REMEMBER

Before she leaves for work, she remembers what she forgot–keys, jacket, the sound of exploding metal. The keys, underneath the unfolded pile of laundry; the jacket, hanging off the bathroom door; but it was the slam of the screen door that brought her back to the day they dunked themselves into the lake, the water cold despite the firestorm that surrounded them. When cheap steel jams against a door frame, apparently, it sounds like an exploding Honda Civic. 

The walk to her car is short, but the ringing is loud. The sidewalk that separates her from her hatchback stretches from three feet to a thousand. One breath. Two breaths. It takes nine before her heart rate slows. Another six before the ringing dies down. A few more and she’s in the driver’s seat, the flame-soaked memory subsiding to faded embers. 

The car sputters to life. The soft wailings of an Indigo Girls track trickles out of the speakers and soothes her. She pulls out of her spot on the street and heads for the freeway. 

She swipes the sides of the steering wheel until her palms are numb. She grips the busted leather, back in control. This is her safe space. The front seat. Not the back seat, where she sat as her brother drove them down the one, single dirt road to the reservoir, one car in a line of a hundred like slow-moving ants, inching along as pine trees combusted and collapsed around them. Not the back seat, where she watched helplessly as the barn Grandpa married Grandma burned in the field beyond, too far for her to have done a damn thing. 

If she’d been in the driver’s seat, maybe they could have saved the barn. Maybe they could have detoured and taken refuge at the creek that ran through the meadow. Or maybe her car would have made it all the way to the lake. Maybe they wouldn’t have had to ditch it and run the last mile to the water. Maybe she’d have remembered to turn around and grab Mom’s dogs, maybe they wouldn’t have been left behind in the mad dash to safety, maybe she wouldn’t have lung damage from going back and searching for them, maybe then they wouldn’t have gotten into that fight last Thanksgiving, maybe they’d still be on speaking terms–

The five is light today, she thinks to herself. A miracle. 

Then she remembers: it’s a holiday weekend. She’s a waitress, though, her only real holiday the one time a year the power goes out. Storm season in Los Angeles is the real Christmas morning, her co-worker once said. It’s always hot in December. 

The CD skips once, twice, three times. She slaps the dash three times, once for each skip. The hatchback is old and battered. The brakes squeak proudly, regardless of the amount of check-ins and tune-ups it goes through, and there’s a large unidentifiable and unbleachable stain that covers a third of the back seat. At the time, it was what she could afford with the $8400 from the insurance company, and after seeing how only five people and two dogs can fit into a Civic in an emergency, she opted to buy the bigger car, shitty as it was.

As she drives past the palm trees and the homeless encampment off Los Feliz, she remembers what it was like to have to leave people behind, to not have enough space to save the world. In her escape, she left her mother behind, her uncle, her cousins, the four-month-old baby. The camp host who thought he was invincible, the cows in the corral, the campers committed to saving their precious RVs. They couldn’t fit in the trunk of a four-door sedan. 

She sucks in a deep breath, the ghosts screaming what if claw their way from her chest to her throat, demanding freedom. She forces them down by remembering that none of those people died, that the cows survived, then forces herself to recall how her aunt told her that they hunkered down at the creek, how they protected her fourth-month old cousin by dunking him in the water and used a tractor to keep the fire from reaching the shore. She caresses the steering wheel like she did the baby’s soft head when she found them. Dusty, but alive. 

She fumbles for the vape stuck between her seat and the center console. It’s almost out, and her dentist says her teeth could fall out any day now, but it’s either this or rear end another person on the freeway. Three deep breaths. She doesn’t think they would believe her if she told them the ghosts made her do it. Two more breaths. The road comes back into focus. One more breath, and she veers right onto the 10. 

The tail of the vape blinks red. Two quick flashes each time she tries to inhale. Damn. She tosses it in the back seat, surrendering it to the sea of sweatshirts, blankets, shoes, water bottles, first aid equipment, and canned food she’s hoarded in the back seat. A viking death, of sorts, for the plastic tube that’s held her together the past week. 

The next two miles of her drive are blissfully clear. 

She gets four texts from the co-worker, the notifications quick and resonant, like church bells. She doesn’t open them, her hands firmly on ten and two. But she sneaks a peek. Boring day says one message. Come quick, says the next. We’ve got the stupid manager today.  

She smiles to herself. This co-worker picked up her shifts when the fire happened, and stood by her when said stupid manager tried to fire her for missing work. Despite the nationwide coverage of the fire, despite her own photos from the three days they were stranded, despite the lingering smell of smoke in her hair that took six washes to dissipate, he still thought she was lying. Next time, he asked, would it kill you to call ahead?  

But she’s not thinking about the stupid manager, or the three days they were stranded, or the grimy North Fork firefighter who cleared the roads for them. Nor is she thinking about how she saw the firefighter on Hinge last night, or how he ghosted her when she reached out. 

She’s not thinking about much when a truck honks violently and cuts her off before her exit. He lurches back to his lane and drives off, unscathed and pissed as hell, leaving her in a cloud of exhaust as she swerves and punches the brakes, the tires screeching, the smell of rubber burning–

As the metal gate crunched and bowed under the weight of the burning tree–

She grips the wheel so tight her palms blister as her car spins out–

As the sound of kids screaming tore through the smoke, as their parents dunked them in the lake, as they prayed loudly that God wouldn’t let the tree crush them too–

She screws her eyes shut, but it doesn’t drown out the pounding in her head or the terror in her chest–

As the ashes sizzled out on her hair, on her ears, in her mouth, dust and smoke clogged her throat, but she wouldn’t look away as the world–as her home–transformed from a mountaineer’s paradise of greens and blues into a scene out of Dante’s Inferno. Three in the afternoon, but the sky was black as night as the flames rose higher and higher, plumes of smoke warped and twisted as if to ensure that no light would reach the survivors trapped in the water. She could only watch from the bottom of the basin as the forest that raised her was incinerated. Hundreds of years of life, gone, like it never existed, because of a faulty electrical pole and a windy fucking day–

She tries to inhale, but there’s no room for breath in her lungs, that stupid, stupid vape, that fucking dog she left behind, her stupid doctor’s sure to blame it on the vape, but what about her mom and her cousins and the rusted trailer they used to live in? The tomato garden, the bookshelf in her room, the fence she built with Dad? Grandpa’s fingerprints on the rafters, his moth-eaten chair in the corner, the photos from his funeral–her lungs could only carry so much. 

She barely registers her car coming to a stop, or the honks of the cars that stream by, doesn’t care that she’s sticking out into the off-ramp, or that her car is unscathed. She doesn’t notice the minivan that pulls up behind her, or the older woman who approaches her window. 

She’s stuck, unable to tell the past from the present. Wherever she is, it’s shrouded in smoke. The days blur together, the locks go uncounted, the sky is burning, and the water is cold. Her dog howls, her mother screams her name, but like her own prayers, they go unanswered. Sensation on top of sensation and the world goes black, then white, then black again–

Tick, tick, tick. She forces her eyes open. 

Someone–a woman–stands at her window. Rapping three times on the pane. One, two, three. One breath in. The woman asks if she’s okay. One breath out. But her voice is muffled, from the window, or the ringing in her ears, she doesn’t know. One breath in. The old woman has two eyes and one mouth. One breath out. She rolls down the window. 

The woman puts her hand on the frame. It’s wrinkled, but firm. Five fingernails on five fingers. Are you okay, she asks again. The woman stares at her cheeks, at the bloody nails, at the spit running down her chin. 

She only knows this is what she looks like because she catches her reflection in the rearview mirror, and remembers where she is.