Chapter 30
NORA
The dogs wake me before the smell does.
Borscht is at the side of the bed with his nose against my arm, whining high in his throat, a sound he has never made in this house.
Pelmeni is at the window. It's a little after one in the morning by the clock on the nightstand, March cold, the Santa Ana coming down off the ridge so hard it's been rattling the casements all night.
I put my hand on Borscht's head to settle him and that's when I get it, faint, under the dry wind. Smoke, green and bitter, the kind that means a lot of dry ground is burning at once, not the clean woodsmoke of somebody's chimney.
I'm out of bed and at the glass before I've finished waking up.
The whole bottom of the property is orange.
It's down in the state-park scrub where the land drops to the creek, a low ragged line of fire chewing uphill through the dry brush, and the wind I've been cursing all week is shoving it straight at the house.
Even through the window I can hear it, a wide soft roar like a freeway that shouldn't be there, over it, thin and awful, the horses.
I get my boots on over bare feet. I don't bother with a bra. Twenty weeks of belly makes the jeans a fight and I don't have the seconds. I leave them and go out in the long shirt I sleep in, phone in one hand already dialing, the dogs pouring down the stairs ahead of me.
The night air hits me at the back door like opening an oven.
The wind is hot now, actually hot, full of grit and ash that stings my eyes shut before I force them open.
The roar is enormous out here. Down the slope the fire has crossed the creek.
It isn't a line anymore. It's a wall, taller than me in places, and it's coming up the hill at the speed of the wind, which is the speed of a car.
"Get out, get out, the brush is going." That's Yuri, nineteen and sprinting across the motor court in his undershirt, phone clamped to his ear, screaming at someone on the other end. He sees me and changes course. "Mrs. Radulov, you have to go, get in a car, the road's still open."
"The horses," I say.
"There's no time for the horses."
There is always time for the horses. I'm already running for the barn.
The barn lights are off, the power must be down, and inside it's a black box full of screaming.
The stalls are a row of terror in the dark, hooves hammering wood, the geldings throwing themselves at the gates.
Smoke is already crawling along the top of the aisle, a low ceiling of it that wasn't here a minute ago.
I drop into a crouch under it where the air is still air and start opening doors.
"Easy. Easy, you idiots, I've got you." My voice comes out steadier than I feel, the voice you use on a panicking thousand-pound animal so it doesn't kill you on the way out.
I get the first gate open and the gelding bolts past me, knocks me into the post. I keep my feet because going down in here is how you don't get up.
Boots hit the aisle behind me. Yuri, coughing, dropping into the crouch beside me without being told.
"You're supposed to be in a car," he says.
"So are you. Take the far end, I'll take these."
"Mrs. Radulov, the boss will kill me if anything happens to you, please."
"The boss is in jail, Yuri. Open the gates." I shove the second latch at him. He takes it. We work the row together in the dark, in the smoke, two pairs of hands faster than one, the geldings pouring out past us toward the doors and the road. "Talk to them. They know your voice."
"They know yours better," he says, gets the third gate, and a horse he's named something I never learned slams past us hard enough to spin me into the wall.
"You named the geldings?" I catch the post before I go down.
"Grigor named some. I named some." He's already at the next latch. "The bay is Gregory. The roan is Volodya. The pinto the boss bought last spring I named Leonard. Nobody knows why."
"Focus, Yuri."
"I am focused. Leonard, let's go."
They run for the open doors, the dark, the road, away from the fire, the way anything with sense runs.
One stall on the end won't open. The latch is jammed, the wood swollen, the colt inside spinning and slamming.
I get both hands on it and haul. The smoke is coming down lower now, into my crouch.
My eyes are streaming so hard I'm working blind.
The latch gives. The colt is gone before the gate's all the way back.
That's all of them. That's everyone. The relief is so big it nearly drops me, because the one I was sick about, the old mare, the slow one who can't run from anything, Maisie isn't here.
She went to the vet's three days ago for her teeth and she's still down there in a paddock in the valley, miles from this, safe.
I don't have to watch her try to run. I get to keep that.
I should go now. I know I should go now.
I look at the tack room.
The door's shut, the little window already lit up amber from outside, and behind it on the long shelf is the box.
My father in a single carton, his tack, his bridle, the cups he won, the worn notebook in his own hand.
The fire is going to take this whole structure, I can hear it in the walls now, a crackle moving up inside the boards.
Every reasonable cell in my body says it's leather, silver, paper, it's not worth your life, leave it.
I can't leave it. There are some things you keep close, things you don't go through, things you don't stand in a yard and watch burn either. I cross the aisle bent double and shoulder the tack-room door open.
The heat in here is a solid thing. The window's whole frame is alight now, glass cracking, and the smoke is thick to the floor so there's no clean air left to crouch into.
I get an arm over my mouth and go for the shelf by feel.
My hand finds the cardboard. I drag the box off the shelf into my chest, both arms under it the way I carried it in, and it's heavier than it has any right to be, heavy like it's full of stone.
The weight of it plus the belly plus no air sends me down to one knee.
That's the moment it gets me. The smoke has filled my whole head, my chest is a closed fist, every breath drags in less than the last, and the floor is the only thing that doesn't hurt.
I tell my legs to push and they don't. I'm on the concrete with my father's box in my arms, the room roaring, and I think about the thing in me, the small fast heartbeat the doctor let me hear last week.
I open my mouth to scream and there's no air to scream with.
A hand closes on the back of my collar.
I'm hauled up and back so hard my feet leave the floor, dragged out of the tack room with my heels skidding.
I don't let go of the box, I won't let go of the box.
Whoever has me drags it too, drags both of us across the aisle and out the big doors into the motor court where the air, even full of ash, is enough to gasp on at last.
It's Lev. Of course it's Lev. He's got me by the collar and one fistful of shirt, his face gray with soot. He dumps me on my feet in the gravel, keeps a hand on my arm while I bend over the box and cough up half a lung.
"Up the drive, away from the structures." He says it flat and even, no more rattled than a man reading a grocery list, with a barn going up forty feet behind him. "You can fall down at the top of the hill where it's not on fire."
"There were horses," I get out.
"You let them out. They're on the road. The road's the safest place on this property, which is where you should be.
" He glances back at the barn, at the tack room going up orange behind us, and there is something wrong with how calm he is, a man watching a building burn like it's a television left on in another room.
"The house," I say. "Your, the safe room, your things, all your, isn't it, shouldn't somebody."
"The vault's poured concrete and the gold doesn't care.
" He pulls me another two steps up the drive, hand still locked on my arm, ash settling in his hair like dirty snow.
The corner of his mouth pulls, not quite a smile.
"The gold's fine until fourteen hundred Fahrenheit. You, considerably sooner. So move."
I move.
"The safe room," I say. "I didn't have time to get to it."
"It holds."
"His files. The books. Everything he keeps in there."
"Holds to twelve hundred degrees. The barn was eight hundred." He keeps walking. "Stop thinking about what's in the walls. Think about what's in front of you."
"Which is what?"
"The driveway. Then an ambulance. Then your husband finding out about this from a hospital and not a morgue, if you cooperate."
We go up the drive together, away from the heat at my back, and I can feel it on my neck the whole way, the wall of it climbing the slope behind the barn now, the wind so loud, so hot, it's like standing in front of a jet.
Yuri's got two of the geldings by their halters at the top, talking them down, his face wet.
Borscht and Pelmeni are circling my legs, herding, pushing me uphill with their shoulders the way they push the horses.
"Mrs. Radulov." Yuri comes to me fast, the geldings swinging on their leads. "You're okay? The smoke, you were in there so long."
"I'm okay, Yuri."
"I tried to get back in. The smoke was, I couldn't." He wipes his face with the back of his arm. "The boss is going to lose his mind."
"The boss is going to hear that you got every horse off the property in the dark. So will I."
Somewhere down the canyon a siren finally, a lot of sirens, the first trucks coming up the only road open.
At the top of the drive Lev finally lets go of my arm. I sink down onto the gravel with the box in my lap because my legs are done. I cough until I taste blood at the back of it, and I hold on to the carton like it's the only solid object left in the world.
"Breathe slow," Lev says, crouched beside me, not touching me now, watching the trucks come. "In through the nose. You're going to want to gulp it. Don't."
"Is it?" I have to stop and drag in air. "Is everyone out?"
"Yuri. Me. You. The animals." He counts it off on his fingers without any feeling in it, the same as always. "Nobody else sleeps here. We're all out."
"The horses. The road."
"Below the fire line. They'll run until they hit a fence." He watches the smoke. "Horses know to keep going. They always know."
"Maisie wasn't here. The old gray mare. She's at the vet's."
"Then she's safe."
"She's safe," I say. Like I need to say it out loud to keep it true.
I get a real breath. Then another. The fire has the barn fully now, the whole roof a sheet of flame, and the tack room where I was kneeling thirty seconds ago is the brightest part of it.
I watch my father's barn turn into light.
I don't cry, I'm too busy breathing. But the grief in me stops thrashing.
It settles into something flat and cold, a thing that wants a reason, wants a person to hand the burning to.
The first truck crests the drive in a wash of red light, men in turnouts piling off it shouting, dragging line, a paramedic peeling off toward me because Yuri's pointing and yelling pregnant, she's pregnant, she was in there.
A young woman in gloves drops to her knees in front of me with an oxygen cup already in her hand.
"Ma'am, how far along, can you tell me how far along?"
"Twenty weeks." The cup seals over my nose, the oxygen hitting the back of my throat, clean, cold, strange, and I gulp it the way Lev told me not to. "Twenty weeks. I'm fine. The smoke, I went back in, I, the baby."
"We're going to take good care of you both, okay, just breathe for me. Can you tell me your name?"
"Nora," I get out. "Nora Radulov."
"Okay, Nora. Is there family we can call?"
"My husband." I have to stop to breathe. "He's in county. They won't reach him tonight."
She has a hand on my wrist, eyes on her watch, and behind the plastic I finally let myself shake. "Big slow breaths. You're doing great. Is this everyone? Is anyone unaccounted for?"
"Everyone's out," Lev says from above us, still on his feet, still soot-gray and unbothered. "She got the horses. I got her."
"And you are?"
"Family." He says it without a flicker, this man who has told me to my face he works for my husband and nothing more. I'm too wrung out to wonder at it. "I'll follow the ambulance."
"Sir, only one rider, and she should ride alone, we need the room to work."
"Then I'll be behind you the whole way." She gets me onto the gurney over my arguing, the plastic fogging with every word I won't stop saying.
Lev looks down at me on it, and whatever's on his face isn't warmth, it's never warmth with Lev, but it's something, a man who pulled a woman out of a fire deciding she's his to deliver somewhere safe.
"Don't let go of the box. She won't anyway. Don't fight her on it."
"I wasn't planning to fight a pregnant lady about a box," the paramedic mutters, and for one ridiculous second, on a gurney with my house burning, I almost laugh.
They wheel me toward the ambulance. The gurney tips on the lip of the ramp and the box goes, slipping from my smoke-slick arms, hitting the gravel before I can grip harder.
"The box," I say, "I dropped it—" "We'll get it," somebody says.
They load me in and the doors close and I can't see where it fell.
They load me in. Through the open doors I can see the whole bottom of the property burning, the barn gone, the brush gone, the fire eating uphill toward the dark glass house that has never felt like mine until tonight, the one place I have my father's things, a man I married, the small fast heartbeat I'm carrying up this hill in my own body.
The Santa Ana drives it up the slope, hot, loud, indifferent, the way it has driven fire up these canyons since before there was a house here to burn.
The doors close. The siren starts.
I sit in the back of an ambulance at one in the morning, clean air going into me through a tube, twenty weeks pregnant and alive, while my home turns to light behind me.
Isaak is forty miles away in a county cell where they won't even let me get a message to him tonight.
He doesn't know yet. He'll hear in the morning the same as a stranger, that the canyon went up in the wind, that his wife went back in for the animals and nearly didn't come out.
The thought keeps surfacing through the smoke.
I keep pushing it back under, because it's the wrong thing to think on a gurney, but I think it anyway.
A fire that started at the bottom of a creek bed earlier tonight, in air that stayed dead still until it didn't, came up the hill too straight, too fast, like somebody had walked it to the house and pointed it at the door.