Elizabeth Tallent - Mendocino Fire

“‘Who stops them?’” she says.

“What?”

“‘Who stops them? Us?’”

After a while he says, “Don’t explain. It’s okay. It’s a strange head space, grief, strange perceptions emerge, I know.”

Woods and more woods. No one else on the road, no lights behind or before. There’s this reckless blissful aloneness she used to indulge in, on road trips with a lover, the awareness that things are destined to go wrong but that for now they’re beautiful. Even if he’s not her lover he causes that same aloneness and feeling of beauty, as if the world is nearly gone and all that’s left is what shows in their headlights. It’s sacred. He keeps his hand down low, extending the joint. Finn takes it, inhales, holds it. Mary. Hands it back. His turn.

“Nother hit?”

“No.” She says, “You know I have no idea where my mother is?”

“You want her to hear you’re down from the tree?”

“Once — this one time when I badly wanted to hear from her — my cell rang and I thought It’s her but I couldn’t get to it in time. When I tried calling back, the number was blocked. Whoever it was never tried again. For all I know, she never even knew I was in Tara.”

“Jesus, Finn. She should know you were a fucking hero.”

Mayhem drives in silence, now and then checking her profile: not asleep.

After a while he says, “We got it all on film, that climber cussing with his knee in your back — I mean, he should know better than to say bitch —and you’re trying to reason with him, doesn’t he want his grandkids to see a tree like her, and he takes it wrong, he obviously feels guilty, and it’s dangerous, him holding you in one arm for the descent while your wrists are cuffed, which is insanely, criminally hazardous. Eleven hundred hits on YouTube, last time I checked.”

When she dreams of the tree it’s Mary who’s there on the platform with her, it’s her mother in one of those slapdash outfits pieced together from thrift-shop finds, a sweater collared in mink and missing only a couple of buttons, a satin slip, green wool stockings and over everything, wrapping it up into a single package, the cumbersome military surplus parka, its hood rimmed with another, rattier kind of fur, or maybe not fur but some sort of tufted, partially destroyed dirty synthetic fiber. Out of all the lost things that could come back in a dream, it has to be that dirty parka, Mary’s smoke-scented dark hair spilling out from the hood. The hair, though — that, she loves. The hair alone justifies the dream, which isn’t an ordeal while it’s being dreamed, which isn’t painful and strange until Finn wakes enough to remember that her mother is missing. Gone without a goodbye. Mary’s hair, swinging into a cave enclosing Finn’s face when she was kissed goodnight, was the single aspect of her mother guaranteed to comfort her, no matter how bad a day Mary was having. It was necessary to hide these bad days from customers, though not from her daughter, and to spin stories from her own existence that obscured its precariousness and exalted its triumphs — chief among them, the uniqueness of Finn, whose destiny was obvious to Mary the moment she was born, because I knew you’d come, Finn. For years I’d known you were on the way , and Finn has always suspected Mary would have said to save me except that it would have come across as frankly egotistical and needy. Your eyes holding such wisdom, like you had a thousand past lives behind you. Older, Finn would try to divert her mother from narrating the tale of Finn’s birth in the woods, but in storytelling, if nothing else, Mary was immune to distractions. And if no one can say what happened to Mary, why she left or where she ended up, throughout Mendocino county strangers can tell Finn how long her mother’s labor lasted, or how, bundled in a raggedy cast-off shirt, the newborn had never cried but only looked around all calm, like “Planet Earth, you are mine.”

Iceland is beautiful, far-flung cloudscapes sailing over drenched green moors where shaggy ponies prick their ears in wonder before wheeling away, running through the smoke of their own breath.

Near the end of what the schedule called the welcome get-together, two women — summer dresses, charm — stood at the foot of the solemn Arts and Crafts staircase where he was seated, mostly in shadow, on the fifth or sixth step. Wasn’t it rude, I wondered, to let them keep appealing for some scrap of his attention from below, wouldn’t it be nicer to come down? That could have been me his condescension fell on: I had been scraping together the daring to approach. He was leaning back on his elbows, his long legs crossed at the ankles. This is you in real life? I said to him in my head. The women at the foot of the stairs were sufficiently unembarrassed in their pursuit that one of them even lifted the camera around her neck and aimed. At the prospect of his rebuking her presumption I was stricken, as if being his adoring reader conferred on me the responsibility to protect us all from any wounding or disillusioning outcome. And then the worst thing that could have happened, happened: he stood up and turned his back on them. Inspired to document this irascibility of a famous writer’s, the camera-holding fan clicked off several shots while he remained immobile, and then both women called out, bizarrely, “Thanks!” before walking off. It occurred to me that they might feel the need to maintain appearances if they were going to be his students in the coming week, as I would not be, having been too broke to enroll before the last minute, and too full of doubt about whether I wanted criticism.

Another student came up to me then, and I made my half of small talk: New Mexico, yes as beautiful as that, no never been before — what about you, six hundred pages, that’s amazing. My fellow student’s confidence was so cheerfully aggrandizing that mine flew below his radar. The full moon would be up before long, and if I wanted we could ride across the bridge on his motorcycle, an Indian he’d been restoring for years — parts cost a fortune. There was a ride like that in his novel and it would be good to recheck the details. I couldn’t, I said; I had to read the stories for tomorrow. He said, “Homework, over the wind in your hair?”

Enough students were out, in couples and exuberant gangs, that I didn’t worry, crossing through the campus’s dark groves of eucalyptus, dry cataracts of slim leaves hanging as still as if they’d just been shushed, low enough in places to whisk across the top of my head. The boy I’d been talking to had implied that, lacking boldness, I wasn’t the real deal; listening to him, I had been thinking no real writer could be as imperceptive as he was; who was real, and who wasn’t, had been the question preoccupying us — pitiable, unpublished us. He had been right about the moon: sidewalks and storefronts brightened as I walked back to my hotel, followed, for a couple of bad blocks, by a limping street person who shouted, at intervals, Hallelujah! On the phone my husband told me that a neighbor’s toddler had fallen down an old hand-dug well but apart from a broken leg wasn’t hurt, and he had finished those kitchen cabinets and would drive them to the job site tomorrow, and our dog had been searching all over for me, did I want to talk to him? You big lunkhead, why did you ever let me get on that plane? I asked our dog. When my husband came back on the phone he said Crazy how he loves you and So the first day sucked, hunh? and They’re gonna love the story. Sleep tight baby. Hallelujah. Bed strewn with manuscripts, I sat up embroidering the margins with exegeses and genius alternatives — if someone had pointed out that You should try this can seem condescending, I would have been really shocked. At two A.M., when the city noise was down to faraway sirens, I collected the manuscripts and stacked them on the desk. They were charged with their writers’ reality, the way intimately dirtied belongings are — hairbrushes, used Band-Aids — and I couldn’t have fallen asleep with them on the bed. Where, in Berkeley, was his house, and was he asleep, and in what kind of bed, and who was beside him?