Firebird

She was conceived on the day the volcano erupted. Her father watched from the orchard as the top of the mountain was blown off. He was so inspired that he gifted his wife a souvenir of that memorable, historical event. He wanted to remember the fire on the streets, smoke between the sheets, and nine months later, Helen slid into the world with eyes wide open. Her hair was black like soot, her cheeks red like fire.

Helen, named for the mountain who lost its head, grew up in the secret garden of her father’s orchard. The neighbors’ orchards shriveled and turned gray with ash, but her father’s crop flourished the year of the eruption. Helen spent her earliest years running and hiding behind lines of carefully labeled trees: Gala, Jonagold, Fuji, Pink Lady. She climbed to the highest branches, gathered the ripest apples in her pockets, and made friends with the small creatures hiding in the leaves. She watched her father hard at work, browning in the sun, pruning, examining, fertilizing, digging, shoveling, lifting, carrying.

At the end of the workday, father and daughter would sit on a bench on the back porch, enjoying the basket of Honeycrisp apples at their feet. They were his favorite kind of apple, and so they were also her favorite. Her mother would be cooking dinner inside, but they would linger, watching the sun, golden and dripping like a giant egg yolk, dip behind the looming mountain. The mountain with its crooked flat top had smoke curling from where its head had been, smoke rising and sighing lovingly into the arms of the clouds.

Her father picked two apples and placed the larger in Helen’s hand. They tipped the apples toward each other and clinked them like they were glasses of champagne. She watched her father bite into his apple with his eyes closed, juice dripping into his beard, before she bit through the skin of her own apple.

“Tell me,” she said, snuggling into his side, juice falling down her wrist. “Tell me again, about the day the mountain exploded.”

“I was in the orchard, the same one you picked these apples from today. I was on the row with the Honeycrisps. I was standing there, right there, where the wheelbarrow is now. It was August, and it was very, very hot that day. And I looked up to wipe sweat from my forehead, just like this, and then, bam! The head of the mountain flew off! Like it was chopped off!”

He pretended to chop her head off, tickled her, then lifted her into the air. She spread her arms like wings and pretended she was a bird. She let her father guide her flight through the air and she closed her eyes, the same way he closed his eyes before his first bite into an apple.

When Helen was five, her father left early in the morning to enjoy a long bike ride, following a familiar trail around the lake, over the arching bridges, tracing the cliffs. His bike was found later that evening, bent and twisted, pummeled into the road by the trucks that sped twenty miles over the speed limit. Weeks later, investigators with bowed heads and sad hands concluded that his body most likely fell into the water over the cliff’s edge, a fall of over a hundred feet into sharp rocks that he could never have survived. They closed the case. His body was never found.

Helen’s mother, consumed with grief, sold the orchard that was her husband’s life-long project. She packed her family’s belongings into a U-Haul, drove five hours into the city, and never looked back. And so Helen grew up in a different sort of garden than the one she had known: wandering among street lamps like tree trunks, hiding behind the leaves of library book pages, tasting the fruits of urban life.

The first night after they moved to the city, she dreamed of flying. There was fire beneath her — fire like an ocean, fire like a grassland, fire that danced, fire that swayed. She was flying over the fields of fire, and she was searching for something. Everything beneath her was burning, and soon she recognized the home she used to live in, the bench on the back porch, the apple orchard.

She glided lower to the ground, scared of the fire, but found that she could fly through the fire without burning. The fire was not hot; it was cool like water. She flew between the collapsing walls of her old home until she found what she was looking for — a photo album of her family, the corners singed. But there was the front cover: her mother, her father, her brother, and her tiny self. She grasped it with invisible claws and lifted into the air, but by the time she reached the clouds the album had burned and disintegrated.

Every night was nearly the same dream. Always the ground was on fire; always she roved over the fire lands until she recognized a familiar location: sometimes her old home, or the new house her mother had purchased, or her grandparents’ home. Always she was looking for something precious — letters, a watch she had lost, a stuffed animal, a video camera, a phone. The fire never burned her like the anxiety that compelled her to search so desperately. Sometimes she woke before she found what she was looking for, sometimes she grasped the item and lifted into the air, but always, she failed to fulfill the final mission. In the distance was a looming mountain with a crooked top, and she knew she must bring her precious item to the top, but never once did she make it there before waking.

She began to practice flying in her dreams. She learned to tame the anxiety, she learned to enjoy the flight. She learned to jump from cliffs and float with her arms spread wide, gliding gleefully in the wind. She learned to skim the surface of a flat pool of water, the reflection of her face blurry. She twirled, rotated, collected clouds on the tips of her wings, raced with her shadow. She no longer feared the fire.

Decades later, after she had graduated from college and moved away and found love and had children of her own, she returned to the city after learning about her mother’s death. Her mother had lived a new life after moving to the city. She mourned her late husband for several years; she remarried; she loved her children; she started running marathons; she joined volunteer groups working with inner-city youth; she wrote books about self-meditation and self-care.

The first night back in the city, Helen dreamed of flying over fields of fire, searching for her mother’s wedding ring. It was wedged beneath the dining room chair of her new home in Texas, but it had been so long since she had last dreamed of flying that her flight was clumsy and she woke before she could make it out of the fire into the air.

At her mother’s funeral, she remembered her dream and thought about how often she had practiced flying, in fire, over fire, within fire, but how long it had been. The dreams had come less frequently in high school, and now, it had been years since she had flown in her sleep. It rained and rained through the funeral, but afterward, sharing a meal with her brother in his high-rise apartment on the tip of South Lake Union, the rain stopped and the sky cleared. She walked to the window, pressed her fingertips against the glass, and saw the mountain who had lost its head, the one also named Helen. It was far away, poking out from between the sleeves of the Cascades, but she could almost see the curl of smoke rising and wedging itself into the clouds.

She didn’t waste a minute. She scrolled through her phone to obtain a last-minute permit. She borrowed a backpack from her brother, rented a car, and drove south. She stopped at a Safeway along the way and bought bottles of water, granola bars, energy drinks, and two Honeycrisp apples. She drove another hour to the trailhead. When she parked it was an hour before midnight. Before sleeping, she stood outside of her car, watching her breath form like smoke in the cold air. She leaned against her car, looked up, and saw more stars than she could count.

She slept in her car and woke the next morning. She laced her hiking boots, tied her hair, and began the journey up the headless mountain, the mountain as familiar as the sister she never had, the mountain from her dreams that she had never been able to reach no matter how fast she pumped her wings.

She was the only hiker in the morning. The dirt was clean and packed beneath her feet. She liked the smell of the early morning. She skirted the boulders and the thin alpine trees, following the cairns. She sat on a boulder near a radio tower for a drink of water. She wondered how the rocks, so cold to the touch from the alpine air, could have once been formed from fire.

She scrambled up rocks that got smaller and smaller until the final climb was nothing more than a hill of ash. And then she was there. She was shivering from the cold wind and her legs were shaking from the exertion. Ash in her hair, sweat in her brow.

At the top was the crater, the place where the mountain had lost her head. Helen held her breath. There were no fields of fire, no lakes of molten lava. The crater was not the fire landscape of her dreams. Instead, it was dry and ashy, like a lake that had been drained. Inside of the crater was its own ecosystem of lakes and valleys, small hills and patches of grass. In the center of the crater was a small mound, and from it rose the thinnest sliver of smoke. The mountain was breathing.

Helen sat cross-legged a foot from the edge of the crater and opened her backpack. She took out one Honeycrisp apple and placed it in front of her, and took the other in her hands. She polished it on the underside of her shirt, then bit into the sweet flesh. She closed her eyes and imagined that her father was beside her, sweating and lumbering and breathing heavily and smiling widely. He grabbed an apple from the basket at their feet, picked from his own orchard, not from the produce section of Safeway, and they clinked the apples like they were glasses of champagne. He said, “I really thought there would be fire at the top. I didn’t expect there to be a lake. It’s really not what I expected.”

She finished her apple, wiped fingers sticky with juice on the cloth of her pants, stood quickly, and made her way down the mountain. She had found the thing she had been looking for in her dreams, and she would leave it for the mountain to have.