After the main course but before dessert, Mike took my hand and led me through the house’s hallway and down a short flight of steps. He brought me to Wes’s bonus room / basement, which was lined in knotty pinewood and carpeted with dark-brown fluff.
“The pirate’s cave,” Mike said, snuggling his face in my neck. Here, Wes kept a collection of Chinese vases, wrapped in bubble plastic, and framed jerseys from the Cowboys and the 49ers. On a shelf, Wes had stored a big bronze General Custer in more of that bubble plastic. In another cabinet, I saw geodes and fancy autographed baseballs, a stuffed boar, and in the corner he’d lumped some white-supremacy survivalist hooey like expensive bottled water and boxes of freeze-dried chicken strips. Also, on the west side of the room, there was a big wall safe, which was all steel and had a Mission Impossible code box.
“What’s in here?” I whispered.
“Oh, a fuckton of euros and dollars and gold bars, like for End of Days times or I don’t know what,” Mike said, wrinkling his nose at the contraption. He looked at me and started playing with the lace on my dress. “One of these days I’m going to break into this damn safe and then take you to Bermuda.”
We started making out like a pair of wild wolves, while Laura clattered the silverware in the dining room and yelled out, “Pie!”
Mike never did take me to Bermuda. He died in ’16. Heart attack. Laura had passed the year before, from cancer.
At Mike’s funeral, Wes didn’t hug me or pat my hand, and I wouldn’t have wanted him to anyway. We sat there next to each other stiff while the police department marched up and down the aisles, offering me condolences. Wes didn’t say anything then, but apparently he was already thinking about bailing us out. It was pretty plain that I’d go broke without the policeman’s paycheck, what with Mike’s miniature pension and my having to take care of Jessie.
A week after the service, Wes sent me an email.
“You 2 can live in the back room if you want.”
Wes had more money for Jessie and me than my parents would have ever been able to scrape up. So I brought Jess and Henrietta to live with Wes at his ancestral manor. The house was a massive six-bedroom, way more than he and Laura had ever needed. It was just too big, layered with cream-colored acrylic carpet and Persian rugs. Wes had an LA architect build it to his specifications back in the ’80s, though I don’t know where all the cash went. Scattered around the salon and his office were the better examples of his celadon Chinese vase collection. Also, Laura had collected a gang of Lladró figurines, which she’d stored in a huge hutch in the living room. There was Limoges china in the kitchen and a squad of expensive books on Winston Churchill in the library. All that old-fashioned mahogany furniture of his looked as filthy to me as a family of warthogs. And then, of course, there was his man cave filled with baseballs, jerseys, bronze statues of Indian killers, the extra supplies, and his big wall safe with I guess enough money to start a new society after the sun exploded and the zombies rose.
At the little red house, I packed a few boxes and threw a lot of things away. Jessie and I drove our Prius to Edgewood and moved into a back bedroom. Laura’s old sewing station became my daughter’s play space. Right away I started doing all the cleaning and cooking and gardening. At night, I’d hold Jessie and try not to scream into my pillow over the loss of Mike.
“The baby’s a keeper, but I know what you are,” Wes said, the day we arrived. He marched me down to the bonus room and showed me the bubble-wrapped extra vases and the bronze fucking Custer. He gestured at the wall safe. “I ever see you trying to get into this thing, you’re out.” He took the time to point a finger at me, and I wasn’t carrying Jessie in my arms, but if he’d gestured at my kid like that, I would have smacked him until his lip split. I didn’t burn any calories on him insulting me, though. Mike’s death had changed the girl who had once taunted Wes about knowing her name. I knew I had to eat the grits he gave me.
I nodded and said, “I get it.”
His face shifted a little then, because he saw I wasn’t interested in his junk.
“Now, I don’t mean any ill feelings about it, understand,” he said.
“It’s okay,” I said, just feeling like kicking that man until he grunted. “You’re all right.”
Still, Wes stopped being quite such a shit by the time the fire came. He adored Jessie, who’d just turned six. Every once in a while, he’d even thank me for my chicken dinners and also my vegetarian experiments with the increased fiber. And last year on my birthday, he took me to a new French restaurant that some Oregonians set up in the venue that used to be Tattie’s. Wes had sat with me in a corner booth, silent and awkward, while I ate a steak and felt weird.
I left Wes fiddling with the hose in the front yard and bolted into the kitchen. Jessie sat at the breakfast nook finishing her milk and petting Henrietta with her feet. As soon as I came in, Henrietta sat up, stiff and staring. But my daughter did not even notice the color of the sky because she’s always daisying about like a princess petunia. I think she got her personality from her father, who was a lollygagger when he was a kid.
“Mom, Henrietta won’t drink my milk,” she yelled at me. Jessie’s a gorgeous little creature with bronze skin and long legs. She has sleek black hair and incomprehensible green eyes that must mean that I have some white in me.
“Honey, just sit there, don’t move,” I said. Henrietta jumped up and padded over, standing next to me and looking around and breathing with her mouth open.
We had a little, white, plastic television on the counter. I searched frantically for the remote and found it by the coffee pot. While Henrietta pawed me, I grabbed it and started pressing. I flipped past bright, screamy cartoons to a black lady newscaster wearing a blue suit and red lipstick. The lady looked as serious as the pope while jabbering something. The screen suddenly split to show a white woman with a pert upturned nose who wore a big black jacket and had her brown hair flipping around her head from the wind. The white woman looked to be standing on traffic-jammed Skyway, which is the main road through Paradise and cuts all the way to Chico. The sky on the screen was a darkening bronze, and when I looked out the window, I saw that it was that color here too.
“Bobbie, I think there’s an alert out for your region now,” the black lady said.
The white lady with the wind-whipped hair nodded. “There’s an evacuation alert for the community of Paradise, and there’s already traffic on the road. So we recommend—”
From behind the white lady, you could see a bloom of gold and red suddenly shooting up through the brassy sky.
“Oh,” said somebody off screen, maybe a cameraman.
“What?” the white lady said. I snapped off the television. Henrietta and I ran from the kitchen to the hall and then to my bedroom, which I shared with Jessie. I lunged toward our green bureau and opened the drawers. From the top drawer I grabbed her clothes, and from the bottom one I snatched mine, but all just randomly. I had jeans and nightgowns lumped in my arms, and did I need sneakers? I dropped the clothes and ran to the closet and tore the door open and found my Kivas there. I put them on. I grabbed Jessie’s little Mary Janes and put them in my shirt, in my sports bra. Then I ran out the room. Henrietta came flying out after me.
With the dog whining at my heels, I dashed down the hall again, making my way across the living room and then another hallway and then to a little carpeted stairway that went down to the basement / bonus room. The big safe gleamed from the west wall, all steel and with its nuclear code box where I just probably had to type in L-A-U-R-A to get to Wes’s treasure. Beneath the safe, next to the bubble-wrapped Custer, there were three big boxes of Arrowhead water and some cartons of chicken strips. I had no idea what to take, but water seemed like a good idea. I could pour it on Jessie if there was fire. I lifted one of the water boxes up, using my back and hurting it, and then jostled with it up the stairs. I almost tripped over Henrietta but somehow stayed on my feet. I ran through the kitchen with my load as fast as
I could and then out to the front yard.
Wes sprayed me and Henrietta as soon as I hit the lawn. He had turned on the hose full force and thumbed the nozzle so that it jetted out with a big, white fan of water, and the wind sent it shooting crazily everywhere.
I took the blast in the face and kept going. “Help me, help me,” I said.
“Just go,” Wes said. “This is my house and Laura’s. I’m not leaving it to burn.”
I blinked. My eyes were watering even without the help of the hose. The sky had turned a bright, bright gold. You could smell smoke, thick smoke, acid-smelling smoke. Everybody on the street was racing around and loading their cars.
“You could lose everything, Wes,” I said. “Tell me the code for the safe, and if I can, I’ll get your stuff and we’ll pack it out of here,” I said.
He looked at me funny. “I don’t think so.”
“Okay,” I said. He could have called me Pocahontas right then and started dancing around in his Klan hat, and I would not have given a single tiny shit. I turned from him and ran straight to my Prius—the Prius instead of his giant Yukon in the driveway. It was a stupid move, but, like his weirdness with the safe, I’d learned not to mess with Wes’s things and I was just operating on habit. I dashed to the curb in my Kivas and put the box of water down in front of my car. I grabbed at the Prius’s back door, but it was locked. I started crying. I ran back into the house and raced around looking for my keys.
“Mom, Mom,” Jessie yelled from the kitchen.
I swear to the Lord almighty that goblins must have taken my keys and hid them under the Dora the Explorer sweatshirt in the second bathroom, on the floor, by the shower stall. I’d had to stand in the hall with Henrietta growling at my feet and piece my actions of the night before and that morning back together. I wasn’t thinking straight. I shouldn’t have been focusing on those keys. It was a waste of time. I finally figured it out, ran to the bathroom, and thrashed around until I found them under the sweatshirt. Henrietta tried to help me by digging at the clothes. I jangled the keys into my hand, and we ran back out to the kitchen. I snatched up Jessie from the kitchen table, gripping her in both arms so that one of her shoes fell out of my bra. I ran back with her and Henrietta out to the front yard.
I think it might have been eight forty-five by that time, maybe nine or even nine fifteen. You could hear sirens. You could see towers of smoke from far off. I looked at the cars fleeing down Edgewood. Wes remained standing on the soaking lawn with a tsunami of water pouring out of his hose onto the myrtles, the cottonwoods, the dry grass, the house windows, the whole facade. Jessie had her face in my ear and started screaming. I looked at the Prius, and then I looked at the black Yukon shining in the driveway. If fire swept over our car, we’d have a better chance of barreling through in that monstrosity than in my flimsy eco compact.
I ran back to the house with Jessie bouncing up and down on my shoulder. I dashed into the foyer. There was a big mahogany secretary set up on the wall with little porcelain Chinese dishes that held keys and coins. I saw Wes’s Yukon keys on their big, thick, plastic keychain in a little red dish. I balanced Jessie on one hip and grabbed them. Henrietta started barking. I ran back out to the front yard and dashed for the Yukon and clicked it open. I tossed Jessie into the beige leather back seat, and Henrietta jumped in after her.
Then I ran back to Wesley.
“Dude, listen,” I said.
Wesley’s face was folded up like a wallet. He stayed on the lawn pouring water on the house where he’d lived with his wife and seemed like he was ready to die there.
“Wes,” I said.
“Oh, God,” he said.
“Wes, Jessie and I need you in our lives to protect us and be with us as a family,” I said, insanely saying any hokum that I thought he’d listen to. “You have to come with us. We can’t make it without you.”
He turned and looked at me with real, tender, human eyes, for maybe the first time.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. I was already running to the Yukon’s driver’s side.
“I’m driving,” he said, dropping the hose.
“You’re an old man,” I yelled. “And you have to protect the baby from the fire with your body.”
“Okay,” he said.
We got into the car, slammed the doors. We left the Arrowhead water on the curb. Jessie began screaming again. I started the Yukon and jammed it down the driveway and almost crashed into a Camry that was speeding down Edgewood. Wes gripped onto Jessie in the back seat and didn’t say anything about my freak driving. I screeched onto the street and pushed the gas so we zipped toward the end of Edgewood, where we’d turn the corner, onto Pearson.
There was a traffic jam, right at the stop sign. Pearson was one long clog of cars. Our Yukon idled four back from the intersection. I recognized Martin’s brown Dodge in front of me and Nancy’s gray something, I don’t know, a four-door. Somebody else I couldn’t make out had taken the front of the line, ahead of Nancy. Big, fluffy pieces of ash fell down from the sky, like snowflakes. I had to turn on the wipers just to push the crud off the windshield.
“No problem,” I said, in a calm, normal voice, like I was at Starbucks and they’d accidentally put oat milk in my Frappuccino. “Just need this to clear, and then we’ll be off.”
In the back seat, Wes held onto Jessie, who sobbed herself hoarse. He kissed her many times on the cheek. “You’re a very good baby,” he said.
“I’m not a baby,” Jessie wailed. She didn’t know what was going on.
Henrietta sat quivering next to Wes. The dog began to nudge her way up past Wes and Jessie, then slid up in the space between my seat and the Yukon’s big console where you keep your Big Gulps in its handy holes. She slipped through and lumbered onto the front seat next to me. Then she just sat there, looking out of the windshield, like a person.
I reached out and petted Henrietta on the nose and flashed on Mike. He used to roll around with Logan and Henrietta, and the pups had opened up their mouths soft and pretended to bite him while he laughed.
“Yup yup yup,” I said, rolling up all the automatic windows because the smoke and ash came flowing in. “We’re going to be okay. We’re going to be good. We’re going to be fine.”
We sat there. We sat there. The cars didn’t move. We sat there. More ash flakes fell. I don’t know how much time passed. The sky began to change again. Black smoke started to stream into the gold sky, like the design on a Chinese vase.
“Come on, come on,” I said.
“Move your ass!” I could hear a man screaming, I don’t know from where.
The car at the intersection moved onto Pearson. Maybe ten minutes passed, maybe more. A full, thick stream of cars waited behind me. Ahead of me, Nancy switched on her turn signal, which flickered at me like a sign from another, normal, world.
“Do you think it’ll all burn down?” Wes asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“My safe’s fireproof, but I don’t know to what degree,” he said.
“All I care about’s that child you’re holding onto now,” I said.
Maybe ten, twelve, twenty, I don’t know how many more minutes crawled by.
“I’m never going to make back what I lose,” Wes said. “I’m too old.”
“Insurance’ll cover you, and then Trump’ll make you a rich man with one of those disaster packages,” I rattled on. The sky was really starting to darken, and I could see a thick haze of smoke coming in fast on a current.
Nancy moved onto Pearson. I inched the Yukon to the stoplight. I turned on my turn signal like she had because we had all become robots.
“That asshole will leave us stranded,” Wes said. “He’ll piss on some more hookers and burn it all on golf.”
I started laughing. Tears were streaming down my face. “You liked him, I thought.”
“Only on Mexicans and Puerto Ricans,” Wes said.
“Right,” I laughed some more.
“Not you,” Wes said.
“I don’t care, it’s okay,” I said. “Because if we get out of this alive, I’m going to punch you till you sneeze teeth, you old sonofabitch.”
“Okay,” Wes said.
I turned my head over my shoulder to look at my daughter tucking her nose into Wes’s armpit. “But everything’s good, right, Jessie? Everything’s good.”
Next to me, Henrietta’s jaws were working strange, like she was nibbling something. I saw froth on her lips.
“Everything’s good,” Jessie said. She clung onto grandpa but had stopped crying, I think.
“Here we go,” I said. I got an open spot and moved onto Pearson. Pearson was filled with traffic. We sat there like on Edgewood, watching the known sky disappear. The wind whipped through the world. The pine trees standing tall above us thrashed and tottered against a heavens that quickly crowded in with orange-pewter clouds. We still had to move from Pearson, past the Elementary School, past the Gold Nugget Museum, past the park, and onto Skyway. From Skyway, we’d flee southeast to Chico, about forty minutes out.
We barely moved, just little bits, while it got hotter in the car. The sky got swallowed by busy blackness. The earth burned fast. The people used both lanes, of course. I didn’t like to see the people in the lane to our left. Women and men bent over their wheels, mumbling to themselves, kids scrambling in the back seats. At one point I saw Shelly in her Dodge Caravan, which was strange, because I thought she had been long gone. She saw me, and we smiled at each other, our faces both shuddering. We looked away from each other. We looked toward the road ahead, which got worse as the minutes ticked away.
“Don’t let her look out the window,” I said to Wes.
At both sides of the road, the landscape turned into what looked I swear to holy Jesus like molten lava. Black-brown clouds streamed down through a bloody sky and onto a swell of hills that had fried deep black and were streaked through with flame. It was getting furnace-like hot in the car. It was close, like you couldn’t inhale right.
The World Doesn't Work That Way, but It Could Page 8
