“Maya?”
A pause. “Where are you?” she asks.
“What?”
“You’re outside,” Maya says. “I can hear the wind. I thought you were studying.”
“We’re taking a breather.”
She gasps. “You’re going to look for Brooks.”
“I’m not!”
“What are you doing? Audrey, what are you doing?” Her voice breaks. “I know something is up. I know it. You’re acting as if Brooks is nothing to you. You can trust me. I’m your sister.”
I’m crying. “I love him, Maya.”
“I know.”
We both cry. We waste a minute crying together on the phone, and it helps—simply being on the phone with my sister—it relieves a swell of pressure in my chest.
“When are you coming back?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “As soon as I can.”
Silence. And then, “Do you think there’s hope for Shadow?”
“I do.” And I have to believe it. “We’ll call all the shelters,” I say. “Tomorrow, Tuesday, all week.”
“Please be safe.”
“I love you,” I say, and she says, “I love you too,” and I somehow don’t cry again.
When I hang up, I make my way to Hayden, to the crest of the canyon. We look out over the maze of homes below us.
“Maya,” I say. “She’s not taking the evacuation well.”
Hayden squints. “How are you taking it?”
I laugh. “I’m falling apart,” I say. And it’s a foolish hope, given all that I know, what I saw this morning, but I need this hope, so I hiccup and say, “But maybe our house will be okay.”
Hayden stares at me like we’re in class and I asked about the date of an exam we’re scheduled to take that day. He shakes his head. “Oh,” he says, “Audrey.”
“What?” But I see it in his eyes, his hunched shoulders. He scrubs his hand behind his neck. “I mean, your neighborhood, the ones surrounding it—”
My grandmother’s paintings. The photo albums I left on the living room bookshelves. Maya’s journals. Shadow, maybe Shadow, despite what I just said. My sister’s beloved first cat. She might be okay, but I can’t know that. Our home. Where Maya and I grew up. Where we pretended to be royal mermaids. The home my parents built and loved in.
“Oh.” It’s all I can I say too.
“I’m so sorry,” he says.
I knew there was a high probability of my house burning. I was there. It was so close. But I never really thought—how could I think—I don’t want to go anywhere. I have nowhere. I’m gutted. My home gone.
“There’s a site online,” Hayden’s saying, “where they update the evacuations and list the hit neighborhoods. I thought you knew.”
I shake my head. I’m shivering in the heat. His and Grace’s house might burn down too. Neighborhoods destroyed. How many families without homes, without the financial ability to simply build again like my parents? It’s hard not to hate myself, hard not to let my anger with myself take over, my guilt too—it’s hard to breathe normally, and I need to do something, anything—
When I hug Hayden, he doesn’t act surprised, though I am. Surprised by my want to hold and be held, surprised by how it feels. It’s strange because all my life I’ve flinched away from touch, afraid of my family’s embrace, of them being too close, of exposing too much of myself. And all my life I’ve panicked at the idea of what it means for someone to feel my body, to be so close to me.
And gradually, Brooks tangled so near, and I was numb and ecstatic and afraid and confused. I thought I’d give myself to him—thinking I could mend his scars, make him okay, telling myself I needed him too because he was my thing. Thinking that I owed him because his brother was dead, and I was the only one who could really help ease his pain. But none of that was true. It was never my job, never my obligation.
And hugging Hayden isn’t anything like hugging Brooks, and it isn’t like Friday when I caught Hayden off guard with my lips. Hugging Hayden is steady and simple and assuring.
He holds me until I back away, and I say, “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“Everything. Being a friend. Being an awesome brother to Grace. Being a great psych partner and pushing me,” I say, and I laugh and add, “For taking me home last night. For making me pull over.”
“It was kind of self-preservation. My making you stop the car—I didn’t want to die.”
“Your idea though,” I say. “What was the point?”
“I read something when researching for our project, how context influences how we remember things—where you are, who you’re with, what you’re feeling.” He kicks at the gravel. “That every time we remember an event, we change it based on our immediate surroundings, and particular scenarios can salvage what’s been repressed.”
I stare at him. “And you decided to play with this theory while driving through a smoke storm because?”
“It was an on the fly decision,” he says, a tense laugh. “I thought it might help your anxiety if you paused, focused on something other than the fire. Like a weird meditation. It helps me sometimes.”
I want to laugh at the word anxiety—if only that was all I was feeling—and tell him that the experiment failed, that the fire still consumed my thoughts. But I am calmer, as calm as I could be right now. And that probably has more to do with my talking to Maya, but the focused thinking surely helped.
And so all I say is, “Huh. Well, thank you.”
My lips are chapped, the wind so hot. I’m trying to digest what Hayden said, the hypothesis—I can’t help but wonder if, after the last three days, every memory with Brooks has become tainted. How differently would I remember the past three months if Thursday night had never happened?
“Last night, at the party,” Hayden says. “Why were you running?”
But I don’t have to answer because my phone is buzzing and buzzing in the pocket of Grace’s shorts. Not texts but a call. And it’s not Grace.
It’s Brooks. He’s calling me.
He’s alive.
64
SATURDAY
Saturday night, still at the party, after Brooks and I moved inside from the balcony, the torchlights and pool lights and back porch lights illuminated Derek Sanders’s parents’ chandelier suspended above the bed. The crystal leaves hanging from the iron arms clinked in the wind.
Brooks was sweet—sweeter and gentler and more vulnerable than June and July combined. He kissed my eyes and told me how beautiful I was. How much he loved me. How I had saved him. He cried about Cameron and told me how much it hurt not to have his brother anymore. He apologized for everything, all the vicious things he’d ever said or done. He apologized for Thursday night, for the fire. Can you forgive me? His shoulders shook in the dark.
And then we were kissing. My hands were under his shirt, grazing his stomach. His hands were under mine, gliding around my waist, beneath my bra. I stood up to check the door. It was locked.
Really? he asked.
I nodded yes.
And I don’t know why, after saying no for so long, after not having the desire, it then felt somewhat okay. We were moving fast and slow and fast. I was still unsure, still shaking, but it didn’t seem to matter anymore. We were past waiting, and his want outweighed my hesitation, my uncertainty. I was numb from Thursday. The fire was building, and I was drunk and needed tangible control over one thing in my life.
I also wanted to believe that Brooks was still good and sweet, that we were still good and sweet—that he loved me and I loved him, and that nothing else mattered.
And maybe I am actually finally starting to feel comfortable with myself.
I let him pull off my shirt. I pulled off his. He unbuttoned my jeans, eased them from my legs. We fell down to the floor together. And it
didn’t make everything okay, but it was okay.
But afterward, still lying on the rug, Brooks trying to catch his breath, I asked, Why did you lie about Cameron? He didn’t answer, and another whisper slipped from my lips. Why did you start the fire?
And eyes wet, he said, “I knew you’d finally want me if we had a fire.”
My chest throbbed. “You think that’s what this was?” The question came out as a sob. I stared at him, his vacant eyes. “You’re sick.”
And Brooks said, “Not as sick as Cameron. Not sick enough to pour gasoline on myself.”
I got dressed, realizing how disgusting it was for him to think up such a story. And I told him that, said it out loud. And, last night, I left him crying on the shag rug in Derek Sanders’s parents’ bedroom.
65
7:45 P.M.
My phone is pressed to my ear and Brooks says hi, as if it’s any day, just a normal Sunday, and he’s calling to see if I want to go for ice cream at the lake.
I walk away from Hayden. “You’re alive,” I say.
“Barely,” he says. “You have no idea.”
I can hear the wind through the phone. And I think it’s funny because it pulses there when it doesn’t pulse here, like an exchange, like it’s on the same path and there’s a delay for the time it takes for the wind to get from there to here. And, you know, I’ve been waiting for his call all day, and I’m shaking because he’s not dead, it wasn’t him who died. But someone did die, someone entirely innocent, a life gone. I can’t swallow the thought.
“My dad,” he says. “He shouldn’t have called you. He shouldn’t have.” Brooks doesn’t sound like he did this morning, excited, ready to fight. He is terrified. “Audrey, you there?”
“I’m here.”
I thought I would cry when he finally called, but I am not crying. I am numb, and Hayden is biting his thumbnail, pretending not to be watching me as I pull up thorns from the ground.
“I’m going away,” Brooks says. “I’m leaving.”
“What?”
“Alaska, remember, we can go and they’ll never—”
“We need to go to the cops,” I say.
“I can’t,” he says. “My dad, my mom—this will ruin them. This, I can’t do this to them.” His words tumble, and I want to tell him he already did—he already did this.
“Where are you?” I ask, and Hayden stares at me, and I don’t care. I’m ready to keep talking even with him listening, but he nods toward the truck and retreats into the cab for cleaner air, maybe my privacy, and I say to Brooks, “I’m going to find you, and we’re going to make this right.”
“I only called to say goodbye,” he says as he did this morning.
“This is not goodbye.”
“Audie.”
“If you won’t go with me, I’ll do it alone,” I say.
My throat is sticky, and my eyes burn from the smoke and ash that falls so similarly to snow. I think of Colorado, a dream school, a hope—I still have time to find my thing, and maybe I never needed a thing but rather an acceptance that this is my life, my life, and that alone is a thing. My confessing to my part in this fire won’t destroy me—it’ll save me.
“We’ll be okay,” I say.
“Wait,” Brooks says. “Wait. You can make it okay. You’re only sixteen. You’re a minor.” He speaks too fast. “And it was an accident.”
But it wasn’t an accident.
I’m cold. “What are you saying?”
And he talks, a frantic sound. “A brokenhearted teenager with a history of depression, obsession, a pyromaniac since she bombed ballet. You fell for an older guy, a volunteer firefighter, a protector, you loved me so deeply that I became your life—and we can tell them, we can lie—Audrey, listen, I broke up with you at your romantic anniversary surprise.”
I’m no longer cold. My blood boils. I push myself up to standing.
“My leaving broke you so bad that you started a wildfire to win me back,” he says, “and you lost control—”
“Brooks.” It doesn’t make sense, what he’s asking, the mass of his request.
“It’s the only way. I need you to do this. You’re a minor, and it won’t be so bad, but me, I’ll be locked up the rest of my life.” His voice isn’t malicious, isn’t demanding—he’s begging, a heartbreaking plea—and he says, “After your time is over, we can go. We can go. You and me, we’re like those aspens, remember?”
After your time is over.
It’s a knife to my heart.
“You’re asking me to take all the blame,” I say.
“I’ll go now—I’ll do it for you—” I think he’s crying. “If you won’t run away with me, if you won’t let me go—” A pause, and I hear him suck in a breath, and his tone changes, taking control. “For my dad, my mom, us. You have to do this. Otherwise I’ll be locked up, and we’ll never be. If you want to tell the truth, this is the only way.”
“But it isn’t the truth,” I say.
“It can be.”
Ash sticks to my lips. I stare at the homes in the canyons, and I unclench my fist and look down at the silver of the Zippo. I imagine it. Going forward, giving a false confession. I’m a minor. It won’t ruin me, not entirely. But confessing will destroy him.
And I am to blame. I am. I didn’t report the fire when it first started, and if I had, no one would have lost their home, a firefighter would still be alive, only a patch of valley and hillside would be charred. I built this wildfire too—fanning the flames with my silence.
Thinking I could save him by protecting his fire.
Thinking I could save us by protecting our fire.
“Audrey?”
I hear myself saying it. Telling the lie. My heart was broken. I started the Caspers Fire, a gift to him. It was me. I’m so sorry. It was me.
“No,” I say.
“I’ll go now.” A threat. “Your hair. You skin. The forensics team—they’ll trace it.”
He doesn’t mention his jars, the sleeping bag he brought, but he doesn’t need to: He’s set on his plan. And who would they believe—a sixteen-year-old with a history of instability or a diligent firefighter?
“Where are you?” I ask.
“I can’t do this to my dad.”
“Tell me where you are,” I say, because I’ve already walked back to the truck, already opened the door. From the passenger seat, Hayden gapes at me because I’ve already peeled back onto the road.
There’s a pause, but finally Brooks says, “Tesoro.”
“What?”
“The school, Audrey,” he says. “I’m at the school.”
66
THURSDAY
There’s a Hail Mary method in firefighting. If you can’t outrun a fire, you give in. In the 1940s, when Idaho’s Mann Gulch Fire was closing in on the firefighters, chasing them uphill, gaining, the crew’s foreman finally stopped running and set fire to the ground at his feet—blackening a circle of grass so he could lie face-down on the smoldering embers as the fire spread. Wagner Dodge, that was his name. He lived. The others who continued to run didn’t.
A burn circle, that’s the Hail Mary. Collapse inside and dig past the ash for oxygen, a gasping breath. Soil for air. Fire can’t burn what it has already touched. That’s the idea. Retreat into the burn and wait it out, don’t look up, keep your head down. Let the fire skirt over your back. And live.
That’s what Brooks told me on Thursday night, as he pulled a school notebook from his pack. He lit the pages with his Zippo and held it down to the grass, lowered the flame, walking in an outward loop. A wash of light. Sizzling weeds. He wasn’t saving us, wasn’t saving the valley, but feeding the dry land.
“It’s beautiful,” he said.
“Brooks,” I said. “Brooks.”
The heat was consuming. I didn’t think. I jumped
on him, made a grab for the torch of papers, reaching for it with my bare hand. An instinctive reaction—thinking maybe I could stop it, stop him. I dropped back, howling. My skin being ripped. That’s what it felt like.
His arms were around me in an instant as he pulled me into him. We hit the ground, tumbling away from the heat, the fire. And then we were sitting cocooned, my hand in agony. I gripped the ampersand pillow to my chest. I miss you, I thought he said, holding my knuckles to his lips. I miss Cameron so much. The flames were growing.
I remember raising my head and thinking how for a moment it looked like fireflies were flickering through the brush. And I remember thinking, No, more like Fourth of July sparklers. My breath held, skin searing. Brooks still holding me, not moving, both of us watching the flames. The sparklers didn’t fizzle out like they were supposed to—they grew and thickened into a dozen pockets of light. The wind ripped the grass, feeding the flames. Not a burn circle. Not a contained Hail Mary, but the beginning of something vast and terrifying.
“Brooks,” I said. He was transfixed, staring at the light. And I noticed his Zippo on the ground then, a shining glint. I fisted it with my burned hand, let the throb rock through my gut. “Brooks,” I said again.
But then he was pulling at my arm, pulling me away.
“We need to run,” he said. “Can you run?”
But he was already on his feet, his pack swung onto his shoulder. He tugged at my unburned hand before letting go, and then he was running and I was running after him, pillow and Zippo in hand, the heat on my back.
67
7:56 P.M.
Need to get to Tesoro High School?
The Toll Road is the most direct route. A total rip-off, but hey, you’re in Orange County. Join the overspending club and take the 241 South until it spits you out onto Oso Parkway. The road will end, and you’ll be forced to exit. Smile for the Toll Booth cameras. You’ll be billed later.
Nothing Left to Burn Page 22