People would likely line up to give opinions about that. The part that thinks ahead, for one. A stay-at-home wife with no skills, throwing sense to the four winds to run after a handsome boy who could not look after her children. Acting like there was no tomorrow. And yet. The way he looked at her suggested he'd be willing to bring her golden apples, or the Mississippi River. The way he closed his fingers in a bracelet around her ankles and wrists, marveling at her smallness, gave her the dimensions of an expensive jewel rather than an inconsequential adult. No one had ever listened to her the way he did. Or looked, touching her hair reverently, trying to name its color: somewhere between a stop sign and sunset, he said. Something between tomatoes and a ladybug. And her skin. He called her "Peach."
No one else had ever called her anything. Only the given name her mother first sounded out for the birth certificate in a doped anesthetic haze, thinking it came from the Bible. Later her mother remembered that was wrong; it wasn't the Bible, she'd heard it at a craft demonstration at the Women's Club. She found a picture in a ladies' magazine and yelled for her daughter to come look. Dellarobia was maybe six at the time and still remembered the picture of the dellarobia wreath, an amalgam of pine cones and acorns glued on a Styrofoam core. "Something pretty, even still," her mother insisted, but the fall from grace seemed to presage coming events. Her performance to date was not what the Savior prescribed. Except marrying young, of course. That was the Lord's way for a girl with big dreams but no concrete plans, especially if a baby should be on the way. The baby that never quite was, that she never got to see, a monster. The preemie nurse said it had strange fine hair all over its body that was red like hers. Preston and Cordelia when they later arrived were both blonds, cut from the Turnbow cloth, but that first one that came in its red pelt of fur was a mean wild thing like her. Roping a pair of dumbstruck teenagers into a shotgun wedding and then taking off with a laugh, leaving them stranded. Leaving them trying five years for another baby, just to fill a hole nobody meant to dig in the first place.
Something in motion caught her eye and yanked her glance upward. How did it happen, that attention could be wrenched like that by some small movement? It was practically nothing, a fleck of orange wobbling above the trees. It crossed overhead and drifted to the left, where the hill dropped steeply from the trail. She made a face, thinking of redheaded ghosts.
Making things up was beneath her. She set her eyes on the trail, purposefully not looking up. She was losing the fight against this hill, panting like a sheep. A poplar beside the trail invited her to stop there a minute. She fit its smooth bulk between her shoulder blades and cupped her hands to light the cigarette she'd been craving for half an hour. Inhaled through her nose, counted to ten, then gave in and looked up again. Without her glasses it took some doing to get a bead on the thing, but there it still was, drifting in blank air above the folded terrain: an orange butterfly on a rainy day. Its out-of-place brashness made her think of the wacked-out sequences in children's books: Which of these does not belong? An apple, a banana, a taxicab. A nice farmer, a married mother of two, a sexy telephone man. She watched the flake of bright color waver up the hollow while she finished her cigarette and carefully ground out the butt with her boot. When she walked on, pulling her scarf around her throat, she kept her eyes glued to the ground. This boy had better be worth it: there was a thought. Not the sexiest one in the world, either. Possibly a sign of sense returning.
The last part of the trail was the steepest, as far as she could recall from her high-school frolics up here. Who could forget that ankle-bending climb? Rocky and steep and dark. She had entered the section of woods people called the Christmas Tree Farm, fir trees planted long ago in some scheme that never panned out. The air suddenly felt colder. The fir forest had its own spooky weather, as if these looming conifers held an old grudge, peeved at being passed over. What had she been thinking, to name that hunting shack for a meeting place? Romance felt as unreachable now as it did on any average day of toting kids and dredging the floor of doll babies. She could have made things easy on herself and wrecked her life in a motel room like a sensible person, but no. Her legs were tired and her butt ached. She could feel blisters welling on both feet. The boots she'd adored this morning now seemed idiotic, their slick little heels designed for parading your hindquarters in jeans, not real walking. She watched her step, considering what a broken ankle would add to her day. The trail was a cobbled mess of loose rocks, and it ran straight uphill in spots, so badly rutted she had to grab saplings to steady herself.
With relief she arrived on a level stretch of ground carpeted with brown fir needles. But something dark loomed from a branch over the trail. A hornet's nest was her first thought, or a swarm of bees looking for a new home. She'd seen that happen. But the thing was not humming.
She approached slowly, hoping to scoot under it, with or without a positive ID.
It bristled like a cluster of dead leaves or a downturned pine cone, but was much bigger than that. Like an armadillo in a tree, she thought, with no notion of how large that would be. Scaly all over and pointed at the lower end, as if it had gone oozy and might drip. She didn't much care to walk under it. For the second time she wished for the glasses she'd left behind. Vanity was one thing, but out here in the damn wilderness a person needed to see. She squinted up into dark branches backlit by pale sky. The angle made her a little dizzy.
Her heart thumped. These things were all over, dangling like giant bunches of grapes from every tree she could see. Fungus was the word that came to mind, and it turned down the corners of her mouth. Trees were getting new diseases now. Cub had mentioned that. The wetter summers and mild winters of recent years were bringing in new pests that apparently ate the forest out of house and home. She pulled her jacket close and hurried underneath the bristly thing, ducking, even though it hung a good ten feet above the trail. She cleared it by five. And even so, shivered and ran her fingers through her hair afterward and felt childish for fearing a tree fungus. The day couldn't decide whether to warm up or not. In the deep evergreen shade it was cold. Fungus brought to mind scrubbing the mildewed shower curtain with Mr. Clean, one of her life's main events. She tried to push that out of her thoughts, concentrating instead on her reward at the end of the climb. She imagined surprising him as he stood by the shack waiting for her, coming up on him from behind, the sight of his backside in jeans. He'd promised to come early if he could, hinting he might even be naked when she arrived. With a big soft quilt and a bottle of Cold Duck. Lord love a duck, she thought. After subsisting for years on the remains of toddler lunches and juice boxes, she'd be drunk in ten minutes. She shivered again and hoped that was a pang of desire, not the chill of a wet day and a dread of tree fungus. Should it be so hard to tell the difference?
The path steered out of the shadow into a bright overlook on the open side of the slope, and here she slammed on her brakes; here something was wrong. Or just strange. The trees above her were draped with more of the brownish clumps, and that was the least of it. The view out across the valley was puzzling and unreal, like a sci-fi movie. From this overlook she could see the whole mountainside that lay opposite, from top to bottom, and the full stand of that forest was thickly loaded with these bristly things. The fir trees in the hazy distance were like nothing she'd ever seen, their branches droopy and bulbous. The trunks and boughs were speckled and scaly like trees covered with corn flakes. She had small children, she'd seen things covered with corn flakes. Nearly all the forest she could see from here, from valley to ridge, looked altered and pale, the beige of dead leaves. These were evergreen trees, they should be dark, and that wasn't foliage. There was movement in it.
The branches seemed to writhe. She took a small automatic step backward from the overlook and the worrisome trees, although they stood far away across the thin air of the hollow. She reached into her purse for a cigarette, then stopped.
A small shift between cloud and sun altered the daylight,
and the whole landscape intensified, brightening before her eyes. The forest blazed with its own internal flame. "Jesus," she said, not calling for help, she and Jesus weren't that close, but putting her voice in the world because nothing else present made sense. The sun slipped out by another degree, passing its warmth across the land, and the mountain seemed to explode with light. Brightness of a new intensity moved up the valley in a rippling wave, like the disturbed surface of a lake. Every bough glowed with an orange blaze.
"Jesus God," she said again. No words came to her that seemed sane. Trees turned to fire, a burning bush. Moses came to mind, and Ezekiel, words from Scripture that occupied a certain space in her brain but no longer carried honest weight, if they ever had. Burning coals of fire went up and down among the living creatures.
The flame now appeared to lift from individual treetops in showers of orange sparks, exploding the way a pine log does in a campfire when it's poked. The sparks spiraled upward in swirls like funnel clouds. Twisters of brightness against gray sky. In broad daylight with no comprehension, she watched. From the tops of the funnels the sparks lifted high and sailed out undirected above the dark forest.
A forest fire, if that's what it was, would roar.
This consternation swept the mountain in perfect silence. The air above remained cold and clear. No smoke, no crackling howl. She stopped breathing for a second and closed her eyes to listen, but heard nothing. Only a faint patter like rain on leaves. Not fire, she thought, but her eyes when opened could only tell her, Fire, this place is burning. They said, Get out of here. Up or down, she was unsure. She eyed the dark uncertainty of the trail and the uncrossable breach of the valley. It was all the same everywhere, every tree aglow.
She cupped her hands over her face and tried to think. She was miles from her kids. Cordie with her thumb in her mouth, Preston with his long-lashed eyes cast down, soaking up guilt like a sponge even when he'd done no wrong. She knew what their lives would become if something happened to her here. On a mission of sin. Hester would rain shame on them for all time.
Or worse, what if they thought their mother had just run away and left them?
Nobody knew to look for her here. Her thoughts clotted with the vocabulary of news reports: dental records, next of kin, sifting through the ash.
And Jimmy. She made herself think his name: a person, not just a destination. Jimmy, who might be up there already. And in a single second that worry lifted from her like a flake of ash as she saw for the first time the truth of this day. For her, the end of all previous comfort and safety. And for him, something else entirely, a kind of game. Nothing to change his life. We'll strike out together, she'd told herself, and into what, his mother's mobile home? Somehow it had come to pass that this man was her whole world, and she had failed to take his measure.
Neither child nor father, he knew how to climb telephone poles, and he knew how to disappear. The minute he breathed trouble, he would slip down the back side of the mountain and go on home. Nothing could be more certain. He had the instincts of the young. He would be back at work before anyone knew he'd called in sick. If she turned up in the news as charred remains, he would keep their story quiet, to protect her family. Or so he'd tell himself. Look what she'd nearly done. She paled at the size her foolishness had attained, how large and crowded and devoid of any structural beams. It could be flattened like a circus tent.
She was on her own here, staring at glowing trees.
Fascination curled itself around her fright. This was no forest fire. She was pressed by the quiet elation of escape and knowing better and seeing straight through to the back of herself, in solitude. She couldn't remember when she'd had such room for being. This was not just another fake thing in her life's cheap chain of events, leading up to this day of sneaking around in someone's thrown-away boots. Here that ended. Unearthly beauty had appeared to her, a vision of glory to stop her in the road. For her alone these orange boughs lifted, these long shadows became a brightness rising. It looked like the inside of joy, if a person could see that. A valley of lights, an ethereal wind. It had to mean something.
She could save herself. Herself and her children with their soft cheeks and milky breath who believed in what they had, even if their whole goodness and mercy was a mother distracted out of her mind. It was not too late to undo this mess. Walk down the mountain, pick up those kids. The burning trees were put here to save her. It was the strangest conviction she'd ever known, and still she felt sure of it. She had no use for superstition, had walked unlucky roads until she'd just as soon walk under any ladder as go around it, and considered herself unexceptional. By no means was she important enough for God to conjure signs and wonders on her account. What had set her apart, briefly, was an outsize and hellish obsession. To stop a thing like that would require a burning bush, a fighting of fire with fire.
Her eyes still signaled warning to her brain, like a car alarm gone off somewhere in an empty parking lot. She failed to heed it, understanding for the moment some formula for living that transcended fear and safety. She only wondered how long she could watch the spectacle before turning away. It was a lake of fire, something far more fierce and wondrous than either of those elements alone. The impossible.
The roof of her house when she saw it again still harbored its dark patches of damaged shingles, and there sat her car in the drive where she'd parked it. With her mind aflame and her heels unsteady from what she'd seen, she tried to look at the vinyl-sided ranch house in some born-again way. Whatever had gained purchase on her vision up there felt violent, like a flood, strong enough to buckle the dark roof and square white corners of home and safety. But no, it was all still there. The life she had recently left for dead was still waiting. The sheep remained at their posts, huddled in twos and threes. The neighbors' peach orchard still rotted in place on its perfect grid, exposing another family's bled-out luck. Not a thing on God's green earth had changed, only everything had. Or she was dreaming. She'd come down the mountain in less than half the time it took to climb, and that was long enough for her to doubt the whole of this day: what she'd planned to do, what she had seen, and what she'd left undone. Each of these was enormous. If they added up to nothing, then what? A life measured in half dollars and clipped coupons and culled hopes flattened between uninsulated walls. She'd gone for loss and wreckage as the alternative, but there might be others. A lake of fire had brought her back here to something.
To what? A yard strewn with weathered plastic toys and straggling grass, devoid of topsoil, thanks to her father-in-law's hasty job of bulldozing the pad for the house. One neglected rosebush by the porch, a Mother's Day present from Cub, who'd forgotten roses made her sad. The silver Taurus wagon in the drive, crookedly parked in haste, the keys in the ignition where she always left them, as if anybody around here would drive it away. The faint metal sound like a pipe dropped on its end when she put the car into gear.
It could not be more tedious or familiar, any of it. Sadness filled her like water as she turned out onto the highway and clicked on the radio. Kenny Chesney was waiting there to pounce, crooning in his molasses voice that he wanted to know what forever felt like, urging her to gallop away. She clicked Kenny right off. She turned up the drive to her in-laws' place and their old farmhouse came into view with its two uncurtained windows upstairs that made her think of eye sockets in a skull. Hester's flower beds had melted under the summer's endless rain, and so had the garden. They'd finished tomato canning almost before they started. Hester's prized rose beds were reduced to thorny outposts clotted with fists of mildew. It was Hester who loved roses. For Dellarobia their cloying scent and falling-apart flowerheads opened a door straight into the memory of her parents' funerals.
When she got out of the car she noticed one bright spot of color in the whole front yard, a tiny acid-green sock on the stone step where she must have dropped it this morning when she brought the kids. She swiped it up and pocketed it on her way up the s
teps, abashed to confront the woman she'd been a few hours ago, dying of a sickness. She opened the door without knocking.
Cramped indoor odors met her: dog, carpet, spilled milk. And the sight of her kids, the heart-pounding relief of that, like the aftermath of a car accident narrowly avoided. The two of them sat close together on the living room floor in a tableau of brave abandonment. Preston had his arms around Cordie and his chin nested on her fuzzy head while holding a picture book open in front of her. The collies stretched on either side in alert recline, a pair of protective sphinxes. All eyes flew up to her as she entered, keen for rescue, the grandmother nowhere in sight. Preston's dark, plaintive eyebrows were identical to his father's, aligned across his forehead as if drawn there by a ruler. Cordelia reached both hands toward Dellarobia and burst into tears, her mouth downturned in a bawl so intense it showed her bottom teeth. The TV drone in the kitchen died abruptly, and Hester appeared in the doorway, still in her bathrobe, her long gray hair coiled around pink foam curlers. On her children's behalf Dellarobia gave her an injured look, probably just a slightly less toothy version of Cordie's. It wasn't as if she asked her mother-in-law to watch the kids every day of the week. Not even once a month.
Hester crossed her arms. "The way you run around, I wasn't expecting you back so soon."
"Well. I thank you for keeping an eye on them, Hester."