Because of Our Child

by Margot Early

  “You just say what you think.”

  “No, I don’t. It doesn’t work in television.” And I definitely haven’t said everything I think about you.

  He laughed then. And glanced away from the table, then looked back to her. His jaw was tense, frozen in motion.

  He was still reacting to her revelation.

  Was his conscience kicking into gear? Jen didn’t trouble herself over the point. At the moment, she didn’t like him much—Elena was better off without him.

  She said, “The answer on Makal Canyon is no.”

  “Because I don’t want to be a father.”

  You are a father, damn it.

  “For many reasons,” she said.

  “I don’t know what I feel yet, Jen. Let alone what I should do. I’ve only known for fifteen minutes that you and I made a child together and that now she walks the earth. Give me a little time before you consign me to your permanent list of fiends.”

  “It’s easier for me if you just stay away,” she said sharply. “I told you for Elena’s sake, to give her a chance if you wanted to know her. But you don’t and…”

  “I’m not sure about that.” Max jerked his head back as he spoke, as though he’d said something regrettable.

  “You’re not going to involve my daughter in some emotional circus just because you want me to help you investigate the death of your fiancée.” Now, Jen wished she hadn’t spoken. What on earth had made her phrase the objection that way? But she couldn’t stop trying to put the words right. “I just mean, it’s not mature to do that to Elena. She doesn’t need to meet some person who doesn’t care about her, just so she can put a face to her biological father.”

  “How do you know?”

  Jen nearly stood and left the restaurant then. Her burns were stinging, the pain suddenly intense. And Max had just said that he didn’t care about Elena, but that it might be helpful for Elena to meet him anyhow. How could he think Jen would expose her daughter to that kind of pain? “Let’s just say,” she replied, “that I know.”

  “You’re in pain.”

  “Of course I’m in pain,” she hissed, and then she did stand up, grabbing up her purse. “But don’t think it has anything to do with you.”

  MAX WISHED he hadn’t gotten a hotel room for the night; wished he’d gone back down to the fairgrounds to be with the other firefighters. But after the second catastrophe in two days, he was off this fire for an enforced—and he hoped brief—period. Getting a hotel room, relaxing, had seemed the intelligent thing to do.

  Now he lay in an alien environment, suddenly alien to himself as well, as if he’d become someone else in the past few hours.

  Since Jackson had been burned, Max supposed he had become someone else. He was responsible for serious injuries to another jumper—and he was a father. As for the first thing, he wished it was untrue. And as for the second…

  Why didn’t I know?

  As if the fact of conceiving a child with Jen should have been known to him at the moment.

  The circumstances…

  Not even Jen really understood the reasons he’d made love to her again and again and again.

  Now he sat on the edge of the large empty bed with the generic polyester spread, the mirror reflecting an unshaven, half-dressed man, not even a smoke jumper now.

  Tock had taken a room down the hall, and Max considered rousing him. It was only eleven and Tock would still be awake. They could talk—about Jackson—about the choice of helispot.

  But it wasn’t Jackson Max wanted to see.

  He grabbed his shirt and withdrew the business card he’d tucked in the breast pocket.

  It was late, but could she be sleeping?

  Her burns… She would have taken her pain medication. If she had managed to fall asleep, he should leave her alone.

  On the other hand, if she was awake…

  SHE WATCHED HERSELF on the eleven o’clock news and had her first glimpse of the incident commander as he was interviewed by someone from Channel 7. How had Bill Black gotten to the IC? Not by being caught in a burnover.

  Her cell phone rang, playing Ravel’s “Bolero.”

  She opened it to check the number.

  This hotel.

  There was only one person it could be.

  She answered.

  “How is the burn?”

  “I’m floating. Percocet.”

  “Ah. Could I come see you?”

  She considered her attire. A long T-shirt Teresa had given her, emblazoned with the words, I haven’t been the same since that house fell on my sister.

  She should say no.

  Or should she say yes?

  To Makal Canyon. To walking over burned ground.

  “You can come down,” she said.

  She grabbed the loose raw silk pants that she’d found the most bearable against her injury.

  Then she went to her door. He was already there, in the pants he’d worn to dinner, with a faded forest service T-shirt bearing an image of Smokey Bear and the words ONLY YOU.

  She said, “You know, of course, that he was a real bear. A cub whose mother was killed in a forest fire.”

  “I do know this.”

  Jen tried to remember the things she’d felt in the restaurant, but the pain medication made it impossible for her to summon that anger. Now, things were different. Elena slept safely in Ouray, happy at her dance camp, unaware that her father wished she didn’t exist—or at least wished he didn’t know of her existence.

  He shut the door behind himself and sat on one of the two queen-sized beds in her room, gazing at the television screen and watching the flames of the Silver Jack fire.

  “Did you know those smoke jumpers well?” she asked.

  “No. One was a rookie. We’re not as close-knit as the hotshots were.”

  Jen remembered just how close they had been, the Santa Inez Hotshots. Like family.

  Max kept his face turned toward to the TV screen.

  Jen stepped past him and lay facedown on the other bed.

  He said, without looking at her, “Salma was pregnant.”

  Jen heard. Thought. Tried to understand what this meant. Did this have something to do with his not wanting children? Was the pregnancy why he and Salma had planned to marry?

  She could see only his profile. There was nothing more to read.

  “Do you have a picture of her?” he asked.

  Elena.

  “Why? What does Salma’s having been pregnant have to do with it?” she wanted to know. Though the pain relief was effective, she could feel a part of her mind clearing.

  “Nothing, Jen. It’s just one of the things that’s made me… How I’ve become.” He searched for his words in the pauses.

  Jen didn’t want to hear any more of Max’s views on fatherhood, so she stood up, retrieved her purse, found her wallet, and took out the picture of Elena she carried, a school photo from the previous fall.

  Her daughter was blond, like Max.

  She looked like the two of them, although people said she had Jen’s smile.

  Max took the photo from Jen and stared at it.

  Elena had braces, but still he knew her mouth. He saw himself in the shape of her eyes and her nose. “How tall is she?” he asked.

  “About five-foot-eight. Taller than me.”

  “She’s pretty.”

  “Yes,” Jen agreed.

  She’s my daughter.

  Max felt himself change again. He said, “I was ambivalent about the baby. But…I was raised a certain way. I loved Salma and I wanted to marry her.”

  “But you were young,” Jen said distantly, remembering herself, pregnant with Elena. Young. Knowing that her life would change, would be mapped by events she hadn’t foreseen. Knowing that she would be a mother at nineteen.

  “I was blown away that she was pregnant. It seemed incredible that she and I had created a life between us.”

  “I really don’t want to hear this.” The statement was unlik
e her—callous. Teresa had watched Salma die. Had Teresa known Salma was pregnant? If so, she’d never said.

  Jen wanted to call her sister, no matter the hour, and find out what Salma had told her in the burn unit.

  Max stared at her. Dispassionate; maybe wondering why she had any feelings at all about Salma’s pregnancy so long ago.

  You are thick, she thought. “Look,” she said, “don’t delude yourself. You have ceased to be much of a factor in any of it now, but at the time I was… Well, I suppose, in love with you.

  “You were in love with Salma, who had just died. Now, you’re telling me Salma was pregnant when she died. I was pregnant and I didn’t die. The ‘baby’ is twelve years old and dancing in Ouray this week.”

  Max shot another look at her.

  Jen cursed the Percocet. Why had she chosen those words? Did she want Max to know Elena was that close, that he could see her if he liked? Did she believe that if he saw her his feelings would change?

  Yes, she believed that. But still she wished she hadn’t told him Elena was nearby.

  “She’s in Ouray?”

  “Now you want to see her? Meet her?”

  “I think so.”

  Jen considered. In a way, it was what she’d set out to achieve. But Max’s ambivalence had changed things.

  Or had it?

  “This isn’t something I can figure out tonight,” she said. “Let me sleep on it. Maybe you should, too. And then I’ll ask Elena if she wants to meet you. I strongly suspect she does.”

  “What does she like to do?” he asked.

  “She likes to dance.”

  “No surprise.” He smiled, but the smile was uneasy, uncommitted. “What kind of dance?”

  “Modern dance and ballet. She likes theater, too. Actually, she wants to apply to the performing arts high school in Denver so she can pursue all these things.”

  He nodded, distractedly watching a commercial for identity-theft protection.

  After a moment he asked, “What’s her whole name?”

  “Elena Allegria Delazzeri.”

  Max wondered how he would ever sleep. “Do you have another copy of this photo?”

  “You can have that one,” she said. Her initial anger began to fade.

  Max’s cell phone chimed, and he opened it to see who was calling. Tock.

  “Hey,” he said, answering.

  “Want to go back on the fire line?”

  Yes, was the easy answer. Maybe fighting fire could help him to forget what Jen had told him.

  But, no, Salma and the baby she had carried were part of every fire. Jen was, too.

  “They aren’t going to let us,” he told Tock.

  “Wrong. They’re too short-handed. Alex just called.”

  Their foreman.

  “He said to show up at the fairgrounds at six, if we’re willing.”

  Max saw Jen rest her head on her arms. “I’ll be there,” he said.

  After hanging up, he told her, “I’m back on the fire. What are you doing tomorrow?”

  Her head lifted. “They’re letting you go back up there?”

  “Not enough personnel.”

  “Will you be all right?”

  He didn’t know what he’d expected from her. At first, he’d wondered if she would show her journalist side, seeking information about decisions that had been made, ready to assign blame for past and future events. Instead, she spoke as a friend.

  He remembered, from a time far away, the closeness of the Santa Inez Hotshots. He shared a closeness with other jumpers, too, and he supposed that was part of what he loved about firefighting.

  “Yes,” he said, studying her. “This isn’t related to your… To…to Elena. What about going back to Makal Canyon?”

  “Why do you want to go back?” she asked. “Is this about Salma?”

  “In part. But the whole picture wasn’t right. I’ve got a graduate degree in fire science, Jen. Fires are what I do with my life and Makal Canyon is part of the reason I’ve chosen this work. I understand things better, now. I want to know what went wrong there.”

  Jen thought about the books by Norman and John Maclean, which she had read, revisiting Mann Gulch and Storm King. But Max wanted to put his findings on film.

  “Find members of the crew?” she asked. “Supervisors? But, Max, it’s not like the subject has that wide an audience. One person died—Salma. It’s not like Storm King, where the public is going to be overwhelmed and outraged. It happened a long time ago.”

  “It will have an audience among people who fight wildfire.”

  “What will happen if you find that the decisions of a certain person were responsible?”

  “Decisions of a certain person were responsible.”

  Jen did not ask who. Richard Grass had been superintendent of the Santa Inez Hotshots. Richard, who had been like a Zen master; who had practiced t’ai chi chuan every day of his life. Who had been so focused—whom they had idolized, all of them. It was Richard whom Max held responsible.

  Strange that Jen, who’d become so involved in martial arts herself, rarely thought of Richard.

  “I think you should let it go,” she said.

  “He’s still in fire, Jen.”

  Max’s sudden intensity far outweighed any emotion he had shown at the news that he had a twelve-year-old daughter.

  “He made a mistake.”

  “A similar mistake to the one made at Storm King. He’s never been held accountable.”

  “You think he doesn’t hold himself accountable?”

  “Please,” Max said. “Do this with me.”

  He had moved off the one bed and now he crouched beside the other, his face level with hers.

  “Why me?” She was not susceptible to feelings for a Max who used to be, the long-ago lover she’d cared for. She had become a different woman and he was a different man. Yes, she dated. She’d even had two lovers since Max. The first hadn’t lasted long; she’d ended it. The second… Well, she’d been relieved when he moved away.

  Her path? Career was part of it, although not in an overly ambitious way. Elena was ambitious; Elena wanted to dance professionally, choreograph, have a school and ultimately a company of her own; and Jen doubted that ambition would change. In some twelve-year-olds who loved to dance, yes. But not in her daughter. And most of Elena’s decisions, even at twelve, were made with that single goal in mind.

  “Jen,” he said, “we were together. You and I shared a shelter in that fire. You’re a journalist. Why anyone else? Why would I want anyone but you to help me with this?”

  Today they’d been together again. Not sharing a shelter, yet with that same fearing-for-their-lives intimacy. “And my sister was with Salma,” Jen added.

  “Tell me what Teresa is up to.”

  Ah. There it was. No opportunity to get away from it. “She has mental health problems.”

  “From the fire?”

  “No. Partly… No one really knows. It’s in the family, though.”

  “What precisely?”

  “My mother’s father was schizophrenic.”

  He waited, showing no reaction.

  “My mother… Well, her issues are more situational. My parents divorced when I was three. And my mother… Let’s say she tended to create drama where none was necessary.”

  Max still said nothing.

  “As for Teresa, well, she gets depressed. It’s more than that. We all live together, my mother, Teresa, Elena and me. My mother and I bought the place together.”

  “Does she work—your mother?”

  “She’s retired now. She was a nurse practitioner.”

  “So her problems didn’t keep her from holding down a job.”

  “No. She always worked.” Jen tried to imagine successfully explaining her mother to Max but she couldn’t work it out. Her fear, a fear she’d always held, was that her mother’s behavior would rub off on her. Not that her mother was a bad mother. On the contrary, Robin Delazzeri had always cared
for her children diligently, which was one of the reasons she’d always looked so good to the courts.

  And there’d always been courts.

  There had always been drama.

  It filled Jen with shame and also anger when she remembered. Gino Delazzeri had been no prince. The fisherman son of Irish and Italian immigrants, he’d drunk more than was good for him or anyone close to him.

  He’d cheated on his second wife, just as he had on the first. He’d taken his daughters to bars and taught them to shoot pool and let them sip the foam off his beer. He’d brought them to the Monterey docks to see the commercial fishing vessels that were his home when he was away. He’d talked about the sea; told stories of the waves, of drownings, of sharks, of storms.

  His daughters had loved him and they’d wanted to see him.

  But by the time Jen was eleven, higher wages elsewhere and her mother had finally driven Gino away, to Gulf Coast ports and then back to his East Coast roots. Jen and Teresa hadn’t blamed him.

  They’d watched their mother lie—not just lie but perform—to keep him away from them. And instead of enjoying a week in Hawaii or Squaw Valley or Disneyland with their dad, they’d found themselves bustled to women’s shelters in the middle of the night.

  They’d been baffled. Though they’d sometimes seen their dad throw things in exasperation, they’d never seen him so much as touch their mother in anger. He’d never laid a hand on either of them.

  Whenever they’d seen him, they’d run to him with delight. Jen still remembered how her dad had swung her up onto his shoulders and how she’d liked being able to see, knowing that she could suddenly be the tallest person in a crowd.

  The other women in the shelters often had bruises and broken bones, and most of all, terrified expressions. And their mother had been able to look terrified, as well. But as far as Jen knew, there’d never been any real reason for terror.

  Jen had begun to put two and two together around the age of seven, the first time she’d heard her mother say to her father, over the phone, “I’d like to go to Hawaii, too. Why don’t you just take me along?” Eventually she’d realized that her mother was still in love with her father.

  Now she understood that her mother’s reaction to not being loved by her husband had been to deprive him of his daughters. She was determined to punish him for rejecting her.