Because of Our Child

by Margot Early

  He and the other jumpers and firefighters at the helispot cleared their tools from the new landing zone and watched as the chopper set down and a flight crew member, then a passenger, climbed out.

  “That,” said Tock, beside Max, “must be the media.”

  The visitors were another sore spot, as far as Max was concerned, and the other firefighters agreed with him. Nothing was predictable about this fire, and it was one place a television news crew, even a crew of two—reporter and cameraman—didn’t belong.

  The woman who’d come out first was going to have to get that long hair tucked away to start with. Who had allowed this? But he answered Tock, deadpan. “Maybe she’s a rookie.”

  The individual in question, who now had the attention of every man there, had a straight, elegant nose, a curling cascade of thick, dark hair, well-defined black brows and a smile that was radiant in its suddenness as she turned to speak to one of the helicopter crew.

  Max knew the smile.

  Their eyes met across the helispot.

  No way. As a crew member gestured the path she should take away from the chopper, Max stepped toward her. “Jen?”

  She turned, her woman’s face more austere, remote and wary than the nineteen-year-old face had ever been. But her smile seemed genuine. “Max!” She hugged him.

  Keeping an arm around her waist, he guided her further away from the chopper, through the smoky haze of the helispot. “Did you come to relieve us?”

  “No. I came to ask questions. Channel 4. Denver.”

  His objections to civilians at the site vanished. “I’ve smudged you.”

  Jen glanced down at her fire shirt and shrugged. She was her own makeup woman out here, and she would deal with her face and the rest of her appearance before she went on camera. She was calm; Max shouldn’t be able to tell that her muscles were strung tight. She wanted him to know that it was no problem for her, seeing him after all these years. None at all. “You look the same,” she said.

  “Covered in soot.”

  “Yes.” With the whites of his eyes still showing extraordinarily bright, even when bloodshot from smoke. The irises were the shade of dark chocolate—or darker, almost black. And the blond hair—now more straw-colored, more golden than pale blond—was comparatively short. But really, he looked the same.

  She remembered something, remembered that if they stood facing each other, her lips could just touch the base of his throat.

  That would not have changed, either.

  Of course, she wasn’t planning on testing the memory to see if it was accurate.

  “What questions are you going to ask?”

  Jen considered whether or not to answer him. But what had Max done to deserve being surprised by her inquiry? “I’ll want to know what happened yesterday. I’ll have to ask if there are any similarities between yesterday’s events and what happened at Storm King Mountain in 1994.”

  “Why don’t you talk to the IC?” The incident commander.

  “Well, I will. But I’ll also want to speak with the firefighters. We’re covering the fire for the news, but we may include some footage as part of an hour-long special we’re planning on wildfire.”

  “Going to give Nova a run for its money?”

  As part of her preparation, Jen had watched Nova’s Fire Wars. “No. We’re taking a different angle. World fire, actually.”

  “And you’re covering western Colorado?”

  “Yes.” She barely noticed the quiet ribbing about this small corner of the world. No need to explain how surprisingly uncomplicated she’d found the assignment, in the end. No need to say that Elena was attending a dance camp in nearby Ouray this week.

  No need to mention Elena, at all.

  As a matter of fact, it was easy not to think of Elena. Because this smoke, at close range, was part of her intimate memory, much more so than the smoke she’d smelled in Denver and elsewhere on the Front Range throughout the summer. She had breathed this smoke before.

  “Where are you based?” she asked Max. “Still in California?”

  He shook his head. “Leadville.”

  Her intake of breath was involuntary. He had been that close… For how long?

  Smoke jumpers weren’t like hotshots. They didn’t necessarily stay together all fire season. Many of them spent their winters in Montana, employed by the government sewing packs or other fire equipment. Others worked different jobs altogether. “What do you do in the off-season?” she asked.

  The chopper rose into the air, startling her. She hadn’t expected to be left on the ridge without transport. Max’s radio crackled and he cocked an ear, listening.

  She heard it, too; someone requesting a water drop.

  Of course, this was too far from Denver to use the station’s helicopter, so she and her cameraman had flown in on a chopper belonging to the Bureau of Land Management. Nothing about her experience in Makal Canyon had increased her confidence in that federal agency or made her happy to be in their keeping. She had no doubt whatsoever about the pilot’s credentials—he was ex-military and better than competent. It was just the matter of what the BLM might ask him to do.

  And apparently, now he was fulfilling a new request, to leave Channel 4 at the helispot and make a water drop.

  Oh, well.

  By her watch it was just after 3:00 p.m. They should get to work filming. The new incident commander was supposed to meet them here. “Is Hugh Barlow here?” she asked Max, who hadn’t yet answered her question about how he spent the off-season.

  “Don’t know him.”

  “He’s the new IC.”

  “I haven’t yet met him.”

  Jen’s journalistic instincts kicked in. This wasn’t the story Channel 4 wanted. Nothing incendiary, the station manager had instructed her, with a wink, that was supposed to drive home his stupid pun. She detested the man, who was given to a form of harassment that didn’t quite qualify legally as sexual harassment. Until recently. Outside of work, he had come on to her in a way she’d found so offensive—and disturbing—that she’d wondered about her future with Channel 4. Even his nothing incendiary, wink, wink, was now tinged for her with knowledge she truly wished she didn’t have of him.

  She was supposed to present a supportive look at the nearly impossible job everyone, from overhead in public agencies to the lowliest firefighter, was attempting to perform: to keep every one of these blazes from destroying property and taking lives. She wasn’t supposed to find out what anyone had done wrong on the Silver Jack Ridge fire. And she’d believed, when she’d left Denver, that she’d have no trouble following those instructions. She knew the kinds of things that people could do wrong fighting wildfire, and she’d seen the results, smelled the results, lived some of the results. She was no Norman or John Maclean, dedicated to exposing mistakes. Others—fire investigators, other journalists—could do that.

  But Hugh Barlow had taken over as incident commander that morning at eight-thirty. Surely Max would at least know what he looked like by now. “Who’s the smoke jumper in charge?”

  “I am. Today.”

  As she’d thought. He’d been a squad boss at Makal Canyon. She estimated that he’d been fighting fires for almost twenty years. He was not incident commander on this fire, nor had he been at any time. Smoke jumper in charge was a position that came with its own responsibilities. So what did today mean?

  But she had the answer. It was in her notes. The smoke jumper in charge yesterday had died yesterday.

  Bob Wright, her cameraman, joined them, and Jen introduced Max.

  Bob squinted at the chopper and hoisted his camera to his shoulder, training it on their departing transportation.

  Jen turned to her own bag, her own gear, for a quick makeup check before clipping on a microphone.

  Okay, so she wouldn’t dig up the mistakes that had led to yesterday’s deaths. But she wouldn’t cover them up, either.

  She wasn’t yet ready to turn to work. She had questions, yes, but they
were for Max Rickman the man, not Max the smoke jumper.

  Peering at her reflection and seeing the backdrop haze of smoke, she said, “Why are you still in fire?”

  “How could I not be?”

  Glancing up, she saw him gaze away, as though into the distant past.

  Surely, surely, he did not still pine after his dead fiancée.

  “You haven’t married?” she asked.

  He shook his head. Eyed her. “You?”

  “No.” A definite response, with the vigor of a lie; a lie that proclaimed she would have nothing to do with marriage or commitment or anything associated with those things. A lie that said she was too free to have children, for instance. Of course, there was nothing to hide, and even if he met Elena Jen doubted he would suspect or think or see.

  “How’s Teresa?” he asked.

  “Mm, good.” Vague, intentionally vague. And truthful. Good meant good as compared to very bad, of which Max was probably unaware.

  When Jen glanced up at his face again, she saw that he was watching a column of smoke rising from below. He lifted his radio and reported it. She was sure she hadn’t seen it from the air; sure it hadn’t been there minutes earlier. The afternoon seemed to her windless, unaccountably warm.

  Jen knew from studying maps and reports that the smoke jumpers who had died the day before had died because of a sudden reversal of wind at the edge of the ridge, with a box canyon below. Experienced men dying in an unpredictable—and yet appallingly predictable—situation.

  The odds against what she sensed happening now should have comforted her.

  She and Bob had been equipped with fire shelters but they hadn’t been instructed in their use. She knew the shelters had changed since she and Max had shared one so many years before. And Bob wouldn’t have a clue what to do.

  She said, “Bob, if we get into trouble, you’ll have to leave the camera.”

  He gaped at her. They’d found themselves in bad spots before. There had been that sniper in Lodo, for instance. And when they’d had to cover the airplane crash….

  But he would not leave the digital video camera. His expression said she could just forget that possibility, because whatever happened he would want to record it.

  She followed Max’s gaze as the wind came, darkening the smoke column, which seemed to separate and come together again, as flame emerged and sudden gusts cast sparks from the top of a piñon below into what looked like gambel oak, the infamous Storm King killer.

  “Escape fire,” said Tock, and Max drew out a fusee.

  Jen understood. The smoke jumpers on the helispot set fire to the grass, that which hadn’t been cleared from the helispot, to create a “safe black zone,” an area that had already been burned and thus would be a safe place to escape the fire coming toward them.

  Bob filmed the smoke jumpers and Jen checked her microphone, clipped into Bob. “We’re at a newly established helispot below Silver Jack Ridge, and flames are erupting below us. Smoke jumpers are setting an escape fire, creating a safety zone where we can retreat. We’re wondering if they’re going to ask us to shelter up.”

  Max, across the helispot, heard her and nodded—an answer.

  There was no way the camera and Bob and she would all fit in one shelter, and she knew she wasn’t going to be able to persuade Bob to put down that damned camera. Also, if they were going to deploy shelters, now was the time. She lifted Bob’s shelter from the pack strapped to his waist. It unfolded easily. “Bob, for God’s sake, set down the camera, lie down and keep the edges of this shelter down. The open part is on the bottom.”

  “We’re going to shelter up on this hot ash, with our feet to the blaze,” Jen said for the benefit of the tape. “Smoke jumpers are directing us to shelter locations.”

  “I’ll take this, fools,” said a smoke jumper beside them, tugging the heavy camera and its straps from a protesting Bob and gathering the microphone from Jen. “Get in those shelters now.”

  This isn’t happening.

  It was unlikely for a firefighter to be caught in more than one entrapment situation. And Jen was no longer even a firefighter.

  Watching Bob take direction on getting into his shelter, she pulled out her own. Max’s eyes locked with hers for just a moment, as he walked over beside her and yanked out his.

  As she lay down, pulling the shelter over her, she noticed him arranging his shelter next to hers.

  The job, she thought. She could keep doing her job with the handheld digital recorder she sometimes used when she was driving.

  Inside a shelter, a tin foil house.

  The roar erupted, and she remembered a much younger Max Rickman beside her, their unwashed bodies so close in the searing heat.

  She wished—and could not believe she wished it—that he was with her now, inside this shelter.

  “Hold down the edges, Jen!”

  A baritone shout amid the roaring flames, or a voice from her memory.

  “The fire is coming over us,” she said with the voice recorder against her mouth. “It’s hot in here, really hot, but not as bad as it is outside. These new shelters are an improvement on the old ones. Yes, I’m terrified. Someone is screaming.” She made herself continue to report. “I’m not sure who it is. My cameraman is to my left and smoke jumper Max Rickman on my right. The screams sound farther away.” I don’t want it to be burns. “It’s uncomfortably hot. I’m trying to hold down this shelter, but the fire, I think, has punched some small holes in it. I’m not going to look up for any reason. I’m drinking some water. That’s what’s recommended when you’re in a burnover.” And how do you know this, Jen Delazzeri?

  “Bob, drink water!” she yelled, but how could anyone hear?

  She remembered the sensation from Makal Canyon. The unbearable heat.

  But this time it was not quite as intense.

  Yet the screaming was coming from somewhere.

  Someone was burned.

  I don’t want to know. I don’t want to be here. Who picked this helispot?

  A cry erupted from her, into the roar.

  Only the darkness and heat answered, the wind ripping at the sides of the shelter, trying to tear it apart and incinerate her.

  Then, the lighter world, the quieter place. What had she screamed, and had she been heard?

  “Bob, talk to me!” Through the heat.

  “I’m here, Jen!”

  “My cameraman is talking to me from his shelter. He surrendered the camera to one of the smoke jumpers. I don’t know what’s happened to it. The fire has taken about five minutes to pass over us, but it’s quieter now and lighter inside the shelters. I don’t think I’ve been burned.”

  “Channel 4, stay in your shelters!” A commanding voice, a baritone. “Tock!”

  “I’m here.”

  “Bob, did you hear that? Stay in the shelter!”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Radios squawked.

  “The smoke jumpers,” Jen told the recorder, told those who might sometime hear the recording, “are equipped with radios and are talking to each other. Someone’s hurt, and they’re trying to learn who. We need to stay in the shelters because of the dangerous gasses and lack of oxygen outside after the burnover.”

  “Jen?”

  Max’s voice.

  “Yes.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yes. Are you?”

  “Yes.”

  Like a long time ago.

  The radios making noise.

  When they got out of these shelters, they would see who was hurt and how badly, and she would report it, but Bob would film delicately.

  Oh. No camera, though. How could it have escaped?

  What she wished she could escape, now and forever, was a baritone voice from her past and the remembrance of need.

  CHAPTER TWO

  IT WASN’T OVER. Jen knew better than to risk peeking out from under the edge of her shelter. That was, perhaps, for Max to do.

  Yet she was u
nprepared for the new surge of wind and heat. It took time for her to understand what was happening. As she did, she remembered her tape recorder, still running because the sounds outside had never stopped.

  Roaring air.

  Screams from that one firefighter.

  “What passed over us before was the crown fire. Now the grass is burning.” If the tape recorder picked up her voice, it would be a miracle.

  She remembered, abruptly, the disgusting sexual advances of Gary Lowell, the station manager. As the heat inside her shelter grew again, she sipped water and thought, Life is too short to be around that man. Granted, he would do nothing inappropriate on the job, but she had had too many unpleasant encounters with him. What if she gave notice and took a job elsewhere?

  How much longer did she have in this job, anyway? Should she be switching to radio, perhaps?

  I can’t burn up. Who will take care of Elena?

  Her own mother would, of course. Like she’s capable of taking care of anyone, Jen. As though Teresa is, either. But the judgment wasn’t entirely fair; didn’t take in the whole picture. They had lived together, three generations of women, since not long after Elena’s birth. The arrangement had made it possible for Jen to graduate from college.

  She sipped water, and said to the deafening wind buffeting the edge of her shelter, “The heat in here is nearly intolerable. I can feel the grass fire around us. Grass fires burn more quickly, thank God.”

  Finish burning. Finish burning.

  A corner of her shelter whipped up, and flame was inside. She screamed, and then rolled—instinctively trying to smother the fire, while also trying to drag down the back of the shelter. Her pants had burned off a buttock and the back of one thigh, yet the violent shaking of the shelter had ceased, and Jen rolled and squirmed, trying to put out a fire that seemed to be on the roof of the shelter.

  “Jen?”

  Max’s voice. Again. Because it was quiet. No, not quiet; just no longer deafening.

  “The fire got inside. I’ve put it out. I’m okay.”

  “Burned?” he asked.

  Inside his shelter, Max heard Tock’s voice on his radio, saying, “Wild Thing?”