Smoke Season

CHAPTER 29

It felt like both five seconds and five hours had passed when Sam heard the crash of the front door and then, impossibly, miraculously, Mel’s voice cutting through the never-ending noise. “Sam!” she screamed, the sound of her footfalls—heavy in her boots—already on the hardwood. “SAM!”

Relief sluiced through him, thick and hot, feeling every bit as intense as the heat and the smoke.

“Is that ... Mom?” he heard Astor yell, her voice muffled by terry cloth and wind and booms.

“Yes, but stay where you are!”

If he knew Mel, which Sam most certainly did, she would come to them.

“In here!” Sam yelled, torn between running to meet Mel and remaining here with the girls, still huddled in the tub. Her boots thundered down the hall, and the bathroom door he’d wedged closed shook. He leaped toward it, yanking it open against the resistance put up by the soaked towels lining the crack at the bottom of the door.

“Mel!” He collided with her, the solid bulk of her radio unit strapped to her chest momentarily robbing him of what little air was in his lungs. He didn’t care, holding her tight, inhaling the strong scent of smoke and dirt and sweat on her yellow shirt.

Her arms wrapped around him, too, but only briefly, before she lunged toward the girls. True stood behind Mel; Sam only just then registered her presence.

“Mom,” Astor cried, trying to rid herself of the towels to get to her mother.

“No, no,” Mel rasped. “Stay down. Stay there.” Her voice sounded tighter and higher than Sam was used to, the urgency there impossible to miss. It sent a new wave of alarm through him. If Mel and True were here, so was Mel’s crew, right? They’d have engines that could stand the heat. That could carry them down Highline. “Why don’t you want us to go?”

“We can’t transport Annie until we get an EMS rig up here,” Mel said. She tugged Sam back toward the little bathroom window, gesturing for him to look. He did, and holy shit . Where smoke had obscured his view just moments ago, visibility had been oddly restored. It took Sam a second to understand why: direct flames now lit up the street. The wind had driven the Flatiron Fire back up their hill, just as Claude predicted. Had it essentially encircled the house? Yes, it burned right there, ringing around the field and on both sides of Highline, having left the near slope of Buck Peak aflame in its wake. Sam knew in this moment he and Claude had made the right call: had they set out on foot, or even if the truck had cooperated, they would have been caught on the road when the fire made this turn. Trailing so far behind the other evacuees, and without the protection of a fire engine, they would have been consumed whole.

The reality of this was so sobering, he swallowed impulsively, his throat burning. Instinctively, he staggered back toward the girls. Astor and Annie looked like small, poorly costumed ghosts slumped in the tub, adding a macabre twist to what was already a scene of doom.

“Stay here with the girls,” Mel ordered, turning for the door, True, as always, on her heels.

“You stay, too!” Sam shouted back at Mel, grabbing her by the shirt sleeve.

She shook herself free. “Sam, I can’t!”

The sudden sense of abandonment as his fingers grasped empty air brought another question to Sam’s lips. “Where’s Claude?” he asked in a panic.

As Mel wedged the door open just enough to slide back through it, they all glimpsed the answer to this question at the same time. Claude had fallen again between the hallway and living room and was now trying to ease himself back on all fours.

Oh, Claude.

Mel reached him first, pulling him to his feet with one shaky arm and turning him back in the direction in which she’d come. “Go!” she told him. “You’re halfway out already! You, too!” she told True. “Go with him!”

The tone of her voice had Astor lifting her head. “Mom? Don’t you leave, too!” she cried in panic, looking up through the haze of smoke. “What are we going to do?”

Mel crouched down to meet Astor at eye level. She touched Astor’s quaking shoulder briefly, then Annie’s, in a trail of a caress, like she was both loath to leave and loath to stay, where she would be as impotent as the rest of them. Sam understood completely.

“True and I are going to keep the house wet,” she told her. “Claude, too. Dad already started the lines. We’ll keep the house wet, and that will help.”

“It will keep the fire outside?”

Mel hesitated, her jaw doing that thing it did when she couldn’t quite stomach what she had to say next. Sam had seen it often enough. “It will help,” she repeated.

“But when will this be over?” Astor cried, as unsatisfied with this answer as Sam. She looked frantically from Mel to Sam to Mel again.

Again, Mel struggled for an answer. Finally, she said, “Soon.” Her throat worked as she swallowed hard. “It will be over soon, baby.”

A hitch in her voice made this even harder to hear. Tears from the smoke and so much more bled a trail down the dirt and grime on Mel’s cheeks as she rose from her crouched position to leave.

Sam wanted to stop her again. Wanted it as much as Astor. Instead, he locked eyes with her one last time, hoping he could ensure her safety by sheer willpower alone.

She sensed it. “Don’t worry. We’ve got Lewis outside as well,” she told him. “And Sam?” She returned his gaze. “That was a good call, turning on the water. A great call.”

The gratitude Sam saw in her eyes burned away the edges of the fear for just an instant, but then she was on the move again.

He crawled into the soaker tub with his girls, feeling through the smoke for Astor’s hand, for Annie’s. “Okay,” he whispered—or cried, he wasn’t sure which—into their ears, brushing their wet hair back from their sweat- and water-soaked heads, letting them bury their small faces into his chest. “Okay, babies. It’s okay.”

He curled his body around them, and the three of them huddled there, in the tub, Sam reminding himself over and over that he didn’t need to play the hero. The mother of his children more than filled that role.

Mel knew the impossibility of fighting a wildland fire with a garden hose. But here she stood, legs braced against the wind and the heat and the flames that literally licked her boots, her face wrapped in her Buff, shoulder to shoulder with True, Lewis, and Claude, who looked, the few times Mel risked a glance, like he might topple with fatigue into the fire at any moment.

Before them, across their field, somewhere in the midst of this angry, churning blaze, Claude’s house already burned, Mel was sure of that, each wall and window and warm memory of his late wife adding fuel to the fire as it fell. They could hear the intermittent crashes and booms as drywall dropped as though detonated, as glass shattered, as wood cracked. Most people didn’t realize how loud it could be in the presence of a burning building. When you saw it on the news, everything was muted by audio and voiceovers. They all got the full experience now, in surround sound, the noise deafening. Next to Mel, Claude cried openly as he aimed his hose at the burning ground, but he didn’t retreat, and he didn’t complain.

The mowed field between the houses proved to be their salvation. It slowed the progress of the blaze from Claude’s property to Sam’s, buying them time—buying Annie time—so that instead of a wall of flame, they faced a carpet. But still it crept, this fiery carpet, low and thin, like a predatory animal slinking toward them through the dense smoke. In a moment of inspiration, Mel handed True her garden hose, opting to add Sam’s pressure washer to the mix, which she attached to the only water hookup in the garage, unscrewing the thick rubber hose to the washing machine in the mudroom with clumsy hands. She ran the pressure washer at full capacity in wide arcs across the ground at her feet, but even so, it only delayed the inevitable, pushing back the crawling fire less than an inch at a time.

It was at least ten more minutes before she heard a new, much more welcome sound through the din. She paused, pressure-washer hose in hand, trying to listen. Yes ... that was the promised EMS rig, and a big one. Probably a Type 3 engine, as well, from the magnitude of the rumble at Mel’s feet.

She felt a tentative smile crack her dry, burnt lips as beside her, Claude let out a hoarse whoop of gladness. They’d done it ... They’d held the blaze at bay long enough for help to arrive. The sight of Mel’s crew spilling out of the second engine brought a sudden rush of tears to her eyes ... She hadn’t thought she had any moisture left in her body. She caught a glimpse of Janet’s silent nod in her direction as she hopped down from the running board, her careworn face still smudged with soot. Men and women shouted orders over the noise, their voices disembodied through the thick smoke. From the EMS rig, an entire ground team from Eagle Valley piled out in full structural gear, wasting no time unwrapping hoses in the driveway. They must have off-roaded the last few hundred yards, where the fire burned on both sides of the road.

“In the house!” Mel shouted to them, dropping the sprayer end of the pressure washer onto the smoldering, wet ground to rush over. “Please! Get my girls!”

Two men wearing Dust Busters jackets entered the front door, while Claude said, “Go, go!” and Mel went, sprinting back across the grass to make sure Sam and the kids made it out to the trucks.

She should have known it couldn’t be that easy. First, the only medic qualified to supply Annie with the extra oxygen she needed to make the journey down the hill had just passed his EMT-Intermediate level last week, which led to a lot of panicked floundering with the tubes and tank in the doorway. Mel’s attention divided; half the time, she focused on continuing to fight the blaze in front of the house, but the other half, she was craning her neck to watch for Annie’s evacuation from Highline.

“They’ll get her to the rig,” True kept saying, but when ?

When Annie finally emerged in Sam’s arms, she made for a pathetic picture, still wrapped in wet towels, her face obscured by a pediatric oxygen mask and nasal canula. Astor ran behind, an N95 pressed to her face with one hand—they simply couldn’t be adjusted to fit properly—and Annie’s medical supply bag in the other. On her back she’d strapped her own go bag, as well as several of Claude’s prized quilts that had never made it out to his truck.

“That girl is a freakin’ marvel,” True declared. But behind the pride, her voice shook with worry and fear and entirely too much smoke inhalation.

Sam pressed Annie back into the arms of the EMT, who climbed into the cab of the EMS rig. Janet followed; then Lewis held a hand out for Astor, who swung up behind him. Mel lifted a hand in farewell, finally understanding the sentiment godspeed , expecting Sam to heft himself up into the vehicle behind the girls. Instead, he pushed off the running board at the last moment, hopping back onto the dirt of the driveaway.

At least three people yelled his name, and he ignored all three, running back to the house and grabbing the hose from a barely standing Claude. “Go. Now!” he told him, shoving the old man in the direction of the EMS rig in his place.

Claude attempted a protest, but his words were lost, stolen from his throat by the cloying smoke. Sputtering and coughing, he pulled Sam into a swift embrace and then launched himself toward the engine. Shoulders hunched, head down, he made his way to the safety of the rig on shaky legs. As Lewis lifted him up, Sam swung around to True.

“You, too!” he shouted, completely ignoring the stunned Who, me? look she flung his way. He grabbed at her, practically pulling her toward the rig. “Please, True. My girls need you. Because what if ...” He cast a look back over his shoulder toward the blaze, where debris from neighboring roofs flew through the wind, where the flames licked in an angry roar. “Just—please!”

True looked between him and Mel and back again, as if unsure from whom she took orders these days, then came to her own conclusion.

“Hold up!” she yelled toward the rig, jumping into the back just as it began to move, managing a tight maneuver in the drive before pointing its nose toward town.

“They’ll make it,” Mel told Sam, whose hands were now braced on his knees as he coughed in the direction of the dirt. The EMS rig, like the Engine 3, was built to withstand the heat and debris that Claude’s truck simply couldn’t.

“Good,” he managed. “Thank God.”

As Mel redirected her hose toward the fire, part of her wanted to take Sam by the shirt and shake him for giving up his space beside their girls, but the other part had never been more grateful. Having him by her side in this moment felt so right, it made the entire past year feel like a stupid, pointless detour. How had it taken their literal feet to the literal fire for her to see it?

The righteous anger that usually burned hot and bright in her being melted into the marrow of her bones, and the fact that this revelation came as they fought for this house, the house that had broken them in the first place, was an irony she would have to unpack later.

If later ever came.

She expected Sam to pick up Claude’s hose and use every remaining second to combat the blaze, but instead, as the Dust Busters piled into the engine, he reached for her hose and dropped it to the ground. “Annie is safe,” he said, tugging her toward their last chance at a ride out of the inferno. “Which means it’s time to go.”

From the back of the Type 3, Sam watched as a Douglas fir, lit up like a torch, toppled onto the roof of his deck with a loud crack, just to join the cedar that had flattened his SUV. For an instant, a shower of sparks impeded his vision, and then he saw the flames begin to lick the roof.

This structure, in its current state, represented every toxic family pattern Sam had been determined to break since he’d left for his first deployment. The sense of purpose that reimagining it for his own family had given Sam a visceral feeling, like every ounce of parental responsibility his old man had lacked had skipped a generation and landed squarely in Sam’s gut. And maybe he’d needed that. Maybe fixing what was broken in this house had been essential, even, but that purpose had been served. His girls were safe. Mel was at his side, pressed in close on the jump seat of the engine.

The only thing left was to let it burn.

Once the thought landed, it burrowed itself directly into Sam’s frontal cortex, igniting into something akin to hope. Was this how ancient peoples had felt, watching the pyres of their ancestors burn in fiery surrender? He remembered something Mel had told him after she’d finished her fire-science training. Ash is the purest of elements. It mixes with the earth and helps create new growth.

It was time to be reborn. He tore his watering eyes away from the house and onto the road ahead of them as the engine eased out of the driveway, not looking back even as he heard the fire find its way from the porch roof to a second-story window in an explosion of glass and heat.

One of the firefighters clapped a hand on his shoulder in sympathy. “Hey, now, this is what insurance is for,” he shouted over the noise of the fire and the engine.

Money for Annie. Money for what mattered. Yes, Sam thought, egging the fire on with a fervent prayer of thanks. Let it burn.