28. Beck
twenty-eight
Beck
We hit a stretch with actual bars for the first time in several days, and my phone lights up like it's been waiting to unload on me all at once.
Texts. Missed calls. A voicemail from a number I don't recognize. I scroll through most of it without really reading it, looking for one name, and there it is.
Ivy.
We've got a fire near the district. Blackpine mobilized this morning and more crews are coming in. We're okay. I'll keep you posted.
We're okay. Relief hits first, before my eyes drop to the timestamp.
Forty-six hours old.
I read it again like the number might change. It doesn't. She sent this almost two days ago, and she said she'd keep me posted, which means there should be another message after it. I scroll down.
Nothing.
I check again, in case I missed it somehow, some notification buried under the others. There's nothing from her after that single message. Just silence where an update should be.
I call her. It rings twice, then nothing, no voicemail, no connection at all. I try again. Same result.
Just got your message. Are you okay?
I send it, then, after a second: Call me when you can.
I stop there. I know service can drop out in that country. I know she could be working, could be somewhere with her hands full and no time to check a phone. There are a dozen reasonable explanations, but none of them do anything to quiet the part of me that keeps checking the screen anyway.
Reid notices something's wrong before I say a word.
“What is it?”
I show him the text, the timestamp, the empty space where a follow-up should be. His face changes the same way mine probably did. He's got his own phone out in seconds, checking, trying Ivy, then Russ, then, after a pause, Tessa.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
Neither of us reaches for social media. We're not going to build a picture out of secondhand posts and speculation during an active incident. We ask through people who'd know, our supervisor, anyone connected to the operation who might have current information on a fire near Blackpine's district.
It takes twenty minutes to get an answer. It's worse than either of us expected.
The fire's grown substantially since Ivy's text. Weather turned against the suppression effort. More resources were pulled in. And Timber Creek is now directly threatened.
Residents are being evacuated.
I hear the word and something in me goes cold and very still.
“Evacuated doesn't mean Ivy's out,” I say, working through it out loud. “She's Blackpine crew. She could still be working somewhere in that whole mess.”
Reid doesn't answer. He's reached the same conclusion. Knowing residents are safely leaving town tells us nothing about where Ivy is.
We learn more, piece by piece. Communications around Timber Creek have degraded badly.
Power's out in parts of the district. Cell infrastructure out there was never robust to begin with, and now it's overloaded on top of already being limited, everyone trying to reach everyone else at once while evacuation traffic and fire operations complicate everything further.
Official channels are still functioning.
Incident command knows where its resources are.
I am not incident command. I don't know where Ivy is.
Reid tries Russ again. Straight to nothing.
“He's supervising a wildfire threatening his own district,” I say, before Reid can say it himself. “He's not answering personal calls right now.”
“I know that.”
“I know you know.”
He doesn't respond, just stares at his phone like willpower alone might make it ring.
I watch something in him I don't think I've ever seen before.
Reid's the most even-keeled person I know when it comes to fire.
He trusts training. He trusts the system.
He's spent years watching me and everyone else on our crew disappear into this kind of situation without falling apart about it.
This is different. This is Ivy.
“She's with Russ,” he says, after a minute, like he's reciting something. “She knows what she's doing.”
“She does.”
“If they need to move her, they'll move her.”
“They will.”
He's not really talking to me. I understand this halfway through, watching him list the facts like saying them out loud might make them feel more certain than they are. I let him get through it, because I'm doing the same thing in my own head. But it’s not helping much.
Every instinct I have says go. There's a wildfire threatening the town where Ivy is, and I fight wildfires for a living. Every trained reflex in my body wants to move toward her instead of staying here.
I can't. We're assigned to an active incident.
People here are relying on us. Even if somebody released us this second, we're hours from Timber Creek by any road that exists, with no aircraft available for a personal errand and no operational reason for anyone to send us there instead of where we are.
“Any chance they send us that way?” Reid asks, mirroring my own thoughts.
It's a fair question. If Timber Creek's escalating and requesting more resources, could our unit get reassigned there?
We ask.
Not right now, comes the answer. Our current incident still needs the personnel it has. If resource orders shift, we'll be told.
Stay here. Do the job.
I've spent my whole career on the other side of this feeling.
I've been the one who disappears into terrain without service for days at a time, trusting that the people waiting back home understand there are a dozen simple, rational reasons for silence.
I never fully understood what that truly costs someone until right now, standing here with a silent phone and nothing to do but wait.
When you're working a fire, you have a tool. A task. A crew. A radio. Something to point yourself at. Waiting gives you none of that. Just the space to imagine every possible version of what might be happening, none of which you can confirm or rule out.
Ivy's done this with Reid for years. Every fire season, every assignment, every stretch of silence that could mean nothing or could mean something.
She's trusted trained people she couldn't see.
She's told herself no news wasn't bad news, over and over, and kept working anyway, kept living her life.
The alternative was letting the fear consume every hour she wasn't hearing from him.
There's something cruel about the symmetry. Ivy worried about me leaving for a fire. Now I'm standing at one fire, surrounded by everything I'm trained to use against this kind of threat, and none of it does a single thing to help her.
Somebody calls my name. Break's over. Whether I'm ready for it or not, I have to shove all of this down far enough to be useful to the people standing next to me. Because fear that makes you careless gets someone hurt out here. I check my phone one last time. Nothing. I put it away and go to work.
It's what Ivy would do. It's what she did, sending me that message and then getting back to whatever needed doing.
So I do the same. I follow instructions.
I pay attention. I try to not let what I can't control bleed into what I still can.
It takes everything I have. Every legitimate break, every pause for water, my hand goes to my phone.
Nothing. Back to work. An hour later, same thing. Nothing. I catch Reid doing it too.
Late in the day we get an update. Timber Creek remains threatened. Evacuation's underway, mostly complete for residential areas. Crews continue working the incident. No catastrophic news. No report that infrastructure has burned.
But also no information about Blackpine fire personnel. That's the part I need, but it's the one piece nobody has for me.
Smoke still hangs low over the western ridge from our own fire. My body's exhausted after a long operational day. My mind isn't tired at all. By evening, the work slows enough for me to check again. Nothing. I try calling Ivy again. Nothing.
My own service is working fine now, sufficient bars, everything functioning the way it should. That almost makes it worse. My phone works. Hers, wherever she is, apparently doesn't.
Here's what I know: there's an active wildfire threatening Timber Creek. Residents have been evacuated. Blackpine personnel are part of the response. Communications in the area are unreliable. Ivy's last message came over two days ago.
Here's what I don't know: where she is right now. What assignment she's working. Whether she's still near town or somewhere else. Whether she's gotten any of the messages I've sent. Whether, right this minute, she's okay.
I check my phone one more time before I try to get whatever sleep I can tonight.
Nothing.
I lie back against my pack, phone still in my hand, screen gone dark.
Somewhere out there, Ivy's doing what I'm doing right now.
Working. Waiting for a break to check a phone that isn't giving her anything either.
Telling herself the same things I'm telling myself, that no news isn't bad news, that trained people know what they're doing, that this is just how it goes sometimes.
I've spent years being fine with silence.
Assignments where I disappeared for a week and never thought twice about who might be sitting somewhere wondering if I was okay.
It never occurred to me there was a cost to that, not really, not until tonight, lying here aware how many hours it's been since I knew for certain she was safe.
I'm not going to decide what this means.
Not tonight, not like this, not with fear doing most of the talking.
But I know this much: I have never once, in my entire life, wanted to hear someone's voice the way I want to hear hers right now.
Not to ask her anything. Not even to say anything in particular.
Just to hear it.
I continue holding my phone and stare up at a sky still faintly orange at the edges from a fire that isn't hers.