into his bag. She wriggled up in front of him and got close.
Talking, telling the story had wakened her and set her mind in motion.
She had done some things right in her life and some things wrong. Nothing about her life before age twenty- four, when she started getting paid for her first big movie, had been particularly easy. Up to age twelve her life was a blur of day care and baby-sitters. Her mom taught drama at the high school. Her father sold cars. It was more than full-time employment because Dad sold as many cars at night as he did during the day, and Mom’s plays were put on after school and practice often ran into the early evening.
She never really questioned in her head whether she was loved, and she told herself and everybody who would listen that her father was probably one of the better people that had ever walked the earth. Pretty much, she ignored the defining moment in their relationship.
It was May 14, 1979, two days after her twelfth birthday, and it hadn’t been hard to fool the babysitter-one good lie did the trick.
It was 4:10 when she walked into the hospital. The walls were light yellow. There were tubes coming out from under the sheet. The tubes were full of fluid and it made her sick.
He was mold-gray and breathing oxygen.
Everything that she was going to say whirled in her mind. About loving him. That he was the best dad ever. That she would keep a special place for him in her soul.
Her father’s hand waved. The arm was rail thin, the skin under it loose, the muscle gone.
She went to him and took the hand. It trembled badly. It seemed like he couldn’t catch his breath.
“Dad… Dad…” He put a finger to her lips and beckoned her. She drew close.
“You didn’t get your butt tattooed, did you?”
A joke. Dad did that a lot. He joked. When he read the newspaper and she waited patiently for him to look up, he always smiled. He usually patted her on the head and then he joked. Like now.
“Dad, I wanted to talk about that day under the tree.”
“We didn’t tattoo your butt under the tree?”
He laughed and then he choked. He couldn’t quit. There was a cord and he pushed the button. The nurse came running.
“We’ll just be a minute, honey.” There was a hole in his throat that had a plastic lining and that was normally blocked off, airtight, allowing him to breathe through his nose and mouth. Now they unplugged it and put a green tube down inside. The sucking sound, the green fluid, brought a gut-wrenching sadness. She could tell they didn’t want her to watch, they didn’t want to feel her pain.
Figuring to start over in her talk with her father, she went into the hall and took a seat. She thought about the tree. Big hot tears rolled down her face. A second and third nurse came down the hall.
“No code. No code,” she heard the big one say. Then they closed the door. It was taking a long time. She went to the door and just then they opened it. They were fixing his hands. His head was thrown back and his mouth was open. There was a stench. Her knees shook, and the big nurse came over and pulled her to her bosom.
“Honey, I’m sorry. He’s gone.” Her knees shook and she wanted free. The woman’s flesh and perfume were suffocating. Her head was spinning.
“I’ll be okay,” she sobbed, and ran down the hall.
When she got outside, it had stopped raining. Life was cheating her. Please let it rain. She said it all the way home. To this day she remembered nothing of the walk. The tree in front of their house was no longer dripping. Just the same, she went and stood under it She tried to remember. But there was no rain.
Lying on the ground next to the house was the garden hose, right where her father had left it not two weeks ago. She went to the faucet, turned it on, and took the hose to the base of the tree. Using her thumb she created pressure and squirted water on the leaves of the big maple, letting it drip down over her body. Three years ago there had been a swing from the large branch, but it was no more. He had pushed her on the swing in the rain with the water pouring down. It was a simple moment. There had been no joke. He had said: “I love you and I’m so proud to be your father.” That was all.
Sam realized that maybe she was crying. There was no sound, it was just a feeling. Maybe a vibration in her body.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Sleep,” she said. Then she wriggled even closer. Of course the heat of her and the smell of her filled his mind.
He breathed deeply and thought about his grandfather and a place of old trees-fir, hemlock, cedar, and pine. A lake, opal smooth, cooled the eye while the leather brown of its sand shore rippled the air in the afternoon sun. There was the emerald green of spring-fed meadow dotted white, yellow, and fireball red. Around the cabin, mountain bilberry grew, heavy-branched with sweet fruit. He was walking through the pasture to the trees and there was a tunnel shaped by the foliage as if elephants had passed through. When he looked down the dark of the tunnel, there were people running and hearts pounding. Anna was there, out of nowhere, and she was panting bent over and the crowds were rushing past. Then the fire came, a ball of yellow and red rising, tearing through the trees and opening a hole to the sky. Fear was in her eyes and she was shaking him, talking, trying to tell him. But he couldn’t understand.
Sam awoke with a start, still glued to her back-sweating. “We’ve got to go now.”
“What? Why?”
“Out.” He jumped out of his bag, pulling at her.
“You were dreaming.”
“Yeah.”
He turned his back as he pulled on his clothes. “We’ve got to get off this island and get to a place we can really build a fire.”
“How do you intend to get off this island, or do I want to know?”
“We can make it. Misery doesn’t usually kill, it just hurts. Staying here we could be instantly crispy. Like one rocket into this place and pufffff. A fireball.”
She fingered her still-damp clothes. “What if we stay here and dry off a little more by the stove?”
“You stay. I’ll go check around and see if anybody is coming.”
They were both nearly dressed when he turned and looked at her.
At that moment the roof exploded over their heads and it began raining fire.
Seven
On this clear night in the wilds of British Columbia the sky was splashed across with stars in myriad swipes and trails set against the black. So luminescent was the three-quarter moon that one imagined warmth but for the bitter cold edge to the air. It lit the meadows nearly green and left the forest in deep shadow. The wind had blown away the clouds.
Under the trees it was still darker, and Anna understood they dare not use the light. So when they left the creek, they crashed through the brush in cold wet misery, feeling their way like blind people, stepping into holes, trying to find trails and to stay on them. Finally they found what seemed like a real pathway.
“I’m vibrating like those wind-up teeth,” she said. The cold was terrible and wet. It ached the bones and palsied muscles until she thought she couldn’t stand it; then she would take another step, only to be clung to by a wet branch or torn by a prickly vine; and there were more steps, and it seemed a mockery of her self-awareness that she considered each step to be her last, when there was always another.
“You Manhattanites are tough.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“It was a compliment. But don’t get any ideas.”
Despite her abject misery she laughed.
They stooped through a mucky thicket of something Sam called salmonberry with water running down the leaves all over her and gnashing prickles irritating her arms and legs. They exited into some sort of overgrown
