Because of Our Child

by Margot Early

  What she wanted to know was the magnitude of any discrepancy between the official line and what had actually happened in the field.

  “Tell me about your present responsibilities.” Jen kept her tone deliberately friendly, nonconfrontational. “I think the viewers will be very interested in what you have to say about the fires of this summer.”

  “Fortunately, it’s been a quiet season in this district. Not like you’re having in Colorado.”

  The initial interview, an hour long, ended up veering, inevitably, into Richard’s martial arts experience.

  It was Max, who’d remained quiet and watchful through most of the meeting, who finally said, “Jen’s a Thai boxer.”

  Richard blinked. “Now, that’s a brutal sport for a man or a woman. Very effective.”

  “I don’t know what it is, really,” Max admitted.

  “Boxers. With gloves, but they also kick, use elbow strikes, use basically everything at their command except the intentional awareness of yin and yang.”

  Jen couldn’t smother a smile at Richard’s description, particularly the absence of that “awareness” which made aikido so effective. He was wrong about its absence in Muay Thai, anyhow. So many students of fighting arts believed their art superior to all others. She didn’t feel this way.

  The interview concluded with Richard taking their phone numbers, as well as directions to the place that was becoming known as “the fire house.” He wanted to see Teresa again. “Poor kid,” he said. “I worried about her. We were all over there together.” On the east flank. “What’s she up to?”

  “Not what she planned on before the fire.” Jen vowed to do her best to let Teresa explain herself. Or not. “Different things,” she added, deliberately vague.

  MAX SEEMED SUBDUED after the meeting. Maybe his wrath against Richard had diminished slightly. As they reached the motorcycle, Jen said, “What do you think?”

  “About him?”

  “Of course.”

  “A bureaucrat. Whatever he says, he’s going to protect himself and the Bureau of Land Management. What do you think? About him?”

  “Similar,” she said.

  Max handed her a helmet.

  Climbing on the seat behind Max, Jen asked, “Home?”

  “Actually, I thought we’d play for a couple of hours. Unless you’re anxious to get back.”

  “There’s work to do,” she pointed out.

  “It’s your birthday.” He turned the key in the ignition, then twisted around to see her face behind its shield, his own in similar shadow. “Okay?”

  She felt her smile take over. She thought fleetingly of Elena and how since coming to California she herself had been less consumed by her daughter’s life, more in tune with her own. “Okay.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  HE TOOK HER to a Montecito shop that sold nothing but beautiful motorcycle leathers. There, he talked her into black leather chaps, a sexy and unnecessary but also unusually classy black leather halter-bustier, boots and a leather jacket, which the resident artist airbrushed with a wood hare, Jen’s Chinese astrological sign. She left wearing all her new garments except the jacket—because it was warm out—and carrying everything else in an upscale shopping bag.

  Out on the street, Max gently touched her bare upper arm to guide her across the drive toward the exquisite Hotel Montecito.

  “What do we need over there?” she asked.

  “Lunch. And something else.” He stopped at a flower stand on the wide lawn and bought her a bouquet of lavender-colored roses.

  “What do lavender roses mean?” she asked him.

  “I don’t know what the official line is.”

  “The unofficial, then?”

  “That purple outfit you were wearing the day I met Elena. I like you in purple. Maybe it’s passion.”

  They ate seafood for lunch, rode the motorcycle out onto the pier, then briefly went to the zoo. It was five when Max finally asked if she was ready to go home.

  “How are you going to explain where we were and why we weren’t working?”

  “Oh, it will be obvious to everyone that I was working.”

  “On me,” Jen said.

  “Something like that.”

  THAT NIGHT, as Jen was getting ready for bed, there came a knock at her door. Jen went to open it and found her sister there, holding a small wrapped package.

  “Happy birthday,” said Teresa, stepping into the room.

  Jen’s new leather clothing lay over a chair near the foot of her bed.

  “Thank you.” Jen took the package, which had no card.

  “So Max has just forgiven you,” Teresa said, sounding almost disappointed by her sister’s good fortune.

  “And I him,” said Jen, no longer certain that she wanted the package in her hands—or anything to do with Teresa’s mood, with whatever was going on with her. She decided on a strategy of friendliness. Teresa, usually the gentlest of creatures, could be testy when she’d decided that Jen had done something that she, Teresa, would never do. “Richard’s looking forward to seeing you.”

  “He was good to me,” Teresa said. “I always liked him. Max is prejudiced against him, and he’s trying to buy your allegiance.” She gazed pointedly at the leather clothing draped over the chair.

  Jen tried to deflect the insult. To not feel it as an insult. Max had bought her clothes because it was her birthday, because she was the mother of his child, because he liked her. “Should I have held out,” she asked, “for candy or books?” Because he’d given her flowers.

  “Well, he’ll expect something,” Teresa said. “But I doubt it’s anything as mundane as sex.”

  Jen sat down on her bed, glanced at the package she held, then at her sister. “Is it safe to open this?”

  Teresa said, “Of course. I couldn’t afford anything like what Max gave you.” She frowned at the lavender roses in a vase on Jen’s countertop.

  “Teresa, what’s wrong?” Jen tried again.

  “Absolutely nothing.”

  Sure.

  “I’m sorry I was gone all day.” Why, when Teresa behaved this way, did she respond by apologizing, even though she’d done nothing wrong?

  “I wouldn’t have come,” Teresa said, “if I thought we were just here to promote your relationship with Max.”

  What an interesting remark. “That’s not why we’re here. And when we came… Look, he’s Elena’s father.” Her protest trickled away, lame, sinking. “Did something happen today while we were gone?” she finally asked. “You weren’t like this in the morning.”

  “Nothing happened.”

  “What did you do today?”

  “I went for a hike.”

  “To the ridge?” Jen asked, already knowing the answer. Her sister had gone to the ridge where she and Salma and the others in their party had been trapped and overrun by flames.

  “Of course. That’s why I came here. To revisit that place. To remember, so that I can move on.”

  Jen was out of her depth. She was no counselor. Teresa was a psychiatric patient; she had a psychiatrist who was also her psychotherapist. “Have you called Dr. Malloy on your cell phone?”

  “It’s not up to you to suggest when I need to talk to my psychiatrist. My relationship with Dr. Malloy is private, none of your business.”

  Jen knew this to be true. However, she also knew that Teresa had been aggressive toward her, mean and challenging. Which made whatever was going on her business. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here,” she said, “to visit the place with you. If you feel like going back tomorrow, I’ll be glad to come with you.”

  Teresa shrugged, and the accusatory storm seemed to have died in her. “Whatever,” she said, almost indifferently, but the act didn’t quite fool Jen.

  Jen decided that attentiveness was the best gift she could give her sister at this moment. “Did it look the same?”

  “No. I only knew it was the same place because of a boulder. There was this boulder that looked like a rooste
r, and it was still there, and it still looked that way. It looks over the place where we deployed shelters.”

  Jen wished she could give back to her sister everything Teresa had lost in the fire. But she had no power to undo the past.

  She untied the ribbon on the package Teresa had given her.

  “I got them in Denver,” Teresa said as Jen lifted the lid on the small box. “I thought they’d match what you usually wear.”

  Earrings. The style was Art Deco, and they were purple, copper and black. “Thank you. They’re really nice.”

  “Do you like them?”

  “Yes. I’m going to try them on right now.” Jen fitted the hoops through her ears and stood up to check the effect in the mirror.

  Teresa said, “You look beautiful. You’ve always been the pretty one.”

  “That’s not true,” Jen said—and yet she knew that it was true, lately. Teresa’s problems had affected her health and her looks. Once or twice, Jen had tried to interest her sister in going to the martial arts center. She’d been willing to take any class with Teresa, to study t’ai chi chuan or ju-jitsu or dance or anything that suited Teresa. But Teresa had always refused.

  “Shall we go up to the ridge together tomorrow?” Jen asked. “Just the two of us? Gosh, I’m crazy about these earrings. They’re gorgeous.”

  “I’m glad you like them. Sure, we can go tomorrow.”

  Jen hesitated. “Do you remember that day?”

  “Yes. Not every detail, but I remember. Bob was talking about Jackson today, about hearing him scream.”

  Jen wondered if this was part of what had upset her sister. I shouldn’t have encouraged her to come. She’d believed that bringing Teresa back to Makal Canyon would help free her sister from the past. But that wasn’t what was happening.

  I was a fool.

  Or, more to the point, she’d been too concerned about what might happen between herself and Max and Elena to think effectively about Teresa’s concerns. As of tomorrow, that needed to change.

  Teresa suddenly grinned. “The new leathers look great on you. I would have accepted them, too, Jen. I was just in a snit.”

  “Thanks for saying that,” Jen answered, “but I’m not sure you would have. You’ve always been more scrupulous than me.”

  “I think,” Teresa said, “I’m just less sure than you of my own determination to do the right thing.”

  THE RIGHT THING. Jen’s ideas about “the right thing” were shaped by Muay Thai and other fighting arts. Not abusing power. Protecting the weak. Integrity.

  She wasn’t sure where exposing wrongs that had occurred more than a decade earlier fit in. Also, with so much time passed and human memory inherently fallible, how was she to determine right from wrong?

  She reminded herself that the mandate of the journalist wasn’t necessarily to provide answers, so much as it was to ask the important questions. She could ask those questions without an agenda as to what the answers should be. Indeed, that was the only way to get at the truth.

  Max’s plan, going in with preconceived notions about what had happened thirteen years before, wouldn’t necessarily lead them to the truth. Well, it might—but it could also lead them astray.

  She and Teresa set out alone on their hike to the ridge where Salma had been burned. Max had asked where they were going, and Jen had replied, To have girl time. If Max accompanied them, it might well renew her sister’s bad feelings of the night before.

  The ridge was more than a mile from the Canyon Wind Estates. The summer morning was warm, though fog hung over the distant coast. The interior had grown uncomfortably hot by ten o’clock, making it too easy to remember the scorching heat of the day of the blowup.

  “Is this hard for you?” Jen asked her sister. “To be back here?”

  “No. One good thing is happening. I suppose that I’ve had survivor’s guilt about Salma’s dying, but being back here I remember things more clearly. Her fire shelter gusted up, you know. She’d deployed it at a bit of an angle.”

  That was important to know; it could influence how the fire was remembered and how Salma’s part was remembered as well. Nothing about Salma deploying her shelter in a vulnerable position or in the wrong direction had been included in the report of the fire investigation. And such a thing could matter. Salma should have deployed the shelter so that her feet would be toward the blaze. If she hadn’t, that could have helped to account for the severity of her burns.

  “Of course we shouldn’t have been there at all,” Teresa added, “but that wasn’t my fault, either.”

  “Whose was it?”

  “Oh, Richard was the one who made the decision, along with some local BLM guys. I mean, Richard was responsible for us hotshots. We were his crew and his responsibility. I’m with Max on that.”

  “You know,” Jen said, “since the South Canyon fire, hotshot crews and other firefighters have been saying no to building line down slope. They’re taking responsibility for their own safety.”

  “That’s where my guilt comes from, I suppose,” admitted Teresa. “I think we should have said no. I should have. I’m an assertive person. I speak up when I think something’s wrong. But that day I didn’t. And I still don’t know why.”

  “We were pretty young.”

  “You were. But I’d seen a thing or two, and I was getting ready to go to medical school. I think the fire showed me what a bad idea that would have been, for me to become a physician.”

  “Why?” Jen exclaimed. “That’s nonsense.”

  “No, it’s not. I knew we shouldn’t have been building fire line downhill, but I listened to Richard’s reasoning and went along with it. If you’re a physician, you must never do that.”

  Jen felt keenly what a loss it had been to the medical profession that her sister, so wise and truly determined to speak the truth, had been deflected from the path. She tried to work out the best way to share her feelings with Teresa but she couldn’t find the words. After all, it was too late for Teresa to turn back to that course, wasn’t it?

  But it wasn’t too late for her sister to lead a productive, fulfilling life.

  “Do you ever think,” Jen asked tentatively, “of going back to school?”

  “I’ve been going back to school for thirteen years,” Teresa said tiredly. And it was true. “If I were to get a graduate degree now, it would be in sociology.”

  “To do social work?”

  “Yes. To help the mentally ill as an advocate. But who’s going to take me seriously, when I’m one of the multitude?”

  Jen understood. Her sister’s plight saddened her. “Do you think you became sick…” She hesitated over the word, hesitated after uttering it, checking to see how it was received. “Because of the fire?” she concluded at last.

  “Oh, only in part.” Teresa sounded even more weary. “Here. Here’s the boulder.”

  It did, in fact, resemble a rooster. Jen had never been to this place, either before or after the fire.

  “Where did you deploy your shelters?” She’d seen photographs and mechanical drawings—part of the fire investigation’s official report, and so she thought she could find the place. But she wanted to see what Teresa remembered, before people like Richard Grass and Max came along to try to make her remember things differently.

  Max had been to this place. He’d hiked here as soon as it was safe for his group to leave their shelters.

  Jen still wondered what he’d felt upon learning that while he’d been sheltering Jen Delazzeri, his fiancée had been burned so badly that she would die within twenty-four hours.

  Teresa showed Jen where the shelters had been deployed, frowning as she tried to remember where each of her fellow hotshots had been. She could only remember three, including Salma.

  They had all been overwhelmed by the extent of Salma’s injuries.

  “She wasn’t closer to the blaze than anyone else,” Jen pointed out. “So what you said, that her shelter came partway off her, must be the reason she wa
s so badly burned.” Though the day had now grown hot, she shivered. The same could have happened to her at the helicopter landing spot during the Silver Jack Ridge fire.

  Fire had come inside her shelter.

  But she’d been spared, unlike Salma.

  Figures were walking toward them from the direction of Canyon Wind Estates. Jen recognized Max and Bob by the way each of them moved. After a moment, she realized that the third must be Richard Grass.

  She wasn’t made up to work, but Bob carried a camera. So maybe the viewer would simply hear her voice asking questions or not hear her at all for this segment. Richard Grass must be the intended subject today. He wore his Bureau of Land Management uniform.

  Yes, the camera would be on him, and Jen didn’t understand why she felt apprehension on his behalf.

  “WE—DICK HENRY AND George Riley and I—discussed how best to fight the fire. We’d done an aerial observation together, and during the flight I pointed out that I never like to build fire line downhill.”

  “Pointed out?” said Max now, ironically. He, Jen, Bob, Teresa and Pete, the computer animation tech, were reviewing the footage of Richard Grass, who had since gone home.

  “Don’t be so judgmental,” Teresa said.

  “We’re trying to make some judgments here,” Max told her, rather sharply.

  Jen eyed him, ready to warn him off if he made another similar outburst. But Teresa did not need her sister to fight for her. Teresa said, “Yes, but I don’t think his word choice is really what you’re trying to judge. You want to know who made the decision to build fire line downhill. He said Dick and George did.”

  “And George, conveniently, is dead.” He’d had a fatal heart attack three years before.

  They hadn’t yet managed to contact Dick Henry, though they had tracked him down to his present home in upstate New York. But he was on vacation in New Zealand until mid-August. A spanner in the works.

  The tape ran on a small monitor around which the five of them were now grouped. “I told them I didn’t like it,” Richard continued, “but George was IC, incident commander, and he made the call. He said there wasn’t a good way to fight the blaze, but that this was the most efficient, given the conditions. I didn’t disagree. Now, I know that I should have. Fortunately, the world of firefighting has been more forgiving of my error than I’ve been of myself.”