Her Voice

There’s nothing like the sound of a mom reading to her children at bedtime, when they’re your children too, and she’s your wife. It’s the exact opposite of nightmare, the universal antidote to their fears of darkness and whatever imagined horrors it may conceal. It works on me too, easing me out of today’s and tomorrow’s cares.

And everything sounds better in her British accent.

“The Tale of Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter. Read by Mum, for Jake and Amber.

“Once upon a time, there were four little Rabbits, and their names were – ”

Jake and Amber are still young enough to enjoy snuggling in our bed for their stories, and they’re still small enough to fit there between Ann and me. I’m with them because my bedtime is early too; I have to be on station by 5:00 a.m., almost an hour away. On work nights I hardly ever hear the end of the first story.

I listen because I love Ann’s voice. I love staying awake to it, and I love falling asleep to it.

Sometimes in the middle of the night, half-awake for a fleeting moment, I’ll put my arm around the warm body beside me, and she’ll snuggle against me in her sleep and purr. At 3:45 a.m., when it’s time for me to get up, I try not to wake her, but she drowsily welcomes and sometimes returns a hug and a kiss, before falling back into sleep for a couple more hours.

I dress, then linger for a moment in each child’s doorway, gazing on small, quietly slumbering forms in the pale white glow of the moon and our lone streetlight. I am as content as any man could be, when he’s up for work before the dawn.

That’s how things are for me at home. That’s how they’re supposed to be. My life isn’t perfect, and I don’t always love a routine, but I love this one.

This morning, it’s harder to wake up than usual, and it takes longer. Even as I fumble for my phone to turn off its alarm, I’m still not certain I’m awake.

The moon is up, shining faintly through the bedroom window, but the color is wrong – brown, yellow, weak, eerie. The light itself is like sludge, as if it should smell bad. The alarm’s sound is off a bit too. I must be more exhausted than usual, or maybe I’m coming down with something. I turn it off before it wakes Ann.

I roll over to give her a squeeze and a kiss, but my arm falls onto the cool sheet. The strangeness shocks me fully awake. The linen is crisp and clean on her side of the bed. No one has slept there since laundry day, at least.

On my way to the bathroom I stop and slide open the doors to her walk-in closet. It’s full of her clothes and shoes, and I love that it smells like her. This morning, it just smells dusty. I close the doors.

That’s when I realize that air in the house smells like smoke, but it feels like that’s not new. Maybe it has always smelled like smoke.

The moonlight in the master bathroom is wrong too, and flipping the light switch doesn’t help as much as I expect. The face in the mirror is off – my own, almost, but there’s something hollow about the eyes, and there’s more gray in my hair than I remember.

For all the strangeness, routine is routine. I stop at each child’s doorway. In each case, by the faint yellow-brown glow, I see an empty, carefully made bed in an unnaturally tidy room.

I grab my lunch from the fridge, wondering if it will taste like smoke. The brown paper bag has an unusually soft texture, and it doesn’t crinkle like a paper bag should. At first its proportions seem too wide and too short, and its angles seem odd, but I blink a couple of times, and then it looks normal.

It’s time to leave.

Our home is on the outskirts of town, near the base of a mountain and the edge of a forest. From my days off I have a hundred memories of watching from the back porch, later in the morning, as the sun finally rises into the clear blue sky above the gray peaks and green forest, while ten thousand birds chirp and sing and the whole world smells of pine, aspen, dewy sagebrush, and scrub oak.

This morning, the smoky silence blurs those memories. The only sounds I hear are startling intrusions: my pickup’s door closing and its engine cranking to life.

My office is a Forest Service watchtower, thirteen miles in. The last ten miles of my commute are on a primitive track that makes my four-wheel-drive Toyota a necessity, not a toy.

After the first mile I see no other lights at all – not on the road or off, not on land or in the sky. The moon is gone, and I cannot see the countless stars which, when I last surveyed them, were a lush blanket of lights such as one never sees in the city. My burly Tundra is the only light source in this world. Its headlights make the surrounding darkness darker.

The forest should be full of wildlife, but after the second mile I see no animal, large or small. The reason is in my headlights, whenever the road curves and they shine on what used to be aspens. Now they’re naked trunks, forlorn shadows on the mountainsides, mostly black but with unburned streaks of whitish bark. The fire here was recent, and it would have smoldered for days, but I don’t remember it. Could I have been so distracted?

I must have been away.

Fog shrouds the road ahead, but when I reach it, it’s dull and brownish, not reflective and white. I know it’s smoke from wildfires 200 miles upwind, not from the forest I watch for fire, but the drive into the smoky void seems familiar. I should be accustomed to this nightmare, but I’m not.

How would one become accustomed to this?

I work alone, a 12-hour shift. Ty is nearly always there as I arrive, ending his own shift, but this morning there is just a note in his familiar scrawl. “Repeater down again. I’ll reset it on the way home. Leaving early.” The note itself is strange. Ty spells repeater with all e’s and no a’s, and for him there are two s’s in reset. But this morning, everything is right, and that’s wrong.

Until he resets the repeater, I am alone and isolated. But it shouldn’t be long. He lives on the other side of the mountains, a seventeen-mile drive from our post. The repeater tower is just off the road, and resetting it takes only five minutes.

In any case the rules are clear: even if communication fails, I stay at my post, except to report a fire.

When the sun climbs halfheartedly through the secondhand smoke, I can see that only the firebreak saved the watchtower itself. From its far edge to the horizon sprawls a black, lifeless dreamscape, with practically nothing left to burn.

Yet still we watch for fire.

This must be what hell is like. Alone, the smoke, the stench of charred wood, the meaningless drudgery, the silence.

I often stream music while I watch the horizon, but our Internet connection depends on the same repeater. So I turn on the AM radio instead. Nothing happens, not even static. Fresh batteries don’t help.

I could break the silence by talking or singing, but there’s no point. It would simply retreat outside the tower, wait patiently for me to stop, and then return.

At noon I study my lunch bag. It’s just a brown paper bag, used and reused until it has gone soft and verges on disintegration. I probably have new ones at home somewhere.

The repeater doesn’t go back on line. No doubt, Ty will explain when he arrives for his shift, but that’s still hours away. In the meantime I doze. I dream of the same wasteland I see when my eyes are open. I wonder if I’m seeing reality. I wonder whether what I think I see around me is actually inside me, and vice versa.

This feels like a nightmare that has always been and will always be.

Ty is late for his 5:00 p.m. shift. It’s been a year or two since that happened. The rule says I’m to remain on station for two more hours. Then, if he’s still not here, I can leave and report.

I wait the extra two hours, then almost three. By the time I leave, it’s dark, and my drive home is through the same brown, black, smoky nightmare as my morning commute, until I reach the last mile of forest. It’s green and alive, but shrouded in smoke.

As soon as I’m home, I check my e-mail. There are two messages from Ty. The repeater wouldn’t reset, and it can’t be serviced until next week. And his truck wouldn’t start, so he’ll be three or four hours late for his shift. I thank him and wish him luck.

I heat up something from a can for dinner, then make tomorrow’s lunch. I find more lunch bags in a cupboard, but they’re worn soft and smooth too, so I use the same one I used today. I shower, washing the stink of burnt forest off my skin. Too bad I can’t wash the air, which still turns every light in town a dingy yellow.

At 8:30 p.m. I put on my pajamas and settle into bed.

With the thoughtless efficiency of long habit, I tell Siri to set my phone alarm for 3:45 a.m. Then I give the last voice command of the night: “Play Ann Czerny.”

Her words and her voice are my nighttime refuge. Her accent is music.

“The Tale of Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter. Read by Mum, for Jake and Amber.

“Once upon a time, there were four little Rabbits, and their names were – “

If I’m lucky – and I often am – I will dream of her being in bed beside me, with our children between us at first, and then not. And of waking up early and giving her a hug and kiss, and standing in the children’s doorways, watching them sleep. And of going to work in a lush mountain forest that teems with life.