Wildfire

by Carrie Mac

  Screw it. I got out and flapped my arms and tried to stop crying, but that just made my cast slide up and down and hit my wrist over and over. These mountains are not claustrophobic. Not to me. My mother hated them, and wrote entire compositions about their dark powers.

  Not me.

  These are my mountains.

  It was a clear day, but the tops of the mountains were shrouded in a smoky haze. It was starting already. Or, more accurately, wildfires had been popping up and being put out for weeks, but there hadn’t been that much smoke until now. Now there were fires that couldn’t be contained. Burning and burning despite every effort to put them out. Carrying on, arrogant and sure of their hunger, of the wilderness they wanted to eat. Just before I’d left the house, Pete had texted me from the event that this smoke was from a fire on the west side of Ross Lake.

  Let the wildfire season begin! Good luck at the doc. Countdown to Fire Camp!

  I started to text him back, but I couldn’t find the right words.

  About Fire Camp. I don’t think I’m going to go, but you

  Delete.

  Wait, a fire on the west side of Ross Lake? Plus this wind? That meant I should smell it. Did I? I started again.

  Did you smell it? I don’t smell anything. Must be small.

  His reply was immediate:

  500-acre burn area. More later, going into ceremony. Make sure doc doesn’t cut off your arm. You need it for camp.

  For Fire Camp. “Where Future Wildfire Fighters Learn to Fight!” Pete and I had worked on my dad for the last three summers just to get him to agree to let me go when we were old enough. Ultimately, he still doesn’t want me to go, but he’s wisely decided not to stop me.

  “Do you know what ‘self-immolation’ means?” he asked as he held a pen over the place where he had to sign his permission.

  “Okay, that’s really grim and you should be ashamed for exposing your vulnerable young child to such horrors. Also, Fire Camp is not the same as dousing myself with gas and lighting a match, Dad.”

  “Isn’t it, though?” He was grinning because he was trying to be funny, but I know him better than that. Funny doesn’t work well for him. He’s the kind of guy who goes to make a toast at a municipal code conference and gets led off the stage by some nice guy with a clipboard. Mostly because my dad doesn’t know when his own jokes are over or when to stop waiting for people to laugh, or when to pay attention to Clipboard Guy waving at him from the wings.

  “It’s super safe, Dad,” I said. “They wouldn’t let kids do it if it wasn’t. Consider it my civic duty. That’s a good thing, right? You raised a kid who wants to help? Besides, your generation caused climate change, so now here’s me and Pete trying to do something about the fires that are your fault.”

  “I use cloth grocery bags,” Dad said with a genuine laugh. “And I recycle.”

  “While driving your gigantic truck.”

  “That is the only way to get snow machines where they need to go,” he said. “Which you don’t complain about at all.”

  “You’re a good person, Dad.” I patted him on the shoulder. “Now sign.”

  * * *

  —

  But now I don’t even want to go to Fire Camp. I just can’t imagine it right now. I don’t have the energy to scale a climbing wall in a forty-pound suit or run backward dragging a two-hundred-pound dummy with me. I don’t want to do trust exercises like doing a ropes course blindfolded, with Pete—or worse, some stranger—talking me through it from the ground. I don’t want to eat in a loud mess hall with twenty other teenagers I don’t know. I don’t want to put in the effort to get to know them, even though they’re probably as close to a posse as I’ll ever get. After all, what kind of weirdo wants to run into the fire when everyone else is packing up their cars with their dogs and their clothes and driving in the other direction? I don’t want to sit in a classroom and pretend that I can focus on all the statistics when I just want to remember how Gigi put her fingers to her ear whenever she was being serious, and how she put that same hand to her collarbone if she was lying to you. Who cares how many hectares burned last year when Gigi isn’t on this planet anymore? I want to make a mental inventory of all the movies we ever watched together and then rewatch them, not learn about forest floor management, emergency evacuations, ropes. I don’t care how it will look on my college application, which is perhaps the only reason my dad signed that permission letter. There won’t be any college anytime soon.

  I blew that out of the water.

  I just want to stay home.

  I don’t want to go anywhere.

  I am stoned. Over the last two weeks, I’ve eaten all the edibles—gummy bears, cookies, two lollipops. I was saving the last bottle of Gigi’s THC tincture for Fire Camp, although now that I’m not going, I might crack into it when her weed runs out. For now, I am lying on her bed, crosswise, sucking on the vaporizer she bought when she was first diagnosed with cancer. It’s like something a Hollywood starlet with pin curls would smoke while reclined on a chaise lounge. I haven’t lain in her bed properly since the night she died, because sometimes I think I might never get up. So I lie like this, or sometimes on the floor, or I sit in her pastel pink recliner in front of her TV.

  Dust motes dance lazily in the light between the curtains, weaving in and out of the curls of steam from the vaporizer. I can hear the toilet running, which used to drive Gigi mad. Dad fixed it three times, but not since she died. He says it’s pretty sad when a running toilet makes you think of someone you loved.

  The neighbor is mowing his lawn, which I swear he does twice a day. Or maybe it’s because even when he’s not mowing, I hear it. Like when you’re vacuuming and you hear your phone ringing, even if it’s not.

  Farther down the block, a bunch of kids are running through a sprinkler, screeching and laughing. Gigi loved the sound of kids playing, even during a super-quiet part in a movie. She never turned it up, and so sometimes we watched entire nighttime spy missions with the soundtrack of red rover or tag.

  Dad’s sprinkler is spitting and arcing one way over his prize peas, then the other, over his cucumbers. Back and forth.

  If I am stoned, these things should not matter. If I am stoned, then why am I still worrying about how to tell Pete that I’m not going to Fire Camp? Why am I still rehearsing the conversation that I don’t want to have? Why can’t I just be still, with nothing in my head but a low, pleasant buzz?

  Pete, you’re going to hate me, but…

  Pete, I don’t know how to tell you this…

  Pete, would you forgive me if I ruin everything?

  For once in my life, I kind of just want Pete to leave me alone. Not because I don’t want to be with him, but because I don’t want him to be with me when I’m like this.

  * * *

  —

  The incredibly tedious Chariots of Fire is just about to start on the Movie Classics Channel for the second time today. Gigi loved this movie. She knew long sections of the dialogue by heart and could play that song on the piano. It says something when a song sounds the same even if the piano hasn’t been tuned in years. The piano was my mom’s thing.

  But I’m not changing the channel. In honor of Gigi, her TV will only ever play the Movie Classics Channel, as it has done ever since she moved in.

  I suck on the vaporizer and reach for my pen and my notebook. These things that I hear and see are poetic. The dust motes belong in a poem. Gigi was always saying that as she jotted things down in her notebook. “This belongs in a poem, absolutely. It needs a home in a poem.” And then a year later, she’d show me the poem with the angled sunlight or the small child’s shoes or the broken fence in it. But when I try to describe something that should have a home in a poem, even my writing looks scratchy and weak on the paper. Glimmer wisps. Slanted glow. Gigi would say, Your muse is out running errands. S
he’ll be back when she’s found the right eye shadow.

  Said the woman who only ever wore Max Factor.

  Here it comes. The beach-running opening. All those fit, young, exclusively white men in their white shorts and white shirts and bare feet, and the guy with the goofy grin.

  A commercial for laundry detergent.

  Car insurance.

  Old-age home.

  Mute.

  A draft catches the drapes and they lift away just a little, exposing more light and all the dust swirling inside it. This is the poem I’ve been trying to write since before Gigi died. One good poem. To capture these tiny things that have loomed so large since Gigi came home to die.

  I open my notebook and thumb through the pages of half starts and crossed-out lines.

  Dust motes like translucent

  Outside, I hear the noises of normal life, and I wonder

  If they’ve ever felt loss like this, heavy and sour, like

  A piece of paper falls out. That piece of paper. The one that I put in recycling and then took out again three times. I don’t know why I’m keeping it. It’s not going to make me change my mind about anything.

  As per our conversation in May, we regret to inform you that Annie has not achieved a sufficient GPA to move into twelfth grade. Even with summer school, she will need to redo her junior-year coursework in full. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to call.

  The letter from Principal Hazan came before Gigi died, but I didn’t tell her about it, and neither did my dad. He read it, then took it to work with him. Later, in the driveway when he got home, he texted me to come outside. I stood on the stoop, arms crossed, ready to get into a fight. Dad stood there in his code enforcement officer uniform that is a size too small, the paper folded in one hand, his lunch box in his other.

  “I’m guessing you don’t want Gigi to know about this?”

  I shook my head.

  “Probably because you and I both know the only reason you’re not at school is because of her.”

  I nodded.

  “And I said that was okay, right? Because what was I going to do? Physically force you to go?”

  I shook my head.

  “No. Because I’m not that dad. And you’re not that kid. And you have one grandmother, and she is more than that in so many ways, and we want to do right by her, correct?”

  I nodded again. This was one of those lectures that if I talked, I’d only make it worse. So I didn’t. Nods, gestures, acceptable. Words? Defense? Not the right time.

  “So I said that was okay, so long as Pete brought your work to you and you stayed caught up. That’s what I said, right?”

  I nodded again.

  “Speak up anytime, Banana.” I could tell by his voice that he wanted to be angrier too. “Tell me what your plan is.”

  My turn. Only I didn’t have anything good to say. “I don’t have a plan.”

  “You had one. To do your schoolwork.”

  “While Gigi is dying?”

  “That was the deal. I’m pretty sure that you don’t want me to go in there and tell her about this letter.”

  “You wouldn’t! She’d just feel guilty. On her deathbed!”

  “Okay, then. How about your plan?”

  “I don’t have a plan, Dad.”

  “I’ve got one. You do your junior year over.”

  “I am not going back.”

  “The hell you’re not. You go back. Redo the year. You broke your end of the bargain, so now I get to decide.”

  “You can’t make me go, Dad. You’re not that dad. You just said.”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment. Just stared two holes right through me with his disappointment.

  “Online, then,” he said. “Those are your two choices.”

  No. I was not going to do that either. No more school, online or in person. Not for now. But I nodded, because all of it could wait while Gigi was busy actively dying.

  He approached me and gave me a tight hug. Even with his hands full, he gives the best hugs, as if he’s doing it on behalf of my mom too. One parent, twice the love.

  * * *

  —

  The front door opens and closes.

  “Annie?”

  Pete.

  “In here.”

  I leap off of the bed and throw open the window. The room stinks of apple-scented pot, and sheets that need to be washed because I haven’t changed them since Gigi died on them, and me, who needs to be washed too. It’s been at least four days since I’ve showered. When he walks into the room, I’m sitting up on the edge of the bed, with the men of Chariots of Fire running around a track while even more white people yell from the stands, each and every one of them dressed in beige or cream or brown. One could almost believe that I’ve been functionally upwardly mobile in the hours before he walked into the room. Pete tosses his I ♥ Unicorns trucker hat onto Gigi’s bed and holds up a greasy paper bag. Gigi never let him eat with his hat on.

  “Falafel and pakora.” Then he frowns. “You still have your cast.”

  “Interesting food combo.”

  “Got a problem with it?”

  “Nope.”

  “Cast?”

  “Car died.”

  “Car died. Just a few weeks after being fixed from the crash?”

  “Correct.”

  “Died. Huh.”

  “Yeah.” I glance down at the floor for a second and then tell him the truth, because we suck at lying to each other. “Okay, the car is fine. I just couldn’t do it.” I lift my broken arm. My not-broken-anymore arm. “I don’t want to cut through her flowers.”

  “The only other option is to let your arm atrophy even more, until the cast can just slip off. You might not ever regain full use of it, though. Hold this.” He hands me the bag and pulls the bedside table to his knees and starts unloading the take-out boxes.

  “Falafel and pakora don’t really go together, Pete.”

  “Fried and fried goes together,” he says. “Preet’s mom serves fries with her samosas. She knows what she’s doing. She’ll be here soon. Not her mom. Preet, I mean.”

  “How was the thing yesterday?” I will myself to ask it. I just don’t like bringing Preet up when she’s not even here. It’s like it drains the time I do get with him, but I know I should ask.

  “They had actual caviar,” he says. “The black stuff you see in movies. Kind of gross watching people eat it. Especially when they licked their lips after and there were tiny, shiny black bits of fishy nasty rolling everywhere.”

  “Unicorn Pete here.” I do my best impression of him. “Reporting live from a decidedly not-vegan buffet.”

  “They did have these little cards that said if things were vegan, or had nuts, or gluten, or whatever. Even kosher.”

  “Rich people.”

  “Love their little printed card labels that look like they were sloppily handwritten.”

  “And calling the servers by their first name to acknowledge that they see them as people.” We’ve done enough serving gigs at the ecology center to know the type. “Thanks so much for the pakora, Peter. It looks really great, Peter. I mean, really great, Peter. Do you have plans for college, Peter? Tell me you have plans for college. Because we have to get you out of this station, and I don’t mean salads.”

  “Hey, I did that,” Pete says. “To Clive, who brought out a new platter of these amazing smoked tofu and watercress things.”

  “Clive probably thought you were hitting on him.”

  “He was cute.”

  “Did you introduce Clive to your girlfriend? The one the buffet was honoring?”

  “She was off filling her plate with five pounds of gourmet vegetarian hors d’oeuvres.”

  “What did she think of the little black
pearls of fishy loveliness?”

  “She says if there was ever a reason she’s vegetarian, caviar is it.”

  “Not being Hindu?”

  “Besides that. And anyway, her brother eats meat all the time, even if their parents have no idea.”

  “Scandal!” I head off to the kitchen and come back with a load of stuff left over from Gigi’s not-dead-yet party. Paper plates with illustrations of chandeliers on them. Clear forks. “Like something out of Cinderella,” Gigi said when we picked them out. I told her that we had enough plates for us, Pete and his dad, Preet, the doctor, and the two home care nurses. She didn’t want anybody else, yet she did want to plan a party for two dozen people. Which is why we have a lot left over, including entire trays of sausage rolls in the freezer and two boxes of the red wine only she would drink. My dad likes cheap wine and cheaper beer, but even he won’t drink it.

  Pete loads a plate with food and hands it to me.

  “Want to?” I hold out the vaporizer. “Before we eat?”

  “I think this thing is overheating from overuse.” He takes it from me and switches it off.

  “Want to crack into one of those boxes of wine?”

  “Definitely not,” Pete says. “I know she always said it was for her migraines, but I think that stuff gives most people migraines.”

  “We could make sangria.”

  “No we could not, because that stuff tastes like ass.”

  “You’re lucky that she’s not here to kick said ass of yours.”

  It’s only when I get Pete to myself that we can ever have a drink together. When Preet is around, he doesn’t drink at all, because she doesn’t. Solidarity.

  “The cast has to come off,” he says through a mouthful of pakora and tamarind sauce. “It’s not an option. Your arm will atrophy even more if you don’t. We’re going to go after lunch.”

  I don’t say anything because I do know that it’s ridiculous to want to keep the cast on only because Gigi drew on it. I know it, even if I don’t feel it. The doorbell rings.