by Margot Early
“I said that was probably the case; that we planned on going straight to Canyon Wind Estates, straight to the house there.”
Beside Max, Jen asked Teresa, “Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
THE SUBDIVISION HAD BEEN well-planned—but for the danger of fire. Eyeing the adobe dwellings built on the California Mission theme, Jen said, “I forgot how nice these houses are.” Max bit back the reply he was tempted to make. A subdivision built on a southwest-facing slope. It should have burned.
But Jen knew that, too. And Max had certainly made the point in conversation with her.
Their rental house was two-storey, built around a red-tiled courtyard replete with planters and fountains.
“Everyone has his own room,” Pete said. “Unless people want to share.” His eyes fell upon Max and Jen, and Jen looked taken aback. Max watched Pete’s slow grin at this reaction. Pete enjoyed baiting people he believed to be overly serious; in Jen, he’d found a new target. Well, she could take care of herself.
Pride, he thought. Pride would have made her especially prickly, if someone suggested she’d be sleeping with him. Because they had been lovers, he’d rejected her, she’d borne his child and she would never forget the smallest detail of the pain he’d caused her.
As they went through the house, choosing their rooms—although Pete had already selected a downstairs suite with plenty of shade so that he wouldn’t have to keep the blinds drawn while he was on the computer.
Jen decided on a room upstairs, one with a four-poster bed and an outside sleeping porch. Teresa chose a corner room, looking away from Makal Canyon. Max took the front room beside Jen’s. His was the master suite, off the sleeping porch. Bob’s bedroom was across the courtyard from Max’s, connected by an upper walkway.
Sitting on his bed, Max gazed through the wide French doors at the canyon where Salma died.
He thought of Jen, wondering why he’d taken the room next to hers. It wasn’t because it was the master suite—or for the memory foam mattress he felt beneath the spread.
Why did I even ask her here?
She was going to help him with the documentary. She would interview subjects. She would use journalists’ instincts he suspected she deliberately kept sheathed. She didn’t want to be a rebel. She wasn’t inclined to expose error or injustice.
I should have asked someone else to do this.
Why had he asked Jen? Because of Elena? So that he would have a chance to spend more time with his daughter and know her better? He could have done that in any case.
Because he’d used Jen to deal with Salma’s death, her horrible death?
Use… He’d thought a lot about that word since he’d learned that a child had resulted from the week he and Jen had spent together making love. Had he used her? Had he ever used any woman?
Whatever his intentions had been back then, that week after the fire, they’d been neither pure nor mature. They had been…momentary. Gratuitous?
When he remembered, he didn’t like himself all that much. The man he’d become did not treat women so callously. Max knew that lovemaking frequently resulted in one party or the other falling in love. So he didn’t do that much of it and was selective. A woman had to be able to handle his independence, which meant having some of her own. That was the only way he stood a chance of falling in love. There’d been a woman smoke jumper years ago in Alaska. Which was why he’d left Alaska. He’d run into her on one fire since then. She’d married someone else and he’d been happy for her, but also sadder than he’d expected to be. He hadn’t wanted to marry her, he’d left their relationship; and yet he had missed being with her.
Now, he had asked Jen Delazzeri here.
Okay, he’d been attracted to her when he was engaged to Salma. That wasn’t a crime.
Once he’d seen her through her window next door—from the window of the room where he and Salma slept. Jen hadn’t been undressing but standing in front of the mirror, doing ballet exercises.
She was too curvy for a ballerina, he had thought.
He’d made himself not look, not even glance toward that window.
But he couldn’t forget. He’d never been able to forget, and whenever he’d seen her afterward the memory was there.
Until the fire.
Till Salma was burned.
Then… It just happened.
The world’s most frequent and least explanatory excuse for all the errors of flesh in this world.
Error?
Disloyalty to his fiancée, who was injured, then dead.
Teresa had told him that Salma was dead. Teresa had been the one to call him on the phone, and she’d barely been able to speak. Max, Max, you have to be with someone. You’re with the Hotshots, right? You’re with everyone?
He’d been with one of the other guys when Jen had brought him the phone, turned and started to walk from the room, paused briefly at the door, walked out, making some decision to give him privacy. And then had changed her mind.
She’d come back.
She’d come back because they’d shared the shelter.
And after Teresa had told him, Jen and Jarod had sat on each side of him, had held him, and others had trickled in. People crying. Everyone crying.
He hadn’t cried.
He’d never cried.
He’d had nightmares and been awakened from them by Jen. But that was later… Just a little bit later.
Strange that the memory of those nightmares, and awakening and finding her there brought him pain that seemed greater than Salma’s death, which had been a numbness. Grief that wasn’t exactly felt, but was more than felt.
It was after he’d overheard some of the other hotshots talking about the two of them that he’d said those things to Jen, whatever they were; the things he’d said before he’d left to join a hotshot crew in New Mexico. When he’d returned to Santa Barbara, Jen and Teresa were both gone, and that, he’d thought, was best.
He hadn’t enjoyed his memories of the time he’d spent with Jen. Rather, he’d felt guilty, hating himself for how much he wanted her. Not even taking the time to get to know her the way he would have…if things had been different. Everything.
First Salma’s pregnancy.
Then, he’d made Jen pregnant. He should have used a condom. He shouldn’t have been selfish.
But he was.
That selfish man was still inside him. Parts of a person didn’t evaporate. They came along for the ride, maybe partly transformed but still there. But he’d matured, and now he felt shame, and he couldn’t undo who he’d been that year, that summer, that week.
His thoughts turned from fire to what he’d begun to think of as the Other Task. Telling his father about Elena.
His sisters would welcome their new niece, he knew. His father would, too, eventually.
Pete had told Norman Rickman that Max wouldn’t be by that day. So maybe this was the day to surprise him. He could take the bike out.
Get away from Jen.
From what he felt, whatever that was.
He’d seen another helmet outside, with the bike, but he’d brought along his best one from Colorado. Little though he wanted to on such a clear summer day, he dressed in his bike leathers and left the room.
Jen was just coming out of hers, in blue jeans and a tank top. “Can’t wait to risk your life, I see.”
“Want to go for a ride?”
“No.”
“Not even to dinner?” A postponement of whatever scene awaited him at the family home.
“I…” she lowered her voice slightly “…I’m not sure I should leave.”
Teresa.
“I think she’d want you to. She’s stronger than you give her credit for being.”
“What do you know about it?” Her whispered retort was indignant.
“Tell her we’re going for a motorcycle ride.”
Jen’s eyes wandered up and down his frame, but without any apparent approval. “I don’t have the clothes
for it.”
“Did you bring a fire suit?”
“Of course not. I’m not signing up to be in another fire.”
“I’ll lend you some clothes.”
“Like they’ll fit!”
“You want to go, don’t you?” He couldn’t keep from grinning. “There is another helmet here. Let’s see what we can find you in the way of protective clothing.”
Her cheeks had turned pink, and Max thought of Elena’s insistence that her mother still carried a torch for him.
Max wondered if Elena was right.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“OF COURSE YOU SHOULD GO,” Teresa said. “I’m fine. You should take advantage of being away from Mom. You want the jacket?”
“Mom doesn’t run my life,” Jen replied. “You know that. I don’t let her. And besides, it’s your jacket.”
“It’s ours. But if Mom was here,” Teresa said, her words seeming less slurred, more decisive than they had in months, “she’d be warning you. Which you don’t need.” Without asking, she went to the closet, removed a black leather jacket and pressed it on her sister.
Jen laughed. “No, I don’t need to be warned.”
Max stopped in the doorway of Teresa’s room and saw the two sisters, catching that bright, sudden smile that he associated with the real Jen Delazzeri.
Jen wore Levi’s and a long-sleeved T-shirt stamped with the logo of the Martial Arts Center, Lodo. As he watched, she pulled on a black leather jacket with plenty of zippers. On the back was a painted image of the street urchin from Les Miserables.
“If my jacket doesn’t come back intact,” Teresa told Max, “you’re in trouble.”
He winked at her. “I’ll take good care of the jacket.”
Teresa said, “I won’t wait up.”
As he and Jen walked down the wide tiled staircase, Jen said in a low voice, “She made a joke. She hardly ever jokes.”
“She wasn’t joking.”
Jen rolled her eyes. “About the jacket. She loves this jacket. Actually, she and Mom and Elena and I saw the play on a trip to New York, and Mom got someone to airbrush the jacket for me. They didn’t want to, because of copyright, and so forth, so she told them I was in the cast.” She shook her head. “Not one of my prouder moments. I was mad, so I gave it to Teresa, who loves it. But she refuses to accept it as hers.”
“And I think you love it, too,” Max said knowingly.
“A bit.” She smiled, half reluctantly, but the Jen he remembered—and cared for, maybe more-than-cared-for—reappeared like the sun peeking from behind a cloud.
MINUTES LATER, they were headed north and into the Santa Inez Mountains. Jen knew without asking where he was taking her, where they would eat. Cold Springs Tavern. They’d gone there as a group, as hotshots, on bicycles, riding up the pass from school. They’d played the jukebox, shot pool, danced.
Friends.
Hiking in the mountains.
It had been like family, a new and different family from the one with which she’d grown up. Despite her initial doubts, she loved being on the back of Max’s motorcycle again. They’d traveled this way during the week that followed the fire. Down to the beach. Up the coast to another spot, where the Chumash Indians had left handprints in the stone on a high cliff. Magic everywhere.
Except that Salma had been dead, and Max hadn’t talked about it; wouldn’t talk about it.
As they crested the ridge of the mountain range, Jen gazed out at the ocean, the oil rigs, everything. She had changed so much from the woman she’d been in college. She remembered, most of all, a vulnerability that, although not entirely vanquished, had been hammered into something stronger. Yes, she could fall in love. But her experience as a Muay Thai fighter, in particular, gave her a focus outside her inner tenderness. Her exterior was strong, had known pain, had fought and triumphed. Her spirit grew from her martial arts practice.
I want to go down to the beach, she thought, and she wanted to surf again, do all the things she had done growing up. When she was young, she’d danced and surfed in Monterey, the two things combined for her. She’d surfed with Teresa usually; neither of them wanting to surf with boys, both anxious in a rough-and-tumble world from which their mother had been so determined to protect them. Maybe Robin’s protectiveness had helped lead Jen to martial arts; or maybe it was the drama of the spectacle. She had fallen in love with the most brutal fighting style, had even been to Thailand once, for two weeks of intensive study.
Yet people who didn’t know her well perceived her as vulnerable. Jen hated this.
How did Max see her?
As she’d predicted, Max took them to the Cold Springs Tavern, and Jen found it largely unchanged, with a line of motorcycles parked outside beneath the evergreens, the air less dry than Colorado—and familiar.
She climbed off the bike, avoiding the hot tailpipes, and removed her helmet. A cool breeze lifted her hair, blowing dark tendrils back from her face. Max grinned at her as he pulled off his helmet. “You look the same,” he said, as he had before.
“Thank you,” Jen said. I suppose. “I’m not the same, though.”
“Yes, so you’ve said.” Again, a rather impish grin.
“I can’t escape the feeling that you’re—well, paying attention to me simply because I’m Elena’s mother.”
“Since I’m her father and I find you attractive and interesting, I can think of worse reasons.”
Jen considered. So could she. “You don’t know enough about who I am to find me interesting.”
His eyebrows drew together slightly in puzzlement. “Are you always this inviting on dates?”
Jen laughed, surprising herself. “No. I’m hard on you.”
“Let’s have some dinner. To start your birthday celebration.”
Her birthday was the following day. She’d told him the date not long before. And he’d remembered.
THE WOOD INTERIOR was rustic, the bar in one room, the dining space in another. As their waitress seated them at a table with a red-and-white checked cloth, they could hear the jukebox playing Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Jen chose the special, a sautéed duckling with wild greens. Max had seafood, and they shared their entrees with a glass of chianti each. Jen watched their candle flicker in its glass holder, wishing she could find it as easy to love and to trust as she had thirteen years earlier.
Yet she’d felt an excitement, a warmth of skin and limb and flesh as she pressed close to Max on his motorcycle. It wasn’t his looks—though there was nothing to complain about in that regard. Age had given his face character, and she suspected he would grow even more attractive in the coming decades.
“Is your family looking forward to meeting Elena?”
Max lifted his head, brown eyes flitting to hers then back to his meal. “Now that you mention it…”
Jen waited.
He sipped his wine.
“I haven’t told them yet.”
She tried to remember his sisters, and she decided they couldn’t be the ones he was uneasy about telling.
She played through the questions she might ask: Why not? When are you planning to tell them?
But of course he planned to tell them, because he’d promised Elena she would meet them.
“You wanted to do it face-to-face,” she said.
“Yes.”
“That makes sense.” But sense wasn’t what it made. She couldn’t draw conclusions. She’d met Max’s family, yet she remembered little about them. His mother had died when he was a teenager; his sisters were healthy and blond and fond of Max. His father was a doctor…. “Your father.” Jen hesitated. “You were close to him, I remember.”
No response.
“Are you still?” she asked.
“Well, I’m the only son. He’s a physician. I’m a smoke jumper and a forest-service ranger.”
“He’s disappointed?”
“Yes.”
“How do you think he’ll react to learning you have a daughter? He won’
t reject Elena, will he?” It annoyed her to think that Elena believed finally knowing her father would be the answer to all her prayers and a salve for all her wounds. Nonetheless, she’d derive no satisfaction from watching her daughter be hurt by Max’s father or siblings.
“No. I can’t imagine that. He won’t be happy with me, though.”
Trying to predict what form his father’s displeasure would take was impossible, Jen decided. Impossible for her, anyhow.
As long as he doesn’t hurt Elena’s feelings.
“What’s our plan,” she asked, changing the subject, “for investigating the fire?”
“We want to interview the principals, particularly on camera.”
“Who else?”
“Some experts on wildland fire and on the problems with urban-wildland interface.”
In other words, problems that occurred where privately owned land and structures met public lands.
“Are you planning on talking to home owners and prospective home owners in this, addressing how people can protect their homes in a fire season?”
“Yes, actually, and also urging buyers and developers to look carefully at wildfire danger before developing risky areas.”
“Are you thinking about putting Teresa on film?” Jen asked. For her, the subject was a sensitive one. On film, Teresa’s instability would likely be apparent. Jen didn’t want her sister to see herself that way.
“I don’t know yet. I want her to walk the ground with us. It could be useful to have her perspective, as someone who was there.”
Teresa had the right to make her own decisions about something as important as this, Jen knew. To prevent her from choosing was to behave as Robin sometimes had in their lives, overly protective and controlling.
“When do you plan to start looking at the topography?” Jen asked.
“Tomorrow. Ideally, I would have liked to begin shooting the documentary on the nineteenth, the same day we arrived on the fire. But as it is, we’re pretty close. And fortunately, there are photographs of the actual blaze.”
“Do you think of the day of the blowup…” Jen stopped.
“What?”
She didn’t know what had driven her to ask something so insensitive. She shook her head.
