Falls Like Lightning (5 page)

Where was he going with this?

“The lower level of the cabin is like its own apartment. The kids use it as a big playroom, mainly.”

“What are you proposing?”

“I’ve spoken with Carol about it. The timing is perfect. She’d be more than happy to watch little Madison—free of charge, of course—along with our two grandchildren for the duration of your stay in South Lake . . . if that’s something you’d consider.”

Elle had come into this meeting expecting news of more layoffs, and here she was being offered free child care from her boss’s wife and a fire assignment in Tahoe. “I don’t know what to say. I—”

“There’s lodging at the airport, of course. Bunk beds and small rooms. You can always pick up Madison after your on-call shifts and bring her back there. But our downstairs has a small spare bedroom and a full bath. You’re more than welcome to stay there for the interim.”

It sounded too good to be true. But maybe it was what Elle needed. An answer to prayer. Get out of Oregon and away from the rickety old rental house. And how could she turn down free baby-sitting? She gathered herself together. “So what’s the catch?”

He shook his head and smiled. “No catch. But I need you up there by tomorrow night.”

Tomorrow?
Madison had her appointment with the specialist at the children’s hospital in Oakland. They couldn’t miss that. How would she find time to drive Maddie to her appointments in the San Francisco Bay Area when she could be looking at a max of twelve hours off at a time on extended fire assignment in Tahoe?

That was it then. Elle stood. “You almost had me there, Chief. Madison has a weekly medical appointment in Oakland. We can’t miss those. Best of luck though in finding a pilot.” Elle turned and walked to the door. She set her hand on the knob.

Weathers cleared his throat. “Then fly her there.”

Elle froze. “What?”

“You need to log flight time for training hours anyway, right? In fact . . . there’s a smokejumper crew in Redding, California, that needs a ride up to the Desolation Complex. I could have you fly to the Redding base tomorrow and take Madison with you. You can fuel up there and then make the quick flight down to Oakland for the appointment. When it’s done, you just fly back up to Redding and pick up the jumpers for the trip to South Lake. I can have Carol meet you at the South Lake Tahoe airport with a car. What do you think?”

Elle felt a door swing wide open inside her. She couldn’t find a reason to refuse. She and Maddie would be provided for. How could she say no?

She extended her hand toward Weathers with a smile. “All right, then, Chief. You’ve got yourself a bombardier.”

CHAPTER

07

E
lle gripped the smooth wood of the steering wheel. Violet washed the horizon—night retreating and the dawn making its entrance. Was she doing the right thing?

Elle had jammed everything she thought they’d need for a month-plus into her ’76 convertible MG. Madison slept beside her in her booster car seat, gently snoring with her head back and mouth open. The house looked dark and abandoned, silhouetted by the lone streetlight on the country road. Cecelia was gone. A note on the table had explained she was going to Florida—Miami first—to restart her life and forget the West. To find herself. . . .

Elle couldn’t help but think that she’d do nothing but the opposite.

Elle opened the glove box and pulled three CD cases from it. Her favorite groups—Phoenix, Arcade Fire, The Ashes.

There was a pattern there.

She slid the Arcade Fire disc into her player, dialing it in to song seven—“Wake Up.”

She dropped the MG into gear and headed for the airfield.

Wind whistled through small gaps in the soft-top. Maddie stirred and yawned with a squeak. She stretched. “Put it on number nine, Mommy.”

Elle smiled. She played the disc enough that Maddie had already developed favorites. Pastures and fences flipped by, bowing power lines and telephone cables and lonely shadowed street signs, and Elle had the sensation that she and Madison were actually sitting still and it was the earth moving and rolling beneath them—turning and shifting—and all she had to do was play pretend and turn the wheel slightly left and right, the way actors did in the old movies. Soon they’d touch down in a place she hadn’t been to since her father’s disappearance.

Elle lifted her insulated mug and sipped English breakfast tea. Herbal dregs mixed with honey. The stretch of cool stratus steel along the horizon lifted, pushed up by a narrow band of molten sunlight.

The car still smelled like her father. A hint of Brut aftershave, not overpowering or odious. She breathed deep.

Thinking about it now, she marveled at how he, her dad, finished raising her on his own. Granted, she had already been fourteen when her mom died of cancer. And she’d pretty much grown up at the McCall Smokejumper Base. She’d had free rein, really, about that little part of Idaho, surrounded by forest and Payette Lake. That little section of the state had been the planet to her. It was all she’d known. So much freedom—swimming in Payette by herself and hiking off and wandering to places she’d never consider letting Maddie, even as a grown-up, go alone.

She loved to fly like her dad, but short of a vague sense that piloting airplanes would somehow fit into her future, she really wasn’t sure of what the days ahead would hold. But one thing she knew for sure by the time she’d turned nineteen—and that summer with Silas Kent confirmed it—she never wanted to marry a smokejumper.

Strange, now that she thought about it, that a girl raised with so much independence would “settle down” so early. She’d thought she was making the prudent choice in marrying Seth Riordan the winter after Silas left. The decision had felt stable, secure. He offered the chance at a family a bit more as it was “supposed to be”—in a house in a suburb, nowhere near a runway, and void of men who launched themselves out of aircraft for a living.

Seth had a business degree and a reliable schedule. Promoted to middle manager of sales at an insurance office, he’d left for work at seven thirty, taken his half-hour lunch break at twelve thirty, and was off at four thirty. She never questioned his monthly “sales” trips that took him away for a week at a time. It was part of the job.

They had a sixteen-hundred-square-foot house with a four-hundred-square-foot lawn in a ten-square-mile linear section of town. Two of their neighbors were retired. The house next door was a rental. She’d had a rainbow sprinkler on a hose in the front yard with patchy wet ground and clumps of crab grass, a JCPenney wedding ring, and a belly newly rounding with their growing child.

It was all impeccably, comfortably, and numbingly safe.

Just what Elle wanted.

Elle drove into the hangar, pulled the key, and set the e-brake. “We’re here, baby.” The space seemed inordinately large for the MG.

Maddie looked up through the windshield and grinned. “There’s the twin otters.”

Elle pulled their suitcases from the trunk. “There she is. All ready for us.”

Wind rattled the corrugated metal walls. Oversized steel-dome light fixtures buzzed, suspended from steel beams that arched overhead.

Madison shuffled her tennis shoes along the floor, squeaking like a basketball player.

“Maddie, please don’t.”

“Sorry.”

“Here, take your backpack and blanket.”

“Do I get to ride in the front seat?”

“Yes. Well, in the cockpit, at least. I’ll strap you into the seat behind mine. You’ll be my navigator.”

“What’s a navigator?”

“The girl in charge of where the plane goes.”

“But that’s your job.”

“Well, yes. But you can help me with the map so we know just how to fly down to California to pick up the boys.”

———

Elle hung her headset over the hula girl glued atop the instrument panel.

Silas Kent.

Unbelievable.

How many years had it been? Why did she not know he’d been stationed in northern California?

He still looked more like a surfer than a fireman.

Streaked raindrops from the afternoon’s thunder cell stained the plane’s narrow windshields. The circle of smokejumpers he stood with on the tarmac joked and laughed.

Yep.

Take away the soot streaks from his face and that cinder-shaded yellow Nomex shirt, and he was still just a shaggy-haired kid, grinning through ash grit, with that same great expanse of ocean in his eyes.

Elle slipped her aviator glasses on.

Last thing I need is another baby-sitting job.

She scooted out of the captain’s chair, wincing as ponytail hairs hung up in the headrest. She followed the strands down with her fingers and broke them at the source, a ring of prior casualties already wrapped around the thin chrome support.

Elle tapped the bulkhead and ducked through to the passenger compartment, the smell of oil and woodsmoke mixing with the humid breeze that wafted in as she opened the side door and lowered the steps. Madison was caught up with her dolly imagining.

“Maddie, you want to come down and say hi? We’ll be here only a few minutes before leaving for your appointment.”

Madison seat-belted her doll into one of the jumper seats. “No thanks, Mom. I need to fly Rose to her appointment first.”

Elle felt a welling of sadness and affection for her daughter. She swallowed, thankful her sunglasses were on so Maddie couldn’t see. “Well, that sounds good. Just make sure not to really flip any of the switches—just pretend.”

“I know, Mommy. I’m not really going to fly her there.”

“Oh, I see. Well, that’s good. Maybe when you’re older—huh, baby?”

“Of course.”

Elle grinned and bit her lip. “Of course.”

She descended the ladder to the tarmac, knowing from the corner of her eye that she’d caught the attention of Silas, the sandy-haired smiler. She set foot on the runway, took a breath, and steeled herself.

You can’t handle this airship, Surfer Boy.

Laughter broke out again in the circle of smokejumpers. Elle noticed Warren Adams and strolled up to him. “Word is I’m supposed to taxi you up and over yonder. That about right, Mr. Adams?”

Warren grinned with his square, silver-stubbled jaw. “Westmore, what’re you doin’?”

Elle brought her palms up at her sides. “Ain’t it obvious by now? What about you all?”

He hugged her, heavy with the humid odor of sweat and soot. “Huey dropped us off about five minutes ago. Saw Jumper 41 circling to land and had a feeling it might be you. How’s your little girl?”

“Wonderful.” Elle pointed to the plane.

“No, no. I meant Madison, not the Twin Otter.”

“So did I. She’s in there right now.”

“No kidding? Taking her to be with you in South Lake?”

“There’s a lot to it, actually. But she did most of the flying down here, so it was a nice break. Got myself a good nap in.”

Warren chuckled.

Elle ran her hand along her braid. “So how was your jump?”

“Good, good. Growing fire this side of the Sierras. Small in comparison to what’s blowing up in the Desolation Wilderness. We were sent in to pull out an injured radio tech.”

“Is he going to be okay?”

“He has a pretty gnarly leg fracture and a concussion. But he’s alive. Last I heard he’s awake now and recovering in the hospital ICU.”

Silas cleared his throat.

Warren threw a sideways glance. “Where are my manners? Elle, this here’s Silas Kent. A man instrumental in the rescue. I’ve been trying to groom him for the next spotter promotion, but some things take easier than others.” He winked at Silas.

She extended a hand, all business. “Good to see you again, Kent.”

Warren raised his eyebrows. “You two already know each other?”

Silas wrapped his coarse fingers around hers, looked in her eyes, and smiled. “We flew together for a while. But it’s been years.”

On the far end of the circle, a slouching jumper spat on the tarmac.

Elle took advantage of the distraction and pulled her hand back. “Hey now, McJumper. You going to clean that up off my runway?”

A Hispanic man beside Silas laughed to himself. “She said
Mic
-Jumper.”

Warren scratched his jaw. “Been here five minutes and it’s already her runway.”

She pointed a finger at Warren. “You better believe it.”

The spitter straightened, teeth littered with tobacco. “If cleaning that up means I get to fly with you, pretty lady, then absolutely.”

Thunder rolled overhead. Rain spat on the tarmac in dime-sized circles.

“All right, boys,” Warren said. “ ’Nuff of that. Go get showered and fed, and I’ll find out if we get the privilege of flying somewhere soon with
Captain
Westmore here, as we will respectfully address her from this point on.”

The crew shuffled off.

Warren patted Elle on the shoulder and started toward the base. “Good to see you again.” He threw a glance at Silas. “You coming?”

Silas hesitated, and Warren put up a hand. “Never mind. Don’t know why I asked.”

“Mommy, can I come down now?” Madison stood in the passenger compartment doorway.

Elle turned. “Not now, baby, we’re just going to get fuel and then get right back in the air for your appointment.”

She faced Silas and smiled.
Mr. Kent, meet my daughter.

Silas stood there, a look on his face like he’d seen a host of angels.

Elle breathed out a laugh. “Are you all right?”

He glanced at her, back at the plane, and ran a hand through his hair. “That’s your daughter.”

Elle bit her lower lip and nodded. “Yeah.”

His eyes fell to her left hand.

She shifted her weight. 
Let him wonder—he deserves it.

Returning his attention to her little girl, he whispered, “She’s beautiful.”

She wiped a raindrop from her forehead. “Thank you.”

“Four?”

“Five.”

His eyebrows rose. She could see him doing the math in his head.

Yes, Surfer Boy, I got married and pregnant less than six months after you left.