become just rising gray scarves.

  “I heard two teachers talking. White ones.” Corpse slid her hands into her fleece’s pockets, pressed her fingers together to blot the missing ones’ wails.

  “The girl’s not here anymore. Her father died. She had to go home.”

  “He froze to death?”

  Angel looked at her funny. “Yes.”

  “What room was it?”

  “Yours.”

  Corpse stumbled, and Angel caught her arm.

  At the road’s fork they followed its right side. It des-cended more than the road to the dorms, and they walked in long strides. With each step Corpse tried to push forward off the
balls of her feet to eliminate that bob. Over her shoulder, the climb back up taunted. Her sore legs were already arguing with the downhill. Since she and Angel had slept in, they hadn’t greeted the sun.

  “A medicine man cleansed my room?”

  Angel didn’t respond.

  “Does that stuff linger? Like, could his power cleanse me?”

  Corpse had my attention.

  Angel seemed to sort out her thoughts on the road ahead of them. “When you first came here, you scared me.”

  “What exactly is a ghost in your culture?”

  Angel shook her head. “It’s not good to talk about these things.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Angel just shook her head.

  “Could a medicine man cure me? My hands and feet have been tingling since Circle.”

  Angel gave her a serious once-over and then broke into a sly smile. “Seems like you’re healing yourself.”

  “Really?” Corpse smiled, but I swore myself to silence. At least for a while.

  The road descended a half mile, till a hillside curved before them and the Oasis House appeared, a sprawling porched building nestled in the valley floor. Leafless trees towered overhead, but lush vegetation quilted the ground.

  Corpse followed Angel up three front steps onto the porch and around the building’s side to the back, where a huge deck reached out to the green shore of a pond. She descended steps to the pond’s bank, and her reflection stared back at us from the water.

  Pretty was coming back to her. Something in her eyes had changed. I looked closer. Recognized courage. She reached out to trace that reflected nose, sending waves across that girl.

  “How can this be here?” she said.

  “There’s a spring,” Angel said.

  Corpse returned to the deck and peered through glass doors into an open room with a wood floor, leather couches and chairs. A regal painting of a Native American chief in a headdress, whose name she couldn’t remember, hung on the wall opposite her. She recognized a corner of the gilt frame from the background of the photo on Angel’s roommate’s desk, and she imagined the people in that photo posing in there, laughing.