THE QUEST TO CATCH A BREAK
In the early years of their marriage, moving was easy.
Back then, Henry and Astrid Granger were hungry to create a life together. That was more than 40 years ago, before the Tubbs Fire destroyed their Santa Rosa home and the world they had built within its walls. Before everything stopped being new.
They weren’t young anymore. Moving wasn’t exciting
CHAPTER 1 The Fire CHAPTER 2 The Reckoning CHAPTER 3 The Trials CHAPTER 4 The Rebuilding
— it was a chore. But, as autumn 2017 bled into winter, it’s what they had to do.
At least they didn’t have much to pack, Henry thought. The fire had seen to that when it destroyed their Coffey Park neighborhood in the early hours of Oct. 9.
They were relocating from their daughter’s Oakland apartment to a rental off Dutton Avenue in Santa Rosa until they could purchase a new home.
Astrid didn’t want to rebuild in Coffey Park, and, as was usually the case, Henry deferred to her.
The town house had a yellow front door, which Henry found cheerful. Astrid bought a doormat emblazoned with their initial, “G.” Some former Coffey Park neighbors lived in the same complex. They tended to have glazed stares and didn’t converse much.
Rent was $3,100 a month, and the Grangers’ insurance would pay it for up to two years. Henry didn’t intend to stay in the rental that long.
All those years before, he had promised his wife everything — comfort, safety, stability. Those were the sweet assurances of youth, before age whittled him down and then the fire knocked him flat. The vows he had made to Astrid, the woman who had moved around the world for him, were no longer ones this man in his 70s knew how to fulfill.
They had fallen in love in Germany. He was 37 and divorced, a sergeant on his third tour of the country after stints in Vietnam and South Korea. She was 22 and stocking shelves at a big-box store. They met at the disco where American soldiers stationed in Giessen, an hour’s drive north of Frankfurt, danced on their nights off. Astrid used to hitchhike there to meet dashing GIs.
Henry was handsome and muscled. She was sharp and lithe. They began dating and, when his tour ended a year later, she followed him to California. Both of their families were bewildered.
His two children from an earlier marriage were just five and six years younger than Astrid. Now he was marrying a woman he met in a club who could practically be their sister.
Her parents liked that Henry was older and drove a big car — it conveyed a sense of stability for their only daughter. But when Henry was shipped back to the U.S., and Astrid went with him, that broke their hearts.
Astrid had always been bold and impetuous. When she was 18, she moved to London to be a nanny for a family living near Piccadilly Circus. She waitressed in their pub some afternoons, serving kidney pie and mashed potatoes to entertainment executives. It was an adventure.
So was life in the United States. She and Henry married at Monterey City Hall in 1978. They had no one to invite — his family was in Alabama, hers in Germany, and they had just moved to Pacific Grove in Monterey County. A neighbor snapped a photo of the couple, dressed in their nicest clothes, in front of their small home. Astrid couldn’t afford a wedding dress.
Afterward, they drove along the scenic 17-Mile Drive and stopped for dinner on Cannery Row. Astrid got pregnant right away and, within a few years, another child followed. She got her green card and became an American citizen, before she fully understood all that she was sacrificing: heritage, family, identity.
Henry might have moved back to Alabama, where his family was, but Astrid had been to the Deep South with him and hated it. If Astrid had her way they would have returned to Germany; her parents were growing older. But Henry’s post-Army jobs piloting airplanes for a cattle rancher and driving county buses were here.
California was their compromise. A place foreign to both of them became their new home.
When their firstborn, Audrey, was a toddler, they moved to Goshen, near Visalia in Tulare County, for Henry’s pilot job. He was between paychecks, and after the couple paid the $3,000 housing deposit, they couldn’t afford many groceries. For three weeks, they existed on eggs, bread and Henry’s leftover military C-rations. They didn’t care, as long as they had a home and each other. They were happy.
The baby splayed like a starfish, his tiny arms and legs quivering under a mess of tubes and wires. A thick scar bisected his chest.
Cole Geissinger had known fatherhood would be difficult. But never this difficult. Bruises bloomed on his son’s soft skin where nurses had tried to insert intravenous lines. Blankets rolled up like burritos pinned Apollo — Ollie, as they nicknamed him — so he wouldn’t turn over and pull out all the tethers to his medical equipment.
Ollie’s tiny cry sounded like a kitten’s mewling. Cole stroked his arms and wispy hair. He traced the gold, heart-shaped sensor taped to the 1-monthold’s stomach. Monitors softly beeped. His wife, Melissa, leaned against him.
“You’re doing a great job, little dude,” Cole said to his son.
Cole and Melissa had known about their baby’s heart problem since August 2017, two months before they lost their home in the Tubbs Fire and four months before Ollie was born. Actually, problems: an obstructed ventricle, a mismatched aorta sprouting from the wrong ventricle and a hole in his heart.
During a routine ultrasound, the technician had spotted something off. There was a 99 percent chance everything would be fine, he said. But that’s not how it worked out.
After Ollie was born on Dec. 20, doctors at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in San Francisco sliced open his chest to install a shunt, increasing blood flow to his lungs. That had gone according to plan. A week later, a portion of his small intestine died, a condition called necrotizing enterocolitis. It was unrelated to the heart problem.
On postsurgery scans, doctors had noted dark shadows accumulating in the labyrinthine folds of Ollie’s digestive system and rushed him into surgery. They removed the dead part of his intestine and looped what was left out of a hole they cut in his belly. Melissa and Cole had been ready to deal with the heart problems, but not this, and it smacked them hard.
Now the baby was embarking on a hospital stay that would last more than two months.
Cole was wrong every time he thought things couldn’t get worse. With every hit, it became harder to bounce back. He and Melissa hadn’t been able to work consistently in months. She wanted to be a writer. But she had stopped writing. He used to have hobbies and spend time with friends. Not anymore. Ollie had become his life.
His temper flared. Just once, he wondered, could they catch a break? At least he had Melissa. Their marriage had struggled in the two years following her miscarriage. They were enmeshed in separate grief cycles and couldn’t reach each other, until she became pregnant with Ollie.
When the obstetrician detected the heart problems, she asked them if they wanted to terminate the pregnancy. Of course not — they would work as a team to make a plan.
Cole studied anatomical heart diagrams online. He talked with doctors. He became an expert on the condition he knew would dictate his son’s early years.
He called the insurance company. Ollie’s health costs would be astronomical, upward of $3 million. Some of it would be covered, but not all of it.
Cole realized that even with the house insurance payoff, he and Melissa might not be able to rebuild the home where they had planned to raise their child.
Ollie squirmed in his bassinet. He was alive. That was enough. Where was Henry? Astrid was cooking lunch in the kitchen of their rental home just before New Year’s Eve. Her husband had left for the Santa Rosa Veterans Affairs clinic a few hours before. She glanced at the digital clock on the oven.
Usually, he was home by now.
Home — this place still wasn’t home. But it finally felt comfortable. Astrid had printed and framed new photos: her daughter, Audrey, dressed in white lace on her wedding day; her son, Jeff, seated at a Mexican restaurant; her niece holding her newborn child. Astrid had nailed cuckoo clocks onto the living room wall, replicas of the ones she lost in the fire. Their muted chirping on the hour was familiar and soothing.
Her friends had donated appliances, things that wouldn’t sell at their garage sales. The town house had otherwise come furnished, though the bedsheets were starched and stiff. Astrid bought new linen from a department store that offered a discount to fire victims.
There was one surviving tchotchke from Coffey Park: a blue tile, discolored and singed. It showed a Dutch ship cutting through roiling waves. Evermoving, frozen mid-crest. Astrid duct-taped it near the kitchen sink. How small things became big things! She had already lost so much, even before the Tubbs Fire.
Just once, she wondered, could she catch a break?
As a child, Astrid had fled East Germany with her parents and two brothers. The world’s Western and Eastern powers cut the country in half during the Cold War, and her family was trapped on the wrong side of history.
They had been living on her grandparents’ farm in Reinstedt, a village 140 miles southwest of Berlin. Just a child, Astrid was oblivious to geopolitics. She loved it there — she climbed trees and forded streams without supervision. She felt free. It was an idyllic childhood her own son and daughter wouldn’t have growing up in a city in the United States, even one as tame as Santa Rosa.
“There’s something wrong with your ears,” her mother began telling Astrid when she was 4, even though she could hear perfectly.
Her parents had falsified medical documents claiming they needed to travel to Frankfurt in West Germany for treatment or Astrid would go deaf. No one knew they had booked one-way tickets — a train to Berlin, then a flight to Frankfurt. They left everything they owned behind.
Six months later, in August 1961, the Berlin Wall went up.
They arrived in Frankfurt poor and dispossessed, and moved into a refugee camp with thousands of other people. Her parents got jobs in a factory that produced metal cables. Astrid’s mother — who fled Silesia, now part of Poland, during World War II — carved out a new life for her family, instilling a strength in her daughter that never wavered.
In photos, she holds Astrid, small and puny, her arms emaciated compared with her twin brother’s rolls of flesh. Astrid had been a sickly child, and in those photos her cleft feet are bound in plaster casts. She’s rarely smiling. But her chin is cocked defiantly.
There were other photos, too. Gone now, incinerated. Her daughter, Audrey, in a blue flowered dress standing in the front yard of their home in Coffey Park. Her children playing in the local park, a few adults picnicking at tables in the background. The trees are young and small, not the flaming torches they would become when the Tubbs Fire rampaged through the neighborhood.
That was so long ago. The memories were blurred and distant now, almost like they had happened to someone else.
Astrid finished preparing lunch. She fed birdseed to the ravens living in their tiny backyard. The cuckoo clocks chimed, marking another lost hour. She waited for Henry to come home.
From the hospital room, Henry could see the ocean. He stared at the unwavering blue line for hours.
They would show photos of this moment to Ollie someday, when he was older and stronger. Because someday, he would be older and stronger, Melissa thought.
In May, they returned to the hospital for a second open heart surgery. His recovery took two weeks, and now they were being discharged. They were headed home to Melissa’s parents’ place in Sebastopol.
They had barely spent time there in the past seven months, instead shuttling between the hospital and Family House, a long-term hotel for parents of children with chronic health problems. Their clothes smelled like antisepetic — the calling card of hospitals.
Melissa pressed a pink sticker onto a wall in the cardiac transitional care unit. More than 100 other stickers bordered it — markers of hope and anguish. Leaving a message on the wall was a rite of passage for families being discharged. We were here, the wall signified. Our love and our pain happened in this place. This was our life.
Cole drew a spaceship on the sticker, floating next to a moon and a field of stars.
“Thank you, CTCU,” he wrote. “We love you.” Signed, Apollo G. Melissa peeled off the sensors taped to Ollie’s skin, until he looked like a normal 5-month-old baby again. Only the feeding tube sprouting from his nose and the oxygen monitor Velcroed on one foot remained. She dressed him in a cotton onesie and doublechecked his list of medications. It filled two pages.
How had their lives gone so wrong?
Her life with Cole had once been easy, the way romance had never been before for Melissa, who was strong-willed and stubborn. They were introduced through a mutual friend in early 2011 at a tech meet-up in Santa Rosa. She knew that Cole was kind and helpful, and engaged to another woman. So they became friends.
After a month in Europe, Melissa returned that summer to the North Bay. Cole and his fiancee had broken up. He and Melissa went on an outing with friends to the California Academy of Sciences. He flirted with her, and she flirted back.
Within three months, they had moved in to a 450-squarefoot apartment above a garage. They got a cat and named her Ascii, the acronym for the computer alphabet.
They were nerdy. They didn’t fight, ever. Two years later, they got married on a dairy farm in Petaluma.
In February, during Ollie’s first hospital stay, Melissa had driven up Highway 1 to Schoolhouse Beach near Bodega Bay. The sunset was bold and endless. A man paddle-boarded across the water with his dog. She went to dinner alone and drank red wine at the bar. She talked with some strangers. They didn’t know about her loss. They didn’t know about her sick child.
For a few hours, she pretended things had turned out differently.
She was just a mother — not one whose child refused to breast-feed or take a bottle, forcing her to measure every milliliter of formula poured into his feeding tube.
Just a homeowner. Not one who was a fire victim, who regularly drove through Coffey Park, measuring the progress of other homes going up on Astaire Court and hoping hers would soon be among them.
Just a wife. Not one who suffered anxiety attacks in the middle of the night, whose husband had to hold her until the cold chills subsided. Not one ensnared in the sharp teeth of post-traumatic stress disorder. But now it was May, and on this day, she didn’t need to pretend. Ollie was being discharged. It was a good day.
“Congratulations! Goodbye!” said the front desk nurse.
“Ollie is out of here,” Melissa told her. “See you a really long time from now, hopefully.”
Henry’s legs ached and cramped. Then they went numb.
The air felt viscous, like he was walking underwater. He drove more than 60 miles from Santa Rosa to San Francisco, where the local Veterans Affairs hospital was, and checked into the emergency room.
“Go see your primary care physician,” the doctor said. “Everything seems fine.”
Another 60 miles, back to Santa Rosa. He dragged himself across the parking lot, struggling to breathe.
“This isn’t a hospital,” the physician said. “You need to go to a hospital.”
Another 60 miles, back to San Francisco. In Santa Rosa, Astrid continued making lunch.
Henry couldn’t feel his left leg. He poked it. Nothing. This time, doctors rushed him into a hospital room and hooked him to whirring machines. The electronic lines on their display screens went haywire — steep peaks and plummeting valleys.
Henry was having a massive heart attack.
A hospital receptionist called their daughter first. The damn fire — it was destroying her parents. Audrey called her mother. In Santa Rosa, Astrid’s phone rang, slicing the silence.
Surgeons inserted stents through Henry’s left wrist to help carry blood away from his heart. He would stay at the VA Hospital in San Francisco for two weeks. More tests. A second procedure. Nurses ran out of healthy veins to puncture, and his arms bruised a blotchy black.
Doctors came every day, crowding into his room. Where do you hurt? How are you feeling? What is your pain on a scale from 1 to 10? Over and over. He got fed up with their badgering. From the hospital room window, Henry could see the ocean, and he stared at the unwavering blue line on the horizon for hours. There wasn’t much else to do.
“The way they are treating me here, I could do better at home,” Henry grumbled. “This is a bit too much.”
As Astrid pulled out of their rental’s parking lot with her daughter one afternoon, upset and distracted, she turned in front of an oncoming car. The airbags deployed, and white dust pirouetted through the air like ash.
Astrid and Audrey were unharmed. Her car was totaled.
How had their lives gone so wrong?
If Henry died, what would Astrid do? Maybe she wouldn’t need a new home. It didn’t make sense for a widow to live alone in a space that big.
She sold their lot in Coffey Park for $145,000 — far less than what it was worth, even though there was no house and the neighborhood was in a burn zone. Henry went along with it.
An acquaintance had reached out, saying she wanted to be near her mother, who had Parkinson’s disease. Coffey Park was close by. Astrid’s goal wasn’t to make the most money she could off a sale. That’s not who she is.
“Someone else would have given me more,” she said. “But it wouldn’t be right.”
Kindness was her tenet. She did right by people, hoping they would do right by her, too. Maybe this would bring them luck. It had been so long since anything had been easy.
Any one of their traumas alone would have knocked them to their knees. The fire. The move. The surgeries. The car accident. Together, they seemed insurmountable.
As spring blossomed in Santa Rosa, everyone else was moving on. Everyone but them. The “Sonoma County Strong” posters disappeared from shop windows. The city finished clearing thousands of lots in Coffey Park and beyond.
The tangible signs of destruction — proof of what they had endured — were disappearing.
Lizzie Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: ljohnson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LizzieJohnsonnn
Melissa and Cole had been ready to deal with the heart problems, but not this, and it smacked them hard. Now the baby was embarking on a hospital stay that would last more than two months.