Elizabeth Tallent - Mendocino Fire

But they were not. “She has rights,” Sarah told Sean, who was in her kitchen, in a rickety chair she had pulled away from the table, saying, “She has rights,” saying now, “It’s wrong for him to be kept from his mother the way you-all have done.”

For some reason, when she’d pulled the chair out for him, he’d taken it and turned it around and straddled it. Maybe he had needed to act, to take control of something, if only the chair. This is her sister — or closer than sister, twin — and he keeps his voice down. “Ask yourself why I brought him by? I’m her best friend in this mess, but what she’s done is damage her own cause. This isn’t gonna look good.”

“To who?”

“Do you know where she’s going?”

“To who won’t it look good?”

Trailer trash , Daisy called the sisters once. “The thing is to make this right without having anybody else get involved.”

“You’re threatening me.”

“I’m the opposite of threatening you. I’m saying, let’s work this out ourselves. You tell me where she’s gone and I find her and we work it out like reasonable people and there’s no need for anybody else to know she abducted a five-year-old child.”

“ Abducted. Like my sister wasn’t in labor eighteen hours. Like she never chipped a tooth from clenching or left claw marks on my hand. Tell me you ever even really knew she was in the house. Ever once really talked to her. Victor hit her upside the head so hard the ringing in her ear lasted a week. Do you know he told her he’d kill her if she tried to leave? It was my four thousand dollars. So she ran, you know, she took the money and she ran and there was never any phone call and it kept me up a lot of nights. It wasn’t the money, it was not knowing she was all right — they say twins know that, but I didn’t, not till I saw her again. And I never saw her look at anyone like she looks at that little boy when he says I want to stay with you , and it’s not like she planned this, but after that how was she going to let him go? I’m not saying she makes great choices, but you were unrealistic thinking she could give him back.”

The chair wobbled as he crossed his arms on its backrest. “Maybe so. She and I need to talk about that. Work out what’s best for all involved.”

“It sounds so reasonable when you say it.”

“I am reasonable.” He smiled. “Families need to work these things out.”

“Now you’re family.”

“Like it or not.” Still smiling.

Esme was driving north toward Arcata to go to college there. “None of you thought she was good enough for college.”

An outright lie, but he let it pass. “How long ago did they take off?”

“Not long. She had to get her stuff. She was just throwing things into the car. Dylan helped. Laughing like they were both little kids.” He continued to look at her and Sarah shook her head before saying, “Twenty minutes ago maybe.”

“What kind of car?”

“I don’t know kinds of cars.” He won’t look away. “Smallish. A Toyota maybe. Green, maybe.” Not smiling now: he needs her to get this right. “Yeah. Green. A bumper sticker. Stop fucking something up. That really narrows it down, hunh. Trees. Stop Killing Ancient Trees. Trees are her thing.”

“You’re sure about Arcata.”

“See, she’s wanted that for years, an apartment and classes and her little boy with her. Botany. Redwoods, really. Did you know that about her? She loves redwoods and there’s this guy there who’s famous, like the guy if you want to study redwoods, and she met him, and she might be going to be his research assistant this summer. She said—” But she’d told him what he needed to know and he was out the door. Lucky that it was north, the two-lane highway looping through the woods without a single exit for sixty miles and few places to pull over, lucky that after dark nobody drives this road but locals and not many of those. As long as he checks every pull-off carefully and doesn’t overshoot her then it comes down to how fast he can drive, each curve with its silver-gray monoliths stepping forward while their sudden shadows revolve through the woods behind, the ellipse of shadow-swerve the mirror image of his curve, evergreen air through the window, no oncoming lights — which is just as well given his recklessness, the rage he can admit now that he’s alone, the desire just to get his hands on her, the searing passage of his brights through the woods like the light of his mind gathered and concentrated into swift hunting intelligence that touches and assesses and passes on because its exclusive object is her. At this speed it’s inevitable he will overtake her — nobody drives this road like this — but now he has bolted past a likely spot, a rutted crescent rimmed with trees tall enough to shade it from moonlight: there. He brakes and runs the truck backward onto the shoulder, passing an abandoned car whose color, in the darkness, can’t be discerned, and pulling in behind it he reads Stop Killing Ancient Trees. Such fury, such concentration, and he almost missed it. An empty car. Here is his fear: that she has arranged to meet someone. That Sarah was lied to, and Arcata was a fable, and there’s a guy in this somewhere, and Esme told him she would go away with him if she could get her kid. Nobody to be seen but when he gets out in the moonlight it is as if the air around Sean is sparkling, as if electricity flashes from his skin and glitters at the forest, as if he could convey menace even to a stone.

When he checked in the backseat there was the boy curled up, sleeping in his little shirt and underpants with nothing over him, no blanket, not even an old sweater or jacket, and cracking the door open — its rusty hinges alarming the woods — Sean ducked into a cave of deepest, oldest life-tenderness and took the child in his arms and backed out, loving the weight of him and the shampoo smell of his mussed hair. He set him down barefoot and blinking, his underpants a triangular patch of whiteness in the moonlight, the boy as shy as if it was he who’d run away, keeping a fearful arm’s length from Sean and blinking when Sean said, “Where’s your mom?” seeming not to trust Sean, confused and on the brink of tears, and there was no time for that. “Get in the truck,” he told the boy, “and I don’t want you coming out no matter what. Your job is to stay in the truck and I don’t want you getting out of that truck for any damn reason whatsoever, do you understand me?”

“I have to pee.”

“Come on then.”

Watching from behind, Sean felt the usual solicitude at the boy’s wide-legged stance. Dry weeds crackled.

“She had to go pee in the woods,” he said. Solemnly: “My mom did, in the woods.” That was a new one to the boy.

Sean said, “What happened to your clothes?”

“I threw up and she made me take ’em off and throw ’em out the window cause the smell was making her sick too.”

“All right, now you get in my truck and you stay in the truck. What did I just say?”

“ Stay in the truck.”

“What’re you going to do?”

“ Stay in the truck.”

He had to boost the shivering boy up to the high seat. Sean took the flashlight from the glove box and checked to make sure the keys were in his pocket. He motioned for Dylan to push the lock down, first on the passenger side, then, leaning across, on the driver’s. Sean nodded through the window, but the boy only wrapped his arms around himself and twisted his bare legs together, and Sean remembered the old parka stuffed down behind his seat and gestured for the boy to unlock again and leaned in and said, “Look behind the seat and there’s a jacket you can put on,” and his flash framed twigs and brambles in sliding ovals of ghost light, stroking the dark edge of the woods, finding the deer trail she must have followed. By now she had to be aware that he was coming in after her, and he took the shimmer of his own agitation to mean she was scared, and somehow this was intolerable, that she would be scared of him, that she would not simply walk out of the woods and face him. That he is in her mind not a good man, a kind man, but instead the punisher she has always believed would come after her, and whether he wanted to cause fear or didn’t want to hardly mattered, since that role was carved out ahead of him, narrow as this trail: coming into the woods after her, he can’t be a good man. He can’t remember the last time he felt this kindled and all-over passionate, supple and brilliant, murderously right , and when his flash discovered her she was already running, but it took only two long strides to catch her. She broke her fall with her hands, but before she could twist over onto her back he had her pinned. If she could have turned and they could have seen each other, it might have calmed them both down, but this way, with her back under his chest, his mouth by her ear, he was talking right to her fear-lit brain, and what he said would be indelible, and he felt the exhilaration of being about to drive the truth home to her, and he said What is the matter with you and then You took my kid and she said He’s not your kid and he said My flesh and blood and they both waited for what she would say next to find out whether she had reached the end of defiance but she hadn’t. If you take him away I’ll just come back. Even now she could have eased them from this brink if she had shown remorse, and he was sorry she hadn’t, and he said What do I need to do to get through to you. She thrashed as he rolled her over and her fist caught the flashlight, sending light hopping away across the ground. In the refreshed darkness he reached for her neck, and she was screaming his name as his hands tightened to shut off her voice. Where his flashlight had rolled to a halt a cluster of hooded mushrooms stood up in awed distinctness like tiny watchers. When she clawed at his face, he seized her wrists and heard twigs breaking under her as she twisted. The twining silver bracelet imprinted itself on his palm: he could feel that, and it was enough to bring him to himself, but she did not let up, raking at his throat when he reared back, and now her Fuck you fuck you fuck you assailed him, its echo bandied about through the woods until, feeling her wrath slacken from exhaustion, he rolled from her so she would understand it was over, and they fell quiet except for their ragged breathing, which made them what neither wanted to be, a pair, and as he sat up something nicked the back of his skull in its flight, frisking through his hair, an electrifying non-contact that sang through his skull to the roots of his teeth and the retort cracked through the woods and there was the boy, five feet away, holding the gun with his legs braced wide apart. Behind him rose a fountain of sword ferns taller than he was. “Don’t shoot,” she said. “Listen to me, Dyl, don’t shoot the gun again, okay? You need to put it down now.”