23. Ivy
twenty-three
Ivy
The trail's been dusty for days, the kind of fine, powdery dust that hangs in the air after someone walks through it instead of settling right back down. Trevor's a few yards ahead, and every step he takes kicks up a small cloud that lingers behind him like it's in no hurry to go anywhere.
I haven't seen real rain since the night before Beck and Reid left for Elk Ridge.
“Feels different than it did a couple weeks ago,” Reid says, crouching to pick up a piece of grass that snaps clean in his fingers instead of bending. “This should still have some give to it.”
“Everything's cured early this year,” Tessa says. “We haven't had anything worth calling rain in what, over a month?”
The whole district's got that late-summer tightness to it, vegetation gone from green to gold faster than usual, the ground hard and dry underfoot, heat sitting heavier in the afternoons than it did back in June.
We're doing fuels work today, clearing brush along a section that Russ wants thinned before things get any drier.
There's an added carefulness to how everyone handles equipment, an awareness that wasn't quite as present a month ago.
Nobody says the word fire more than usual.
We don't have to. It's just there, underneath everything, the way it always is this time of year, except a little closer to the surface now.
It's strange, working through all that while carrying around the quiet happiness I've had for the last couple of weeks.
Beck came home from Elk Ridge. We hiked the old burn.
I taught him to make lefse, badly on his end but enthusiastically.
We had our first real date, dinner and a drive-in and his shirt smelling like him for the rest of the night.
Small, good things, stacking up one after another, until somewhere along the way I stopped thinking of any single day as remarkable and started just expecting all of them to be good.
Maybe that's why the dust concerns me.
At lunch, Russ gathers everyone in the shade, water bottles and sandwiches passed around, and gives us the bigger picture.
“Dry spell's not just us,” he says. “Whole region's the same. New starts popping up faster than usual for this time of year. Some of them are getting caught quick. A few aren't. Resources are starting to move around more than they have been.”
“Hotshot crews?” Trevor asks.
“Some. Smokejumpers too, from what I'm hearing.” Russ glances, briefly, almost incidentally, toward Beck and Reid. “Things are picking up.”
He doesn't say anything else about it.
I see Beck look at Reid. Reid looks back. Neither of them says a word, but something passes between them, the kind of understanding that doesn't require conversation. I feel my stomach drop a little even though nothing's actually happened yet.
“Heard the same thing from a couple guys on our jumper crew,” Reid says, mostly to Beck, like the rest of us aren't sitting right here. “Marcus said they sent two teams out yesterday.”
“Figured it was getting close to that,” Beck says.
“Sounds like things are finally picking up,” Reid says.
There's an energy in his voice I recognize, the enthusiasm of someone hearing that the job he's trained for is about to matter again.
Reid's not wishing for anything to burn.
He's just a smokejumper who's spent weeks doing valuable, useful, decidedly non-smokejumper work, and some part of him has clearly been waiting for this.
I look at Beck.
Two months ago, I think he'd have looked like Reid does right now.
He's serious about the job, always has been, and if his crew needs him, I know he'll go.
But there's something else in his face too, something Reid's doesn't have.
I know what it is because I've watched it build in Beck same as I've watched it build in myself.
Blackpine stopped being a temporary assignment to him weeks ago.
I'm not sure he's said that out loud, even to himself. But I can see it.
Russ doesn't say anything else about a recall. He doesn't predict it, doesn't tell Beck and Reid to expect anything in particular. He just moves the conversation along to the afternoon's work. Lunch wraps up, and we go back to clearing brush like nothing's changed.
Except something has, quietly, underneath everything else.
All afternoon, every time I catch sight of Beck working a few yards away, the same thought surfaces.
He was going to leave eventually. I knew that from the beginning, understood it the way you understand any fact you've decided not to think about too closely.
I just haven't been living like I knew it.
Somewhere over the last two months, Beck stopped feeling temporary to me.
His water bottle in the kitchen. His seat at the table.
The way he finds my hand without looking for it. Sunday dinners with him beside me.
None of that felt temporary while it was happening. Now, suddenly, it does.
Back at the crew house in the evening, the heat finally starts to let up. Most of us end up outside, sitting on the porch steps or leaning against the railing, drinks in hand, the whole crew loose the way we are on a Thursday night with nothing scheduled.
“I'm just saying,” Nolan announces, apropos of nothing, “that broken branch pattern near the north trail is suspicious.”
“It's suspicious that a tree fell down,” Tessa says.
“It fell in a very specific direction.”
“Trees do that. It's called gravity.”
Mabel picks her way across the porch and settles onto Reid's lap without ceremony. He looks smug about it, like this proves some point he's been trying to make all summer.
For a while, sitting here listening to Nolan defend Bigfoot's honor, everything feels like it has for weeks. Ordinary. Easy.
Eventually Beck and I move together to the porch swing, far enough away from the others that the conversation gets quieter between us.
“You think they're going to call you back,” I say. Not really a question.
He doesn't try to soften it. “If things keep going the way they're going.”
“When?”
“Don't know. Could be a couple weeks. Could be sooner.” He turns his water bottle over in his hands, thinking about how to say the next part.
“If it comes, it won't come with much warning.
We're already trained, already equipped.
We're not starting a new job. We're just going back to the one we left.”
“So you could just be gone. A day or two.”
“Yes.”
I hadn't quite let myself think through what that would look like until he says it out loud.
When he went to Elk Ridge, the departure was sudden but with a return we both knew was coming.
This will be different. No expected return.
His bed at the crew house will just be empty one day, and he won't be back.
That hurts more than I expect it to, sitting here on a porch with him still beside me.
Beck's watching me closely, enough I know he can see where my thoughts have gone. He reaches over and takes my hand, not saying anything.
“This is different from Elk Ridge,” I say.
“Yeah.” Then, quiet, steady: “But I'm not disappearing on you. Whatever happens with the recall, that's not the same as this ending.”
I don't know how the logistics of a long-distance version of this would even work.
Neither of us has solved that, and I'm not sure tonight's the night to try and figure it out.
But I hear what he's saying. I let myself believe it, mostly because the alternative is spending our remaining time together grieving something that hasn't happened yet.
He squeezes my hand. I lean into his shoulder, and we just sit here for a while, not talking, listening to Nolan and Tessa continue their Bigfoot debate a few feet away, the evening settling in warm and gold around us.
Eventually Cassidy calls Beck into an argument about which fast-food chain has the best fries, a debate that's been simmering since dinner.
The moment eases back into the larger group, everyone's voices overlapping.
Mabel migrates from Reid's lap to Beck's without explanation.
I try to just be here, in this, instead of quietly counting how many evenings like this one might be left. It mostly works.
We all go to bed at a reasonable hour, tired from the day's work. But I lie awake longer than usual.
The next morning starts like most mornings do. Coffee. Boots by the door. Somebody arguing about whose turn it is to drive. I'm halfway through a piece of toast when I notice Beck's gone quiet at the table, phone in his hand, reading something with an expression I don't like.
Reid notices too. He's across the kitchen, but something in the way Beck's sitting pulls his attention, and he crosses over, looking down at the screen over Beck's shoulder.
Neither of them says anything for a second.
Phones have gone off all morning, same as always, nobody paying much attention. This time is different, and I know it before either of them looks up.
“What?” I ask.
Beck looks at me. Not panic. Just a flicker of something that tells me whatever he's reading isn't unexpected. But not entirely welcome either.
“I think we're getting recalled.”