Part 7 – Smoke, Shelter, and a Scare
The wind changed overnight and brought the mountain with it. I woke to a light in my room I didn’t recognize—orange, like a sunset that had lost its manners—and the smell of campfire without the comfort. My phone lit before my feet hit the floor.
Mendez: AQI 168. No rides. Call me if he coughs or if the concentrator struggles. Windows closed. Mask outside. Hydrate.
Hale: High school gym is an evacuation site. If you’ve got spare cylinders, they could use them. Allied is coordinating drop-offs. Roads toward Kestrel are closed at the pass.
I stared at the last line: closed. The word felt like a door we’d been painting for months, suddenly nailed shut.
Kenna arrived with a tote full of practical mercy. She taped towels over the cracks where weather gets in and ignorance follows. She fitted a particle filter to the concentrator’s intake the way mothers fit mittens before snow. She set out a row of bottles like a parade of clear soldiers.
“Car only, short trips,” she said. “If you’re delivering cylinders, I’m coming. He can come if he insists, but mask on, oxygen flowing, no heroics. We do small kindness in big weather.”
Dad sat in his jacket like a man dressed to be himself. I held up a gray N95. He grimaced. “I’ll look like a duck.”
“You’ll look like a duck that breathes,” Kenna said, and he put it on.
We loaded the trunk with the two cylinders Allied had left for medical transport, labeled in a font that pretended this wasn’t life. I texted Hale and he replied with a thumbs-up and an arrival time that matched the way he does everything: exactly.
On the way to the high school, the town had the edges rubbed off it. Streetlights were halos in the wrong church. People moved in little caravans: dogs in back seats, totes of photo albums on laps, one man pushing a lawn mower toward a truck because you save what you can save, and sometimes that’s the thing that makes you feel like you have a say.
The gym had been turned into a kindness factory. Bleach and pancakes and the sound of duct tape claimed the air. Volunteers taped arrows onto the floor until the path told you where to go without asking. Someone had found cots, someone had found plush blankets, someone had found a way to make a thousand cups of coffee taste like courage.
Hale met us at the door, uniform turned gray by smoke. He lifted his chin in greeting and took one cylinder from me like it was a baby and he was the godfather.
“Allied’s here,” he said, gesturing to a man in a familiar polo hunched over a clipboard at a folding table. Caldwell looked up, saw me, and did something with his face that wasn’t quite a wince and wasn’t quite a smile.
“I’m still the policy,” he said without preamble. “But I also brought twenty tanks and a tech who can make these concentrators behave when the generator hiccups.”
“Thank you,” I said, because the world works better when you say the true thing first.
Dad wanted to see the room, not because he could take it in with his eyes, but because he could take it in with whatever else he uses. We wheeled him along the edge of the cots; he trailed fingers along the vinyl like he was reading Braille composed by logistics.
Near the stage, I recognized the Spiderman blanket from the lake—the boy with the concentrated look and a mother whose smile was a bridge over a river she didn’t choose to cross. He was pale and tight around the mouth in the way kids get when air turns into a complicated math problem.
Kenna crouched, voice low. “What’s your name, buddy?”
“Evan,” he said, breath high and fast.
“You remember me?” Dad asked, and Evan’s eyes clicked to him like magnets find metal.
“You’re the motorcycle man,” Evan said.
“Sidecar man,” Dad corrected, a pride so gentle it didn’t sting. He patted the empty chair beside him. “Wanna hear a trick I learned when the air thinks it’s the boss?”
Evan nodded, a jerky bob that said yes and help at the same time.
“Okay,” Dad said. “We’re gonna smell the roses and blow out the candles. In through your nose like you’re sniffing cookies you’re not supposed to have, out through your mouth like you’re not supposed to tell.” He puckered, exaggerated. Evan copied. “Like this,” Dad said, and they did it together—slow, then slower—until Evan’s shoulders dropped back to where shoulders live.
Kenna watched the numbers on the little finger monitor creep from emergency toward ordinary. She met my eyes over Evan’s head and nodded once, the wordless language of good news in small packages.
Around us, the gym ran on purpose. A teen with purple hair handed out crayons to smaller kids who hadn’t learned yet that drawing is a way to anchor a day. The church ladies’ guild from three congregations and a synagogue argued about pancake batter and then made both their ways and fed everybody twice. An old man tuned a battered guitar and played a song that made the cots look less like surrender.
Caldwell hustled past with a dolly of tanks and stopped long enough to tug the strap on Dad’s portable like a reflex. “Flow steady?” he asked.
“Three liters,” Kenna said. “We’ll titrate if he insists on telling more stories.”
Caldwell’s mouth twitched. “Tell them all,” he said, and moved on.
By noon, the smoke thickened the gym into a room that didn’t know the word far. You could taste it when you swallowed. Hale stepped out, radio pressed to his shoulder like a second head, then came back in with the news we all were bracing against.
“Kestrel Pass is closed,” he said quietly. “Brush crews are trying to cut a line. The AQI up there is 220. The air bites.”
Dad’s hand found my sleeve. “We don’t go,” he said, accepting it before I could fight it. “We wait.”
“We bring it to you,” I said, and pulled the packet of black-eyed Susan seeds from his pocket. I pressed it into Evan’s palm. “You like planting stuff?”
He nodded. His mom wiped a tear that hadn’t asked permission. “Where?” she asked.
“Right here,” I said, then laughed at myself because the gym floor was varnished and stubborn. “Not here here. Later. When the air remembers its manners. We’ll plant them at the school. Or at the church. Or at the place my dad tells me about where the wind sounds like an eagle turning.”
“Eagles don’t make wind,” Evan said, already calmer—scientific, even.
“Everything makes wind,” Dad said. “Some things just brag less about it.”
The generator hiccuped then—lights flicked, a collective inhale, that soft animal panic that moves through crowds like weather. The concentrators complained in beeps and coughs.
Caldwell was already moving. “Batteries,” he barked to his tech. “Tank swap on rows one and two. Keep nasal cannulas on. Don’t panic the patients.” He glanced at us. “You got one more cylinder in the car?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Go,” he said. “Bring it in. We’ll triage and then refill.”
I jogged out into the orange and came back carrying the last cylinder like it contained a season. When I pushed through the doors, Mara was there, hands out, ready to help unstrap, ready to argue later. We hooked it up to an older woman whose numbers had started to wander. Her chest stopped sounding like paper.
You can love a person in a hundred ways. One of them is turning a valve until a hiss eases.
We stayed until afternoon pretended to be evening. The gym never rested; it oscillated between crisis and laughter like the good house that holds Thanksgiving and spilled wine and the argument about politics you regret and the forgiveness you meant to give sooner.
Kenna checked her watch, checked Dad’s color, checked the AQI app on her phone. “We go,” she said in a voice that made decisions stay made. “Now. Before the worst of the shift. Home. No stops.”
I nodded. The word home moved through me like something you feel at your throat and your knees at the same time.
We eased Dad up. He stood, steadier than I deserved to expect. The N95 made him look like a duck and a hero. He tugged the bandana into his pocket like a talisman.
“Thank you,” Evan’s mom said, touching my arm. Evan saluted with two fingers and made a face at the mask that said this stinks and this works at once.
Outside, the air was thicker. The sun had been turned into a coin you couldn’t spend. Cars crawled in the lot like animals learning a new gait. Hale walked us to the curb, scanning the horizon like he could will it to make better choices.
“Straight home,” he said. “Text when you’re inside.”
“Copy,” I said, and because humor is a bridge over terror, he smirked.
We were twenty feet from the car when the oximeter shrieked. Not the polite beep we knew, but the full-throated alarm it saves for pay attention now. Dad’s hand opened and closed in the air like he was trying to catch something invisible. His knees softened. I heard a sound I didn’t know I could make and was already under his elbow when he folded.
“Chair—now,” Kenna said, and Bear was there with the transport chair we kept in the trunk because Kenna told me to keep it in the trunk. We lowered him, fast but not panicked. Kenna fit the cannula; the gauge on the portable tank flickered and sagged—near empty. Of course. The gym had borrowed more than we’d tracked with feelings.
“Switch,” Kenna said. Sparrow had the spare off the dolly in a breath; Caldwell appeared like he’d been summoned by that hiss.
“Regulator,” Caldwell said, hands already at the knob. “Seat him forward. Pursed-lip breathing, Mr. Price. You know the drill.”
Dad’s eyes rolled white for a second that lasted a year. The monitor tried to make a number and couldn’t make the number and made a dash instead.
“Breathe,” I said, my voice somewhere between a prayer and an order. “Smell the roses. Blow out the candles.”
His mouth puckered. Air went in. Air went out. The dash became an eight, then an eight and a five. Eighty-five. The kind of number you hate and love at the same time.
“Again,” Kenna said.
He did it. Eighty-seven. Eighty-nine. The alarm softened back into a nag.
“I’m fine,” Dad tried, and then wasn’t. His head tipped back like a man looking for a bird he couldn’t name. His hand slid out of mine and hit his thigh with a sound I will hear in empty rooms. The monitor wailed. The world came close and far at the same time.
Hale’s radio was already talking to someone I couldn’t see. “We need a medic to the south lot, evac center. Oxygen-dependent male, desaturation event, responsive to coaching, now unresponsive.”
“Dad,” I said, and the word didn’t behave. It fractured, fell, rearranged into a noise.
Kenna pressed fingers to his carotid, eyes a metronome. “He’s there,” she said to me and to God. “Hold him up. Keep the airway open.” She tilted. Sparrow steadied the chair. Bear’s hand was a planet on the back of Dad’s shoulder.
The siren that had been theory all day became fact. The medic unit swung in, lights carving the smoke into ribbons. A woman hopped down with a kit the size of a future and moved like she was remembering a dance.
“COPD?” she asked. “Oxygen baseline?”
“Yes,” Kenna said. “Two liters at home. Three today. Smoke exposure. Brief near-empty tank, switched. Syncope.”
“Okay,” the medic said. “We’re going to help him do what he already knows how to do.”
She fitted a nonrebreather mask, turned a valve, watched numbers like a gambler who knows math. Ninety. Ninety-two. My shoulders came down from around my ears.
“Do we transport?” her partner asked.
Kenna looked at me, looked at the gym, looked at the sky. “He’ll want home,” she said, and Dad’s eyelids fluttered like an answer.
The medic nodded. “We can follow,” she said. “If he dips, we pivot.”
We lifted him—four sets of hands, a physics you learn in families and fire calls—and slid him into our back seat like a secret you plan to keep. The nonrebreather hissed like a promise and a warning.
Mara stood planted, eyes wet, jaw set. “This is what I meant,” she said, not to win, just to mark the spot where fear and love are the same animal.
“I know,” I said. “I know.”
Hale cleared a path with two fingers and authority. The medic unit fell in behind us. The town moved slower than fear and faster than rules.
In the rearview, my father’s chest rose and fell under the strap of his seatbelt. The mask fogged at the edges and cleared, fogged and cleared, like the glass in a winter house where someone is cooking something that tastes like being alive.
I put my hand back, found his knee, held.
“Home,” I said, to him, to the road, to whatever was listening.
The number on the pulse ox flickered—ninety-one, ninety-two—and then the screen went black and came back with a single line waiting to be a number.
That’s where Part Seven ends: in a car that smelled like smoke and leather and lemon hand sanitizer, siren in our mirror, the town we love holding its breath, my father between a breath he took and the next one we prayed he would.
Part 8 – Mom’s Letter and the Dawn Window
The line on the pulse ox blinked, thought about being a number, then decided to be ninety-two. I don’t remember the drive home except my hand on my father’s knee, the hiss of the nonrebreather like a metronome, and Hale’s cruiser in the mirror holding back a world that doesn’t mean harm but sometimes does it anyway.
We got him into the recliner with the careful choreography that comes from practice and fear: Bear under one elbow, Sparrow at the belt, Kenna steering the oxygen like she could steer fate. She stripped the nonrebreather, eased him back onto the cannula, checked the gauge, the flow, the color that had taken decades to learn and seconds to forget. His lids fluttered, then opened.
“I was on the deck at the lake,” he said, voice thin but certain. “Then the wind got mouthy.”
“You’re home,” I said.
He nodded like a promise he could keep.
Kenna ran the humidifier, loosened his collar, changed the filter on the concentrator with the unshowy competence that keeps people alive. “Steroid tonight,” she said. “Inhaler on schedule. No heroics. He rests. You rest.” She held up the pulse ox until I looked at it and not through it. “The number is a guide, not a god.”
By evening, the sky remembered how to be gray instead of orange. Ash fell like the kind of snow that doesn’t stick. We ate soup from a neighbor who had never spoken to us until last week and now knew our names and how many spoons we own. Dad dozed with the baby monitor painting him ghost-green and ordinary.
Hale texted: Pass remains closed. AQI 172 at summit. Will update. Good job today. Dr. Mendez followed with: No rides until AQI <100. If trend drops overnight, we reassess. Window is smaller. Use it well.
The window felt less like glass and more like a trapdoor.
For two days, the house became a submarine. Towels stuffed the cracks. The air purifier hummed a hymn. I learned the cadence of my father’s cough the way you learn the steps of a dance you didn’t want but refuse to sit out. Mara came and went with the efficiency of a nurse manager and the tenderness of a daughter hiding it. We didn’t fight so much as repeat ourselves with different words.
On the third day, I caught my reflection in the microwave and didn’t recognize a man who looked older than the jacket he was wearing. The thought came slick and quiet: Maybe it’s time for a facility. Not because I wanted to get rid of him. Because I didn’t want to be the one who made the wrong call on a Tuesday and regretted it forever.
I found the brochure in a stack—smiling seniors in a courtyard that looked like a catalog—and stared at the page like it owed me proof. It didn’t have any.
I went to the garage to breathe air that wasn’t anything but air. It still smelled like oil and rubber and knowledge. The sidecar sat under a sheet, ghost-shape in the half-light. Tools kept their silence. On the pegboard, a faded Polaroid of my mother teaching someone to parallel park in our cul-de-sac—Tasha from the diner, hair younger than her face now, hands on a steering wheel while Mom pointed through time.
Bear let himself in through the side door like he owned the property of my worst thoughts. He set a battered coffee can on the workbench. Someone had written BOLTS on the side with a Sharpie that had seen better markers.
“What’s that?” I asked, too tired for ceremony.
“A thing I’ve been carrying longer than made sense,” he said. He pried the lid off with a flathead screwdriver. Inside: not bolts. Letters. A folded bandana. A tiny paper envelope sealed with yellowed tape and labeled in my mother’s hand: SEEDS — BACK FENCE, KESTREL.
I didn’t touch it. My hands were too something—dirty? holy? I don’t know.
Bear lifted an envelope and turned it so I could read the front. For Jordan. When his eyes don’t see, borrow yours.
I sat on the stool like my bones had decided to be honest. My name in my mother’s writing looked exactly like the day she wrote it and nothing like the day she died. Bear didn’t offer a speech. He put the envelope in my palm and stood back like a good mechanic giving you the tool and the space.
I slid a finger under the flap and lifted her voice out.
Dear Jordan,
If Bear did what I asked, he’s giving you this when your father is disappearing into caution. I love caution. It paid our mortgage and kept you from breaking your neck. But caution has cousins—fear and pride—and they throw bad parties.When your father’s eyes can’t see the road, borrow yours. When his lungs get small, borrow your courage. Don’t turn him into only a patient; let him stay a person as long as you can without lying to yourselves.
There’s a place where our story started: Kestrel Point. If he can’t get there on his own someday, take him. If you can’t take him, bring there to him—tell him what the light is doing, what the eagles are pretending to be, what the wind tastes like.
I tucked seeds from the fence line in this can. Black-eyed Susans. They grow in stubborn dirt. Scatter them at Kestrel if you can. If not, scatter them where he can hear kids laughing. Either way, plant something. We are not in the business of ashes only.
Love,
Mom
The garage made a sound I had never heard it make: my father’s name falling out of my mouth like a prayer and a curse and a boy asking for his mother. Bear put his hand on my shoulder and let the weight of it be a shelter.
I unfolded the paper envelope. Dry seeds ticked against each other like tiny bones of a story that wanted to live. The bandana in the can was the twin of the one in Dad’s pocket—same pattern, same years. I pressed it to my face and smelled machine shop and laundry line and summer.
Sparrow appeared in the doorway like he’d been called by the weather. “Hale says there’s a chance,” he said. “Wind shifting tonight. They might open the pass at dawn for utility crews to move. Ten-minute windows. AQI could dip under a hundred for an hour.”
My phone vibrated like an argument. Hale: Don’t promise. But if the models hold, there’s a dawn window. You’d need to be staged at the barricade by 5:00. Only escorted vehicles beyond that. I can get you to the overlook turnout if we clear med and air.
A second text, almost on top of the first. Mendez: Forecast shows AQI 96–102 between 5–6 a.m. If his baseline at 4:30 is ≥92 on 2L and he’s afebrile, I won’t veto a car to the base. Sidecar only if AQI <100 and he’s strong; even then, keep him masked. I’ll set my alarm. Send me numbers at 4:35. If it’s a no, it’s a no. Love is also no.
I put the letter down and found my breath. It was still there. It belonged to me and to him and to a place on a mountain I hadn’t earned yet.
Mara stepped into the threshold like a prosecutor arriving without a docket. Her eyes found the can, the envelope, the seeds. She read Mom on the page and the fight left her shoulders.
“What does it say?” she asked, not because she couldn’t read but because she wanted me to say it.
I read the last line out loud. We are not in the business of ashes only.
Mara pressed her lips together until they hurt, then nodded. “Then we plant something,” she said. “If not there, here. If not now, when it’s safe. But we don’t stall until stalling is all that’s left.”
We laid the plan on the workbench like a map and divvied it up like a family that has learned how to be a team. Sparrow would gas the car, pack the emergency kit, load the spare cylinders. Bear would check the sidecar and then cover it again because the judge’s order and the air’s stubbornness still governed us. Kenna would come at 4:15, take vitals, call Mendez, be the grown-up in a room of adults. Hale would text when the county’s mood changed.
I went inside. Dad was awake, listening to the sound of the house thinking.
“You been crying?” he asked, because blindness is not a deficit in the things that matter.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s a good letter.”
“From who?”
“Mom,” I said, and watched his face do something like sunrise from inside. I put her words in his hands and let him hold the paper like touch would make sound.
“You gonna take me?” he asked, and there was no pressure in it, only hope and a dare to the morning.
“If the air behaves,” I said. “If Dr. Mendez says yes. If the numbers look like yes.”
He nodded. “If not, you bring it to me,” he said, not sad, just sure. “Tell me the light. Tell me the wind.”
I sat on the arm of his chair and put my head on his shoulder the way you do when you’re too old for it and make room anyway. The baby monitor framed us both in bad green. In the kitchen, the printer coughed out the updated plan like a small, reliable animal.
At 9:12 p.m., Hale texted: Pass likely to open 5:10–5:40 for escorted crews. I can tuck you into the tail with a medical pretext if air and doc okay. No promises. Be staged by 5:00 at Mile 3 turnout.
At 9:13, Mendez: Set your alarms. See you at 4:35 by text. If we say no, it’s no. If we say yes, it’s a fast yes.
I set three alarms because failure isn’t always drama; sometimes it’s oversleeping. I laid out the high-vis vest, the mask, the folder with the order, the seeds. I taped Mom’s line to the dashboard with blue painter’s tape because permanent felt wrong and necessary at once.
At midnight, the town sounded like a patient turning over in sleep. At two, the wind rattled the maple and then changed its mind. At three-thirty, the house breathed with my father and the concentrator and the old clock in the hall.
At four, Kenna’s car crunched the driveway. She came in without knocking and put a hand on my shoulder like she’d been in families before. At 4:12, she slipped the cuff around Dad’s arm. At 4:14, she set the oximeter. The number climbed and sat: ninety-three. No fever. No new rattle. Dr. Mendez’s text arrived at 4:36 like a door that opens because you knocked and not because you broke it.
Okay for car to base. Mask on. Oxygen three liters in the car. No heroics. If AQI at the barricade is <100, you can discuss a short sidecar pull to the overlook with Hale. One minute out-and-back. If not, windows down a crack, tell him the light. Send me a photo of him smiling either way.
I carried the seeds in my pocket and the letter in my chest. I set Dad’s boots by his feet, laced them like a father does for a son on his first day of school. He squeezed my arm once, twice—our borrowed language for bravery and stop if needed.
Outside, the air tasted like rain finally remembering its job. The eastern sky wore a lighter bruise.
I texted Bear one word: Dawn.
He replied with two: We’re ready.
At 4:58, I turned the key. The car woke like a dog who knows the sound of a walk. The sidecar blinked under its sheet as if it had its own opinions about forecasts and permission.
Dad touched my sleeve. “Kestrel?” he asked, not a question, not an order, something else.
“Yes,” I said, the yes you can say before the world agrees. “We’ll go as far as the air lets us.”
Part Eight ends with the seeds in my pocket, my mother’s handwriting taped to the dash, Hale’s taillights turning the corner, and the road to the barricade opening in the kind of dawn where you can believe almost anything—if you’ve built enough plan to carry hope without dropping it.
