The Smoke Jumper

by Nicholas Evans

  ‘Julia?’

  She turned to him and there was such a tragic look in her eyes that it took him a moment to go on.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  She gave a little shake of her head. ‘Not really. But I’m getting there.’

  He held out his hand and she hesitated then took it and held it in both of hers. Her skin felt cold.

  ‘I’m sorry I never returned your calls.’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  ‘I guess I just didn’t know what to say. I was so ashamed about what I said to you that day. I didn’t mean it.’

  ‘I know. It’s okay.’

  ‘You saved my life. And I know I should . . .’

  She swallowed and shook her head and looked away into the fire.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I just . . . sometimes wish you hadn’t.’

  Tears broke from her eyes. Connor leaned forward and clasped both her hands in his.

  ‘Julia, what happened wasn’t your fault.’

  Out in the hallway a door clicked and again they heard the tap of the cane. Julia took her hands away and wiped away her tears. Connor’s voice was low and urgent now.

  ‘You mustn’t think that. You did all you could.’

  She gave a wry little smile.

  ‘Sure.’

  Ed came into the room and Connor watched him find his way without falter to his chair. Silence hung over them like a shroud.

  ‘Okay,’ Ed said. ‘So either you’re asleep or you were talking about me - which is fine. What better subject is there?’

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ Julia said. Her voice was instantly, startlingly cheerful. The only hint of what had just passed was the smudged mascara under her left eye. ‘Anyhow, we’ve been talking about you all evening. You haven’t asked Connor a single thing about what he’s up to.’

  ‘True. So what’s hot in Montana, cowboy? How’s the photo business?’

  ‘Oh, pretty much the same as ever. It’s okay, I guess. I’ve sold a few pictures. Truth is, it’s time I moved on.’

  He took a sip of brandy. They were both waiting for him to continue.

  ‘Connor, you’re such a pain in the ass,’ Ed said. ‘When you say something like that, all casual, like it’s nothing at all, it’s a sure sign that there’s a major life-change about to happen. For heaven’s sake, move on where?’

  ‘I’m going to travel a little.’

  ‘That’s great. Where exactly?’

  ‘Europe first, then Africa maybe.’

  ‘Great. To take pictures?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘So, where in Europe exactly?’

  Connor knew Julia was staring at him. He was avoiding her eyes.

  ‘Come on, man. What’s the big secret?’

  ‘I’m going to Bosnia.’

  ‘Wow. You got, like, an assignment or something?’

  ‘No, I figured I’d just go.’

  ‘What, you can go to a war zone, just like that?’

  Connor shrugged. ‘I guess I’ll find out. I’m just going to play it by ear.’

  ‘Wow! Well, good for you, man. When do you go?’

  ‘Well, I was figuring on leaving pretty soon. Now I guess I’ll have to kick my heels till after this darned wedding of yours.’

  He had made it all sound more definite than it was, or at least, than it had been. He’d been thinking about the trip for some time and had done his research. But it wasn’t until just now, hearing that the woman he loved was to be married, that he knew for certain that he would go. Julia hadn’t said a word nor taken her eyes off him. And at last he looked at her and smiled but she didn’t smile back.

  Had he thought about it and had Ed been able to see, he would never have done what he then did. Quite on impulse, he leaned forward and wiped the mascara from Julia’s cheek. And she closed her eyes at his touch and silently bowed her head.

  14

  The house that they found in Montana stood above a rocky bend of the Bitterroot River, with the forest rising steeply behind it. It was on two floors and built of logs and had an acre and a half of land laid largely to grass. There were apple trees and pear trees and the side of the house that looked down on the river had tall glass doors and a deck and a yellow rambling rose run riot. The place had been built nine years ago by a couple who were sculptors and there was a long barn that they had used as a studio. One of their pieces, an elaborate totem pole carved from a pine tree thirty feet tall, stood at the foot of the lawn so that the scowling eagle at its top glowered east over the river like a sentinel.

  After the wedding they had spent ten days lying on a beach in Mexico. Ed took along a stack of novels on audio-cassette but couldn’t stand the music they plastered on, so he got Julia to read to him from her book, Madame Bovary, and was soon concocting a musical version of it called Oh, Madame! Sometimes he would fall asleep while Julia was reading and she would stop and gaze at the pelicans patrolling the shoreline in lazy squadrons and making their comical crash-dives into the surf.

  Tanned and refreshed, they flew directly to Missoula to start looking for a house. She had expected that it would take many weeks to find somewhere that they liked, but they found it on the third day, which was just as well because house-hunting with Ed was a tiring business. He wanted every detail described. What color were the kitchen walls? What could you see when you looked out the bedroom window? Did the river look good for fishing? Could she see any trout rising?

  ‘Hundreds,’ she said. ‘They’re monsters. There isn’t room for them all. They’re even sunbathing on the bank.’

  The downstairs was one big living room with a wood floor and Ed stood there and sang so that he could get an idea of the acoustics. The realtor, a jovial woman of about fifty in scarlet lipstick and big gold earrings, thought it was hysterical. Especially when Ed got her singing too.

  ‘Hmm. Most impressive,’ he said. ‘The Maria Callas of Missoula.’

  His parents had given him a new piano as a wedding present, a sleek black Yamaha baby grand. He asked Julia where it should stand, saying it had to be somewhere that had a view of the river. The realtor caught Julia’s eye and Ed somehow sensed it and explained to her that even though he couldn’t see it, it was important to know it was there. The obvious place was by the glass doors that led out onto the deck.

  And that was where, nine months later, it now stood. Ed had made it the center of what he called NASA control - the complex of keyboards, screens and computer equipment that did indeed look capable of launching a small missile. On the piano’s lid, among the stacks of braille sheets, each with a different object upon it for identification, stood the silver-framed black and white picture that Connor had taken of them at the wedding. In it Ed was laughing - no doubt at one of his own jokes - the Kentucky sun flaring like a starburst in his sunglasses, while Julia, looking sideways at the camera, kissed him on the cheek. It still struck her as odd that Ed had never seen nor ever would see how they had looked that day.

  There was, however, something more profound about the image that struck her only later. With its devotional kiss, the pose somehow symbolized the compact they had made, or rather, the compact that Julia had made with herself. It was straightforward enough. She had caused Ed to lose his eyesight, so now he would have hers. This didn’t mean that she had married him merely from a sense of duty. Nor that she didn’t love him. Of course she did. And her admiration at his courage, his lack of self-pity and his unflagging optimism grew with every day she spent with him. All of this was there in the picture as a daily reminder to her that this was how things were and would be; that this was now her allotted life. That the photograph also showed her looking sideways at Connor was something she refused to allow into her head.

  They had moved into the house at the end of September. Both of their mothers came to stay for a few days to help them get things straight, and although they were about as different as two women could be - the southern belle and the Italian hairdresser from Brooklyn
- they got along famously and laughed so much that for a while after they left the place seemed empty.

  Those first few months had been hectic. The local Blind and Low Vision Services had sent rehab and orientation and mobility counselors to help them. They adapted the kitchen, marking the stove and the microwave and food containers with little rubber dots and magnets so that Ed could figure things out. They pruned the rose and the fruit trees so that he wouldn’t catch his face on them and then erected posts with a rope strung between them all the way from the deck down to the river and along the bank, so that he could safely go there by himself.

  Ed wasn’t the only one having to learn a new way of living. Though they were nothing by comparison with Ed’s, there were many minor readjustments that Julia too had to make. Such as remembering not to leave things lying around in odd places where he might trip or knock them over, not to leave doors or cupboards ajar in case he walked into them, always to put things back in exactly the same place so that he could find them. By far the most difficult thing she had to learn was the fine line between when to help him and when not to. It was painful to stand by while he got frustrated and furious with himself, to watch him fumble or even fall, but she knew that sometimes she must. By the time winter came, however, they had worked most things out and these bad moments were fewer and farther between.

  It was Julia’s first Montana winter and it gave little compromise. The first snow came in October and kept topping itself up like an overattentive waiter. Far from feeling trapped or isolated or even depressed by it, as she had feared she might, Julia loved it. They wrapped up warm and went for long walks under clear alpine skies. They even tried cross country skiing, Julia going first with a set of bear bells pinned to her back and Ed trying to follow the sound. He kept going too fast and crashing into her and they wiped out in some truly spectacular falls but ached more afterward from laughing so much.

  Their evenings were spent cocooned together on the couch by the big log fire, reading and listening to music or, if Ed insisted, watching a favorite old western or musical on TV. He would make her give a running commentary about what was happening on the screen. Sometimes she would tease him by inventing characters or pieces of action, but he knew most of the movies so well that he would cotton on right away and grab her and tickle her and make her beg for mercy.

  Thanks to the generosity of Ed’s father and to the smoke jumper insurance money, they had few financial worries. Julia hadn’t worked since giving up her job in Boston the previous spring and although she intended to find a new job, she was still relishing the freedom to read and potter and to get back to some serious painting, which she did most mornings in the barn studio. Ed, however, was a lot less comfortable about relying on charity (especially his father’s) and was keen to demonstrate that he could support himself. The long-term plan was still, of course, to make it as a composer, but meanwhile he was determined to go on teaching piano.

  Back in the fall he’d put an ad into The Missoulian and it conjured over a dozen would-be pupils. Word-of-mouth soon conjured more than he could handle. Nearly all were children who came to the house after school. And having them around the place, hearing their voices and their laughter and seeing how much fun Ed had with them, Julia knew it wouldn’t be long before he raised the subject of having children of their own.

  It happened on the night after Thanksgiving. They had made love on the couch beside the fire and were lying in each other’s arms. Julia was watching the snow fall in slow, fat flakes outside on the deck.

  ‘So, what do you think?’ he said.

  ‘You mean out of ten? Mmm, I’d give you a four, maybe five.’

  He dug his fingers under her arms. ‘You know what I mean.’

  She did, though quite how was a mystery. She often seemed able to read his thoughts and only hoped it wasn’t mutual.

  ‘Isn’t it a little early? I mean, shouldn’t we get a little more settled?’

  ‘I don’t know. I feel pretty settled.’

  ‘Well, so do I, but ...’

  ‘Listen, if you’re not sure, that’s cool. We’ll wait.’

  She thought about it all night and all the next day. She wanted children just as much as he did. What was the point in waiting? They had always used condoms and the next time they made love, she silently stopped him as he reached for one. Neither of them said another word about it, as if by some tacit accord that to do so might jeopardize their efforts.

  Now, more than four months later, Julia still hadn’t conceived. And although she knew that these things took time and that some couples could indeed spend years trying, an irrational voice had started to nag her that there was something wrong. Having started unsure, by now she could feel herself becoming almost obsessed with having a child. And ten days ago, without telling Ed, she had gone to see her doctor and had him run some tests. Today she was going to find out the results.

  The omens that early April morning all seemed good. Ed woke her with a cup of coffee and she lay in bed with the sun streaming in and Neil Young booming on the downstairs stereo while Ed did his morning workout. Then he cooked some delicious blueberry pancakes for breakfast and they ate them in the sunshine at the long pine table and talked about the summer and where they might go for a vacation. Ed liked to start his workday by playing something on the piano and today he chose one of her favorite pieces of Schubert. Julia cleared the dishes and put on her boots and coat and kissed him goodbye, saying she was going into Missoula. It was a Friday, when she normally did the weekly food shopping, so he didn’t ask her why. Outside, for the first time, there was a palpable stirring of spring. The snow had all but gone and crocuses were pushing through the weathered grass.

  The clinic was in a long, low building on the south side of town, not far from the mall. In her eagerness, she arrived twenty minutes early, before the place had opened, so she walked over to the mall for a cup of coffee and a newspaper and came back to wait in the car.

  She looked first, as now she always did, for any stories about Bosnia. She prayed every night for Connor’s safety. All they had heard from him since the wedding was a couple of postcards, the last one from Sarajevo just before Christmas. Both were brief and chatty and gave nothing away. Last week Julia had seen a report on the TV news about what was now being called ‘ethnic cleansing’ and how in Sarajevo snipers were randomly killing civilians. But today there was nothing in the paper and although she knew it was silly she decided to take this as another good omen.

  One of her mother’s many homilies was that a woman should always have a female doctor and that if for some reason you absolutely had to have a male, you should make certain to get a young, goodlooking one, because all the old, ugly ones were frustrated and lecherous. Julia’s was suave and handsome but pushing sixty and she didn’t know where that left her. His name was Henry Rumbold, which Ed said reminded him of one of those old-fashioned cure-all tinctures they used to sell from the back of wagons in the days of the Wild West - Dr Henry T. Rumbold’s Remarkable Throat, Bowel and Boil Remedy. Julia had never since been able to look at the man without thinking of it.

  The waiting room had been given an early spring makeover in primrose yellow and still smelled of fresh paint. Apart from a woman with a small child who had a streaming nose and a rather unsettling rash, Julia was the only one there. Dr Rumbold came out to find her and ushered her into his office, asking how she was and how Ed was and saying, thank the Lord, it seemed as if winter was at last on its way out. He motioned to Julia to sit down in front of his desk and settled himself on the other side of it. He put on some rimless spectacles and, for what seemed an eternity, shuffled through the papers before him. Julia sat and watched, deciding that her mother was right, at least in part. Dr Rumbold was clearly a frustrated thespian. He surely knew already what the damn notes said, so all this fussing around was purely for dramatic suspense. At last he looked up over his glasses and delicately placed his hands flat on the notes.

  ‘Well, we’ve got
the test results back,’ he said.

  What an asshole, she thought. ‘And?’ she said sweetly.

  ‘Frankly, Julia, you’re in great shape.’

  ‘Hey! You’re sure?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  She immediately forgave him everything.

  He went through the details with her but Julia was too elated to pay much attention. He wound up by giving her all the usual guff about how being anxious could often make it more difficult to conceive and Julia made a feeble joke about how she would try not to get anxious about getting anxious. And that was it. He showed her to the door.

  ‘Of course, it takes two to tango,’ he said, almost, it seemed, as an afterthought. ‘And if it still isn’t happening, maybe Ed should come in and we could run a few tests on him too.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But I’m sure you’ll find that won’t be necessary.’

  ‘No. Right. If we tango enough.’

  She tramped around the supermarket, trying to find her earlier high spirits, as if they might be stacked on a shelf somewhere, but they seemed to have sold out. She filled the cart with all kinds of things they didn’t really need, telling herself to cheer up, for pete’s sake, she’d gotten a double thumbs-up, she was a proper, paid-up, functioning female.

  By the time she reached the checkout she was feeling a little happier. She waited in line, watching the other women, all of them older than her, waiting patiently with their loaded carts. Maybe it was time she quit being a lady of leisure and got herself a job. After all, Ed was fit now and working and knew the house well enough not to need her hovering over him all day. He had said so himself. Maybe she would start looking. The decision made her feel better still.

  ‘Julia?’

  She looked around. A young man was standing behind her, next in line. He was tall and cute, with long dark hair, and he was vaguely familiar but Julia couldn’t place him. He grinned.

  ‘Hey, it is you. I thought it was.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I—’