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She got horribly sick with bronchitis, surely from the air. My son wasn’t doing well, either, worried all the time. “Mom, do you think the dog will live to be a hundred?” he asked, meaning fourteen—his age—in human years. I said it was possible, if we took good care of her. He was quiet. “It’s so weird that things start to deteriorate as they get old.” Like what? I asked. “Like people,” he said. “Not stuff, actually. People.”
One day, I got a call from FEMA. It started like this: “How are you surviving today, ma’am?” (Probably safer than “How are you doing?”) The government worker told me I was on the “total-destruction list.” That had an appealingly heavy-metal ring.
Some insurers, heeding a call for mercy by the California insurance commissioner, waived the requirement for customers to submit an itemized list of everything they’d lost. Not ours. In order to fill out my “Total Loss Memory Book,” a spreadsheet sent by the public adjuster we hired to help us navigate our claim, I was going to have to get granular.
I had videos of Hartzell on my phone, made after researching a fire-insurance story that I never wrote. (We have to wait for a big fire, I’d argued.) Now I used them to research my own life. In the clips, I seem impatient, like someone scanning a yard sale for bargains. I almost blow right past the wall in my bedroom where the baby pictures are: Billy holding our son’s six-month-old hand; our daughter’s round eyes and rosy face. Slow down, I want to scream, you won’t ever see this again. When the videos ended, I was bottomed out with despair. I had experienced this feeling once before, at twenty-five. A few weeks after my father died suddenly, I’d awakened from a dream in which he was alive. Just let me go back!
Among the losses were the contents of the fireproof safe, which wasn’t actually fireproof; the documents inside were incinerated and the jewelry reduced to scorched fragments. I turned my attention to another missing item: a velvet-lined box containing my grandmother’s wedding silver. The youngest of her grandchildren, I was born two months after she died. I was the only one who never met her, and I have no idea how I ended up with it. I had rarely used the silver, but now I fixated on finding a way to retrieve it from the rubble.
The pattern, Shell & Thread, was a Tiffany workhorse, introduced around the turn of the century. A line (the thread) traced the utensils’ edges; each handle bore a stylized scallop shell, the kind Venus was born on. The knife blades were rounded and symmetrical, more like tongue depressors than cutting tools. A fork in your hand felt profound, with a dull glow I remembered from setting the table on special occasions as a kid. The handles were monogrammed with my grandmother’s initials.
The idea of her, as the gentlest being, had haunted my childhood. She was from Denver, and when I was in college my father built a cabin in the Rockies, near where she had spent summers. At family dinners there, he would mistily say her grace: “Thank you for the things we eat. Thank you for the birds that sing. Thank you for the wind that blows. Thank you, God, for everything.”
These days, our family dinners consisted of takeout from a paper bag. But that prayer started coming back to me, a ghost whispering in my ear, trying to make me say thank you. I was mad at the wind. I was even mad, ludicrously, when an old friend wrote to say he’d “caught wind of” our situation. I had so much to do, but I was thinking about the grandmother I had never met. I was thinking that, even though I knew California people plunge their heirlooms in the pool when they evacuate, I had not. I’d let her wedding silver burn.
At the beginning of March, we went back to the house as a family for the first time. With its animating force leaked out, it was corpse-like, caving. There was a dead crow in the street. My son stood alone and looked up at the sky where his room had been.
After a few minutes, Billy took the kids to get breakfast; I stayed back with the two men we had hired to dig in the rubble. They had brought their own portable changing room, from which they emerged wearing white Tyvek suits, hard hats, and orange safety vests. I stood at the side of the pit. At my feet was a melted blue blob, the bird camera.
Using shovels, the excavators turned over pieces of the house. Before long, one of them held up a piece of metal victoriously. It was part of a bronze casting of “The Three Graces,” by my relative Charles Cary Rumsey, a sculptor in the early twentieth century.
The Graces, naked, entwined attendants of Venus, classically represent beauty, joy, and abundance. Here was a single grace, separated from her sisters. The bronze had blackened and grown florid with green and white spots. Headless, armless, her deep spinal canal resolving into a pear-shaped bum, she looked ready for a hot date with the Getty Bronze. She gave me hope for the silver.
On my phone, I looked up the melting points of various metals. Gold, 1,945 degrees. Silver, 1,762. Bronze, 1,675. The diggers pulled up a pile of forks. I could see immediately by their swooping handles that they were from a Crate & Barrel set that we’d bought and regretted. The sideboard where we’d stashed them had evaporated. That was also where we kept my grandmother’s silver. I pictured it all together, buried under chunks of wall, waiting to be rescued. But after three hours the excavators had not found it, and I called off the dig.
One of my friends moved back into her fire-damaged house as soon as the evacuation order lifted: single mom, two kids, no choice. Others, who had signed short-term leases well away from the burning mountains—West Hollywood, Playa Vista, the Valley, anywhere flat and far—began to return. Since the fire, I had thought periodically of Margaret, the woman with the long gray hair who lived in her car, and then one day I thought I saw her, near a Whole Foods in Santa Monica. I went back a few times, hoping to learn how she’d been managing, but I didn’t spot her again.
In the first three months, my family moved ten times, from hotel to hotel to Airbnb. In March, we rented the home of a woman from my book group; we could stay for three months, until her kids came home from college and started summer jobs. Everyone asked us what we were doing, but we were still hovering, no plan. I got a trampoline from Sam’s Club and installed it in the borrowed yard. If we couldn’t land, we could at least jump.
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Dana Goodyear
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