Three years of having the answer. Three years of keeping rooms comfortable, of giving people the version that’s easy to be around, of knowing the exit before the thing gets complicated enough to need one. I’ve been doing it so long it doesn’t feel like something I’m doing, it just feels like who I am. And now I’m standing here and none of it showed up. What comes instead is just me, in her doorway, without a plan.
The honesty of that lands between us like the thing we’ve been not saying since the kiss.
She looks at me for a long moment.
She doesn’t kiss me again.
But she doesn’t close the door.
“Come in,” she says. “I’ll make coffee.”
The coffee, when it comes, is perfect. I sit on the bench in the waiting room, the one with the poster of a golden retriever wearing a stethoscope, which has apparently been here since before either of us arrived, and I hold the mug and say nothing.
She sits at the desk and opens a chart, and the pen moves and the clock on the wall marks time and outside Main Street does what it does in the early evening and neither of us says anything.
It’s not uncomfortable.
That’s the strange part. The silence between us has always had a temperature. The first weeks it was professional courtesy, a specific warmth. After the horse call it was the temperature of something neither of us wanted to touch. Tonight it’s different.It’s just present. Like we’re both agreeing to be in the same room with the thing between us without either of us having to name it tonight.
The dog is not here. There’s no chart on the table that requires my input. I came here covered in smoke for no articulable reason and she made me coffee. Now we’re sitting in the quiet together, and it’s the first time I’ve been in a quiet that didn’t feel like something I needed to escape.
After a while she puts the pen down. “The weekend forecast looks bad,” she says.
“Yeah, it is.”
“How bad will it get?”
“Red flag Sunday. The week after that depends on the wind.”
She nods. She looks at the chart and then at the wall and then, briefly, at me. Quick, like she’s checking something she already knows the answer to. “Okay,” she says.
That’s it. Okay. I don’t know what it means and I don’t ask and she doesn’t elaborate and we go back to the quiet, the coffee, and the golden retriever poster until the mug is empty.
Forty-five minutes later I drive back to the station.
The ridgeline is dark against the sky, the fire contained, the smoke gone thin. My phone buzzes.
Diaz: Weekend forecast in. Hot, dry, NW winds 15-20 Saturday. Red flag conditions Sunday. Fire season just changed.
I stop and look at the message and then look at the clinic behind me and the ridgeline ahead of me.
Hot, dry, windy. The trifecta. The fire season has been building toward this and now it’s here, and I know what that means. The calls will escalate, the deployments will get longer,and there’s an end date I know and she knows and neither of us says out loud.
Two kinds of fire, and the weekend forecast is about to make one of them considerably more demanding.
Fire season is finite. It has a start date and an end date, and I’ve always known both and treated the end date as the thing that makes the start date possible. The end of fire season means I leave, the way I’ve always left, and what I leave behind closes behind me the way water closes over a stone.
Except I’ve never left anything I couldn’t stop thinking about.
I’m standing in the middle of both.
Chapter 8
Sloane
Ilasted four days.
Four days is not nothing. Four days is the other night, the empty coffee mug, the waiting room chairs, his truck pulling out of the lot at nine p.m., and the choice I make standing at the clinic window watching his taillights disappear: the door is right there. I know how to close it the way I know how to intubate a cat in an emergency, which is to say: automatically, without thinking too hard, because thinking too hard is when you lose the airway.
