‘That’s not the point – it’s the party!’
‘Oh, sorry – The Party! Well, what do you know, I didn’t mark that down as the pinnacle of my social diary this summer. I’m kind of busy looking for a college place for the fall.’
He’d turned it around and put me in the wrong, made me feel so bad. I’d apologized and went to bed hating myself, wondering when exactly I’d begun to press the destruct button on our relationship.
‘Tania, we’ll drive you out to Black Eagle Lodge.’ Grace broke my dark thoughts to repeat the offer. ‘And tomorrow night I’ll come to your place to help with your costume. What was it again – bird of paradise?’
My dad came home that night with news that should have solved the costume dilemma plus the going-to-theparty-solo problem in one fell swoop.
‘Forest fire,’ he reported as he flung down his flight bag and kicked off his boots. ‘Out at Black Eagle Canyon. I saw Forest Service pumper heading out there to join county fire crew.’
‘How bad?’ Mom asked.
I was half elated that the party would now be cancelled, half spooked by the news of a fresh forest fire. It ended in a shiver right down my spine.
‘Plenty of smoke heading down mountain. Couldn’t see flames.’ Dad was tired – he’d been out of state on a construction project in the Utah desert, sleeping in camp for three nights. At the best of times he chops his English into short, sharp bursts, ignores details like the definite article, the personal pronoun. Exhaustion exaggerates the habit.
Mom jumped on the news. ‘How did it start?’
‘Fuel accumulation at ground level – deadwood. Lightning strike, no rain.’
‘Let’s hope it stays low, doesn’t get into the canopy,’ Mom said. Round here everyone is a wildfire expert. ‘Wind’s coming in from the north, which means the flames should push towards Turner Lake and fizzle out.’
We all thought but no one said, What about our retired rock star’s multimillion-dollar spread? Did the flames engulf the house?
‘Untouched,’ Holly reported next morning. We could smell smoke in the air, even from a distance of ten miles. Everyone gathered at the school entrance, picking up snippets of news. ‘The flames leaped from one side of Black Eagle Canyon to the other; left the lodge unscathed.’
‘It’s a miracle,’ Jude said. ‘But I guess the party’s off.’
‘No way,’ the fountain of all knowledge insisted. ‘Zoran already put it on his blog – attendance of heavenly bodies required, his place, eight p.m. tomorrow.’
Smoke still hung in the air during lunch break. We breathed in acrid fumes, felt it catch at the back of our throats.
I picked up a text from Orlando: ‘Sorry,’ he said. That was all. It was enough. ‘Me too,’ I texted back. ‘Luv u.’
Grace was rechecking Zoran’s updated blog. ‘The flames stayed low on the ground,’ she reported. ‘The fire crew graded it low intensity, surface fire. Trees, house, outbuildings are all OK.’
‘Cool,’ everyone agreed.
But then Jude brought the mood down. ‘The way I heard it, a guy from the forest service got caught on the mountain without a shelter.’
‘No way. What happened to him?’ Leo Douglas asked. He’d been sitting next to me, watching me text Orlando and I’d been about to tell him how his best buddy was delayed in Dallas and wimping out of the biggest party of the decade.
‘They didn’t find him yet,’ Jude told us. ‘He’s been missing since four p.m. yesterday.’
‘How do they know he didn’t have a shelter?’ Leo again.
A shelter is a foil tent that a firefighter shakes out and climbs into while the flames sweep through. The way Bobby Mackey tells it, it’s a total life saver.
‘It was still in the truck with his name on. Marty Austin found it and tried to locate the missing man by two-way radio. No reply. The guy is twenty-four years old, with a wife and a baby.’
‘So how come it’s not on Zoran’s blog?’ Grace didn’t want to believe Jude. She finds it hard to absorb bad news.
I was in freefall again, smelling smoke, hearing the deadwood crackle, shielding my face from its orange blaze. Sparks rise and dance in billowing white smoke, way above the treetops.
‘I guess he won’t want to talk about it – not until it’s been confirmed,’ Holly suggested.
What followed was one of those uneasy silences that no one found a way to break. We were all thinking maybe our rock star shouldn’t go ahead with the party out of respect, or maybe they would find the missing guy safe and well.
But I remembered the time last fall when a woman hiker in her early thirties went up Black Rock alone. It was a normal day, no weather warnings. She never came back. They went over the whole area with a fine-tooth comb – nothing. In the end they came up with two strong possibilities. Either the lone hiker had fallen into a sink hole caused by an old forest fire – the kind of hole that opens up when flames have burned underground for weeks, gobbled up tree roots and hollowed out big, unseen caverns. Or else she’d wanted to disappear, i.e. she’d planned the whole thing in order to flee from her family. If you run with this story, she and her secret lover are currently running a beach bar in Barbados, Bermuda, Bali … you choose. Personally, with my apocalyptic sensors on full alert and given the many and lethal dangers up on Black Rock, I lean towards the sink hole option.
As you can see, I’m the complete opposite of my best friend Grace.
‘Are you OK, Jude?’ she asked as we gave up speculating and headed indoors for afternoon class. The two of them hung behind. He was searching through his pockets for something.
‘Inhaler,’ he mumbled.
I noticed he was short of breath, trying to draw air into clogged lungs.
Luckily Grace always carries a spare. She dug it out of the bottom of her bag and handed it to him. ‘Is it the smoke?’ she asked.
Jude nodded, inserted the mouthpiece and sucked hard. I heard the light mechanical whir of the tiny device.
‘Slow down, breathe deep,’ Grace instructed, so accustomed to Jude’s asthma attacks that she didn’t miss a beat.
‘You want to take him to a doctor?’ I asked.
She shook her head. ‘Give him five minutes, he’ll be cool.’
‘Sure?’ Jude didn’t look cool. His breaths came short, shallow and sharp, his head was tilted back and his mouth was pursed into an ‘O’.
Grace nodded. ‘Go ahead, Tania. I’ll see you later – costume, remember?’
‘My place?’
‘Seven thirty. See you.’
I went inside and sat through classes, living with a shaky feeling that the blaze out at Black Eagle Canyon, the missing firefighter, even Jude’s asthma and Orlando not being here were all bad signs that combined into some kind of warning not to attend the party, a message in the ether.
‘Even for you that’s total bullshit,’ tell-it-like-it-is Holly informed me on our drive home. ‘Quit the superstitious crap, Tania, for chrissakes.’
I didn’t argue with Holly. I never do.
Time to join dots, I guess.
Holly Randle doesn’t suffer fools. She spits out tough opinions, no softening, no compromise. She has the mind and body of a professional athlete, a tennis player serving 120mph balls straight at your body. Her total focus is on winning every argument, holding the advantage, psyching out the opposition. Physically she conforms to type too – she’s tall, tanned and wears her blonde hair tied high on her head, like those Eastern European Amazons who blast their opponents off the court, whose legs go on for ever and whose names begin with an impossible collection of hard consonants all rattling together and ending in ‘ova’.
If Holly hadn’t lived next door to me all our lives, I know for sure we wouldn’t be buddies.
‘Costume time!’ Grace announced, knocking at my door an hour later than planned.
I checked my watch. Eight thirty.
The single organizational skill Grace possesses is the ability to produ
ce an inhaler for Jude whenever he has an asthma attack. Otherwise she floats blissfully through total chaos.
‘How’s Jude?’ I asked as I let her in.
‘Not so good,’ she frowned. ‘His dad took him to the ER.’
‘What did I tell you!’ I yelped. ‘I said he needed to see a doctor.’
‘The hospital is keeping him in overnight. They say the smoke from Black Rock is definitely making him worse.’
‘See!’
‘Yeah. Honestly, Tania, this happens so much. I guess I’ve become a little blasé.’
‘Gotcha.’ I backed off, sensing that Grace had already done the mea culpa routine on herself. ‘You’re sure you want to be here? Shouldn’t you be at the hospital?’
She shook her head. ‘You mean, with Dr Medina standing guard, bedside?’
‘I hear you.’ Everyone in the world loves golden, gentle, generous Grace – everyone except Jude’s family. What’s not to love? She’s a people magnet, the most popular girl in our year with both students and teachers. You’re naturally drawn to the way she always makes time and space for you; you bask in the sunshine of that laid back, effortless smile.
‘So show me the sketches,’ she insisted, and I had to admit that I hadn’t made any yet and Grace sighed and made me sit down and focus until I developed the bird of paradise idea into something that could be scrambled together in the space of twenty-four hours – basically a turquoise one-piece bathing suit from my closet, draped with petals of gold foil to mimic plumage and topped with an elaborate bird mask with a high purple crest.
‘We need Orlando,’ Grace sighed as we discussed details. ‘He’d know how to do this.’
I need Orlando, period, I thought. God, I was missing him, and how come minutes stretched into hours, hours into days when he was away?
At ten pm Grace got a message from Jude in the hospital.
Out of my mind, crazy bored. When can u visit?
Early 2moro. Get some sleep xox
Bed is lonely without u.
Sleep! Grace’s finger trembled over the Send button and she sighed as she pressed it.
‘Go home,’ I told her. ‘He’ll be OK in the morning; they’ll let him out of the hospital, you’ll see.’
When I finally went to bed it was past midnight and my room was a mess. Scraps of gold foil and stray feathers from my mom’s old feather boa littered the carpet. Before I could slide under the sheet, I had to clear cans of paint and glue from my bed. Then I opened the window to disperse the fumes. As I sank my head against the pillow, though my costume was almost complete, I still had the sickening feeling in my stomach that I really, truly didn’t want to go to the party on Black Rock.
Eventually though, I quit worrying about who I would talk to and would anyone even want to dance with me and I drifted off in the darkness.
I drifted, then jerked awake, turned on to my side, drew my knees up to my chest, tried to sleep. It was no good. I turned again, stretched my legs, pulled the pillow over my head to cut out the distant sound of a siren wailing along a deserted highway.
I don’t know if I was asleep or awake but I smelled woodsmoke. It’s unmistakable; not unpleasant, especially the sweet scent of burning pine resin. I breathed it in, began to wonder, where is this fire – on the mountain or inside my head?
Suddenly I feel the wind. It’s so strong it almost lifts me off my feet. And I see the first orange firebrands in the dark sky, flung into the air ahead of raging flames, then the fire itself, heating the mountainside so that trees burst into flames, turning to ash, and the flames jump gorges and rampage on.
I raise my head, try to get out of bed but smoke is filling my lungs, a blast of red-hot wind forces me back.
Live embers drop on my flesh, fade and die. Though the fire has found its own direction and is running towards me, I can’t move. Flames are sweeping down Black Rock, trees are twisting and cracking – sharp explosions all around, the sound of branches crashing to the ground.
The head of the fire sweeps over the ridge on to Becker Hill. It hits an old-style log cabin overlooking the lake and explodes into a wall of flame; now it’s arching over the next house in its path, leaping over the roof, leaving it untouched.
The hot wind blasts down the hill, tearing at doors and shutters, flinging those firebrands into porches, shattering windows.
I’m trapped in my bed, feeling the searing heat. My heart is thumping through my ribs. I hear a baby cry, a woman scream. The flames arch again in a fantastic riot of yellow and red. Someone is praying; a figure runs straight into the flames without looking back, then a second person – straight into the inferno – and the cries stop and the only sound is wind sucking around corners, whooshing through the room, and roof timbers cracking in the roaring flames.
And me sitting up and sobbing.
Someone ran into the room and turned on the light. Mom held me and promised it would all be all right, that it wasn’t real, only a nightmare – the same way she’d soothed and comforted me through all the years.
I knew not to share with Holly, or Aaron or Leo. Instead I chose Grace, once I’d checked with her that the medics had given Jude the all-clear.
‘He’s home,’ she’d told me when we met at the school gates. ‘They gave him new medication and warned him to stay inside until the smoke clears from the valley.’
‘I don’t get it,’ I told her as we headed for class. ‘Why do I always dream the same thing – the fire, the people burning to death? How come I believe I’m actually there?’
‘I have no idea. I never even remember my dreams, let alone relive them the way you do.’
‘So that’s it? It’s a recurring nightmare, end of story.’
She nodded. ‘What else?’
‘You don’t think it’s a kind of sixth sense – something weird and extra sensory that most people don’t know they have?’ I almost apologized as I said it, knowing how crazy it made me sound.
Grace wasn’t willing to give the idea any space. ‘Think about it. Make the link with the specific history of your house – not the actual house, but the plot it stands on – the fire, the tragedy.’ She hesitated, obviously not wanting to continue and hurt my feelings.
‘Go ahead – you’re planning to be the psychology major,’ I sighed.
‘Somehow that event has taken hold of you, deep down in your subconscious. Then yesterday, when we were discussing the latest fire out at Black Rock, it lit up those dark corners of your brain, and there you go again – classic nightmare build up.’
So Grace was a rationalist, a budding scientist who didn’t believe in the paranormal – I already knew that.
‘Something new happened – I heard the baby crying,’ I confessed. And I feel connected; it feels like it’s happening to me.
‘Only in the dream,’ she insisted, blocking my way into the noisy classroom. ‘You hear me, Tania – only in your imagination.’
‘OK, yeah.’ I stopped there, didn’t press on to describe the link I felt to that long-gone child – the love and the pity, the helplessness when I heard her cry.
Dad was home for a week after working two weeks on the Utah site. During his down time he likes to hike in the forest, fish in white-water rapids and read biographies of dead American presidents. This is down to his immigrant background. In Romania he and his family lived on the breadline in a tiny apartment on the tenth floor of a cement tower block in Bucharest. His dad traded black-market Levi jeans until 1986 when he fell foul of the Communist regime and the entire Ionescu family had to flee the country by stowing away in a shallow compartment concealed under the floor of a truck.
And I guess while I’m on the subject of parents, you may have the wrong idea about my domestic goddess mom with the stack of sweet-smelling laundry and the ever-hugging arms. She’s also a commercial property lawyer working for a multinational energy company, renting office space all over the world. I’m serious – she’s a legal hotshot, so she was currently on a plane to Russia
and Dad was on the couch with JFK.
‘They found firefighter guy,’ he told me, deep and staccato, when I walked in the house after school. ‘He took shelter in old mine.’
‘Is he OK?’ I asked.
Dad shook his head. ‘Didn’t make it. They told family in Irvine County. Brother lives here in Bitterroot.’
So I went straight on to Zoran’s blog, expecting and probably hoping to see ‘Cancelled’ written all over the invite to his party. But no, he’d updated everyone with the sad news and decided in spite of the tragedy that the Heavenly Bodies event would go ahead: ‘Our doors are still open, the band is here. We’re ready to party.’
‘Look at this,’ I said to Dad. ‘Don’t you think he would cancel?’
‘Lot of money, lot of time getting ready,’ he shrugged. ‘Live music, caterers. Anyhow, celebrities don’t think how we do.’ And he went back to the Cuban missile crisis and how the president was rumoured to have taken his eye off the threat of nuclear war to admire the curvaceous charms of Marilyn Monroe.
So when Grace called to tell me that Jude still couldn’t leave his house, I was more than ready to call a rain check.
‘Let’s stay home, girls together,’ I suggested. ‘Play some music, read magazines.’
‘And miss the big event?’ she argued. ‘Tania, everyone will be there!’
‘But you can’t leave poor Jude.’
‘What am I gonna do? Hammer at the door pleading with the parents from hell to let me in?’
‘OK, but how’s he going to feel knowing you’re out partying?’
‘Don’t do that to me,’ she warned. ‘Jude knows how much I’ve been looking forward to this, so he’s fine with it. What does Orlando want you to do – stay home and mope?’
‘Actually, he said for me to go party.’
‘Exactly my point! And the costumes, Tania – we made a lot of effort.’
I stood with the phone to my ear, gazing out of the window at the sun sinking behind Black Rock. It looked like a gold coin with a red rim melting on to the dark horizon and turning the sky violet. ‘Why don’t I want to go?’ I sighed.