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  “You’re okay!” he said, grateful for this one piece of news.

  “It was really hairy, man. Awful. Did I wake you up?”

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “You’re both okay, then. Good.”

  “No. Sylvia’s missing. I can’t get through to her on her cell.”

  “Shit.” There was a long silence. “Do you—I mean.” More silence.

  James decided to bail him out. “I know. You don’t know what to say. I don’t either. I’m frantic. And there’s nothing I can do, so I feel like a big dumb rock or something, sitting here and staring, but inside I’m screaming and running around in circles.”

  There was another long silence. “I keep thinking of things to suggest, but I know you’ve done them all.”

  “No, go ahead. Maybe I’ve missed one. I’d appreciate it.”

  Pasquale made several suggestions, and none were things James hadn’t thought of. “Thanks, man.”

  “Happy to help.”

  “Tell me how it was. I mean, if you want to. If it isn’t too hard to remember.”

  “There was this crazy pileup of cars on the loop road. Blocked one end by a fallen tree. Blocked the other end by people too afraid to drive over a little bit of fire, from how I understand it from other people’s reports, and then cars were jammed around them, and anyone brave enough to try to drive out couldn’t get around them. It was like a riot for a while.”

  “You would have driven out through fire.”

  “Fuck yeah, I would have!” He was loud. Ramped up with adrenaline still, or able to get there easily, remembering. His next words were calmer. “A fistfight broke out. People trying to wrestle their way into other people’s cars. People trying to calm others down but getting nowhere.”

  “Did you hit anyone?”

  “No, you know me better than that. But I tell you, I didn’t know myself what I was going to do next. I might have, if there was one more minute’s delay. I mean, this big guy punched a tiny middle-aged woman! It was insane.”

  “Panic.”

  “Hell yeah, we were all panicked. Panicked and most looking like it, or panicked inside and barely in control. So anyway, I went back to the downed tree, and there were two jeeps that had winches, and I worked with them trying to get that blockage out of the road. The fire wasn’t bad there at all yet. It’d burned through fast there for some reason, and as far as I could see, that one tree was the only one that had any damage. I don’t know why it fell. It was possibly a dead one. And it had to just come down to block the road today, at that moment. It was like the hand of fate or something.”

  “Yeah?”

  “So eventually, or really, not long after I arrived there to help, the fire department got a bulldozer there and cleared it, and they drove in to fight the fire, and we all got out. I drove myself to the hospital and I’ve been there for freakin’ hours.”

  “What’s wrong? Were you hurt?”

  “Not badly.”

  “Was Lindsey staying with you?”

  “No, no. I’m so happy she wasn’t. She’s in Truckee.”

  “She knows you’re okay?”

  “I called her from the hospital, and she came down.”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I tried to get the cables around that tree, and it was smoldering in places, and I burned the shit out of my hands.”

  “Gloves.”

  “Now you tell me.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s easy for me to say.”

  “No, I’m sorry. You have worse problems than me.”

  “Is it too bad? The burns?”

  “Second-degree, they say. Hurts like a mother. I hope to never experience it again, I tell you. But considering what it might have been, I got off lucky.”

  “I think the best I can hope for with Sylvia is that she’s burned and held in a hospital somewhere.”

  “Ah, James. I’m so sorry. I am. Is she on the official missing list?”

  “I don’t know. I talked to a deputy about it. She looked her up in the hospital records. And I guess morgue records too,” he said, though he hadn’t realized that until this very second. “Didn’t find her.”

  “Well, that’s good, as far as it goes. Then she probably is listed among the missing.”

  “Yeah.”

  Another long silence. “Look, I don’t know what to say at all. Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “There’s nothing I can do to help, so I kinda doubt it.”

  “So what are you doing?”

  “Sitting here eating a shitty fast food breakfast.” Just then, a worker was cleaning up a table nearby and looked up at him and frowned. James shrugged in apology.

  “You never eat fast food.”

  “It’s a strange kind of day.”

  “Look, I’m going to catch a few hours’ sleep. I can barely think right now. Then I’ll call you, and by then I’ll try and think of something I can do to help.”

  “You’re probably going to be busy yourself. Did your house make it?”

  “I don’t know. Did yours?”

  “No idea.” Though what he’d heard from the deputy made him think odds were, they’d both lost everything. He didn’t feel like being the bearer of that bad news. Besides, he didn’t know for sure. So let Pasquale hope for a few hours more, get a decent sleep before he started worrying about that.

  “Okay, expect a call mid-morning. And don’t hesitate to wake me up if you need to. And stay away from the fire. It’s scary. I can’t even explain how horrible it is to be trapped by it.”

  “I’m glad you’re okay,” James said. He disconnected. He was glad Pasquale was okay, but he felt a kernel of resentment. If Sylvia wasn’t okay, he was afraid he’d hate everybody who survived, at least a little bit.

  Outside, the sky was showing the slightest signs of gray. He was done with his second orange juice. He’d had food and caffeine. It was time to move. He’d check the hotel, hoping that Sylvia was there. If not, somehow he was going to get into Pinedrops.

  He reached the hotel through the beginning of the morning traffic. No Sylvia.

  He plotted out the route with Google Maps, having to argue with the software to not take him the most sensible route. It couldn’t be sensible, was the thing. Not right now. Because of the way the ridges ran, it would take him hours to circle around to the north. But there was a different way in, if he backtracked to Yuba City, that he could head up toward a lake just north of where the fire started, and catch 49 coming back down. It included a number of dirt roads, and he doubted they had those closed off. And if there were temporary barriers up, he doubted they would be manned. He’d move them and get through.

  As far as he could tell from the morning’s news and the updated map of the fire, he’d be driving into a burned-out area, one the fire had passed through many hours ago. Big structures might still be smoking. But he thought the roads would be fine and he could get close. If he had to hike, he’d need supplies. Yuba City had a Walmart, open all the time. So he headed there.

  * * *

  The Walmart was a blast of normalcy, of irritating normalcy. He was repelled by the rush-hour traffic beginning out there, the glaring lights of the Walmart and all the brightly colored plastic crap on the shelves. It was too damned normal, and he wasn’t normal. His life wasn’t normal at all, and it seemed unfair that other people’s lives were.

  He shopped for a backpack, for water, energy bars, chocolate-almond bars, boots, and heavy leather work gloves. He tried to think of what else he might need, but he couldn’t come up with anything. A display of hockey equipment next to the camping gear made him pause. A goalie stick or a baseball bat would make a good weapon in case he ran into looters. But he couldn’t see himself actually hitting a human being, not even a criminal, so he passed it up. He was almost to the check-out when a final thought hit him. He went to the home improvement aisles and found a multi-tool. He didn’t know what he might need it for, but it might come in handy.


  He was as ready as he’d ever be. Time to go home.

  Chapter 18

  It took James two hours from the time he left the Yuba City Walmart to arrive near the point of the fire’s ignition. He passed some cars with official county seals on their doors parked along a wide spot in the road. Investigating the cause of the fire? Or looking for bodies, maybe. No one was on the road to stop him from driving on, so he scooted past them without incident.

  Around him, the blackened landscape told some of the story. The treetops over about thirty feet were spared. Anything under that had been burned, except for strange spots here and there where the fire had seemed to go around a section of brush, random plants being spared. He drove through five hundred yards of untouched chaparral. Wild gooseberries and poison oak predominated lower down, with scrub oak and gray pine growing over them. He drove into another burned area, and the gooseberries and poison oak were gone, and another few hundred yards later on, only the few largest scrub oaks were left alive. The smaller ones were blackened skeletons.

  It was as if the fire had tidied up the place, taking out all the thicker, messier, low stuff, and leaving only the tall trees in an eerie landscape of blackened forest floor, the smell of smoke, and the sense of death. He forced his mind away from thoughts of people as almost a part of the forest understory, too short to be out of the flames, and so vulnerable in the same way.

  Though some smoke was rising here and there in the distant woods, the unpaved road was clear. He made it to Highway 49. To his surprise, there was no roadblock anywhere up here. There were also no cars. It was just possible there was a roadblock north of him, and he’d avoided it by slipping through the one-lane dirt roads. He turned right, toward his home, and through a landscape of devastation on either side of the highway. There’d been a couple of houses visible from the road a week ago. No more. He couldn’t even tell where they’d been, except for one melted metal mailbox drooping in a short turn-out.

  The fire had eaten up those houses. You’d have to know exactly where to look to see the charred remains.

  He’d never been in a war zone, but he’d heard the comparison before. He doubted any war waged was this effective at destruction. A nuclear war, maybe, at the center, where the fireball burned. There was almost nothing left standing that people had put here. Metal road signs were still there, but unreadable. That was about all that was left.

  He turned onto the northern loop road to Pinedrops and pulled up at once. Several cars were blocking the road, and every one of them had burned. Strange sculptures of melted black plastic and aluminum flowed from them, reminding him of the kind of thing one of Pinedrops’s artists did. Abstracts from industrial materials.

  It was a stunning sight. Parts of cars had actually melted. And had flowed off, like those lava flows in Hawai’i you saw, frozen by cooling into shapes that recorded the direction of the flow.

  Above the melted parts, the metal skeletons of the cars stood sentinel.

  He didn’t recognize any of the cars, but he wouldn’t have recognized his own, not in that condition.

  James thought about going around to the other entrance to the loop road, but he feared he would encounter a roadblock there, or an official on the road who would send him away. That nice deputy had indicated that they’d be searching for bodies. It’d be a day or two before people like him were officially let in. But he was here, he’d avoided authorities telling him to leave so far, and he needed to look while he could. So he left his car in the middle of the loop road, safely away from anything that was still putting off heat or smoke. He checked his phone, saw it had no signal at all. Probably electronics of the cell tower had burned, or maybe the power company had shut off power to it, and the battery backup had run out. He put it in his pack anyway, in case the signal returned.

  James donned his new boots. He put on his backpack, loaded it with food and water and his other new purchases, and started hiking. He was eight miles from home.

  In the first five miles, he should have passed by a dozen homes. But there were no homes. Oh, he could see where they’d been. Driveways, some of asphalt, some of gravel, ran up to square piles of black ash. Wisps of smoke rose here and there from the former houses. He could see the shape of one car, framed by sagging beams that must have been a garage. He could see smaller, mysterious six-foot-tall lumps, though he didn’t go any closer to see what they might be. Furniture, maybe?

  He marched on, feeling more numb than afraid or sympathetic. He knew it was horrible, and he knew it would bother him later, the memory of this, of all these lives destroyed, all those treasures gone and mourned. But for now, after no sleep, and with his worry for Sylvia overriding all other concerns, he was like a robot, set to move forward automatically, step by step. That was what he did. He walked.

  Two and a half hours after he left his car, he stood in front of his own house. Or what used to be his house. It looked like all the others he had passed, so he wasn’t shocked, exactly. But he was sickened by the sight. They’d worked so hard to buy this home. He remembered house-hunting, all the houses they’d seen in the foothills, the careful checking, the flushing of dozens of toilets, the backing out of a house that had been smoked in and reeked so badly you’d have had to bulldoze it and rebuild. They had slowly built a list of four “maybes,” one well below their price range, and one farther above than he thought was wise to buy, when they’d come upon this house.

  Sylvia had walked through the kitchen and straight to the back deck. He took a quick loop through the house, counting rooms, making sure that it was well designed space. The realtor trailed behind him, looking at everything as well. It was a newer listing and she said on the drive in that she’d not seen it, so she checked it out as carefully as he did. Nothing was painted a hideous color, and the one wall-to-wall carpet in a second bedroom was in okay shape. The laminate floors elsewhere would be easy to keep clean. Everything looked up-to-date, the outlets all three-prong, and the kitchen cabinets and counters looking like a recent upgrade and showing little wear. When he’d joined Sylvia, still standing on the deck, he’d said, “Syl?”

  She’d turned to him, her face beatific, and said, “This is the one.”

  “You haven’t looked at it.”

  “Is it a mess? Need a lot of work?”

  “No, it’s fine.”

  “It’s the one, then. I know it.”

  He didn’t feel that in the same way, but he could see she was smitten. She turned the look on him, and he felt the love coming from her. She was smitten with him too right then, and at whatever dreams she had of their life together here. He’d been ready to say, “We need an inspection before you get your heart set on it,” but the words died unsaid. What he said instead was, “We can afford it. Even if you can’t find work, we can barely afford the payments.”

  She nodded, still smiling, and then turned to the view of the forest from the deck. It started about fifty yards down a gentle slope. She had pointed. “Look, there are Pinedrops, like the name of the town.” There was a stand of the little red plants at the edge of the woods.

  The realtor came up behind him.

  Sylvia said to her, “How much of the land is ours?”

  “Let me look.” The realtor flipped through papers. “The lot is three hundred by six hundred and forty. So it goes back six hundred feet from the road. We’re standing a little over halfway back. Some of those trees are yours. And there’s a wood-burning stove.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t cut any of them,” Sylvia said.

  “We can buy firewood lots of places. Come on in and look around, Syl,” he said. “We like it okay so far,” he said to the realtor. He didn’t want to seem too eager. It paid her to keep the price up, and though they could afford the asking price, there was no reason to pay that if they didn’t have to. He’d offer ten percent below asking and settle for five percent. Their loan was pre-approved, and the seller would like that the sale would move quickly.

  James came back to
the present, standing in front of the house that had been. It had been a good house, without any hidden costs springing up after closing, and it had been a happy house for the most part. It had also seen the start of the second rough patch in their marriage, the first being more about adapting to being married, at the beginning back in San Francisco, and the second being here, and all about lack of quality time. He’d felt her slipping away, and he’d been scared, and that was why he had complained to her yesterday morning.

  And now she might have slipped entirely away.

  That made him feel stupid for whining over a few extra hours apart while she worked on her business. If he could only have her back, he’d never complain about that again.

  He checked his phone again. Still no signal. He took a deep breath and walked up his driveway. They’d planted some flowering bushes in the front, and there wasn’t a sign of those anymore. There wasn’t a sign of much, in fact. He could see the shape of the attached garage. He’d seen two burned cars so far, on his walk in, and at least there was no car in this garage. Sylvia had driven away. There was that. It was a hope to cling to.

  But if she’d driven out, where was she? Why hadn’t she called him?

  He walked up to the garage area to make doubly sure there wasn’t a melted car sitting there. There wasn’t, but there were a few lumps. He swallowed back bile. Were they human-sized lumps?

  No. He didn’t think so. Too big, for one thing. But he edged up to them to check them out. His feet could feel heat through the cheap boots. He touched one of the lumps and snatched his hand back. It was still damned hot. He needed those gloves now. And the multitool might be useful.

  He went back to the driveway, felt the ground to make sure it wasn’t hot, and shrugged off the pack and put it down to go through it. He shoved aside the food, which vaguely nauseated him. The chocolate was soft to the touch. Yeah, that’d been stupid to buy that. But he’d had the experience before, backpacking in the heat of the summer. Chocolate tasted the same when melted. You just had to lick it off its wrapper.