19. Kael
KAEL
Walt still looks like he just saw a ghost. Sharon keeps talking, setting out mugs and fussing with a kettle, but the way he’s pale and quiet makes my skin itch.
Sharon reminds me of Gram. The morning Mom left, Gram picked me up in her Buick Century like a knight in a dented sedan, snatched the note off the counter before I could read more than my name, and told me I was coming to stay “for a while.”
When Alistair first messaged me online, I did the same thing I’d done with her. I turned him into a story: a wizard with a bottomless well of resources, dropping money into my account and saving me from trading my passion to make rent.
Sharon and Walt aren’t superheroes or wizards. They saved us, but without the smoke and the flaming trees they’re just two exhausted people in a too-new apartment, looking like they need us as much as we need them.
Ash calls Jenny to tell her we’re safe, while I shower off smoke, sweat, and adrenaline. When the water stops, I just stand there, dripping in the guest room tub, while the fire loops behind my eyes, until I’m shivering and have to crank the water back on.
By the time I sit at their dining table, the brief jolt of relief from the alert feels far away.
Sharon sets down a pot of tea and little plates of cookies, crackers, meat, and cheese on a quilted runner that looks like it’s seen three different kitchens and twice as many moves. Their things are old, far older than their home, and it feels like stepping back into the house where I grew up.
Sharon’s easy kindness overlays the memory of her white-knuckling that pickup through embers and of her shoulder slamming into a fallen tree to save our lives.
Gram hid that same California steel under soft cardigans and lemon cookies.
She raised me to believe I was a blessing, not a burden, teaching me that true strength is a radical act.
That kind of resilience takes both muscle and heart.
Looking at Sharon, I can almost hear Gram’s voice in my head, reminding me of the mantra she lived by: no struggle, no strength.
Walt, on the other hand, still looks like he hasn’t come back from the fire at all.
“They say Camp Fire was the deadliest wildfire in state history,” he says, once he’s sipped his tea and gotten some air into his lungs. “Started in Pulga, just down the road. There wasn’t time to do a damn thing about it.”
“We’d been hiking the day before,” Sharon adds, close enough that her shoulder brushes his. “So we slept in. Couldn’t have been past eight in the morning.”
“It was like waking into a nightmare,” Walt says. “House was right here, same corner, but out the windows it was just black and red.”
“Like Dante’s Inferno,” Sharon murmurs, staring somewhere past us.
“When we went out, it looked like the gates of hell had opened.” He jerks his chin toward the wall of paintings. “I keep telling Sharon, if she really wants to show people what it was like, she should paint the whole damn thing black.”
“It’s impressionistic,” Sharon huffs, nudging him. “Kael gets it.”
“They’re incredible,” I say. “It sounds terrifying.”
“We left everything,” Walt says. “Hopped in our car and drove straight into another on our driveway.”
“That’s why I’m the driver now,” Sharon says. “There was no way for him to see it. Never imagined traffic backing up to Fir and Almond, let alone spilling into the yard.”
Walt rubs a hand over his mouth. “People were trying to get around Skyway. Driving over curbs. Bumper-to-bumper everywhere. Didn’t even care we hit ’em. Never did find out who it was.”
“We’re still here,” Sharon says, reaching for prosciutto as if she needs something to do. “Not like we’re hiding.”
“If only,” Walt mutters.
Ash shifts, uneasy. I catch it and try to warn him with a look, but he barrels ahead anyway.
“You don’t have to relive this if you don’t want to,” he says. “We already made you relive it once today.”
Walt lays his hand over Sharon’s. His eyes stay on her. “Camp Fire is why I froze today. Put you both, put my wife, in danger. I need to talk about it, if that’s all right.”
The urge to tell him he doesn’t have to is strong. Instead I hear myself say, “My mom left when I was ten. Gram made me see a therapist. Took a long time before I said anything real, but… it helped.”
Walt squeezes Sharon’s fingers, then gives me a droopy smile. “I’ll… look into it,” he says.
Sharon kisses his cheek. “Been begging him for years,” she tells us, equal parts fond and frustrated.
“I swear by it,” I say. “Anger, trauma, frustration—art’s my therapy now. Maybe you want to join Sharon.”
“She doesn’t even like it when I watch her.”
“Oh, Walt, finish up,” Sharon says, giving his shoulder one last squeeze as she stands. “Boys, will you stay for dinner? It’s no trouble. After Walt’s finished, I’ll open the liquor cabinet, and we can celebrate being alive.”
Ash meets my eyes over the table. We both know there’s no universe where we say no.
“How can I help?” I ask, pushing my chair back.
“Let me see…” Sharon crosses to the fridge, pulls it open, and hums at the shelves. “We do homemade pizza on Sundays. Easy enough to double.”
“Perfect,” Ash says, already standing. “Put us to work.”
Soon there’s flour on the table and the oven ticking hotter. Sharon presses dough into pans with quick, practiced hands. Ash chops peppers and onions while I slice mozzarella.
Walt leans against the counter, trading tea for wine, as he slips back into memory with his eyes fixed on the dough.
“Embers were raining down,” he says. “Looked like snow till you got close. You’d hear explosions from propane tanks or cars going up. Then, back to more horns and screaming. We abandoned the car and walked, hundreds of us, all trying to leave town.”
Sharon’s hands slow on the crust. Ash’s knife hesitates over a bell pepper.
I picture that main road jammed solid with abandoned cars and people on foot, leaving their entire lives behind.
“Then this policeman told us to lie flat on the road and pray,” Walt says.
“Pray?” Ash’s disbelief hits at the same time as the spike in my own chest.
“That’s what I thought.” Walt’s laugh cracks. “But I’ve never been so scared in my life. I prayed to everyone I could think of—Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, the president—all of ’em.”
He looks down at his hands, dusted with flour from where he’s pressed a palm into the counter. They’re steady now.
“It worked,” Sharon says, pointing a wooden spoon at us, as if daring us to argue.
“And I thank ’em all each night,” Walt adds. “We may have lost the house and most of our stuff, but we’ve got each other. Stuff’s easy to replace.”
“As you can see,” Sharon says, waving the spoon around the fresh drywall and new cabinets.
Maybe they are superheroes.
“You’re still laughing,” I say, thinking of how tight my own chest still feels. “Still loving. It seems like this made you stronger.”
“Thank you, dear,” Sharon says.
Walt shakes his head. “I couldn’t even get out of the dang truck,” he says. “I kept thinking, This is it; this is it.”
“You’ve been thinking ‘this is it’ ever since we moved back, dear. Therapy’ll do you some good.”
“Getting out of Paradise will do us some good.” Walt’s response is somehow heavier than the whole story.
I glance at the big front window, the empty sign on the roof, the built-in counter downstairs that’s begging to be a café, a gallery, a something. A whole building, sitting on a corner other people would kill for, and he just wants to escape it.
“Boys were complimenting our house,” Sharon says quickly. “We’ve been blessed.”
“She says that because she feels guilty leaving,” Walt says. “Recovery gave everyone a little money to rebuild. We got a whole building because they’re tryin’ to move downtown to our block.”
“Blessed,” Sharon repeats, firmer. “From the ashes, a phoenix rises.”
Walt snorts. “We don’t want to open a store. We don’t want to live above one. We don’t want to be in Paradise.”
Ash’s hand tightens on the knife handle, and I think of those FI people with good jobs and nice houses, all planning their escape. Enviable lives, wanting anything but what they have.
“Alright now.” Sharon sets the spoon down and moves to a wooden cabinet. “Time for cocktails. We’ve bored the boys long enough. Today, we saved each other’s lives. I’d like to cheers to that.”
“Hear! Hear!” I tell her.
Ash, bless him, reaches across the table and takes Walt’s hand, squeezing with a look that shows he understands more than numbers and news clips. We weren’t here for Camp Fire, but Walt accepts the gesture with a grateful nod.
Sharon pours wine. I ask more about her painting because it’s something she can talk about without going distant.
We spread sauce, scatter cheese, and argue about toppings.
Ash asks how they met. Sharon tops off our glasses again and tells us about a tenth-grade history class and a boy who wouldn’t stop staring at her notes.
By the time the first pizza comes out of the oven, the kitchen smells like oregano and toasted crust, and the edges of everyone’s grief are soft with fatigue and alcohol.
“What about you two?” Sharon asks at some point, simple as anything. Whatever’s written on our faces must be obvious.
“We love the gays,” Walt chimes in immediately.
“Walt!” Sharon smacks his arm with the back of her hand. “You don’t say ‘the gays.’ If you find yourself saying, ‘the’ anything, just stop.”
I can feel myself go beet red.
“Oh, we’re not—” Ash starts. “I mean, I am gay. We both are.”
“We met yesterday,” I say, my own cheeks burning, but there’s a smile I can’t quite tamp down. “Ash was going to a finance camp, and—I’m sure he’ll tell you, so I’ll fess up—I was there because I thought it was an art retreat.”
“You’re kidding!” Sharon cackles, the wine and the relief loosening her into a full-body laugh.
“Yeah, Kael, it’s a joke, right?” Ash teases.
“I heard about this new art movement called Futurist Illusionism,” I explain. “When I looked online, there was a whole retreat about FI at Philbrook the next day. So I booked it.”