Because of Our Child

by Margot Early

Jen had never known any of that, but she burst out, “Well, you just have to be bigger. I’m sorry. That must have been horrible, Mom, but it didn’t have anything to do with us. We wanted to see our dad, and you used us to try to punish him.”

  “You sound about thirteen years old,” Robin said tightly, “but Elena is more mature than you.”

  “You tried to control everything,” Jen went on, like a fountain that would not stop spraying water. “It wasn’t about what he’d done to you…or done, period, because he wasn’t necessarily doing it to you. And, Mom, he never hit you. We felt like idiots going to battered women’s shelters, and here you’re putting on this act…”

  Robin had gone white. She began to shake, and Jen knew what was about to happen.

  “You don’t know anything,” Robin said.

  It occurred to Jen that perhaps she didn’t. Perhaps, alone with her mother, her father had been another person. Yes, she had heard her mother lie, relate events that she, Jen, had witnessed, in a completely false way. Once, she had known her mother to do something to herself in her bedroom, hit herself with something, and come out with a black eye. But that didn’t mean Gino had never hit her.

  “You’re a good mom,” Jen said gently, assuming again her role of caretaker. Of Chief Liar. “You took care of us mostly alone, though Dad did pay child support.”

  “Only if I made him. Only if I told him he couldn’t see you otherwise.”

  “Which is illegal.”

  “I had a moral right to protect my children from him and his values.”

  Robin was dead wrong. And I understand that she’s wrong, Jen thought. My understanding of what she did wrong will prevent me from becoming like her. Not for the first time in her life, she prayed that she was right about this. Should she quit arguing with Robin? She would never win. She could try her whole life and never win.

  But Teresa said, “So unless he was who you wanted him to be, he couldn’t see us.”

  “It wasn’t who I wanted him to be.” Robin seemed to be starting to hyperventilate. “It was who I know he could have been.”

  And the Chief Liar took charge, so that there wouldn’t be a Robin Meltdown. “You’re right, Mom. You always wanted the best. We love you.”

  Her childhood was long over. Robin would never change. But Elena, by God, was going to know and spend time with her father.

  JEN LAY AWAKE. How could she be so certain that marrying Max was what she wanted to do, what she was somehow meant to do?

  Because it was what she’d wanted long ago?

  No. Not that simple. If Max had not changed, had not grown into exactly the man he’d become, she couldn’t have agreed to marry him. It wasn’t who he’d been but who he was and who he promised to be that spoke to her.

  And yet…

  Max had spoken tonight of some sort of reckoning he’d managed. Coming to terms with having been the one who’d encouraged Salma to join the hotshots in the first place. Now, Jen remembered when Max received the news that Salma was dead and afterward. Things said.

  Things done.

  Things felt.

  Her own opportunistic certainty—doubt free—that there was nothing whatsoever wrong with her being in bed with Max.

  Part of her still cringed as she remembered the young girl she’d been. Salma’s dead, he’s free.

  And she, Jen, had always liked him, always looked up to him, always envied Salma. Like the kid sister who suddenly has a chance with her older sister’s sexy, mature boyfriend, Jen had seized her opportunity to be closer to Max.

  What had gone through his mind?

  Probably just horror that Salma was dead.

  But that wasn’t what he’d said at the time.

  So many things she’d spent years blotting out, deliberately forgetting, she now remembered. Chance remarks. Fragments. That smile, he’d said of hers as though his heart was breaking at the beauty of one facial expression—hers. Hers, not Salma’s.

  Also, when the two of them had kissed, there’d been a sweetness. He had not acted as a practiced older seducer but as someone entranced by her.

  Back then, she’d have been thrilled had he wanted to marry her. But it couldn’t have happened back then. Some things could only happen with the passage of time. If she’d been asked about the critical factor back then, thirteen years earlier, she’d have said it would have been for him to get over Salma. Now, she knew that wasn’t what had to happen. She’d needed to grow up and not need him in the way she had, in the days after the fire, to make her complete.

  So she’d raised a daughter alone, had a career, stood beside Teresa through her struggles. Now she was mature enough for marriage. Now she was independent.

  Now she was ready.

  A knock on her door.

  Jen got up, pulled on some sweatpants with the Leadville smoke jumper T-shirt Max had given her, and opened her door. It was Max.

  “Am I stealing your beauty sleep?” he asked.

  “Of course, but I’ll survive. I’m glad you’re here.”

  He came in, shutting the door behind him as Jen switched on her bedside light.

  “I’m getting back in bed,” she said.

  She’d talked him into spending the night apart from her so that he wouldn’t see her in the morning, thus—by traditional superstition—causing unluckiness. But now he came and lay down on the bed beside her.

  “If I leave before midnight,” he said, “can I stay?”

  She almost laughed. But now that he was here… “I’m glad you’re here, because there’s a question you’ve never really answered.”

  “Mm? What?”

  “You’ve said you’re not marrying me only because of Elena. What are your other reasons?”

  He rolled on his side to face her. “Has it escaped your notice that I’m very attracted to you?”

  She grinned, the feel of the smile surprising even her. “Still, these days most men don’t see marriage as a necessary step to resolving that.”

  He gazed into her eyes, his own creasing in the corners, following his smile. “No,” he agreed. “I guess we don’t.” He paused. “Do I love you? Yes. Is my decision about love? Not really. Marriage, to last, should be built on other expectations. Or hopes. I see you and I being able to share things, to grow together. We’ll always have common interests. I think it can work. Does that make sense? We can truly be partners, not just in raising Elena.”

  “Yes.” So he loved her. Now he had said it. That must be enough.

  She related the scene with Robin in this bedroom only an hour before.

  “Teresa told me. She said she always forgets that your mother is never going to change.”

  “I always forget it, too.”

  What she wondered now, however, was how much time would have to pass before she changed, before she believed that he was marrying her for reasons that truly had to do with who they were together as a couple, not simply as Elena’s parents. How many days or months or years would have to elapse before she didn’t see the two of them being together now mainly—if not solely—because of their child.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  EARLY THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Max walked into the computer room to find Pete uneasily scanning the first page of a fax which was still spitting subsequent sheets onto the paper receiving tray.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing you need to look at this morning.”

  Taking this as an indirect sign that the fax was important—critical, even—to the film, Max moved closer and read over Pete’s shoulder.

  The previous week, they had sent an independent fire investigator in Missoula, Montana, photos from the Makal Canyon fire, particularly of the fire shelters. Of course, Salma’s shelter had been moved from the place where it had lain during the fire, as had many of the others. The precedent the South Canyon fire had set weeks before, of leaving shelters—and the dead—where they lay had not yet made itself widely felt. And in any case the priority would have been helping Salma and others
who were injured.

  But the fire investigator revealed that at fire research laboratories in Missoula, he and other fire specialists had examined enhanced photographs of the site where shelters had been deployed and had found they could see depressions in the ground at approximately the spot where Teresa Delazzeri had indicated that Salma Garcia had deployed her shelter. Deploying a shelter in that direction, he continued, would greatly increase the risk of fire entering under the shelter and burning the firefighter inside.

  The pages of the fax gave scientific data and evidence to support the findings.

  The fax dealt only with the issue of the deployment of Salma’s shelter. Other previous reports had addressed the decision to build the fire line downhill, which the investigators had strongly criticized.

  Max handed the first page of the fax back to Pete. “I guess it’s not that surprising. But we have other pieces to put together. Jen wants to get Richard back in front of the camera.”

  “Ain’t gonna happen. He knows what she’s after, and he’s not going to say on film who was in charge of assigning lookouts.”

  “Not the IC,” Max said. “There’s no way it could have happened as he told Jen at the barbecue.”

  “You know more about the fire world than I do, but I tend to agree, just because of the incident commander’s degree of responsibility. Will Richard be at the wedding?” Pete asked.

  “He wasn’t invited.” Jen hadn’t suggested it, and Max didn’t want him there. When all was said and done, the responsibility for Salma’s death could be spread around, but Richard Grass had done a lousy job for his hotshots at the Makal Canyon fire. We need him on film one more time. But Max knew of no way to accomplish that. They needed his compliance, his agreement.

  Pete said, “What about the other guy? The guy who didn’t die, but who was involved in a lot of the decision-making? Dick somebody? Isn’t he supposed to be back soon?”

  “Dick Henry. He is back. He just hasn’t had time to talk yet, he says, and I tend to believe him.”

  “Are you flying him out here?”

  “He hasn’t agreed to come. But I think he may. The problem is, he and Richard are still in contact.”

  “Do you know him?” Pete asked.

  Max shook his head. “I barely remember him. He was overhead, he wasn’t local. We were, which usually doesn’t happen on a fire like this, and we didn’t know him.”

  “So all this can wait till tomorrow,” Pete finally said. He was to be Max’s best man. “Let’s get ready for this wedding of yours.”

  THEY GATHERED on the beach at 11:00 a.m. Jen and Max had chosen vows from a selection offered by the minister. At the time, as certain as she was that she wanted to marry Max, Jen had wondered, How can it matter what vows we choose? Max was not in love with her, and no words spoken on the beach in the morning would make him love her.

  But now, on the beach, everything was different. Max stood across from her in white linen trousers with a black silk shirt in a subdued Hawaiian print. She’d felt silly for caring about this moment, for feeling excitement. She’d told herself that to care so much about this wedding was to be attached to the past, to keep alive a nineteen-year-old girl and her immature love for the Max Rickman of then.

  But she’d been wrong. This was not the long-ago Max. Their twelve-year-old daughter, Max’s and Jen’s, stood near Teresa, Jen’s witness and maid of honor, and the reality of Elena, of the years Jen had spent raising her, of the chance that Max would actually have done his part, that she, Jen had done something she had no moral imperative to do… All these things overwhelmed her now, embodied as they were in the present-day Max, her lover and the man she loved. Both of them were different people—the same souls, yet grown and changed.

  Jen listened to the ocean as much as to the minister’s voice as the ceremony began.

  Robin looked tense and disapproving.

  Jen and Max had each selected one reading which was secret from the other, a wedding gift to be revealed during the ceremony. Jen had chosen something from a book of the minister’s, Weddings of the Heart. The excerpt was by William Meredith:

  In Chota Nagput and Bengal

  the betrothed are married with

  threads to mango trees, they marry the trees

  as well as one another, and

  the two trees marry each other….

  Jen liked the reference to trees and to marrying trees, as Max was not just a firefighter but also a ranger.

  Teresa read Jen’s selection, and Jen watched Max’s satisfied smile. Then, to Jen’s surprise, Robin stepped forward in the semicircle of guests, a piece of paper in hand.

  “Max asked me to read this poem today. Oddly enough, it has long been a favorite of mine. ‘The Country of Marriage,’ by Wendell Berry.” Robin’s eyes grew moist as she began to read, and through the cynical thought that Robin couldn’t bear the dramatic spotlight focused on anyone but herself, Jen saw her mother as a hopeful bride, wanting her marriage to Gino Delazzeri to put down roots, to branch upward, to scatter its seeds, to become every rich and beautiful thing a marriage could be. And she felt the stirrings of forgiveness for the wife and mother who had continued to want these things and been denied them.

  Had Max foreseen all this in asking Robin to read this passage? It was at moments such as this that Jen foresaw an especially fulfilling future between Max and her. He didn’t want strife, but a deeper understanding of all around him.

  And through the reading he’d chosen, Jen understood her mother perhaps better than she ever had in her life.

  The vows were simple, traditional, straightforward, but their simplicity brought Jen a sense of the peace and the sacred. “I, Jen, take you, Max…”

  DICK HENRY FLEW OUT the following week, at Max’s expense. Max was the only one of the group who had ever even met him before.

  Jen cleared her mind of Max’s continued feelings of vengeance toward Richard Grass and of her own worries about Elena and how she would really do in Leadville.

  She asked Dick Henry, “Did you and Richard Grass and George Riley post fire lookouts?”

  “That would have been the superintendent’s responsibility, particularly for the crew he was working with. The squad boss on the other crew should have posted their lookouts.”

  “But it didn’t get done.”

  “That was a mistake.”

  THEY FINISHED editing on August twenty-eighth and celebrated with a screening in the living room of the firehouse, which they would be vacating in two days.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Max said, “that he isn’t fired. He won’t go any further up the ladder with this film out there. Maybe he’ll be forced into early retirement.”

  Jen didn’t like what she heard in his voice, the vengeful streak. For a time, she’d been sure Max was ready to move past his rage about Salma’s death. She knew he didn’t idealize Salma’s memory—or, she supposed, she hoped that he didn’t. It was easy to see how he could look at what might have been and see how it lacked the problems of what was.

  What frightened her was that somehow married lovemaking with Max brought them into even deeper intimacy and, with that, greater love and greater trust. He had destroyed her trust once before, and it had only been partially rebuilt. That was the nature of the fine fabric of trust. And Jen no longer saw his desertion of her thirteen years before as something he’d done to her, but rather as something that had happened. His fiancée had just died, he hadn’t been prepared, his world was in turmoil. She had been a casualty of the situation. He hadn’t been able to help his feelings, and the part of her that had known that at the time must have been what kept burning a single ember of her feelings for him.

  The night of the screening, when they went to their room, they talked briefly, as it seemed they did every night, of the logistics of Elena’s and her move to Leadville. Then, Max said, “Thanks for making the film happen, Jen. I wanted that on film. I wanted the fault shown.”

  The film had noted several
factors that had led to the disaster that July day when the Makal Canyon fire had blown up. Builders and firefighters together had discussed the development of Canyon Wind Estates and the inevitability of the subdivision being threatened by fire.

  The lack of lookouts had been noted—and the fact that the firefighters hadn’t known what their fire was doing. Salma’s wrong deployment of her fire shelter and her inability to keep it over herself had been addressed.

  Jen had watched Max’s face during the screening. He didn’t love Salma anymore. He loved her memory, of course, as one loves any friend who has died.

  But that night, when they were in bed and he took her in his arms, she stiffened some without meaning to.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Are you going to move on from what has happened?” she asked. “Are you always going to carry anger over this fire?”

  “Why?”

  That wasn’t the answer she’d been looking for.

  “Because you’ll never be able to move on, as long as you do. I thought the film would get it out of your system. But you feel the same as you did when we sat down together in the Mexican restaurant in Ridgway and you first asked me to work on the film with you. It hasn’t changed you at all.”

  Max heard her, heard the wisdom in her words about moving on. He could tell her the fire was by no means the driving force in his life. But wasn’t that untrue? Wasn’t his whole career somehow bound up by the catastrophe?

  But what could make him move on if the film had not? If he was ready to leave the scene of the fire, figuratively as well as literally, the change would have happened naturally.

  “Jen, you’re wise,” he said. “Be patient with me. Think of it as a habit I’m trying to break.”

  I didn’t agree to marry that habit.

  But she had. She’d agreed to the whole package of Max Rickman, and the Makal Canyon fire was part of it.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  BY THE END of the first week of September, they’d settled in Leadville and Elena had started school there. She was off crutches and healed of her injuries, but was only dancing in a limited way until she regained more strength. Jen found a part-time job with the recreation district teaching kickboxing, a less disciplined sport than Thai boxing, and was doing some freelance television work as well.