Elizabeth Tallent - Mendocino Fire

2

California girl is what her brother sometimes called her, meaning lightweight and out of touch, no longer adapted to harsh Iowa-caliber reality, and she can’t turn out to be what her brother implied she is, a California abandoner, an escaper and eluder of responsibility, the only child not there the night her father lies dying, she can’t bear that, the parking lot’s raw cold ablaze in her chest; it sets her coughing. Her raincoat is gauze, and when she looks down, each button sports a crescent of snow. If only the knitter had knit mittens, too, her hands would be cozy striped paws, not fisted, freezing, in useless pockets. Inside her stupid boots her toes begin to sting. Behind, the low-slung terminal sends out its diligent, snow-defused radiance. If her father is still conscious he has observed that her brother is there and her sister is there and she is not. But they live here. All her sister had to do is drive across town. Her brother lives in a different but nearby small town and would have had to drive for twenty minutes, but what is twenty minutes earlier in the day when the storm had barely begun compared to these wheeling veils, the white sky’s swept and shuddering slow-motion dump? She’s no longer capable of driving in snow like this, if she ever was. Here comes shame. Let it come. Shame is better than getting herself killed. Sure you want to go out in this? Give in, turn back, walk through those sliding doors into warmth, into refuge, choose the chair on the end of a row of chairs, drop your bag, slouch down, cover your eyes, see if you can sleep, but no, to spend the coming hours sleeping in the impersonal haven of the terminal would be the most terrible mistake she’s ever made in regard to her father. No messages very probably means he is still alive, and if he is conscious and can recognize her, then he will feel forgiven, and it will mean something that she rushed to get to him. Her fucked-up family. As for anger at their withholding news of his cancer, delegating the call to her to the hospice worker, that’s going to have to wait. She can see the front door of her parents’ duplex as clearly as if she’s facing it, and the door is numinous in the way of doors about to open, and she’s destined to stand there facing it and waiting for it to open. It seems a minor matter, the distance between where she is now and the actual location in space of that door. Breath pluming, hers the only tracks in the Arctic, halogen lamps blurring and refocusing, car after car, hard-candy colors dimmed, each car a neutral platinum glaze frozen around a core of essential dark privacy. Wonderful, in a way cars rarely are — she never sees cars, really. She’s not a person cars matter to, but these do, now, set apart by the storm, they matter like musk oxen would matter, besieged in their fortress bodies, hunkered down to endure, her aliveness called to by theirs, the aliveness of cars which of course does not exist. Still, it is fantastic, the vast field of empty, gallant vehicles. Not too long ago, someone must have shoveled around them and done some scraping of windshields. When she reaches the SUV he chose for her, the big guy, she cuffs snow from its windshield and packs it. The snowball flies soundlessly through falling snow. Isn’t that beautiful? Why is it? — something about the opposition, the pure, moving focus of the sphere piercing tall flexing vertical wave after wave of cascading, blown-back snow. The SUV beeps its response, and she hears the thunk of its locks unlatching. Under the dome light whirl the bright particles gusting in behind her. The messenger bag, her only piece of luggage, plops into the backseat, snow fanning out, sparkling across the upholstery. Then comes the chill hospitable order of the new-car interior, the dashboard requiring several minutes’ concentration to master — the embarrassment, as if anyone is watching, of not right away grasping how to work stuff like this, or maybe it feels like one’s technological prowess is continually being assessed these days and no fumbling with a machine is ever truly forgivable, just as language is an inherently social endeavor and mistakes in figuring out language carry a special, outcast charge of humiliation — and gradually they acquire meaning, the icons below the dials, the knobs precipitating out from inscrutability, wipers, heater, the setting for defogging, the angles of the various mirrors, the rumbling of the big guy that will get her there; then, ludicrous or not, the self-salute to her bravery for being about to drive alone through the falling-snow world that holds her dying father. The massive calm vehicle she controls, which she can make do anything, backing and churning down the broad lane hemmed in by the blind backs of other SUVs, is lovable. She loves this car more than she loves anyone in her family. For this comparison, she apologizes aloud: “Fucked up.” A cloud of breath. Does her father know he has only hours left, is he terrified or does he, as her mother has long prayed for him to, believe at last in a life after this, can he still think , to what extent is he still himself , she wonders, understanding in a distracted way (distracted because she is beginning to comprehend the lag time snow interposes between her steering and the vehicle’s response) that she would give anything (now, navigating cautiously between parked monsters) to feel the love that figured in the word dad when the car-rental agent pronounced it: love that ought to be in her heart and isn’t. Did she love that way as a child? She must have. Everyone does. Was it not just some gift allotted to you, was it finally your job to love that way, should she have fought harder against her own hard-heartedness to still be able to love like that, how serious was her crime in not calling for two years?

The big SUV lumbers down the lane between parked vehicles as she tries to get the hang of steering in snow. She can’t help it: to think of him is to tinker with consuming narcissistic calculations whose aim is to prove either that he was at fault in their rift, or that she was. She wonders if he would ever under any circumstances have come running to her like this — no. That no seems to lift the SUV and swat it through a weightless circle with snow falling all the way around it, shades of gray accreting to suggest a presence looming toward her as in fact a glazed black panel buckles, crunching, and her SUV rebounds, skidding through another destined arc into a second surreal panel flashing and popping with reflections, the accident playing out in fractions of fractions of sliced panic until a fresh fraction conveys the news that her SUV is still riding through a languid circuit terminating in the light-mirroring mass of yet another parked vehicle, which flicks it away. The world comes to a stop.

3

She thinks I am not hurt. She looks out through the windshield. No alarms are going off. It is so silent, the widely spaced lights mooning through obliterating snow and the beauty-shock of albino dunes slung and saddled with blue shadow. Either the impacts were too glancing to trigger the air bag or this car has a defective air bag — in which case, it crosses her mind, she can sue the car-rental agency. Or could if she was hurt. She twists against the seat belt to study her wake. The ranks of cars look the same as before, none jolted out of line. But surely that first impact shattered a taillight, or worse. She ought to get out and check; she owes it to the rental agent not to drive away without inspecting the other vehicles, wiping snow from a bumper, a taillight, if she has to, and she’ll have to because it’s avalanching down, and walking back to the terminal to take responsibility. And then what? Questions. Lines to sign on. Paperwork. Taking how long? Her father will die while she’s doing paperwork. She tries to make out the damage she has done but none can be seen, really, not through the falling snow, not unless she gets out and walks back and looks, and once she’s done that she’ll have to slog back to the terminal, to his counter, and if he’s even still there she’s going to have to explain, and he may well say he needs to come back out here with her to assess the damage, and then — forms, questions, lines to sign on. She thinks fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. All the while the SUV is idling as smoothly as ever.