Line of Fire (23 page)

37

I
woke at dawn to the sound of my daughter dancing through the house in her Halloween costume, enthusiastically humming the tune of Girlyman’s “Everything’s Easy.” It was Grace’s third morning in a row wearing her costume before school.

I was hoping the outfit—Gracie continued to regale me with the Hermione-inspired details—would survive intact until the big day, five days hence.

Jonas had his arms curled around a book at the kitchen table. He would not don his hotshot getup—his chosen costume was an homage to the crews who had snuffed the Fourmile Fire—until the calendar told him to. He had buds in his ears to help him remain oblivious to his sister and a huge serving spoon in one hand to shovel cereal into his mouth as fast as he could chew and swallow.

The family tableau felt like performance art. Like most performance art, I feared it was well over my head. I did feel gratitude that all the performers were mine.

• • •

I rushed to get out of the house just in time to see a new patient at seven thirty. His name was Daniel Shelton. He hadn’t said much on the phone while setting up the appointment other than that he wanted to talk about his marriage.

Though I had only seen him once before—briefly, on the night that Sam and I met Comadoe for the first time—I recognized him in the waiting room. Daniel was the widower of the statistician from the Commerce Department labs, the woman on whom I’d performed CPR while humming “Stayin’ Alive.”

The marriage Daniel wanted to discuss with me was the one that had ended on the first day of the Fourmile Fire. His.

His name had rung no bells when he had set the appointment. He and his wife had different surnames—something my patient had never had a reason to mention in therapy.

Daniel was, it turned out, as focused a patient as his wife had been. Daniel’s final words to me at the end of that first session were, “I think I have a lot of work to do.”

I said, “Yes, we do.”

Daniel’s history was a toxic mix of neglect, abuse, loss, and perversion—an alloy of toxic components that had, until that morning, been beyond my imagination. My words to him about the work ahead were an understatement.

• • •

The moment he was out the door after his session, my cell vibrated.

It was Lauren, timing her call to the minute in order to catch me between sessions. At eight fifteen in the crazed morning routine at our house she would be attempting to corral the kids into the car to get them to school on time.

“What’s up?” was how I answered. I knew something was up. Lauren didn’t often call during the workday; she knew that she could reach me more reliably with a text. I made a guess that one of the kids had complained of feeling ill and that Lauren and I would need to negotiate juggling our work schedules for the rest of the day so we could play nurse. I began to review the day’s caseload in my head to see what I could reschedule.

Lauren said, “There’s a new fire behind town. I think it just started. We can see the smoke clearly from up here. Have you heard anything?”

My first thought?
It’s almost November. It’s too late in the season for a wildfire.
I immediately recognized it as wishful thinking. The area remained under a Red Flag Warning.

During the latter half of my session with Daniel I had noticed a few sirens erupt in the direction of Canyon Boulevard. I had not given them a second thought at the time. “I heard sirens out there,” I said to Lauren. “But I didn’t—” I paused and listened.
Jesus, there are a lot of sirens.
“Yes, I do hear sirens. They’re on Canyon.” Canyon Boulevard, only a hundred feet away, was the main route west into Boulder Canyon. “Does it look serious?” I asked, knowing damn well that during Red Flag Warnings along the Front Range there were no inconsequential wildfires.

Lauren said, “There’s a lot of smoke.”

“Location? Can you tell?”

“It’s closer to town than Fourmile was. Jonas spotted it from downstairs. He says it’s near Boulder Falls. I think it’s closer to the city than that.”

“Did you call it in?”

“Yes, but nine-one-one put us on hold. They already know.”

The number of sirens outside seemed to double. “Yeah,” I said, “they know.”

We had friends who lived up Boulder Canyon and along the panoramic ridges in the neighboring watershed, in nearby Sugar-loaf, or up Magnolia. Boulder Canyon is a steep, rocky canyon. Beyond the main roads, access is a challenge. Any fire near Boulder Canyon would provide firefighters a daunting combination of wilderness, tough access, lack of water, and depending on location, many difficult-to-defend homes. With years of beetle-kill pine dotting the hillsides, and a season’s worth of dry grasses and chaparral waiting for the smallest spark, Boulder’s mountain backdrop was as volatile as a fire pit already set with kindling and doused with lighter fluid. If winds blew in hard from the west, a nascent Boulder Canyon fire could jump quickly to the foothills’ residential enclaves. From there, any gust could carry embers over the final ridges separating the Rockies from Boulder proper.

I carried my mobile out the french door that led to the yard. From my office, a mere eight blocks from the rise of the first jutting foothill of the Rockies, I would not have the luxury of the perspective that Lauren and the kids had from their elevated perch near the rim of the other side of the Boulder Valley. I didn’t see flames or smoke.

I sniffed at the air. I said, “I just stepped outside. I can’t smell it.”

“It’s blowing up fast,” she said. “You’ll smell it soon.”

“Is it windy in the canyon? Can you tell? It’s not bad down here.”

Lauren said, “It’s windy. The smoke is being sheared north-northeast as soon as it rises out of the canyon. I think it’s doubled or tripled in size since we first started watching. It’s . . . exploding, babe. Just like Fourmile did.”

I watched a pumper truck speed west on Canyon.

Northeast.
I worried about Diane. In so many ways. Could she cope with another wildfire and evacuation? I thought it might be too much for her. I said, “Can you tell how far north it is? Does Diane have anything to worry about up Lee Hill?”

“I would say no, not yet, but . . .” Her pause gave me chills. “Most of the smoke is rising on the north side of Boulder Canyon. I would guess that Sunshine is involved, or in jeopardy. If I had to pinpoint it, I would say that the fire is burning be- tween Boulder and Sunshine, heading north. If it crosses into Sunshine, especially if it stays as close to town as it is, Pine Brook will be in its path. Wonderland, Wagonwheel Gap, and Lee Hill are only, what, another small ridge or two away? There’s nothing along the city side of those hogbacks but dry grasses, so a fire could motor north fast. Everything depends on the winds. If they blow from the west or southwest . . .”

Lee Hill was vulnerable. Diane might be in danger. Again.

Hundreds of homeowners would be in jeopardy before the fire got to Lee Hill or Olde Stage. Sunshine Canyon snakes out of Boulder only a few blocks north of downtown. In places, only a solitary hogback separates the watershed canyons. Because of the topography—near its mouth, Sunshine Canyon is neither as deep nor as steep as Boulder Canyon—Sunshine was home to more prime residential mountain real estate than was Boulder Canyon, which meant there were more homes to protect, or to lose. I presumed many residents had already received their reverse-911 orders to evacuate.

“You going to work?” I asked.

“For now, yes,” she said. “After I drop the kids at school.”

“If you hear anything official, let me know.”

“Of course. If you talk to Diane, tell her she can come stay with us, okay? She can have the whole downstairs. We’ll move the kids up for a while.”

“Yeah. Thanks. I love you.”

“Me too. Oh,” she said, “I almost forgot. Sofie called. She confirmed her trip. I am so excited to see my baby.”

• • •

Any denial I had been holding on to about the seriousness of the alarm Lauren had raised was completely fractured by the acrid smell of smoke that blew over downtown in the next minute.

On Canyon Boulevard a seemingly endless stream of emergency vehicles carried mobilizing firefighters into Boulder Canyon. I could watch the operation unfold from my office window.

I wasn’t able to reach Diane. I left a message on her home’s landline and another on her mobile. I texted Raoul, too, to let him know what was going on. He texted me back immediately. He would monitor things from Chicago.

I texted him again, asking if he had spoken with Diane. He didn’t respond.

• • •

The second time Lauren contacted me that morning, a couple of hours later, seemed more innocuous than the first. Her text read,
Have a few minutes? Can I stop by during your next break?

I read it just moments after ten, but she’d sent the text message about twenty minutes earlier. I don’t check messages during my sessions.

By the time I read Lauren’s note, evacuation orders were in place for the foothills and mountain communities closest to the fire. Everyone west of Broadway in Boulder had been placed on evacuation alert. That included my office. The Justice Center, where Lauren worked, was between my office and the entrance to the canyon. I was certain the complex was being prepared for evacuation, too.

My eleven o’clock had left a message canceling her appointment so she could help her parents evacuate. They lived in town, on Highland up near Fourth.

I wrote back to Lauren,
Free from 11 to 11:45. Does that work? Things OK?

Lauren replied,
See you @ 11.

• • •

She didn’t do it often, but Lauren occasionally stopped by with a gesture of affection during the workday. Once, a bear claw in a pink bakery box. A single stem of red ginger in a tall vase. The most memorable was a she-did-not-say-a-word-but-got-down-on-her-knees blowjob that I would recall for the rest of my life.

I sniffed the air. The smoke. The gloom. This wouldn’t be that kind of visit. What kind of visit would it be? I lacked the energy for guesses.

Damn,
I thought. I recognized that I might have created an awkward situation. My ten fifteen patient that morning was Amanda. At eleven, she would be exiting my office at the time Lauren would be arriving. Given my growing concern that Amanda might turn out to be a crucial factor in Diane’s and Raoul’s marital woes, I didn’t think that an inadvertent waiting room encounter would be the ideal way for my wife to be introduced to her.

I typed out a fresh text for Lauren.
Can you do 12:30 instead?
But before I could hit
SEND
my cell buzzed. It was an attorney with whom I’d been playing phone tag. I’d been trying to convince the lawyer not to depose me as a witness in the divorce proceedings of the parents of a sixteen-year-old boy I was seeing for depression.

The lawyer and I wasted some precious minutes talking about the fire—her sister lived up Sunshine. Once we got to business the conversation went back and forth. As my available time butted up against the ten fifteen start of Amanda’s session, I knew I hadn’t convinced her. We agreed to speak again.

• • •

Amanda was distracted. For the first time since I had begun seeing her for treatment, I watched her skip from topic to topic. The procession felt random. I sensed no grand scheme to distract me with either prurience or private jets. I recognized no theme to tie together threads of content or process. Instead, she seemed to have no affective attachment to anything she discussed. I followed her from place to place the best I could, wondering what the aimlessness meant. I was tempted to blame it on the fire, but I thought it was more likely a psychological retreat from the power of the prior session.

At one point I wondered aloud about her apparent avoidance of an issue she had previously raised. “The pregnancy?” I asked.

She said, “I’m not ready to talk about that.”

Our minutes ticked away. Over Amanda’s shoulder I could see the red light beaming near the door. The indicator told me that Lauren had arrived in the waiting room.

Amanda sensed our time was up. She grabbed her bag and scooted forward.

“Are you parked nearby?” I said. “I have a favor to ask.”

“Have you started validating?”

It was a fine retort. Congested parking near my office was a chronic complaint among my patients. Boulder’s meter-reading posse was legendary—in my experience they were the most efficient segment of city government. I smiled to acknowledge her joke.

She said, “I found a spot right across the street, in front of Bitter Bar. Downtown’s empty. Probably because of the fire.”

I said, “As you know, the architecture of this old house precludes having a separate exit for patients. That can present a privacy problem. Every so often I get a request to exit after a session using this door”—I gestured toward the solitary french door that led to the yard—“instead of through the waiting room. I try to honor those requests. On even more rare occasions, I will suggest to a patient that it might be preferable to use this door instead of the front door. This—”

“—is one of those occasions. I understand,” she said. “I’ll just sneak out the back.” She grinned. “Won’t be the first time in my life.”

My guess was that what she understood, or misunderstood, was that I was trying to minimize the risk that she might run into Raoul’s wife, Diane, in the hallway or in the waiting room. I didn’t offer a clarification—Amanda had never acknowledged knowing either Diane or Raoul. Nor did I offer an honest explanation, that I would rather Amanda not meet my wife in the waiting room.

Amanda stepped toward the french door.

I said, “The driveway is to your right. It will take you to your car.”

She wriggled her fingertips at me. “I have a mani-pedi at the St. Julien’s spa first. But I may just use this door from now on. Bye,” she said, gazing back over her shoulder at me.

She stopped midstride. With wistfulness in her eyes, she said, “He never offered me a future with him. That was never going to be part of what we were doing.”