Mendocino Fire (24 page)

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.

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.

It continues, the emergency clarity of this falling-snow world, the way the snow
knows about
her dying father and roots for her to get there on time, arrows directing her to the on-ramp, signs that blaze up through falling snow, a conviction of rightness, the highway remembered not from childhood but from adult visits, summers when she had flown out to spend a week, a week turning out to be too long, the burdensomeness of her presence dawning on her father and her mother and on her, too, as well as hatred of herself for not being their irresistible guest, the
daughter they would hate to see leave, but—in her mother's telling she was born repellent, sporting a full head of straight black fur, her skin crisscrossed with furious scratches she had inflicted on herself in utero, if her mother's account is to be believed, and if her young mother turned from her with instant loathing there was nothing the nurses could do, they could only bring the baby back again and say
Here's your baby, don't you want to hold her
, and her mother couldn't stand to look and had no feeling for that baby except hatred that she was being thrust at her, and the nurses tried again and the young mother said no again, and at last the nurses slicked the black hair into a Kewpie doll spit curl and tied a bow on it and carried her in and the bow did the trick and her mother took her, and that was the story her mother told her and who is to blame in that story?, if the young mother didn't feel what young mothers ought to feel whose fault is that?, and once when she was eleven she asked where was Daddy for those two or three days when the nurses could not get you to take me, and was told, well, fathers didn't get involved in things like that then, not in those days, it was different, fathers were not expected to, and he was at work, he had to go back to work, and what she'd really wanted to ask was did it bother him that you refused to take me or even look at me, did that concern him, wanting him to have been on her side. If it's any consolation, she can tell herself it could easily be true, he could have wanted to come into the nursery where the bassinets were lined up and lifted her baby self out and held her, if fathers did that then, but fathers didn't, fathers then looked through glass.

Snow falling, her ticking-clock concentration pierced by appreciation of the fact that she's in over her head, not skilled enough for a night like this,
but what can she do except drive
. A motionless mass up ahead casts a beam the wrong way, across
her lane, what she thought was her lane. Then a fresh S-curve in the snow terminates in the long, dim, intricate underside of an overturned semi, the trucker stamping his feet while he justifies himself to his cell phone, lifting an arm as she slows, not to halt her but, it turns out, in thanks for her being kind enough to slow to see if she can help, or at least that's how she construes it, his wave and the tilt of his head conveying
Sure, keep driving. You might make it.
Signaling, too:
Good luck.
Or so she interprets it, and how desperate she must be, how fucked and despairing, for that quick sideways tip of his head to mean so much—for her to derive from that stranger's gesture the confidence she needs to continue driving, how ridiculous; yet it changes her mood to have had her striving recognized, her desperation saluted and encouraged, and who cares if it's a stranger who does that for you?
Angels we have heard on high
plays on her mind's radio.
Sweetly singing o'er the
—what? In the cinderblock, abstract-crucifix interior of the Methodist church of her childhood she and her sister share a hymnal, singing
o'er the—
,
o'er the—
. She skips ahead to the line the two sisters can barely sing without giggling:
Shepherds, why this jubilee?
She repeats it until the rhyme arrives:
Why your joyous strains prolong? What the gladsome tidings be—
Skips further to
Come, adore on bended knee
, and she has it whole except for whatever it is the angels are singing o'er, the two sisters in the backseat of the car on the drive home teasing their stoic little brother,
Shepherd, why this jubilee?
until, crushed by their ruthless repetition of the baffling question, he shouts
Because!
After that, a lonely hour with no sign of another vehicle, no one else out in this.

Far down the headlights, snow flings and agitates in an opaque onslaught, but closer, maybe only a yard or so in front of the SUV, there's some kind of boundary where snow detaches
itself from the prevailing chaos, seeming almost, fascinatingly, to freeze in a vortex before zipping at her in extreme close focus, detailed down to individual flakes—a trick of vision, thrilling enough that she has to remind herself to look away from the borderline where the snow changes, back out to the farthest reach of the lights nudging into whiteness, the core of the halogens steadily dazzling, probing deeper but never gaining, not giving her much to go on—and it's tedious staring steadily at those few yards of lit world, which might as well be the same yards over and over again, and there it is,
plains. Sweetly singing o'er the plains.
For some reason the acuity of her father's glare two years ago comes back. Her own eyes in the rearview—a fraction of an instant's assessment—are nowhere close to his in intensity. Nonetheless he hated her holding his gaze.
Don't you look at me like that
was a thing he said fairly often. Not from boldness, but out of the need to understand him—
the
unrelenting need of her childhood—she wanted to keep looking right up until she transgressed, to look at him as long as she safely could, but the line was never where she thought it was. When she tilts her head, the bobble on top of the hat adds its mote of weight to the tilt. If she didn't know this highway runs through flat fields, would she still sense, through the fast-falling snow, the vacancy stretching away on every side? How many die of exposure every winter in this county? Not only the homeless, not just drunks, but farmers who go astray between house and barn, whose tracks instantly fill in, according to her father at the dinner table of her childhood, and he was moved almost to tears by a farmer's no longer being able to make out the lights of his house, and none of them knew what to do for him, or how to care more, as it seemed they should, for whoever had fallen asleep in snow.