Stork Magazine Issue 16

STORK fall 2013 vol. 16

Stork Magazine is a fiction journal published by undergraduate students at Emerson College. Submissions are discussed with the authors and we determine which stories are accepted based on the quality of the author’s revisions. The process is designed to guide writers through rewriting and provide author support and an understanding of the editorial and publishing process. Stork is founded on the idea of communication between writers and editors—not a simple letter of rejection or acceptance.

We accept submissions from undergraduate and graduate Emerson students in any department. Work may be submitted at stork.submittable.com during specified submission periods. Stories should be in 12-point type, double-spaced, and must not exceed 4 pages for the “short-short” issue or 30 pages for the longer issue.

Authors retain all rights upon publication. For questions about submissions, email storkstory@gmail.com.

If you are interested in joining the staff of Stork, contact us at the above email address and we will explain our application process. We accept staff applications at the beginning of each fall semester. We are looking for undergraduate students who are well-read in contemporary fiction and have a good understanding of the short story form.

Copyright © 2013 Stork Magazine Printed and Bound by Shawmut Printing Danvers, MA

Masthead Editors-in-Chief Jenna Greenberg Becca Pollock

Managing Editor Allison Singer

Readers

Christopher Calhoun Sarina Clement Nina Corcoran Bennett Graves Chloe McAlpin Michael Moccio Benjamin Nadeau Kelly Nolte Erinn Pascal Tyler Powles Talia Rochmann Kaylan Scott Casey Walker Richie Wheelock

Prose Editors Gabriella Balza Sierra Lister Robert O’Neil

Senior Copyeditor Talia Rochmann

Copyeditors

Sierra Lister Michael Moccio

Designer

Rose Tawney

Letter from the Editors At the start of this semester, we were honestly worried. Less than half our staff was returning and we took on an unprecedented number of newcomers. Top that off with two loud, sometimes overwhelming editors with oftentimes unrealistic aspirations and this issue may have never reached your hands. However, we were blessed with a surprising outcome. Our staff this semester has been one of the most vocal, honest, and encouraging groups we have encountered. We wanted the best for Stork, and we are proud to say that our staff–old and new–cared just as deeply as we did. The dedication of our team can be seen in the quality of the pieces selected for issue 16. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do.

xoxo, Becca & Jenna

Downriver

02

A World By Itself

26

Nothing Else

54

In the Trees

72

Melinda Thompson

Richie Wheelock

Emily Mackenzie

Brian Loewen

Downriver Melinda Thompson between fifth and sixth periods, as they walk from the main building to the science annex, Margot and Joel talk through their escape: book it right after the first bell, while everyone else is still at their lockers; check that Sister Mary Hawk isn’t watching; climb the six feet of chain-link fence; climb down the other side; and duck down, staying invisible through the stained-glass windows of the church out back.

Then hit the woods and run like crazy.

They always talk about it, but that Tuesday Joel convinces her to actually go through with it. He drops his pencil case back on the other side of the fence and has to fish it through, and Margot snags her uniform skirt on the zigzag chains and has to stop and tear it out even as Joel hisses, “Hurry up, hurry up,” while doing nothing to help her. They run with their books still clutched in both arms, and the Virgin Mary smiles over them with glassy eyes and hands folded in prayer.

Then they’re running through trees and the school’s out of sight. They’ve made it, they’ve made it, they’re out.

It takes a long moment for them to catch their breath.

“So what happened?” Margot asks.

3

Joel had poked her in the middle of fifth-period religion; they were supposed to be working on their joint report about the life of St. Sebastian, but instead he muttered, Jump the fence after the bell? Margot couldn’t tell him no.

They’ve been best friends since kindergarten, and she knows all his facial expressions—the Bored to Death, the Mischievous, the manipulative Begging Puppy Dog—but this one was new. Sad, or maybe scared—both words she didn’t associate with Joel.

“I don’t know,” Joel says. He fidgets with the collar of his uniform shirt, buttoned straight to the top. “I just…”

He fades out. Margot has a few hypotheses, anyway: Rudy Jacobs. Lunchroom drama. Something the Sister said in class. Rudy Jacobs has become a real problem this year; he’s been in their class since the third grade but only lately, now that they’re in seventh, started to have it out for Joel.

He knocks him around and passes it off to teachers as a joke and calls him words—“gay” and “faggot”—that Margot can only vaguely define. The elusive “homosexuality” that’s been mentioned in class, homo meaning same, sexuality meaning… well, sex. Two boys kissing. It’s a bad thing to say. The school guidance counselor, on the few occasions that Joel has gone to see her, has stepped in and more or less stopped Rudy from physically shoving Joel into the lockers a few times every week. Her advice about the words is to just ignore them.

But now Joel is shaking his head. “Nothing happened,” he says, and Margot recognizes this expression: a half-smile accompanied by a casual shrug, the No Big Deal, or else the Cover-Up for something deeper that he doesn’t want to talk 4

about. She can never tell which. “I’m just sick of everything.

I wanted to get out. That’s all.”

“That’s all?” Margot says.

“Besides, did you really want to sit through the spitball circus in Nicholson’s class?”

Margot didn’t, so she doesn’t push, but Joel has never wanted to actually run away from school before.

They pick their way through the trees, their shoes sinking in the soft dirt from yesterday’s rain. The adrenaline from their escape is wearing off, but there’s an underlying thrill of being somewhere that is not sixth-period science. Margot feels guilty at first but quickly forgets. By now they’ve made it to the drainage ditch that cuts through the woods—on one side, the school and the church’s lot, on the other, a newly built subdivision. All the houses are brick and have playhouses in their backyards.

The drainage ditch is wide, maybe three Margots across, but not deep. Over the winter it almost dried up. Someone’s cigarette butts are usually caked into the silty mud along the concrete bottom, but now the rain has buried them. A murky stream runs along it, just a few inches deep.

Joel is sitting on the ground beside the ditch, pulling up handfuls of grass and tossing them into the shallow water.

The grass snags in the mud and twitches, not quite caught in the current. A few leaves get away and drift downstream.

“Where do you reckon this goes?” Joel asks.

“Probably to the river,” she says. They’re downtown, and the ditch is pointing more or less north—everyone in town orients their mental compasses based on which way to the river, north. “And from there, the Ohio hits the Mississippi 5

and goes to the Gulf of Mexico, I guess.”

“Water leads to water leads to water,” Joel says, which sounds simpler than it is.

“I guess,” Margot says.

They can’t go home yet; their parents will ask why they’re not at school. Already Margot is worrying about calls from Mr. Nicholson to the principal, from the principal to her mother, about long, serious talks at the dinner table about disappointment. She shouldn’t have left class, but Joel had looked so desperate and sad. He’s usually the happy one, the ringleader, the concoctor of their ridiculous plans, and the star of their silly games in Margot’s basement. They play Archaeologists and Magical School in the closet with the water heater; they act out their own versions of fairy tales, complete with costumes that Joel engineers out of whatever pieces Margot can scrounge up. Her mom’s old blouse here, a bed-sheet cape there.

For years they performed these plays for their parents, for Margot’s mother and father and Joel’s dad, but lately the audience response has changed. They used to get comfortable laughter and shaking of heads: oh that Joel, always up to something. Now they’re met with silence. Margot’s mother sometimes opens her mouth like she has something to say, but she never says it. And last weekend, when Mr. Steiner came to pick Joel up and they told him all about their latest adaptation of “Cinderella,” where Cinderella and her fairy godmother team up to take over the kingdom, he didn’t even smile.

“Aren’t you getting a little old for this?” he’d asked, a question for Joel and not Margot, and they’d gone home.

6

Now Joel is smiling, at least. Back at school, in the constant uproar of their science class, Mr. Nicholson probably hasn’t even noticed they’re gone. They won’t get reported.

They can kid around like they always have, weaving tiny rafts out of the untrimmed grass and twigs no longer than Margot’s index finger: fairy-sized rafts. She and Joel used to make them on the elementary school playground and float them in the puddle at the bottom of the slide when it rained.

“You’ve lost your touch.” Joel smirks when Margot weaves her grass too tight and the twig raft splinters in her hands.

He’s climbed down into the ditch and is already floating his raft in the muddy water, letting it bounce back and forth between his hands, trapped. “Guess I’m the raft-captain.

I’ll sail the Seven Seas. You can be my first mate, if you want. Good experience with following orders and swabbing the—hey!”

Margot has seized the boat. “And the first mate commandeers your vessel!”

Joel calls it a mutiny, and they tussle over a bundle of sticks and grass until Margot’s uniform skirt is not only hemless but also splattered with mud and Joel looks like he spent the afternoon at a pig farm. Now their parents are bound to ask questions, whether the school calls or not. Margot suddenly feels guilty for her own immaturity. She’s supposed to be a teenager now. Elementary school was nice; there was so much less to think about, no Rudy Jacobs problem or Mr. Steiner asking if they were too old for this. And Joel hadn’t even mastered the Cover-Up yet.

In the end, though she suspects it’s silly, they sail what’s left of Joel’s fairy raft down the drainage ditch and watch 7

until it’s out of sight. Although she knows in a logical way the basic geographic route, she can’t quite make herself believe that the twigs will really go down the Ohio and the Mississippi and into the Gulf of Mexico. Instead, in her mind, they round the bend into the trees up ahead and are simply gone, disappeared from view and existence.

Margot shouldn’t have worried about her mother’s disappointment; her sister has called from out of state with updates on the wedding this summer. When Margot gets home, her mother is standing stiffly in the kitchen, the phone pressed to her ear, her mouth tight. Margot’s sister is marrying a boy she met at college, an outspokenly liberal biology student from New York. The fiancé is a professed atheist; they’re having the wedding at a garden instead of a church, and there won’t be a priest there. Margot sneaks to her room and changes out of her skirt.

At dinner, her mother and father talk in lowered voices as though Margot can’t hear them from across the table.

“She keeps asking about the guest list, but we can’t invite the Kellers,” her mother says. “Think of how uncomfortable Lynn would be. The same with the O’Connells.”

“You could talk with Allen and Jane,” her father says.

“One of theirs had a non-church wedding. Maybe they know the etiquette.”

“Yes, maybe.” Margot’s mother looks at the ceiling, her hands clasped in front of her asparagus and potatoes. Then, she reaches around the table’s edge and gives Margot a onearmed squeeze. “You’re not going to cause me so much stress, are you, honey?” she says, holding on tight.

8

Margot’s potatoes taste like glue. Is it a sin to sneak out of school? Probably, but it’s probably not a mortal one. Just venial. Not enough to send you directly to hell, although it definitely doesn’t help. Margot wonders where marrying an atheist falls. Girl meets boy; girl marries boy. Girl meets atheist; girl marries atheist, albeit in a garden and without a priest. Aren’t the basics the same? This must be something else they haven’t covered in the Sister’s class yet. Margot knows it’s wrong—it gives her an uneasy feeling deep in her stomach—but she feels like she’s missing something.

Margot tries to pray about it that night as she’s lying in bed. If you’re listening, God, I just have a few questions. She feels like she’s pretending again.

She often wishes that she could have an easy, casual, friendly relationship with God, like that man in Fiddler on the Roof. She wishes she could just talk to Him, not recite prayers, just talk, chat about her day, maybe even make jokes.

The way she talks to Joel. She tries sometimes, but she always gives up; it always feels forced.

Staring at the ceiling, the soft pillow fluff enveloping her head, she thinks about the day’s events, about running away from school and her mother’s around-the-table squeeze. She starts reciting the contrition prayer she learned in second grade: God, I am sorry for my sins with all my heart… But then she’s not sure if she really is, and while she’s wondering whether God appreciates an inauthentic apology over no apology at all, and also willing herself to feel genuinely contrite, she falls asleep.

At school the next day, Joel shows her a book he unearthed 9

at the public library. A Raft That Will Sail: Your Guide to the Techniques of Basic Boat-Building. They’re sitting between the cinderblock walls of the cafeteria, surrounded by classmates talking about going to the movies this weekend or the football game last night.

“You’re joking,” Margot says, because she thinks he is.

“It’s got diagrams and everything. Look.” He flips to one of many pages whose corners he’s folded over. Page 27 shows an inventory of the basic log shapes you should use in your raft, and Page 28 shows how they fit together.

“You’re serious?” Margot says. “About building a raft. An actual raft. Are you crazy?”

In fourth grade, Joel spent three weeks trying to convince everyone that Bigfoot was real and hiding out in southern Indiana. Margot told him it was impossible, but Joel had seen a footprint on a Boy Scout camping trip; despite the scoffing, it was obvious he believed it himself.

“No crazier than I usually am,” he grins. This is a joke between them; Joel is crazy only in comparison with Margot—not-crazy, rule-abiding Margot.

She has to ask it again. “You’re serious?”

“As a heart attack.”

Somehow that still doesn’t clarify. Margot feels like she’s on the outside of a joke, missing some secret piece of knowledge that would help her understand. Joel tucks the book inside his backpack.

“Anyway, we can’t leave school again,” Margot tells him.

“It was a miracle we didn’t get caught yesterday. And, besides, it’s wrong.”

They go to first period. They go to second. She means 10

to hold by what she said—she really does—but then, after fourth-period P.E., where they’ve been playing indoor soccer and Margot and Joel have both been trying frantically to avoid the ball, Rudy Jacobs steals Joel’s sneakers. They’re still crusted with a little mud from their trip to the woods yesterday. Rudy runs around the gym, waving the sneakers, and then Joel has to chase him in his socks. People are laughing, and Margot can’t tell whether it’s malicious or not. Coach Nielsen doesn’t notice; he’s looking at his clipboard. Finally, Rudy throws Joel’s shoes into the girls’ locker room.

“Go get them, faggot,” he keeps saying, while Joel stands outside the door looking smaller than usual. “Why don’t you just go in your locker room and get them?”

“That’s the bell, let’s hurry it up!” Coach Nielsen says.

Margot waits until Rudy Jacobs has left and then fetches Joel’s sneakers for him. They’ve bounced into the dark, cobwebby area between the lockers and the wall; a string of dust clings to one of the shoelaces.

“Rudy Jacobs is stupid,” she says as Joel sits on the floor of the empty gym and ties them. “Don’t listen to him. You’re not a …” She doesn’t want to say it out loud. “You’re not that.”

The word is tainted, taboo, like the s-word and d-word and f-word; she’s still not a hundred percent sure what that other f-word stands for and worries that looking it up will bring more answers than she’s ready for. Joel is silent. He has that desperate look again.

“We probably won’t miss anything really important if we don’t go to science,” Margot admits.

Joel smiles, falling back into the No Big Deal face. “You mean you’re not dying to learn about mitosis?” They make it 11

through lunch and then fifth, and then Joel grabs his raftmaking book and they’re gone.

Every afternoon that week, after fifth period, Margot and Joel sneak out to the woods. The spring rain comes in spurts, mostly overnight; on Wednesday, the muddy water completely covers the concrete bottom of the ditch. They wade across it and go to the latest construction site at the subdivision, where they use Joel’s diagrams to pick out pieces of wood from the builders’ scrap pile. Two-by-fours, plywood, more two-by-fours. Margot doesn’t know the buoyancy of a two-by-four but figures it’s just a goofy project anyway. Joel doesn’t seem to have thought that far.

They drag their supplies back to their spot, back across the ditch. By the time they ought to be getting out of school, they’ve arranged the framework: two parallel beams, two braces, a slab of plywood stretched across.

“Looks sturdy enough, right?” Joel says. “We could go anywhere on this.” He gives it a good kick to show its sturdiness. One of the beams jolts out of place.

“If by ‘anywhere’ you mean the bottom of the ditch.” The frame isn’t fastened yet; they’ve wedged it together, but it only holds up for appearances’ sake. If one piece moves, the whole thing falls apart.

“But I mean after we tie it together.”

“Where exactly are you planning to go?” Margot asks.

Joel wipes his muddy hands on his uniform pants, brown on starched navy.

He doesn’t answer.

On Thursday, the water has risen by another foot. Joel 12

has brought a spool of heavy twine he got at the home building store; again, Margot marvels at his dedication. She helps him bind off the braces. It’s just like their fairy rafts, except bigger, and the twine is less likely to break apart and the two-by-fours don’t splinter if you tie them too tight.

They push their creation down into the two-feet-deep stream, where it floats for a few seconds before it goes lopsided and starts taking on water and they have to drag it out again. Joel starts reengineering, muttering to himself; they need something else to keep it afloat. Maybe he can take the inner tubes from the tires of his dad’s old, now broken, tractor.

“You want to come over for dinner?” Joel asks. “And then we can check out the tractor tires afterwards.”

Margot doesn’t go over to Joel’s house much anymore; dinner at the Steiners usually means reheated stir-fry instead of her mother’s pork chops and potatoes, and anyway, it’s a longer walk from school. She shrugs though, nods, and when school lets out—or when it should be letting out, at least, for everyone else who is still in it—Joel lends her his phone so she can call her mother. She’s only ever allowed to use the computer for homework; her parents would never get her a phone.

Her mother makes a little tsk-ing sound when Margot asks permission, but then she gets quiet. Then she says, “Yes, of course, sweetie. Just be home before dark, all right?”

They keep working on their raft for another hour or so, because Margot’s mother won’t know now and Joel’s dad won’t care, and then they hike two neighborhoods over to Joel’s house, which stands in the middle of a street of nearly identical gray-sided houses. Joel’s house is smaller than Mar13

got’s, although she didn’t start to notice that until this year.

The screen door has a hole kicked through it that’s been there for as long as Margot can remember.

Mr. Steiner is sitting in the living room when they walk in.

“You’re home later than usual,” he tells Joel, looking up from his newspaper. Then he sees Margot. “Wasn’t expecting you here.”

“Can Margot stay for dinner?” Joel asks.

“Where’ve you been?”

“We were just hanging out at school.”

Mr. Steiner frowns. He looks like the across-the-street neighbor’s Doberman, Margot thinks, all long, lean face and sharp teeth. When he frowns down his nose at her with his eyes slightly narrowed, she realizes that he sometimes scares her.

“Look,” he says to Margot, “he’s not going to join your drama club, or knitting club, or whatever you two have been doing. You should get home.”

“We weren’t—” Joel starts, but then goes back to staring at his shoes.

“Do you need a ride, or can you walk?”

Margot says she’s fine, she’ll walk, and Joel walks her outside. He stands on the sidewalk, kicking a crack where a tree root has forced its way up through the pavement.

“Sorry,” he says. “I should’ve made up something about trying out for the football team, or something.”

Margot laughs before she can really think why; she doesn’t see it as a mean thing to do until Joel’s face falls. Why does she never know the right thing to say? Everyone else always seems to. Usually this is what makes her friendship 14

with Joel so much easier: they’ve known each other for so long that it’s like talking to yourself. But he digs his shoe into the sidewalk crack now, not looking at her, and Margot pats his arm.

“I’m sure you could make the football team if you wanted to,” she says. “But they play football in the fall, not spring.

And you’re still in your school uniform.”

“Oh. Right.” He tugs on his collar. “Anyway, sorry.”

Margot gets home in plenty of time for dinner, and although her mother is surprised by the change of plans, she’s not upset.

“Can you set the table, please?” is all she says.

“We should have Joel over for dinner another day,” Margot says while she gets down the plates.

“Sweetie,” her mother says, “I know you and Joel have been friends for a long time, but sometimes people…” She stops the sentence there, studying the pan of fresh vegetables simmering on the stove, and then she smiles suddenly and says, “Maybe we can have him over sometime.” She doesn’t set a date.

Margot suspects her mother is being condescending, but she can’t do anything about it, and her mother’s tone implies that she knows something Margot doesn’t. Margot sets the table.

On Friday morning, before Margot has left for school, her sister calls again. She has to talk to Margot about bridesmaid dresses for the wedding. Margot’s mother pulls her lips into a straight line and hands over the phone. Her sister tells her about colors and skirt styles and about some dresses 15

that she saw in a boutique here in the city. And there are so many options, she says, but she’d really like to know what Margot would like, because she’s the one who will ultimately be wearing it and so her sister thinks the choice should really be hers.

“I mean,” her sister says, “assuming you don’t pick out something really hideous.” She laughs.

Margot doesn’t want to be the one to choose; her sister’s caveat means that there is, in fact, a right answer, or at least a wrong one, and it’s up to Margot not to pick it. She has no strong feelings one way or the other. It’s just a dress. It’s not even for her own wedding. She’d rather have someone else just tell her what to wear.

It’s almost time for school, so Margot’s sister tells her to think on it. As an afterthought she passes the phone to the fiancé to say hello.

“Hi there, Mar-got,” he says, pronouncing the t as usual.

It’s a running joke: Mar-get, Mar-got. “How’s school?”

“Fine. School is great.” He’s a biology student, or maybe a biologist now, so she adds, “We’re studying the stages of mitosis.”

At least that’s what they were studying on Monday. She hasn’t been to class since. She considers mentioning this but her mother is standing right there. The fiancé makes a nostalgic comment about anaphase and telophase, and about the low-power microscopes he had to use in grade-school, and then he says, “And how’s your boyfriend? Joey, Jonah?”

Margot’s face is hot, because Joel isn’t really her boyfriend, and in the background she can hear her sister saying, “Don’t ask her that, she can have friends who are boys!” Her 16

mother is calling that Margot is going to be late, so she just says, “He’s Joel. He’s fine,” and tells them both goodbye and hangs up.

She mostly likes her sister’s fiancé. Sometimes—a lot— she forgets that he’s an atheist.

At school, in first period, Joel tells her that he’s brought the tire inner tubes, plus some canvas and more two-byfours to make a sail. He’s already stashed them in the woods.

Margot wonders for the first time what they will do when they finish building their raft. A giddy feeling has settled in her stomach. The sun is out again; it shines through the windows at the back of the classroom, paints yellow trapezoids on the cracked tile floor. She feels inexplicably happy—not just the vague neutrality of being not sad, but a real, conscious joy. She feels herself glowing.

“Just because you’ve brought all the supplies doesn’t automatically mean you’re the raft captain,” Margot says suddenly, although she knows it’s immature. Joel cocks an eyebrow.

“What are we supposed to do, duel for it?”

They do duel, with pencils, even though their classmates stare. The fight lasts about five seconds and three parries— click, click, click. Then the teacher walks into the room and shoots them a look and Margot puts her pencil away, tinged with guilt.

During class, though, Margot can see that Joel is glowing too—it’s strange how quickly he fluctuates between completely happy or completely sad. Everything is bigger with Joel. He doesn’t have a neutral state. They cruise through second period, third, fourth, drugged on their own happi17

ness; they’re going to sneak out to the woods after lunch.

And it’s Friday—one more day and then the weekend, when they can build their raft to their hearts’ content. Nothing can touch them. This must be what it feels like to be invincible.

But then, during lunch, Rudy Jacobs trips Joel as he’s carrying his tray to Margot’s table and Joel goes sprawling. Fries skid under the trash cans; his sandwich falls under the table, the bread splits open, lettuce and mayo sticking to the linoleum. Rudy Jacobs laughs, surprised, as if he hadn’t expected that to work so well. Joel picks himself up.

“Don’t you have anything better to do?” he says. The feeling of invincibility has shattered for Margot, but Joel must still be high on it; he must be crazy. “Seriously. You’ve got no better use of your time than to stalk me and jerk me around?”

Rudy Jacobs leaps up, shoves Joel away. Joel hits the floor again. “I’m not the one who’s a fag, fag,” he says. There’s that word again—it’s this that makes Joel wince, not landing hard on the linoleum. The words, not the shove. Two boys kissing.

It’s bad. She knows it’s bad.

Margot is on her feet. She can’t think straight. She feels like she’s watching a TV show. Someone else is walking across the cafeteria, someone else faces Rudy Jacobs and pulls back their arm. Someone else’s hand connects with his cheek. She feels the slap; there’s a yelp. Her palm is tingling.

Then it all comes crashing down on her. It’s her: she just slapped Rudy Jacobs, and Joel is still sitting on the cafeteria floor, staring at her, and her feet won’t move. Now Sister Mary Hawk is running toward them, finally, even though she must have seen the whole thing. She must have seen Rudy trip Joel and heard him spit that word. Margot’s brain is still 18

repeating it in a daze: fag, fag, fag.

Instead of climbing the fence after fifth period and finishing their raft, Margot and Joel end up in the principal’s office, sitting across a desk from the guidance counselor, the Sister, and the principal himself, who has already called Margot’s parents.

Margot takes her punishment in silence. She’ll get a detention, at the very least, and talk of a suspension is tossed around. She’s a first-time offender and usually a model student, so they’ll have to consult. Either way, this is unacceptable behavior. They’re very disappointed in what she did today.

Whatever punishment they eventually settle on won’t matter: she already feels the guilt, their disappointment, prickling on her skin like a bad sunburn. She’s supposed to be the good student, the good daughter. She wants to be good. She thinks she feels genuinely contrite now, though probably not for the right reasons. She can’t remember the contrition prayer. She wants to throw up.

“What about Jacobs?” Joel asks, because Margot’s voice is clogged. “He was the one who started all this. If anybody should get in trouble, it’s him.”

“We’re going to talk to Rudy Jacobs, but we agree that whatever he did or said, it wasn’t enough to provoke this kind of violent reaction.” It’s a collective statement: always ‘we,’ never ‘I.’ “We can’t excuse Margot’s retaliation, under any circumstances.”

“But he said I was….”

Joel doesn’t finish, but they all know. The Sister, at least, was there to hear it. She looks at him with her eyebrows pulled 19

together. Sympathetically, Margot thinks—it’s hard to tell.

“We’re not advocating for Mr. Jacobs’ behavior,” the principal says. “But frankly, Mr. Steiner, there’s nothing we can do to help the situation if you don’t want to change.”

It’s late that night when Joel comes to Margot’s window and raps two knuckles on the glass. She’s been asleep for hours.

He looks like he hasn’t slept at all. Margot pushes the windowpane up in a daze. Her parents are two rooms over; she’s already gotten in enough trouble today, though they haven’t given her an official punishment yet. They’re probably sleeping now, anyway. It’s past two.

“What are you doing here?” Margot asks in a whisper.

“We have to get out of here,” he says. “Tonight. I want to leave.”

He’s wearing a backpack over his jacket. Margot is afraid to ask what’s in it. His face is manic—not just a little jumpy, but all-out wild.

“What?” Margot says.

“I finished the raft. I feel like I’m going to explode. Can’t stay here. Let’s just get out.”

“But get out of where?” Margot wonders if she’s still asleep. Maybe this is a dream.

“Here. We can go anywhere, I don’t care, but I can’t stay here, Marg. I just can’t …”

He shakes his head. The window screen between them has turned him slightly grainy, like an actor in an old blackand-white movie. Somewhere down the street a dog is whining, soft and persistent.

“I’ve got to tell you something,” he says. “Okay? I’ve got 20

something I have to tell you, and I don’t know how to, but …” He’s shaking his head again—back, forth, back, forth, frantic and fast. “Okay?”

It’s not okay. Joel is supposed to be the eloquent one, not the one who rambles and trails off and repeats himself, and even with a lifetime of practice she can’t place his expression now. And maybe she knows what he’s about to say, or maybe she doesn’t, but either way she’s afraid.

It’s just two words. Lots of people have probably said them before, maybe hundreds or thousands of them, but that’s different. Those people aren’t Joel. It’s her sister’s fiancé all over again—yes, there are atheists in the world, but Margot isn’t supposed to know any of them. Even the word itself has a wrong, sinful feeling: the hard g, the long vowel, with nothing to ground it at the end. It’s left hanging.

Drifting. She looks at Joel, Bigfoot-hunting Joel, raftbuilding Joel, and he looks just the same but something is different now. Everything is different.

“No, you’re not,” Margot blurts out. “No, you’re fine.

You’re not gay.”

“I am, Marg, I really am.” He lets out a nervous laugh and shivers. It looks like it’s starting to rain, and even inside, Margot can feel a mist. Maybe she’s imagining it. “I mean, I wondered for a while, but I know now, I just know, and… please,” he says. “Can we just leave? I can’t stand it here. Now you know why. Please, can’t we just …”

He trails off. Back, forth, back, forth. In the kitchen when she got home from school that day, Margot confessed everything to her mother, all about Rudy Jacobs and the slapping, which her mother had already heard, but then 21

about the sneaking out of school and skipping science class and lying, or at least not telling the truth, and about not even feeling sorry for it. She blurted it all out, one wrongdoing after another, and when she was done her mother leaned over and kissed her forehead. “Oh, honey,” she said.

That was all. Just, “oh, honey.” Margot was worse than her sister, worse than the fiancé. Her mother looked so sad. At dinner, Margot’s father asked how her day was and she had to tell the whole story again, and they both really listened to her, and then they hugged her, and the guilt that had been burning into her skin let up a little.

Joel is still watching her through the screen. “Please.”

“We can’t,” Margot hears herself saying. “It’s not right.

We’ll fix this. We’ll meet at the raft tomorrow, and I can help you fix this. You’re going to be fine.”

She doesn’t really know where it’s coming from, except that she thinks it’s what she’s supposed to say, the thing her mother or the ‘we’ of the principal and guidance counselor and Sister would tell her to say. For one terrible second she worries Joel might cry. His eyes go wide and his cheeks pinch—she doesn’t have a name for this expression because she’s seen it so rarely. Something in her chest hurts, like swallowing a hot drink too fast and knowing that tomorrow you’re still going to feel its burn. Finally he takes a step back, out of the circle of yellow light filtering through her window.

“Right,” he says, his voice empty. “I’ll leave you alone.”

“We’ll talk tomorrow,” Margot says.

“Right.”

He walks, doesn’t run, to the sidewalk, where he’s just a person-shaped silhouette under the streetlamp. The shape 22

rounds the corner and is gone. The dog has stopped whining; the street falls silent. Margot closes the window. She expects it to take her ages to fall back to sleep, expects to toss and turn and rehash everything that just happened and probably be filled with the occasional surge of regret. Regret for what Joel told her or regret for what she said? And if she’s honest, there is some rehashing, maybe a lot of regret.

Some of it—most—is for the second. If she’s honest.

But in the end she’s tired. Her eyes shut. She sleeps.

The next morning, Margot isn’t quite sure if it was a dream or not. The rain has started in earnest now, a steady rhythm on her bedroom window. She pulls on her raincoat and boots.

She walks to the school. There’s no need to climb over the fence this time, or to worry about someone seeing her, but still her heart skitters a little when she sees the stained-glass Virgin Mary in the church window, smiling at the sky with her hands folded, probably praying. In the rain she looks like she’s pleading with someone.

Margot reaches the ditch in the woods and finds that overnight it’s turned into a river. The brown water courses north, sweeping sticks and rocks and blades of grass into its flow. North to the Ohio, then west to the Mississippi, then south to the Gulf. Her boots squelch in the mud; the ground bubbles up. What is she even supposed to say to Joel when he shows up? She doesn’t know. She knows what she wants to do: to throw her arms around his neck and tell him that she’s sorry, so sorry, please forgive her. But she doesn’t know.

Now she’s at their spot along the river, and the raft is gone.

23

Numbness fills her; the rain has become white noise. The raft is gone. She could reason that it got swept up in the widening current, but she can see the twine where they’d tied it to a heavy oak tree to secure it; one end is still knotted tightly there. The other half is gone, cut and gone wherever the raft vanished to. That’s not an accident of nature.

Joel cut it. Of course he did. She sees it now, Joel coming here after he left her house, late in the night or early in the morning. The only light is the gray glow of the moon through the trees. He walks to the river, misty rain gluing his hair to his forehead, and the river is deep enough now, deep and fast, and he has his backpack with a water bottle and a few granola bars, or maybe some crackers. He has to get out, that’s what he said; if he doesn’t get out he’ll explode. He pushes the raft out into the ditch. It floats this time, floats and bobs in the current. It’s fighting the rope. He climbs out onto it. He takes a pocketknife out of his bag and slices the twine—it doesn’t take much, the twine wants to come free—and then the raft breaks away and he’s floating, he’s sailing, sweeping downriver on this thing of plywood and two-by-fours and tractor tire inner tubes of his own creation.

The sail catches the wind—Margot never saw the sail but in her mind it’s magnificent, white and billowing, like a cloud.

He flies around the bend and steers with a makeshift oar, clinging onto the mast as the water turns faster and deeper.

Where does the river go? To the Ohio and the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, that’s the long answer, but the only important thing is that it goes away.

She stands on the bank. The water’s so fast that if you fell in you might not come back up. She doesn’t mean to, 24

but now she’s seeing another scene, too, one that makes her empty stomach churn: Joel cuts the raft free. It goes lopsided; it starts taking on water. The water’s everywhere, murky and brown, pushing and pulling and grabbing him by the ankle and dragging him down; there’s no air, no handle, no raft anymore. Just muddy water and sky. Then just muddy water.

I can’t stand it here. Now you know why. Please, can’t we just …

Nothing makes sense anymore, the boxes are all broken, and Margot starts running without knowing where or why.

The muddy ground bubbles up around her shoes. She’s running upriver, toward her house and away from wherever Joel may or may not be, but for some reason she finds herself talking to him, and she’s given up on what she’s supposed to say and is just saying what she thinks.

“I’m sorry for what I said to you,” she breathes out while she runs, two words between each step. And, “I’m sorry I wouldn’t come with you.” And then, “I love you Joel. You’re my best friend.”

She doesn’t have any more big sentiments after that, and she falls into smaller things as she hits her stride, lighter things, things they would chat about any old time: “How’s it going out there on the river?” And even a joke: “Are you still a raft captain if you don’t have a crew?” No one answers. But it feels different this time.

She’ll get help, she thinks, get the grown-ups to go out looking for Joel, but she doesn’t know what they’ll find. She can’t quite believe that they’ll find anything at all. She keeps running, even as the misty rain seeps around the edges of her raincoat and through her clothes and stays there, cool against her skin.

25

A World By Itself Richie Wheelock

there wasn’t any peace for President Leon Ormand those days. He grumbled a few curses as he slid into his slippers. On the bedside table was a picture of a gently smiling woman, which he contemplated while reviewing the day’s itinerary. He knew the schedule by heart. In five minutes he would brief Isaac Liska on his duties when escorting the country’s first American visitor. Ormand made a mental note to remind Isaac to refill the blood packet; he wanted a wide splatter. After that, he would discuss the recent threat of missiles from Cuba with his foreign secretary—who was playing Polonius—over breakfast. Sometime around lunch he would attempt to make peace with the Costuming Union protest. They were still reeling from the Macbeth disaster. But before that, at the unmovable time of seven o’clock, he had rehearsal.

“What art thou that usurp’t this time of night, together with that pale and warlike form...? Is it pale? Fair?” he muttered to himself. “No, I am not even near off-book.”

With another look at the photo next to his bed, he downed an ibuprofen. His headache was keeping him awake most nights now. Ormand tried to ignore it as he stumbled down the marble staircase to the entrance hall. He noticed that the painters had finished, and Marina—who was playing Ophelia—had been right: the blue wasn’t too jarring.

He would have to tell her, slip it in before the unavoidable argument at rehearsal.

“Good morning, Mr. President,” said Isaac Liska. He was waiting by the door in a painfully ill-fitting suit.

“Who dressed you?” Ormand asked.

“Bessie had to, since Andrinette is leading the strike,”

Isaac said. He frowned. “Why, is something wrong? The jacket is old, I know, but all the others were completely ruined in Macbeth.”

“Age is not the problem,” Ormand said. “The whole thing is too small.”

Isaac pulled on the sleeves. “Bessie hoped it was not obvious.”

“I can see your calves,” Ormand said. But he moved on.

“We should go over your instructions.”

“I get to know Jane Harper after the plane lands.”

“And you are…?”

“A Vatican spy.”

“But you tell her…?”

“In the car.”

“Show me your accent.”

“I like to eat pasta and lasagna in my Maserati.”

Ormand marveled at how Isaac was able to drop his own dipping, rounded accent and, for that moment, he absolutely sounded Italian. Even Ormand found it difficult to lose his thick Amargian drawl.

“Well done. Now, the shot should be in the plaza. Have you practiced your fall?”

Isaac gave a demonstration, collapsing to the floor in a spread-eagle sprawl. Ormand nodded approval. “Perfect.

And make sure your blood packet is full.”

“Bessie already checked.”

“Good girl.” Ormand shook Isaac’s hand. “Make it believable, please. We risk enough with the Vatican bullshit.

And Jane Harper did not get a press pass by being an idiot.

She is shrewd; the Vine had her reporting from Libya for three months.”

28

“This will be my best work,” Isaac promised, preparing to leave.

“One more point.” Ormand clicked his tongue. “I assigned a small cast from the Chorale Musical Theatre Company to act as her security detail.”

Isaac’s eyes widened. “Is it true they may begin work on South Pacific?”

“If anybody asks whether you heard this from me, you tell them no. But yes, it will be ready just in time for our fall season. I am as excited as you.” Isaac gave him a grateful salute and Ormand returned the gesture. “Break a leg.”

Jane Harper was the only one on the plane. Not at the beginning, of course. She boarded with a full plane of passengers at JFK, but the last of them got off in Buenos Aires. She had expected this; nobody was allowed to fly to Amargio for pleasure. There used to be flight attendants and a captain, too, but after landing on Amargio they had also left. She was told her security detail would arrive soon and that, in the meantime, she should make herself comfortable in the cabin.

An hour later, Jane found herself at the point where she could barely keep still. The excitement she’d felt entering the plane in anticipation of a new place, a new story, had grown more and more thrilling. Halfway in, she tried taking off her flats to do some side lunges and squat jumps in the narrow aisle. But every time she thought about the interview ahead, her limbs would tingle with the adrenaline rush and her heart would swell with burning curiosity, and eventually she had to sit back down to keep from screaming. Amargio was a big fish—the kind journalists worked their whole lives to 29

hook—and now it was nibbling at her line. But that kind of catch took patience.

She had expected some type of delay. Countries like Amargio didn’t just let planes land. Even now, she bet the plane and landing strip were swarmed with military officials, sweeping them for bugs and cameras, and that there was a surveillance team carefully reviewing and re-reviewing her own records, to be absolutely sure.

She began to pick at the plastic window shade with her fingernails. She wished she could see outside. The shades had all closed sharply on their descent onto the island, and they seemed to be locked. Jane could tolerate it—she wasn’t claustrophobic or anything—but she wanted something to look at other than the neutral blue and grey pattern of the seat in front of her.

She decided to brush up on her history; reading could be a good sedative. From the overhead compartment, Jane retrieved a file some editors at the Vine had prepared on Amargio. Intelligence on the aggressive island was limited, so the fact sheet contained a meager skeleton of mostly useless information.

Languages: English and Portuguese. Population: Unknown.

History: Amargio was the Brazilian territory of Milena until Izmúr Fioria declared its independence in 1966 and instituted himself as its president. After gaining independence, the island began very publicly threatening other nations with military force.

It claims to possess nuclear warheads. Fioria and the presidents after him have made threats on multiple countries, from Cuba to Syria to Russia. In fact, the U.S.’s relationship with Amargio was fairly sour until the last decade. Internal Affairs: Everything 30

is conjecture. Popular rumors include the government’s creation of a “secret police,” the entire island being steeped in poverty, and unconfirmed accounts of urban concentration camps. Classification: Do not approach.

Jane flipped to the last page, which was a spread on Amargio’s newest president, Leon Ormand. The article was cheap guesswork: Ormand spent two years at Oxford (not likely); Ormand was a party favorite, making his recent victory a landslide. (Or so we think; wouldn’t that make sense?)

This was whom Jane would be interviewing. He was the most sought-after subject in the journalism world—the monster under democracy’s bed. When Jane was given the assignment she went home and burned her other articles, on poverty in Tripoli, on Arab socialism, and Colonel Gaddafi.

In their blaze she had smiled and shook her head back and forth, thinking: how could they compare to Amargio?

There was a picture pinned to the article, which Jane studied. It showed Ormand in full blue and white uniform with his wife standing behind him, her hand on his shoulder.

Neither was smiling. He would be handsome, Jane thought, if he didn’t hold his face in such a disapproving scowl, his eyes dark and hooded, jaw clenched.

Ormand turned on his heel and, headache still throbbing, strode into the breakfast room. The foreign secretary was already there, tucking into a sizzling plate of bacon and eggs.

Ormand wearily joined him.

“I bring a message from the Costuming Union,” said the secretary. “They want to meet with you earlier than lunchtime. They say it is urgent.”

31

“Well, they can wait a few hours,” the president said. The cook set a plate down in front of him, and a cup of freshly squeezed orange juice. Ormand started with the bacon.

“I would not be so dismissive,” said his advisor. “Those costumers get dramatic.”

Ormand chuckled. “Just tell me about the missile crisis.”

“Right,” the secretary said. “Lee, the Cubans are starting to take us seriously.”

“What do you suggest, old Polonius?” Ormand asked.

The secretary, whose name was actually Victor Corey, grinned. “Put on a show.”

“Another foam WMD? The leaked-video trick must be getting stale.”

“Only when they stop believing us.”

Ormand took a sip of juice. Something Marina had mentioned weeks ago was nagging at him very actively. “What if they do stop believing us? What then?”

Corey gave a wry smile. He recognized the look on Ormand’s face, infected by the irksome worm of anxiety. “I sincerely doubt they will.”

“But what if they do?” The young president paused in his eating, pointing his fork at the older advisor. “What if they attack us, with ships and troops and real missiles?”

Corey leaned forward. “Listen, each president before you has gotten some form of stage fright in the beginning. But you know who I am; you know how long I have been around.

I was there with Fioria, getting this reputation to stick. We did it right, Lee. The Cubans will stay in their harbors for the same reason they did five years ago: they are scared. Have you seen the article?” Ormand hadn’t, so Corey slid over a copy 32

of the Horror Vine (“faithfully telling you the news you never wanted to hear”).

Its headline read “Amargio Named Scariest Country.”

The piece below went on to list accusations of concentration camps, nuclear programs, and forced disappearances.

“We won!” Ormand smiled gratefully. “Sometimes I have nightmares where the world stops being afraid.” And seeing the Vine reminded him of the reporter they would be entertaining. “It could happen, now that Jane Harper is coming,” he remarked.

“I am glad you mentioned her. What, again, do you have planned for Miss Harper?” Corey flicked a piece of bacon fat across his plate.

“Only the usual scare tactics. She arrived at around six, and Isaac Liska will distract her at the airport for a few hours.”

“Smart cast,” Corey noted.

“Yes, Isaac is one of our best. Shame he was passed over for Mercutio; he is far too practiced for Balthazar. Anyhow, Isaac should get the bullet at quarter till ten, which will put me in a nice spot to do my dictator act. Hopefully the terror of today will have her phoning for a plane home by dinner.”

Corey was listening proudly. “See, we are doing this right. I think you can stop worrying about Cuba.” His eyes twinkled. “You never miss a beat, Lee.” Ormand sighed. “So I am told.” He paused for a moment, wondering whether he should say anything. “Mari is campaigning for me to give it all up.”

“Resign?”

“No: take off the mask. She wants me to tell the world 33

what we actually do, what Amargio actually is—the theatre, the unions, the foam warheads.”

Corey nearly choked on his eggs. “Is she serious?”

“She stays with her sister overnight now.” Ormand stared down at his plate. “She tells me the distance is for my own good.”

“It sounds like she may be going method.” Corey shook his head. “So this is not stage fright after all: Mari is interfering again. Well, you know as well as I do how important this mask is. Talk with her, will you? And keep her away from Jane Harper.”

Ormand finished his last forkful of eggs and got up to leave. “I will do my best.”

“Oh, and Lee,” the advisor called after him. “To answer your question more directly, about if Cuba actually attacks,” Corey wagged his finger at the young president, “the Props Department is always prepared to do more than set dressing.”

Jane was waiting for her car. Several minutes ago, a team of five suited men had entered the plane and escorted her out over the tarmac to a bland building that she had only just realized was the airport. The air outside was muggy, and the sun so bright that she was briefly blinded as they led her to the small structure. It was little more than a cement hut on the edge of the landing strip, with blank walls and one room with a desk at the far end, and sets of folding chairs in the middle. The employee behind the desk was the most beautiful woman Jane had ever seen—she could have been an actress or a model—but she refused to make eye contact with Jane, and would only answer her questions with one-word sneers.

34

“I’m from America,” Jane told her.

“Sorry,” said the woman. The way she said the word, even in those two strangely accented syllables, jolted Jane back to the reality of her situation. She was in a foreign land—a hostile foreign land. She took a deep breath and clenched her fists tightly, reminding herself of what was waiting at the end of all this: the interview.

“They said they would send a car for me. Do I just wait here?”

The woman batted her eyelashes, bored. “Yes.” So Jane sat down to wait. After a few minutes, a man emerged from the bathroom. Jane hadn’t expected anybody else to be in the airport. He was very handsome, almost as attractive as the woman behind the desk, with curly blonde hair and skin like lightly burnt cream. His suit, however, was far too small. She could see his calves.

The man noticed the yellow press pass on her lapel, and he walked over.

“Hello,” he held out his hand for her to shake. From his accent, she guessed he was Italian. “My name is Isaac Liska.”

Ormand took the long way to the mansion’s theater, through colorful halls that housed the Department of Art Direction.

The walls were papered with artwork and designs for countless productions from over nearly fifty years. Ormand could pick out his favorites: Sunday in the Park With George (in which his father had starred), Chicago, The Glass Menagerie, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Those were only a few.

He reached a large pair of black maple doors that opened onto the theater. It was the largest theater in the world, with 35

a gilded ceiling that blossomed above the highest balcony in shining arches. A diamond chandelier alone cost upward of one million dollars, and there were five of those. The stage was already filled with actors, all milling around and chatting until rehearsal started. Ormand spotted Marina in the wings.

He waved as he walked over, and she groaned.

“Did you ever hear the story of the ass and the beautiful maiden?” she said once he was within earshot. “The ass made an ass of himself, and the beautiful maiden swore a vow of silence until he righted his wrong.”

“Is that Aesop?” Ormand asked. He moved in for a kiss, but she stopped him before he got too close and gave him a stern look.

“Probably.”

Jane was fed up with waiting. Isaac was telling her how excited he was to begin teaching in the fall, showing her the Latin he had learned in his free time, and Jane couldn’t stand it anymore. She stood up and stormed over to the door, opening it. There were men outside with their arms crossed sternly. Jane huffily retreated back inside.

The anticipation built up inside her began to feel wrong, somehow soured. Was she an idiot for wanting to come here? They were just going to make her wait, and wait, and wait, and maybe she would never meet Ormand. Maybe they would capture and kill her: make an example of her for the rest of the free world. Jane shook her head anxiously.

No, that was absurd. They wouldn’t do that—couldn’t do that. Not to an American. They were one island against the whole world.

36

She went to sit back down next to Isaac, her face settled into a slump.

“Is something wrong?” he asked. “Do you not like Latin?”

“It’s not the Latin, Isaac. They’re making me wait,” she told him. “I’m not getting the interview. All this waiting and it’s gonna be part of some sick joke.”

“Did you say were a journalist?” Isaac asked. “Well, I do not know if you have ever been overseas before, but I am sure this is just one of those foreign travel protocols.”

“Fuck!” She slammed her fist into her leg. Isaac jumped and nearly fell out of his chair. Jane shook her head back and forth, thinking. This was sick, it really was. She needed that interview; it burned in her with such ferocity that she could feel it in her forehead, aching there like a small fire. Then, in a flash of cunning, she had an idea.

“Does the bathroom have any windows?” she asked Isaac hurriedly.

Isaac paused. “Yes,” he said slowly. “One small window— very small.”

Jane grabbed her bag and walked into the bathroom.

Isaac followed her in a panic.

“Get out!” she whispered at him menacingly.

“No!” he whispered back. “I know what you plan to do, Miss Harper.”

Jane shot him a glare. “I’m just gonna get a taxi, or something! I’ll walk to the mansion, if I have to. I will get this interview.”

She climbed up onto the sink and pried the window open with her hands. Isaac pulled her back down. “No! Stop!

Stop!” he urged her.

37

“Get off of me!” she struggled in his arms.

Isaac was adamant. “You will be killed! You will be killed and then I will!”

“Why would they kill you? You’re a teacher!” She tried to bite him on the wrist.

“I lied,” he said, suddenly. “Sono una spia. A spy.” Jane stopped protesting. He loosened his hold of her, and they stood there, in the cramped, little bathroom, panting. Isaac stared at the floor ruefully.

“A spy?” she hissed. “For Amargio? For Italy?”

Isaac sighed, running his hand through that curly hair.

“For the Vatican.”

Jane threw her bag on the ground. She wasn’t aware that the Vatican even had an intelligence department, and she told him that, very loudly.

“Keep your voice down,” he hushed her. “In the past, we had no need for one, but the cardinals decided, in this age of terror, that we needed to play a bigger role on the world stage. I am one of many operatives in the field.”

“Liska, you do know I’m a reporter, right?” asked Jane.

Isaac put his hands on her arms and looked into her eyes.

“I think we have a better chance of keeping alive if we stay together,” he said.

Jane regarded him with one eyebrow raised. The Vatican spy had a point.

“Fine,” she said, shaking his hands off her. “But that car is never coming. So, how about you man up and help me get out of this airport?”

Ormand tapped his foot on the stage uncertainly.

38

“The blue in the hall works well,” he said. “I want you to see it.”

“You failed to learn anything from my story,” Marina said with crossed arms. “And I picked the blue because it was perfect; I hardly need to see it to know.”

“I am asking you to come home,” he said.

She sighed. “Trust me, this way is better.”

“I need a better reason.”

“Because I might kill you if you insist on maintaining this illusion.” She jabbed her finger in his face accusingly.

“And I care about not killing you.”

“Illusion of what? Amargio is the safest, happiest country in the world.”

“Yes, but the world thinks we put our children in sweat shops instead of primary school. I read the Vine.”

Ormand crossed his arms too. “Stories like that are what keep us safe and happy, Mari. If I make a speech telling every civilized nation that I am not a real dictator, there will be chaos all over the world: lethal chaos.”

“Because Cuba will fire missiles at us.” Marina raised a skeptical eyebrow.

“And Russia and North Korea have their subs, and the U.S.—” “When did we piss off Korea?”

“Nobody did, but they bite at anything these days.”

She gave him a withering stare. “I know your reasons.

You think the story is best for our people. But despite what I have said before, I do not lose sleep over code blacks, Lee.” Marina snapped her fingers, pointing at him. “How do you like this for a story? Once there was a leopard who painted 39

on himself all kinds of colorful spots because he wanted to be beautiful and admired by the other animals. Do you know what happened to him?” She gave Ormand a meaningful look. “He died of lead poisoning.”

“Is that Aesop too?”

Marina stomped her foot. “How do I know?” Then, she reached out and held onto his wrist, tighter than he was expecting. “All I know is I worry about you. You are too young to look so old! And I know those headaches have not stopped.”

His migraine spiked to a new class of pain as if on cue.

As his head filled with fire, Ormand bravely suppressed a grimace.

“Mari, I really cannot see how my health is more important than national security,” he tried to deflect.

He quickly realized this was the wrong thing to say.

Marina was silent, but Ormand could tell she was just trying not to erupt. He recognized the face: she would bite at the inside of her lip and scrunch up her nose to keep from yelling. Finally, she spoke. “Well, at the top of the food chain, I would expect the lion to have a better view.” Then she quickly turned and stormed off the stage.

Isaac was at the wheel, since he claimed he knew the way to the presidential mansion. Jane clung to her seat, knuckles white, and she was smiling wildly.

“Are they still following us?” Isaac shouted.

Jane turned her neck and looked back. They were racing through the streets of Amargio in a stolen cart from the airfield. At first, the men of her security detail had tried to 40

pursue them, but the little buggy was able to reach a surprising speed, rattling and coughing as it did, and the men weren’t able to keep up with it on foot. As soon as their wheels hit the streets of the main city, the men had disappeared into the distance.

“No, we lost them,” Jane replied.

Isaac nearly hit a huddle of women dressed as nuns.

They stopped their singing and swore at him as the buggy drove on. The song they were practicing, Jane realized, was definitely from The Sound of Music. And this wasn’t where the weirdness ended. There weren’t any cars on the road, but Isaac had to swerve around people pushing carts laden with what looked like colorful masks, and large velvet curtains, and at one point a cow made out of painted papier-mâché.

Singers were on every corner. A bearded man was dancing on a roof down the block with a fiddle in his hands.

Jane had expected, from the stories, for the streets to be empty, or at least filled with mange-ridden dogs and beggar children with only rags for clothes and rocks for toys. She had expected dust in the air, hanging over shacks with cardboard walls. But the air here was sunny, and most houses had tapestries dangling out of windows. Some of the doors were painted in multicolor murals, of strange blue women swimming across the sky or fairies dancing in circles around a willow tree. And it slowly dawned on Jane, as the houses and palms flashed past, that maybe the stories she had heard were only stories.

The buggy stopped. Isaac turned to Jane, and his brow was worried into wrinkles. Just ahead—rising over the plaza like a marble giant—was the president’s mansion. It spoke 41

power in the cast of its columns, and strength in the sweep of its stairs. Its blue and white banners fluttered heavily in the tropical breeze.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Isaac asked.

Jane nodded. “Don’t you see what it’s like here? This isn’t the scary shithole we’ve all heard about. People are literally singing in the streets, for Christ’s sake.”

Isaac looked nervous. He kept pulling down on the tooshort sleeves of his suit. “Still,” he said. “You are not in Libya anymore, Miss Harper.”

“Clearly.” Jane hopped out of her seat. “Are you coming, or aren’t you?”

Isaac looked up at the mansion, and around at the buildings behind them. He followed her reluctantly across the blue and white checkered plaza. Jane didn’t see him take out his cell phone. She didn’t see him send a text, and there was no way for her to see the man in military uniform who received that text, waiting nearby with five similarly dressed actors. But she did stop, abruptly, and she turned to face him, hand on hip.

“I never mentioned Libya.” She tapped her foot on the plaza tiles.

Isaac looked up at her blankly. “What?”

“I don’t know what you’re fucking playing at, Liska, but I never said anything about Libya.” Jane pursed her lips, eyes narrowed to slits.

Isaac opened his mouth, then closed it, then opened it again, gulping like a fish, and with his hands he pulled at his sleeves. “I—” he said. “I—I was just—” Suddenly, a shot rang out.

42

Everybody finished mingling and took out their scripts.

Those who weren’t in the first scene filed into the house, while Bernardo and Francisco remained center stage.

Ormand, who was confused as to whether he was an ass or a leopard or a lion, and Marcellus, played by the steward of the Scenery Union, waited in the wings.

“Who’s there?” Bernardo called into the darkness.

Rehearsal had begun.

All through the first scene, Ormand had trouble focusing on the script. The points Marina had made, once he looked past the animal-themed fables, were ringing in his head with unavoidable urgency. His thoughts felt crowded, with the burning migraine and the lead-poisoned leopard and the strange choice he was only just realizing was his to make.

The way he saw it, he had two options laid out before him. He could continue as everyone always had: convincing the world Amargio was a nation in the Atlantic to be feared.

Or he could end the charade, and turn Amargio into the most vulnerable country on the map. He tried telling himself not to worry, to focus on the Jane Harper plan instead. The press usually gave Amargio a wide berth, and he wanted to keep it that way.

They were in the middle of the line: “How now, Horatio!

You tremble and look pale—” when a muffled bang sounded from somewhere outdoors. Ormand slapped his forehead.

He knew what that sound was: a prop gun being fired. It would have been promptly followed by Isaac Liska convincingly collapsing to the ground, a stain of blood pooling from the packet in his suit.

“Shit.”

43

“Is something wrong, Mr. President?” the director asked.

“That was too soon,” he muttered. He began to feel queasy.

The director scowled at him severely. “I need everybody to focus. Can you do that for me? Alright, take it from: ‘How now…’”

The rehearsal continued, with Ormand in a worse state than when they’d started. He was sweating copiously and kept fumbling lines. Marcellus, Bernardo, and Francisco began to give him mean looks. Ormand popped another ibuprofen on the side.

“Timing is everything!” chanted the director. “Remember your cues!”

Suddenly, the door of the theatre cracked open, and a woman slunk through. Her blouse was splattered with blood.

Her face was pale, as if she had just seen a ghost. But as her eyes took in the scene before her, she began to look more confused than frightened; perhaps she was wondering why some of Amargio’s highest-ranking officials were gathered on a stage. She slowly pulled a small notebook from her bag.

Ormand saw the yellow laminated tag on her lapel that read “Press Pass,” all his fears rapidly manifesting. His mind raced, searching for a way to explain. Nothing came. His lips grasped for words but they found none. He glanced into the front row, where his eyes rested on a fuming Marina. She was looking up at him, too, with that same lip-biting-nosescrunched face that he knew so well. There, with their eyes locked, something clicked in his subconscious, and he knew what he had to do. This was the moment. This was when decades of carefully spread stories, rumors, and threats would scatter like flakes of ash in the fiery breath of the fourth 44

estate. This woman was Jane Harper, and she was very early.

Jane stared across the rows of red velvet seats at the enormous stage on the other side of the theater. She could see Ormand standing with the other officials. Her heart was beating very quickly, and she could barely hear her own thoughts with the fire flaring so brightly in her head. With all of this she almost forgot the singing in the street. With all of this she almost forgot that a squad of men had shot Isaac in the plaza only a few minutes ago. All she could see was Ormand. All she could do was stare.

Then, behind her, with an ominous, creaking yawn, the maple doors opened. A tall woman strode through, and then two men, and then five more men, and then three men and six women, and then a whole flood of people until Jane lost count. They weren’t stopping, so she dove from their path, and sought shelter behind a nearby pillar.

Ormand watched uneasily as all two hundred members of the Costuming Union marched through those black maple doors. The striking costumers, led by Andrinette, were dressed in the still red corn syrup-stained garb from Macbeth.

Ormand thought they looked ridiculous, like some macabre pack of clowns.

The horde marched down the aisle in a resolute beeline for the stage. Jane’s jaw dropped as she saw what the woman in front was wearing—what they all were wearing.

Every single person was dressed in a blood-drenched uniform; a crowd caked in dried gore. They looked as if they had just massacred an entire village. Jane covered her mouth in horror, knowing that, given the circumstances, she probably 45

wasn’t far off.

Isaac’s face flashed in her mind: the burst of blood as he fell.

“Mr. President,” the woman in front addressed Ormand when she reached the stage’s apron. “I know you are very busy, but we need to talk. Now.” Ormand didn’t exactly know what came over him.

Looking back on it, he thought it might have been the sight of Jane Harper weakly scuttling out of Andrinette’s way to hide behind a pillar. It might have been the stress, or the migraine blazing in his skull. Whatever the cause, Ormand became annoyed.

“This is inappropriate,” he told Andrinette frankly.

“We could not wait until lunch,” she replied.

“I can see that.” Ormand paced the stage, eventually kneeling at its edge and looking imperiously over Andrinette. “But that was a mistake.” She raised an eyebrow. “Do you remember the forest being chopped down?” he asked.

He was referring to a section in Act Five, Scene Four of Macbeth when Malcolm’s army was directed to cut down trees to use their branches as camouflage. Ormand and a team from the props department had constructed that scene down to its smallest detail, and it was one of few good memories from the show.

“You mean for the army.” Andrinette nodded. “Yes, I remember.”

Ormand scanned the crowd of syrupy costumers. Some looked determined, confident, and others—most of them, he noted—looked hesitant, scared. He could see Jane Harper behind the pillar. Her face was a pallid green. “That was difficult work,” he said loudly so that everyone could hear, 46

even Miss Harper. “But they made it look easy, the way the branches fell, and the soldiers carried them on their backs.

“It was hard work but they never complained—never showed me the blisters on their hands—because that part is simple. We have to be strong; one unified force. Yet you continue to show me your weakness. You invade my home wearing the evidence of your incompetence, like I am supposed to feel sorry for you. Like you carry the world on your shoulders. I was happy to meet at noon, but you have forced me to reconsider.”

Meanwhile, in the back, Jane broke down. She staggered away from the pillar and leaned up against the wall, tears stinging her eyes. This was far worse than anything she expected—to be in the same room as dozens of bloodstained murderers. And there was Ormand above them, telling them they were weak.

“It was—” Andrinette stammered. “We thought—” Ormand cut her off: “You thought you were sending me a message.”

He paused for a moment, and his eyes darted to the pillar, but Jane had shrunk out of view. And then, he realized a kind of lightness had entered his head. The migraine, the aching and the fire, had vanished. Relief flooded through his whole body. Ormand turned back to the union, a sense of airy confidence billowing in his temples.

“I think you forgot who I am,” he said firmly.

Andrinette was not without tact; she recognized that he had nothing more to say to them. Keeping silent, she bowed at the waist and with her hands gestured to the people around her. After some sheepish shuffling and mumbling, 47

the syrup-drenched costumers exited the theater in a bloody procession, and the maple doors shut behind them.

But as he watched them leave, Ormand began to feel dizzy. The airy sensation in his head turned to fog. He blinked twice, his mind feeling fuzzy and his mouth was dry.

He swayed unsteadily. Marina stood from her seat. Lee was acting oddly; he had just stopped moving and talking altogether, and was staring out at nothing in a daze.

“Are you having another fit?” she called to him worriedly, her earlier anger forgotten in the moment. Hopping from her seat, she rushed to help him. “How do you feel?” Marina led him down to the edge of the stage so they could sit.

Ormand’s head began to clear once he was off his feet.

“Jane Harper is here,” he said. “She got here too soon, and now she has seen everything. I think—I think—” “Jane Harper, from the Vine? Is she lost? Was there a plane crash?”

A frayed-looking Corey joined them where they sat. “I was just told Miss Harper and Isaac are no longer at the airport. They are missing.” He showed Ormand the text.

Ormand stammered, “She—here. In the theater.”

Corey swore, loudly, so Marina socked him in the shoulder.

“Stop that! Will somebody tell me why an American journalist is in the country?”

“We invited her here,” Corey said, rubbing his arm sorely. “She was promised an interview with Lee, but we planned something else: an assassination with Isaac as the victim. She was supposed to be so terrified that she would leave by tonight.”

“And you thought that would work?” Marina snarled.

48

“All to keep telling this poisonous lie?” She glared at Corey, gesturing at her husband. “You are killing him; I hope you know. This whole nation is murdering him.”

“I have to tell her,” Ormand mumbled. “Everything. I have to.”

Corey and Marina both snapped their heads back to face him.

“No!” Corey shook his hands frantically.

“You be quiet,” Marina hushed him. “Yes, we are telling her everything.” She looked over her shoulder at Corey. “You cannot be killing my husband forever, Victor.”

Marina pulled Ormand up by his arms and together they descended from the stage. Corey could only look on helplessly, wringing his hands and cursing quietly.

“I will be there for you, but you must be the one to tell her,” she told Ormand as they walked up the aisle. While she spoke, Marina noticed she had a bit of a headache. It was only small, but it was distracting, spitting like a budding flame in a bed of coal.

They found Jane Harper collapsed against the furthest wall of the theater with her head in her hands. Her notebook lay forgotten at her feet, and they could see that she had torn some pages out, and crumpled them. Jane looked up with red-rimmed eyes as the couple advanced. She recognized the woman walking with Ormand from her picture in the file.

This was Marina Ormand, the First Lady of Amargio. Her face was thin but soft, and she was staring back at Jane with streaks of concern worked into her brow.

Marina studied this poor journalist on the floor. The 49

blouse she wore was splattered with red globs, which Marina realized were probably from Isaac’s blood packet. As Jane wiped her nose with her sleeve, Marina felt a pang of pity for the woman.

“Do you need help?” she asked, squatting down with her husband, hand-in-hand.

Jane opened her mouth, hoping to say something along the lines of: I’ll be fine, thank you. But the words got caught in her throat, and so she froze for a second, trying not to cough, or cry, trying not to remember the look on Isaac’s face as he fell to the ground—the way his chest exploded when the men shot—or the red-stained swarm who marched out only a few minutes earlier. She tried not to think about all the blood. Her eyes began to tingle with the forecast of tears again, and she silently cursed herself.

She turned her eyes towards the president. Looking at him, remembering the single purpose that had driven her to climb out of that bathroom window, to steal the airport’s buggy, had a strange effect on her. The words didn’t feel trapped anymore. In fact, up they bubbled, taking even her by surprise.

“Who did they kill?” she asked shakily, but directly.

“How many people?”

Marina flinched at the word “kill.” Her hand slid out of Ormand’s.

He wasn’t sure how to answer, so Ormand stayed vague, in the most neutral voice he could muster. “They made a mistake.” And it was the truth, after all. They should have known the witches’ cauldron would be filled with blood.

He looked fleetingly at Marina for any cues, but her face 50

was as blank as ash.

Jane heaved back a sob. There was a horrible aching in her head, and all she wanted to do was go home, to where things were different, to where things were better.

“I wanted this so badly,” she managed to say. “You don’t know how badly I wanted to come here and just talk to you.” Part of her wished the words would stop, but they kept coming out in wobbly surges, like a faulty fountain.

“I thought I could do it. I really did; I was sure. It didn’t matter to me that you were a monster, that you did such terrible things. I—Well, now I don’t know anymore.” Jane looked up at Ormand, her voice growing steadier. “I saw somebody die today. He was a spy. You must have found out because you shot him, right outside, in the plaza.” She took a breath. “His name was Isaac, and you probably don’t care, but he only did what he did because I asked him to help me… because I wanted this so damn badly.”

“We do not allow secret agents in Amargio,” Ormand said feebly.

Marina rubbed her forehead with her fingers, trying to massage away the ache that had taken root somewhere in her skull. Her eyes were unfocused, her face felt numb.

“You don’t usually allow journalists either.” Jane’s eyes cast downward bitterly.

Ormand looked to Marina. Her head was turned away, fixed dazedly on the wall. The strength she had once stoked within him was sputtering like a dying candle, and as that strength failed, their original motive for approaching Jane began to feel alien. The words he would have used, the faults and the reasons he planned on expressing back when the 51

maple doors first opened, back when his head still flamed with urgency, those words were a distant, unfamiliar delusion. Ormand had lost his fire.

So, instead, he looked into Jane’s eyes and he spoke as calmly as he could. “When you board your plane tonight, and while you fly back to your big city and your big newspaper, I want you to remember everything you have seen on our island. I want you to keep it vivid in your mind.” He picked up her notebook and handed it to her.

“Do not forget a single thing because finally, when you are back in your home, with your books and your routine, and you are told to write a story about what you have seen,” Ormand stood, and Marina stood with him, still as withdrawn, “I want you to look back on your trip.” He put his arm around Marina, like a lion with its cub. “And I urge you to think very deeply about whether ours is a story you want to be telling, after all.”

He and Marina left, she following him mildly. The couple passed through the black maple doors, and Jane watched them walk away without wondering where Ormand was going or what he was thinking or what he was going to do. All her thoughts were being muffled, muted as the fiery throbbing in her head began to rage more intensely.

52

53

Nothing Else Emily Mackenzie

my niece was gone before I even had a chance to meet her. All of the times I had knelt at Teresa’s feet—my hands around her large, round belly, giving eskimo kisses to the baby inside— seemed like a distant memory of something I had once read in a book or seen in a movie. I could almost imagine that she had never been pregnant at all, that the nursery hadn’t been decorated down to the smallest detail from a Pottery Barn Kids catalog. I could almost pretend that we hadn’t forced Joey out and into the guest room when we stayed up watching Love Actually and making weird concoctions, always involving ice cream, far into the night.

I stayed with Teresa a lot the summer before her due date.

I loved that she asked my opinion about everything baby when I didn’t even know how to hold one. Our text message thread for the past five months has basically been a bunch of pictures of baby things and a question mark from her end and a quick “Cute,” “No,” or “What even is that?” from mine.

The last message I had gotten from Teresa’s phone, dated October 16, 2013, read: “Resa’s water just broke, gather the troops. Joe.” Joey knew that my parents might as well have relied on The Pony Express to communicate over using the pristine smart phones they never had close by them and wouldn’t know how to use even if they carried them around, so he messaged me. I collected my parents and the five thousand congratulatory greeting cards my mother had bought, even though I told her not to bother, even though I knew Teresa wouldn’t care about a bunch of sentimental words on paper when she was in the middle of having her first kid. The cards were how my mother kept from worrying and I knew Teresa

would artfully collage them into the first baby book, empty and already angled decoratively in the corner of the coffee table, to make my mother feel good. Mom kept swerving all over the road, keeping up a one sided conversation alternating between excited “and thens” and panicked “what ifs” until my dad made her pull the car over and changed places with her so he could drive.

At the hospital, I reminded my sister of the promises I hadn’t made—to stay in the delivery room with her if it got too intense, and to be on diaper duty when I visited—and she nodded, smiled mildly before grimacing and breathing deeply through another contraction. When Teresa found out she was pregnant, she asked me to be the baby’s godmother.

I had told her I wouldn’t be the one-and-only. I had asked for a back up in case I got stuck at the maturity level of a seventeen year old and couldn’t figure out how the rest of life worked, let alone raise and mentor my orphaned niece. I didn’t mention this amended promise in the hospital hallway though, because I didn’t want to bring up the end of my sister’s motherhood before it even began. Nurses hooked my sister up to multiple beeping machines and the sense of urgency in the room heightened when they called in the Ob-GYN. They spoke calmly but rapidly as they bombarded my sister with questions about the last few days of her pregnancy. They couldn’t hear a heartbeat.

The next three hours went by in a disoriented blur. I stood in the hallway, helplessly separated from my sister, red eyes and tear-stained cheeks buried into my father’s warm, sturdy chest, soothed by the steady rhythm of his beating heart. I took a walk to the cafeteria, trying to keep from 56

passing out. When the blood suddenly rushed to my too hot, tingling forehead and blurred my vision, I leaned against the wall and sank down to the floor to let my heavy head drop onto my bent knees.

I ate a sugar cookie and drank a bottle of water. I went up and down different flights of stairs a few times and wandered through hospital hallways, grateful I wasn’t a dying patient and simultaneously wishing I was. A part of me hoped I’d get lost in the compartmentalized maze of doorways and catwalks, but somehow I found my way back to Teresa’s room, back into my dad’s arms.

When it was over, we were ushered back into the delivery room. I sat beside the delivery bed, resting my forehead on my sister’s outstretched hand; the absence of a baby’s first wailing emotions echoed in my already pounding head. Joey gripped Resa’s other hand on the opposite side of the bed in an attempt to hold her together and maybe to keep his own brave face from shattering to the floor in a million irreparable pieces.

A nurse came to move Teresa into a new ward on another level of the hospital. I imagined it was the recovery unit for broken hearts, because I knew our hearts were all so sad, but I also knew doctors couldn’t fix us. I found a trashcan along the way and slid the stork-embellished Hallmark cards from my purse to the bin to make sure my sister never saw them.

A silent weight shrouded each of us for about an hour and a half in Teresa’s new sterile room. I figured she would be tired, but she didn’t sleep. She just sat, motionless in the half-reclined, sanitized hospital bed, propped up by pillows, staring vacantly at a potted plant in the corner of the room. The first 57

words to come out of Resa’s mouth, the first words to break the clouded hush, were spoken to me.

“You okay, Lee? You aren’t dizzy anymore?”

She knew I always got light-headed in hospitals and doctor’s offices. I wanted to yell at her. I wanted to scream that she couldn’t be that selfless, but I only murmured, “Don’t worry.”

On the drive home, it was my dad who veered slightly toward the highway guardrail. In the rear-view mirror I could see tears brimming in his eyes, probably blurring his vision. I stared out the window for the rest of the drive home, alternately squinting and opening my eyes wide to make the streetlights dance in and out of watery focus. My dad opened the door and threw the keys onto the kitchen counter. Every action after, as we put ourselves to bed, seemed pointless and impractical. I felt like we were trapped inside a snow globe someone had turned upside down, but never righted to make the snow fall.

I didn’t go to school, in light of a “family emergency,” as my mother told the attendance secretaries every day that week. I sat at home on the couch bundled under a blanket in an oversized sweatshirt and fluffy slippers, letting my dirty blonde hair darken with grease every day I didn’t wash it.

I didn’t have the energy to be anything but useless to my mother, who was a cyclone around me, making funeral arrangements and trips back and forth from Resa and Joey’s place, trying to pack up the baby’s nursery before they came home. They spent a day and a half at the hospital for recovery—I wondered if doctors wanted to test Resa to see if her own body had rejected the baby, to see if they could find a cause for a perfect, living thing to suddenly just stop living.

58

But doctors see “complications” all the time.

Resa and Joey stayed two more nights at a Holiday Inn Express because she couldn’t quite handle having no baby to bring home on “Bringing Home Baby Day.” She had asked my mother to get everything out of the “spare room.” Six boxes of small baby toys and sleepers sat in our foyer, the extent of my mother’s attempt at purging the nursery before she gave up. I heard her on the phone telling Joey “it’s too soon,” “She might change her mind,” and “her instinct to want a fresh slate just isn’t rational right now.” The bassinet, the changing table, the canopied crib all remained lonely and unused in the corner bedroom of Teresa’s suburban townhouse. I figured that they would stay there for a long time, behind a closed door, until they were finally replaced by office furniture or sewing equipment. And maybe one day there would be another baby.

Resa committed to a baby name only to have it engraved on a small white marble headstone, to pronounce it in a funeral service on Sunday afternoon. Joey said she had stayed up half the night scrawling names on the complimentary Holiday Inn Express notepads. Elizabeth Suzanne.

The pastor called her “A little angel taken too soon for reasons only God can know.” He quoted Romans, that verse that says, “All things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to His purpose.” I thought that it was a stupid verse to use. I didn’t want anything good to result from this.

It has only been a week and a half since I got the text from Joey, but it feels like an eternity. Today was my first day 59

back at school. After only leaving my house for the funeral, it had gotten to the point where the extent of my lethargy was depressing me. But school didn’t lighten my ennui— my mother’s diagnosis—it just seemed like a lot of people I don’t talk to wanted to know where I had been for the last week and I really didn’t get why they even cared. I told them I had gotten my tonsils taken out. It didn’t feel like a lie because of the empty space in the back of my throat that had become raw from choking on tears. During third period, Mr. Keaton discussed ionic compounds using foam shapes to build a 3D model. It felt more like preschool arts and crafts than twelfth grade chemistry. Instead of paying attention, I debated whether or not to skip class and visit Resa.

We hadn’t spoken much since the baby’s funeral. My mother and father had carpooled back to Resa’s house after the service. My sister didn’t want a reception. She had patiently waited for the funeral to end, dry-eyed and somber; my ordinarily laid-back and laughing sister had vanished. I didn’t recognize her sitting like stone in the church pew and I didn’t recognize her as she moved vacantly from her front door to her bedroom, leaving the rest of us behind in the hallway. Joey followed her and I could hear their muffled voices coming from behind the closed bedroom door, while my parents and I sat rigidly on the sofa, each spaced slightly apart, not wanting to be the one to break the silence. It was awkward not knowing how I should act in Resa’s house, where I sometimes spent more time than I did at home. Now I somehow felt like I was trespassing.

“She says she just needs to take a shower. She’ll be out soon,” he told us when he came back out.

60

“There’s no rush,” my father said.

My parents and Joey continued to talk about how nice the weather was for the service and what Resa’s plans were now. They knew she was on maternity leave at work until New Year’s. They were trying to analyze her indirectly, afraid she was too fragile to talk about the future. I knew it was because they were worried, but Resa was my unbreakable sister, not a china doll. She reminded me of a greeting card I had seen with a picture of an orange on it—the rind was shaped into a person whose arms were wrapped around the large round middle. It said, Sometimes you just have to pick yourself up and carry on. Somehow Resa never seemed to doubt we could move past all of the bad things in order to experience the good.

I was tired of hearing so many pointless conversations. I got up and wandered across the room to the closed nursery door, opened it slowly, and shut myself inside. My parent’s voices alternately faded and sharpened as they moved around outside. I heard my mother pulling pots and pans out of the cabinets, probably scrounging some meals together for Teresa to keep in the freezer. I looked around at the room’s emptiness. The toys and stuffed animals that were propped up on the dresser and along the windowsill a few days ago were now in my front hall, packed away in boxes.

It looked like a movie set, staged with baby furniture and rented mobiles that no one would ever really use. I hated it. I opened the drawers, frantically looking for something left of our nine-month baby preparation, something personal. The dresser drawers were empty and I slammed them all closed shut again. I heard my father’s voice outside the door once 61

again asking Joey about Resa. His voice came closer and I could tell he was about to open it. I ran towards the door and pressed my weight against it, holding the door handle while he rattled it from the other side.

I wasn’t strong enough to keep him out and he pushed his way inside, “Are you okay, Aylee?”

“We just—we planned all this for the baby. There is no baby, Dad. What was the point?” I picked up a white stuffed bunny I hadn’t seen before lying in the bassinet.

“Aylee …” he said, confusion in his eyes. He couldn’t think of a proper response. My mother always said our quiet, contemplative personalities were so similar, we couldn’t even communicate with each other very well.

“Dad, Resa isn’t okay—they can’t be okay. She just lost her baby. We just lost our baby.” Tears had started streaming down my face and I couldn’t figure out how to get them to stop. Joey looked into the doorway to see if I was alright, but left at my words. I heard the soft thud of his office door closing. My father reached for me and I pushed him away, “How are we supposed to be okay?”

“We’re not,” my mother broke in, coming to stand beside my father. “You’re right, Aylee, we’re not.”

Just as my mom reached towards me, Resa came out from her bedroom wearing pajamas. She had taken her makeup off, but her hair was still dry. “What’s going on?”

“Sweetie.” Teresa didn’t hesitate to come into the nursery when she saw me, tear streaked and standing in the middle of the room. She wrapped her arms around me and my sobbing became uncontrollable. I felt like a toddler; they always seem to cry harder about a scrape when they see their moms.

62

“I know,” she soothed.

My sister peeled my hands away from her waist and swept my hair behind my ears, “I know.”

I looked into her intense, gray, crescent-shaped eyes. I dropped the stuffed bunny I was still holding and smeared the saltwater flood that had pooled beneath my eyes into my hairline with trembling fingers. She enfolded me into her arms again and stood on her tiptoes to press her lips to my forehead.

“It’s nice to do the consoling instead of being consoled,” she whispered.

Teresa picked up the small stuffed rabbit that lay crumpled on the floor, walked past me to place the bunny delicately in the crib, and circled back around us, out of the nursery to the kitchen where one of my mother’s pots was boiling over. My mother was the first to move and my father and I followed, his arm tightly clasped around my shoulders.

Mom returned to the kitchen to help Resa, greeting her by placing a hand on her lower back. They looked similar from the back, standing side by side, coping. My father sat down at the kitchen counter and I curled up with my knees to my chest, in a corner of the couch, watching them. I felt frozen again, like I would never be able to shake myself back into reality.

We hadn’t spoken much since then, other than making evasive small talk over the phone. I was too embarrassed to face her after I had been so dramatic and selfish, stealing all the attention. I should have been the one comforting Teresa, not the other way around. Thinking all of this over in Mr. Keaton’s classroom, I trashed the idea of visiting Teresa sev63

eral times before finally making the decision to go. I knew that as soon as I saw her, everything would be the same as it always was and I shouldn’t have been worried, because we were sisters and after that, there was really nothing else that mattered. I excusing myself to the bathroom, then headed straight out to my car instead. I made it off campus without any trouble from the security guards. I stopped at home first, and for my mother’s benefit, who probably didn’t even realize there was still an hour and fifty minutes until school ended, called “Going to Resa’s!” As an afterthought, I grabbed the bananas I had let over-ripen for banana bread off of the counter and slammed the door behind me.

One of my first memories is baking with my big sister.

Even when she decided to make a pie late at night, after my bedtime, our mother would let me stay up a little while longer to help because she knew I wouldn’t get to sleep any sooner if I thought I was missing out on the fun. Sometimes it just annoyed Teresa when I begged to stir everything together, but she’d always let me anyway, and we’d stand side by side in grandma aprons and sing along to the radio. She’d let me lick the spoon when our mother wasn’t looking, but always with the disclaimer that she wasn’t taking the blame when I got salmonella. I hoped we could have that back again. Banana bread was my sister’s favorite.

“Resa!” I called, using my key to open Resa’s door. . I set the bananas down on the counter and called again, “Resa!”

“In here, Aylee,” Teresa’s voice echoed over the hard wood floors from the guest bathroom. I grabbed a bag of caramel corn out of the snack cabinet before I went to meet her. I walked in to see Resa barefoot and wearing a pair of 64

Joey’s work jeans tightened with a belt so they scrunched around the top. Open paint cans surrounded her and there was almost as much paint smeared on her cheeks as there was on the walls.

“Hey, babe,” she said. She pulled up the sleeve of her tightly fitted, black long-sleeve shirt with a paint stained hand and looked at her watch. “Aren’t you supposed to be in class?”

“Yeah, but I thought we could hang out instead. Obviously, I made the right choice. Whatever this is a lot more interesting.” I looked up from the paint cans on the floor to the mural she was painting on the wall. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility for my art major sister to get a sudden urge to illustrate the bathroom wall like she’d decorated dressers and cabinets in the past; it was the painting itself that startled me. A large, floor-to-ceiling tree was cut in half by the door and its roots grew into dark, murky green lake water. Darker gray ripples on the water’s surface resembled the waves of a fading heartbeat on a monitor. A vibrant sunset of intermingling oranges, pinks, and yellows penetrated the water with long tentacles, contrasting the darkness of the tree and the lake.

“What do you think?” Teresa smiled at me, waiting for my approval.

“I like it,” I answered, stuffing a handful of sugary popcorn into my mouth. “Interesting choice for the bathroom, though.”

“Yeah. But I read somewhere that painting whatever comes into your head on a really big scale, somewhere that doesn’t accommodate mess-ups, makes it harder to concen65

trate on grief. It’s supposed to be distracting. Like you’re thinking really hard about what you’re doing, while not thinking at all about what you’re doing.”

“Yeah, okay. You totally just made that up so you’d have an excuse to paint absolutely everything in the whole house,” I laughed.

“You’re right,” she said. “Joey hasn’t said anything, but I knew he’d want a more rational answer than, ‘I wanted to paint, so I did.’ He’s much more of a simple, clean-line kind of home decorator.”

Teresa plopped the paintbrush she was holding into one of the cans around her ankles and stood staring at her work, her hands unconsciously resting on her stomach, and I just looked at her because I didn’t know what else to do.

“Lee?” Teresa finally said, brushing the dark baby hairs around her face back towards her messy ponytail. The eyes that dad said made every boy in high school want to date her had grown wide; I could see my reflection in the glisten of her welled-up tears. “Do you remember how we used to fall asleep watching the stars on that trampoline in the back yard? Even when mom wanted us to come inside, we’d just go grab more blankets and tell her—” “—We were sleeping in our planetarium. Because you had gone on an eighth grade field trip and decided to be an astronomer. You taught me all of the constellations.”

“We’d somehow still always end up in our beds in the morning and you thought it was magic in the stars that did it. That’s how I feel now, Lee. It’s like I’m that little girl lying under a big blanket of stars, being moved from place to place, but the magic’s gone and the sky’s closing in on me. I can’t 66

do anything about it.” She looked at me with tears trickling across her cheekbones. The first tears I’d seen from her at all.

She looked so helpless standing there. I didn’t know what to say to comfort her. What could I say to the sister who had held newborn me in her ten-year-old arms and in that moment vowed to be my protector, my teacher, my comforter?

I realized that maybe the scripture from Romans wasn’t so stupid after all because I wanted so badly to give Teresa something to look forward to, something hopeful, and I couldn’t. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t think of anything to say that would make this situation better.

I only repeated what she had said to me in the nursery: “I know.” And I did know. I always thought Resa was the strong one, but now I wondered if she had only seemed that way because she was older and she had to protect me.

Because she had to be. For me.

Somehow she just always knew the best thing to do, the best way to fix me, whether it was frosting sugar cookies or speeding down the old orchard-lined highways. She had wrapped me in her skinny, teenaged arms and laid her cheek on the top of my head when our grandma died. She told me that she loved me very much, that she would always be there, no matter how old we were, no matter how far apart.

Teresa spoke again, softly. “They told me my baby’s heart had stopped beating, probably days before I went into labor. But when I had called the doctor to see why she wasn’t kicking, she told me you feel it much less at the end of the pregnancy because the baby’s too big to move around much anymore. She said it was normal. I believed her. And maybe I shouldn’t have.”

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She suddenly seemed to realize we were still standing in the bathroom because she shook her head and raised her shoulders, as if she was trying to wake herself up from a bad dream. She brushed past me without saying anything else and I followed her into the kitchen, where she began pulling pots and pans out from beneath the stove, grabbing dishes from the cabinets and silverware from the drawers. I sat down at the kitchen counter and watched as Teresa began making the beef stroganoff recipe I had found online and ruined with too much salt the first time I made it. I loved that Resa looked Italian, or maybe Greek, with dark coloring that contrasted her olive-toned skin. She bore no resemblance to my light-skinned, pale-faced, long-limbed frame. She was less fragile-looking than I would have been, moving around the square kitchen, pouring and mixing ingredients in a big bowl, very businesslike, as if she had built a career on this one recipe and never admitted to herself that she hated it.

Resa seemed freer at her real job, happier. She first sketched ideas and sent them in for approval to a heavy guy with a mustache I had seen briefly at her baby shower. When she received his answer, which was always “yes,” she designed and painted master copies of posters to be printed for mass distribution. I wondered if she would go back to work before New Year’s or if she would just wait around, paint more walls.

But like my parents, I wouldn’t ask.

“Joey will like coming home to dinner on the table.

He always tells me how much he loves when I come over because we always get around to cooking,” I said, trying to make my voice light and teasing, but I knew that whatever followed Teresa’s words would feel out of place. I never knew 68

what to say, unlike Resa, who always sounded so eloquent even if she was talking to the guy behind the Albertson’s deli counter. I let long periods of time lapse between my answers in a conversation, so when I finally responded it never quite felt relevant, no matter what I said.

“Oh, since he took a couple of days off at work, he’s been completely swamped since he went back. He won’t be home until later, but I figured you’d stay for food.” She chuckled to herself as she poured the browned meat from one pan into a larger pan. The family always joked that I shouldn’t be “skin and bones” the way I was always eating.

“I was already planning on staying anyway. I’m tired of being at home.”

“You need to get out of the house more, silly. Even if it’s just to go see a movie or drive around. With someone other than me or Dad.” “You sound like Mom,” I said, rolling my eyes. My mother, in the most motherly way possible, nagged me about staying in on Friday nights, then complained when I wasn’t home.

“Alright, alright. Why don’t you go put a movie on? I’ll finish sautéing these, it’ll cook for half an hour, and we can snuggle in bed with dinner.”

I left my sister busy in the kitchen, and paused for a second by the closed baby room door before heading into her bedroom. I was determined to pick a movie that didn’t have children in it, wasn’t super depressing, and had a happy ending. I finally settled on French Kiss, a ’90s movie my sister and I grew up watching with our mother. When Teresa came in, Meg Ryan was panicking on a simulated airplane flight, 69

and she commented on how long it had been since she’d seen the movie, leaving, then coming back to stand awkwardly in the doorway until the food was ready. We giggled and talked through the entire movie, reminiscing about the movie nights we had with our mom when Teresa was only in high school and still lived at home. But when the credits started to roll, Teresa got up to put pajamas on, and those days felt really far away. She came back and curled up under the covers. Confessions of a Shopaholic was playing on TV, but Teresa fell asleep before the movie was halfway over and I turned it off. It was only seven-thirty, but I knew that she was exhausted and simply trying too hard to keep moving at the same pace as before her pregnancy, before she was a mother for nine months.

I leaned down and kissed the top of Resa’s head, knowing that she always kissed me goodnight when I was little, even if I was already asleep. She sometimes still did on late visits to Mom and Dad’s when I was already in bed. I whispered, “I love you very much, and I’ll always be here, no matter how old we are, no matter how far apart,” before pulling the blankets up to her shoulders and switching off the lights.

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71

In the Trees Brian Loewen

from the highway just below the top of the east-facing ridge, the amber light shrouded Feather River Canyon in a premature dusk. It was only early afternoon, the sun still well overhead, but the smoke from the fire burning on the other side of the river had filtered out half the sunlight in the valley below. Two men in green and yellow Nomex pants and pullovers arrived at the edge of the road and looked down towards the distant river. Eighteen other men stretched out behind.

“By the time we got down there it would be two-thirty or three,” Martinez said to his boss. Fish stared back at him without expression, “You know what I mean.” Martinez said.

“Yeah, well I’m worried about the wind too. Kinda tough to tell the Incident Commander we’re not going down there though, seeing how it’s not blowing at the moment.”

Fish said.

“I was just thinking that this part of the Feather runs north-south and if it does start to blow from the north, which you know is the prevailing wind ‘cause you grew up in this hillbilly infested area, it’ll probably jump the river and come munching up the hill for our asses.”

Fish thought it over. “Let’s go down a ways and see if we can get a better look at it, then we’ll decide what to do,” he said. He looked at Martinez with a grin. “By the way, we prefer to be called mountain folk.” He motioned for the crew to follow. “Tool order,” he barked, and started downhill.

Martinez smiled. “Let’s go then,” he said, and dropped into the canyon. Martinez turned to look at the men following him and thought back to the beginning of the season.

He and Fish had been standing away from the rest of the crew as they burned brush piles in their forest, just miles from their station. Jake Fish looked like he could be he model for a Forest Service Superintendent poster: he stood six feet two inches and had a lean runner’s frame with curly, sandy colored hair protruding just the right length from under his helmet. His uniform and all of his prescribed gear looked used and reliable. All of the confidence he exuded into the air seemed to be inhaled and recycled by his men.

“You liking any of the new guys to make the squad this season?” Fish had asked, hands on his hips and his chin slightly raised.

“I think two of ‘em will make it,” Martinez told him.

“Probably Walters—you know he worked Cal Fire two summers ago?—and I think the kid from San Diego can hack it.”

“Ok, we’re on the same page there.” Fish said. Martinez didn’t let his face show it, but his chest filled with pride.

Every man on the crew desired Captain Fish’s respect, but to his second-in-command, it meant the world. Martinez looked down the dirt road that led from their station back to the highway, his mind already making the long drives the summer would bring. It was the third dry winter in a row, and fire prognosticators were predicting the worst season in a decade. He smiled. “We’re gonna be living the dream all damn summer.”

The crew made their way down a shifty trail, little puffs of dust billowing up with every boot step. Tool order was how the crew walked into every fire: the superintendent followed by the two co-captains, a squad boss, then the saw 74

teams, made up of a sawyer and a swamper, followed by men with long handled tools, and finally, the second squad boss bringing up the rear.

As a co-captain on the crew, Robert Hinkle walked third in line as the team snaked its way down the canyon. Everything he walked past had some layer of dust—there had been no rain to speak of for well over three months in the Feather River Canyon. The north fork of the river came out of the dam at Lake Almanor and descended more than four thousand feet in seventy miles. The river was dotted with eight Depression-era hydroelectric powerhouses as it raced to the valley floor. A two-lane highway followed its path up the canyon. At its widest, the path down from the highway to the river was only two feet.

The amount of red-orange dirt that covered the evergreen hardwood shrubs, tall pines, granite boulders, and even the insects made it seem as if they were walking down a barren dust bowl. The forest was sparse on the canyon’s slopes, giving little shade; because of the smoke, the diffused light from above decreased every few minutes. The smoke from the fire rose straight up, but was making no attempt to leave the canyon. At points along their descent, the river was visible, water now a dull grey against the muted greens on both sides. The smoke began irritating their eyes and throats.

Coming back from two weeks in Montana, they had been only twenty miles from their northern California home base when the call had come in. They could have been breathing clean air, showering, opening the first cold beer in two weeks, or even lighting their grills in anticipation of a hot meal.

Instead, they were now guaranteed to work the rest of this 75

day and probably spend the night out here. Hinkle smiled and said, when the call came in, “Sometimes you get lucky and you get to fight fire.”

The trail had been worn by fishermen and those seeking the cold water of the river. The highway was visible only briefly as they descended; this portion of the canyon was steep, and the trail switch backed tens of times as they walked.

The footing was all pale loose rocks and dust. They had left their transportation, two mint green United States Forest Service crew hauls, in a turnout off the highway and walked a half-mile before the trail made its last visible hairpin.

“How big you make that burn right now, Martinez?”

Fish asked as they came to a junction in the trail, a huge piece of grey and black granite jutting out of the side of the mountain. A natural lookout point. He knew the time for a decision was here.

“Four acres, if we’re seeing all of it,” Martinez said. He peered down at the fire, less than a mile away now. “I can’t tell if it goes around the corner.” As the men looked to the north, the river turned to the west and out of sight, the left side of the canyon blocking their view.

“Hinkle?” Fish turned to the other co-captain. He would hear from them both before putting the crew into harm’s way. Hinkle was tall, stocky, and plain looking. While not a great motivator of men, Hinkle was a born workhorse; he went about his job as if all his German ancestors were looking on to gauge his diligence.

“I’m with Martinez,” he answered. “I don’t like the amount of smoke, though.” He looked down at the river, then back up towards the ridge they had left forty-five min76

utes earlier. “I guess if it’s been smoldering overnight with no wind I could see it, but it just seems like a lot of smoke.”

“Fuel changes here,” Fish said, pointing out the change in slope and the abundance of dried wood and vegetation below them as the canyon began to flatten out. Martinez and Hinkle knew that Fish was asking their opinions on moving down to confront the fire or stopping and turning around.

The fire was more visible now. Stretching for two hundred yards along the other side of the river and up the face of the canyon, the whole of it slowly burning, small pieces of light green vegetation peering out of the grey and black. A shared silence filled the air and comforted the three men as they looked downhill; there was no rush.

Those in the business of fighting wildfire call this part of the day the witching hour. From mid to late afternoon, winds are likely to shift or intensify and intensify the danger of being in a burning forest. This is what they thought of as they looked down at the blaze. Escapes routes or safe havens were needed if a crew decided to walk downhill to meet a fire at this time of day.

“If it stays like this, I doubt it’s gonna blow up.” Martinez said, referring first to the wind and then to the fire. “We have any idea of the weather? Or if anyone has had eyes on this from above?”

“The weather’s supposed to hold, and no one has seen this from the sky as far as we know,” Fish told Martinez.

“As of now we don’t have air assets. They’ve been rerouted because of a fire threatening structures to the north.”

“We can control the leading edge of the fire if it moves left or right,” Hinkle said “We have the river to fall back on.”

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“That’s all true, but what’s the goal here? It could burn uphill to the top and downstream without burning any structures.”

Fish mulled it over before he said, “Don’t forget about the hydro-dams. I’m not worried about it burning to the top of the other side, but if it moves left or right it could reach one of the powerhouses pretty quickly.”

Martinez tilted his head back and closed his eyes, surprised he hadn’t thought of the dams.

“You’re not telling me we’re going to walk back up to the road while it burns our backyard, are you, Fish?” Hinkle said.

The Tahoe National Forest was split into four pieces, and the northwest quadrant, called the Yuba district, was theirs.

“Yeah, I take back what I was saying. We can’t let those powerhouses burn,” Martinez said.

“Okay,” Fish said, convincing himself that he could continue making decisions to keep them safe, knowing he could not let the fire reach the dams. “I’m going to keep walking north parallel to the river with one saw team and two tools.

Hinkle, take the same and walk down at a forty-five degree angle north towards the river. . Martinez, take the rest of the guys and head straight down from here.” Fish pointed at a thin trail that led down the remainder of the mountain to the water. “Don’t cross and engage until I have eyes on the other edge of the fire beyond the bend.” Fish motioned at the radio clipped to the front strap of Martinez’s pack. “Hinkle, you’ll be support for Martinez or me depending on which way the fire moves. We’re going to cut line up the hill on either side of it so it can’t go north or south. Once it gets to the top of the canyon, it’ll burn itself out.” Hinkle nodded and stepped 78

out of line to grab his saw team and tool men. “I don’t think it’ll take more than an hour for me to get around the corner.”

Fish said, looking at the two of them. “Both you guys take a squad boss. Talk to you soon.”

As Fish’s team moved north, they came to a cut in the trail. A dry runoff chute down the side of the canyon wall had split the trail the previous winter, leaving a ten-foot gap where the water had washed it away. Farther down the canyon wall the ground leveled out drastically.

“Let’s head down towards the river and go from there,” Fish told the guys. He eyed the other side of the cut, where the trail picked up again. Fish moved downhill. The sight of the broken trail had made his stomach go sour. It was an ancient feeling for him.

Martinez had asked Fish about it once, four years earlier.

They had been sitting on the back patio of Scooter’s Bar and Grill close to dusk, drinking beer. It was a Tuesday after work and there was no one else with them out back. Scooter’s was a bustling biker hangout on weekends. During the week it was home to Pacific Gas and Electric guys that worked the canyon, construction workers, and guys from the Hot Shot crew after work.

“Can I ask you about that rookie on your crew up in Bend that fell?”

Fish had looked at his beer, and just when Martinez was about to apologize for bringing it up—to tell Fish to forget he ever mentioned it—Fish began to speak. He told Martinez how this rookie kid, a friend of the captain’s family, who 79

no one on the crew liked, had been a major pain all season.

The guys were going to ask the captains not to bring him back the next season. The kid was a loud-mouthed knowit-all. Towards the end of summer they had been hiking back to their crew hauls after mopping up a brush fire. The rookie kid walked in front of Fish as he brought up the rear, when he was still a squad boss.

They moved along a ridge that dropped off to the left down a cliff. Fish said eighteen other guys had just walked on the same stretch of ground, but when the kid stepped on it a three-foot section of the trail simply gave away. The chopper took an hour to get to the kid and the crew took over two hours to get down to the body. Everyone thought, or hoped, the kid had died right away, that he hadn’t lain at the bottom of the cliff alone and in pain. Fish said the worst part about it was that nobody had liked that kid, worse still because he would have been the next and last to walk that part of the path. It made the guilt never ending. It kept him up nights and developed in him a sense of dread that grew with every promotion.

“Don’t mind you asking,” Fish had said, “but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t bring that up again.”

“We’re in place.” Hinkle’s voice came over the radio. Martinez looked upriver instinctively as a warm gust of air washed past his face. He couldn’t see Hinkle, but he figured his co-captain’s crew was about a half mile up from them.

“You feel that, Hinkle?” Martinez asked about the wind.

“Roger” “Fish?”

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“Yeah, we feel it.” Fish said. “I’ll be around the corner in five.”

As they walked down the drainage, their vision of everything to their right and left had been blocked for fifteen minutes. Fish and his men found the high water mark, thirty yards above the river, and used the clear ground to round the bend, moving over whitewashed boulders and rocks. The wind was pushing everything downriver now. As he got his first look at the fire’s northernmost edge, Fish felt the top of his head tingle, dread like bile welling up in his throat.

A quarter mile north of their position, a makeshift campsite next to a felled tree sat deserted; a small hole smoldered where a campfire had been built with no ring. A pile of driftwood underneath the tree was blazing. Just then, a hot blast of wind sent embers skyward, orange stars against a darkening ceiling. Because he had not been able to see as his team walked down the cut to the river, Fish wondered how long it had been throwing embers like that, a dandelion letting loose spores in the wind. It was likely the fire had already jumped somewhere else in the canyon. Fish now saw why there was so much smoke: the fire must have jumped from the brush pile during the previous night and crept south in the mild conditions, smoldering all night. Now the driftwood pile had been fanned by the wind and was spitting fire into the air, taking it far above their heads back the way they had come.

The wind was ever increasing. In twenty years of fighting wildfire it was one of the worst sights Fish could have imagined; both of the squads behind him were in bad positions now, deep in a canyon with no air support.

“Martinez, how long would it take you to get back to 81

the lookout we left from?” Fish asked, weighing options in his head.

They had been at the edge of the river for over an hour now. Martinez thought about it, “25-30 minutes back up the hill,” he said. “What are you looking at?”

“There are embers in the air. It may jump the river.”

“What do you want us to do?”

Hinkle broke in. “I have smoke above your position, Martinez.”

As he heard Hinkle, Martinez looked in shock over the river. Across the water to their left, the fire moved southward with ferocity. It was burning the green Manzanita like deadwood.

“It’s running,” Martinez said into his radio.

“Fish, I don’t think they should move uphill,” Hinkle said over the radio. “I make that smoke between them and the lookout.” Moments passed as the two co-captains waited for Fish to speak.

Martinez’s voice broke the silence, an octave higher than before. “We’re getting a downdraft now.” The wind was now coming down side of the canyon towards the southernmost crew.

“Say again Martinez?” Fish came back. “It’s still in our face from the north here.”

“Yeah, I’m telling you it’s coming from down the ridge.”

Fish fought the terror clouding his mind, knowing that the wind Martinez was feeling was probably created by the flames above him. His failure to imagine this scenario and his desire to keep the hydro-dams from burning had put Hinkle and Martinez’s crews in jeopardy.

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“Damn hero,” he muttered.

“It’s in the trees across the river from us!” Hinkle shouted over the radio, meaning that the fire Hinkle was looking at had moved from the brush and debris along the ground and was now moving into the pines, hot enough to burn live trees, much hotter than any of them had previously thought.

Fish was speechless for a beat. “Confirm it’s in the trees, Hinkle?”

“Affirmative, the fucker’s in the trees and it’s running now.”

Fish made his decision instantly, forcing down his panic.

“Both crews move north towards me!” He considered all other routes compromised. Man cannot outrun an active fire moving uphill.

Martinez had his men moving at once, and for a quarter mile they made good time along the rocks next to the river.

Then, a huge shoulder of granite blocked their path and forced them into the cold water.

Fish managed to stay off his radio for fifteen minutes, knowing his men were moving as fast as they could.

“Hinkle, how’s your progress?” he asked, trying not to sound desperate.

“We’re coming along fine, almost to the bend, the fire is on both sides now though. We’ll be wading the last hundred yards.”

“Copy.” Fish said. “We’re right at the bend.” He wanted badly to move downriver, but knew there was no strategic advantage to it unless someone radioed for help. His mind could not comprehend how the situation had become so dire.

Standing at the edge of the river, time had ground to a halt for the superintendent.

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Martinez walked calf-deep in the river and glanced back up the west side of the canyon, the way they had come three hours earlier. For a brief moment, he allowed himself to imagine they had never walked down here. He tried to double his speed. The fire was now burning on both sides of the river, the heat pressing the men in the middle. Martinez turned his head and shouted to his crew. “We’re gonna walk this river north until we meet up with Hinkle and Fish, then we’ll look for some black on the east side.” He was surprised how confident he sounded. The smoke was now rolling across the surface of the water and the men could see no more than a hundred feet in front of them. Martinez didn’t know how hot it was going to get between the two fire fronts now that it was fully involved on both sides. Probably too hot, he guessed. He marveled at how fast the fire had blown up. Trees on both sides of the river were fully engulfed. He looked up at the majesty of it, red flames dancing skyward on a smoke black canvas, impossibly dark at five in the afternoon. They could lay in the river with just their heads sticking out to breathe if it got to that. Over the roaring flames and splashing water, no one heard him laughing at the thought of hypothermia.

Hinkle and his guys had made it to Fish five minutes before he called on the radio again.

“Martinez, what’s your location?”

“In the river heading north. It’s getting really hot, Fish.”

Martinez said, sounding more than worried.

From where Fish, Hinkle, and the rest of the crew stood at the northern edge of the fire, it appeared as if it would not move towards them. Only Martinez’s crew was still at risk.

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Fish knew the men around him felt helpless now. The wind had increased and was pushing the fire south. Soon there would be a completely scorched area around the campsite on the far side of the river. ‘Good black,’ they called it: an area burned of all its fuel turned into a safe place to wait while the wildfire ate everything around you and eventually moved on.

Knowing Martinez had already considered the option, Fish radioed him. “If the water is shallow enough, you can deploy in the river. If it gets to that.”

Every firefighter carried a collapsible aluminum personal fire shelter, a tiny metal tent meant to keep its occupant alive as a fire raced over. They only worked if the fire didn’t linger.

Fish had never heard of one being used in a river. Saying the word ‘deploy’ over the air filled him with self-loathing.

A man stands upwind and tells his protégé to kneel before chance and hope for the best?

“Copy,” Martinez said. “That’s not plan A right now.”

“Get over here, then!” Fish urged. He looked to the sky.

From the moment Hinkle had told them all that the fire had jumped the river, Fish had been on the radio demanding air support for his crew. He constantly gave coordinates from his hand-held GPS unit. Water from the air from a helicopter on either side of the river, right into the flames, would buy time and almost certainly guarantee the lives of Martinez’s squad. Instead of sending support at the time of Fish’s first transmission from the top of the ridge, Air Attack HQ waited to designate a chopper for a drop until the firefighters were in danger. The ETA on the chopper was imminent.

Fish was no longer worried about the dams. With air support on the way, the hydro-plants would be kept safe. Eyes 85

from above in that sweet noon hour would have made their descent unlikely; the smoldering driftwood pile could have been discovered. Too late for all that, Fish knew, forcing his mind back down to the river where it belonged.

Just as he heard the faint beat of the helicopter overhead, he made out one, then two, then five men round the bend in the river south of him. Martinez and his men had made a miraculous run up the river that was bound for legend. As they came on, past the back edge of the dual-sided blaze, his men screamed a primal sound of triumph. “Thank you,” Fish said to no one.

Martinez’s eyes welled as they turned the corner and he saw the rest of the crew. Fifteen men waved their hands in the air and splashed water as they celebrated the return of their brothers. The tears that blurred his eyes were not for his life or those of his squad. Martinez wept because he had done right by his hero. He had returned the men to Fish.

Fish wanted to break down as well, but refused; his wandering eyes betrayed his beaming smile and laughter as they looked back down the river. He let go of the notion that his decisions would always allow for the best chance of his crew’s survival; Fish knew it could have turned out a multitude of ways, all worse than this.

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A Note About the Type The running text for this book was set in Adobe Caslon Pro. Originally designed in 1722

by William Caslon, it became instantly popular throughout Europe and the colonies, being Benjamin Franklin’s font of choice and the original printed font for the Declaration of Independence. The display types for this book are Avenir and AlexandriaFLF.