China Lake (46 page)

We staggered out of the brush and onto a road, into the path of a firefighting crew pulling up the hill.

The firefighters bundled us into the cab of their truck. They put an oxygen mask on Luke. He kept looking up the mountainside, waiting for Tabitha. The crew chief, a rugged man with a white handlebar mustache, got on the radio and called the sheriffs to evacuate us.

I touched the sleeve of his khaki turnout coat. ‘‘My boyfriend’s trying to get down the pass to get my brother to a hospital. He’s been shot.’’

He stared at me, incredulous and hard-eyed. Then he said, ‘‘The pass? The highway, or the old road?’’ A Highway Patrol car had been cut off by flames on Old San Marcos Pass Road.

I was numb and exhausted, but when I heard that, the panic began crawling through me all over again. I said, ‘‘The highway.’’

He grabbed the radio, put out the call.

Luke pulled down the oxygen mask. ‘‘Aren’t they going to get my mom?’’

The firefighter hung in the doorway of the truck, poised, tense. ‘‘Somebody else is out there on the mountain? A woman?’’

Luke said, ‘‘My mom.’’

I looked the man in the eye and shook my head. Gathering Luke in my arms, I told him the truth.

Luke walked by my side, small hand in mine. He wouldn’t let it loose. That was what kept me going. Nikki had an arm around my shoulder, pacing me through the big double doors into the emergency room at St. Francis Medical Center.

This was our last stop. End of the line. I had phoned hospitals and the Highway Patrol, had searched the frantic ER at Cottage Hospital, and no one had seen Jesse or Brian. They had gone into the smoke and hadn’t come out.

St. Francis was bright and sterile. A television in the waiting room showed the mountains raging red, hysterical reporters, houses burning, girls fleeing down main roads on horseback. My head buzzed. I walked toward the desk, where a nurse in pink scrubs was speaking briskly over the phone.

‘‘Excuse me,’’ I said.

She raised a finger, indicating
just a minute
.

Nikki’s arm held me up. ‘‘Excuse me,’’ she said to the nurse. ‘‘We need to know if you have a gunshot wound here, Lieutenant Commander Brian Delaney.’’

Her voice could have driven fence posts into the ground. The woman looked up. Nikki said, ‘‘And we need to know right now, because otherwise we have to get a rescue crew to go into the fire and find him.’’

The nurse took a good look at me and Luke: grimy, reeking of smoke, coughing and ragged. She hung up the phone.

‘‘I’ll check,’’ she said.

She disappeared back into the ER, through another set of double doors. I leaned my head against Nikki’s shoulder. Luke stood mute, his fingers warm in my palm. How, I thought, how would I tell him if Brian was gone? I blinked, staring vacantly past Nikki, looking through the open double doors down a long hallway. I heard myself say, ‘‘Oh.’’

Straightening, I headed through the doors and down the corridor. My eyes were welling. Luke trotted to keep up with me, fingers squeezing mine. The grief, the pain, all I’d been straining to suppress, rose and spilled out. A sob broke from me and echoed off the walls.

At the end of the corridor an orderly was pushing a gurney. A nurse walked alongside it adjusting an IV bag, and a doctor in blue scrubs, talking to the man stretched out on it. It was Jesse.

I started running. ‘‘Wait.’’

Jesse turned his head and saw me. He told the orderly to stop. I rushed to him, threw myself across him, weeping.

The orderly said, ‘‘Ma’am, we got to get this man to X-ray."

‘‘Hold on,’’ Jesse said. His voice was a hoarse whisper. He lifted my face to his and kissed me like nothing before. Everything was in that kiss: need, distress, relief, love, all at once, overwhelming. He pulled back, still holding my face. His eyes were bloodshot and filling with tears. I had never seen him cry before.

He said, ‘‘I wrecked the Jeep. Coming down the pass.’’

‘‘Brian?’’ I looked from him to the doctor, helpless.

The doctor said, ‘‘The gunshot victim?’’

‘‘My brother.’’

‘‘He’s in surgery.’’

My jackhammer heart drowned out the rest, the cautions, the
we’ll have to wait and see
and
they’re doing everything possible
. Brian was alive. Jesse had driven through miles of rough terrain and reached the highway. He’d gotten Brian out; he’d gotten help.

‘‘Too fast,’’ he was saying, ‘‘missed the curve—’’

He kept talking in that hoarse, ragged voice, as though words would seal off his tears, and I knew he wasn’t upset that he’d crashed Carl’s Jeep. He had thought I was dead. I stroked his hair.

‘‘—on this empty stretch of road, grille’s smashed, radiator blowing steam, and your cell phone rings.’’

‘‘What?’’

‘‘Your phone. I didn’t even know it was in the car. I thought, with my luck, it was an insurance agent cold-calling to offer me cheap collision coverage, but you will not believe this. It was that reporter, Sally Shimada. She was looking for a quote from you, and ends up calling the paramedics instead.’’

Words weren’t working. The tears kept coming. I wiped them off his face.

He said, ‘‘Brian’s in bad shape, Ev.’’

I took his hand. He squeezed my fingers, wanting to say something else.

‘‘But he’ll make it—I’d bet my life on it. He’s a tough son of a bitch.’’ He looked at me and at Luke. ‘‘Like all you Delaneys.’’

The fire burned for days. The sky hung red and the air-attack planes thundered. It leveled homes and businesses, laid a charred shroud across the mountainside. They called it the Camino Cielo Fire, a name insufficient to describe what I had experienced, and what it had done.

Tabitha’s body was found under the tree that had crushed her. She was lying faceup, the coroner told me. Reaching for the mountaintop, I thought.

Chenille Wyoming was not found. Though Isaiah Paxton’s scorched bones were recovered from the ashes of the cabin, no other body was found on the hillside. She had disappeared.

With her, so went the Remnant. The church dissolved into chaos. Shiloh and the Brueghel triplets were arrested near Reno and charged with kidnapping. Curt Smollek survived his wounds and was booked for the murder of Mel Kalajian, as well as for various assault, weapons, and animal-cruelty charges. No one rose up to liberate them or to strike out at new targets. Leaderless resistance flopped. The Remnant needed the whip; without Chenille they were like a sack of headless snakes. Dawn came; that was their problem. The lithium sunset did not ignite.

However, their cry—‘‘Justice for Pastor Pete!’’— was answered. Garrett Holt was arrested for killing Peter Wyoming. Charged with capital murder, plus theft of government property and national security violations, he confessed under a deal that spared him the death penalty.

Holt was not a religious fanatic, but a man driven by greed and resentment against the navy. He had joined NCIS after washing out of navy flight school, and nurtured a grudge about failing to make the cut as a pilot. It bred the loathing that Brian had recognized in him, and the envy. When he posed as an aviator, he wasn’t just lulling me into trusting him; he was indulging his ego, bringing a ruined fantasy to life.

But beyond spite and jealousy, Holt was also corrupt. Bribery was his middle name. At China Lake he had uncovered a ring of petty thieves, enlisted men who were selling equipment through a fence in town. Instead of arresting them, Holt took money to look the other way. Then, when the Remnant started nosing around, shopping for military hardware, he grabbed the chance to enrich himself at the navy’s expense. He took control of the theft ring. Getting the enlisted men to do the heavy lifting, he started selling firearms and munitions to the cult.

Inevitably the navy realized how much ordnance and ammunition were going missing, however, and Holt’s game turned dicey. Then came an event he hadn’t counted on: the rift between Chenille and Pastor Pete. Their battle to control the Remnant ultimately destroyed his scheme.

The night of the killing Chenille phoned him in a panic, saying that Pete had gone over the edge. He knew he was infected with rabies, and that she was behind it. Betrayed, and fearing that the Remnant’s zealots would rally behind Chenille, Pete had phoned Brian.

Why Brian? Holt gave the only plausible explanation: Peter Wyoming knew that Chenille wanted Luke for herself, and that once she got him she would not hesitate to destroy Tabitha. Facing death with a strange burst of nobility, he had tried to protect Tabitha by seeking help from her husband. He had decided to sell his wife to the enemy.

But Chenille reached Holt in China Lake, telling him to stop Pete from talking or they’d all end up in federal prison. Holt was alarmed, and furious that Chenille had lost control of the situation. But above all, he was enraged that Peter Wyoming planned to tell everything to a fighter pilot. Holt was about to go down, and a fighter puke would get the credit for blowing the theft ring.

Stop Pete,
Chenille said. There was a gun in Brian’s closet.
Make it look like Brian did it, like it was a crime of passion, of frenzy.

And he did. Pinning the crime on a naval aviator, screwing the fighter jock who would have turned him in, that was just the poisoned icing on the cake.

It was an old story. Avarice, fear, ambition, and jealousy have always made a murderous combination. Read the Bible; it’s full of the stuff.

Brian was in the hospital for a month. His wounds were severe. He faced a long recovery and extensive rehabilitation. The doctors did not predict permanent physical damage, although the damage to his flying career was another matter. The navy had informed him that they intended to convene an inquiry about the scam involving the Sidewinder. His future as an officer, and an aviator, was clouded.

But he said it was worth it, every bit of what he’d done, even if he never flew an F/A-18 again. Luke was safe. No regrets. And I believed him. Still, he looked diminished when I saw him, and not just from the wastage brought on by injury.

Grief had decimated him. Despite Tabitha’s disloyalty, confusion, and disastrous actions, he mourned her passion, her beauty, her heroism. Knowing that in her final moments she had lifted Luke to safety, he now tormented himself for failing to prevent her death. He lay there reliving those minutes in the cabin, over and over, eyes lost to sight, locking on outcomes forever out of reach. If I had gone for Paxton sooner. A second earlier. A finger snap faster, I could have grabbed the shotgun from him. Could have stopped the whole thing right there. If only.

I couldn’t pull him out of it. Our parents arrived and couldn’t either. Finally Jesse talked to him, nobody he would have listened to a month earlier but the only man who could speak to him with authority. Not because he’d driven him down the mountain, but because he knew about chance and the irrevocable pain it inflicts. He talked about the Fucking Facts of Life. About death taking the person beside you, and leaving you breathing but damaged so badly that you fight against believing it. About the futility of reminiscence, which was a way of talking about acceptance. Perhaps someday Brian will hear it.

Jesse had to have surgery on his fractured leg, more pins going into bones that had already set off airport metal detectors, and he was treated for a severe kidney infection and dehydration. He checked himself out after two days, saying he hated hospitals worse than being held captive, and that the food had been better in the fallout shelter.

He came to stay with me. He’s the one who told me that I had to stop running so hard every day, that I’d lost too much weight. And he’s beside me when I wake up shaking. In the nightmare I reach for Tabitha’s hand, feel her fingers touch mine as she stretches up the face of the rock. Her skin feels like electric silk. Her eyes are bottomless and black, full of calm freedom, certain of me. The tree slashes down and it’s a dragon’s tail, embers flying from it like stars, and it sweeps her away. When I sit up shouting, Jesse pulls me against his side. Sometimes we make love, a hungry brand of sex that convinces us we’re still alive. Sometimes he lies staring out the window. He has his own incubus. It feels like a trigger and sounds like gunfire, looks like a throat ripped open, and it says,
Your decision.

The last time I had the dream, he told me, ‘‘Take this nightmare to a priest. You should.’’ He ran his fingers through his hair. He didn’t have a priest.

I said, ‘‘And maybe you should talk to Brian.’’

He took a bottle with him when he went.

Luke was also staying with me while Brian recovered. He had a long way to go, but at least he hadn’t reverted to hiding in his closet. He had returned to school, and was seeing a child psychiatrist to help him deal with Tabitha’s death and the traumas he had endured at the hands of the Remnant.

Acceptance isn’t easy. Uncertainty is a devil. But that’s what I’m living with, because the vial Chenille smashed near my face, the substance she called the Apocalypse, could not be found. Toxicological tests on me couldn’t identify anything. No one knows what it was. I have to wait, and wonder.

The weather stayed hot straight through November. Thanksgiving afternoon, after dinner, Jesse and I took Luke to Shoreline Park. The wind was brisk, the sky endless, the grass emerald in the late sun. The ocean rolled cold against the cliff below. We brought kites, and they snapped in the air, dogfighting, neon bright. Luke raced up and down the lawn until his cheeks were flushed.

I spread a blanket on the grass and stretched out with Jesse. His leg was still in a cast. The sun shone on his face and reflected from his eyes. We watched Luke circle around the lawn, running with that smooth Olympian stride of his.

‘‘How about Eastertime?’’ he said. ‘‘Right here.’’

It was the first time since that day on the mountain that either of us had spoken about getting married. I said, ‘‘Could rain. How about the Old Mission?’’