Because of Our Child

by Margot Early

  He said, “In these situations, no one can ever tell how someone else feels. In any situation,” he corrected himself.

  “Anyhow, why do you want my mom to help you investigate that fire? I mean, she’s doing this fire thing for Channel 4, but it’s not like she’s a scientist or anything.”

  “That’s all right. I want her to help for two reasons. For one, that is her area of expertise—being in front of a camera. Interviewing people. The other reason is that she was there. She remembers. She remembers what happened, who else was there, the details.”

  “What are you going to do when you find out what happened?” Elena asked.

  He met her eyes. “I’m not sure. If some people still have jobs they shouldn’t have…” he began.

  “You want to blame someone,” she interrupted.

  “I want to make sure that people who made mistakes then don’t make the same mistakes again.”

  “What if no one made mistakes?”

  Someone had definitely made mistakes. According to the official investigation report, firefighters, a squad boss. But not a superintendent of hotshots.

  Not Richard Grass.

  Why do you hate so much after all this time, Max?

  Was it injustice that moved him? Was it that Richard had gotten away with near-murder?

  He had loved Richard. They all had. Max had trusted Richard’s expertise.

  Now he thought of Richard as a windbag, someone who’d been happy to dazzle a bunch of kids with his ersatz Oriental wisdom. His aikido and t’ai chi and wing chun kung fu. His pseudo-Tao way of “appreciating” fire.

  Then Salma had been killed, and Richard had dodged the responsibility and the accountability.

  Like a snake, Max thought.

  Yes, he’d like to hang Salma’s death on Richard, where it belonged.

  “My grandma says that people who set out to get someone back usually end up hurting themselves.”

  Words of wisdom from the woman who had tried to deprive Jen of a relationship with her father.

  “I think anyone who does something wrong would like other people to live by that rule,” Max answered. “I mean, they’d like us to forget they did anything wrong and not concern ourselves with seeing justice done.”

  Elena’s eyes narrowed as she studied him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “No, you’re thinking something.”

  “Well—I don’t go to Sunday school or anything. That’s not the kind of family we have. We’re sort of more into, I don’t know, the power of women than Jesus.”

  He listened, and didn’t bother to tell her that his impression was that Jesus had liked women just fine. He wasn’t religious and he didn’t care enough about the subject to argue with anyone.

  “But don’t a lot of religions,” she asked, “say that people aren’t supposed to concern themselves with dishing out judgment?”

  “Look at it this way,” he told her. “Say your mom, or… No, say someone else you care about gets murdered. Wouldn’t you want to see that person’s murderer go to jail?”

  “It wouldn’t bring the person back to life.”

  “But say that putting the person in jail kept him from killing anyone else.”

  “I can see that,” she said. “But nobody got murdered in the fire, did they? Wasn’t it just an accident?”

  “When you’re supposed to be doing a job and you make a mistake and people get hurt—” thinking of Jackson, he winced slightly “—it’s never just an accident.” He watched her face. Here he’d known his daughter half an hour, at most, and he was trying to influence her thinking on moral issues. What if he taught her the wrong thing?

  Had his parents ever wondered if what they taught him was wrong?

  His father hadn’t, that was for certain. Norman Rickman knew what was right and suffered no other opinions.

  Being a physician, for example, was right.

  For a person intelligent enough to become a physician, becoming something less—a smoke jumper, for instance—was wrong, a squandering of divine gifts.

  But I like fighting fires, Max had told him.

  It’s doubtful if a lot of those fires should even be fought, his father had replied.

  Sometimes we let them burn.

  Well, thank God for moments of sanity.

  And so on.

  Max seldom thought of these exchanges any more. But finding out that he himself was a father changed that. Now he examined one bygone argument with his father after another.

  “Where did you grow up?” Elena asked.

  “A place called Carpinteria in California. My father still lives there.” He wouldn’t have attended graduate school so close to home except that the University of California at Santa Barbara had offered the program he’d wanted. And back then he’d valued his father and his sisters especially highly. His mother hadn’t been dead all that long. Family mattered.

  They still mattered.

  And if he returned to Makal Canyon with Jen, he couldn’t escape seeing them. Because Makal Canyon was in the mountains above Carpinteria.

  In any event, whether in person or by long distance, he would have to tell his father that he was a grandfather once again.

  He would have to tell his father how, and how it happened that he hadn’t known.

  Max dreaded it—for himself, for Jen and for Elena.

  “Would you like to come out to California with us?” he asked Elena. “And meet your cousins?”

  “I guess.”

  He’d heard more enthusiasm from smoke jumpers preparing for a long pack out after a fire.

  He eyed her curiously.

  “What’s out there? Am I going to be hiking around with you and my mom, trying to find out about the fire?”

  “We’ll probably manage to have some fun, too. Have you ever been to the ocean?”

  “Yes.” A touch of resentment in the answer. Did you think I had no life before you decided to be part of it?

  “I could teach you to surf.”

  “I might get injured,” she pointed out. “It wouldn’t be worth it.”

  “You’ve never surfed. So how would you know?”

  “I love to dance. That’s all I need to know.”

  Someone, he thought, had done a good job on her. No risk, no risking her future, which she was so certain would involve dancing professionally.

  You’re twelve years old! he wanted to say. Live a little.

  But what right did he have to say anything of the kind, to try to shape who she was at all?

  His jaw tightened.

  He hadn’t wanted this. But now he was in. And he had as much right to take part in Elena Delazzeri’s life as he would have if her mother had told him she was pregnant thirteen years before.

  He was going to exercise that right—though not in order to live up to the standards of Norman Rickman.

  But simply because now he had met his daughter.

  And now, he didn’t want to walk away, and he knew he never would.

  “I HAVEN’T EVEN SAID I’ll take part in that project!” Jen exclaimed angrily, when Elena told her what she and Max had discussed. “How dare he invite you along, when he doesn’t even know if I’m going to take part?”

  Jen was tired and edgy. Still in some pain from her burns, bored from wandering in and out of shops while Max and Elena had their first conversation, annoyed at having been accused by her daughter of first one thing and then another. Now, this.

  “You just don’t want me to be around him,” Elena said.

  “Nonsense. I arranged this meeting, didn’t I?”

  “But you didn’t think I’d like him, did you?”

  How unfair. “I thought you probably would like him.”

  “But you thought I’d just want our life to go on the way it has been, as if I hadn’t met him.”

  “Elena, why are you doing this?” Jen demanded through gritted teeth as she drove her Subaru station wagon back to Denv
er. “You’re making all kinds of suppositions on a subject you know almost nothing about. You wanted to meet your father and I was able to make it happen.”

  “You could have made it happen before I was born, instead of waiting till I was twelve. What were you afraid of? He wasn’t going to hold anything against me. Just against you.”

  “I don’t deserve this.”

  “I want to go to Makal Canyon,” said Elena. “And I want to go to Carpinteria and meet my cousins. I have a whole bunch of relatives you never even would have told me about.”

  “Elena, the meeting today did not happen by accident. And since Max is not psychic, it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t taken steps to bring the two of you together.”

  “You just hate men,” Elena said. “Like Grandma and Teresa.”

  “I do not hate men. In fact, I like them.” Jen tried to think of what she’d done to explain her daughter’s constant attacks for the past twenty-four hours or so. “I’m sorry,” she said, “that you have not had the benefit of knowing your father your whole life. I’m glad you’ve met him now.”

  “‘Have met him now’?” said Elena. “You say that like that’s the end of it, like I’m never going to see him again.”

  “He works long hours. It may not be convenient for—”

  “You don’t want me to have a relationship with him, do you? Because he doesn’t want to be with you. Just like Grandma. You’re exactly the same.”

  “I am not the same as your grandmother.”

  “Could have fooled me.”

  Jen wondered if a more irritating twelve-year-old had ever walked the earth. “For twelve years,” she said tightly, “I have supported you, done my very best by you, given you almost everything you’ve wanted. I’ve driven you to dance classes, enrolled you in workshops and camp…”

  “So that buys you off? I thought my father must be, like, sleazy or something,” Elena said, “since you didn’t want me to meet him. I thought there was something wrong with him.”

  “But I told you the truth.”

  “I didn’t think anything that lame could possibly be true!”

  Jen heard the last words she herself had spoken. The truth.

  Had she really told Elena the truth?

  Not the whole truth, because the whole truth included Max and Jen making love just hours after his fiancée had died of burns. Jen understood very well that death often had that effect on people. But Elena was not an adult and shouldn’t be expected to understand that.

  Just how did Max plan to pull off the Makal Canyon documentary with Elena on the scene—without Elena learning that Max had been engaged to the only person who’d died in the fire?

  Of course, Jen had already revealed that he’d loved Salma.

  But being engaged was different, and it would be seen differently by a twelve-year-old.

  Furthermore, there was no making Elena see that it wasn’t that unnatural for her mother and Max to have made love not long after his fiancée’s death.

  Jen could hardly wait until she had a chance to talk privately with Max and point these things out to him. In any event, she’d had just about enough sass from her daughter.

  “Let’s get something straight, all right?”

  “Yes,” snapped Elena. They were driving into Grand Junction, and Elena was already searching the radio for music, emphasizing that nothing her mother had to say was of importance.

  Jen punched off the radio. “Whatever you think, I am not carrying a torch for someone I haven’t seen for thirteen years. None of my decisions concerning you—” lately, she silently added “—have come about because I still like your father or want him to like me. When you’re twelve, maybe it seems possible that something like that can happen.

  “But it doesn’t happen, all right? I got over him so long ago that I was a completely different person then. People don’t keep on being attracted to the same people they liked in college.”

  “That’s not true! People get married in college and stay together!”

  She was right, of course. “Fine. But that’s not the case here. I got over him and made my own life.”

  Elena said, “What you have is a life?”

  Jen snapped the radio back on.

  “Fine,” her daughter added, as if she hadn’t already had the last word. “Don’t talk about it.”

  “Fine,” Jen answered. “I won’t.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHANNEL 4 CAMERAMAN Bob Wright had been an audio-visual geek in high school and had then gone on to earn a master’s of fine arts in audio-visual geekdom. This is what he’d told Jen when he’d met her. He had the kind of light hair she thought of as “fish” blond, freckles and blue eyes.

  When she told him she’d handed in her resignation at Channel 4, he simply said, “Me, too. So you’re going to Makal Canyon with us, then?”

  She had not agreed to go to Makal Canyon and was actually considering a job offer from an Albuquerque station. Elena had greeted this news with the observation that her mother was “only doing this so I’ll be farther from my dad. It’s like a demotion, Mom.”

  Not a demotion. A change. A smart change.

  “No,” she told Bob. “I don’t think I am.”

  “Well, I am.”

  “This is a good job for you,” she said. “Why are you walking away from it?”

  He didn’t answer, and she knew why no answer came. He blamed himself for the burns that John Jackson had sustained. He felt he’d been too protective of the camera.

  He now made daily excursions to the burn center at the Denver hospital to which the smoke jumper had been transferred. He and Jackson had become friends, in a way. Max had been to see him, too.

  In three cell phone conversations with Max since his meeting with Elena in Ouray, Jen had refused to commit to the documentary. Her objection that she couldn’t afford to stay away from work that long was flimsy, and she knew it. She had some money from her father’s death, set aside for a time when she needed it. And her mother had enough money to buy Jen out of Jen’s share in the house where they lived—except that the house had appreciated so much since they’d bought it. Anyway, the whole thing was complicated. But Max had also offered her money for working on the film.

  No, she just couldn’t get excited about going back to Makal Canyon with Max Rickman, with or without Elena. Jen kept praying that overtime—smoke jumper’s paradise—would keep Max too busy to see his daughter again.

  It hadn’t kept him too busy to call Elena, however, and now, according to her, they talked every day that he wasn’t on a fire.

  Jen’s mother had already begun to deliver dark hints and warnings. He could be a gold digger for all you know. Don’t forfeit any of your parental rights. He should be made to pay child support.

  The phrase that rang in Jen’s ears, an echo of what she still believed lay behind her mother’s years of determination to keep Jen’s father from seeing Jen and Teresa was, “He should be made to pay…”

  What bothered Jen most was that sentiments very like that sometimes suggested themselves to her in regard to Max Rickman.

  Jen couldn’t help but notice that Max’s appearance in their lives seemed to have been a catalyst, turning her daughter into a tyrant. Now, every evening Jen was subjected to some form or another of condemnation from her daughter. Jen couldn’t see what Elena hoped to attain. Inflicting guilt? Her nastiness actually chipped away the guilt that Jen felt.

  Embarrassment? Yes, in retrospect, she was embarrassed that she had not told Max she was pregnant—or told him when their child was born.

  And every evening, Elena wanted to know if they would be going to California with Max.

  Jen had asked Elena not to mention Makal Canyon in front of Teresa, saying that it could send her aunt into a downward spiral.

  So instead Elena brought it up every time she and Jen were alone.

  WHEN HE BROUGHT UP Makal Canyon, Bob said, “Jen, it would be fun to work together.”

>   As it always had been. They’d become good friends working together covering the Rocky Mountains news.

  As the two of them waited for the elevator to take them down to the station’s parking garage, Jen told him, “I always like working with you, but trust me, Max’s film is a project with no meaningful future.”

  “It’s for fire education,” Bob said. “After what happened out at Silver Jack, I think there can’t be too much of that.”

  Yes, and I’ve been on a fire where someone died, someone I knew, a housemate, my sister’s best friend, almost like another sister to me… And Max’s fiancée, carrying his child.

  “Please think about it Jen. He’ll want to interview you even if you’re not part of the project, because you were at the fire.”

  Bob and Max had clearly done some talking about the film. Why was Bob getting sucked into Max’s stupid quest for revenge?

  Jen studied Bob’s face. He was shaky again today. The fire had changed him. Maybe he needed to help on the Makal Canyon project as some sort of penance.

  “I’ll think about it,” she told him as the elevator doors slid open.

  “I SUGGESTED a different location for Helispot Two,” Max repeated to the fire investigator, whom he was getting to know better than he had wanted to. Together they’d spent hours looking at aerial photographs, Max’s photos and those taken by others at the fire, topographical maps and the log of the Silver Jack fire. Max and the superintendent had been interviewed together and separately about the fateful selection of the helispot. Max, Tock, the helicopter pilot and others had been questioned about the arrival of the news crew of two. But even now Max felt as if he was deflecting responsibility for the choice of the second helicopter base to the hotshot supervisor, rather than accepting his own part of it.

  Of course, he’d said that he had, in the end, agreed. He’d said that he now heartily wished he’d insisted on a different location.

  But a helicopter had brought the hotshots to Silver Jack, to the ridge. The smoke jumpers had arrived by jump plane. Max told himself that the hotshot superintendent’s stake in the choice had been greater; that’s why he, Max, had yielded.