"I'm Evening," she said.
Molly doubted that they would be any help. Extra people? Where to put them to sleep?
In the end, Jack decided to sleep in the goat barn.
"In the goat barn?" Molly said. "Why?"
"Peony and her kid are still in there. They'll know if anything is wrong. They'll be able to tell me if the fire gets close."
"I thought you said evacuating tomorrow was fine, that certainly the fire wouldn't hit us before then?"
"Oh, but fire leaps sometimes."
"It does? That's reassuring."
"That's mostly in the Australian bush, but I don't know, Molly, I think I'll somehow feel safer away from all these people, able to listen in the quiet."
So it was getting to him, too. Molly offered him a weak smile. What about me? she wanted to say. Take me with you. I won't feel safe without you.
Greta slept on Molly and Jack's bed on the porch. Evening had curled up and fallen asleep on the sofa almost immediately after they arrived. Molly still wasn't sure why Greta had brought her along. She supposed it was one of those gestures people made. Perhaps Greta felt guilty because David hadn't come. Molly sighed.
She tucked herself into her bed for the first time in days, and was shocked by how small her room seemed, how the ceiling was like a large blank face. She'd grown used to the porch and the sky, which spun away from her like a great net, so that she could pretend to fall into it and let it bring her out to sleep.
Rain tiptoed into the bedroom and quietly lay down beside her.
"Mama," she said. "I'm scared. Can I stay with you?"
Molly nodded, putting a hand on the nape of Rain's neck. She radiated heat, like a wall after it's been in the sun all day and is letting its warmth out into the night. In a moment another figure appeared at the door and Amber swung in.
"Me too?" she asked. Rain scooted to the middle and Amber curled up on Jack's empty side of the bed.
So it wasn't so hard, falling asleep, after all. After her girls had drifted off, Molly lay watching them sleep, and didn't have to look at the ceiling face even once.
SEVENTEEN
Morning. Jack sat on a slope outside the goat barn with Sam beside him and watched what he could see of the sun coming up. The sky was red, every smoke particle illuminated. He was coughing in the mornings, now, dislodging smoky mucus from his tired lungs. He needed to wake his family, needed to make this final push.
He went back to the barn for his shoes. Peony looked at him nervously. She was tense and afraid.
"Hey, girl," he said. "We'll get you out of here."
He walked down to the house with the dog, going over his mental list again. Bucks, cattle, horses, boxes. Bucks, cattle, horses, boxes. People. They needed to be sure that everyone was accounted for when they left.
The house was quiet and heavy with the smell of sleeping people. He saw Greta still asleep on the porch and went to find his wife. She was in the bedroom, nudged all the way to the edge of the bed by the long girl limbs that Rain had flung out in her sleep. Amber had scooted to the bottom of the bed, lying perpendicular. Molly was curled like a child.
"Molly!" he said. She opened her eyes and blinked at him. He smiled at her, and she smiled a sleepy smile back. It clutched at him. Oh, he could just dive into her, find a quiet space on her chest to lay his head.
"We need to get going," he said. "Family meeting in twenty minutes."
"What about breakfast?" she asked, clearing her throat when the words wouldn't come out properly.
"Don't we have any cereal?" Amber asked, sitting up and stretching. She always was instantly awake, even as a little girl.
"Maybe, somewhere for emergencies," Molly said. She yawned. "Okay, twenty minutes."
Jack watched her for a minute longer, wishing they had twenty minutes alone somewhere, then turned and strode through the house to find Todd.
Todd was easy to wake up. He jumped out of bed and started pulling his shorts on.
"Dad," he said, as they walked into the kitchen. "Something I forgot to tell you." Molly was frowning at the coffee maker, watching the coffee slowly begin to pour into the pot.
"Yeah?" he said.
"That guy was trying to get a guided tour of the ranch yesterday, when you and Mom were at the ridge."
"What guy?" he asked.
"You know. The pants guy, Mom."
Jack didn't understand. He looked at his wife.
"He means Chuck Telus."
"Chuck Telus was here? Why didn't you tell anyone?" His voice rose without his meaning it to.
"I tried, but we couldn't find you, and then I forgot."
"I can't believe this! I try for weeks to get the guy here, he finally comes, and nobody tells me!"
"It doesn't matter, now," said Molly.
"He came! That matters."
"It's too late. He came too late. The fire has moved past his park, there is no dozer line to put in, he can't do a thing at all. Not a thing."
He stared at her. She was right, they were leaving. It was too late. He had been climbing uphill for a long time and a large hand had tipped the earth, rolled him back down the long hill. He looked at them and they all seemed so indifferent, so resigned. He felt that there was something he should say, something important, but he couldn't locate anything at all, so he turned and left.
"Ten minutes," he said, as he swung through the open door. "In the yard."
He jogged away to see if he could locate the bucks. He hadn't seen the male goats for a couple of days, but they needed to be rounded up today, trucked off to another, safer part of the ranch. The last cattle needed to be shifted, boxes loaded into trucks and they would be off. He stood on the road and shaded his eyes so he could see across the hills. Down in a farther valley he saw what he was looking for; a dark patch that moved. He could pick out individual goats after a moment, though it was hard in the smoke. Someone would need to lead them toward a road so they could be loaded into trailers. There weren't so many of them, twenty or so.
Wheels of cheese. That needed to be on his list too. Bucks, cattle, horses, boxes, wheels of cheese. Good Lord. His throat hurt with panic.
Gerard was approaching him. Thank God.
"Good morning," he said, as Gerard reached him, his hands shoved deep in his pockets.
"The bucks are down there, huh?" Gerard said.
"Yeah, exactly. Will you get an ATV and lead them up to the road? Some alfalfa should do it. They haven't had anything but brush for awhile."
Gerard nodded. "Sure. What about a trailer?"
"I'll send Todd and someone else. Shoot, have to get back..."
"Yeah, no problem. I'm on it." Gerard clapped his hand on Jack's back, hard. Jack bowed his head for a minute, acknowledging the moment, then jogged back toward the house.
The kids were milling around the yard, Todd and Amber talking to Evening, Rain wandering onto the porch rubbing her eyes, clutching a cup of coffee. Molly looked angry.
"What's up?" he asked her as he pulled up in front of the picnic bench.
"Oh nothing major, just an argument with that girl," Molly jabbed her thumb in Rain's direction, "about whether it was a good moment to make an espresso. What's wrong with her?"
"Shrug it off, don't think about it." He put his hand on the crown of her head and smoothed her hair. She bit her lip and shook her head.
"Okay, everybody!" he said, propping one leg on a picnic table and raising his voice. "We have way too much to do and not a lot of time. Four hours, to be precise. So I'm going to shout things at you and I need you to go quickly and get it done!" He looked around.
"Where's Catherine?"
Molly shrugged. "She's been exhausted. I'm not sure she's up to this. We'll collect her before we go."
"Okay. Todd! Amber! Get the truck and trailer and meet Gerard on the road by the big stump. He should be coming up with the bucks, load them up and bring them to the northwest corral. You'll need to make sure they have water!"
"Greta! You and Evening and I are going to ride the horses up to the old cattle barn, then round up the rest of the cattle and bring them up as well." He paused. "I'm assuming you can ride, Evening."
"Of course she can," Greta said. "Why do you think I brought her?"
Jack continued. "Rain! You're in charge of boxes! Get them into the back of your mom's truck."
"Molly," he said, and paused. "Will you get the cheese out of the aging room?" She put a hand to her mouth. Moving and stacking the wheels before they were ready could ruin them. He saw her gather herself together and nod, but tears came to her eyes.
The grass under his feet was withered and brown. The day seemed lazy and hesitant, like it wanted to begin again and find better footing. But this was all they had.
"Okay, let's go! Meet back here at 11:30 exactly!" he said. People dispersed and headed for the various places. Molly was making triangles with her hands, arranging and rearranging her fingers on her legs.
"Molly," he said quietly, as Greta and Evening came toward him. "Are you going to be okay?" She nodded, but her eyes moved from his quickly and leapt around from object to object. She wasn't far from breaking, but what could he do about it now? He left with Greta and Evening, as helpless as he had ever been in his life.
Jack, Greta, and Evening had moved all the horses. Now they were focusing on the last of the cattle. A vulture circled lazily over a spot not too far away. Something must have caught its eye. Jack turned his attention back toward the cows and steers that drifted slowly through the corral gate, ticking numbers off in his head. Sam hopped around behind them, nipping the air around their hooves to keep them moving. The smoke was even stronger. Minutes flew by. A water truck drove past him.
Greta approached on Jive. Evening was riding another horse, Prince, at the other end of the corral.
"That's it, Jack!" she yelled above the noise of the truck.
"We're two shy," he said. "They're somewhere close by. I'm sure of it." He closed the gate behind the last steer. "Why don't you run down with Evening and see if Todd and Amber need help. I'll go and look for these cows."
Greta nodded. "I'd head that way, if I were you," she said, lifting her jaw toward the vulture that was still circling, dipping lower now. Jack nodded, waved at her as she left.
He didn't have the stomach for dead cows today.
He tied his horse and walked with Sam into the woods in the direction of the vulture, feeling as though he was coming to a familiar point on a circular path he'd been on for a long time, the point when he, Catherine and Molly wandered down a different trail toward the scent of a dead cow.
The question he had to answer now was almost the same as then. "Do you, Jack Boscelli, take this ranch for your own?" But it was changed. "Do you take this ranch broken? Old? Heavy? Will you keep her when she's blackened and burned? Will you keep her even though being here isn't the magic cure for Molly that you thought it would be?"
There wasn't much of a trail here. He broke through the thick forest, not taking time to be careful as he tried to keep the vulture in sight. A lonely bush, covered with small pink roses, was doing its best to climb a neighboring tree. How did the rosebush get way out here? He stopped and looked at it.
"I do," he whispered.
It was the very same question asked of him many times over in the room of his life called marriage. But especially on that day sixteen years before when he'd taken his broken wife to the hospital against her will. It was as though God had created his life to be like this: layers of browns and colors, overlapping scenes, asking him this question: "Can you love what is imperfect, flawed? Can you love what hurts you? Drains you? Empties you?"
She had started harming herself when Rain was around nine months old. She was sick and he couldn't understand her. She scratched at her face, pulled out her hair. When she burned a circle into her arm, he went berserk. He left, went for a walk, cried, prayed. He didn't know what to do. She was steadily getting worse. The kids were full of anxiety, Todd the worst. When he came back to the apartment, Molly screamed at Jack when he was still across the street. "Take him!" she shrieked, holding Todd dangling over the balcony toward him. Todd screamed and cried, and she blinked at him like she didn't know he was there, then pulled him up and dropped him on the balcony floor, whirling into the living room. He ran up the stairs and called a neighbor to come over, guided Molly out the door and down to the lobby, out onto the sidewalk where she wouldn't get into the car. He remembered the people who had stopped dead on the street to watch as she ran down the sidewalk and he tackled her. Remembered their blank, stupid faces as he yelled for someone to call the police, an ambulance, anyone. Remembered the blood on her forehead where she'd knocked against the sidewalk as she fell, how he held her wrists to the cement, sitting on her while she pleaded with him. "Don't, Jacky," she begged. "Please don't." He shut his teeth against her and looked away from the circle of watchers, past them, at the sky, grey and unforgiving, trying to find God, who seemed to have disappeared.
The worst day of his life. She had changed so much. She'd always been emotional, stormy even. But she was exuberant, excited over the tiniest things, despairing over small untidy hurt feelings. Then she turned from the woman he loved to this obsessive, nervous creature who counted the forks and spoons, again and again. And then again. And again. No more laughing. And that last day, heating up a pair of scissors and branding herself like a calf, holding Todd over that three-story drop because she was too far gone to even see the danger. That was the worst day. Insanity stared him in the face and he did the only thing he knew how to do.
She was in the hospital for two months. It was a long, empty time. Jack grieved his marriage as though it was over, with so much sorrow for the loveliness he'd known in Molly, the way she was gone. He was a man who had committed his own wife. 5150 was the police code. Involuntary psychiatric restraint. It was a long way from what he'd dreamed when Molly caught his heart so effortlessly in college.
But then, miraculously, she'd come back to herself in the hospital. The first six weeks were a blackout and he wasn't allowed to speak to her. He was ruined, opening cans of soup for the kids, allowing his mother to watch them for days while he roamed the streets waiting, or sat on the sand at the beach for hours and hours. One day he called her doctor at the hospital.
"Please tell me something," he begged.
The doctor cleared his throat. "Post-partum psychosis, possibly," he said. "Although with her family history there are other components. She's certainly exhibiting obsessive-compulsive behavior."
"But is she... has she... has she gone over the edge?" Jack asked, terrified by the word psychosis. Dread hammered through his body and turned into bile in his throat. The doctor laughed, a light, easy sound.
"No! No, no. She's responding well to treatment. That's all I can say, but it's just four days now. She'll be able to talk to you soon."
Jack was reassured, but jealous. Angry that this doctor who barely knew his wife was so easily able to laugh off his concerns, as though there was some secret Jack didn't have the clues to, as though she was unknowable now. He paced his way through the remaining days. The kids played quietly, Rain no longer asking for her mother. It was hard to get Todd to eat.
Now, on the hills of his ranch searching for a couple of lost cows, Jack cried again, remembering those days. He leaned against a tree and wept, his dog whining beside him.
As soon as he talked to her on the phone, he knew that he hadn't lost her. Goosebumps covered his arms and legs with her first words to him; she spoke to him with the soft voice that he knew.
"Jack, I'm so sorry. It's okay. We'll be okay." All he could do was cry, while she tried to reassure him.
She came back to them intact, though she was bent, smaller somehow. Her self-confidence was a flexible, soft thing, but her therapists in the hospital had taught her to ask for help when she was feeling weak. Some days she approached him, pale and unsteady, as he was getting ready for work at his job teaching
college students about agriculture.
"Help," she'd say, eyes like dark holes in her face. On those days he called in sick. The family formed a tight circle, sitting on the floor together, getting as low to the ground as they could. Molly and Jack let the kids pile on them. Molly sat with her back to the wall and Jack made tea for her, setting the cup into her hand while she took long breaths until she was steady enough to take a sip. The family became smooth and banded, constrained in tenderness.
But that was rare. Most of the time, after the hospital, she was well. She had learned so much while she was there in the quiet circle it had allowed her. She had therapists for a long time after, which was required by Child Protective Services for a mother who has been 5150'd. And then even that stopped. Life resumed its flow around them; they made do with what stutters and stops there were. They took the ranch. And day after day Jack agreed to love his wife, his small, scarred beloved.
Although he was never tempted to leave her, never, each day the question hung in front of him as soon as he stepped out of bed in the morning, like a new spider web, glittery and hung with dew, something he had to step through to get into his day.
"Do you, Jack... take Molly. Take Molly. Take Molly?"
Here he was again, facing down a complex question. But it was easier, now. Over the years he'd been worn into a humbler shape. His dreams and ideals for himself as a ranching man were chiseled away by time. Certain years didn't have enough rain, certain breeds of cattle didn't thrive. He was forced to admit that none of this was within his control. He was out of his league.
It occurred to him, just before he found the cows contentedly munching a patch of clover in a shady clearing, that he and Molly wrestled with life in a way more similar than he had ever believed.
Later, as he was riding Benny down to the house, Jack had reached his point of exhaustion. He needed a pick up, something that would assure him that this would be over soon. A brief dive into some ocean.
The Eve Tree: A Novel Page 20
