Fire Page 14

  “Maybe you don’t,” said a search and rescue guy. He had a dog, a German Shepard mix, who nosed up to James for a pat.

  “Good dog,” James said, scratching its ears. “Find those last people, would you, fellah?”

  “Girl,” said the dog handler. “We will. Dixie and I won’t stop until we do.”

  “Good girl, Dixie,” James said with a last pat. And he thanked the worker and went back to his own hunt, relieved they hadn’t stopped him and sent him on his way. Or had him arrested.

  But a long afternoon of hunting got him nothing.

  He dropped by the café again, hoping for another smoothie, but it was closed. There was another restaurant in town that was open, and he went in and asked for a soda to go.

  His phone rang as he started his car engine. Number unknown. In any other circumstance, he’d ignore a strange number. Today, he answered. It was a Sheriff’s deputy. “Where are you?” the deputy said.

  “In North San Juan.”

  “Can you get to the Red Cross shelter in five minutes?”

  “Yes.” His heart began to beat. “I can. Do you have news? Is she there?”

  “We’ll see you there,” was all the deputy said.

  “But—” James was talking to dead air. He needed to know what was happening. He was torn between hope and despair. Had they found Sylvia? If they had, wouldn’t they have said so?

  Maybe not if they’d found a body.

  But then why tell him to meet them somewhere?

  Ahhh, shit. So they could deliver the news face to face. That was why.

  A crazy part of him wanted to not go. Seriously, just to get in the car and drive somewhere else. Idaho, maybe. Somewhere there was no burned house, no bad news, no mother-in-law back in his hotel room to tell that horrible news to. Anywhere but here.

  He took a deep breath and steeled himself. That was a stupid thought. Whatever it was, he had to face it. Better now than dragging it out.

  He was too tired to cry. The gleam of hope that had kept him going all day faded away. He drove to the parking lot of the shelter and pulled in. Feeling like he weighed half a ton, he got out of his car, and a sheriff’s car pulled in just after.

  He walked up to it.

  “Mr. Teschler?” The guy looked serious, not happy. Wouldn’t he look happy if it was good news?

  The last of his hope winked out. “Chang, but yes, Sylvia Teschler’s my wife. She’s been missing for over two days.”

  “We found her.”

  James swallowed back a lump in his throat and tried to form a question.

  “Just a minute,” the deputy said. He spoke into a radio. “Yeah, I have him here. Pull on in for a minute, if you can.” He paused. “Right. Yeah, just a minute.”

  “What?” James said. “What’s going on?”

  At that point, a siren sounded. It grew louder, and an ambulance came into view. James stared at it, hoping, despairing, feeling every possible feeling all at once. It drove up and pulled to a stop. A paramedic got out and came around to the back, opening the door.

  James marched forward like a zombie, terrified that he was being asked to identify a body.

  The door swung wider, and there were two people in the back. One was helping the other person sit up.

  The second person was coated with soot.

  Sylvia?

  Chapter 28

  When Sylvia had woken up in the car, the smoke was still bad. It was night by the time she awoke, not the false night of the smoke blocking the sun, but actual night. She wasn’t sure how that had happened. How had she lived through the past few hours to wake up at night. She was damned surprised to be waking up at all. She checked her phone. 4:30 a.m. Sunrise would be soon. And she had to relieve herself.

  She opened the stranger’s car door and staggered out, feeling aches all over and pricks of pain on her face, arms, and head. Burns? She’d check her arms when there was more light. The air out here was marginally better than in the car. The smoke was being blown away or was drifting naturally away, if such a thing happened.

  She relieved herself and then returned to the car to find the bottle of water she’d had last night. She was parched. Her groping hand found it, and she drank what was left.

  She looked around the dark woods. Nothing glowed red. If it did, it might help her see, but it was just as well she couldn’t see any sign of fire.

  Smoke rose, right? She got down to the ground and lay next to the car. The air was a little better down here. She turned to the side so her nose was close the ground and waited for the dawn.

  Light came into the world slowly. Maybe that was a good thing because the ruins of the forest were revealed slowly, a blackened tree trunk here, a windswept ash dune there. The slowness of the reveal gave her mind time to adjust to it. The car she’d been in was scorched, but no worse than it had been before. No fire had touched her during the night, though from what she could see, she guessed that it had danced around her all night.

  She’d survived because the patch of ground the cars were on had been burned earlier, while they tried to drive through the fire. The destruction of the scrub around the fire road had been complete enough the first time that any returning fire had passed her by.

  When the sun rose more, the wind should pick up and blow most of the smoke. She didn’t want to wait for that. What she wanted was to get away from here, to hike out, to get to civilization.

  Finally, it was light enough to find her car again. In the growing light, and in the relative calm of today, she could see how badly damaged it was. When she’d been afraid of burning, she hadn’t really paid attention to the details. But it was totaled, no doubt. Burns, only one inflated tire, probably dented terribly on the side that was on the ground. It would never be driven again.

  There were things in the car she wanted to save, but there were other things in there that might keep her alive on a hike out. Those were what she wanted right now. She collected water and what food was easy to carry. She’d taken canned food, which would be too heavy to carry. But there was a package of pepperoni and a sheet of string cheese from the fridge. The cheese felt like it had melted and re-solidified overnight in its little tubes into a harder substance than normal. Still edible though.

  She would have preferred a backpack, but all she had was her briefcase, which was in the car she’d used as a motel room last night. She carried her little bit of food and bottles of water to it and packed the briefcase. A reconnoitering of the area showed her the line of the road to the north and the one to the south, back to Pinedrops. Or she hoped those were the directions. Nothing looked familiar, and she wondered if the fire roads up here split off, and if she was on one other than the one she imagined.

  She didn’t much care which way she went. She longed to go home, but the other direction was probably closer to a road, and mostly she wanted out of here quickly. She wanted to see another living human, ideally, one with a car or working phone.

  And there’d been fire near her home by the time she took the fire road, so everything in Pinedrops might be abandoned. It sure had looked as if everyone in town was trying to get out. But maybe to the north of the river the fire had missed the houses. There were a few houses and that weird little cult with its domed temple. She didn’t know if anyone lived near there or if they drove from other towns to meet there once a week or twice a week or whatever. But it was a destination for her, in any case. If that temple stood, or any house, she’d knock on the door and ask for help.

  Maybe they’d have a landline so she could call James. The longing to hear his voice overwhelmed her, made it impossible to breathe for a moment. Wanting to feel his arms around her, soothing her, with that quiet way he had, just by being near. It would take away so much of the pain and worry.

  If he was alive. Please, let him be alive. If he’d driven slowly back from work or gotten held up in traffic at all, he wouldn’t have made it to Pinedrops. And she hadn’t seen his car on the loop road. She definitely would ha
ve noticed it had he been there, even with all the panic and smoke.

  So. She’d walk north.

  On the way to the paved road where the cult was and the other few houses was the river, the Yuba. She might rinse her face off, might wash the stink of smoke out of her hair. The cold snowmelt water might numb the spots of pain on her face.

  She waited another fifteen minutes for the light to strengthen, convinced herself that the road did indeed point north, and then she took off.

  It went okay for the first mile or so, and then the road began to rise, barely, and she started gasping for air. She had to stop and drop her briefcase, put her hands on her thighs, and just breathe. She felt ninety years old, achy and breathless. She wouldn’t mind a cane right now—or at least a hiking stick. She looked around. There weren’t any of those lying around anymore, convenient branches to lean on. They’d all been turned to soot and ash.

  Little as she wanted to, she had to slow her pace. She was panting over nothing. Probably the smoke, making her body crave more oxygen than was available. Maybe she had some kind of lung damage? Whatever the reason, the fatigue of it was real. And it made her reassess her plan. This was still the best way to walk out, but she’d be lucky if she could make that cult temple by nightfall at this pace. Yesterday at dawn, she’d have made it from here in a few hours.

  But yesterday changed a lot of things. It was time to adjust her expectations of herself.

  When she’d caught her breath, she started off again, more slowly. When she had to stop, she tried to not resent how hard it was to breathe right. It was what it was. Being angry wouldn’t fix anything. Only steady walking would, step after step. She’d done that with her business, working hard, every day, steadily making it grow, pushing past tiredness. It was the same principle here. Steady steps, a goal, and keeping the body moving even when you’d much rather sit down and take a rest.

  It took over two hours to make it to the river, and she was utterly exhausted when she arrived there. More than once, she’d thought about dropping the briefcase she carried. But there were important papers in there, private papers, and James would kill her if she let anyone else find them. Also, her extra water bottles were in there. She had no better way to carry them than this.

  She opened the case to take one out and realized that one had leaked. The papers were damp. One more damned thing to go wrong. She opened the case and assessed the damage. She took out the three bottles of water and lined them up, trying to figure out which was the culprit. It was obvious—one was an inch and a half lower. It looked sealed, but it was leaking, either from the cap, or maybe a seam had split in the heat from the fire yesterday.

  She drank from that bottle and picked up the papers, one by one—or stapled batch by stapled batch—and flapped them in the air to start them drying. Nothing looked beyond hope, but if they dried like this, stuck together, they would be. Whenever she got to where she was going, she should unstaple them and lay them all out, one by one.

  Then it struck her how insane a thought that was. She was burned in spots, she wasn’t breathing right, she was alone and if not lost in the woods, stuck alone in the woods. She may have lost her home, her phone didn’t work, her family had no idea where she was, she might not have enough water for the long day, and she was worried about a bunch of stupid papers.

  Knowing James, he’d probably photocopied everything and had it somewhere safe, or he’d uploaded photos of every page to the cloud, or something like that. He was good about that sort of thing. He was a good man, hardworking, and thoughtful. Gentle and slow to anger.

  Though he’d been angry with her the morning before, hadn’t he?

  She had let him have his say without responding in anger because he didn’t vent like that often. And she knew that he knew why she was working so hard, so there was no reason to explain it again. Her thought yesterday morning was: he’d come around to apologizing. Or she’d apologize. One or the other, and things would go back to normal.

  But she admitted to herself, sitting here alone, he’d had a point. They hadn’t been hiking or camping as much, hadn’t gone out for a nice night in ages, like back to the city for a play or concert. She’d been neglecting him, for sure. And that had seemed the right decision yesterday morning.

  Today, she didn’t think so. If she had lost her home—their home—and if her life was going to be turned upside down, what did she really have? She might have a few clothes in her car, if the stink of smoke could be washed out of them. She had these stupid damp papers. She had some money in the bank and in a retirement account, which was more than a lot of people had. But mostly, what she had and valued wasn’t a what. It was a who. James.

  If the fire meant that they had tumbled down the slope of suburban comfort, going from owning too much junk to owning almost nothing, it didn’t really matter. She still had him. For the first time, she worried that maybe he’d been more than irked at her this morning. What if she’d worked so much that she’d lost his loyalty? What if she’d worked so many hours, she’d lost his love?

  Then she had no one but herself to blame.

  But what a terrible life this would become. Losing everything but still having love and a good marriage, that made the other losses tolerable. It was the people who had lost a family member, or even a beloved pet, in the fire who would have it worst. She quit worrying about herself and started worrying about them, about the familiar faces, the few friends, and the hundred-odd strangers of Pinedrops. How many of them had lost something more precious than stuff? She hoped none of them.

  It made you think. About what you could bear to lose. And how you could lose it.

  She’d been an idiot, hadn’t she? With the business. It wasn’t more important to her than James. Not in any sense of the word “important.” When she saw him, she’d tell him that. She’d apologize, not just for yesterday morning, but for the past year.

  Sylvia washed her face in the river. She could feel the sting of where she’d been burned. There wasn’t a single big place that hurt, but a couple dozen small pinpricks.

  She tried to finger-comb her hair but stopped when it hurt. Cautiously, she patted her scalp. There was a big bald spot and smooth skin that hurt to touch. A bigger burn there, maybe two inches in diameter. She should have dug through the toiletries she brought and hunted for antibiotic cream. Well, too late now. And maybe that was the wrong thing to do to a fresh burn anyway. Without the internet to consult, she had no idea.

  She finished the leaky bottle of water and loaded the briefcase again, making herself stand and prepare for another leg of the journey. It would be a hard one. The road rose more steeply now, winding up from the river, which would of course be its lowest point. She was already tired, and this next hour would be the hardest of the day.

  Get through this hour, and it’ll be easier. That’s all she needed to do. She gritted her teeth and began.

  But every step was a struggle. And the briefcase kept battering her thigh, and she grew more and more irritated with it. The irritation transferred to feeling irritated at herself, and by the time she had taken her first two hundred steps up the slope, she was sweaty, miserable, gasping for breath, and she didn’t like herself.

  “Just calm down and rest for a second,” she said aloud, panting to get the words out. “Keep moving. You’ll get out of here.”

  She stood still, shut up, and just breathed, waiting until her heart rate slowed down.

  She pulled out her phone. Still no signal. Only then did she remember the messages she’d sent, when she was sure she was going to die. She saw they’d gone. At some point, there’d been a signal, and they’d sent themselves.

  Oh, shit. That meant everybody who got them would think she was dead. She had to get out of here and call them, get to them, reassure them. That she’d caused anyone that sort of pain made her go a little crazy. She started walking again, forcing herself despite her shortness of breath.

  Nothing mattered but getting out of here, finding some
one, a house, a moving car, someone to get her to a working cell tower so she could call James. And her mother, and his mother, but mostly James, who would be frantic by now. Sylvia kept walking, energized by this thought.

  It was an hour later when she realized she’d lost the road. The burst of adrenaline that had come when she understood how much she had worried the people she loved had faded now, and the thought of retracing her steps made her even more exhausted.

  She bent down and swept aside the ash to make sure of where she was. Yeah, that wasn’t a road surface down there. There would be well-packed dirt if it were. This was loose soil and pebbles.

  Well. Two choices. Lay down and die, or turn your sorry ass around and go back and find the road. The day was bright now, and the canopy of pines let in few direct beams of light. She could see the marks of her footprints in the ash. She went back carefully, tracking herself, making sure she didn’t obscure her own prints because she needed them to keep from getting even more lost.

  It was the burning of the forest understory that had fooled her. It had cleared out enough areas that there were open patches, and she’d mistaken a string of them for the road. But it wasn’t the road.

  She didn’t want to be lost out here. Even if she sat and waited for rescue, she needed to do it on the fire road.

  She wondered for the first time about bears. There were bears here. Black bears. They might have been driven out by the fire, but they might have come back by now. And they’d be looking for food. All the wild berries that usually were around this time of year were surely burned. She’d be the best source of food around, her and whatever they could smell in her briefcase.

  Great. Just great. For the first time, she regretted not staying with her car. There was a better chance someone would have found her there than in the middle of the stupid woods!

  A moment later, she patted an unburned pine, apologizing to it mentally for calling it stupid. It wasn’t the stupid one. She was.

  Her prints faded for a stretch, but she kept walking straight, the best she could make it, and zig-zagged a bit until she saw another curve of her tracks. She traced her way back, but she had no idea if she was on the road or not. Every ten minutes, she stopped, dug through the ash, and tried to determine if the ground underneath had been road or not.