by Margo Catts
I folded my arms and watched the water rush and ripple. I walked closer, then squatted on my heels at the edge and touched the water. Unzipped my pants all the way, which felt so much better. The water ran through my fingers, clear and cold, distorting their shapes so that they appeared like the fat fingers of a baby or the gnarled ones of an old woman, depending on how you looked.
I looked upstream, toward the mountains, then back down at my fingers. Old woman. Baby. Back again. I heard a grumble of thunder and looked over my shoulder. Clouds mounded on top of each other in their haste to get to me.
I didn’t want to leave this spot. Or maybe this town.
My father was wrong.
The water rippled on, leaping and sparkling. The sun bore down on my shoulders. I dropped back onto my seat, hugged my knees to myself, and rested my cheek against them. We had sat right over there, Kevin and I, talking about making mistakes. I had chastised us both for being so paralyzed by the fear of doing something wrong that we did nothing at all. But what did “right” even mean? My father had made me believe that there really was such a thing. Now it seemed such judgments must be only illusions, that what seemed bad could become good somewhere downstream, or if it was seen from another angle. Or the other way around. An effect of light, nothing more.
I felt a drop against my arm. A splash from the river? I brushed it away, then waved a fly from my face. Another drop. And another. I looked up, then twisted my neck around to check behind me. The sky above and before me was still blue, but rain reached forward from the darkening cloud over my shoulder. A peal of thunder smacked against the rocks around me and thudded in my chest.
I didn’t move.
What if, perhaps, the fire wasn’t an unrelieved disaster? In nature it wasn’t. New growth required it, even. Did the father widowed by my actions and bereft of two daughters perhaps remarry? Was there now another child who would grow up and have more children, children who might otherwise never have been born? Was the new family a source of unexpected joy?
The drops multiplied until rain ran over my face and hair. It soaked through my shirt, and I turned my face up toward the sun that still buttered the far shore of the river, letting the water run across my cheeks and down my neck.
I would never know. But I had never considered before that it was possible.
I didn’t deserve forgiveness. No good I might do could ever atone for the grief I’d caused. And I’d come to a point where it was no longer possible to avoid the risk that my actions might cause more. Should I stay or go? Go where, and do what? Give my baby to someone else? To whom, then? The consequences of my choices would stretch forward for generations. I could ruin more lives. But if Paul and the children were to be believed, I also had the capacity to render good.
In the absence of surety, maybe I could be forgiven for allotting a sliver of space in my mind to hope.
Beauty from ashes.
28
We drove up to Hat Creek the next morning, Tuah and my father and I, each of us preserving our exit options by taking separate cars. My plan was certainly the simplest: I would spend the first day being a helpful and dutiful family member, prove how well socialized I was the next day by going on a ride with Leo, then prove how indispensable I was—to somebody, at least—by leaving the following day to return to the Koffords’. Tuah and my father would have to negotiate their own interactions after that.
By that measure, day one exceeded expectations. The garden plants had grown large enough that Tuah now trusted me to weed, a pleasantly solitary task. A seepage around the neck of the water pump called for my father to take the pipes apart and reassemble them, so he was constructively occupied as well. By the time I’d finished weeding and moved on to adding a coat of paint to the porch posts, Tuah had put my father to work tightening and securing the fence around the garden.
While my father and I worked outside, Tuah shuttled between the pump and the cabin, hauling out a tub against one hip, or a stack of pots balanced against her chest, washing them, then taking them back inside. Other times she’d carry a fresh pot of water in to heat on the stove, then bring the hot one out and add it to the washtub. Smoke drifted out of the stovepipe. Pots clashed and clanged. At some point, I thought I heard her whistling.
Through the course of the afternoon, dry white clouds wandered across the sun, drawing us into light or shadow the way waves pull across the sand. The wind that carried them sighed through the pines, then drifted on. The rhythm of work served as an undercurrent that steadied and calmed us, and eventually brought us together on the porch, the scattered wreckage of the Alvarez family at last washing onto a common shore.
“That yellow is a nice color,” my father said at one point as we painted the porch posts.
“Warm,” Tuah said.
“Exactly,” my father said.
We lapsed back into silence. Mac, stretched out on the dirt and dreaming, huffed little barks to himself and twitched his paws. A mourning dove cooed from the trees somewhere behind the house.
“Did the mice get into much this winter?” my father said.
“Just toilet paper. I’ve got all the food in cans.”
“That’s good.”
I took my cup to the paint can, poured some more in, then went back to the post I’d been painting, squatting down to work paint into the joint surrounding the base. The sun’s low angle made it hard to see into the shadowed side of the post.
“Something sure smells good,” my father said.
“Goulash,” Tuah said.
“That’s good,” my father said.
The wind stilled as the sun lowered, but it was warm and we ate outside, sitting in a row on the edge of the porch, bowls in our laps. It seemed we sat at the bottom of a golden pool, looking up at the blue surface overhead. We watched the light fade and the blue gradually deepen. Still no one spoke or got up to go inside. I reached under my shirt and ran a thumb along the waist of my pants, tugging it down a little farther.
When I could barely make out her outline, Tuah turned toward us.
“Thank you for your help,” she said. “It’s been a good day.”
“It has,” my father said.
I think she nodded.
“And thank you for coming,” she said, more quietly still.
“Of course,” my father said.
I looked at their silhouettes, just discernible against the darker pines beyond them, the chin and cheekbones I shared. My people, such as they were. All that I had.
Well, not quite. Plus one.
*
“Where are we going?” I asked Leo the next morning as the trees closed around us and the house disappeared. I looked forward to getting out into the sun soon. It was still early, and I held the reins inside my fleeced pocket. The sweatshirt covered a tank top I expected I’d want later, but right now my cheeks and ears tingled in the chill.
He turned around in the saddle and grinned at me. “Exploring,” he said. “New frontiers.”
“‘To boldly go where no man has gone before?’ Or just go at all after I bit your head off?”
He laughed. I’d tried to apologize at the hospital, after Sarah was safe, but he’d brushed it off. “Don’t worry about it,” he’d said. “No bonfires. Got it.” Then he gave my shoulder a brotherly squeeze and put a kiss on my forehead before he left.
“Well, it’s a place I’ve never gone before.”
“Great.” I leaned forward and scratched Spot’s neck. It was warm against my hand.
“How are you doing?” Leo asked.
I cast around for an answer. A lot had changed since that night at the hospital. I gave the horse’s neck a final pat.
“It’s been—a lot,” I said. “Got things on my mind.”
“I bet,” he said. He reined his horse around a granite outcrop, then nudged him forward again.
Bless Leo. Any answer was taken at face value. No prying, no follow-up questions demanding answers that were sure to be misunderstood. If I wan
ted to tell him more, I could. My choice.
“I know this path,” I said. “It leads to a big meadow.”
“Yeah, another guy chasing cows up this way last week told me that if you go along the base of Washington Rock you’ll start following a really thin little creek that leads up to another meadow where he said the wildflowers are amazing right now.”
“Washington Rock?”
He turned in his saddle and looked back at me. “The ridgeline—to the west. Are we thinking of a different meadow?”
“I have no idea.”
“Huh.” He turned forward again. “I guess we’ll just see.”
*
We rode in companionable silence the rest of the way to the meadow, breaking it only occasionally with little scraps of conversation about whether I’d had enough breakfast or what the name of an unfamiliar blooming shrub might be. But shortly before we got there I noticed something.
“Can we stop? I think my horse is limping a little.”
“You think?” He turned around in his saddle and watched the pinto walk. “Which foot? I don’t see anything.”
“I’m not sure.”
He studied my horse’s steps for a few more moments. “Well, we’ll stop at the meadow, and I’ll check.”
A few minutes later the trees thinned, then parted to reveal a wide bowl where the grass thrived but the trees pulled their feet back. Leo reined in and let his horse drop its head into the grass.
“There,” Leo said, pointing at the rock ridgeline that rose over the trees at one edge of the meadow. “Washington Rock.”
“Well, yeah. I’ve seen it before. Why Washington?”
He grinned. “We’ll take another look at the the other end of the meadow. But hop down first. Let’s see what’s going on with those feet.”
My horse’s head was down before I was, and he let Leo pick up a front hoof as he snatched at the grass. I stood to the side, holding the reins. Leo prodded around in the hard tissue with his finger, flicking away packed dirt and small rocks.
“So how are the kids doing, anyway?” he asked.
“They’re shaken up, for sure. Kevin’s beating himself up something awful.”
“I bet.” He let the hoof drop. “A couple little rocks, but nothing he’d limp for.” The horse swished his tail and shook his head, then snatched another mouthful of grass. Leo patted his shoulder, then ran a hand along his side to go around the back to the other foot in question.
“I try to keep telling Kevin he’s the one who saved her. That he did everything he could, more than you could ever ask of a kid his age. But all he can think about is that he did something wrong and nearly killed his sister.”
“I get that.” Leo had to duck his shoulder into the horse’s rear quarter to get him to shift his weight and give up his foot. How could he be so nonchalant about this? I came around the horse’s head to join him on the other side.
“But he’s just a kid! He’s eleven years old! Kids break rules all the time, and everything turned out okay.”
“That was luck. Coulda gone either way. If I were him, I’d be thinking about that all the time.” More dirt flicked away. “Besides, what does okay even mean? Nightmares, don’t want to be alone, afraid of the dark. I’d take a broken leg over that anytime.”
“Remind me not to send him to you for comfort.” I started running my fingers through the horse’s mane. “So what makes you such an expert, anyway?”
“Are you kidding?” He glanced up, supporting the hoof between his knees with one hand while fishing in his back pocket with the other. “With my crazy brother? Childhood sticks with you. You blame yourself for stuff that’s not your fault all the time. I sure have.” He opened the pocket knife and turned his attention back to the hoof, digging intently at something. “He ran away one time after I took the last waffle. A stupid freezer waffle. I wasn’t even hungry, but I just wanted to win. He was gone for four days. We never knew where he was, but he came back filthy and with these big bruises on his ribs. I thought it was all my fault.”
“Wow.”
“There!” He wedged his thumb against the knife blade and pulled a rock from the hoof, holding it up for me to see. It was irregular and about the size of a grape. “You’re his guardian angel. Likely he’s been walking around with this for a while.”
He dropped the hoof and patted the horse’s rump, then flicked the rock away into the grass. “Tell me you’re not combing his mane,” he said.
“I am. He could do with a little spruce-up. I’m going to put little bows in it when I’m finished.”
“He’s already been gelded, you know. You could let him keep a little dignity.”
“I’m surprised the ten-year-old girl didn’t already do it,” I said. I flipped a section of white hair to the other side of the horse’s neck, away from the black. “Okay, so how’d you figure out it wasn’t your fault?” I said.
“The gelding?”
I smirked at him. “With your brother, smartass.”
“Oh, right. Time, I guess. And talking—my folks had to explain the same thing to me over and over. Kids get weird stuff stuck in their heads if somebody doesn’t set them straight.”
“So that’s what I should do with Kevin?”
I heard a few more pats against the horse’s hide. “Well, you oughta know.”
“What?”
“The fire.”
My mouth actually started to move, to ask what he was talking about, before his meaning struck me like a fist in the chest.
“Are you—do you mean—you think that’s the same thing?”
“Isn’t it? I mean, I don’t know the details but that doesn’t matter. You’re hardly the first person to blame yourself for more than your share.”
“It’s not even close! People died from what I did!”
“Sarah could’ve died, just as easily, no matter what Kevin did. They got lucky. And you had bad luck. You didn’t walk up and shoot those people, right? They were in the wrong place, wrong time. Nobody can ever know all the reasons.”
I fumbled for words. Or even identifiable feelings or thoughts. Shock, perhaps, was the only one. I had never talked about the fire with anyone. Never. To my mother and father, it was taboo. As much as possible, I avoided mentioning it with everyone else. I had certainly never heard anything like this.
“How can you say it like that?”
“Because it’s true.” He pushed his hat back on his head. “Look—I’m not saying you didn’t start the fire. But you were a kid, messing around, right? Just bad luck it turned into anything, that’s all. If it had just scorched some grass or a building, you’d have gotten yelled at. But somehow it got away, and that’s not something you did. You didn’t make the weather. How fast did it go? And why? Did firemen respond fast enough? Did somebody not call when they should’ve? Did people not evacuate when they should’ve? Did they try, but”—he waved a hand—“I dunno, the car didn’t start. Because a mechanic screwed up. Anything. A hundred things. I don’t know what happened, but I do know it’s crazy to think that one little kid is responsible for all of it, alone. You’re not God.”
My hands hung limp at my sides. I’d never, never, never, never, never thought of any of those things.
I couldn’t think of them now. There was no mental structure in place for them to connect to. The idea that I could be allowed to imagine anything good growing in the scorched path behind me was still too new. And now to shift blame as well? Who had the authority to do that? Not me. And not him.
“Are you okay?” He took a step closer. “I’m sorry—did I say something wrong?”
I shook my head. He put a hand on my arm.
“There’s nothing wrong,” I said, twisting away. “I just—I don’t know. I—can we just get going again?”
He looked at me for a moment, then pulled his hat down over his brow and nodded. He put a hand on my back to steer me around the horse’s head to the saddle.
“All aboard,” he said, h
olding the stirrup for me to step into.
I swung up into the saddle and took the reins. “Thanks,” I said, looking down.
He squinted up at me. “If you don’t want me to talk about it, just let me know.”
I shook my head. “No—I don’t know. That’s not it. I guess I don’t know what to think.” And I didn’t. I just—didn’t.
He gave another nod, patted my knee the same way he had just patted the horse’s rump, then went back to his own horse and swung up.
“Here we go, then.”
We pulled the horses’ heads up and nudged them forward, and I followed Leo across the meadow. Wildflowers had started to open at this altitude—harebell with its cornflower-blue bells stacked on an impossibly slender stem, the bristling orange-red spikes of Indian paintbrush, blue asters winking from underfoot.
“You say the other meadow is better than this?”
“So I hear.”
Leo stopped at the uphill end of the meadow and pointed. “See there? George Washington’s profile, as if he’s lying on his back. Top of his head to the left, chin to the right.”
He was right. And it took no stretch of imagination to see it. The profile might as well have been carved, it was so accurate. Above the crown of his head and below his chin everything jumbled, but between those points, the shapes, the proportions—exact, like the head on a quarter. There was even a depression in the right spot for the eye, and a hollow behind the corner of the jaw.
“Wow,” I said. “How had I never noticed that?”
“Well, sounds like nobody ever told you there was something to look for.” He nudged his horse forward.
I wasn’t as easy on myself. I kept looking up at the stern profile. Smug George. Things look different, he lectured me from the mountaintop, from different perspectives. The fault had all been mine, obviously, for failing to see him the right way.
I looked away from the ridge. The sun was too bright. Had I ever seen anything the right way, ever?
“Can you tell me about how the fire happened?” Leo asked as we neared the far edge of the meadow.
