When I emerge from the curtained-off changing area, Andy pulls a handkerchief out of his pocket and ties it around my neck. He chuffs me on the chin and gives me a wink. I feel small and weak and strong and ready. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so many things at once, all pulling in different directions. I need something to draw my focus in, make it steady on something other than me.
When Andy is satisfied that I’m ready, I tell him he’s making me feel like a kid, and he says he does it to all his crew. Then we leave the trailer and join the line of men waiting for him. Andy consults a map, and we follow the path they’ve made over the past few days, slow and winding at first, then straight up.
Together, determined, our boots keeping time against the earth, we walk into the fire.
Two hours after I’ve climbed into the hot zone, I’m exhausted, my lungs are smoke-filled, and I’m full of a feeling that’s become so alien to me it takes me a minute to figure it out.
I’m happy.
Not happy about my life, or this mess I seem to have gotten myself into. But happy in this moment, with a hoe in my hand and the whir of chain saws in my ears. I feel . . . safe. I know that sounds impossible, but, yes, safe—in my bubble of smoke and effort and sweat.
We’re building a firebreak along the top of the ridge, a strip of land from which we’ll remove all the fuel. The trees are cut down, and the earth is turned up—our Maginot Line against the destruction we passed on the way up. No farther, no farther.
On the other side of the ridge, maybe a mile away, is my house. They’re cutting down trees there too. Laying hose and spraying roofs with water to replace the rain that will not come. I’ve been in many neighborhoods, too many, that have had this treatment, so I can picture my house, roped off and surrounded by equipment like it’s a crime scene, as if I’ve seen it with my own eyes, which Ben and I decided last night we wouldn’t.
“Let’s not go there,” he had said at dinner. “It would be . . . too much.”
We were at our favorite Thai place, Thai Thai, sitting at a table next to the window. The name of the place always cracks us up, and its owner has become a friend. When I worked up the courage to ask, years ago, why that name, Sammy shrugged and said, “I’m Thai, it’s Thai.”
This made us laugh all the harder.
Despite my seesaw of nerves, we had a good time. I pushed past the voice in my head saying, Tell him, tell him, tell him, and focused on our five-star hot pad thai and the lettuce-wrapped larb I’d ordered on a whim.
When Sammy slapped our food on the table, he’d winked at us and said, “Date night, yeah? You know you my favorite couple.”
I gave Ben a nervous smile. I could tell Sammy had outdone himself on the spice front by the sweat that was already breaking out on Ben’s forehead, three bites in. A positive side effect: the spices were so strong that the restaurant was the only place I’d been in two days that didn’t smell like it was on fire.
“Am I going to regret eating this?” I asked, my fork hovering above my food.
“Probably,” Ben said.
“Good.”
He was wearing a sweater I’d given him years ago in the exact shade of slate green as his eyes. It felt good to see his whole face smile.
“Same old Elizabeth.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“No. It’s one of the things I like about you.”
“Just one, huh?”
“There are others.”
“That’s good.”
He flashed me a grin and set back to his food. I ate a few tentative bites. It was extremely hot, and something about it tasted off. Was this a pregnancy effect? I’d read somewhere that the hormones did that, made food taste different than usual.
Tell him, tell him, tell him.
I shoved the thought away. I hadn’t even taken a test yet. I had a box of them at the house, bought in bulk in another town back when we were trying so the news wouldn’t spread through Nelson like . . . wildfire.
It always came back to that, didn’t it?
“I’m guessing Tucker didn’t confess?” Ben said, taking a swig from his beer, then a long drink of water for good measure.
“Uh, no.”
“You think he did it?”
I knew he didn’t actually expect me to answer, but fuck it, I thought. I couldn’t keep one more thing to myself.
“He’s hiding something, that’s for sure.”
Ben’s eyes were tearing. “What about Angus?”
“Him too.”
“Hard to imagine that Mr. Cake Pop had anything to do with this.”
“I know. Did . . . What did Mindy say when you spoke to her?”
He signaled to Sammy for another beer. Mine lay untouched in front of me, but I didn’t want to call attention to that fact by offering it to him. Would it be awful if I had a few sips so it wasn’t obvious I wasn’t drinking?
Tell him, tell him, tell him.
“You should call her,” Ben said. “She’s really worried. No surprise. Those messages are upsetting.”
“Kids are so mean.”
“People are mean.”
I took a small bite of noodles. My mouth lit up. “I just meant . . . Remember what you were like then?”
“Sometimes it feels like yesterday.”
“Right? I feel like I walked around with the volume turned up all the time back then. You know?”
He shrugged. The sweat was rolling off his brow, but he kept on eating, determined not to let the food defeat him.
“Has Angus changed?” I asked. “Since he’s been hanging out with Tucker and those other boys?”
“He’s certainly been quieter the last year or so. Remember how much he used to talk?”
When Angus was a kid, he was like a wind-up toy. Just start him talking about something, anything, and away he went, and went, and went.
“I’d forgotten,” I said. “It makes me feel sick to know he’s been going through all that and nobody knew. And now . . . Oh, hell. Tucker pointed the finger at him. He said Angus did it.”
Ben put down his fork. “That little fucker.”
“But what if it’s true? This will destroy Mindy.” I looked down at my plate, my eyes suddenly filling with tears. “I really don’t want it to be Angus.”
He lifted my bowed head, so we were looking each other in the eyes. “This is not on you. You’re only doing your job.”
“I know, I just . . . Ugh, let’s stop talking about this, okay?”
“Of course.”
He pushed his plate away and used his napkin to wipe his brow. I put my hand on his arm. It felt like he had a fever.
“You going to admit defeat?” I said.
“Never surrender.”
I laughed. “Oh my God, Corey Hart.”
“What now?”
“Corey Hart. The ‘Sunglasses at Night’ guy? We’ve talked about this before.”
“Stop speaking Canadian and eat your food.”
“It’s too hot.”
“Nothing’s too hot for you. Isn’t that what you always said?”
“I did,” I said. “I do.”
Tell him, tell him, tell him.
“I’m glad we’re doing this,” I said.
“Me too.”
“You want to tell me about it?” Andy asks. When I check the clock, I see that it’s not even ten yet. I’ve lost all sense of time. But that’s exactly why I came up here, and why I did this for so long. I’ve never found anything else that was as easy to get lost in.
We’re taking a break to “water up,” as Andy put it. We’re sitting across from each other on two recently cut-down trees. The bark digs into my backside. My throat is scratchy, and my tongue feels like I’ve eaten a package of sour candies. The top layer of skin is going to peel off at any moment.
“Tell you what?” I say.
“Come on, Elizabeth.”
His face is filled with soot, as my own must be, and the whites of his eyes look almost bleached i
n the middle of all that black.
“I can’t talk about this with you.”
“Fair enough,” he says, true to form. I have a flash of what things might’ve been like if I’d given into temptation, let something happen between us. Would it all be so easy if we were actually together? Then again, wasn’t it easy between Ben and me for the longest time?
Life works on easy, smooths it down and wears it away until there’s only the grit left between you.
I swish the lukewarm water around in my mouth and look down the hill. The fire’s closer than it was when we got up here. It feels like it’s racing up to meet us, to test the trench, our resolve, our will. I try not to think about the fact that if I turn around and walk for ten minutes, I’ll be able to see my house.
I stand up quickly. My stomach does a double axel, and my ears fill with a buzzing sound.
“Elizabeth?”
There’s a hand on my arm, then the loamy earth beneath me.
“Come on now, deep breaths.”
I try to follow his stern command, but I can’t get any air into my lungs.
I hear footsteps, murmurs, voices. There are more tall, strong men standing over me, casting shadows and worry.
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Should we call the EMTs?”
“No, I’ve got her.”
Now I’m being lifted up, and like the baby who might be inside me, I curl into a fetal position. I can hear the thud of someone’s heart, most likely my own. My eyes are closed, and I have no sense of direction, like a pilot who can’t tell which way is up.
All I know, after a while, is that we’re descending.
The lower we go, the smokier it is, but the only way out is down.
CHAPTER 25
Fight Fire with Fire
Elizabeth
Ben found out about the tests I took.
I’d never hidden anything from him before, so I had no procedure for secret keeping. I deleted the email from the doctor’s office, and paid the doctor in cash, but I had to fill up my car on the way there and buy some lunch, and I paid for both of those things with our joint credit card. And Ben, who isn’t suspicious but is oddly finicky about paperwork, saw the charges and asked what I was doing so far from where I said I’d been. I stammered and hemmed, and then I completely folded. It’s one thing to keep a secret when nobody asks about it, I learned. A whole other thing to actively lie in the face of your trusting husband.
So I told Ben. He was angry. Very angry. Not that I’d taken the test, but that I’d kept the fact that I was doing it, and the results, from him. He said he hadn’t meant to make me think I couldn’t get tested myself. That wasn’t his choice to make; of course, it wasn’t. Just because he didn’t want to know if it was him didn’t mean . . . But that was exactly the impression he’d conveyed, I couldn’t help myself from saying, combative when I should’ve been contrite. And so we fought and fought, and then there was silence. An awful enduring silence that was a kind of noise in and of itself, like a background hum you can’t block out once you’ve tuned in to it.
When I broke it the next day, Ben assured me that the results didn’t change anything, but this was why he didn’t want to know in the first place. Because he knew I’d think it would change something. And how could I not trust him, how could I be so wrong about his reaction after all these years? How could I not give him the benefit of the doubt?
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know,” I repeated like a yogic chant, as if it might bring us peace or balance or restore our universe. But that sort of thing never does—it isn’t any kind of answer, and so I brought about what I was trying to avoid. Ben was angry and hurt, and as I came to realize in the next few weeks, I’d shattered the elemental trust that had always existed between us.
That’s where Andy came in. Oh, not in the way you’d think. I wasn’t sleeping with him, or even worried I might do so. We truly were friends—Andy knew that, I knew that, and I thought Ben knew that too. Only he didn’t anymore.
It’s hard to pinpoint what it was that made Ben start to distrust that friendship. I was so nervous in those days and weeks following the revelation of my lie, I’d chatter away, saying anything to fill the space between us. And, clearly, I said too much about Andy. I missed the signs. Those warnings that I’d done enough and said enough and . . . Would I just stop talking about Andy? Why was I talking about him so much, anyway?
As those words came exploding out of Ben’s mouth one night at supper when I’d been talking long enough I could feel my throat getting dry, I knew all at once where this was going. Ben no longer took that he knew me for granted. People had affairs. People who spent long months away from their spouses in the company of others had affairs. God knows I’d regaled him with enough stories of that very thing happening all around me over the years. We’d even joked about who he’d sleep with in his faculty. What about the physics teacher with the stick brown hair and no makeup who hadn’t aged since Ben had taken classes with her? Or the dolled-up office assistant who had a crush on him?
Ha. Ha. Ha.
If I’d known about the existence of Stephanie, I might not have laughed so hard. But we were so arrogant, so confident that nothing like that could ever come between us. And when it did, when that suspicion crept in when we weren’t taking enough care to keep it at bay, it knocked the wind right out of us. Nothing had even happened—not that Ben believed me—but it didn’t matter. The act of losing trust was enough. Enough to make him question everything I did, every trip I took, to make him sleep as far away from me as possible without actually moving to another bed. Enough to eventually drive me to the bathroom floor in the middle of the night with my forehead pressed to the cold tiles thinking, I can’t take this anymore, I can’t take this anymore, I can’t.
“Elizabeth, you need to talk to me now.”
The hand on my face is soft and callused. The voice has a familiar lilt to it. I’m lying on something soft, but the blanket covering me is scratchy. I can’t place myself in time, and I feel nauseous and weak. Have I become a time-traveler?
I try to open my eyes, but I can only make them flutter.
“Kara?” I say weakly.
“I think she’s coming around,” says another voice that snaps me into myself. Fainted, pregnant, Andy.
Oh, God, no. No, no, no.
“Ben?”
I force my eyes open, and it is Ben who’s standing over me, of course it is. I glance swiftly around the room, looking for Andy, but he’s not here. Relief. Relief, followed by guilt. Why do I keep repeating the same mistakes over and over? Why?
Ben crouches down in front of me. He’s dressed in his teacher clothes—khakis and a button-down shirt. He strokes the side of my face, pushing my hair away from my eyes. He looks so worried, my guilty heart fills with sorrow.
“You okay, Bethie?”
“You never call me that anymore.”
Our eyes lock, and I’m halfway between a sob and a laugh. You never . . . How many times had we promised we’d never say something like that to each other? And how many times in the last year have we done so?
“I’m sorry,” Ben says.
“It’s fine. I’m fine . . . I don’t. What happened?”
“You lost consciousness,” Kara says. “Up on the ridge. The men brought you down.”
I look up at her. Her normally smiling face is lined with concern, but also with something else. Censure.
She knows. She knows everything.
Please don’t say anything, I plead silently, knowing somehow that she’ll hear me but not that she’ll obey.
She hesitates, then gives me the briefest of nods.
“What were you doing up there?” Ben asks.
“I woke up this morning and I saw the fire report and I wanted to do something to save . . . to save us. That sounds so stupid.”
Ben squeezes my hand. “No, I get it.”
“I feel like an idiot.”
“No, Be
th. You just gave us a scare.”
I push myself into his arms, lay my head against his chest, breathe in the scent of him. How could I want anything but this, him, us? Why was I never willing to fight as hard for that as I was to protect other people’s property? Why do I question, question, question and never do anything about it, when I do something about everything else?
What is wrong with me?
“Am I okay?” I ask Kara over Ben’s shoulder.
“I think you will be.”
CHAPTER 26
Alarm Bells
Mindy
That morning in spin class, Mindy didn’t feel like talking. As Lindsay barked orders at them to get their asses up!, she lifted herself off the seat and worked through the exercises with a newfound focus. Sweat ran down her face, and her muscles ached, and she still hated every moment of it, but she seemed to have found another gear.
Clearly, fear was a great motivator.
Because Mindy was afraid.
Afraid for her son, afraid for her family, afraid for her marriage even.
They wouldn’t survive this, she knew with an odd certainty. If Angus had done this thing, even accidentally, something would be torn in her house that couldn’t be repaired. The deep-down mistrust she had of their son, this she knew would be unforgivable to Peter.
“Sit!” Lindsay screamed.
Mindy rested on the uncomfortable seat. Kate and Bit were here today, but they hadn’t taken their usual places next to her. For all Kate’s professed support, Mindy knew it was a temporary thing. Kate couldn’t be seen to back down, so she’d defend Mindy publicly right up until she didn’t have to anymore, and that would be it.
Mindy couldn’t summon the energy to care. Elizabeth was the person she needed now. Elizabeth, who’d looked so tired and drawn yesterday. But so determined too. So certain.
That’s what she needed, Mindy realized. Not Elizabeth herself, but Elizabeth’s resolve. Elizabeth’s confidence. She needed to find her way toward those things, or back to when she had those things, and when she did that, she knew, she’d be able to fix what was broken.
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