Smoke (27 page)

To date, over 500 homes have been evacuated. Approximately 7,000 acres of brush and timber have been consumed, and the fire is nearing the break that firefighters have been working on all week just below the north ridge of Nelson Peak. If it continues at its current pace of advancement, the fire is expected to reach the top of the Peak this evening.

The local weather outlook remains an issue, with the current unseasonable temperatures and high winds expected to continue.

Neither the sheriff’s office nor the investigator in charge returned the
Daily
’s calls. The paper received an official response by e-mail from the sheriff’s office just before going to press advising that “this is an ongoing investigation and details will be made public when appropriate.”

Maps of the evacuation area are available on this website, at all county offices, and through the Nelson County Emergency Services website. All residents should collect their important papers and any portable valuables, and be ready to evacuate. Residents are encouraged to sign up for emergency service alerts via text or e-mail if they have not done so already. More information can be found at www.nelsoncountyemergencyservices.com.

CHAPTER 30

Survival

Elizabeth

This is one of the things
I love most about Ben.

About ten miles from town stands the Majestic. At over fourteen thousand feet, it’s the highest peak in the state, and the third highest on the continent. The climb takes two days for most people, and involves gaining seven thousand vertical feet.

It is not a walk in the park; it is a climb.

I’d wanted to scale the mountain since I first saw it. It pulled at me as I imagine Everest did to George Mallory. Because it was something that would push me to my very limits. Because it’s only when I’m at those limits that I know I’m truly alive. Because I had some stupid notion that a missing piece of me could be found if I pushed myself to that place.

And, of course, because it was there. In fact, in Nelson, it is everywhere. It’s the view on every postcard, a place others recognize even if they’ve never been here. It’s the view from our kitchen window, the one I look at every morning, sipping my coffee till the mist burns away.

It claims lives every year. Usually more in winter, but every summer too. Unprepared tourists, usually, but more than once a local who was caught by a fast-moving thunderstorm, or lost their footing in the snow field, or twisted their ankle in the rocky debris at the bottom of the glacier. You get used to these kinds of deaths in Nelson. You just do.

The year I turned thirty-five, Ben agreed to climb it with me. He’d summited when he was eighteen with a group of friends. The way he always described the trip made it seem perfectly doable, and there are many for whom it is just that.

I was not one of those people.

Even though I’ve hiked my whole life, I’m afraid of certain kinds of heights. Everything else I’d climbed had involved a trail, no risk, no dangling off cliff faces. But the Majestic involved all of those things and more, and so while it drew me in, it terrified me too.

We spent what time we could that summer training. It was a light fire season, so I was often at home, and even when I was away, I could put in half days hiking or acquiring rope skills at a local gym. We decided to go at the end of August, if I could get away, since the snowpack would likely be gone by then. As I climbed up interior walls to try to get over my fears, I convinced myself I could do it.

We started out on a dry August day under an endless, empty sky. We had an arduous but breathtaking first day’s hike up to the lower saddle, where we’d spend the night in a hut. Our packs were heavy but manageable. Eight hours after we’d set off, we were watching the sunset turning first one way, then another, snapping pictures, marveling at the two-state view. Somehow we managed to sleep in the hut, which was full of snoring men. Then we rose in the dark, dressed, and snapped our headlamps into place to take ourselves to the foot of the first wall we’d have to climb.

Our guide led the pitch and set up our ropes. I was to climb next, the rope trailing from him to me to keep me from falling. I was fine at first, but then the route veered off sharply to the side, right at the top of the fifty-foot pitch. The exposure made me nervous, and my foot started shaking. Then my leg. Then my entire body. My hands were so slick with sweat I started to lose my purchase. Everyone on the ground yelled encouragement, but nothing could calm me down.

I slipped. I lost my hold on the rock and fell sideways like a giant pendulum, crashing into the rock face with my shoulder before the rope could arrest my fall. It was all I could do to keep from sobbing. I had nothing left in reserve. I wanted to be lowered down and soothed and medevac’d off the mountain.

Then I heard Ben’s voice.

“You got this, Beth. You’re going to be okay.”

He said it over and over again until my shakes went away, and my hands found the rock again, and I made it up to safety.

Three hours later, we celebrated on the summit, Ben kissing me with sun-chapped lips, and everyone slapping me on the back though we still had a long way down.

But it was Ben who got me up there.

Without him, I wouldn’t have made it.

That, and a lot of other things.

I wake up on Saturday morning with one purpose: to tell Ben I’m pregnant. Come what may, whatever the consequence, he needs to know, and I need to tell him now. He’ll be angry that I didn’t say anything sooner. But I only really knew for sure last night before the town meeting, and with the chaos afterward, I didn’t get home until late, and an emotional conversation at that moment wouldn’t have helped either of us. So I climbed into bed and wrapped Ben’s arm around me, like we used to sleep, like we used to be, and he snuggled into my back and his lips grazed my neck, and we fell asleep without any words passing between us, either of revelation or regret.

But even thinking about that is making excuses, so . . .

“Ben,” I say, turning toward him.

An empty bed greets me. There’s a Ben-shaped depression in the mattress, but no man to fill it. I glance at the clock. It’s only a little after seven. He must be eating breakfast and letting me get some sleep.

I push myself up. I feel bone-weary tired. I can’t remember the last time I felt like this. Is it the pregnancy, the exertion of the fire, or the fact that I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in months?

Probably all three.

My phone shakes on the bedside table. An incoming e-mail alert. They’re hourly now, the faint buzz of their arrival turning me over in my sleep. I know it will be bad without even reading it, but I read it anyway. Nothing’s changed. More acres consumed, almost no containment, more personnel, more costs, more water drops coming throughout the day. I know that today will be the day that makes or breaks the fire, which seems fitting. It might also take my house. But perhaps I can salvage my marriage.

As if to confirm my gloomy thoughts, tendrils of smoke slip past the window like they’re haunting me. I’m so used to being around smoke I didn’t even notice the smell had seeped inside. I’ve caught the scent now, though. It’s marking its territory. It wants me, this town, this idyll three miles away. It will not discriminate if it is not stopped.

Okay, Beth. Enough procrastinating.

I turn toward the edge of the bed, and the room spins. I place my feet on the floor and take a few deep breaths. I rest my hand on my stomach. It’s warm to the touch. Is it possible I’m feeling the heat of the cocoon already forming inside me? How did I not notice it before? Given the state of my relationship with Ben, there’s only one conception date that makes sense, and it’s far enough back to make me embarrassed. Am I really so tone-deaf to my own body?

The nausea passes, and though I may still be a shade greener than my eyes, I pull a bathrobe over my pajamas and run a brush through my hair, and I will have to do.

I follow the smell of oven-baked croissants, suddenly ravenous, certain it will lead me to Ben. They’re his favorite way to start the day, something his mother indulges him with whenever she can.

This feels like a good omen, that he must be in a happy mood. But as I near the kitchen, I hear raised voices. Ben’s and—surprisingly, given the hour—his mother’s. They stop talking when I enter. Ben’s face is white as a sheet above his favorite sleeping T-shirt. Grace looks miserable, and I know what Ben is going to say before he does.

“Is it true?”

And though this is not how I imagined this would go, I lift my chin and put everything I have into a smile of good news, and say, “Yes, it is.”

CHAPTER 31

Don’t Fence Me In

Mindy

If Mindy had been allowed
to sleep on the floor outside the cell where they were keeping Angus, she would have.

That’s what she used to do when Carrie was in the hospital: sleep in her room, curled up on an uncomfortable chair. Sometimes she’d end up on the floor, resting on several crummy hospital pillows scavenged from various rooms to break the hardness beneath her, wrapped in a scratchy blanket to keep out the chill. There was a bed in the adjacent room—Peter sometimes slept there when one of their mothers could stay with Angus—but that seemed too far away to Mindy. She needed to be as close as possible to her daughter. She would have crawled right up into the crib with Carrie if she fit.

That’s how she felt knowing Angus was locked behind bars, lying on some mattress on a metal bed, his personal effects confiscated. She hadn’t been allowed to see the place where they put him yet, though she remembered from a conversation with Elizabeth that the cells were in the basement. Aboveground or belowground, just that word,
cell
, was awful, and she spent the night trying to prevent the images from every cop show she’d ever watched from racing through her mind. Just a few months before, she and Peter had binge-watched
Orange Is the New Black
, and she would’ve given anything to erase those scenes from her brain. The strip searches. The anonymous uniforms. The aching loneliness. The danger from the other prisoners. Surely Angus would be okay in the few hours she had to be separated from him?

And in the morning, they’d have to let her in. They must let her in. If only she and Elizabeth were talking, Elizabeth would know what to do.

And perhaps that was the solution now: Elizabeth.

Angus was the worst liar when he was a child. Not that he was bad at lying—goodness, no, Mindy would say whenever someone asked her about it. He was an excellent liar; it was almost something to be proud of, a prodigious skill.

He simply lied about everything—little things, big things, all the things in between. And not only when he was in trouble or wanted something. He seemed to delight in the act of fabrication, giving flight to his imagination, his apparent six-year-old dissatisfaction with the life he was surrounded by.

One time, when they were all flying to Florida for her father’s seventy-fifth birthday, Mindy listened with fascination as Angus convincingly told the woman he was seated next to on the airplane about his conjoined twin sisters who had to be left at home because “they didn’t fit properly into an airplane seat.” They were joined “here,” he said, pointing to his heart. “They share it, you see,” he said with perfect solemnity. “It’s awful dangerous.”

Mindy admired his insight as she blushed at his falsehood. Mindy shared her heart with her children too, and it
was
awful dangerous.

A week with no television, that one had gotten him, and an admonishment given in the airplane bathroom to go back to his seat and apologize to the nice lady.

“But she
liked
hearing my sthrory,” Angus said with the remnant of the lisp Mindy sometimes thought he played up when he was in trouble. But he couldn’t be that calculating, could he? Not at
six
.

No TV wasn’t a punishment that stuck, nor were any of the others. After one particularly bad lie about Carrie turning blue in her bedroom had brought a panicked Mindy and Peter scrambling up the stairs two at a time to find Carrie perfectly all right, quietly reading a junior ballet magazine, Peter had turned on his heel, picked Angus up, and administered a hard spanking, twice, to his eight-year-old bottom. Then Peter had thrust a crying Angus into Mindy’s arms and gone to his study and closed the door. She knew Peter had fled in shame. His own father had been fond of the switch, and he’d vowed, they both had, never to spank their children no matter what.

When Peter emerged an hour later, his eyes still wet, they talked about taking Angus to a psychologist to see if something could be done. They got a referral from a friend, and a few anxious sessions later, they’d been reassured he’d grow out of it, that it was just a phase, perhaps longer than one might like, but a phase nonetheless. They weren’t raising a sociopath, as they had both secretly feared. Angus was a caring and empathetic boy who simply didn’t see the harm in telling people about the stories he made up in his head.

Angus had seen the psychologist for a year, and the lying had diminished, then disappeared. Or so they wanted to believe. Perhaps Peter did believe it, but Mindy was never sure. He stopped the overt lying, of course, the things he could be caught at. But whenever Mindy found him chatting amiably to a stranger when they were on vacation or somewhere else they were unlikely to return to, she always wondered.

“Your son is so
interesting
,” she’d heard one too many times.

So Mindy knew that Angus was more than capable of spinning a tale. It was the rest of it that left her breathless, and doubting.

“I’m not sure I should be doing this,” Deputy Clark told Mindy as he led her down the stairs to the holding cells as the sun was rising through the smoke-covered morning.

Mindy hadn’t been able to get hold of Elizabeth. It took all her courage to call, but when the phone went right to voice mail, she hadn’t bothered leaving a message. But that didn’t mean she didn’t have other tricks up her sleeve. Specifically, crying. She’d used the crying-mother routine to great effect in the past, and she wasn’t above using it now. She was surprised, really, by how quickly the skill had come back to her.