Smoke

by Catherine McKenzie

  We lie there, afterward, in the quiet room, filling it with the sounds of our breathing. The wind rattles the window in its frame, and I feel that same prickle of gooseflesh I did the last time we did this here.

  I wonder which of us is going to speak first, what either of us is going to say. I don’t know how I feel about this or how he does or even, really, why it happened. Does it mean we regret our decision? Are we both trying to cling to the one thing that always remained good between us, no matter how vicious our words got? Is this just an excuse to feel something, anything, other than loss?

  I don’t get a chance to find out, because right when I feel like one of us, maybe me, is going to speak, say something important even, my phone starts buzzing insistently in the pocket of the pants we flung aside in our haste. I let it go to voice mail, but then the buzzing starts again, and I haul myself up, feeling bruised by the floor, and slip Ben’s T-shirt over my head while I reach for the phone.

  “Liz?” Rich says. “Where are you? All hell’s breaking loose here.”

  “What? I—”

  “What did I hire you for if this kind of shit was going to happen?”

  I sense Ben standing next to me, climbing slowly back into his clothes. He must be able to hear Rich’s angry tone coming out of the phone.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What’s going on? What’s happened?”

  “I told you Phillips was responsible for this.”

  “But I really don’t think he is. I saw him today, and he was able to tell me who the ringleader of that gang of kids is, and—”

  “You’re not listening to me. He did it.”

  “Why are you so sure all of a sudden?”

  “Because his house was about to be repossessed.”

  DAY THREE

  CHAPTER 16

  Take Cover

  Mindy

  When the roar of low-flying planes started at three in the morning, Mindy was fully awake.

  She’d been tossing and turning all night, never able to catch even a moment of sleep. She knew this because every time she finally closed her eyes and opened them again, sure it must be at least an hour later, less than five minutes had gone by. It was enough to drive anyone insane, especially since Mindy felt like she was halfway there already.

  It had started with the e-mails. Well, one e-mail, to be precise, her own. She and Kate had written it together, but Kate had insisted Mindy be the one to send it because it was “her idea, after all.”

  Her idea.

  She was starting to feel as if it had been a bad one.

  Take how the organizing committee had reacted to the news.

  “Will everybody calm down and let Mindy speak!” Kate had said to them in a stagey voice. She’d studied theater in college, and the voice-projection training came in handy sometimes.

  They were gathered in one of the meeting rooms at the Nelson Arts Center. Tablecloths, votives, and long strings of fake fall-colored maple leaves were scattered around the tables waiting at the edges. Twenty irate-looking women sat in the kinds of plastic chairs the elementary school used, too low to the ground and too narrow for a grown-up backside. Mindy was up front with Kate, and she’d just finished dropping the news that they were going to shift the focus of the event.

  “I mean it,” Kate said. “Shut it. All of you.”

  She looked around the room sternly, and Mindy had that sense again that she was glad Kate was her friend. So what if she was catty and domineering and sometimes made Mindy feel like she was a twelve-year-old girl? When it came down to it, Kate did the right thing.

  “I just don’t get it,” one of the women said. “Why does it have to be now? Why does it have to be him?”

  “I’ll let Mindy answer that,” Kate said. “She’s taken a shine to Fire Guy.”

  Mindy looked down at her feet as if the tops of her sensible shoes might somehow hold the words she needed to say. All she saw were blank floor tiles, so she raised her head and looked out at the women. They really did seem vulnerable sitting in those tiny chairs. But not as vulnerable as John Phillips, shivering under his blanket.

  “I’m guessing that none of you have ever met John Phillips,” she said with a cracking voice. “I hadn’t either. But then I went to see him this morning. Right now, this man has nothing. Those chairs you’re sitting in? He has one of those next to his bed. Only his bed is not a bed, it’s a cot. He’s got a pair of hospital scrubs, and someone gave him a book from the school library. A Harry Potter book, which he told me he found mighty interesting, all things considered. His wife died two years ago. He has no kids. No insurance. Like I said, he has nothing. Can you imagine that? Well, I can’t. So you asked why we should do this, Susan. Why him? Seems pretty obvious to me.”

  Mindy sat down with her legs shaking and misjudged the distance to the minuscule seat beneath her. She almost teetered off and onto the floor, but Kate’s strong hand caught her at the last moment and righted her.

  “Anybody else have questions?” Kate asked, still holding Mindy firmly in her grip. “No? Then let’s get to work.”

  After the meeting, Mindy and Kate took their time writing the e-mail that would be sent to the Fall Fling mailing list to advise them of the change in plan. After the reaction from the committee, they knew they had to set the tone just right or there’d be no end to the complaining. And on some level, Mindy could understand why people might be upset. The tickets were all prepurchased, and they’d been sold on the promise the money would go to the hockey team. Only the thing was, even if the fire and John Phillips hadn’t happened, the money wasn’t really going to the hockey team. That was something only she, Kate, and Bit knew about.

  The hockey team was overfunded. That’s what Kate explained to her yesterday afternoon while they were sitting at Kate’s kitchen banquette, as she called it, enunciating the tt’s strangely.

  Mindy always felt as if she’d made bad life choices in Kate’s ultramodern and pristine house. It wasn’t that it was somewhere she wanted to live—it didn’t feel like a home to her—or because of how much it cost. She wasn’t a materialistic person so long as her kids were taken care of. No, it was how clean it was. Not that Mindy’s home was dirty, it was just, well, a house with kids and busy people living in it and no help but her to pick up after them all. On the rare occasions when Mindy and Pete had people over for dinner, Mindy spent half the afternoon trying to figure out where to hide the kids’ sports equipment and the winter coats that never seemed to get put away, even when winter was long over.

  But, yes, Kate had said nonchalantly. The hockey team hadn’t really needed any money for years. And because of this, Kate was secretly funneling the money they raised every year into a fund to renovate the town library, which was barely able to stay open. Kate had three hundred thousand saved, and this fall she was going to get the rest of what they needed by having a library renovation fund put on the special projects initiatives list that got voted on once a year.

  “Three hundred thousand dollars?” Mindy had asked incredulously. “Didn’t anybody notice it was missing?”

  Kate shrugged as she pulled her ultrathin silver laptop from the drawer where it lived in the kitchen. Kate had a drawer or a cabinet for everything. “Even for condoms,” Bit had whispered to her once behind a cupped hand, flushed with her boldness.

  “Clearly not,” Kate said.

  “But how is that possible?”

  “Oh, honey. You can hide anything in this town if you plan hard enough.”

  Mindy had sent the e-mail around 4:30 p.m., then turned off the computer and got tied up in dinner preparations. Angus and Carrie arrived home just as she was starting to cut up vegetables for the stir-fry she was going to make, and she asked them to help with the prep.

  For once, amazingly, Angus hadn’t protested. He’d picked a knife out of the chopping block, testing the blade’s sharpness as Peter had taught him to do, and asked what she wanted him to cut. She set him on the broccoli and cau
liflower, and stood watching him for a minute like she was seeing a ghost. And maybe she was. The ghost of Angus past.

  Cooking together had been their thing. Mindy loved trying new recipes or seeing if she could replicate a dish she’d enjoyed in a restaurant, and mostly, she was pretty good at it. Except for roasted chicken, of course. But that night she felt in her element. And it was so nice to be working with Angus and chatting about his day that she forgot about the e-mail altogether.

  “How’s Willow doing?” she’d asked him from across the kitchen island, certain she’d get something snappy back in reply.

  But instead, Angus had said, “She’s all right. Some of those guys . . . well, you know kids are mean, right, Mom?”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  He stopped chopping and looked at her. Mindy wasn’t sure whether he was more surprised she could relate to what he was saying or that she remembered what it was like to be a teenager.

  “Right,” he said after a moment. “Well, like, there’s these guys, and they’ve kind of decided Willow’s the problem, but she’s not the problem, you know?”

  “I think so. Sometimes adults do that too.”

  Angus cut the head of cauliflower in two with a big thump.

  “Tucker’s the fracking problem.”

  “Angus. Language.”

  “What?”

  He gave her his innocent face. Years ago, he’d been into Battlestar Galactica, and that’s how they swore on the show. Fracking this and fracking that. Mindy found it intensely annoying, but Angus had picked it up with gusto. The problem was, when he said the word in public, it sounded enough like the word it wasn’t to make people snap their heads around and mentally put her on their Bad Mother list. So he’d long been forbidden from using it, and then, of course, he naturally stopped using it when Battlestar Galactica became a “stupid kid thing and never tell anyone I watched it, okay, Mom?” about a year ago when he’d started hanging out with Tucker and company.

  “Nothing,” Mindy said. “So, what’s going on? What is Willow supposed to be the cause of?”

  “You wouldn’t get it.”

  “Try me.”

  “It’s just Tucker being Tucker. He always needs to have all the toys.”

  Mindy almost laughed. That was a classic Peter line right there, and it was funny to hear it come out of Angus’s half-Peter voice. But she stopped herself because she sensed the fragile ground they were on and didn’t want to do anything to disturb it.

  “Well, someone should’ve taught him to share,” she said.

  Angus rolled his eyes, and Mindy knew their moment had skipped away.

  He finished up the vegetables soon after and drifted back to the computer. Mindy watched him frowning at the screen, scrolling through his news feed. She wished, not for the first time, that she had some way of seeing directly into his mind, believing that if his thoughts could be projected on a wall, she might be able to understand and fix whatever had gone wrong.

  So with dinner and Angus and cleaning up, she’d forgotten all about the e-mail and the impact it might have until an hour after dinner, when she’d gone to look something up on the Internet she and Peter were debating (something silly about how old an actress in the TV show they were watching was) and she’d seen her inbox.

  Forty-seven new messages.

  At first, she thought she’d been spammed or hacked or whatever it was called when you suddenly got a million “investment opportunity” e-mails at once. Then she noticed they all had the same subject line as her Fall Fling e-mail, and she clicked open the first one nervously. It ended up being pretty typical.

  I must say I was quite shocked/perturbed/disturbed/surprised/taken aback by your e-mail. While I applaud/support/encourage/back acts of charity, this is really neither the time nor the place for this type of action. Surely the town/state/federal government/Red Cross will be taking care of the victims. I suggest/strongly encourage/expect/insist you rectify this situation immediately as I understand that everyone is very upset/angry/furious/calling for your resignation at your unilateral action.

  Four more versions of this missive came in while she was reading the first one, and another thirty before she went to bed. Not that all of them were negative (positive e-mails were running one to three), but it was clearly a major problem for most. She tried to phone Kate, but as the call went to voice mail, she remembered that Kate and Stuart were out on their monthly “date night,” for which she insisted both of them leave their phones at home. Mindy wrote Kate an e-mail telling her she could call whenever, and then she took her phone with her to bed.

  She had to hide the phone from Peter and put it on silent because he’d insisted that she put it away, but after he started snoring, she pulled it out of her dresser drawer and found another twenty messages waiting for her.

  So she was awake when the air bombardment started, and it was what finally drove her from bed. Peter slept through it all, as did her teenage children, who seemed to be able to sleep through anything.

  She crept downstairs quietly, anyway, and went and sat at the computer, thinking that maybe a casual browsing of the sale section of the J. Crew website might calm her nerves.

  And that’s how she found Angus’s messages.

  COOPER BASIN FIRE

  Witness to Investigators: Local Teen Should Be Interviewed

  POSTED: Thursday, September 4, 6:45 AM

  By: Joshua Wicks, Nelson Daily

  The Nelson Daily has learned that a witness has identified a possible suspect in the Cooper Basin fire. Yesterday, the witness told fire investigators the name of a local teen who may have started a fire in the fire pit behind John Phillips’s house. It is that small fire that has turned into the large one that is now burning out of control on the north side of Nelson Peak.

  The fire was started around 1:30 a.m. on Tuesday morning. Phillips’s house is the only one so far to be lost in the fire, which has now claimed over 3,000 acres of brush and timber. More than 250 fire personnel from around the state have been called in, and that number is expected to double by the end of today.

  So far, crews have managed to direct the fire away from the Cooper Basin housing development by pushing it toward the Peak. However, the current hot, dry, and windy weather is predicted to remain in place for the next several days and exacerbate an already precarious situation created by this summer’s lower-than-average rainfall. It is becoming more likely by the day that the Cooper Basin fire will be the worst in Nelson County in a century.

  Authorities have said that given the fire warnings that have been in place since June, the person or persons responsible for starting the blaze will be prosecuted and held liable for the costs, which are now estimated at one million dollars, and will likely reach much higher than that.

  The Daily has learned that the suspect is part of a group of teens known to loiter around Phillips’s property. The suspect is a student at Nelson’s exclusive Voyages high school.

  The evacuation advisory has been reinstated and expanded. Maps of the evacuation area are available on www.nelsondaily.com, at all county offices, and through the Nelson Emergency Services website. Residents should collect their important papers and any portable valuables, and be ready to evacuate. They 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 17

  Bombed

  Elizabeth

  I wake up in the middle of an air raid as the low buzz of a fixed-wing plane rattles the house.

  The windows shake.

  An engine revs.

  My heart pounds in my chest.

  It takes me an instant to connect the dots. The fire’s being water-bombed. Big, heavy planes and helicopters equipped with tanks carrying water and fire retardant are releasing their cargo on Nelson Peak to try to do what the human crews couldn’t.

  Mimic God. Make it rain. Stop the fire.

&nb
sp; The plane’s engine revs again, followed by that distinct rippling sound a water bomber makes when it releases its cargo. I imagine the clouds of bright pink liquid fanning out from the plane, speeding down toward the dancing red flames. I listen to the plane as it banks away, lighter now, circling back to get another load. The whine of its engine is joined by another, and another behind that.

  I listen for a few moments until it occurs to me that it’s fully light out. It feels late, later than it should be. I check the time; it’s just after seven. Both of us have overslept.

  “Ben,” I say, shaking him slightly, amazed that he can sleep through this. “Ben.”

  He grunts and turns on his side so he’s facing me. A short lock of hair is standing straight up. He’d say he needs a haircut, but I’ve always liked his hair longer.

  “What time is it?”

  “Seven twelve.”

  “Shit,” he says, but he makes no move to get up. His green eyes are caked with sleep like I’m sure they used to be when he was a boy. “Are we under attack?”

  I smile. “By water.”

  “Ah. That makes more sense.”

  “Than?”

  “The dream I was having about Robert Duvall. I think we were in Heart of Darkness.”

  “You mean Apocalypse Now,” I say, doing that thing I do again, but smiling anyway, because Ben always does this too. Confuses some piece of basic social knowledge in a way that makes sense but is slightly off. I’ve often thought he did it on purpose, but I could never get him to admit it.

  He yawns. “Whatever. You knew what I meant.”

  “I did.”

  “So?”

  “What did you—”

  His phone buzzes on the nightstand. Once, then twice, then twice again in rapid succession.

  “That can’t be good,” he says.

  He rolls over and picks it up. His screen is cluttered with e-mail notifications. He swipes at the first one and sighs deeply as he reads it.