Page 64 of Smoke Season

She shook herself free. “Sam, I can’t!”

The sudden sense of abandonment as his fingers grasped empty air brought another question to Sam’s lips. “Where’s Claude?” he asked in a panic.

As Mel wedged the door open just enough to slide back through it, they all glimpsed the answer to this question at the same time. Claude had fallen again between the hallway and living room and was now trying to ease himself back on all fours.

Oh, Claude.

Mel reached him first, pulling him to his feet with one shaky arm and turning him back in the direction in which she’d come. “Go!” she told him. “You’re halfway out already! You, too!” she told True. “Go with him!”

The tone of her voice had Astor lifting her head. “Mom? Don’t you leave, too!” she cried in panic, looking up through the haze of smoke. “What are we going to do?”

Mel crouched down to meet Astor at eye level. She touched Astor’s quaking shoulder briefly, then Annie’s, in a trail of a caress, like she was both loath to leave and loath to stay, where she would be as impotent as the rest of them. Sam understood completely.

“True and I are going to keep the house wet,” she told her. “Claude, too. Dad already started the lines. We’ll keep the house wet, and that will help.”

“It will keep the fire outside?”

Mel hesitated, her jaw doing that thing it did when she couldn’t quite stomach what she had to say next. Sam had seen it often enough. “It will help,” she repeated.

“But when will this be over?” Astor cried, as unsatisfied with this answer as Sam. She looked frantically from Mel to Sam to Mel again.

Again, Mel struggled for an answer. Finally, she said, “Soon.” Her throat worked as she swallowed hard. “It will be over soon, baby.”

A hitch in her voice made this even harder to hear. Tears from the smoke and so much more bled a trail down the dirt and grime on Mel’s cheeks as she rose from her crouched position to leave.

Sam wanted to stop her again. Wanted it as much as Astor. Instead, he locked eyes with her one last time, hoping he could ensure her safety by sheer willpower alone.

She sensed it. “Don’t worry. We’ve got Lewis outside as well,” she told him. “And Sam?” She returned his gaze. “That was a good call, turning on the water. A great call.”

The gratitude Sam saw in her eyes burned away the edges of the fear for just an instant, but then she was on the move again.

He crawled into the soaker tub with his girls, feeling through the smoke for Astor’s hand, for Annie’s. “Okay,” he whispered—or cried, he wasn’t sure which—into their ears, brushing their wet hair back from their sweat- and water-soaked heads, letting them bury their small faces into his chest. “Okay, babies. It’s okay.”

He curled his body around them, and the three of them huddled there, in the tub, Sam reminding himself over and over that he didn’t need to play the hero. The mother of his children more than filled that role.

Mel knew the impossibility of fighting a wildland fire with a garden hose. But here she stood, legs braced against the wind and the heat and the flames that literally licked her boots, her face wrapped in her Buff, shoulder to shoulder with True, Lewis, and Claude, who looked, the few times Mel risked a glance, like he might topple with fatigue into the fire at any moment.

Before them, across their field, somewhere in the midst of this angry, churning blaze, Claude’s house already burned, Mel was sure of that, each wall and window and warm memory of his late wife adding fuel to the fire as it fell. They could hear the intermittent crashes and booms as drywall dropped as though detonated, as glass shattered, as wood cracked. Most people didn’t realize how loud it could be in the presence of a burning building. When you saw it on the news, everything was muted by audio and voiceovers. They all got the full experience now, in surround sound, the noise deafening. Next to Mel, Claude cried openly as he aimed his hose at the burning ground, but he didn’t retreat, and he didn’t complain.

The mowed field between the houses proved to be their salvation. It slowed the progress of the blaze from Claude’s property to Sam’s, buying them time—buying Annie time—so that instead of a wall of flame, they faced a carpet. But still it crept, this fiery carpet, low and thin, like a predatory animal slinking toward them through the dense smoke. In a moment of inspiration, Mel handed True her garden hose, opting to add Sam’s pressure washer to the mix, which she attached to the only water hookup in the garage, unscrewing the thick rubber hose to the washing machine in the mudroom with clumsy hands. She ran the pressure washer at full capacity in wide arcs across the ground at her feet, but even so, it only delayed the inevitable, pushing back the crawling fire less than an inch at a time.

It was at least ten more minutes before she heard a new, much more welcome sound through the din. She paused, pressure-washer hose in hand, trying to listen. Yes ... that was the promised EMS rig, and a big one. Probably a Type 3 engine, as well, from the magnitude of the rumble at Mel’s feet.

She felt a tentative smile crack her dry, burnt lips as beside her, Claude let out a hoarse whoop of gladness. They’d done it ... They’d held the blaze at bay long enough for help to arrive. The sight of Mel’s crew spilling out of the second engine brought a sudden rush of tears to her eyes ... She hadn’t thought she had any moisture left in her body. She caught a glimpse of Janet’s silent nod in her direction as she hopped down from the running board, her careworn face still smudged with soot. Men and women shouted orders over the noise, their voices disembodied through the thick smoke. From the EMS rig, an entire ground team from Eagle Valley piled out in full structural gear, wasting no time unwrapping hoses in the driveway. They must have off-roaded the last few hundred yards, where the fire burned on both sides of the road.

“In the house!” Mel shouted to them, dropping the sprayer end of the pressure washer onto the smoldering, wet ground to rush over. “Please! Get my girls!”

Two men wearing Dust Busters jackets entered the front door, while Claude said, “Go, go!” and Mel went, sprinting back across the grass to make sure Sam and the kids made it out to the trucks.

She should have known it couldn’t be that easy. First, the only medic qualified to supply Annie with the extra oxygen she needed to make the journey down the hill had just passed his EMT-Intermediate level last week, which led to a lot of panicked floundering with the tubes and tank in the doorway. Mel’s attention divided; half the time, she focused on continuing to fight the blaze in front of the house, but the other half, she was craning her neck to watch for Annie’s evacuation from Highline.

“They’ll get her to the rig,” True kept saying, butwhen?

When Annie finally emerged in Sam’s arms, she made for a pathetic picture, still wrapped in wet towels, her face obscured by a pediatric oxygen mask and nasal canula. Astor ran behind, an N95 pressed to her face with one hand—they simply couldn’t be adjusted to fit properly—and Annie’s medical supply bag in the other. On her back she’d strapped her own go bag, as well as several of Claude’s prized quilts that had never made it out to his truck.

“That girl is a freakin’ marvel,” True declared. But behind the pride, her voice shook with worry and fear and entirely too much smoke inhalation.

Sam pressed Annie back into the arms of the EMT, who climbed into the cab of the EMS rig. Janet followed; then Lewis held a hand out for Astor, who swung up behind him. Mel lifted a hand in farewell, finally understanding the sentimentgodspeed, expecting Sam to heft himself up into the vehicle behind the girls. Instead, he pushed off the running board at the last moment, hopping back onto the dirt of the driveaway.

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