When Kayla closed her eyes, Jim’s propane tank exploded all over again, and when she opened them, the flames she’d driven through danced on Amber’s living room wall. Just a few days ago, she’d been living in the redwoods with Jim. Now she was crashing on her high school friend’s couch, the Santa Cruz Mountains—and probably Jim—turned to ash.
Kayla coughed more black gunk into a tissue, and Amber looked up from her Zoom meeting in alarm. “You all right?”
“Sorry,” Kayla said, scurrying to finish her coughing fit in the bathroom, conscious of her breasts bouncing beneath the thin dress she’d grabbed from a donation box.
With the bathroom door closed, she coughed until it felt like her insides would come out. But all she expelled were long gray sinews and dirty mucous globs that she flushed down the toilet. She at least recognized herself in the mirror today, not like when she arrived with the soot-covered face and red- rimmed eyes of a Halloween witch. She’d scrubbed the grime from her skin, but the smoky smell remained.
Lifting her bandages, she winced as they stuck to the gluey mess of dried ointment and pus. Her shoulder throbbed, a big patch burned when she fell on a smoldering tree while trying to drag Jim from his wheelchair. The blisters on her leg were ready to pop, the skin charred from brushing against the bubbling paint on her 4Runner. Kayla checked the medicine cabinet for pain meds, but there was only aspirin.
As Kayla returned to the living room, Amber looked up. “Doing okay?”
“Yeah,” said Kayla. It was hard to get used to Amber’s eyes being on her all the time. She held up her arm. “Thanks for patching me up.”
“Happy to help,” Amber said.
“Hope my story of outrunning death didn’t give you nightmares.”
Amber shrugged. “You wouldn’t believe the stories I hear from clients. Some crazy stuff goes on in the slammer—not to mention on the street before they end up there.”
Kayla looked concerned. “Wait, can’t they hear you?”
Amber stared at her strangely. “No, it’s okay, I’m muted.”
Muted. That described how Kayla felt, like she wanted to scream but couldn’t. She craved a hit of pot to take the edge off, but Amber had been clear: no drugs or alcohol allowed.
“Can I make you more coffee?” Kayla asked.
Amber held out her cup, and Kayla checked out the grid of shady-looking characters staring from the computer screen. Amber was a substance abuse counselor for people fresh out of jail, working from home during the pandemic.
“Co-workers or cons?” asked Kayla.
Amber laughed. “Yeah, hard to tell the difference.”
Living up on Last Chance Road, Kayla hadn’t known anyone with an actual job. Free spirits scratched out a living harvesting timber fall, carving wooden bears, crafting stained-glass windows, or growing pot. Kayla had a pang when she thought of the rickety shed, now burned, where people had bought her essential oils, earning her enough for food and gas.
Amber had shown her how to operate the Keurig, but Kayla still had trouble fitting the plastic pods in the hole and pressing the right button. Jim had liked coffee too. But he used a stovetop coffee pot, not some fancy gadget that produced a lot of waste.
She didn’t want to think of him yet. Maybe she was in shock. Or going through withdrawal. She hadn’t gone more than a couple of days without weed since before junior high. She remembered the stale pot brownie in her purse. But no, Amber said no drugs. She repeated the word in her head. No, no, no.
Amber had been the only one who’d answered Kayla’s desperate mass message. When Kayla drove up, Amber was waiting outside, her blocky body solid amid the swirling haze, dark eyes serious above black mask doing double duty against smoke and virus.
There were no hugs, no smiles, as she helped Kayla unload the one bag she’d evacuated with and a box of clothes from the relief center. They’d grown up together, back in West Virginia, but had never been close.
In fact, when Amber had reached out on Facebook a while back, realizing they lived just a few miles apart, Kayla could barely remember her. But then with all the pot Kayla had smoked, high school was a blur. She met Amber and her girlfriend, Gina, for lunch once in Palo Alto. Kayla didn’t ask about Gina now. The fact that Amber hadn’t mentioned her said enough.
After making coffee, Kayla folded her bedding and sat on the couch, watching the hunky Cal Fire captain deliver the morning update. The CZU Complex fire was 100,000 acres, and only 3 percent contained. It had chewed through Bonny Doon and Davenport and along Empire Grade, and incinerated beloved Big Basin Park. The fire was inching toward downtown Boulder Creek, where volunteer firefighters were making a stand.
When lunchtime rolled around, Amber plodded into the kitchen. “Hungry?” she asked. “I could make us veggie burgers, or avocado and tomato sandwiches.”
“Whatever sounds good to you,” said Kayla. “I’m not that hungry.”
Her stomach was in knots, her mind flicking back to the ten-foot-high plants behind her shed that probably burned along with everything else. She was drinking plenty of Amber’s Sparkletts, wishing for something stronger.
“You should eat,” said Amber. “But I’m not your mother.”
Kayla hadn’t talked to her mother in a year. “I should call my mom,” she said, sighing. “She’s probably seeing the fires on the news.”
Amber took a loaf of bread from the fridge and extracted some slices. “She still at the high school?”
“No, she took a buyout and married the football coach, Bill McCormick. Remember him? The creepy jock who defended his team captain for date rape.”
“Ugh,” Amber said, gagging as she sliced a tomato. “How could she?”
“Not many options back there. How about your parents?”
Amber slathered the bread with vegan mayonnaise and stood back to appraise her work. “They tried to sell the hardware store after my brother OD’d, but couldn’t find a buyer. They’re living in an RV on my uncle’s property.”
“Do you ever see them?” Kayla asked.
“No, we’re not in touch.” Amber screwed the lid back on the mayonnaise jar. “Having a gay daughter doesn’t fit with their Christian values.”
They stood in the kitchen eating their sandwiches and staring into space. Kayla rinsed the plates and wiped the kitchen counter and Amber went back to her computer for a one o’clock Zoom. Looking out the window, Kayla tried to make sense of the sludgy, orange sky that made day look like night. Couldn’t even go for a walk with all that smoke.
She returned to her doomscrolling. Ash piles, before-and-after pics, and a lot of GoFundMe campaigns. Interviews with people who’d lost everything. Signs thanking firefighters. Reports of missing people. Nothing about Jim.
She’d told the deputy at the roadblock about Jim after her wild ride down the mountain. “I couldn’t get him to leave,” she mumbled through her wet bandana. “He might be okay, he’s in a bunker.”
“A what?” the deputy had asked.
“A hole in the earth with a fire door,” she said before launching into a coughing fit.
The deputy wrote down the address and said someone would check it out when it was safe. Once she got to Santa Cruz, Kayla joined the line of traffic trying to get into the evacuation center. She read the texts from Jim’s son, Don, in Watsonville, then made the call she dreaded.
“I made it out,” she said. “But your dad wouldn’t leave.”
“This is some fucked-up shit. You were supposed to be looking after him,” Don said before ending the call.
Jim didn’t trust the government. That’s why he’d lived in a mobile home on Last Chance Road. Off the grid, with a generator and solar panels and water from the creek. She’d met him at Joe’s in Boulder Creek in the cold blur after some other guy, when she was spending evenings in the golden light of the community watering hole. Band up from Monterey playing Grateful Dead songs. Clank of pool cues sending balls into corner pockets.
He was just one of many emerging from their hideouts for a taste of human company. Grinning behind a gray beard. Smelling of soap. He walked with a cane, back bowed and belly squeezing out above his jeans. His wicked sense of humor almost made up for his crankiness.
She’d been sleeping in a tent near the Boy Scout Camp all summer, waiting for something or someone to save her. The rainy season was coming, or was supposed to be coming. Jim showed up just as it was starting to get cold.
And now Amber had shown up in her time of need too. If Kayla was lucky, maybe Amber would let her stay a few weeks. She’d lived a lot of places since hitching a ride west with a pot grower named Damien, stopping briefly in Southern California before heading north to the trees. Apartments with roommates, parks, underpasses, and lots of couch surfing. Supporting herself with odd jobs: tree planting, waitressing, and picking lettuce before landing on aromatherapy.
She got through life by waiting for the next thing to present itself, by giving people what they needed. With guys, usually sex. Not Jim, though. What he’d needed was a caregiver.
Jim could still walk back then. Taking the gravel road down the mountain to get supplies evolved into helping him out of his chair, picking him up when he collapsed, and nagging him to find out why his muscles were turning to jelly.
Later that afternoon, Kayla watched as Amber lay on the floor and did her crunches, then went through a series of arm flexes with her dumbbells. Kayla admired her strength and discipline. Next to Amber, she was a twig.
“Ready to have your bandages changed?” Amber asked when she was finished.
Kayla sat on the toilet as Amber gently pulled back the bandage on her shoulder and began dabbing the wound with moistened toilet paper. “How’s it feeling?” she asked.
“It hurts,” Kayla said. “I hope it won’t get infected.”
“Let’s keep an eye on it for another day,” said Amber, squeezing out more antibiotic cream. “If it’s still bad tomorrow, maybe we can go to the urgent care.”
Kayla’s eyes blurred with tears. It was the word we.
“Oh,” said Amber, tenderly taping a fresh bandage on her shoulder. “You’re not used to being looked after.”
Later, after Kayla refused dinner, Amber handed her two valerian root capsules. “You’ve been through a lot. Why don’t you take the bedroom and get a good night’s sleep.”
Kayla protested. “But where will you sleep?”
“Couch,” Amber said. “I’ve slept on it before.”
It felt intimate to lie on Amber’s bed, sheets radiating with her smell. Kayla glanced around while waiting for the valerian root to kick in. There were no pictures of Gina. That part of Amber’s life seemed to have been erased.
On the walls instead were pictures of their dying hometown. The winding roads along Big Coal Creek. The old courthouse on the National Register of Historic Places. The Appalachian Mountains, whose veins were emptied by coal companies that took profits then declared bankruptcy, leaving raped piles of rock.
Some of the Santa Cruz Mountains had been similarly defiled, old-growth redwoods slaughtered and put on barges to feed the appetite for fire-resistant wood for homes. But at least redwoods regenerated, new trees encircling old- growth stumps, moss covering the carnage. It was hard to imagine the forest regenerating from a fire this big.
To Jim, the redwoods were just trees that gave him cover from nosy neighbors. He had no idea how advanced they were: communicating below the surface and sending extra nutrients to ailing neighbors. When Kayla pressed her body against their mossy, red bark, she felt them pressing back, alive.
She loved the trees more than she’d loved Jim. They bickered like an old married couple. Trying to convince him that chemtrails weren’t evidence of the government influencing the weather grew exhausting.
Halfway through the night, groggy from valerian, Kayla staggered into the living room, where Amber tossed and turned on the couch. “I can’t sleep,” Kayla said, her voice sounding like a little girl’s.
Amber sat up and opened her arms. “Come here.”
As Kayla collapsed into the circle of caring, she cried for the burned trees, the place she’d lived, Jim. Then louder, for herself. Amber steered her into the bedroom, and they slept, arms entwined. Sometimes you just needed the feel of another human being beside you.
Weeks later, the fire finally contained, people were starting to go back. Some to search for keepsakes in the ashes. Others to rebuild. But Kayla couldn’t. Not yet. Amber tried to convince her. “It’s like seeing the body at a funeral. Seeing helps you accept that things have changed.”
“I’ve seen pictures. If I see any more chimneys surrounded by ash, I’ll throw up.”
“Pictures aren’t the same as being there,” said Amber. “You should know that.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re always talking about energy, trees having spirits. I’m surprised you don’t want to go there and feel it.”
Kayla shot Amber a side-eye. “That’s why I don’t want to go there. The energy from total desecration would be overwhelming.”
“Maybe you’d see a sign of hope—the lily growing from ash.” Kayla shook her head. “Screw the lily growing from ash.”
And then, one day when Kayla woke, she felt clear-headed and ready. They piled into the 4Runner, its burned sides branding it as one of the heroes that had carried its driver to safety through terrifying walls of flame.
From a distance, the burn scar looked like a gray wound. But as they got closer, they passed neighborhoods where all that remained were chimneys and the hulks of cars. Dazed people wandered around. Chainsaws buzzed as crews removed the dead and dying.
After leaving Davenport, the forest grew quieter, the skeletons of trees like graveyard markers. Kayla gripped the steering wheel, reliving the last time she’d traveled this road.
Amber touched her arm. “Let me know if you want me to drive.”
“I’m okay so far,” said Kayla.
The memories came like intermittent flashes of light. The roar of fire, the heat of flames. The destruction was endless. Worse than the blackened trees were the orange ones still dying.
Miraculously, some of the giants had survived, the flames not able to reach their limbs a hundred feet up. And some stretches of forest were unscathed. Below the surface, Kayla knew the network of tree roots were reaching out to each other, survivors helping the weakened.
And then they were there. The chain to keep out vehicles was strung across Jim’s driveway as always. They peered down the driveway at something moving. But no, not Jim, only a deer looking for something alive to eat.
The fire had burned clean. Except for the charred hulks of Jim’s stake bed and pickup, and a dried puddle of melted aluminum where the mobile home had been, nothing remained. They walked through the ash to the blacked roots of an ancient redwood, where yellow tape encircled Jim’s hole in the ground.
They’d watched the lightning storm in wonder. The staccato purple flashes coming so fast it was hardly worth counting one-thousand-one, one-thousand- two. Jim an overexposed photograph, handlebar moustache white against gray skin. Trees silver ghosts. Air crackling with electricity.
They hadn’t imagined the wondrous lightning show would set their world on fire. They waited days after the evacuation order. Smoke building. Sky black. Distant orange glow. Jim saying he’d been through fires before. That they’d be safe in the bunker. Kayla insisting they leave.
“I’m not going to die here,” she’d said. “And I’m not leaving you here to die.”
On the third night came the roar. “It’s here,” Kayla warned.
Fear gave her the strength to pull Jim from his wheelchair. But he fought back, dragged himself into the bunker, sat crouched inside it like some wild animal, ready to close his prized three-hour fire door. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll be safe in here.”
Embers danced around them in the crazy wind. And then the yard was on fire, hungry flames licking the sides of Jim’s mobile home. Her survival instinct kicked in. The last thing she saw in the rear-view mirror before entering the corridor of flames was the blue plume of Jim’s exploding propane tank.
Amber looped an arm around Kayla’s shoulder as she stared dry-eyed at the yellow tape. And when Kayla tired of looking at the plastic flapping in the breeze, they got back in the 4Runner and drove home.
Margo McCall (she/her) is a Southern California writer whose short stories have appeared in Pacific Review, Howl, Pomona Valley Review, Toasted Cheese, Dash, and other journals. Her nonfiction has been published in numerous newspapers and magazines, including Herizons, Lifeboat, and the Los Angeles Times, and her poetry in Amethyst Review and Umbrella Factory Magazine. A graduate of the MA creative writing program at California State University Northridge, she lives in the port town of Long Beach. For more information, visit http://www.margomccall.com or follow her on Twitter at @wordly1.
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