Through the Fire (3 page)

Robert Louis Stevenson stared at me from a framed John Sargent print. Wine hues inhabited his room, his disinterested wife, clad in gold and ivory, reclining in a chair.

The computer voice continued. “Next message.”

The doorbell rang. I paused the machine.

On my front porch stood a vampire, a clone trooper, and a black-costumed Spider-Man. “Trick or treat.”

“Go away,” I heard myself say.

The kids just stood there, cocking their heads like perplexed puppies.

“Ha. Right. Just kidding, kids.” I looked back toward the kitchen. “Hold on a sec.”

I opened the pantry.

No candy.

I came back with a box of Grape-Nuts, a box of crackers, and a bag of bagels.

“Here you go. Now get out of here.”

The three of them strolled back toward the street, staring into their bags. A harvest moon loomed ochre and oversized on the horizon.

Back in the kitchen I hit the answering machine button.

“Aidan, it’s Uncle Cormac. It's been too long. How are you doing? Hope everything is well. Hey, I’m calling because I’ve finally finished the remodel on the guesthouse down here in Baja and wanted to invite you to come stay for a bit—get away, you know? I’d love to have you, so just give me a call. Seriously, you’re welcome any time. Call me. Take care, bud.”

Beep.
“There are no more new messages.”

I took a deep breath in and out.

I’d almost killed my partner, my fiancée was leaving me, and I’d just been put on two-weeks’ leave without pay. Somehow an impromptu vacation to Mexico didn’t feel like the appropriate next step.

Thanks anyway, Cormac.

I had to see Matt. I grabbed a snack and hopped back in the Cruiser. Nightfall draped its chilled swath over the valley. The asphalt lay long and gray on the way to Washoe County Hospital. I parked in an ambulance spot outside the ER. I didn’t care. I just wanted to get inside to see him. I’d known the guy all of half a day and already I felt as if I were visiting a relative.

I hadn’t taken the time to change. My navy blue department shirt clung to my shoulders and hung heavy with sweat, the scent of smoke trailing off me in a cloud as I entered the ER. I saw a red-haired woman in her twenties standing outside of the cardiac resus room, an infant in her arms. Tears brimmed in her eyes, cheeks flushed and moist as she stared through the door.

Hartman’s wife.

A wrecking ball hit me in the gut.

God, I hope he’s okay.

Behind the glass, a flurry of scrubs and hands moved about with instruments and wires. I felt frozen, as if my feet were affixed to the floor. I wanted to turn and bail.

A security guard approached. “I’m sorry, sir, but all the firefighters have been asked to wait in the lobby.”

Hartman’s wife pivoted and looked at me, eyes bloodshot, her baby reaching to touch her chin.

“Sir?” The guard hung close, like a slab of beef in a commercial freezer.

I turned to him. “He’s my . . . He’s my brother.”

“Yes, sir. You’re the fifth one to tell me that, and I understand you are concerned for him. But right now the best way you can help him is by waiting in the lobby.” He grabbed my arm.

I shrugged. “Get off me.”

His expression soured.

“Look,” I said. “He was my partner. I was with him when he went down. I was there, all right? He shouldn’t be here. It’s my . . .” I glanced at Hartman’s wife.

Her focus fixed on me. Too much resided in that expression, too many thoughts and feelings and fears. Her bottom lip pushed up. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She shook her head, chin quivering.

“It was my . . .”

“Sir, I’m sorry, but . . .” He kept talking. His voice trailed off.

Hartman’s wife kept staring. “Just leave,” she mouthed.

The entire ER may as well have fallen silent. The air escaped from my lungs, the light from the corners of my eyes. All I saw and heard was this despairing woman holding her baby saying, “Just leave.” She looked to the ceiling, then back. “Please, please. Just leave. Just go.”

The guard reached out for me. I stepped back and clipped my hip on an EKG cart. My throat tightened, I couldn’t swallow. The room spun.

“Sir, are you okay?” The guard put his face in front of mine. “You look . . . Hold on. I’ll call a—”

“I’m fine. I’m fine.” I put a hand up. “I . . . I shouldn’t be here. This isn’t right.” I didn’t know what else to do. I turned and pushed though the ER doors, digging the keys from my pocket. I walked straight to the parking lot, unable to face the guys in the waiting room.

The same dark empty house welcomed me back. I pulled off my shirt and walked down the hallway, stopping at the photo of my father. His affable grin hung frozen in two-dimensional bliss, Irish eyes smiling under a badge hat with a slight tilt, his crisp chalk-blue collar with silver bugles at the hems.

“Five years tomorrow, Dad.” I ran my thumb over my palm. “How’s that for almost repeating history?”

I got in the shower and let the heated rain wash over me. Steam wafted, pulling soot from my pores. Everything smelled like smoke and ash.

Baja, Mexico . . .
I nodded and shut off the water.
All right,
Cormac.

I had no reason to stay and every reason to leave.

CHAPTER
4

A
fter the shower I threw what I needed for a couple weeks into the back of my car and started south. The Cruiser's hundred-and-seventy-five thousand miles were half-life, really, so what was another twelve hundred? The purposeful motion of the road, of having a set destination, freed my mind, helped me relax, and kept at bay the stinging guilt over Hartman and the hollow ache for Christine. The lights of Reno and Carson City soon fled, twinkling in my rearview mirror, swallowed into the vast expanse of the evening. I followed the towering jagged sentries of the eastern Sierra front and wove along the Carson and Walker rivers, amidst the still quiet of Mono Lake and native spirits rising from tule fog blankets.

All Hallows’ Eve.

The one night it is said when the boundary between the quick and the dead lay unguarded, when souls walk unfettered to either side. How often had I tread that line? How many times had I run without worry on the fence, balancing over the demarcation of life and death? Maybe I was reckless. Maybe I was missing something my father always had.

Maybe I wasn’t the best communicator. Things between Christine and me had been rocky at best over the past few months. I couldn’t put my finger on the real problem, but it seemed that everything I did had some ulterior motive in her eyes, and I found myself defending the simplest of things.

My cell phone beeped. I was out of service range. I yawned and readjusted in my seat. My plan was to drive through the night, or at least until I was too tired, to try and make the bulk of the journey to Baja in one big chunk. I’d call Cormac in the morning. It was a bit of a risk, heading off without talking to him first. But knowing him, it wouldn’t be a problem. He had always been welcoming in the past. Though it had been almost five years since I last saw him in person. Since he left.

I remember him saying how he just couldn’t see himself as part of the fire service anymore, too many things and places to remind him of his brother’s death. So he straight up retired and moved to his place down in Mexico.

Too much had happened in such a short time. First his younger brother—my father—had died, and then his father, the department chief at the time, died five months later of heart failure, overwhelmed with grief from the passing of his son. I didn’t blame Cormac for needing to get away from it all, but part of me had always resented his decision a bit. As if he were the only one affected by it all. I was right there in the middle of it. It was my dad. My grandfather. My . . . fault.

Hartman’s sunken and vacant eyes flashed across my view.

A family of deer trotted across the highway, stealing glances into my lights. I slowed a bit.

I’ll never shake the vision of my father lying pulseless and apneic in the back of the ambulance, the feeling of his ribs separating from his sternum as I performed chest compressions, his pupils fixed and dilated, his mouth agape.

Everything went bad on that fire. Large warehouse, unreinforced masonry construction. Rapid,
rapid
fire spread. The explosion and building collapse, the brick wall that broke his neck.

The thing that still prevented any sense of closure was how the department left the official cause as “undetermined.” That never set right with me. The head investigator on the case had since retired and they just closed the book on it.

Normal fires didn’t burn that hot, that fast, that destructive. My buddy Blake in the arson investigation office made a pact with me that he wouldn’t let it rest. Five years later and he still worked on it with me in his free time. Couple times a month Christine and I would make dinner for him. It was the least we could do.

The double yellow line disappeared with the road into a perpetual black. It felt just like the smoke, driving into the dark. An all too common experience for me.

All I could see was what was just in front of my headlights.

CHAPTER
5

A
round three in the morning I made it to a veritable ghost town outside of Bakersfield named Red Mountain and paid seventy five dollars to stay in a roadside motel. I woke around ten a.m. and got ahold of Cormac, to his surprised and cheerful response. He said he’d have dinner waiting and admonished me not to waste a second more in central California.

Cormac also told me that his town of Lazaro Cardenas was just a little south of Ensenada. After hours of driving, I decided he was speaking of
little
in a global sense, because it took me a lot longer than I expected. I was a good quarter of the way down the Baja Peninsula and through my
sixth
toll checkpoint before I finally saw a sign that read
Lazaro Cardenas 25 Kilómetros
.

The town itself, perhaps by virtue of its distance from other cities, retained a nineteenth-century pueblo charm. An adobe mission replete with tarnished bronze bell sat in time-worn grandeur in the city square. Cylindrical timber beams projected from building fronts. A fine coating of sand and dust blurred the street edges.

Eucalyptus trees with painted white trunks shaded a park with a three-level concentric fountain. A dozen men and boys played soccer on a small field of patchy grass. Fading paint on building sides sported dated ads for Coca-Cola and Tecate beer. A couple shops were fronted by wooden carts full of yellow marigolds and what looked like ornamented human skulls and small dressed-up skeleton dolls. I found it quite a bit more intriguing than the standard American Halloween décor, even a bit disturbing.

A winding road took me through rocky bitterbrush-covered hills, westward toward the ocean and my uncle’s estate. The peak of the last hill brought with it the unbridled blue of the Pacific Ocean, contained only by the limits of my vision south and by a misty haze creeping in from the north. Cormac’s place was easy to find, the only house for a mile in any direction, encompassed inland by horse corrals and a weathered barn, and on the west by an elaborate garden and deck overlooking the water. The word
estate
had never really hit me until then. I was amazed by what the American dollar could buy in a third-world country.

I pulled the Cruiser to a stop on Cormac’s gravel driveway, a small dust cloud bypassing the vehicle as I opened the door. The air smelled sweet and humid. A light breeze cooled the line of sweat along my spine. Cormac appeared from around the corner, his thick hairy arms outspread, his grin surrounded by a salt-and-pepper beard. He’d gained weight.

“Aidan!”

I stood trapped in a bear hug before I could bring my arms up. Cormac stood a few inches taller than me. My face squished against his shoulder.

“How’s my favorite nephew?”

I managed a muffled “Hey, Uncle Cormac.”

“What was that?” he said.

I pulled away and coughed. “Hey, Cormac. It’s great to see you.”

He shook his head. “It has been too long.” He glanced at the gauze wrapped around my palm. “What happened to your hand?”

“This? Oh, you know, nothing. It’s only a flesh wound.” I laughed, anxious to change the subject. “But you’re right, it has been too long. It’s weird to see you with a beard after all those clean-cut years with the department.”

He waved a hand. “Ah, who wants to talk about the department, anyway?”

I scoffed. “Yeah, count me out.”

He stole a glance toward the car. “Christine couldn’t make it?”

I swallowed. “Oh. You know. She’s swamped with her master’s thesis.”

His bushy eyebrows crunched.

“Yeah. Something about beatnik writers and grammar teachers. I don’t know.”

He just stared at me.

I ran my hand along the back of my neck. “She’s out visiting her mother.”

His eyes crinkled at the sides, just like my dad’s. Just like mine. “Say no more, son.”

And that was it. Nothing more needed be said. I smiled and patted him on the shoulder. “It is great to see you again.”

He stroked his beard, then pointed his index finger. “You must be hungry.”

I grinned. “Yeah, actually—”

“Come on. Let’s grab your stuff and I’ll give you a quick tour. Rosa should have the
pescado
soup done real soon.”

“Rosa?”

“You think I can keep this place up by myself?”

“Must be nice living the good life.” I grabbed my backpack from the car.

“Yeah. But it comes at a price. My pension doesn’t cover everything, so I'm still doing consulting work stateside.” He pulled out the rolling luggage.

“Thanks.” My eyes trailed over the eastern hills. “So, Lazaro Cardenas. Most of the people here farmers?”

“Miners.”

“Oh?”

“The old salt mines down south. Probably still employ sixty percent of the population.” He paused outside a thick cedar door.

“Well, here we are.”

The door opened into a column-lined entryway paved with marble. A small fountain trickled water into a basin with koi swimming under lily pads. The hallways were cool and naturally lit by recessed skylights and transom windows.