Page 12 of Smoke Season

Thank God. But what about True? The smoke could be funneling into the river valley by now, since the fire raged so hard here. Given the unprecedented speed of this fire, would she have to pivot from her usual course? Mel couldn’t decide which was worse: True failing to carry out this week’s handoff, crucial to keeping Annie’s meds flowing, or getting stuck en route, putting herself, and her river clients, in danger. A quick swell of anger, not unlike the resentment that simmered persistently below it, arose in Mel. Just for once she’d love to have actual viable choices placed in front of her instead of the shit hand she and everyone she loved had been dealt.

Get your head on straight.Firefighters who had half their brains elsewhere made mistakes. Sometimes big ones. Occasionally fatal ones. She’d promised herself, from the start of this mess she’d gotten them into, that nothing like that would happen on her watch.

She only allowed herself to iMessage Sam back, cursing under her breath when she got a predictableText not sentmessage. She tried again, sending the words as an iPhone text message instead.Fire gaining. Annie ok?When this attempt, too, resulted only in a scrolling wheel of death, she bit back another wave of worry—for Annie, for all of them—and simplified further, even though she knew this new message, in its succinctness, stripped down to only what mattered most, could alarm Sam.Love to all. Kiss girls for me.She hit Send three times before she heard her message sling through the ether with awhoosh.

CHAPTER 6

Twenty minutes later, Mel and the rest of the Carbon Rural team had regrouped down-mountain. There they staged, once again fueled up, yellowed up, and ready with nothing to do but wait.

“All dressed up with nowhere to go,” José noted, settling onto the running board of his truck.

“Like Deklan when he wassosure Hailey Myers was going to ask him to Homecoming,” Ryan threw out, earning himself a smattering of laughs from the younger volunteers and a smack on the arm from Deklan. The rest of the crew found a seat on stumps or in vehicles to await the arrival of the additional muscle they’d requested.

The neighboring agencies made their appearance within minutes. First Eagle Valley, then the sheriff’s department. Oregon Department of Transportation’s larger rigs couldn’t climb higher than the base of Flatiron, but even so, the sound of their additional trucks staging on the Forest Service roads below provided a sense of comfort. Some pulled tractors and bulldozers on flatbeds behind them, and the occasional screech of metal on metal as trailers were unhitched reassured the crew that the collective firefighting community was now behind them.

Everyone wore their Buffs over their mouths and noses now, and most of the men and women looked fidgety as they awaited orders from their respective superiors, packing and repacking their gear. Mel understood: everyone was anxious to either get started fighting this thing or get the hell out of here, one or the other. Her own musclestwitched as she shifted from boot to boot, her very cells seeming to hop around like electrons illustrated in a science movie shown in class. It was a feeling Mel listened to, a gut instinct if you will, a sixth sense. It was time for action.

“What do you think, Chief?” she asked the Eagle Valley officer standing closest. She reported only to her own superior officers, but she valued his opinion. “She look like she’s gonna take a run to you?”

Because it sure did to her.

Before he could answer, Doug White chimed in.

“I don’t think things could get too hairy.” He threw an indulgent look toward the officer as if to say,Leave it to a woman to overreact.

“If the breeze picks up,” Mel pressed, “we could see this fire make a play for the west, northwest.” Even without wind to fuel it, the flickering swath of flame before them hadn’t settled down since dawn.

The potential trajectory was obvious, at least to her, but White only offered a grunt that sounded a lot like a scoff. Mel refused to rise to the bait. If she planned to make fire captain before she turned forty-five, with the raise that would go along with it, she needed to exude confidence. When the Eagle Valley officer nodded, giving her words weight, Mel gave herself a mental pat on the back. Finally, they could see her point. But no: it was just that Chief Hernandez had arrived on scene, stepping up behind her.

“I’m thinking this blaze could run west, boss,” White contributed immediately, as Mel’s face heated with instant and righteous rage.

She couldn’t help it, even knowing fighting her profession’s built-in patriarchy would do her about as much good as Deklan trying to get out of cleanup duty. She knew the drill: no matter how hard she worked at every PT, no matter how well she scored on every training course, and no matter how many Coronas she drank with the guys off shift when she’d rather just be at home, she’d never be part of the boys’ club. She suspected it had already cost her a fast-tracked promotion or two. If she failed to bite her tongue, it could cost her job. And Mel couldn’t afford to lose even a day’s pay.

Hernandez eyed the pine needles blanketing the dry dirt, the dense sage clinging to the slope of the west bank, carpeting Flatiron all the way to the peak, and nodded. “We’ll stay on alert.”

“Should we work to meet the dozers in the meantime?” Mel asked, because that uneasy feeling returned to her gut. “Start cutting containment between here and there?” Wind, ground fuel ... either factor could change everything in an instant, sending their crew scattering, making retreat the only option again. She couldn’t stomach the idea of putting her people at risk because the likes of Assistant Chief Doug White couldn’t read a forest fire.

Hernandez gave her suggestion some thought but ultimately dismissed it. “We’ll wait and see, as I said.”

White did a poor job of trying to hide a condescending smile, and with a sigh, Mel settled uneasily back in to do as told. Prevailing fire-science wisdom did dictate that whenever possible, nature needed to run her course. Still, she wished the fire-science PhDs in Salem could stand in her crew’s boots on the front line a few times.

As she breathed shallowly through the filter of her Buff, her mind flitted to Annie, down in town. Was she struggling for air, too, in the cramped apartment over the Eddy? Her asthma was always worse when the air quality dipped. What if her oximeter numbers made her ineligible for surgery?

Mel made a mental note to ask their pediatric team. It was the never knowing that was the hardest part of parenting Annie. The first time her daughter had experienced what the specialists called a “tet spell,” she’d turned blue within seconds. When your baby couldn’t breathe and you had to reach for the supply ofmorphine—of all things—that you always had to have on hand, you realized really quick: this was parenting at a whole new, terrifying level.

While other parents worried their kids might not get invited to the latest birthday party, or have trouble learning to read, or miss a field trip due to a head cold, Mel got to worry her daughter’s blood wouldbe suddenly denied oxygen. And a spell could hit anytime, anywhere, out of the clear blue sky, gray sky, and all skies in between.

Even when they had a good day, or a good week, Sam and Mel were left to wonder: How long would it last? Holding one’s breath while your baby lost hers, waiting for the next downturn—which always came—was exhausting as hell.

“Bishop?”

She jumped, startled. Ryan had sidled up next to her, a frown on his soot-dusted face. “How long are we gonna be standing around?”

Mel looked for Hernandez, but he’d already left the scene, then sidelong at White, but he was staring at his phone, so she decided it was up to her to toe the company line. “As long as it takes for this fire to decide what she’s gonna be.” She sighed, wishing she could give him a different answer.

Ryan was a hard worker, eager to follow whatever order came down. She tried to keep the frustration out of her own voice. It wasn’t Ryan’s fault that White had undercut her, or that watching the Flatiron Fire felt a lot like watching Annie reach every infant milestone with bated breath. Would she roll over on time? Would she sit up? Would her breath be suddenly snatched from her lungs? Mel and Sam had scrutinized her for any and every slight change.

True had been nothing short of a lifesaver, Mel remembered as Ryan wandered away, digging a granola bar from his pack. Even if True didn’t feel that same, awful constant tug between family and career that Mel felt every waking moment of her life, some of Mel’s favorite family memories included her—scratch that, werebecauseof her.

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