The fire began small, in the undergrowth, which was desiccated from a summer of 105-degree temperatures. It stayed low to the ground for a while, burning grass and pine needles and ferns. Eventually a wind gusted from the north and the fire crowned, spreading to the tops of the trees and passing from one pine to the next, igniting the flammable oils inside their trunks. The fire found its wings. Soon it was traveling at close to fifteen miles per hour, creating its own weather, whirling and bursting, spotting downwind to ignite additional fires. Snowshoe hares exploded. Logs catapulted into the sky. At one point, it seemed to veer into fast motion, hairpinning uphill and devouring an entire slope in a matter of seconds.
The fire fed this way for days, despite the human efforts to contain it. When there was nothing left to feed upon, the west face of the mountain reduced to ash, the flames caught a downdraft and spread downhill in search of fuel, using a creek bottom for a chimney. It headed toward some homes along the lake, which—like Salish itself—had already been evacuated. Stray horses wandered the highway. Hotshots took engines and skidgines up the fire road and fought the blaze as best as they could; helicopters dumped water from enormous buckets they’d filled in the lake. An air tanker, bleeding from its belly, doused it with slurry. Hand crews did their best to clear a line uphill from the houses, working chain saws and Pulaskis, scraping the ground to soil on the steep hillside and then using drip torches to set a backfire so that the line was even wider, trying to protect the houses with a moat of dirt and ash.
But the fire proved impossible to contain. Flames hopped the moat, not from the wind but because the blaze was so hot it caused the pines fifty yards downhill from it to spontaneously ignite. The fire consumed one house, then the next. They went up like the trees did: expertly, as if they’d been put on earth to burn. The fire swept toward the lake. It did not notice that the third house was yellow, or that it had been there for a hundred and twenty-two years, or that it was a house at all. That the house meant anything to anyone—that some old people explored it, almost nightly, in their dreams—of course never occurred to it. The timber was simply waiting to be used. It had waited a long time. The fire consumed the orchard and the house and the front yard, turning the badminton net into a gigantic spark gap for a second, then continued down to the dock and burned that up too, transforming it into smoke that you could see from space.
Lana grabbed her light meter and Zoom recorder, then opened the trunk of her rental car and pulled out her old Canon C300, which she still used on scouts. The camera was hopelessly outdated, but they’d had a long relationship and she couldn’t bear to replace it. Agnes, Lana’s partner, observed her from the passenger seat, watching for signs of distress. Lana ignored this. She crossed the highway and waded through the fireweed that skirted the road to the place where the house used to be. Spires of blackened pines surrounded the area; the few whose crowns were still intact looked like arrows, fletched at the top with withered branches. It had rained the night before and the trees smelled dank and cindery, like burnt rope. The smell clawed at Lana’s headache. She stepped over the foundation, into the Margolises’ living room. It still had a feeling about it, a ghost of shelter though you were just as outdoors. The stone fireplace stood in the open air, charred but unscathed. The rest of the house had disappeared.
Seedlings had begun to sprout here and there, interspersed among the fireweed, impatient to claim the site and return it to forest. Ponderosa pines. One still had its seed coat stuck to the top, like a Christmas ornament.
Her mother had loved this place. Lana had too. One of the few things, really, they’d had in common.
Lana waited for her head to stop throbbing. She’d gone to a bar with Agnes last night, where she’d literally cried into her beer—visiting her mother always turned her into a country song—before bucking herself up with a margarita. Shakily, she took some measurements on the meter. The light was tough, but she’d be shooting flat anyway. She checked the profiles on her camera and chose neutral—she’d apply a LUT in post—then began to film the ruins, panning from the fireplace to the rubble of the foundation, half-buried in the earth like an ancient city. She was just scouting at this point, to see how it looked. She had the idea for a documentary: a kind of essay film, about her and Jasper and the summers they’d spent at the house. Something like Sans Soleil, narrated in the form of a letter. She imagined bringing some furniture out here and arranging it around the fireplace, stage-designing it from memory.
She recorded the ambient sound—birdsong, the buzz of cicadas—on her Zoom. Then she stepped over the foundation and headed between the poles where the clothesline once stretched and through the blackened fence where the orchard was, re-meadowing now with pioneer grass. The ancient apple trees, of course, were gone—had died well before the fire. Lana wished she could remember the names of them, the different cultivars; Sweet Sixteen was the one that came to mind, and only because Jasper used to eat them in a pervy way as a joke. If only she could ask her mother. Her father had put her in Lakeview two years ago, when she’d become a danger to herself. (“Graveview Village,” he called it.) Her mother roamed the halls endlessly, vocationally, like a robot vacuum. Lana and Agnes had found her there this morning, touring the memory wing in her nightgown. She’d seemed startled to see them, almost annoyed. Her hair was white and thin—had turned to silk, like something in a fairy tale. She’d beckoned Lana over to tell her something, a secret, but when Lana bent down to listen, her mother only breathed in her ear. Seemed to have forgotten what she was going to say. Or perhaps the breathing itself was the message. The secret. She’d wanted Lana to remember it, the only news she had left.
Lana had cried on the way back to the house she’d grown up in. (She cried every day on these visits—felt, sometimes, on the plane from LA, as if she were a storm cloud preparing to rain.) She’d stopped on the porch to recover, not wanting to upset her father, whom she could see was napping on the couch, an E. O. Wilson book tented on his chest. He seemed lost without Lana’s mother. Spent most of his time at the nursing home, roaming the halls with her or listening to cheesy pop songs from their youth, one of the few things that made her stop moving. Stillness at last. They’d lie in her adjustable bed together, holding hands. Her mother would hum along to Bonnie Tyler or Duran Duran, clutching the stuffed animal he’d given her. A raccoon. Why he’d bought her such a thing, Lana had no idea. But she loved it, carried it everywhere she went. Lana found the whole development—the eighties hits, the raccoon—demeaning. Sometimes when she visited, her mother would call out, “Mommy!,” like a child waking up from a nightmare, and then get upset if Lana corrected her. She’d have no choice but to go along with it, singing “Goodnight, Irene” or making pretend weather on her mother’s back, which seemed to put the world back into joint.
It was easier with Lana’s father there. Her mother was always checking for his sneakers by the window. If they weren’t there, she flipped out. Pitched a fit and threw things at the wall. It got so bad that he’d had to drive home barefoot one day, buy a second pair of sneakers so he could leave the old ones in her room. They sat there beside her mother’s slippers, laces tied into perfect little knots, as if Lana’s parents had been raptured from their shoes. He’d spent half his life without her, traipsing around the mountains, but now he couldn’t seem to bear leaving her alone. He’d started talking about moving to Lakeview Village as well, to one of the assisted-living suites.
Her parents’ marriage had always seemed like a cautionary tale to Lana, a source of heartbreak and remorse. A rash decision—a crush, really—leading to years of fallout. All that suffering: Mr. Margolis’s, which had trickled in some pitiless way down to Jasper. And for what? An imperfect marriage, like every other. There had been good times, it seemed—but plenty of bad ones too. Lana was not at all sure it had made her mother happy.
But maybe she’d had unreasonable expectations for it. Can kids ever see their parents’ relationship for what it is? Every flaw, every fallibility, feels like a betrayal, as if the only point of marriage were to keep their child happy. Above all, it wasn’t supposed to look like work. But what if the work itself was the point?
How strange that in the end Lana’s parents would be so hungry for each other’s company, like newlyweds. She’d mentioned this to her dad, and he’d said “newlyweds” was a good term for it.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s like she’s found someone new. A different husband. I don’t actually have a name.”
Lana shot the orchard for a while, doing a circular pan along the fence. A stack of buckets had melted into a giant blue patty, like something expelled by Paul Bunyan’s ox. She zoomed in on it, remembering how her father used to take her up here, at the Margolises’ urging, to collect raspberries. They’d fill a whole bucket to take home, her father balancing it miraculously on his head. How she’d worshipped him! She used to picture him up in the mountains, chasing wolverines, and think he had the greatest life ever. As she got older, the wolverining had started to seem less glamorous to her—a bit pathetic even, as if he were using it as a way of disengaging from the world. She’d felt bitter about it. Now she felt like he’d found something small to do, to save, and had done his very best to save it. Lana admired him for it. She didn’t know how to tell him this, to put it into words. He’d told her, not long ago, that his life had been a waste, he hadn’t managed to keep a few dumb wolverine families alive, and she’d tried to tell him you couldn’t measure a life this way, in Gulo Units. If you look for a meaning, Tarkovsky once said, you’ll miss everything that happens.
Lana had thought about interviewing her dad on camera—the man’s memory was startling—but he had no interest in discussing the past. Besides, his vocal cords were nearly shot. He’d literally lost his voice.
Still, she had her mother’s breath in her ear. That was something.
Her head drummed with pain, an upbeat to her pulse. She walked across the orchard and through the east gate of the fence to where she’d humiliated Jasper in front of Téa and her friend. What was her name? Parvini? Lana zoomed in on the patch of fireweed where she imagined they’d sat. It was hard to tell among the graveyard of trees. They poked from the earth at odd angles, like birthday candles. Lana woke up at three or four a.m. sometimes, still plagued with guilt. Not just from humiliating Jasper on purpose, but from the years before that too, when she’d brandished her boredom like a gun and done everything she could to shock him. When she’d used him to grow up.
She could not hold the camera steady. Maybe she should have flown Izzy, her DP, out here to help. But this was part of it, of course: the trembling. The unsteadiness. It was the main story.
It was late in the day, the sun flat against her back. The shadows of the trees seemed to go on forever. She heard a snap in the woods, deep among the spires, where the fireweed was as tall as a fence. Lana froze. She remembered those prematurely aged photos of herself she used to keep on her phone. Yes, here she was; she’d returned.
Another sound, like branches underfoot. Something was there.
Lana backed away slowly, filming as she went. She had the eerie sensation—a conviction, though there was no evidence—that the camera saw something she didn’t. She stopped shooting, then returned to the place where the house had stood. She found a charred log and laid it in the fireplace. Then she walked down to the lake, where all that remained of the dock were its metal pilings sticking out of the water. The sunset was outlandishly beautiful, painting the clouds over the bay a volcanic red, as if a toddler had picked up the sun and smeared it everywhere he could. The lake, too, had turned to lava. Lana put down her camera, knowing that it was impossible to film such a thing without turning it into a postcard. What was it her dad used to say? A photo turns ugly things beautiful and beautiful things ugly. She stared at the sunset for a while. Then she walked back to her car, where Agnes was sitting on the hood.
“Did you get what you needed?”
“Of course not,” Lana said, then smiled.
“Some sunset, isn’t it? It’s, like, prehistoric.”
“It’s the smoke in the air,” Lana said. “The particles. They make the sunsets even brighter.”
Agnes thanked the sun personally, for its lifetime of service—she was like this, a goofball—then got into the car with Lana, who drove off. The bear, who’d been watching her from the woods, wandered down to the lake in search of dead fish. Occasionally they washed up on the beach. The sun continued to do its thing, pulling out all the stops, but the bear could not have cared less. The wind smelled of trout. He roamed the shoreline, skirting a lounge chair that had melted like a crayon. A noise echoed off the lake. The bear flattened his ears, thinking for a second that the people were back—but it turned out to be nothing, or nothing worth huffing about, just an abandoned rowboat scraping against the rocks.
The people were finally gone.