Smoke Season

CHAPTER 10

Frozen now airing in the living room, Sam paced the apartment, cell phone in hand, wishing he could rub it like Aladdin’s lamp and produce an update from Mel. Annie hadn’t stopped coughing, so he’d given her a Benadryl to reduce strain on her lungs, but the smoke would only get worse. Resigned to taking Kim’s advice, he called Claude, who confirmed that the air was indeed clearer up on Highline Road.

“Don’t overthink it,” Claude said. “Just come with the girls. I already gathered Ingrid’s quilts, some of my papers on the house, my taxes. I’m go-ready, so I can help you when you get here.”

Sam thought of Claude’s late wife with a pang, swallowing a second lump that effortlessly arose in his throat. The kindest woman ever, Ingrid Schmidt. Her prizewinning quilts were a must to salvage; in fact, she’d made one for Astor before she passed ... Sam made a mental note not to leave it behind, either. Right this minute, it sat folded on the edge of the couch.

“My River Eddy lease, property-insurance documents, the kids’ birth certificates, that sort of thing are already in the Eddy safe, so I just need to get Annie ready,” he told Claude. He hadn’t been back to the Highline house for more than general upkeep or a quick hello to Claude since Mel had told him she was through. It had felt empty without her in it, even when he had his girls. But any emotional baggage he might harbor about returning now would just have to remain behind, here in Carbon.

He dialed the familiar number for Annie’s pediatric cardiologist in Portland next, the receptionist patching him through to the lead RN right away when he explained the situation. Half an hour later, with the endorsement of Annie’s medical team fueling him, he’d assembled everything the cardiologist insisted upon taking in addition to the kids’ go bags: Annie’s emergency oxygen cannula, her child-sized N95 mask, the ice packs necessary to keep her refrigerated meds cold. As he closed the fridge, Astor’s school artwork caught his eye on the door, and there was Annie’s clay handprint on display by the windowsill, by the Paddle, Inc., oar, a gift from True, whose home-decorating style admittedly left something to be desired.

He spun away from all of it, turning to unplug the medical-grade air purifier and set it next to the heart monitor and pulse oximeter by the door. None of this sentimental stuff could make the cut. Fitting the N95 over Annie’s small face amid weak but futile protest—she wanted the one she’d stuck Hello Kitty stickers on—he rallied Astor, and the three of them made a break for the truck.

“This is cray- zee ,” Astor noted, waving her hand in front of her face when thick smoke met her at the River Eddy entrance. A brave front, or was she really feeling this cool under pressure? Sam never knew. She buckled herself into the truck before leaning across Annie’s booster seat to buckle her, too, and he felt a swell of pride rise up, followed by a chase of regret. Astor was such a good kid, but she shouldn’t have had to grow up as fast as she had.

“Eight going on thirty-eight,” True liked to kid, but truth was, it was no joke, being the older sibling to a medically fragile child.

He turned on the windshield wipers to clear off enough ash to see properly, reminding himself he’d done the same half a dozen times during every smoke season; the river valley acted like a basin, collecting smoke, ash, and soot. It was no indication of the level of danger—or not—the mother of his children faced higher on Flatiron Peak.

They eased their way through town, which was oddly quiet for this hour, any folks not at work probably holed up around their TVs or radios for the time being, or else checking Twitter or Facebook for updates on the conditions outdoors. A few kids could be spotted in front yards—the smoke wasn’t unbearable for those without compromised health—but bikes remained in yards and driveway basketball hoops looked abandoned. Even Astor turned pensive as she watched the road and the intermittent swipe of the wipers.

They turned up Highline Road as Annie continued to struggle with the N95, which, even at size XS, didn’t cup her cheeks properly. “It’s too hot in here, Daddy,” she complained, tugging at the mask.

“I know, but you have to wear it, baby girl.”

“But Astor doesn’t have to!”

Sam ground his teeth as he felt her kick the back of his seat. He wasn’t sure which was worse: dealing with a rare Annie-outburst while he was trying to keep his concentration on the road or witnessing her usual surrender to the inevitable.

“Astor will put one on when we get home,” he heard himself say before flinching on the last word and instantly revising. “When we get to Highline, I mean.”

As if he could sneak such a faux pas past Astor. “We haven’t been home in a long while,” she said solemnly.

Sam felt himself stiffen. Did she miss it? And if so, did that buoy Sam or dismay him? No one told him before he’d become a parent how fraught it would be with uncertainty. “You know it’s easier to get you to school and meet up with your mom if we stay above the Eddy,” he reminded her. He heard the false bravado in the uplift of his words and winced again.

Astor slid him a look. “I just meant ... are you going to be okay with it?”

Sam exhaled. Eight going on thirty-eight, he reminded himself. Hell, no, he wasn’t going to be okay with it, but the other thing about parenting? You found yourself doing a lot of things you didn’t want to do. “Don’t you worry about me. We’re going to invite Claude over and have ourselves a little Bishop-Schmidt house party.”

By the time they hit Highline Road mile marker six, however, where the dirt drive led to the Bishop property, Annie had succumbed to her mask in defeat, listless in her booster seat now that the allergy meds had kicked in. Sam had almost missed the turn, his gaze flicking to the rearview mirror after she’d given up on pummeling his seat to check on her. It was a constant dance: make sure Annie was calm, make sure she wasn’t too calm. Ensure she wore a mask, ensure it wasn’t depriving her of precious O2.

Astor, too, looked dour as she studied the gray gloom out her window. So much for partying. They parked the truck in front of the half-remodeled garage, and Sam hurried them into the house, shutting the front door—which he’d mercifully had the foresight to professionally replace and reseal last year—behind them. Annie clung to him, her arms around his neck and her legs clamped around his hip, but Astor moved into the open living space with cautious steps. She took one look toward the family room with its stone fireplace and cupboard for board games and puzzles—now relocated to the Eddy—and pivoted.

“I’m gonna check on my room.”

Sam watched her go. Astor knew perfectly well that her personal effects had all been relocated to Mel’s place in town and the Eddy, but maybe that was precisely the draw. With a sigh, he set Annie down in the old overstuffed armchair by the fireplace, then stood staring at the room himself for a long moment.

Folks in Carbon never understood why Sam had been so determined to keep the childhood home that had done him no favors, but renovating the space had felt like a way to rewrite Bishop history with his own young family. He’d knocked a wall out about ten years ago to achieve an open-concept look, and when Astor was tiny, he’d also redone the wood-plank floors. Time and money had disappeared after Annie was born, so the kitchen tile was not quite finished, and he’d yet to put the cabinet doors back on after painting. But he’d learned that it didn’t take a lot of money to make a house look homey. Before Mel had left and he’d retreated to the Eddy, Sam had made sure to always have pillar candles on the end table, framed photos on the mantel, and photos on the walls.

He admired them one by one, taking heart in each one until his gaze snagged on Mel’s fire-science degree certificate that still sat, framed, on the mantel of the fireplace. Suddenly his chest felt tight, and he knew Astor had been right to worry about him: being back “home” at Highline was every bit as fraught as he’d feared.

He counted backward from ten, finding a focus point directly across from him like he’d been taught—in this case, the bird feeder he could barely make out hanging from the eave outside the picture window. A lot of good it did; more and more often, domestic scenes like this one stirred up that damned PTSD worse than images of combat. Had he made a horrible mistake by coming back up here?

At least the sky did seem clearer. They hadn’t lingered in their retreat from the truck, but the ash wasn’t thick on the railing by the front steps yet, and though he couldn’t see blue sky past the bird feeder, the pallor in the air was more milky than ashen. Annie’s cough would lessen here, he told himself.

But not until he ensured all the windows were sealed, too, all the vents shut. Which would require him to shake off this melancholy and move from the doorway. He forced his limbs to comply, and once in motion, he managed to make quick work of it, only stopping once to tuck Ingrid’s quilt from the Eddy around Annie’s thin shoulders. She lifted her head to ask for his phone—she was a whiz at DoodleMath—and he handed it over at once in relief. “But stay here on the chair, all right, baby girl?”

She didn’t answer, already absorbed in the game, her little fingers flying over the options in the app. It was just what he needed to break the spell the house had cast over him, and Sam actually chuckled as he got to work checking the windows. He even managed not to berate himself when he rediscovered more half-finished projects, more room for improvement.

“I think it looks just fine as it is,” Mel had said more than once, and to her credit, she had looked truly baffled when Sam insisted the new decking wasn’t weather-sealed enough or the new soaking tub not quite grand enough.

But Mel didn’t have the “before” picture burning a hole in her brain. During Sam’s childhood, the Highline house had been a shithole; there had really been no other way to describe it. Growing up piss poor under the harsh thumb of his own father, Mark Bishop hadn’t sweated the small stuff, like trim or paint or front porch steps. He hadn’t cared if the driveway had remained perpetually littered with junk cars, side jobs to his “business,” an auto-body shop the entire town knew was just a front. The only thing he or John Fallows treated with any pride was their acreage on the Outlaw. They’d been growing there for as long as Sam could remember. Certainly longer than THC had been legal in Oregon.

Sam knew that acreage far better than he’d have liked, spending the summers of his youth out there with Chris. They’d combed the riverbank of the Outlaw for discarded fishing lures they could sell for a few cents in town while their fathers grew and sold the weed, ripped off customers at Mark’s auto shop, liberated copper piping from construction sites, and supplied Carbon’s residents with everything from Percocet to Dexedrine.

The most embarrassing part for Sam: everybody in Carbon knew exactly what was what, how you couldn’t trust a Bishop or a Fallows farther than you could throw ’em, how those little shitheads Chris and Sam were no better, tooling around Carbon on their dirt bikes, shoplifting candy bars and telling dirty jokes. It hadn’t even mattered if Sam hadn’t been doing any of those things, save for the dirt biking. The BMX Mark had thrown into a pawn-shop trade had been Sam’s only ride as he’d tried to separate himself from Chris with Boy Scouts, volunteering for the VFW, and, finally, joining the JROTC in high school.

All of which had been mercilessly mocked by Mark.

“What makes you think you’re so much better than the rest of us, huh?” he had liked to lob at Sam, who’d had no answer. Who the hell knew why what was normal and natural to Chris felt so abhorrent to him. Certainly, his old man and the Fallowses hadn’t given a shit.

The day Sam had helped line Main Street with flags for Memorial Day weekend, bursting with pride to have been entrusted with the task, his dad had laid on the horn as he’d driven past, making him jump, the edge of the flag he’d been lifting brushing the dirt. “Kiss-ass!” Mark had shouted, laughing. “My kid, the pussy!”

Sam clenched his hands into fists thinking about it, even now.

“Finally getting out of my way was the best thing he ever did for me,” he’d told Mel, after his dad had taken the one-way ride up to Pendleton just after they’d met. “I should thank John Fallows for selling out his best friend for nothing more than a dime-bag deal gone sour.”

Mel had found it hard to believe anyone could be glad to see his flesh and blood behind bars. She’d pressed the point, asking him a bit too often how he was dealing with it, if he was dealing with it, whether maybe it would help for him to talk with someone about it.

“What will help will be to see him there for myself,” Sam decided, and so they’d taken the drive east together, the green forests of southern Oregon giving way to the stark beauty of the high desert. Bidding Mark good riddance though the grimy filter of the visitation Plexiglas, Sam had been determined to feel superior. After all, who was on the right side of that glass? Instead, he’d felt fourteen years old again, mocked for mounting those flags.

That kind of shame stuck to a person, like the secondhand smoke that had clung on Sam’s clothes as a kid. Looking out the smoke-tinged window of his home knowing what he knew now, with his marriage in shambles and his kids at risk, he had to ask himself ... really ask: Had his obsession—Mel’s words—with keeping this house healed the past and elevated his family, or only opened up new wounds?

The latter, at least, was a certainty. And maybe he should have tried to sell the house, back when doing so would have taken the edge off what had been the sharpest point of his marriage. Back before chronic fire seasons had depreciated just about all the real estate in Carbon. But then where would he and his girls retreat to now?

He heaved a hard sigh, telling himself he wasn’t doing himself or the girls any favors wallowing and what-if-ing. As Mel had put it, you couldn’t coax a flame once it had been deprived of all fuel. Annie’s medical needs, and the stress of paying for them, had sucked all the oxygen out of his marriage.

He texted Claude to let him know they’d made it to the house, then went through the rest of the place, plugging in Annie’s air purifier and stashing her meds in the kitchen and fridge. There he found Astor scrounging the cupboards for a snack.

“I’m waiting for Claude,” she declared in a huff, one knee braced on the counter, her nose in the top shelf of the pantry. “He’ll have something other than this ...” She slowed to sound out a label. “In-stant coffee and one min-ute stuff-ing.”

“Good call,” Sam conceded, his smile waning as his eye caught another collection of framed photos on the window ledge. Point for the open-wound column, he decided, as his gut felt the brunt of the blow.

Front and center sat the last photo Sam had taken of the four of them—his family right here on the deck, whole and intact. The next: taken two winters ago, while Christmas-tree hunting in the acreage behind Flatiron, then one of Astor and Annie on a trip to Yellowstone, arms wrapped around one another’s shoulders in a rare moment of sisterly affection. Finally, an oldie but goodie: a young Mel and Sam toasting their purchase of the River Eddy Bar and Grill just after their wedding.

“I don’t know whether you guys are hopeless romantics or hopeless fools for buying the place where you first laid eyes on one another,” True had declared with a raise of her shot glass.

Fools, Sam supposed now, but not begrudgingly. Hindsight was twenty-twenty vision, and all that. Besides, True had only half the facts. Sam had met Mel at the Eddy, but that was mostly because he hung out there all the time. During Sam’s teen years, and after, when he’d come back from the service, the Eddy had been a safe space when very few safe spaces existed for a Bishop. He’d suspected this meant the original proprietor, Edward Phillis, had made a deal or two with his father and Fallows over the years, but maybe not, because according to the wall of Little League and high school football-team photos gracing the walls, the man was a pillar of the community, his name, and the River Eddy’s name, on all the jerseys. Gold sponsor. League sponsor. Team mascot. Hell, Sam couldn’t remember now, but the idea had been planted. The owner of a place like the Eddy could contribute in a real way to his town.

Sam was not so sure it had worked out that way. Folks still looked at him sidelong, though Mel and True tried to tell him it was all in his head. Still, he and Mel had been closer to having that elusive “all” that day than they ever would be again: the chance for respect, Mel’s job with its appealing retirement plan; they’d even been expecting Astor, though they hadn’t known it yet. It all would have been enough, wouldn’t it, if only Annie had been born whole. Instead, a hole had pierced her heart, leaving them all inadequate and empty ... however fucking poetic that sounded.

Bless True’s heart: in the years since, she’d never come back with an “I told you so.” Which was why he’d returned the favor when she’d inadvertently bought the place next door to Fallows’s operation. He’d warned her, though. Hell yeah, he had. And he’d flat-out banned her from bringing the kids out there, not even yielding when she’d shown him the little loft space she’d built with them in mind. No way were his girls getting anywhere near that wolf in his den.

He stashed the framed photos into his go bag, the Eddy one on top. That building, he had tried to sell. Before this town suffers one too many smoke seasons, he’d told his buddy Luke at Carbon Realty.

But investors had already become skittish. According to Luke, who heard it all the time: if their part of Oregon became a charred wasteland, the Eddy wouldn’t be good for much more than the occasional stop on a dark-tourism tour. In the end, it had been more financially prudent to keep the place open to eke out what income he could than to shut it down and cut their losses.

It is what it is, he decided, just as Annie called to him from the couch. Her whiny voice, which meant she’d lost interest in math games. Sure enough, upon investigation, she now had a beef with Astor not sharing the bits of the Stouffer’s cornbread-stuffing mix she’d stooped to eating out of the box like dry cereal.

He opened his mouth to order, Share the stuffing mix with your sister! before the sheer ridiculousness of such a command made him laugh instead. His hearty guffaw proved far more effective than any reprimand, anyway; both girls ceased their bickering to find out what was so funny. Then Astor quirked an eyebrow, looking so much like Mel in that moment, the mirth was instantly snatched from Sam’s lungs.

Joke’s on me, he thought, which only doubled the pain in his chest.

He tried not to let it show on his face, but no such luck. “Claude will be here soon,” Astor told him, placing her young hand in Sam’s and squeezing tight.