Rain of Fire

by Linda Jacobs

  Watching the sun sink over the trees behind the hotel, Kyle reflected that the period after sunset and before dark always fascinated her. It was as though each evening presented a dare, to watch the light fade minute by minute and see how long she could remain indifferent.

  Using the excuse that she was getting chilled without the parka she’d left dripping over the shower rod in her bath, she walked briskly through twilight toward her cabin.

  Once there, she unlocked the door and entered the spare and chilly room. Some fiddling with the electric heater set in the wall revealed it was on a fifteen-minute timer so she anticipated a fitful night of sleeping and waking to reset the dial.

  Kyle undressed, took a hot shower, and donned a soft flannel shirt to keep her warmer. Then she lay back on the too-short bed. With her rangy build, she felt the polar opposite of Alicia with her full breasts and rounded behind. Thank God, she’d always been comfortable with the way she looked and at ease with her own company, like having dinner alone in the dining room.

  She had been fine with Wyatt staying with his girl… the yearning centered in her chest tonight was not for him. It was much more basic.

  Being reminded of a world designed for couples made her ache for her own vanished youth and the man she had loved and lost.

  Twenty-year-old Kyle rode shotgun in Nick Darden’s Chevy as he pulled away from the Calico Palace Pizza Parlor in Jackson, Wyoming. A typical Wednesday evening at geology field camp, except for the miraculous fact that Kyle had Nick to herself.

  Back in June, the students had assembled at a 4-H camp near Alpine, forty miles south of Jackson. For the first three nights, the food was okay, wholesome and filling, if not exciting. Roast beef, mashed potatoes, and green beans; then chicken, rice, and salad; followed by ham, slaw, and red Jell-O. On the fourth day, the kids they shared camp with changed and the cycle began again.

  Kyle and some of the others had fallen into the habit of driving up the Snake River Canyon to Jackson for dinner, never mind that the monotonous camp fare had been paid for. Somehow, tonight she and Nick had been the only ones who wanted to go.

  It was funny. The first time Kyle had seen him, she’d not been impressed. With sun-streaked brown hair about the same color as his eyes and summer tan, he looked monochrome. Then he smiled and the gimlet glint of his irises suggested she was included in an excellent joke.

  Evenings, Nick played his guitar in the barracks and the students sang along. The high point of camp so far had been his performance at The Golden Horseshoe Bar in Alpine. Before an eclectic mix of RV campers, sheepherders from surrounding ranches, and geologists, Nick took the stage almost shyly, situating himself with care on a bar stool. He made it all the way through the first verse and half the refrain before the assembled company realized he was singing the praises of “Charlotte the Harlot, the Cow-punchers’ Whore.”

  This evening, Nick drove through the town of Jackson and south. Mountains loomed on either side of the road, made visible by a full August moon. Kyle tried to ignore its baleful eye and focused on their approach to Astoria Hot Springs, an ancient resort with tourist cabins separated from the main highway by a bridge across the Snake River. The camp was the last outpost of light before they headed into the steep-walled canyon.

  Watching the ragged outcrops of limestone, Kyle told herself that going to dinner with Nick didn’t mean anything. He treated everybody in camp to the same brand of disrespectful banter that made him seem a friend until she realized it kept him at a distance.

  She studied his profile in the dash lights. His nose wasn’t large, but it had a little bump as though he’d broken it. It gave him a little boy quality that seemed to match his can’t-take-it-seriously attitude. His lashes were long for a man’s, dark whispers against his cheek.

  Kyle turned away so he wouldn’t notice her looking too long. A steep embankment whizzed by.

  Without warning, a sudden flash of motion caught her eye. Headed straight for the passenger door, a huge boulder rolled and bounced down the road cut. She had no time to think or speak before the rock smashed into the pavement scant inches behind the Chevy, blasting apart with a crack that shot shrapnel against the rear bumper.

  Nick swerved. “Holy shit!”

  Kyle looked back in time to see the largest broken chunks bound over the edge and disappear into the gorge.

  The Chevy fishtailed and came back under Nick’s control. He put his arm around Kyle’s shoulders and drove one-armed while her fingers clutched his shirt.

  “Hey, hey,” he soothed. “We cheated death.” But rather than stop to look at his car for damage, he accelerated. “I’m getting out of this canyon. That rockfall might have been caused by an earth tremor.”

  Kyle felt as though a hand reached inside her chest and clenched off her breath. She’d been doing all right with field camp, steering clear of other students’ weekend excursions to Yellowstone and Earthquake Lake. Another ten miles of steep-walled gorge unfolded interminably as she pressed her head against Nick’s shoulder and willed the boulders above to remain in place.

  Finally, moonlight revealed the mountains receding and being replaced by the blessed broad flats along the Palisades Reservoir. Once in the open she felt better and became aware the drive would be over soon. With Nick’s arm around her, it was easy to want more.

  The final half-mile was on the 4-H camp’s dirt road. The Chevy drifted a bit on the curves, gravel pinging the undercarriage.

  Nick pulled up in front of the barracks and stopped with a jerk. “The eagle has landed.”

  They separated, he toward the men’s head, an ancient railroad car in the woods, while Kyle went down the hill to the ladies’. The cinderblock box was a damp attraction for mosquitoes.

  In the mirror above the sink, her eyes looked enormous in a face pale despite her summer tan. Raising her hand, she touched the places where her hair was tousled from Nick’s shoulder. She carried a brush in her daypack but didn’t want to smooth it. Rather, she wished Nick’s hands would muss it further …

  A moan escaped her. Midnight had passed on her evening with Nick and she’d come home from the ball.

  Wrinkling her nose at the faint insecticide smell of a No-Pest Strip someone had hung in the shower, she abandoned its protection and started her solitary walk back up the hill. Although the moon was still high, casting double shadows where pole lights illuminated the camp, she used her flashlight. The barracks windows were dark, everyone stocking up on sleep before a 5 AM call. Kyle had rigged a battery-powered light above her bunk, not too bright to disturb her two roommates. To be on the safe side, she changed the AA batteries every other day.

  As she reached for the handle to open the barracks door, she caught a movement out of the corner of her eye. Turning, she saw Nick balanced in a handstand on the split log fence.

  “You’re still up,” she said.

  Deftly, he lowered his feet to the ground and faced her. His hand came up to fend off her flashlight beam. “You should have known I would wait for you.”

  He came closer. Jeans and a flannel shirt fit him in a way that seemed to accentuate his body. He wasn’t tall or broad-shouldered, but he walked toward her with a catlike tread.

  “Douse the light,” he said.

  Without thinking, she snapped it off.

  Nick caught her wrists and slid his warm hands inside her sleeves.

  “We had a shock tonight,” he murmured. “And I couldn’t quite see us bunking with the guys and gals.”

  He didn’t kiss her, just pulled her against him. This couldn’t happen, because she was taller than he by a good three inches and refused to slouch to make short men feel better.

  But it was happening.

  Beneath the full moon’s light, she stood with her face against the softness of his shirt, thinking that anybody could look out of the barracks and see them. Her hands rested awkwardly on his sides because she wasn’t sure what to do with them.

  Gently, he tipped up her chin. At fir
st, his lips felt chilly, but they warmed like his hands. Kyle didn’t close her eyes; rather she watched the silver sheen of a snowfield on the mountain above camp. It contrasted with the heat consuming her insides.

  “Come on,” Nick urged against her ear. “While you were gone, I put up my tent in the woods.” He nodded toward the shadows where moon glow did not reach.

  She felt a tug of apprehension. “It’s dark.” Yet, how she wanted to …

  “You’ve got a flashlight,” Nick said.

  She went with him, that night and all the nights of summer, another three weeks.

  For the last camp project, Kyle and Nick worked together on the mountain above Astoria Hot Springs tracking a surface called an unconformity. The rocks on top were millions of years younger than those beneath, with no record preserved between. The upper strata were slanted, or dipped, at a completely different angle, indicating that the surface of the earth had been tilted to a new place before the next layers were laid down.

  Those final weeks of summer were like that for Kyle, as she metamorphosed into a woman she’d never imagined she could be. Learning the contours of a man’s naked form, not simply with her eyes, but with fingertips so sensitized she might have been reading Braille … laughing in the early morning, their mingled breath coming out in puffs in the chilly tent, feeling the hair-roughened skin of his chest moving over the smoothness of her breasts, sharing a single apple, biting off bits in turn until there was nothing left of the juicy pleasure but a stripped-down core …

  After all these years, she’d yet to forget a single word of the letter she’d pulled from her student mailbox a week after camp ended.

  What we had was beautiful, but I can’t see you transferring to UCLA or me to Arizona. Too many things can happen before we get out of school. Even then, we probably couldn’t get jobs together. But I’ll always remember the gal who sleeps with the light on.

  In her cabin behind the Lake Hotel, Kyle rolled over and got off the bed, gasping at the pain of her bruised side. She went into the bath and reeled off toilet paper to wipe her eyes.

  It had been a long time since she’d cried over Nick Darden.

  Once he had persuaded her to unlock doors that she’d never even peeked out and walked away with her heart. Over the years, when she thought of loving again, she always concluded that Nick’s leaving had turned her to a woman who did not want to settle for less.

  It wasn’t as if there’d been no men in her life. She had dated a fellow graduate student at Arizona for several years and here at Utah she’d kept company with a research associate for four years until he went home to Greece.

  Tonight, that did not seem nearly enough. She looked through the bathroom door at the single imprint her body had made on the bedcovers and longed for the quickened breath, the pounding pulse, for flesh on flesh.

  Blowing her nose, she told herself she was just being sentimental because Wyatt had found somebody. Or because a stroke had separated Leila and Stanton after forty years.

  Whatever the reasons, she was alone, her secrets intact.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SEPTEMBER 15

  Snowflakes drifted through the dawn. Their white blanket draped the grass and flocked the pines outside Kyle’s cabin near the Lake Hotel. She had awakened cold, but not realized the significance of muffled silence until opening the door.

  Through the shadowless light, she trudged toward Wyatt’s cabin. By the time she got there, her hands were so chilled it hurt to knock. Thrusting them in the pockets of her down vest, she waited. Her still-soggy parka hung in her cabin.

  After a minute, she knocked again.

  A snow squall approached over the lake, a gray haze sweeping toward shore. The whirling front obscured her view of the water, then the meadow, and finally swallowed the cluster of cabins. She ducked around the corner into the lee and beat on Wyatt’s window.

  Even as she pounded, she expected she knew where he was. In a heated hotel room with Alicia, whose budget appeared larger than that of the Institute or the Park Service.

  Snow swirled and eddied into the sheltered space, cold burning Kyle’s nose and ears. Why had she left her hat and gloves on the top shelf of her closet at home when she knew perfectly well it could drop below freezing any day of the year in Yellowstone?

  “Kyle!” Wyatt called from across the white expanse of lawn. He was walking from the hotel carrying two Styrofoam cups with covers. Coatless, he wore the same pullover he’d had on at dinner, and when he gestured toward her cabin, she wondered if he didn’t want her to see his bed had not been slept in.

  The thought sent another stab of loneliness through her. It had taken a long time to get to sleep last night, with only her memories and the inadequate electric heater for company.

  “Java?” Against dimensionless white, Wyatt’s eyes were dark pools.

  She reached to take a cup from him, and their gloveless hands brushed. “Thanks.”

  “Is that the best you can do?” he chided. “I slept like the devil, waking up a dozen times to reset the damned heater. Then I get up, throw on my clothes, and go on a fieldtrip in the snow to bring you coffee …”

  Kyle burst out laughing. Even the icy flakes attacking her eyelashes ceased to matter as she processed that Wyatt hadn’t spent the night with Alicia.

  Not that it mattered.

  Wyatt slung an arm around her shoulders and turned her toward her cabin. “By the way, after you told Alicia off about teaching and being a ranger, she was all apologies. You don’t know, but she left a considerably soft life on her father’s Texas ranch to come up here and work for the wolves.”

  “Hmmm.” Kyle failed to commit.

  She led the way to her cabin, stomped snow from her boots, and reset the panel heater for another fifteen minutes. Then she tossed up the spread to cover the twisted sheets, aware of Wyatt seeing the evidence she had slept poorly. Sitting diagonally across the narrow double mattress from him, she stripped the plastic cover off coffee with just a touch a cream, the way she liked it.

  Although the wire heater coils began to glow cherry red, Wyatt hunched his shoulders and kept his arms crossed. Wordlessly, Kyle tossed him the flannel shirt she’d slept in.

  He caught it and pulled it on over his light sweater. To her surprise, it fit, just a trifle snug across his chest.

  “We could share clothes,” Wyatt said. “Save money.”

  She knew she dressed casually, in the office and the field, but somehow this stung. Maybe it was the memory of Alicia in her little black dress and high-heels that Kyle, proud as she was of her height, would not have chosen.

  “Alicia is lovely,” she said, without planning to.

  Wyatt’s eyes were steady on hers. “Yes, she is.”

  The heater ticked away. A gust of wind rattled a windowpane.

  Wyatt looked toward the whirling whiteness. “I checked the forecast. Snow, sleet, and freezing rain all over the region.”

  Kyle took another gulp of coffee and set it aside. “I’d planned to leave at midday, but if I want to make it to the Consortium tomorrow, I need to go right away.”

  Shoving up off her bed, Wyatt gave her a grave look. “After the size of yesterday’s quake, we need to keep a close eye on things here.”

  There, again, a stomach clutch that set her mind awhirl with images. Of broken rock and fissured earth, of people waiting for news of loved ones, and a little girl clinging to her grandmother’s hand.

  Wyatt’s touch on her shoulder brought her back. “You okay?”

  Kyle forced a nod.

  “I’ll hold the fort until you can get back with more monitoring equipment,” he promised.

  Driving to the west entrance of the park took five hours, twice the normal time. Once she got to lower elevation, Kyle expected the snow to give way to a cold, soaking rain. Instead, the eddy of flakes continued to whiten the pavement and obscure the center stripe. At an Exxon station in Rexburg, Idaho, she got a soft drink and a chocolate bar with alm
onds and drove on. With a good ten miles to Pocatello, the van’s heater gave up.

  Impatience drilled her as the snow came down faster. If she had this weather all the way to Salt Lake, she’d have to chair the Consortium without preparation. She fiddled in vain with the heater’s control, while she tried to think of some opening remarks for the morning welcome and not to dwell upon her lack of a good slide presentation. At best, she’d have to throw together some bits and pieces from past talks.

  How odd it would be for the Consortium to meet without Stanton. The last piece of business was sure to be the consideration of officially appointing an interim successor. She’d never thought of herself as ambitious, but Hollis Delbert’s grasping at the prize made her want it.

  And that made her feel like a greedy child.

  Nonetheless, since Hollis’s dislike for her apparently blinded him to the potential hazards in Yellowstone, she intended to buttonhole Colin Gruy, senior scientist with USGS Volcano Hazards Program before the meeting. If she let him know Stanton’s wishes, he could make the motion to leave her in charge until things sorted out.

  Low-hanging clouds permitted only a filtered glimpse of white hills on either side of Interstate 15. At least five inches of snow covered the right of way. Seeing a shell of ice coating stalled cars on the shoulder, Kyle wondered for the first time if she would make it home tonight. Digital numerals on the dash clock revealed it was after four and she had at least two hundred miles to go.

  As the cold seeped into the van’s interior, Kyle’s toes first stung, then began to numb. She took turns steering with one hand, warming the other on her stomach. It would be nice to stop and get her coat, but she feared she couldn’t get back into the tracks of the eighteen-wheelers. When she got to Pocatello, she’d stop at Wal-Mart, buy a hat and gloves, and some of those thermal hand and boot warmers.

  The ringing of sleet joined the mopping of wipers, and she slowed from thirty to twenty miles per hour. At this rate, it would take another six hours.