Chapter 40
The minivan creeps through the squall, windshield wipers thrashing.
Los Angeles is ill prepared for a storm.
Trees topple, hillsides avalanche, and accumulated oil and grease form a film across the roads, derailing SoCal drivers.
Power lines are down, sparking in the streets.
Mailboxes have been upended, spat from the soft earth.
The way is choked with tow trucks ambling to their next appointments, with cars that have drifted up onto sidewalks, with folks hauling sandbags to form bulwarks at curbs or garage door seams.
Maddy is half asleep in her car seat, jaw slack, head cast back, her throat bowing outward. Rebecca proceeds cautiously, but the minivan still threatens to hydroplane at every turn.
At last she eases onto their street, crawling past Jackson’s dark house toward their driveway.
A blast hurtles from the heavens, bright enough to scorch her pupils. Only when she blinks can she see what it is in the afterimpression scorched onto the inside of her eyelids—a massive lightning bolt zigzagging down to impale the giant pine tree. It sends out a firework cascade of sparks.
She slams the brake pedal, hard enough to skid a few feet and send Maddy’s head lurching forward.
For an instant, the pine is engulfed in flame from the inside, a lava seam running beneath the bark. There comes a fearsome groan and a top-heavy shift of mass in the darkness above.
The dead fork of the tree gives way, whipping past the house, a near miss, to crash into the driveway ten feet in front of the hood of the minivan.
The other half of the tree is still enflamed, crackling with destruction.
Rebecca and Maddy watch with something like reverence as it sloughs its skin, much of its bulk crumbling to the lawn and across the neighboring hedge, sizzling in the rain.
Awestruck, Rebecca drifts out of the minivan to stand in the puddled street. She hears the door pop open behind her, and then Maddy is at her side, and they stand, and they stare.
The dry, shedding parts of the pine lie in smoldering heaps, but the living shaft, the part that is green and strong and bleeding sap, still stands tall, shed of its dead weight.
It is pointing straight up like a flagpole, like a rifle, like a Gothic spire aimed at the star-beaded darkness overhead.
Thunder rushes them, vibrating straight through their bones. Maddy gives a yelp and tucks behind Rebecca.
Another jag of lightning blasts down a few blocks away, illuminating the front of the house, and there is a masculine figure on their porch, and it is not Mr. Man, it is Mark, and in a sudden burst of mom-strength Rebecca hoists Maddy up, slinging her across one hip as she did when Maddy was a toddler, and she blazes through the parasitical wreckage, and the rain snipes down the floating embers, and then she is in Mark’s arms, she and Maddy are in Mark’s arms, a huddle of three on the porch, and Mark is holding them, holding them both, and he kisses Rebecca’s head and says, “It’s okay now, you’re home,” and they stagger half dead into the quiet of the house.