Elizabeth Tallent - Mendocino Fire

When he comes back into the bedroom, Jade continues to scrawl her legal pad with corporate-attorney trickery, reasons radioactive well water is good for you, maybe, and if not that, then some other bullshit David or someone like him will have to contest, and with nothing left to lose, he lets his anger show. “What did you do with it?”

She takes off her glasses, folds them, sets them on the nightstand. He might be some witness she’s treating to this stilted performance whose essence is her offended disbelief. “How did we get here?” When he doesn’t answer she says, “You wanted it gone. You told Susannah things started going wrong when it came into the house.”

“When did you talk to Susannah?”

“I called her to ask what was up last night. Why she rushed off. How your face got hurt.”

“What did she say?”

He’s invested this question with telltale anxiety, and she frowns. “She said to ask you.”

“Tossing the ball around, and Shane threw a wild one. It looks worse than it is.”

She regards him gravely. “Also she wanted you to know Nina called. From Paris. She’s flying home and she intends to take Edmund back with her. Evidently I’m not to be trusted with either child.”

“But the boys have never been apart.”

“It looks like they will be, now. Because I’ll make them say bedtime prayers for the health of Dick Cheney. I’ll knit them little American flag sweaters, and mock Darwin.” She shakes her head. “When you didn’t come home, and you didn’t call, and your cell went right to voicemail, I couldn’t just sit here stewing, could I? I followed your map. That road is awful, it took me an hour each way, but I thought things would calm down if you knew the rug had gone back where it came from. ‘Evil.’ Susannah said you said, ‘Evil.’ You’ve been so irrational about the rug.”

What he wants to say: The whole world could have gone on lying. Gone on fucking up weather and watersheds and the marrow of little kids’ bones, and I could have stayed steady, I would have been able to bear it, day after day, as long as there was you, here in our house, you to come home to, you whole and sane and beautiful and telling me the truth. What he says, keeping his tone even: “Can you see why that bothers me? You should have waited to talk to me, we could have decided together how to deal with the rug. That’s how people who trust each other behave.”

“No, something needed to be done . You can trust me to see things as they are, and to act. You were used to such com pliance , with Susannah. After her, Nina, Shmina, who from everything you say and despite her supposed feminist credentials was basically this mouse . Now there’s me, and, right, you and I don’t know everything about each other, and we never will, and what matters is how — you’re leaving? David?”

The road unwinds before him in moonlight, rough as ever, and he takes its curves too fast, absorbing the adrenaline hit whenever a clump of cholla looms in the headlights, or a redoubt of sandstone. Once a coyote ghosts across the road, and the station wagon fishtails to a halt, swallowed in its own dust. The wipers squeal, clearing the haze, dirty rivulets rippling horizontally as David picks up speed, the desert laid out for him in luminous swipes, loss a particular taste in his mouth, a rising bitterness he can’t swallow away, his heartbeat manic, though it had been calm enough while he stood listening to Jade. There are no boys in the car to heed the warning, but David lectures. Careful, careful. You’ll get there. You’ll find it. It was there once, it will be there again. Have a little faith .

But the oil drum perched on the spur of rock is empty, turned over on its side, rocking when he nudges it with a toe, its trash blown over the rim, he supposes, scattered across the floor of the arroyo, rags fluttering from prickly pear, shards variously glinting. She left the rug here, she said. That must have been around sunset. It’s unlikely that anyone has driven the road since then. The wind has been hard at work, lashing and moaning: Could the rug have been lifted and sailed over the rim? Here is the trail, wide enough to suit deer or two small boys but tricky for a grown man, stones kicked loose by his missteps, preceding him in clattering showers, his descent entirely audible, if there was anyone to hear. The interior of that listing refrigerator is pierced by spokes of moonlight: bullet holes. Paperbacks cartwheel past, shedding pages. When he picks his way among the wreckage, he meets another moon, hanging in the unsmashed headlight of a wrecked truck, the starry refraction of light coming from some earthly source. David makes for that glow eking out from under the tilted wing of an airplane. The throb in his jaw is worse, the pain in his back nagging, but apart from that, he feels good, looser, a little winded but freer, defiant, trying to recall the last time he pursued something, some aim or intention, under the night sky. Twenty years ago. With the other four, his brothers, prowling a mesa in the dark, tossing survey stakes over the rim after pouring sugar in a backhoe’s gas tank. Nothing he does now can compare with the satisfaction of that sabotage, with its clean, unequivocal high. He’s grown old, tame as office air. Jade had revived him, for a time. Ow. When a chip of stone grazes his chest, its sting — and the primal weirdness of being struck by a flying object in the dark — brings David entirely awake, but when he squints around, there’s only the gusting sand, cholla rearing up spookily to his left, his shadow dipping and lengthening as he hikes toward the glow — a campfire, maybe. Something pelts his chest again, then his arm, and before he can shield his eyes he’s assailed by a whirlwind of grit and twigs. Bewildered, he walks right into it, grazed, poked, showered with debris, leaves, twigs, and flying sand. If she were with him, Jade would hide her face against his chest, and he’d shelter her as best he could, her ferocious lawyer-hair lashing his face, and even with the wind whipping and scouring they could protect each other. David reels along blindly, and from the way his lungs strain he understands he must be shouting, though he can’t hear himself over the wind. This is what he has seen happen to small bald-headed children: death blows you away while you struggle, the truth, the outrage, dying in your throat. Flinging a last handful of grit, the blast relents. David has passed among the cholla unscathed, and here is the shelter under the airplane’s wing, from which a lantern is suspended, shining down on a boy and a girl, entwined on his rug, its arabesques dimmed, its choir of blues bleached to lunar grays and faint violet. The boy is fast asleep, but not the girl. The girl is awake. She tightens her arms around her boyfriend, and lifts her chin defiantly. She’s got the inky hair favored by punked-out runaways, a fright wig trailing sharp fangs over her forehead, the pinched-together brows and eyeholes whose expression can’t be deciphered. When he takes another step toward his rug, she flashes a palm. Stop. He takes another step, and gets both palms. She wants nothing more than to stop him, and he stops. It all stops, moon, love, breath, heartbeat. David sprawls there, feeling the hardness of the ground, the nerve-revival of panic, the terror that she won’t know what to do, that she’s stoned and can’t help. The wind dies down and the moonlight blinks and he doesn’t know what comes next on earth. No one knows. But there are footsteps coming toward him, and if there is any chance of saving a life through the sheer force of one’s love for it, he is already saved.

Ten years later, this can happen to her: someone can set his coffee cup down on the counter instead of in its saucer, and she can, for that, love him. Who is he? No one, a colleague she likes but who isn’t important or especially close to her — no one she has ever imagined herself with . Office politics tend to sweep them, if not into collusion, at least into a nicely practical kind of empathy. There is relief for each of them in understanding the other, when they understand so few people around them, and he has supported her at key moments, strategically, in a manner that prevents his seeming too much her friend . That would be resented, as friendships are in offices — someone would set out to sabotage it. So they meet in amiable secret: it means nothing. He would say — it’s one of his phrases — it’s not hugely significant . She likes and admires him, but would be careful about saying she knows him, careful about asserting any kind of claim to his attention.