Torch

Chapter 14

Chapter Fourteen

Hunter

Dinner is twenty-cent ramen followed by freeze-dried backpacking food. All it involves is boiling water, and I do that while Clementine sits on a cot, ankle wrapped in instant ice packs, scanning the horizon with a pair of binoculars.

“Anything?” I ask.

We both changed out of our sweaty hiking clothes. I’m wearing super-lightweight “lounge” pants — okay, they’re basically really thin sweatpants — and tomorrow’s shirt. Clem has on leggings and a long-sleeve t-shirt with no bra on underneath.

The no-bra thing is making it kind of hard to focus.

“Not yet,” she says. “There’s a couple of clouds that kind of look like smoke, but I’m pretty sure they’re just clouds.”

“Want the expert to take a look?” I ask.

“You’re not the expert on fire spotting,” she says. “You just put them out.”

“Really, I’m the expert at making boundaries that fires can’t cross, if you want to get technical about it,” I say.

Clementine doesn’t answer, and the cabin goes quiet. I don’t mind. The silence now is different from the loaded silence this morning in the car. That one felt like an anvil was swinging over my head, ready to fall, but this one is oddly comfortable. Companionable.

Sometimes you run out of things to say to another person, especially if you’ve been together for twelve hours already, and it’s fine. It feels like putting on a pair of worn-in shoes.

Not that Clementine is a pair of old shoes.

The water on the stove boils, and I pour it into the laminated bags of freeze-dried spaghetti, close them, and wait. I’m not exactly a gourmet chef, but we won’t starve.

“Hey, c’mere,” Clementine says.

I walk to the cot where she’s sitting and stand behind her. She looks back and hands me the binoculars, then points.

“That’s a cloud, right?” she asks.

“I thought I wasn’t an expert,” I say, lifting them to my eyes.

“I didn’t say you were,” she teases. “I just need a second opinion.”

I adjust the lenses and the faint white column she’s pointing at comes into view. I stare at it for a long time.

“Huh,” I finally say. I examine it harder, because while it does look like a pillar, it doesn’t seem to be growing. It doesn’t seem to be emanating from one spot, like smoke would be.

I think it’s just a weird spot of half-fog half-cloud, though it’s hard to tell. Plus, the sun is setting, and that makes it even harder to tell.

“We’ll see if it’s there in the morning,” I say. “If it is, we should call it in, but if it’s anything at all it’s just a lightning strike. Most of those go out pretty fast.”

As many wildfires as there are in the west, there are way, way more trees struck by lightning.

Most of them smolder for a little while, then go out, and nothing around them even catches fire.

Sometimes, some of the brush around them will catch, a few of the drier trees, but those usually put themselves out too.

Even in a drought, live trees don’t catch fire very easily.

It really takes a bad combination for a lightning strike to turn into a wildfire: dry, dead trees, lots of underbrush, dense foliage that hasn’t gotten rain in too long. We’re here because conditions in Big Sky National Forest could be right. They’re probably not, but they could be.

Clementine just nods.

“Dinner?” I ask.

I pour the spaghetti onto tin plates, and we eat with sporks, sitting on one of the cots, watching the sunset.

I don’t say anything, and it’s partly because I’m eating, but partly because I can’t think of anything to say as the clouds above turn from pink to orange to purple, striping the sky with colors I wouldn’t believe if I weren’t sitting here, looking at them.

Then, when the last rays of the run disappear below the horizon, it’s suddenly dark. The whole cabin is swathed in shades of purple and everything seems to go perfectly still, even the air. I hold my breath, afraid to ruin it.

I want to reach out, put my arms around Clementine, rest my chin on her head as she relaxes against me. It feels unnatural to be sitting here, her so close, and not do that. But she’s been pretty clear: this, sitting and watching the sunset together, is gonna have to be good enough.

It isn’t, but I’ve been disappointed before. I’ll survive.

“This might sound weird,” Clementine says, her voice slow in the stillness, “but this kind of feels like college.”

I look around.

“Being in a lookout cabin on top of a mountain with a busted ankle feels like college?” I ask.

She brushes her bangs off her forehead, still looking out the window at the spot on the horizon where the sun went down, smiling.

“Not that part,” she says. “But sitting on a tiny bed and eating in the dark does.”

I grab our plates and stand, walking them to the basin. There’s no real sink, but there’s a big bucket and a tank of water for dishes.

“I thought you went to class and shit,” I say.

She laughs.

“That too,” she says. “But while I was living in the dorms, the only place to sit in anyone’s room was the bed.

So I ate a lot of cereal there, or if people wanted to watch a movie or something, we’d all have to sit on the bed.

And now, anytime I’m on a twin bed doing something besides sleeping, it feels like college. ”

I sit down next to her again, leaning against a window so now we’re facing each other. A small, mean part of me wants to ask what else she did on her bed in college, and who she did it with, but I don’t.

“Sounds like I missed out,” I say.

Clementine shrugs.

“Not really,” she says. “Unless you really like sleeping on spilled coffee because you were too lazy to change the sheets.”

I’ve done that anyway, but I don’t tell her that.

“What else did I miss by not going to college?” I ask.

“What do you mean?”

She’s sitting cross-legged next to me, and she scoots a little, turning so she’s facing me instead of the window.

“I didn’t know about the bed thing,” I say. “I mean, I knew about classes and frat parties and tests and papers and all that, but what don’t I know I missed?”

That isn’t my real question, but I don’t know how to ask my real question. I want to know what she was doing while I was sleeping on a cot in a dusty tent, or in a tank for twelve hours, or busting down doors only to find frightened women and children.

“You’re thinking about this the wrong way, you know,” she says, tipping her head against the window to her right and looking at me, her hazel eyes deep in the dark.

“What’s the right way?”

“You were in the Marines,” she says. “Just because you weren’t in college doesn’t mean you weren’t doing something, you know, noble and important.”

I raise my eyebrows.

“Can I get that in writing?” I ask.

Clementine kind of laughs, then looks out the window again, at the thin strip of light at the horizon.

“You’re not the only one who managed to grow up some in eight years,” she says. “I was kind of a dick about you going into the military.”

I don’t say anything. I’m too surprised for a moment, and I don’t quite know how to respond.

She’s completely right. She was a total dick about it, from the moment I casually mentioned I was meeting with a recruiter to the moment I shipped off to basic training.

It baffled me. Other guys who were joining up, and there were plenty at our high school, had girlfriends who were proud of them, who got t-shirts that said shit like “proud Army girlfriend” and bragged about it.

But any time I so much as mentioned the Marines around Clementine, she’d go totally silent.

In retrospect, it was a huge, flashing neon warning sign. But at the time I was so head-over-heels that I ignored it.

“Yeah, kind of,” I say, trying to keep my voice neutral.

She looks at me and starts laughing, the corners of her eyes crinkling. I can’t help but smile.

“No, I was awful,” she says. “I...”

She trails off, pushing her hair behind her ear, and looks out the window again.

“I was really jealous because I felt like you loved the Marines more than me, and I know that sounds dumb, but back then I felt like you wanted to be halfway across the world instead of where I was and I couldn’t understand how you could say you loved me but want that,” she says, the words tumbling out of her in a rush.

“That wasn’t it at all,” I say.

“I know that now,” she says. “Now I understand that you can love a person and still want to do something else important, and it doesn’t diminish anything. But I didn’t then, and I couldn’t stand the idea of you liking anything better than you liked me.”

She laughs a little, shaking her head.

“God, that sounds dumb when I say it out loud,” she says.

“Is it my turn to confess?” I ask.

“Go for it,” Clementine says.

I pull one knee closer to my chest and drape my wrist onto it, staring at the dark windows across the cabin.

“I picked all those fights with you because I was jealous,” I say.

My heart tightens in my chest, just admitting this to her. It took me ages to admit it to myself, even, and here I am, saying it out loud.

“You were jealous?” she asks, frowning.

I just look at her.

“I was insanely jealous,” I say. “You were off at college, meeting all these new people and learning new things and moving on with your life, and meanwhile someone was still shouting at me to get up in the morning, telling me when I could eat, when I could shit, where to go, what to do.”

I swallow. Clementine just blinks, like this has never occurred to her before.

“And I felt dumb,” I say. “I was totally sure that you were meeting all these smart, interesting people and any minute you’d realize you were still dating some small-town moron from high school and you’d dump me. So I picked fights with you.”

“Because that’s a great way to keep a girlfriend around,” she murmurs, teasing me.

“I didn’t say it was smart,” I say. “I said it was what I did.”

“Well, thank God now we’re mature, grown adults who can discuss their feelings calmly and rationally,” she says.

I can tell there’s more, so I stay quiet.

“I’m sorry about yesterday,” Clementine finally says. “I should have... I don’t know. Not freaked out.”

“I shouldn’t have put Mandy on my shoulders to reach that shelf,” I say. “I wasn’t trying to hit on her, but she sort of suggested it, and then was teasing me that I couldn’t, and...”

Clementine just looks at me.

“And you had to prove yourself to a cute girl, even if you weren’t interested?” she says.

“You called her that, not me,” I say.

Clementine laughs.

“Mandy is totally cute,” she says. “And I fucked up, too, because I don’t think she’d have gone after you if I’d told her about us.”

She shifts again, stretching her leg out onto the cot. I watch as she flexes her toes backward, then rotates her ankle and makes a face.

“Still hurt?” I ask.

“Not too much,” she says. “A lot less than before.”

I grab her calf and put her foot on my lap, then feel gently along the bones and tendons in her ankle.

“It’s still a little swollen, but the ice definitely helped,” I say.

“I’m sorry I didn’t text you while I was gone,” she says. “I almost did a couple times, but I didn’t want to seem clingy or something.”

“I promise that you’re the opposite of clingy,” I say.

I press my fingers into a soft part of her ankle and she makes a face.

“That hurt?” I ask.

“A little.”

“I was afraid you’d disappear again,” I say. “Like you did when you dumped me.”

“That’s the second time you’ve said I dumped you,” Clementine said.

Now I’m just rubbing her ankle in small circles with the pad of my thumb.

“You stopped answering my calls,” I say.

“You told me you’d never loved me in the first place,” Clementine says.

My breath catches in my throat, and for a moment, I feel nauseous. I wish I’d never said it, and I wish she didn’t remember it.

“I figured we were over once you said that,” she says. “I didn’t really want to get my heart stomped on more, so I didn’t answer.”

I take a deep breath.

“I didn’t mean it.”

“I know.”

It seems so simple, now, so long after the fact. I don’t know what to say, and I don’t know that there’s anything I can say, so I move my hands up to her knee and run my thumb over her kneecap.

“This still hurt?” I ask.

She leans over and pulls her leggings up, revealing a deep purple bruise that covers half the side of her knee.

“Yikes,” she says. “That got nasty.”

“Can you move it okay?” I ask.

She straightens her leg, then bends it, depositing her foot back in my lap.

“It’s a little tweaky but fine,” she says. “I just banged it pretty hard.”

I run my thumb over the bruise again, and for a moment, we’re quiet again as the darkness deepens in the cabin.

“You broke my heart back then,” she finally says. “And yesterday, I’d just spent two days watching my parents call each other names, so when I saw you and Mandy, all I could think was that you were going to do it again.”

She sighs, leans her head back against the glass, and closes her eyes.

“I mean, what kind of dumbass goes back for a second helping of that?” she says.

“And this whole time, I thought you broke mine,” I say, running my thumb gently over the ridge of her kneecap.

“God, we fucked up,” she says. “It’s almost impressive how much we fucked that up.”

“We were teenagers,” I say. “If dealing with new Marine recruits taught me one thing, it was that eighteen-year-olds are kind of dumb.”

“Yeah, but I was twenty-six yesterday,” she says. “Apparently I haven’t changed all that much.”

She opens her eyes and looks at me sideways, the corners just barely crinkling.

“Didn’t you just shout that at me in the bathroom?” I ask, half-teasing, even though it feels dangerous.

“Look, I already said I was sorry about that,” she says, but she’s laughing. “Don’t make me say it again, once was bad enough.”

“So you’re also still bad at apologizing.”

“And you still needle me until I’m about ready to kill you,” she teases.

We look at each other in the dark, her eyes deep pools, her face dark blue and white. The sliver of the moon is somewhere overhead, and it’s casting white light on the forests around us.

You’re still so beautiful it aches, I think. I still want to kiss you more than I’ve ever wanted anything.