Because of Our Child

by Margot Early

  Teresa had begged for a solo seat, in the back, and Bob had taken the other. Halfway into the flight, Max stood up to see how they were doing. Bob was talking animatedly to a businessman across the aisle. Teresa was reading a book by Ayn Rand and seemed not to be looking at anyone.

  Jen asked, “What’s she doing?”

  “Reading.” He took his seat again.

  The plane was too full for Jen to wander back and engage her sister in conversation. But it bothered her that Teresa had wanted to sit alone.

  What Teresa had said, however, was, No, you two sit together.

  Well, maybe that’s what it was all about—wanting Jen to be friends with Max.

  Jen didn’t feel much like his friend. Old hurts and recent indignation seemed to overshadow other feelings. And why couldn’t she come to terms with that long-ago rejection?

  Men found her attractive. Some recognized her from the news, yes, and others simply found her to be a pretty woman. She was asked on dates, asked to join men skiing, horseback riding. But she accepted few invitations, and now Elena had accused her of hating men.

  She didn’t hate them. She was wary of them. First of all, it was damned hard to find a good man, a man she wanted to date. But even if she found one, as far as she was concerned falling in love was as welcome as being bitten by something poisonous. It just seemed to come with pain. Even men she liked—but with whom she wasn’t in love—could cause hurt, though not on the scale she might experience if she fell in love.

  As she once had with Max.

  Four weeks. Four weeks they would all live together in a house at Canyon Winds Estates. She’d told him that was it. She had to be back with her daughter for the start of school. Though she wasn’t sure she’d be returning to Denver in the fall. Jen had always been attracted to the educational opportunities in Albuquerque, both for herself and Elena.

  She’d resigned from Channel 4, and she’d told the Albuquerque station that she would give them a decision by the third week in August.

  What will Mom and Teresa do without you?

  Manage.

  The truth was, she wasn’t sure she wanted to stay in television. She’d have to get out sometime; maybe now was the time, when she was beginning to yearn for something different. Just what, she wasn’t sure. But for years she’d been fascinated by acupuncture and Oriental medicine. Or perhaps she might look into in-depth training as a massage therapist? Or a counseling degree? Something like Oriental medicine or even massage therapy would blend well with her interest in martial arts. What she was beginning to feel was the need to move on. She was compassionate and she was good at her job. But John Jackson’s being burned while protecting that damned camera had soured the whole business for her. They shouldn’t have been up there at all, and she’d known it.

  “What are you thinking?” Max asked.

  “Just—dreaming. About getting out of television.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t become a dancer.”

  “I’ll always be a dancer.” Though now her form of dance involved the fighting arts—evasion, grace, flexibility.

  “I just pictured you traveling the world, free-spirited, maybe a choreographer.”

  She smiled slightly. “I’m sure you didn’t picture me nine months pregnant or with a new baby.” Again, she wished she could take back her words. Why did she need to rub his face in what he hadn’t known? She could have told him she was pregnant, after all.

  Max slid his day pack partially out from under his seat and withdrew a textbook. Something on fire behavior.

  “You love fire, don’t you?” she asked.

  “I love fighting fires, watching them as a natural phenomenon. Sure. I don’t have to be out there, though.”

  “So you could move up to being a fire general, so to speak. Strategizing how to put out the big fires.”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Don’t you think you might be rubbing the right people the wrong way by making this film?”

  “Actually, no. Not if it can be used as an educational tool for firefighters.”

  Jen fell silent.

  He said, “So tell me. Any men in your life?”

  “No. I think you’ve asked me that.”

  “Have you ever, say, lived with someone?”

  Now you’re trying to make me out to be some kind of romantic failure, Jen thought, just because I’ve never lived with a man. “That’s not a decision I’d ever have made casually—around Elena. You know. Bringing a man into her life that way.”

  His eyebrows lifted slightly.

  “Well, it’s not,” Jen snapped. “It takes a long time to get to know someone and trust him.”

  “You trusted me fast enough.”

  “You used to be my next-door neighbor, my squad boss. We were hotshots together, and I’ve known you a long time, even though we haven’t been in touch. And you’re mistaken, anyway, if you think I trust you. But you’re her natural father. She needs to know you.”

  Jen’s prickly edges surprised Max, surprised him again and again. She’d changed from when they’d lived together, yes. But it seemed as though more than simple maturity had shaped her. Her life, her all-female household, her job, everything about her, now seemed carefully designed to protect Jen Delazzeri. But from what? What did she think would happen to her if she relaxed just a little?

  He picked over the various ways of putting the question to her, rejecting each one in turn. He’d noticed what happened whenever he became curious about her personal life. When he tried, she responded with reminders of the sacrifices she’d made to raise his daughter.

  “You must get along with your mom pretty well,” he said.

  “Sometimes. Most of the time, in fact, now that I’m an adult.”

  “It seems unusual, to me, for a grown woman to be able to live with her mother.”

  “She has always helped me with Elena.”

  Now Jen sounded defensive again.

  “I wasn’t criticizing you,” he told her.

  “But I feel like you’re picking me apart!”

  He studied her aquiline nose, her smooth olive-toned skin and her freckles. “I’m just trying to know you, Jen. And to know my daughter by finding out what I can about how she has grown up.”

  “She has grown up without a father.” Jen heard herself with disgust. Why did she keep doing this? It was as if she couldn’t control herself.

  “You resent that,” Max said.

  Jen shook her head. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m sorry I said that. I’m responsible for not telling you about her.” What would it cost her to say the honest thing? She eyed the people across the aisle. Was anyone eavesdropping, listening to this conversation in which she was so vulnerable. No and no one could really overhear them. She and Max were talking quietly. “Okay,” she said. “The truth is, I felt much more for you than you did for me, and I was hurt by it, and whenever I remember that I start saying all these…things.” I start turning into my mother. Wasn’t that what had been behind her mother’s drama? Jen’s father had not been a bad person. His only crime had been to fall out of love with Robin.

  But Jen could never speak of that to anyone outside the family. In fact, even she and Teresa didn’t discuss it much anymore. Teresa suffered from one form of instability; Jen thought their mother had some other variety, maybe a personality disorder. Jen had always sworn that Elena’s upbringing would not be like her own.

  Yet I denied her a relationship with her father for twelve years.

  She didn’t know how she expected Max to respond to her confession that she’d been hurt. By saying he was sorry?

  But of their individual sins, hers had been the greater. He’d been a college student whose fiancée had just died. Jen couldn’t believe that he’d set out intending to use her.

  Yet she had kept from him the knowledge that she was carrying his child. Now, in her mind, the action mimicked the spirit of every effort her own mother had made to keep Jen and T
eresa from seeing their father.

  Max said, “Tell me how you got into martial arts.”

  “How did you—”

  “Elena. What styles do you practice?”

  “Well, my focus is Muay Thai, Thai boxing.”

  “Is that the same as kickboxing?”

  “Close. A little more hard-core. I’ve learned some aikido, as well, and played capoeira, which is a Brazilian combat game, very challenging—and fun for a dancer. And now I’m learning fundamentals from some Indonesian fighting arts. But mostly I’m a Thai boxer.”

  “Can’t you hurt your head?”

  “You bet.”

  “You shouldn’t do that.”

  “Well, in sparring situations we learn to exercise a lot of control, to protect ourselves and each other. We don’t go to class and try to knock each other out.”

  A small smile spread on his face.

  “What?”

  “I’m a little envious. I’d like to learn a martial art. Sometimes. Truthfully, Richard tainted the whole thing for me, doing what he did.”

  “Which was…” It was time, Jen decided, to hear exactly what part Max believed Richard Grass had played in Salma’s death.

  He didn’t answer at once. He glanced toward the window, then at his watch, then withdrew a legal pad from his pack and began to sketch, taking her back to the day of the Makal Canyon blowup.

  She remembered that day, even as she didn’t want to remember. The fire had crept below them from the west, reaching the two of them first. The other group had been cutting fire line by the road, against the estates, which had been built in the worst possible location from a wildfire standpoint. “We couldn’t reach them by radio because of the terrain. That big gully.” Her heart began beating faster, a little too fast for a person who wasn’t presently in danger. She shouldn’t have agreed to do this. She didn’t want to remember. She’d been at the Silver Jack fire, in a second burnover, where she’d heard someone being burned. Yet it was the Makal Canyon fire that resurrected all her ghosts, for they were ghosts of that blaze.

  I’m not sure I’m going to be able to do this.

  But this was the kind of thought she never let herself feel, let alone voice. Because of her mother, of course. Robin had feigned weakness—or been weak, at times, because her jealousy had led her to lie. And so Jen must never appear weak; must never be weak.

  Her mother was foremost in her mind these days, ever since Max had come back into her life—and entered Elena’s life. Now her daughter had a father, and Jen felt herself in danger of becoming like her own mother.

  Max said, “Cast your mind back, Jen. Were we in more live fuels or dead fuels?”

  “My ability to answer that question could be based on recollection—or on my study of the investigation report.” Which she had reviewed over the two previous days. It had placed blame on the hotshots for working on southwest-facing slopes, where the fire had gotten below them. It hadn’t mattered, the report implied, who’d told them to work there. Hadn’t they been trained?

  That had angered her. Still, why was Max so bent on doing this documentary? I just want to forget it. Forgive and especially forget.

  Her mother had total recall for every one of the actual sins of Jen’s father, plus all those she’d manufactured. It had been sad to watch. Robin was so beautiful, and all her efforts to get back together with Gino Delazzeri had driven him further away. Her invitations to him to take in a movie with them had never seemed to bother him, but her insistence on controlling him and his contact with Jen and Teresa, most of all the way Robin had used Jen and Teresa in their ongoing conflict, had enraged him. Sometimes, Jen had wondered if her mother was trying to drive their father to violence, so that she could call the police—which she did anyway—and say, I told you so.

  Finally, Jen answered Max’s question. “It was the third year of drought. There were plenty of dead fuels.” The plane had begun its descent, and she looked out the window. Flying into Santa Barbara brought back so much. “I haven’t been to California since I moved away.”

  “Which was when?”

  “Elena was five. I got the job offer with Channel 4, and my mother had the opportunity to study yoga with a teacher she’d admired for years. So we moved to Denver, bought our house, and that was that.”

  “Where were you until then?”

  “Well, Mom still had the house in Monterey, but she was down with Teresa and me a lot because of Elena. And Teresa.”

  “Because all of you needed her after the fire.”

  He said this as if Elena had been part of the fire. Jen said, “The fire is not part of Elena’s life and never has been. You and Teresa and I were at the fire, but Elena was conceived afterward. You know that. Everything in the world is not about your fiancée dying in that stupid fire.”

  It had happened again. She’d said things she’d never intended to say, things she wasn’t aware of thinking before she spoke.

  “Is that why you think I’m doing this?” he asked. “You think I’m not over that?”

  “Do people get over it?” Jen asked. “I’m not sure they do. I don’t think Teresa has.”

  “But she was with Salma. She witnessed more than we did.”

  “We all saw her, Max. Everyone saw the shape she was in. Everyone knew how bad it was and that she might not make it. I don’t think I’m over it, if it comes to that. I didn’t volunteer to cover the Silver Jack fire, you know. I was sent.”

  Max experienced a strange shock again, a sort of electricity. Her honesty was something alive; something that made him more alive.

  I always liked her.

  Yes, Salma had been his girlfriend, his lover, his fiancée, but he’d always noticed Jen Delazzeri, had always admired something unique in her spirit. He’d been intrigued by her ambition, which was quiet yet consistent. The fact that she loved school and had been brave and determined when it came to firefighting.

  Also, though she was a drama student, she was not a drama queen. In fact, she seldom complained, and he’d never seen her overreact. Rather, she was surprisingly calm.

  “Why did you choose drama in school?” he asked.

  “Well…” Jen hesitated and then it came out. All about her mother’s penchant for “drama” and its effect on her and Teresa. “A counselor in high school suggested that I might feel empowered by acting in an appropriate situation—on stage. One thing led to another. And it is empowering. I know that there’s no temptation in me to make a scene for attention or to manipulate people. I’m lucky. I don’t have to fight it, because there’s simply no urge to behave that way. Nonetheless, I’m still more like my mother than I want to be.”

  “I’ve met her.”

  “Yes.” Her mother had been between lovers long enough to visit Santa Barbara and try to run her daughters’ lives all those years ago.

  “She didn’t seem that bad. Were there ever any repercussions for her?”

  “For telling lies and pretending she was afraid for her life? No. Not really. Certain people—neighbors, friends—stopped taking her seriously. That would have been a problem if any of us had actually ever been in danger, but of course we weren’t. She was the woman who cried wolf. Still, she’s not that way all the time. When she has enough going on in her own environment, she doesn’t have so much time and energy left to try to control the rest of us.”

  “Control?”

  “Oh, yes.” Jen nodded emphatically. “Oversee, overprotect, supervise, observe, control. All of it. So,” she finished very deliberately, “a little break is good for all of us.”

  “Does she try to control Elena?”

  “In a way. The dynamic is different there, and they seem more able to be friends. But, then, Elena doesn’t have a lot of independence yet.”

  “Is your mother suspicious of me?”

  “My mother? Yes. Or she wants to be—or pretends to be. Whatever it is, she’s doing it for her own ends. Whatever they are.” Sometimes, Jen wanted to add, I wish her
act was supposed to benefit me. But it would always be for Robin.

  PETE, THEIR computer animation tech, had gone to school with Max. They’d been roommates in their undergraduate years. A rangy Long Island native, Pete had been into film and computers forever. He had a gift for visual art and had sold massive oil paintings to corporations who hung them in the lobbies of their head offices. He’d also been an excellent surfer, and Max couldn’t count the hours they’d spent together floating in channel water dotted with tar, spotting dolphins, whales and so much more.

  Pete picked them up in a Suburban he used for transporting sound equipment. One of his assorted moneymaking enterprises was handling sound for concerts.

  The Colorado group climbed into the SUV, Bob and Pete in front, Max and the Delazzeri sisters in back, and headed south.

  Teresa seemed to withdraw as she gazed at oil rigs, at the palms outside the Belmont in Montecito, at avocado trees, at all the things that spoke of Santa Barbara, of a life they’d shared so long ago. She sat by a window, with Jen in the middle and Max on Jen’s other side.

  “It’s so beautiful,” Jen said. “I forget. Or—well, I don’t forget. I just…don’t think about it.”

  Like Max, she’d spent much of her life by the ocean, but for her it was Monterey first, and then Santa Barbara.

  “I picked up your bike from your dad’s house, like you said,” Pete tossed over his shoulder.

  “A bicycle?” Jen asked. They’d all loved to ride when they were in college.

  “Uh…no.”

  “Not a motorcycle?” Her horror couldn’t have been more pronounced or instantaneous.

  He grinned. “I wear a helmet.”

  “Lovely.” Her jaw had tensed. “Elena wouldn’t ride on it even if I allowed it. Which I won’t, incidentally.”

  “I’ve noticed her extreme caution. But Elena isn’t the passenger I was hoping for.”

  He wondered if she’d heard him. She peered out Teresa’s window, and all Max could see was the perfect curve of her jaw.

  “Your dad asked when he’s going to see you,” Pete continued.

  “Not today.”