The powerful story of a girl struggling to figure out her estranged brother, a new love, and her own life just as wildfires beset her small California town—perfect for fans of Nina LaCour and Kathleen Glasgow
Seventeen-year-old Caprice wants to piece her family back together now that her older brother has returned home, even as she resents that he ever broke them apart. Just as she starts to get a new footing—falling in love for the first time, uncertainly mending her traumatized relationship with her brother, completing the app that will win her a college scholarship and a job in tech—wildfires strike Sierra, her small California town, forcing her to reckon with a future that is impossible to predict.
A love story of many kinds, and a reflection of the terrifying, heartbreaking Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, California, where the author grew up, this is a tale that looks at what is lost and discovers what remains, and how a family can be nearly destroyed again and again, and still survive.
Object: Talking Heads LP Location: 51 Plumule Way, Sierra, California Resident: Caprice Alexander
If you look at Sierra on a map, you’ll see it’s shaped like an obtuse scalene triangle. You won’t see all the backyard beekeepers, grow operations, and do-it-yourself houses. Flatten our town out like that and it’ll look ordered. Contained. But Sierra is part of a wild that rolls down off the mountains and reaches between the suburban-style houses, trailers, and cabins. A wild that creeps out from behind the oak and pine, in the shape of foxes, deer, and mountain lions. A wild that comes up on a sudden rush of wind. We put down our roads, build our houses, but the wild is still there. Prowling.
Anytime I talked about how small Sierra was, my gramps would say, “Sierra’s on the Road to Nowhere, Cappi.” Then he’d sing a few lines of that Talking Heads song. I’d tell him the song was a metaphor, not a literal road to nowhere. He’d shake his gray ponytail and say, “It’s good to be from nowhere. A guy like me can have a view like this.” He’d point to the canyon, where the afternoon light glowed an orange no photograph could capture, and the mottled greens of pine, oak, and red-barked manzanita above the river made you feel like you’d walked into a landscape painting.
Gramps wasn’t wrong. You really can’t get anywhere from Sierra, at least not quickly. Sierra’s shaped by canyons on the east and west, mountains to the north. The lower town limit’s a crenellation of hills that folds into California’s great valley, growing its rice, almonds, and smog. The three main roads out trace the canyons’ edge in winding lines. No highways. No fast escape.
Living in Sierra was like being a fish trapped in a pond where the feeder creek dries up most of the year. If you wanted out in any permanent way, you had to plan, and hope the waters ran high so you could swim for your life if the chance came. At least that’s what I thought. I never imagined we’d be—well, you know. No one imagines it. You just—can’t.
Gramps teased me for wanting to leave. He really thought there was no better place on earth. He always wanted to grow the town, welcome newcomers. He knew all about Sierra. He’d built it. Not the roads, but the houses. Hundreds of them. He tried to preserve the trees when he could. He said they make the town. Roots, you know.
Once, Cecil Ito took Gramps and me over Sierra in his little three-seater plane. From up there it looked like there was no town at all, just three roads twisting through trees. After we came down, Gramps brought me his Talking Heads LP and said I should keep it. We listened to it on Dad’s record player in the living room as we looked at a map of what we’d flown over. I said the map made Sierra look tame, but the view from the airplane made it seem all wild. Sierra wasn’t either. Not really. It was both. A wild filled with people, living in houses my gramps built, nestled between the trees. Under the greens. Perched on the edges of canyons or tucked back from the twisting pavement. People lived. Thousands and thousands hidden on roads that led nowhere.
FIRE SEASON
EIGHT WEEKS BEFORE
“Honey, ask your brother if you can grab something,” Dad said as he stepped into the driveway.
“Don’t,” Beckett called. “Only a laundry basket’s left.”
“Really?” I said, looking at the two boxes in Beck’s hands. His cuticles were frayed, and his arms, strained by weight, shook. A heavy feeling expanded in my center. I tried to ignore it. My brother was alive. Home. Sober. That was good.
“I’ll get the laundry,” Dad said.
“Hungry, Beck?” Mom eyed how his shorts hung too low on his hips.
“Starving,” he said. His voice was a fake cheery that made me wonder when he’d last eaten. Heat blew in the open door with the scent of dried grass and pitch. A guy jogged down the middle of the road, his footfalls slapping the concrete, dark hair peeking out from under an orange bandana. I’d been seeing him running all summer and wondered where he came from. He was cute, but didn’t he know about heat exhaustion? It was ninety degrees and climbing.
Dad returned with the laundry basket in one arm, head turned away. When he got close, I could smell why. He shut the door and stumbled. Cursed. Clothes spilled across the floor as Cheerio, our cat, darted under him. She looked up, her gray face indignant. A pair of boxers hung over one ear and down her body. Dad scratched her head with his free hand, called her a “stupid cat” in a baby voice, and picked up the underwear with two fingers. Cheerio lifted one white paw to swipe at the fabric, and then stretched out across the entry floor.
“Don’t worry about that, Dad. I got it,” Beckett said, appearing empty-handed. He hummed as he scooped up the musty clothes.
Dad handed the basket over, saying, “I’m going to tell your gramps you made it—he was hoping you’d be here for lunch.” Beck nodded as Dad slipped out the front door.
“Did you give up bathing and laundry?” I asked, lifting my foot to stand in tree pose.
“Yeah. It’s a standard part of rehab.” Beck arched one eyebrow.
I took a deep breath, swaying on my standing leg as I pressed my palms together because I was not, absolutely not, going to let my brother unbalance me in all the ways he used to. I was not going to hide in the closet if he yelled. I was not going to ask Mom to stock the kitchen with unbreakable plastic cups. I was going to trust him. Even if three years ago he shattered a dozen glasses while I hid in the closet. He was on the mend now. I could stand to be in the same room as him. On one leg even.
“Come on, Caps. Gotta get used to my rehab jokes.”
I teetered but didn’t fall. I’d recently mastered keeping my foot way up on my thigh above the knee. I felt powerful.
“So is bathing against the rules? Do you have to get dirty to get clean?” The corner of my mouth ticked up as Mom shouted from the other room:
“Caprice! You know cleanliness is an inappropriate metaphor for sobriety!”
“Sorry,” I mouthed. Beckett grinned.
“Easy joke,” he said. “Try harder.” I inhaled slowly, wondering if maybe Beckett and I would be siblings who laughed together again. His expression shifted. “Didn’t Mom tell you? I went to Davis—to see Mason. I—stayed awhile.”
“Oh,” I said. She hadn’t. Mason was Beckett’s best friend from forever who now “lived” at UC Davis Medical Center. Beckett had walked away from a totaled truck with a few bruises and Mason, six months after the accident, had air mechanically pushed in and out of his lungs. Mason couldn’t talk, or even blink in reply, and I wanted to know what Beckett had done there, and if it was even safe for him to visit right after being discharged. But the best support for people coming out of rehab, according to the internet, was to focus on the present and not ask too many questions. So I didn’t.
“The Vanagon doesn’t have a shower, but I’m thinking of trying to install one.” He smiled, same as when we’d sneak down to The Last Dam Stop: Gas and Grub and buy candy we weren’t allowed at home. I chewed the inside of my cheek. Was he joking? It wasn’t funny.
“Laundry is downstairs. That way, remember?” I said, pointing. Once he would have tried to knock me out of my pose. Now he shuffled past me politely, but the basket bumped my hip anyway and I dropped my foot to the floor. He stopped, reaching out his free hand to me. I brushed it away and focused hard to keep my yoga face relaxed.
“If you fall, I will catch you, I will be waiting,” he sang, words from an old song. Beck was lead tenor in the Sierra High Singers. More than once, deals were made that kept him performing despite his rule-annihilation and spotty grades.
Once he was out of high school, there was no more chorus to keep him in check. There were years we barely saw him. Then, after the crash with Mason, he got worse and worse for two months until finally he’d begged for Mom and Dad to help. They found a rehab facility on the coast with an opening. He’d been there the last four months.
Now my brother was back. My sort of sad, broken, too-skinny brother with a laundry basket and two boxes to his name. He didn’t look menacing. But he was an unknown variable. The peace and calm we’d found without him was probably about to evaporate like water off the cracking clay of Sierra soil.
All I really wanted was to get through the coming year without any big surprises, finish the app I was developing, and get into college. That was my program. My plan.
Beckett looked at me from behind a strip of greasy hair, and he must have seen how hard I was working to keep my yoga-relaxed face on, because he said, “I’m not a meth lab, you know. I won’t explode.”
I smiled at that. A little.
“You sure?”
“I smell bad, but not that bad.” His voice was smoke-worn and tired.
I swallowed. Technically, Beckett suffered from substance use disorder from alcohol, but I knew it led him to some pretty dark stuff, though no one had ever bothered to tell me the details and I didn’t ask. My brother joking about how a meth lab smelled made me feel off, and a little scared. Was he serious? Did he really know? Or was he teasing me? I didn’t know how to ask, and I felt like I did when Cheerio disappeared at night, and I was stuck alone imagining the worst: foxes and bobcats out for her soft belly.
In the year after Beckett dropped out of college, we did a few family therapy sessions that he didn’t bother showing up for, and Mom started taking me to yoga and stressing the importance of “routines to promote calm and order.” I suspect she also put a reminder on her phone to tell me “Don’t drink!” and “Make good choices!” at regular intervals, because I heard those phrases so often, they must have run on some kind of programmed loop. For three years before the accident, Beckett had worked various jobs in Willow Springs and had shown up at our house irregularly, usually drunk, often in need of money, never without a fight. The night of his crash with Mason, my parents woke me in the middle of the night to go to the hospital, where we found my brother cussing out an orderly.
Our family had been through enough. Now I just wanted to hang out with Alicia and plan our futures, hers in music, mine in computers, drawing creative energy from each other like the Merry Pranksters, only without all the acid.
Beckett turned toward the stairs. His best friend was never going to be the same. There was no way around that. I felt a tremor in my chest. Like a bird was trapped there, beating its little wings against my ribs. My brother fought battles I’d never understand. And the knowledge tightened around me, crushing my words. I slipped my phone out of my pocket and texted Alicia.
Beck’s back
did he break anything yet?!!!
Ha. Ha.
how’s he look? Not in a coma wasn’t the right answer, though I thought about it.
Remember those plastic sheets your mom got us? We drew people on them put them in the oven and they came out looking the same only all tiny and hard?
so he’s ok except for the miniaturization process? can we carry him in our pockets?? is he shatterproof????
1. Yes 2. No 3. I hope?
IF Beckett returns from rehab THEN shatterproof
I laughed. In third grade, Girls Who Code taught us to make jokes like they were computer commands. Back then they were more: IF eat beans THEN fart. But over time, things got abstract.
IF Beckett THEN prepare for chaos.
I’d typed that one to Alicia a thousand times. It meant I was locating breakable objects, developing an escape plan, and trying to keep everyone calm and happy. In the past it was impossible. But I’d tried. I’d been trying since I was ten. Now it felt a little less impossible to try to be hopeful.
I pocketed my phone. Alicia and her little sister, Jenny, got along fantastically despite the eight years between them. They had some kind of natural sibling code. Beckett and I never did.
I grabbed the almost-full bucket of water from my shower and lugged it downstairs.
“Here,” I said, handing it to my brother.
“Thanks.” He dumped the gray water in the old top-load washing machine. This was a long-standing conservation effort—collect shower water and use it to clean clothes.
“Welcome home,” I said as he turned around. I opened my arms. He half shrugged and stepped into them.
He smelled like sweat and dirt and tobacco. He was home. Alive. Trying.
“I’m glad you’re back,” I said. I meant it. Even as that little bird in my chest struggled to flutter.
“Me too. But if you didn’t leave me any hot water, I’m going to kill you.” He tugged my wet hair.
“I didn’t know when you were coming! There’s this cool technology called texting. You should try it.”
“I need a new phone.”
Right. Mom said he wanted a new number too because there were lots of people he was trying to leave behind. People who wouldn’t understand he wanted to be sober. But not being found in Sierra was going to be like speaking binary code. Just impossible.
“Get on that, after you shower. You smell like one of Gram’s compost piles. And please please forget to collect the water. I don’t want to wash my clothes in your funk.”
He almost smiled, palmed his whiskers, and left the bucket on the floor next to the washer as he stepped away. “Can I borrow a razor?”
“Ugh. Gross. Why don’t you have— Never mind—” I swallowed. “There are disposable ones in the drawer. Right-hand side. Don’t use mine.”
“Aw, Cautious Cappi,” Beckett said, and for a second, his old grin appeared. The one that showed how his right front tooth had shifted slightly sideways because he never wore his retainer. Then he shook his head. “You’re lucky.”
“Understanding basic hygiene isn’t luck,” I said.
“I never paid attention to that stuff,” he said.
“My program is simple—wash hands, don’t touch things other people’s fluids have, and avoid everything you’ve ever done,” I said, chipper, stepping between him and the sink. “You’ve made high school easy.”
“Was that a thank-you?” he said, arms loose at his sides. His panic! at the disco shirt was coming unstitched at the hem.
“Yeah,” I said. Maybe it was. “Thanks for keeping the druggies away.”
“Protection’s like the first job of a big brother.”
I tried to smile but my mouth didn’t cooperate. I was thinking of five years before, when I was twelve, and I’d tried to keep him from driving when he was so drunk, he could barely walk. I’d hidden his keys, but he got the spare Dad kept in the downstairs cabinet. When I realized he was leaving, I ran out front and tried to pry them from his fingers. He elbowed me and I fell on the pebbled paving stones and cut my knee. Angry, I screamed, “Do whatever you want!” and went in to stanch the bleeding. He didn’t come home the next morning, or the next. My terror was matched only by the silence of the house. Nobody played music. Nobody talked. I told my parents what happened, sitting at the table tracing my scab. Owning up. That still made me angry. The guilt. As if a middle-schooler with gumby arms could stop a drunk sixteen-year-old from doing what he wanted.
Beckett dropped his arm across my shoulder. “Be warned, you’re on your own navigating the nerds. I only weed out the losers like me.”
“You’re not a loser,” I said, but it didn’t come out convincingly. We both knew I’d called him that countless times.
“Thanks for the faith—” He paused. “So, any special nerds?”
I shook my head.
“But you’re building that app the parents can’t stop bragging about—isn’t that bound to impress some—”
“Admissions teams and scholarship committees? Hopefully.”
Beckett blinked and then stuck his chin out. “I was going to say hot nerds.”
“Uh, do you remember high school?”
“Not really, no.” His smile dampened.
“The only people who are impressed by me building an app are our parents, Cecil Ito, and the computer club. That’s Alicia and Mo.”
“Mo’s not make-you-sweat material, I take it?”
“Ew.” I swatted his shoulder. Mo, a sophomore who Alicia and I called our little brother, was so far from hotness, he was practically Antarctica. “The Sierra High dating pool is incestuous and small. It’s not worth it.”
Beckett looked at me sideways.
“It’s true! I’ve already dated Grayson, the one person I haven’t known since kindergarten, and he turned out to be a jerk.”
Beckett chuckled. “Maybe that was the problem. There’s nothing wrong with dating someone you’ve known forever.”
“Uh, yeah there is. I mean, Micah Feldstone might be cute if I could forget how he sat next to me in second grade munching his scabs.”
Beckett made a face but then said, “How hot is he? Maybe you could—”
“Even if I could—and I can’t—Micah and Alicia dated all through eighth grade and he seriously broke her heart. For months she only listened to music in minor keys.”
“She did?”
“She wanted to feel her feelings.”
“Huh.”
I shrugged. “Honestly, what’s the point of dating? High school relationships don’t last. There’s like a two percent chance.”
“Ice cream doesn’t last either, but it’s still worth it,” Beckett said, poking me in the stomach.
I poked back.
“I think your app thing’s awesome,” he said, turning to go back upstairs.
Really? He looked back. Did he see something on my face? Some secret joy, some relief? “Dad said it was, anyway,” he added.
Oh.
“So . . .” he said. “What’s it about?”
“It’s so tourists—” I began, and a look flashed across Beckett’s face that said Sierra doesn’t have tourists. No beach. No General Sherman Tree. No Winchester Mystery House. Certainly no Disneyland. “It’s a prototype. Something that could grow beyond Sierra. But Gramps was going on about it to Cecil, and he wants to invest.”
“Real money?”
“Not Monopoly money.” In the world of app development, the twenty thousand Cecil was giving me wasn’t a lot. But in Sierra, it was huge. I didn’t know people had money like that just sitting around to invest in anything, but a high-schooler’s project? It was wild.
Beckett ran his hands through his hair. “You’re earning back the college savings our parents blew on me, then?”
I looked up expecting to see his grin, that crooked tooth, but his gaze was on his Vans, tracing the edge of the tile. “Beck—you know—I—everyone wanted to help.” He shook his head and then stepped toward me, swinging his arm up and dropping a hand on my shoulder. A heaviness bubbled in my stomach and I blurted, “Twenty thousand won’t even cover my first year unless I get serious scholarships, and I’m supposed to pay some of that to my team, so—”
“Hey, I’m a dropout who defaulted on my loans. I get it.” Oof. He squeezed my shoulder, then fell back so I could go up the stairs first.
We found Mom in the kitchen, straight-backed at the marble-topped island, her lips tight, next to our slump-shouldered dad. I could almost hear them silently shouting, You’re not worried enough! and You need to relax! Mom sliced a cucumber and Dad folded meat onto the bread.
“Look—it’s the two people responsible for creating you and keeping you alive,” I said.
“Despite your best efforts,” Mom added, cutting a sandwich in half and smiling.
Dad raised one eyebrow and popped a piece of turkey in his mouth. My parents rarely agreed on anything Beckett-related.
Gramps’s head was in the refrigerator. “Well, here he is! My Beckett Bear,” he said, turning with the tea pitcher in his hand. Beckett made a sound between a laugh and a sigh as he stepped toward Gramps.
“Gramps refuses to believe you’re no longer ten,” I said.
Gramps winked at me. “He can’t be! ’Cause then I’d be . . .” He set down the pitcher and held up his fingers like he was counting. Beck’s eyes stuck on Gramps’s thinning ponytail. “Well, come on, then!” Gramps opened up his arms for a long hug.
“Be careful, he hasn’t showered yet!” I said.
“Caps said I’m worse than Gram’s compost.”
“Good compost doesn’t smell”—Gramps paused and smiled at me—“that bad. We’ll put up with you,” he said to Beckett. “We’re eating outside anyway.”
I pointed to the sliding door. “Right this way, Beckett Bear.”
Beckett stepped past me onto the deck, where Gram was parked in the shade. Dad and Gramps had picked her up from the care facility earlier.
“Gram!” Beckett leaned down to kiss her head. Wow. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen that.
“What trouble could a handsome man like you have been in to say hello like that?” Gram asked.
“You don’t want to know,” Beckett said, sitting down.
When I was maybe eight and Beckett twelve, we were in the garden with Gram. She said, “Some seeds take to the wind. Others grow right in the soil where they’re dropped. Some get carried off in the belly of an animal to be shat out somewhere new.” Then she looked between us. “What kind of seed are you?”
“Wind!” I’d cried, opening my arms and imagining I was floating on the canyon breeze.
“You are,” I’d said, shoving him with my shoulder.
“Smells like you are,” he said.
Gram smacked him hard then with her garden gloves. “Go turn the compost if you’ve got shit on your brain.”
Beckett’s face went blank. My throat tightened. My eyes stung, but I didn’t let tears fall.
“Go on now, it’s not like I hit you,” Gram said, her voice all honey and flowers. It was exactly like she’d hit him. Sometimes she called those whaps “love smacks.” They weren’t usually hard, but they were hits. I never got one.
“Wind seeds land in shit anyway,” Beckett grumbled to me, as if I’d been the one to slap him. Maybe because I kept sitting next to Gram, pressing my fingers into the dirt, maybe I kind of had.
“Boys,” Gram had said then as Beck slunk away. “At least they grow into men, right?” I’d thought she meant strong builder-types like my gramps. But now I realize Gram was all innuendo no matter who she was talking to. I stayed next to her in the garden, tucking seeds into the ground. I felt bad for Beck, even if he’d been a jerk. But not enough to join him turning compost.
We didn’t know then that the disease was already taking root in Gram’s brain, and it made her act more unpredictably than ever.
“She doesn’t remember us anymore,” I said, looking at Gram now, her silver braids coming undone. I wanted to love her in an uncomplicated way. But it was hard to tell where she ended and her illness began.
“I don’t remember the name of the restaurant I worked at last year, so—” Beckett half smiled like it was somehow the same. I wondered if it bothered him at all.
Mom and Dad came out, passing us plates, sandwiches, cucumber slices, salt and vinegar chips. They settled on opposite sides of the porch. Gramps followed with cups of tea sweating in the heat. He pulled a chair up next to Gram, settling his hand on her leg.
“It’s good to be home,” he said. I wanted so badly to welcome him back, to forgive or forget or whatever I needed to do.
“It’s hard to stay away from Sierra, isn’t it, boys!” Gramps said.
“Oh Glenn, don’t start,” Mom said.
“What?” Gramps put his hands in the air. “Growth! That’s the future.”
“Town’s bigger than it needs to be already, Dad.”
“You’re saying that ’cause you’re no longer building up here,” Gramps said, leaning forward as my dad rocked back.
“Gentlemen,” Mom said, “we’re here to welcome Beckett home. Not to argue.”
“Well, thanks for raising the population back up,” Gramps said, his blue eyes sparkling.
“Where are we?” Gram asked.
“At my place, Mom,” Dad said.
“Don’t you try to trick me, Dylan!” Gram raised her finger at my dad.
People think computers are smart. But they aren’t. They’re just fast at doing what they’re told. But once they learn something, they don’t forget. Sure, a virus could wipe them clean, but even then, memory can be restored. Backed up. No one had figured out how to do that for people. I wondered if it would ever be possible—to download your memories—and then restore them. Could that kind of thing work for Gram, or Mason? Who would invent something like that? A doctor? A computer scientist? Both?
An acorn woodpecker tap-tap-tapped. The Hernándezes’ rooster crowed. Our backyard looked across the canyon—trees and red dirt, our ridge and the next. Below us, the snake of the river. I could feel Beck’s eyes on me, but neither of us spoke. What was he thinking? Was he worried about being back? Was he really happy to be here? I didn’t know, and I didn’t ask.
I wasn’t sure how much time we should spend together now that we were all acting out the one big happy family. Still, I sipped my tea, and flashed Beckett one of my practiced yoga smiles. It was the best I could do. I hoped it told him I was trying. If he could, I could.
Program for Trying to Be a Good Sister While Avoiding Beckett-Induced Chaos
IF Beckett is working with Gramps, make coffee and send him off with two cups. THEN: 1. Work on app 45 minutes 2. Yoga 20-35 minutes 3. Work on app 60 minutes 4. Snack 5. Repeat until 3 p.m. THEN run the following: IF Beckett is smoking on the deck THEN take a shower. IF Beckett is reading on the couch THEN work in the garden. IF Beckett is in the shower OR going for a drive THEN stay in the house. IF Beckett is with Gramps, Mom or Dad THEN join in family conversation. A basic rule: IF only Beckett is HERE then Caprice is NOT HERE.
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