Because of Our Child

by Margot Early

  “Yet he is a reminder of humanity’s first encounters with fire. When early people collected burnt animals after fires, undoubtedly they noted the improved flavor, which may have led to the practice of cooking meat.”

  Max stopped to take out his digital camera. These days, many firefighters carried them, because photographic evidence was so important to the record of fires. He snapped a photo down the slope, memorizing again the spot in the landscape from which the smoke had seemed to rise. He picked up a charred twig from the ground and snapped another photo, using the tip of the twig to mark the spot.

  Max slid the cover so that the camera lens would retract. Wind whipped locks of curling black hair, or hair so dark brown that it seemed black, away from Jen’s face. Impulsively, he opened the lens cap again, raised the camera and snapped a photo of Jen.

  She smiled in response, that sudden smile, rare yet brilliant, that he remembered, and he clicked another shot.

  “You’re more beautiful than you were when we first met,” he said. He marveled at the words as they came. He didn’t say things like that.

  Who would you say them to, Max?

  There were women in his life, sometimes. Yet his lifestyle seemed to conflict with theirs. The ones with compatible lives were often so independent that a relationship wasn’t a high priority.

  That smile again.

  And the smile was the same.

  She said, “There will be a critical-incident debriefing, won’t there?”

  Despite the wind howling around them, Max heard her perfectly. “Oh, yes.”

  “Are you troubled about the fire investigation?”

  “I’m troubled that Jackson got burned.”

  Jen felt herself to be an insensitive television reporter, asking the wrong questions. This was something she deliberately strived not to be. Off-camera time that wasn’t spent with Elena was devoted to the study of martial arts; she spent time thinking about ethics. Always, she wanted to be better at her job.

  Her fear, when the fire had come inside the shelter, was that her face would be burned.

  And how close you were, Jennifer Delazzeri. Because her hair had been on fire, and she couldn’t even remember it.

  “It was a new fire. You know that, don’t you?” he said.

  “I didn’t see how it could be anything else. Did it just ignite because of the heat of the day?”

  He shrugged. “You know the fire triangle as well as I do.”

  Yes. Oxygen, fuel and heat—all must be present for fire to exist. Fires were extinguished by eliminating one side of the triangle, one element. Cool it with retardant or water. Cut a fire line to clear brush. Smother it.

  It took them only fifteen minutes to reach the spot where Max had seen the fire ignite. Below the spot were rocks and unburned piñon-juniper woodland.

  Max photographed what he thought was the tree that must have produced the initial smoke—though how he could tell, Jen had no idea.

  “May I observe the investigation?” she asked.

  “I’m not the one to ask. I doubt they’ll want a journalist there. Do you write at all?”

  “You mean articles?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. Not anymore. I have in the past.”

  “You seem to be doing well for yourself.”

  They turned to hike back. Jen could smell her burned hair as the wind whipped it round her face. “In my career, you mean?”

  “Yes.” He had been walking ahead of her, and he didn’t pause as he said, “You don’t have a family, do you?”

  She didn’t lie. She had great difficulty saying anything untrue. But this, she thought, would be a good time to lie.

  “I have a daughter. Elena.”

  “Pretty name.”

  Max asked no more. He simply wasn’t that interested in her daughter, Jen supposed. The satisfaction of long-ago decisions suddenly turned bitter. No matter how many times she had considered finding him, telling him, she had been right to keep Elena’s existence to herself. Because he wasn’t interested.

  And now she was old enough to appreciate that finding out you’d been right wasn’t always satisfying.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE CRITICAL-INCIDENT stress debriefing took place at the Super 8 Motel in Ridgway. For lack of a better place to gather, they sat around the glassed-in pool.

  Jackson was in a hospital in Grand Junction, where he’d been air-lifted. But Jen had received medical attention at a local clinic and was able to attend.

  Now, they sat around, the hardened smoke jumpers Max, Tock and Salazar, Bob and Jen, the division supervisor, whose name was Ted Stuart, a local psychologist whom Jen quickly decided was less than excellent, and an interagency fire investigator named Randy St. George. Jen was sure the investigator should be excluded from their debriefing.

  Bob sat with his elbows on one of the circular white metal tabletops, his head in his hands, fingers pulling at his hair. The fire investigator, who seemed to sense he was something of an intruder, edged away from the rest of them and looked out the window at cars on the highway.

  “He took the camera from you,” Salazar said. “I saw it, Bob. He grabbed it—I would say wrested it—from you.”

  Tock answered, “I knew we weren’t going to die. There wasn’t enough fuel on the helispot. But it was loud. I can still hear it.”

  Max was quiet.

  “Who saw the fire first?” Randy St. George turned from the window.

  “I think I was the first to see the smoke,” Max admitted. “It must have been smoldering for a while, though.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  Jen tuned out. She had called Elena at dance camp, ten miles away in Ouray, to tell her daughter where she was staying and that she was okay. Because Elena was in class, Jen left a message. But she hadn’t said, Your father was with me.

  Elena knew that her father had been a wildland firefighter and a student when she was born. Jen had told her that Max had been in love with someone else, that the woman had died of burns sustained in a fire and that Jen had never told Elena’s father of her existence.

  Elena had only once asked why.

  Because he was young and in love with another woman who had just died, and because he didn’t love me.

  Elena had not asked what that had to do with it—or why Max had made love with Jen if he was in love with someone else. But Jen had certainly asked herself those questions, and more, during the past twelve years. Many times, she’d considered trying to find Max and tell him about Elena. It was one thing not to consider Elena’s rights or Max’s when she herself was nineteen. But with each year that had passed, Jen found it more difficult to justify never telling Max that he had fathered a child.

  Elena did not ask what he was like. Jen had said that Max saved her life during the Makal Canyon fire. She made him out to be a hero, a person from whom Elena could draw strength. A brave man.

  No reason now to tell Elena that she had encountered Max again. Jen and Max were strangers; he was just someone she’d made love with long ago, when they’d both been other people.

  She stole a look at him. His features were angular, rugged, movie-star handsome, charismatic. He had filled out, changing from the lanky young man he’d been into someone with solid muscles—and probably scars. As far as she could tell, his life was entirely about fire.

  He’d become a fire addict. From hotshot to smoke jumper. He worked as a forest-service ranger in Leadville, but he’d also become something of an expert on fire behavior, she had learned.

  Jen suspected that because it was a separate, new blaze that had overrun the helispot, Max and the others who had chosen the spot would be forgiven.

  “I don’t hear much from Jen,” said the psychologist, a woman with straw-colored hair and an angular face, lined from years of sun exposure. “What happened in your shelter, Jen?”

  She knew she was supposed to talk now, express her fear. And it was fear that had ultimately removed her from firefigh
ting—after what had happened to Salma. After she’d seen that people really did get burned fighting fires. That they died that way. She did not want to speak about fear, however; did not want anyone to know she’d ever been afraid.

  “I don’t remember when my hair caught fire,” she said. “I remember that the flames were inside my shelter and that they burned through my pants before I could put them out. I had to hold down the shelter and put out the fire, and I couldn’t do both. But I guess I did—I’ve been in a burnover before.”

  She felt, rather than saw, Max’s cleft chin turn in her direction. His sudden attentiveness reminded her of Elena when her daughter was acting belligerent.

  “When was that?” asked the psychologist, whose name Jen refused to remember.

  “I was nineteen. I was a hotshot in California.” Never saying that she had shared a shelter then; that the person who had shared his shelter with her was in the glassed-in pool area, too.

  “Has anyone else been in this kind of situation before?” asked Ted Stuart, the division supervisor. “I know you have.” A nod at Max.

  “Not this bad,” Tock said. “Not where anyone got hurt.”

  “It was my fault,” Bob repeated. “I shouldn’t have let him take the camera.”

  “He knew better,” Ted shot back, overriding Bob’s assertion.

  “Do you want to talk about the previous experience you had, Jen?” asked the psychologist. “Any of you?”

  Jen shook her head.

  After the debriefing, Max walked beside Jen back to their hotel rooms. “I’ll have to mention it in the fire investigation,” he said. “That you’re the person I shared a shelter with in Makal Canyon.”

  “How could that possibly be relevant?”

  “It’s not. But it will come out—whether I tell them or not.”

  “They won’t say you were distracted by me, will they? I mean, people knew…” Jen let the sentence hang, undone.

  People had known they were involved after the fire. Other Santa Inez Hotshots had seen it. And Teresa had known, of course. It only lasted about a week. A memorable week of not getting enough of each other, of sleeping and not sleeping in each other’s nightmares, of clinging to each other in a variety of settings—on the beach, in the chaparral of the Santa Inez Mountains, in Max’s truck, in bed. Frantic, desperate and fulfilling.

  She still remembered how it had ended, and the sting had never gone away. Never.

  “I don’t know,” Max said, as they reached the door of her room, “what will be said. Want to go into town and get some dinner?”

  “No.” The word came out sharply, too sharply. “I want to check my messages.” I want to talk to my daughter.

  “I can wait.”

  He was attractive, the most attractive man who had ever asked her to dinner—as a friend or otherwise—in her adult life.

  But she could not forget how their week-long affair had ended.

  So? You’re not going to sleep with him.

  He had hurt her so badly, and he probably didn’t even remember.

  But more than a decade had passed. He must have changed. And didn’t she owe it to Elena—if not Max—to find out how? Anyway, she’d changed.

  “What are you thinking?”

  She could not tell him the whole truth, not now. She settled on an earlier truth, instead. “I’m remembering when I was nineteen and in love with you, and you said, ‘I don’t love you. This is just about the fire. This is just because of the fire.’”

  “Oh, God.” His look was rueful, and he shook his head. “That sounds like something I would have said back then.”

  That was better than apologizing. These words meant that now he was a different person, a more mature person who wouldn’t say anything so thoughtless and unfeeling.

  As she had hoped.

  “I’m sure it was true.” She shrugged. “I just wasn’t prepared for it.” She had been a virgin before she slept with Max Rickman.

  And for him it had been just about the fire—and just because of the fire.

  He had loved another woman.

  But he had been—and still was—very handsome. People who looked like that, she found, operated by different rules. While she knew she was attractive, she didn’t have looks that would stop traffic or make people stare. But Max’s striking features, the remarkable combination of brown eyes, blond hair and dark eyebrows and eyelashes, must have made women into a casual thing for him, easily seduced and therefore lacking challenge and of little particular importance. Maybe, she’d sometimes thought, she had even been interesting to him in comparison to other affairs he’d had because of the fire, because they’d shared a shelter, for example. But she’d been no more than another experience.

  “Sure, I’ll have dinner with you. I’ll meet you in the lobby in fifteen minutes.” That should give her time to return phone calls.

  As she stepped into her room, she switched on her cell phone. Two messages.

  One from station manager Gary Lowell. “Hey, Jen, I heard what happened. Glad everyone’s okay.” Jen thought of Bob and how he’d obviously been affected. “Tell Bob to send whatever you got. I’m calling him, too.”

  One from the Hotel Flora Vista in Ouray. From Elena at dance camp. “Hi, Mom. I’m glad you’re okay. That’s scary. Please call me.”

  Jen called the hotel and asked for Room Eleven. A girl whose voice Jen didn’t recognize answered.

  “Hi, this is Jen Delazzeri. Is Elena there?”

  “Oh, yeah. Hang on.” The girl on the phone sounded young, happy.

  “Mom?”

  “Hi, sweetie. Are you having fun?”

  “Yes. What happened?”

  Jen gave her daughter a brief description of what had happened.

  “It doesn’t sound like it was a very good place to land a helicopter,” Elena remarked.

  “No doubt that will come up in the fire investigation.”

  “Do you have to go back to the fire?”

  “No.”

  Even if the station wants you to go back? Jen hadn’t wanted to go anywhere near the fire in the first place, but someone was going to have to cover developments over the next few days for the news. She’d have to do it from the fire camp, which had been established on the local soccer field, just a block from the hotel.

  “Are you sure?” asked Elena suspiciously.

  “Yes.” Now that she had said so, she would keep that promise. “Tell me about camp.”

  “It’s cool. We do ballet in the morning, Afro-Haitian, jazz and improv in the afternoons.” A pause. “Have you seen anyone you know?”

  Jen thought her heart actually stopped for a moment. Elena wasn’t asking about just anyone: Jen had been with wildland firefighters and Elena wanted to know if she had seen her—Elena’s—father.

  “Yes.”

  I don’t know what to say, what to do. How can I say, “No, you can’t meet your father because I’d still rather he not know that you exist?”

  “I have to go, because I’m having dinner with one of the smoke jumpers. I love you.”

  JEN HAD WORN a draped silk outfit in a deep purple to the debriefing. She was here in a professional capacity and she was not about to relax her professional look. Because she had so much hair, the part that had been burned did not present a huge problem. She’d done nothing but shampoo it, trying to get the smells of the fire off her body and out of her mind. She’d failed to accomplish either, however.

  Briefly she scrutinized her reflection before leaving the room, her black handbag slung over her shoulder. She hurried down to the lobby.

  Max, still wearing the off-white canvas pants he’d had on at the debriefing, had exchanged a black button-down shirt for his red Leadville smoke jumper T-shirt. He offered her a new bottle of spring water as he stood up to meet her. “You need to keep drinking,” he said.

  Because of her burns.

  “Up to walking?” he asked.

  “Much better,” she admitted, “than sittin
g in a car.” Sitting, in general, took particular care because of her burns. The local emergency physician had prescribed painkillers, in case she had trouble sleeping, but so far she’d stuck to ibuprofen.

  They left the hotel, walked down to a corner gas station and crossed the highway at the traffic light.

  “Mexican, Chinese or steaks?”

  “I’m a vegetarian.”

  “Ah. Well, the question is pretty much the same.”

  “Mexican?”

  “You’re on, but you should stay away from the margaritas.”

  Again, because of the burns. As they walked past the fairgrounds and down a side street, Jen was almost certain she’d be forced to take the prescription pain relief she’d been given in order to sleep that night.

  “You never stop being a firefighter, do you,” she said, as she sipped from her water bottle. “I mean, telling me to drink water, stay away from alcohol.”

  “True. Well, I’m a ranger in my other life. I spend a lot of time looking out for people and protecting natural resources. Sorry—it’s hard to shut off the caregiver thing.”

  “I wasn’t complaining. Just observing.”

  There was a wait at the restaurant. Still, Jen didn’t want to sit, so they walked onto the patio and stood, looking at the high desert plants illuminated by low southwestern-style lanterns. The air was full of smoke. No escaping it, anywhere.

  “What did they ever find out,” she asked, “about Makal Canyon? The fire investigation.” They’d both had to deal with those memories, had to face them. Max was still in the profession, so he must know what had been determined about the fire.

  “Not much.”

  She heard the dissatisfaction in his deep voice.

  “The South Canyon fire had happened a couple of weeks earlier, and that was considered the debacle of the year. And so the Makal Canyon investigation was hurried, and there were definite errors in the report.”

  “They got things wrong?”

  “A couple of things, at least. They missed the absence of a lookout on the east flank, for one thing. And I’m pretty sure someone widened a bulldozer line two days after, to make it look sufficient. And they blamed Salma, too.”