28. The Thin Time (2)
On November 2, 1993, my mother and father were in a Boeing 757 circling out over the Pacific before heading back east, looking down to try to see our house on the mountaintop, as they liked to do, and noticing instead a large cloud of smoke.
It was their last visit west. When I picked them up at the airport the week before, tears had streamed down my face; I had to turn and pretend to be searching for something in my purse. My father came limping, leaning on his cane, lurching forward with his right foot and dragging his left behind it; his face ashen; his eyes sky-blue. He wore his old familiar pale gray cap and beige windbreaker. Mom’s aspect was strange, unfamiliar, wild even; her eyes bewildered, a little crooked, left and right unlinked and askew. It gave me a bad-dream feeling; like the moon rising in the west; an unhinging.
We had a nice visit planned; I was five months pregnant with Emmeline, so we would keep things simple, we would relax. We would go for a drive up the coast, go to the little outdoor seafood place they liked. My father wanted to see the new museum at the La Brea Tar Pits, and David, always game for a geology and paleontology outing, would be the tour guide and keep him well entertained. Mom and I would sit outside on the park bench by the giant sloths and mammoths eternally sinking into the oozing black tar. The next weekend would be Halloween, and my parents would get to see Janie in her costume (she was still deciding whether she wanted to be a princess or an owl.) The day after Halloween, November 1, was my father’s birthday. We would bake a cake, have a nice dinner, and the day after that, November 2, they would fly home.
There were, of course, a couple of things we had not factored in to our plans. The first, which my father had neglected to mention to me, was that my mother’s dementia had grown well beyond the early stage of affable short term forgetfulness and was now blossoming into full-blown psychosis.
The second, of course, was the fire.
Our ancestors called it the Thin Time, when the veil between the living and the dead grows thin. It begins on Samhain, October 31, and continues through All Souls’ Day, November 2, when the souls of the dead return to us.
In the Thin Time, the portals to the Otherworld stand open.
My body is a portal. An open passage.
One dead, one living, one as yet unborn.
And now, November, the fifth month, the quickening.
A fluttering, a warm bird held in your hand. A flickering, a flame.
For my mother, the veil is thin.
She stands before my father, but doesn’t see him. She sees her father, long dead.
She despises him.
My father’s eyes are downcast. His hands fall to his sides.
Today is his birthday. The Day of the Dead.
The souls of the dead and the living weave around one another, brush against one another, move on. People have been moving over the planet like clouds, like storms, like tidal waves of annihilation, coming into the presence of unfamiliar ghosts.
Ancestors look for their grandchildren, but see only strange faces, without resemblance to the ones they loved.
My baby is here among the ghosts of this place.
Is there something I can do? An offering I can make?
Too little.
Too late.
When fire moves with great speed, your house may pass through it like a hand passing through a candle flame, unburned. By the time we reach the city, the great wave of flame has passed over the mountain. A helicopter circles over our house, TV camera looking down.
We see our house on television, intact, unharmed, flowers blooming in the yard, the land blackened and smoldering like fields of hell all around it.
And all around it, embers, and spotfires steadily burning.
My mother’s mind is burning fast now; visions and terrors are emerging, passions long restrained. The Furies are with her now.
It is payback time.
In a wildfire you don’t just lose your house. You lose your place. Familiar landmarks are obliterated, the hills change shape, the land becomes strange.
When your mother’s mind burns, the world becomes strange.
October 31. I help my daughter dress for Halloween.
My mother is in the next room weeping. Her body heaving with sobs.
She is a whirlwind, a towering flame, a vengeance: the Furies are with her.
I hear their voice.
I feel their flames at my back; I curve my body over my daughter’s body, curve over my unborn daughter’s body, trying to be a shelter.
There is no shelter from a firestorm.
My daughter decides to be an owl princess; to wear the owl-ears and owl-wings with a diaphanous skirt of tulle. Dressed, crowned, winged, she walks proudly and anxiously, her body radiating haughtiness and fear, the ferocity of little girls.
There's a Halloween parade in the valley, so we drive down. We walk among the ghosts, the vampires, the fairies.
My daughter’s face is solemn, fearful. We are in a daze, a fog, ghosts and fairies moving around us.
November 1, my father's birthday.
We bake a cake, light candles. A circle of tiny flames.
November 2.
Fire washes over the mountain.
My parents circle out over the ocean.
A helicopter circles over our house, over the swingset that stands in the garden.
We built a swingset, a yard to play in. A little yard with flowers blooming. A place cut out of the mountain; flattened; bulldozed; cut. The bulldozer came, cut into the earth, cut with its metal teeth, ripped out the roots of ceanothus, ripped the roots of deerweed and sage, crushed the nests of rabbits, of birds, cut the face of the mountain.
That morning the contractor stopped by to pick up his final check.
That night it burned.
The mountain flicked us off like ants, welcomed her un-honored dead.