Mendocino Fire (5 page)

“It's skanking up our car,” Edmund complains, and Shane chimes in, “It smells all old.”

“Hey, does everything have to be new? Plastic? Old's not such a bad smell, is it?”

Pleading, always a wrong move.

“It's not ours.” Edmund, doing a good imitation of Jade. She's new enough that they shouldn't be able to mimic her this well, and the boys' appropriation of Jade's voice and style when they want to drive home a point slightly worries David, and feels unfair, as if he's being ganged up on.

“It's ours now, sweetie.”

Sweetie
is fatal, registered in jolting silence. Jolting because the next thirty miles are so bad, the road seeming as lost as a road can get, running aimlessly along and then madly swerving, barely managing to avoid outcrops of rock or steep drop-offs.

“You mean you can just take anything out of the garbage, whoever left it there, and if they want it back you can say no, it's yours?” Shane, bent, at eleven, on discovering the moral workings of the world.

A hard curve, and as he slows the car, David tries his mostly successful good-father voice. “Look, I don't want you going through
any
garbage
ever
. You never find anything good.”

“
You
did.”

“
You
did.”

Jade says, “It must be worth a fortune. Twenty or thirty thousand dollars, even, depending on how old it is. Really, somebody's
going to want it back. Because how could it have been left in a garbage can? I've never seen anything like this except in a museum. And why didn't I know that you go for these drives? Was this a thing you did before?” Before her. “Were you just having a really bad day? Is something going on?”
Do we have secrets now?
“The rug is a problem, David. There's been some kind of mistake, because this is not the sort of thing that gets thrown away, not ever. You took it? What made you think you could just walk off with it?”

“Which question do you want me to answer? It clearly
had
been thrown away. At the end of a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. Nobody was coming back for it. It was getting dark.”

“I just think you were a little hasty,” she says, “impetuous,” and he shouldn't be flattered, but he is. “Draw me a map of how you get there?”

Her love of proof, documents, evidence, is very like his, and on the back of an envelope he sketches a map, the journey's last leg a squiggle meant to indicate arduousness, culminating in a cartoon oil drum.

“This is your secret guy place? There's nothing there.”

“That's what's good about it.”

He wants to explain further, to point out the sadness of there not being many unowned places left, but she's already asking, “How do you know nobody was coming back? Maybe the real owner is there now, looking, and it's gone.”

Cross-legged on their bed, husband and wife consider the rug unfurled across the tiles of their bedroom floor, and he watches, under the lowered lids of her downward gaze, the REM-like movements of her eyes as she follows, or tries to, the rug's branching and turning and dead-ending intricacy, its profusion of leaves and petals or the geometric figures that might be leaves
and petals, which the gaze barely discerns before relinquishing them back into abstraction. Jade, leaning forward, her elbows on her knees, frowning, her right breast indented by her right arm, her shadow thrown across him because her reading light's on, her backlit profile showing the radiant lint of her upper lip, the angle of her jaw, the length of her throat, and below that the contour of the heavy breast, the nipple's surprising drab brown color, the unaroused, modest softness of its stem, its wreath of kinked hairs. Best of all, in love, in what he's experienced of love, are those moments when you can watch the other's self-forgetful delight.

She says, “I have to tell you something.”

In his work, he's a good listener. More than that, he solicits the truth, asks the unasked, waits out the heartsick or intimidated silences every significant environmental lawsuit must transcend. Someone has to ask what has gone wrong, and if the thing that's gone wrong has destroyed the marrow of a five-year-old's bones, someone has to
need
that truth or it will never emerge from the haze of obfuscation. Of lying. But this isn't work. This is his wife.

“I'm a little afraid,” she says. “I know that's not like me. This is hard.”

“Whatever it is, you can tell me.”

“Whatever it is?”

“You can tell me.”

“Whatever?”

“You can tell me.”

“I'm a Republican.”

He's been blind to the syllogism chalked on the board: X is a corporate lawyer. All corporate lawyers are Republicans. X is a Republican. The outrage that blazes through him makes the
leap to her. When she says, “I knew you couldn't handle it,” her tone is prosecutorial.

“You waited until we were married.”

“Until I thought you could deal.”

Dismay is cranked so high his pulse ticks in his temples. “I'm having trouble believing this.”

“Calm down, calm down a little, try seeing it's love, my telling you, it's wanting no secrets between us.”

“The deception,” he says. “The hiding who you really are. When you know how I feel about lying.”

“I hated it too, every minute of it, but I couldn't lose you.”

“This makes us like everyone else. Lying. Being lied to.”

“It doesn't. We aren't.” She catches hold of his wrist. “Are you all right?”

He waits until she lets go before saying, “Blind, wasn't I. You must have thought
He's incredibly easy to fool
.”

She changes tactics. “David. Let's deal with the other issue first. Say the rug was in the office of some Los Alamos scientist, and one day somebody ran a Geiger counter over it, a random check, a sweep, cause they're human, accidents happen, and despite the most thorough precautions—”

“They're not thorough enough,” he says, and he knows.

“—traces of uranium stick to the soles of somebody's shoes and get tracked across the rug, and out of fear for their jobs they decide to dispose of the rug in this furtive undocumented way, the sort of thing you're always telling me about. You, the expert on how contaminants get into the air and the water and into people's houses, you bring it
home
, into our
house
, with no clue why it was left in a trash can. This just isn't wise.”

“I love you as the expert on wise decisions.”

“My politics are my own, and I could've gone on keeping
them to myself. Ultimately I chose not to, because you and I tell each other everything.”

“One of us does.”

“So okay, right, you're the honesty prince, but this is new territory for me. You're the first person I've ever even wanted to tell everything to. I needed to work up to it. Is that a crime, to have needed time?”

“There's nothing wrong with this rug,” he says. “You're being paranoid.”

“There is something,” she says. “I can feel it.”

“For the first time,” he says, “how you feel doesn't interest me at all.”

He's let down when, without another word, Jade clicks off the light. If they were both wolves they'd be lying just like this, their senses on alert, their fur on end. How about a little red-in-tooth-and-claw sex? He wants her. But who is she? She may intend to amend the constitution to rule out gay marriage, or drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. How can he fuck someone who wants to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? All the same, he's hard. Postcoitally, he can convince her that caribou have rights to their ancient migratory routes. He's not sure where she is in her progress toward sleep, and when he bends over her, the intense repose of her body on the bed tells him she's wide awake. This treachery—another in her string of deceptions—exhausts him, and he gives up. He's asleep.

Before dawn he's startled by her cry. He can't make sense of her naked, placatory stance in front of his computer, or his own accusation: “What did you do?” His voice is rough, his body recollecting their fight before his brain does.

“I walked across your rug and must've picked up some static
electricity, because when I touched the computer, I got a shock, and—”

He scrambles from the bed, the rug's nap pricking the soles of his feet.

“—it crashed. It made this little match-strike sound, and the screen went black. David. I wasn't going to look.”

Well, then, what was she doing there? He never confides in her about his work. He's tediously ethical that way. She could end up representing a corporation he's going after.

“I wasn't going to look.”

The repetition really scares him.

Her fingertips patter across the keyboard. Panic tenses her shoulders as she leans over his laptop, and her hair sticks up in tufts, dirty with yesterday's gel—for the first time, he finds her unattractive. “Leave it,” he says; she says, “Let me just—” His chest hurts: Is this a problem, should he be paying attention? No, it's okay, his heart. It's only that his chest has constricted with frustration and another emotion, uglier, more imperative, pounding away. Fury.

“This weird thing happened.”

Sunday afternoons the boys and their belongings trek back to the house of Shane's mother, Susannah, according to an agreement hashed out with Nina, Edmund's mother, an academic on a year's sabbatical in Paris. Nina trusts Susannah, but then so does almost everyone, including David. He sits with Susannah on her back steps, the boys dodging through the neglected garden whose sunflowers are ten feet high, yellow petals tattered and their brown, saucer-sized centers under attack by sparrows.

“—never make it out alive unless—”

“—we find a way to neutralize—”

Just hours ago Jade walked across the rug, acquiring a crackling charge of electrons that flew from her fingertips to his keyboard, cases compromised, the irreplaceable interviews, the painstaking documentation zapped, and yeah, he has some of it on disks, but not all, an uncharacteristic lapse, one he's going to have a hard time forgiving himself for.

“When I finally got it to the guy I've always relied on, he said it's permanently fried,” David tells Susannah. “Which is bound to cause problems in a number of cases. But the worst part is, I don't know what she was doing with my computer. She has no business touching it.”

“Maybe she was looking for incriminating email. That's the usual reason for fooling around with the other person's computer. She must want to find out about your life before.”

“It's not like that.”

“She could be looking for email from a previous relationship. Like with me. She could want to know how things stand between us.”

“I don't think so. She hasn't wanted the lowdown. She sees us more as a clean-slate kind of thing.” Or a lightning strike. An angel's wing passing over their upturned faces.

From the shoes ranged on the wooden step—shoes with neon glyphs, striped shoes, shoes with soles thick as antelope hooves, shoes bristling with spikes—Susannah chooses one whose laces are a gray snarl and begins, with her dirty nails, to pick the knot. She says, “You do barely know her.”

Angry at her superbly divorced reasonableness, the very quality he loved a moment ago, he says, “The rug is evil.”

“Oh, David. Things aren't evil. People are. And not that many of them, though I can see why your line of work leads you to think otherwise.”

Evil
: he had continued pecking at the keyboard as if lucky ineptitude could conjure, from the dark portal, the blip of returning consciousness. Jade—exasperated by his manic persistence, in which she rightly detected anger meant for her—left for work. In the fugue state of technological thwartedness, he heard the
scream
, shock blazing down every dad-nerve, and danced backward to see out the French doors: Edmund hanging from a branch of the apricot tree, shrieking at his own daring. With this shriek ringing in his ears David lost his footing, and in a slow-motion trance of remorse went over backward. Falling, he seemed to view himself from above, and if he was helpless, his arms flung out and his mouth gaping, the back of his head about to connect with the floor, he was also suspended in a peaceable realm that had detached itself from terror. David had time to marvel at this double consciousness before the impact slammed it out of his skull.

“My god,” Susannah says. “You could have been really hurt”—and her palm on his nape radiates solicitude, but this kind of comforting costs her nothing, really: she can do it in her sleep. With the broad Norwegian planes of her wide-open face she's so different from Jade, so
accessible
. “But you're okay,” she says.

“Well, my back sort of—”

She turns his wrist to read his watch, and the kitchen telephone rings. The screen door bangs behind her sturdy freckled legs.

“Hi.

“You can't?

“You can't?

“I know but why does that have to—

“I know it is but why—

“I know.

“I know.

“I said I
do
know.

“Yes.

“I will.

“I won't.

“Me too.

“Me too. Bye.”

She's high enough from this abortive exchange to sit down beside David and confess, “I think I'm in love. After all this time. I mean, you've been through two wives since me. My turn, I guess.” The smile she gives him is expectant, but he's having trouble reconciling the two realities, the reality before she vanished into her kitchen and this new version, because weren't they still, until this confession, still, really, in spite of everything,
married
? She has eluded him, slipped away taking her critical possessive practical generous irreplaceable and beautifully
accessible
love with her, and David says miserably, “Oh.”