Because of Our Child

by Margot Early

  “I can’t stand the guy,” Max said. “‘Fortunately’? What exactly is that supposed to mean?”

  “That he still has a job,” Teresa said testily. “I’m going to bed.” She stood up from the rocker behind Bob’s chair. From there she’d remained slightly apart from the group, a separate entity with separate ideas.

  Jen said, “Teresa, would you like to be interviewed outside tomorrow? We could go back to the rooster boulder. I think it might be good to have you talking about how you remember that landmark.”

  “That sounds fine.” Teresa’s voice, usually a bit sleepy and imprecise, was now firm.

  As she left the room, Max stood up to follow her. Jen wondered what he intended to do or say, but decided that it was none of her business—and that Teresa could take care of herself.

  “TERESA?”

  Jen’s sister glanced back down the stairs at Max. “What?”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be…aggressive.”

  “Just remember,” Teresa said, “that you weren’t there. Not where we were. I know you want this documentary to reach certain conclusions, but you can’t expect us all to do what you want just because you put this thing together.”

  Max was insulted. Did Jen think this was what he was doing, or was it only Teresa? “I want everyone to tell the truth,” he said. “I just believe that Richard Grass isn’t being truthful.”

  “If he’s not,” Teresa said, “and, by the way, I’m not saying for a minute that’s the case, then it will come out. Maybe you should trust the process. Don’t you think the documentary itself will reveal the truth, whatever that truth is?”

  Max didn’t answer. He stood barefoot on the tile floor, thinking about what Teresa had asked him. Did he think the documentary would reveal the truth? Yes. Unquestionably.

  So why did he feel compelled to manipulate things? Unquestionably, he did feel that way. But even that question seemed one he couldn’t ask without knowing the answer in advance. So he supplied his programmed answer. Richard Grass was a smart, charismatic man who could slant viewer response as he wanted, despite the best intentions of the filmmakers to discover the truth.

  “Or is it,” Teresa said, speaking from the shadows like the voice of his conscience, “that you don’t really want to know the truth?”

  “I want to know,” he answered tersely.

  From above, she said, “Good night then, Max. You’ll hear part of it tomorrow.”

  Why should those words fill him with apprehension? Teresa would be before the camera. What truth did she know that might injure him?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  JEN’S CELL PHONE WOKE HER the following morning. It was Elena. “Have you forgotten I exist?” her daughter asked.

  “No, I haven’t. I tried to call you last night.”

  “When you knew I’d be at rehearsal.”

  “False,” said Jen. “I thought yesterday was a Tuesday. I was wrong.”

  “Well, guess what?”

  “What?”

  “About my trip out to see you on Friday.”

  “You can’t come,” Jen guessed.

  “Grandma’s coming, too. She bought a ticket. She says you’re allowing Max too much power in my life.”

  This was outrageous. Jen lay in helpless silence, aware of others moving about in the hall. Probably Teresa waking up; Teresa, who had agreed to go before the camera today and talk about Makal Canyon.

  “Is she there?” Jen asked. “You’re calling from home. Is she there?”

  “She’s at yoga.”

  Yoga class. “She’s already bought a ticket?” Jen said it in the hope that she’d somehow misheard her daughter.

  “Alas. I think she’s coming to teach you how to raise children without men. You’ve already learned that lesson.”

  “Your dad and I are friends,” Jen told her daughter, glancing toward the motorcycle leathers on her chair, remembering Max’s hand on her bare back as they’d crossed the street together, with her in that black leather halter top—a garment that would certainly raise Elena’s eyebrows. Most of all she remembered kissing him, and that there’d been no repetition of the experience the night before. “We’ve been riding around on his motorcycle together. We get along fine. I’m not committed to your grandmother’s ideals, if raising children without male input is one of her ideals—which I’m not conceding, not for a moment.”

  “So, are you, like, dating my dad?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “You’re not sleeping with him, are you?” Elena demanded.

  Jen hesitated. She certainly was not sleeping with Max. But it had never occurred to her that Elena might have any objections to that scenario.

  “You are?” Elena sounded both disgusted and horrified.

  “No. No, I’m not. I was just wondering why it would be such a big deal if I was.”

  “It’s just that everything in the world,” Elena said, “isn’t about you. Whatever happens, you always make it be about you.”

  “That’s unfair and untrue.”

  “I finally meet my father, who you spent my whole life conspiring for me not to meet, and right away you’re taking him over.”

  “Taking him over?”

  “You just don’t get it, do you?” Elena exclaimed. “Why should I even bother coming out? You just want him for yourself, and Grandma doesn’t want me to see him at all.”

  Jen reminded herself that this was the nature of twelve-year-old Elena. A short while ago, she’d blamed this kind of irrationality on Max’s appearance in their lives. Now she accepted that Elena could behave like a graduate student one moment and a toddler the next, and sometimes a dual-headed version of both, screaming illogical conclusions in stereo.

  “Your relationship with your father,” Jen said, “is very important to me. I want you to know him. I want you to be close to him.”

  “Right,” said Elena, as though she’d just heard the world’s least convincing lie. “Like I buy that.”

  “You are coming out,” Jen said. “You’ve accepted the gift of a ticket from your father, and you’re coming. If Grandma comes, too, we’ll all make her feel welcome.” Robin might be determined to act like a jerk, but Jen would treat her mother with honor and decency.

  Even if it killed her.

  “Try bossing me from there,” Elena snapped.

  “I certainly will try.”

  IN DENVER, Elena threw herself down on her bed. She had wanted to go to California. She’d wanted a special time with her dad, meeting her cousins and her aunts and her grandfather. But now her mother had what she wanted instead. Attention from Max.

  Just like Elena’s grandmother. Robin had to be the center of attention, and Elena’s mom was just the same. He’s my dad, she thought again, angrily. Why did everyone else in her life feel that they had to come first?

  JEN HAD A HARD TIME keeping her mind on her sister’s time in front of the camera. Today, her own role was that of narrator, but she could barely focus on that.

  She couldn’t forget Elena’s baffling behavior on the phone that morning. First, Elena was clearly “telling on” Robin, making sure Jen knew that her mother planned to interfere in Jen’s life. Then, what was this stuff about Max, her taking over Max, or whatever it was Elena had said?

  I wouldn’t “take over” her father.

  And to think that just days before Elena had accused her of trying to prevent Elena from having any kind of relationship with Max. Now, this. But wasn’t it really part of the same thing? Wasn’t Elena worried about her mother spending time with Max because she believed that Jen would take up time that Max would have otherwise spent with Elena?

  Teresa stood before the rooster-shaped boulder. Her poise was natural. Jen, who lived in front of the camera, hadn’t anticipated that Teresa could be as comfortable in front of it as she herself was. Don’t let Mom’s coming here change Teresa’s experience. Because Jen sensed that being here had been good for Teresa so far.

  “When
I hiked out here, returning for the first time since the fire, I saw this boulder. I remembered it. We deployed shelters at this spot, and because of Salma’s injuries we stayed here for a bit when we were finally able to leave our shelters. It made an impression.”

  Teresa’s instructions had been to talk about what had happened that day. Jen was to prompt her, to feed questions that would serve as a springboard for further recollections. Back at the fire house, of course, they would edit the footage.

  Max sat on a boulder several feet away from Bob’s camera and from Teresa and Jen.

  “The fire blew up before we deployed the shelters. I think some of us sensed what was going to happen. Maybe if we’d deployed shelters sooner, we would have been safer…”

  Jen thought of the photos painstakingly collected of the other survivors from the east flank. With computer animation, Pete would create images to show precisely where each shelter had been deployed. He would also, she knew, cover any discussion of the placement of Salma’s shelter.

  But it’s my job to prompt Teresa to speak this truth, to say where the shelters lay.

  Jen waited to see where Teresa’s discussion would take her.

  Max is going to want me to emphasize that they were building fire line downhill with flames below. And, yes, firefighters now refuse this assignment when it is given.

  “When the fire blew up,” Teresa said, “we were down here.” She led the way down the slope, and Jen noticed, not for the first time, how steep that slope was. Though she now lived at high altitude, Jen could appreciate how steep the slope would have seemed to the Santa Inez Hotshots on the day of the blowup.

  They all followed Teresa, and Max fell into step beside Jen. “I know,” he said, “that she’s going to talk about the position of Salma’s shelter. There was nothing about that in the report of the fire investigation.”

  “The shelter,” Jen hissed at him, “blew over before fire investigators could photograph it. The investigation was sloppy and incomplete.”

  She glanced up in time to see Max swallow, his features unreadable.

  She’d already discussed with Pete and Bob what needed to be done. They must request the help of a fire investigator from Missoula, Montana, to attempt a reconstruction, using science, to show what would have happened to a shelter placed as Salma’s was on that day. Max had agreed it had to be done.

  They worked for three hours on the slope that morning, filming Teresa and listening to her painful recollections. “When we were given the all clear to leave our shelters, I think we were terrified. I was especially. I knew, from the sound of her voice once we were sheltered up, that Salma had deployed her shelter at an angle to mine, instead of parallel. Neither of us were rookies, and I remember calling to her to make sure her feet were downhill, toward the blaze.”

  “Shit,” whispered Max, behind Jen.

  She glanced at him and was astonished to find him glaring at her sister. Teresa, fortunately, did not notice.

  Jen couldn’t believe Max’s response. Didn’t he want the truth? It seemed to her that she was hearing it.

  “We were all scared, I think,” Teresa said, “because Salma had been screaming.”

  Behind Jen, Max crouched down in a comfortable squat, listening and watching, and maybe his expletive had been for the realization that Salma might have contributed to her own suffering and death. Maybe it was sadness and dismay gripping him.

  “When you hear about things,” Teresa said, her eyes seeking out Jen, “sometimes they are worse than the reality. The scary thing about Salma was that she no longer was in pain. She’d been burned that badly. There was that much nerve damage. She knew she was going to die. And there was that feeling…I was glad she wasn’t suffering, but I knew that the absence of suffering was bad news.”

  Teresa, Teresa, why couldn’t you have gone on to medical school? How did things get so badly screwed up?

  In her sister, for the first time since the fire, Jen saw nothing but potential. Teresa could rise beyond her current situation, whatever its apparent limitations. She had not been destroyed by the Makal Canyon fire.

  THAT NIGHT, after a communal barbecue dinner on the patio of the house, one of those houses that had been paid for with a human life, Max asked Jen, “Want to ride down to the beach? Go for a swim?”

  It was only six-thirty, plenty of light. Jen felt both drained and exhilarated. Teresa’s work today had been moving and effective, and she’d looked prettier than she had in years. Bob and Max and Pete and Teresa had spent most of the afternoon editing, and the result had satisfied everyone. Well, maybe not Max…

  The swimming trip would give her a chance to talk with him alone, or rather to listen if he needed to talk.

  “Sure.”

  The swimsuit she wore beneath her clothes and motorcycle leathers was a purple maillot which flattered her body. She and Max put towels in his pannier. Before they left, Jen went to Teresa’s room to see how her sister was doing.

  “Another date?” asked Teresa with a small smile.

  “Yes. I guess you could call it that. I just wanted to tell you again how great you were today. You’re amazing in front of the camera. A natural.”

  “Not as natural as you,” Teresa responded, “but thank you. It was satisfying.” As she spoke, she seemed to turn preoccupied.

  “What is it?” Jen asked.

  Teresa shook her head. “Nothing that matters. If it does, I’m sure Max will bring it up.”

  Jen thought of Max’s moods, swinging one way, then the other, throughout the day. Did he know something about Teresa or about the fire or something of some kind? For that was the sense she’d begun to get almost as if he was biting his tongue about something, a little-known fact he was reluctant to share. Speculation about this made Jen uneasy, and she wasn’t sure why, except perhaps that her mother and Elena would be coming that weekend and to Jen it was imperative that they find everything relatively peaceful.

  “Why don’t you tell me,” she suggested, “so I’m not surprised.”

  “You know, I am not your daughter. It’s demeaning how you treat me, Jen. You think because your life is so together and you’re a newscaster that you have a right to treat me as though I’m Elena.”

  Jen decided to abandon the conversation before Teresa’s accusations became more abusive, which they were likely to do. “So, I’m not sure when we’ll be back. Want anything from town?”

  “No. I’m good. Bob and Pete and I might go for a drive in the fire wagon.”

  Jen went downstairs and joined Max in the driveway. She took a helmet from him and tucked her hair inside her coat.

  Max’s face had a preoccupied expression that reminded her of Teresa’s.

  “What,” Jen asked, “is going on?”

  But before she could get an answer, a Subaru Forester turned into the driveway.

  Richard.

  Max nodded to him curtly.

  He’ll always blame Richard, Jen suspected.

  “Off on the motorcycle?” Richard asked. “Just like old times, eh? I’m glad to see my old hotshots again.”

  Max’s smile was barely polite. “We’re just leaving to go for a swim.”

  “Enjoy yourself. Any chance of my getting Pete to show me today’s footage?”

  “Probably.”

  Jen pulled on her helmet. Her questions for Max could wait till they were at the beach.

  EVENING SWIMS WERE generally considered not the best idea because of the increased possibility of shark attack, but Jen had never seen a live shark in the Santa Barbara Channel, only dead ones washed ashore, and the only person she’d known who’d been attacked by a shark, up near Monterey, had been bitten in broad daylight. So Jen wondered if Don’t swim at night was a caution based entirely on an old wives’ tale.

  In any case, it wasn’t yet dark as she and Max swam off the Carpinteria beach half a mile from his family’s home. At seven, they floated out past the breakers, alternately floating on their backs and fronts
, sometimes treading water.

  “So what secret are you and Teresa keeping to yourselves?” Jen asked. “Because none of the rest of us seem to be privy to it.”

  Max came out of a float and treaded water looking at her, his blond hair dark with water, his lashes seeming very long, very black, very close. “You never knew about Teresa and Richard?”

  “About Teresa and Richard,” could only mean one thing. Max meant, You never knew Teresa and Richard were… But what had they been? Jen managed to sputter, “They were lovers?”

  A wave rolled toward them, and they lifted over it as one. Max nodded. “That’s my understanding.”

  “When?”

  “Not during or after Makal Canyon. It happened the summer before. You weren’t a hotshot yet.”

  “Did everyone know?”

  “Salma knew, and I knew because she confided in me. I doubt anyone else knew. Richard’s position in the situation was sketchy at best.”

  “It’s not like he was that much older than her,” Jen reasoned.

  “Oh, be serious. He was her supervisor. Yeah, he was maybe fifteen years older than her, and I suppose he was an attractive guy back then. Certainly someone who would have seemed interesting and romantic to Teresa.”

  Jen began to remember things she’d forgotten—primarily that she hadn’t exactly been her sister’s best friend. They’d never gotten along well enough for that. Too much competition and jealousy, always.

  “For how long?” she asked.

  “I recall that it was a good part of the fire season. Salma didn’t like Richard because of it, and I’m afraid she prejudiced me as well.”

  “Back then—well, when I was a rookie—I thought you revered him. Everyone admired him.”