The Smoke Jumper

by Nicholas Evans

  ‘Amy, will you stand still?’ Julia said, through a mouthful of pins.

  ‘It looks yuck!’

  ‘It does not look yuck. It looks fine. At least it will if you’ll just stand still a moment and let me do it.’

  ‘I’m not going to wear it.’

  ‘You’re supposed to be an angel. This is what angels wear. Honey, please! Keep still. These are pins here, one of us is going to get hurt.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘Well, I do.’

  Julia was trying to pin the hem of the silvery skirt which Amy had decided to despise. As the daughter of the composer and musical director of the school’s Christmas show, she had been able to pick her part - at least, among the supporting cast, for bigger stars with better agents from the fourth and fifth grades had bagged the leads. Six weeks ago she had unequivocally declared that she wanted to be an angel. Not a chipmunk, not an elf, not even the front end of the orca (though what the heck an orca was doing in the show, Julia still had no idea). Nothing but an angel.

  Of course, seeing as the school was a multicultural, politically correct and altogether right-on kind of a place, this naturally didn’t mean angel as in hovering-over-the-baby-Jesus-in-his-manger sort of angel, such as Julia herself had once been dragooned into playing when she was a kid. No, the entire show was more, as Ed had put it to Mrs Leitner when pitching the idea back in the fall, more pantheistic: a spiritual celebration of nature and its bounteous wonders.

  Privately, to Julia, he described it as pure eco-anarchist propaganda. Accordingly, the angels were much more of the avenging, in-your-face variety and though Ed was having second thoughts about giving them Uzis, by the end of the show they had disposed of several evil loggers and an oil slick called Mr Gloop. And it was this, in all likelihood, that lay at the root of Amy’s present tantrum. In the considered opinion of this particular seven-year-old going on seventeen, the costume was just too damn sissy.

  ‘What’s the problem here?’ Ed said. He’d been sitting at the piano in the next room, trying to concentrate on some changes to the finale. ‘You don’t like your outfit?’

  ‘It sucks.’

  ‘Amy!’ Julia said. ‘You do not use that word, okay?’

  ‘Kevin Lucas says it all the time.’

  ‘Well, you are not Kevin Lucas. Ed? Will you talk to her?’

  ‘Tell me what you don’t like about it.’

  ‘It looks yuck.’

  ‘Yuck’s not good enough. Tell me what it looks like.’

  ‘It’s all stupid and . . . splivvy.’

  ‘Splivvy?’

  ‘I look like Barbie,’ she sneered. Amy didn’t much care for dolls of any sort. The only Barbie she’d ever been given was promptly decapitated.

  ‘What color is the skirt?’ Ed asked patiently.

  ‘All white and silver and stupid.’ She twisted it in her hands as she said this and there was a sound of ripping.

  ‘Okay, that’s it,’ Julia said.

  She took the pins from her lips and put them back in the box. Then she hoisted Amy from the table to the floor and unceremoniously stripped her of her wings and skirt.

  ‘I thought it was going to be, kind of, darker,’ Ed said quietly. ‘You know, like gunmetal or something.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Amy sneered. She was sheltering beside Ed, with an arm hooked around his leg.

  ‘That is what it’s going to be. I told her ten times already.

  First we make it, then we spray it. Okay? Jesus.’

  Ed held up his hands. ‘Okay, okay, I’m sorry.’

  ‘You shouldn’t say Jesus,’ Amy muttered.

  ‘Really? Why not? Kevin Lucas says it all the time.’

  An hour later Amy was tucked up in bed looking every inch a regular angel and happy to be one. Her cheeks glowed pink from her bath and her mop of blond curls was brushed as neatly as it ever allowed. The color was clearly from Connor but nobody had a clue where the curls came from. Ed teased her that in a previous life she must have been a flue brush. Her eyes were dark brown like Julia’s and she had the same olive tone to her skin. In the wholly objective eyes of her mother, she was the most beautiful child ever to have graced the planet. Yet if asked, as occasionally she was, to say which of her parents, in character, Amy most resembled, Julia would reply without a moment’s hesitation that it was Ed.

  She was boisterous and funny and quick-witted and in each case sometimes too much so for her own good. Like Ed, she could floor you with a smart remark from a hundred yards and there were times at school when it landed her in trouble, especially with the more lumpish boys whose only resort, when snagged and bound by her verbal knots, was to violence.

  Then there was the music. Whereas Julia could hardly hold a note and Connor, as far as anyone could recall, had never been heard even to whistle to his horse, Amy was naturally musical. She had picked up Ed’s habit of singing to herself when she was doing something and when she pulled out the stops, her voice could be exquisite. Long before she was out of diapers, Ed was teaching her songs and sitting her on his lap at the piano, which by now she played as proficiently as some of his pupils two or three years her senior.

  On long car journeys, the two of them would drive Julia nuts, singing every wretched song from The Jungle Book or The Wizard of Oz or, worse still, from one of Ed’s old favorites like Kiss Me, Kate or Oliver! and Julia, at the wheel, would have to beg for mercy or earplugs and end up being blackmailed into promises of elaborate treats to make them stop. Ed liked to joke that some of his genes must have snuck in there after all. If not, Amy Tully was walking scientific testimony if not to nurture’s triumph over nature, then at least to it having given it a damn good run for its money.

  Julia was lying on the covers beside her now in the cluttered cavern of Amy’s room. The multicolored wallpaper with its animal motif was all but obscured by Amy’s paintings and drawings and family photographs as well as the strings of beads and necklaces and bits of ribbon that she hung from pegs just as Julia hung her jewelry. There were dozens of little glass and ceramic animals and jars crammed with feathers gathered from the riverbank and books spilling from shelves and stacks more on the floor among the jetsam of toys and discarded clothing and bric-a-brac. The mess was a first-class hazard for Ed but they had both grown tired of nagging her about it, persuading themselves that it showed character and was better than having a child who was obsessively tidy. Ed had grown used to picking his way through it like a soldier looking for land mines. Amy’s bedside lamp was a large illuminated goose that Julia’s mother had given her and its glow made the room feel cozy and womblike.

  Together, by its light, they were reading Amy’s favorite Dr Seuss, The Butter Battle Book. They were best friends again, mostly thanks to the fact that after Amy had stomped off upstairs for her bath, Julia had gotten out the spray can of gunmetal paint and some glitter and transformed both skirt and wings into something that even Linda in her Neo-Gothic heyday would have proudly worn. Grinning sheepishly from the tub, Amy said she loved it.

  ‘Sorry, Mommy.’

  ‘Give me twenty years and I might forgive you.’

  As usual, Julia was doing most of the reading. Amy always read more to Ed than to her, describing any pictures in intimate detail. She often read to Julia too, but with this book especially, although she knew it by heart, she preferred to listen. She liked the different funny voices that Julia put on for the Zooks and the Yooks as they escalated their crazy war over which way bread should be eaten: butter side up or butter side down.

  It intrigued Julia that this was Amy’s favorite Dr Seuss, for it wasn’t by a long way his funniest. In fact, it was downright chilling, telling as it did of a world sliding toward apocalypse because of a fatuous disagreement. In both of their minds there had always been an association with Connor.

  Buying the book, about two years ago, had prompted a long discussion about war and why people sometimes hated and wanted to kill each other. Julia reassured her that hardly
anyone nowadays expected the kind of world war that was depicted in the book. But there were wars she said, smaller ones, that were always going on in dlfferent parts of the world. She found herself telling Amy that her biological father (Bio-Dad, thank heaven had never caught on) often went to these places and took pictures.

  ‘Of people fighting?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Shooting each other?’

  ‘Sometimes, yes.’

  ‘Do people try and shoot him?’

  ‘No, sweetheart. He’s not a soldier, he’s a photographer. He has to be careful though.’

  ‘But he’ll be okay because he’s really brave, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, he is.’

  ‘Like when he saved your life.’

  ‘Uh-huh. That’s right.’

  When Amy was still a baby, Ed and Julia had spent a whole evening discussing at what age they would tell Amy about various things. They wanted her to know about having two fathers right away, before she could even begin to think about it. But they hadn’t felt that way about the fire. They worried that it might traumatize the child and agreed that they would tell her when she was, say, twelve years old. It was the kind of ludicrous resolution that parents make before they get real, when they still think that they would never, ever, do such awful things as bribe their kids with candy or tell them to shut up.

  And of course it crumbled. At the age of four and a half, Amy asked Ed how he came to be blind and the story - at least, a censored version of it - came pouring out. And instead of upsetting her, it only seemed to make her proud of them all, especially of her two superhero fathers who jumped out of the sky to rescue poor old klutzy mom.

  Amy didn’t talk about Connor so much anymore. It was hard to keep a memory alive when there were only photographs and stories and the occasional letter to feed it with. He still wrote to Amy and sent exotic gifts from far-flung corners of the world. But never once, since the christening, had he come again to see her. This seemed neither to upset Amy nor to anger her and Julia supposed that this was because it had always been that way. He had never been more than an idea, like a character in an old movie: intriguing, a little dashing and, like his photographs, mostly in black and white. Occasionally Amy would peruse Connor’s pictures in magazines - at least, those that were suitable - and ask questions about him which Julia and Ed would dutifully answer, trying always to sound warm about him and never to reveal their hurt.

  Among the photos pinned to Amy’s bedroom wall were several of Connor, including the only one that existed of the two of them together. Taken by Julia at the christening, it showed him standing on the deck, holding this funny, chubby-cheeked cherub in his arms and smiling down at her, while Amy, ever the star, looked straight at the camera.

  For a long while she and Ed had kept in touch with Connor’s mother and a few times had taken Amy over to see her at the ranch in Augusta. But as the years went by and still Connor didn’t come, it seemed somehow pointless. Like Hamlet without the prince, as Ed said the last time as they drove home. Maggie claimed that he never came to see her either, but Julia knew it wasn’t true. Nor did Maggie any longer call them with news of Connor or to tell them of papers or magazines that had his photographs. Perhaps he had told her not to or perhaps she knew why he kept away. Mothers were like that, Julia knew; even the mothers of monsters closed around to defend them. Whatever the reason, it was now more than two years since they had seen Maggie or spoken with her.

  And with Connor it was more than seven. Amy’s entire lifetime. And sometimes it seemed to Julia like the whole of hers too. They were all different people and their world a different place and the sorrow that was Connor had shifted around it like the sun. Once it had risen hot and harsh and for a while had glared down on them, impossible to behold except briefly through shielded, squinting eyes. Now it had cooled and though not set, was lowering itself through a mellowed sky, casting shadows longer yet less painful to the eye.

  During the first year she had written him several letters but destroyed them all. At first she thought it was simply because she couldn’t find the right words. And then she realized it was simpler still and that there were no words to find. In those days she had thought about him all the time. Barely a waking hour went by without her replaying in her mind that last image of him, sitting beside her in the cold moonlight, confessing his love and then holding her and kissing her tears.

  Before he left the following day, without telling him, she had slipped a photograph into his packed bag. It was the one that Ed had taken of the two of them that last day they climbed together, when they had asked him to father their child.

  She kept track of him as best she could. One way or another - mostly through the eagle-eyed Linda - she would hear about some magazine that had used his latest photographs. She noticed that he now often wrote the accompanying stories, whereas at first the words had always been someone else’s. His style was simple and unflowery and she could hear his voice behind the words. The pieces that moved her most were about a little-reported war which had been going on for years in northern Uganda. Connor seemed to return there often. His most recent piece was about a rehabilitation center for children who’d been abducted from their homes and forced to serve as soldiers in the rebel army. The pictures had made Julia weep.

  Only once had she and Ed drawn near to speaking the truth about why Connor had since stayed away. A brown paper package, mailed from Kampala, had arrived with perfect timing on Amy’s fourth birthday. It contained a little dress - just the right size - and a shawl, both in a vivid African fabric, splashes of bright green and yellow and red and purple. Enclosed in the accompanying birthday card was a photograph of a magnificent Ugandan woman wearing the same outfit and he had written instructions, complete with diagrams, on how to twist the shawl into a headdress. Amy was thrilled. She wore the outfit for a week.

  Ed was furious. Once Amy was safely out of earshot, he exploded.

  ‘Goddamn presents!’ he said. ‘What does he say on the card? “Say hi to your mom and dad”? Terrific. Maybe one day he’ll come say it himself. Or even pick up the phone sometime and say it. She’s never heard his goddamn voice! But I guess he’s just too famous and busy now for that kind of thing.’

  ‘Come on, Ed,’ Julia said. ‘Don’t be like that.’

  ‘Like what? I mean, are we lepers or something? He was my best friend, for christsake! “Say hi to your mom and dad.” Well, fuck him.’

  ‘Maybe he thinks it’s fairer to stay away.’

  ‘Fairer? How the hell do you work that one out?’

  ‘Nothing. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘No, come on, tell me.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. Maybe he thinks you might find it hard.’

  ‘What, find it hard having my best friend come visit?’

  ‘No, I’m wrong. Forget it.’

  ‘What, like, I’d be jealous of him and Amy or something?’

  ‘No, not exactly. Please Ed, let’s just drop it, okay?’

  ‘No, I’m interested. That’s obviously what you think. That he’s staying away because he thinks I’m threatened by him being Amy’s biological father. Is that right?’

  ‘Well. Maybe a little. The way you were at the christening—’

  ‘What do you mean? Like I was hostile to him or something? ’

  ‘A little, yes.’

  He stood there in silence for a moment, still and inscrutable behind his dark glasses. It was as though he were staring into her head with something more powerful than vision and it unsettled her.

  ‘You tell me this now? After four years? That I’m the reason he doesn’t come see us anymore?’

  ‘Ed, how should I know?’

  ‘Wow,’ he said quietly. He shook his head sadly. ‘Oh boy.’

  And Julia at once regretted saying it and tried to soften it by saying that it probably wasn’t that after all and that maybe Connor had found it hard seeing Amy and felt it better to keep his contact with her at a dis
tance in case he grew too attached. She babbled on for a while but could tell Ed wasn’t really listening. He was quiet and thoughtful for days and since that day had never criticized Connor again.

  When Julia reflected on why Connor stayed away, which she could now, though preferred not to, for it still stirred feelings that ruffled the smooth surface of her life, she suspected that both of the things she had said were true. Probably he had sensed Ed’s jealousy and concluded that the best he could do for his friend was to keep clear. And probably he did find the prospect too painful of seeing his daughter growing up as someone else’s. If he couldn’t have all of Amy, then perhaps it was better to have none. This, Julia had little doubt, was what he also felt about her. And although he was part of her and always would be and walked daily in her thoughts, if she were honest with herself, this was how she preferred it to be. If not all of him, then none.

  Julia and Amy always finished The Butter Battle Book in unison, putting on spooky voices as the Yooks and the Zooks menacingly fingered their new bombs, the ones that could obliterate mankind. Who was going to drop it first? We’ll see, we will see . . . Julia shut the book.

  ‘Zooks are dumb,’ Amy said.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘They must be. Who’d eat their bread butter side down?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘You do not.’

  ‘I do too. You’ve just never seen me.’

  ‘Okay, I’m going to watch tomorrow and if you really are a Zook, you’re in big trouble.’

  ‘I’d better go make my bomb.’

  Julia got up and turned off the lamp and leaned over Amy to kiss her.

  ‘Gimme a big hug,’ she said. ‘Bigger, bigger! That’s more like it.’

  ‘Thanks for the costume and sorry I was mean to you.’

  ‘Hey, what are moms for?’

  ‘I love you, Mommy.’

  ‘I love you too, baby.’

  Kay Neumark told the chipmunks and the elves for the third time to cut it out. If they didn’t quit fooling around and trying to trip the angels like that, she said, she would have to find others who would take the job more seriously. It was utter bluff, of course. Both she and Ed knew only too well that every child who was remotely interested had already been enlisted, along with quite a few who weren’t. Still, a first full rehearsal was always a test of nerves and so far it was going all right.