We were flying everywhere: Colorado, New Mexico, Idaho, Minnesota. The West was so dry that Granite Mountain barely had time to rest between jobs.
Early that season, after another two-week “roll” (or mission), I came home exhausted. I was lying on the couch in my apartment when Natalie called me.
“Brendan, we have a problem.”
I sat up straight.
“What’s wrong? Is Michaela all right?”
“She’s fine.” Natalie’s voice sounded tense. “I mean, she’s not fine. That’s the point. She doesn’t want to eat.”
I was dumbfounded. I’d never heard of a child who didn’t want to eat.
“What?”
“She misses you. She thinks that when you go away, you’re never coming back. We have to deal with this.”
I knew Michaela hated to see me go. Having a hotshot dad or mom is tough for a kid. You never know when your parent is going to disappear. We might be in the station and get the call to go to New Mexico or Idaho or Montana, and we’d get in the buggies and scoot. A quick call home, tears on the phone, and then we’d be out of touch for two weeks. Couldn’t even call home. There’s no cell phone signal in the middle of a national forest.
I tried to take it all in.
“She’s not eating?”
“I took her to the doctor. He says she’s suffering from separation anxiety and might be depressed.”
That word was a sharp dagger. Depression. My mom had experienced it and so had I. But one-year-old girls shouldn’t get depressed. It brought me back to that time I was twelve years old, crying my heart out in the driveway of my grandfather’s house after my mom had gone to Oregon. At every stage, I seemed to see my life being repeated over in Michaela’s. And each time, I had to fight to stop it from happening, to find a new way out for her.
I began to realize that eventually I’d have to take a job fighting structure fires, so that I could have regular hours and see my daughter more often. I was also going through a custody fight for Michaela, and I knew that if I didn’t have a nine-to-five, I’d barely see her.
Later on, I talked to Jesse and he took me in to see Eric. I repeated the story to Eric and told him that I needed to look at the structure side. At one point, I was explaining that Michaela had stopped eating when I left. I started crying.
Second time I’d cried in front of the man. Damn. But the thought that I was causing my daughter such pain was hard to take.
Eric didn’t want to lose guys. If he liked you, he wanted to keep you on Granite Mountain. I was worried about that.
But he surprised me. “Listen, Brendan,” he said. “Whatever you need to do for your daughter, you go ahead and do that. I support you fully. You got that?”
I nodded, unable to speak. I’d never had that from a man—that unconditional support, that love. It meant a lot to me.
The three of us talked about when I would start moving over to the structure side. Eric made it clear that it was up to me: When I was ready, he’d make some calls and try to get me started with Prescott Fire. Meanwhile, I was still a part of his hotshots.
Until that moment, maybe I didn’t really believe that Granite Mountain was 100 percent real. I’d met many people in my life who talked about having your back when it counted, but few of them had come through for me. The drug business is not the best place to learn about loyalty.
Eric needed bodies for the line, but he needed me to be a good father more. I cried because I knew all those words Eric had used—“integrity,” “love”—weren’t just words to him. He meant to stand by them. To live them out.
Granite Mountain had become my substitute family.