A PLACE CALLED HOME
California was on fire again.
Through this past summer, blazes raged across the state. They threatened cities and hamlets and shut down a national park. Melissa Geissinger couldn’t watch the news anymore. It was too triggering.
It tugged her back to early Oct. 9, when the Tubbs Fire blitzed Santa Rosa. Snap. She is in her home in Coffey Park, trying to corral the cats into carriers, clutching the flashlight on her cell phone, and the fire is bearing down.
Her heart races. But no — that was nearly a year ago. It isn’t real.
Here is what people didn’t tell her about wildfires: After the flames die down and the news crews leave, she would be left to grapple with the tragedy. Healing would come, but slowly, so slowly. The collective emotional trauma wouldn’t disappear.
But no one told Melissa that. Who could have?
In June, she and her hus-
band, Cole, had dinner at their friends’ home in Shiloh Ridge. Lance and Barbara Cottrell’s place looked northeast toward Mark West Springs and had almost been destroyed by the Tubbs Fire. They evacuated to Melissa and Cole’s home in Coffey Park, only to have to flee again when the fire arrived there.
The Cottrells had gotten lucky. The wind shifted and their home was spared.
Now, they were hosting a party for everyone who had crammed into Nancy and Ron Crain’s home last October. They had nicknamed Melissa’s parents’ house in Sebastopol “the Crain Compound” because so many evacuees were camping on air mattresses in their living room. The talk circled back, again and again, to what had survived and what had been lost.
It was easy and comfortable — the type of conversation that was becoming more difficult for Melissa to initiate as the rest of the world moved on. Fire fatigue had set in, and people had begun to rush past the Tubbs in conversations.
Melissa watched as white formula seeped down a medical line and into the feeding tube of her son, Ollie. It snaked down his nose. Thick tape kept the tube lodged in place on his cheek. It was a remnant of the 6-month-old’s hospital stays — the openheart and abdominal surgeries. He still wouldn’t take nourishment like a normal baby.
The memories in the Shiloh Ridge house were layered. Melissa and Cole once had house-sat there for a week, before Ollie and before the Tubbs Fire, even though the house didn’t really need sitting. The Cottrells were away on vacation and offered their guest home to the couple. It was as calm and quiet there as the wooded cabin Melissa’s parents owned in Calaveras County when she was a girl.
She and Cole skinny-dipped in the saltwater pool, which reflected the towering pines and sky. One evening, they accidentally set off the security alarm trying to place a package inside the front door of the main house. They still laughed about that.
Later, there was a much different stay, after the miscarriage, when she and Cole had begun fighting and needed a break from each other. Melissa had moved in to the Shiloh Ridge home for a time. Not many people knew about that.
Now they were back, this time with a baby. Melissa was happy, not the bright and kicky kind of happy, but more lasting and subdued. For once, she didn’t feel panicked or trapped, like she did when the PTSD swallowed her whole.
Maybe this was hope. Maybe they had caught their break.
Astrid Granger stood on a chair, reaching into the town house’s kitchen cabinet with a serving spoon.
“Somebody gave this to me, but I don’t think I’ll ever use it,” she said, dragging a rice maker from the top shelf.
It was late June, and the scent of stale coffee wafted through the kitchen. Boxes covered the counters. She and her husband, Henry, had bought a small house in Windsor to replace the one the Tubbs Fire had devoured. They were going home.
It had taken more than eight months, through Henry’s hospital stay and every failed offer for a house. They were always being outbid by people who paid in cash. Who has that much cash lying around? At least three times, the Grangers had spread bank statements across their bedspread as they tried to figure out how they would come up with the money for a deposit. Three times it wasn’t enough.
They had gotten an insurance settlement, but it wasn’t as big as some other people’s, like those whose showpiece homes had been spread across the hills of the Fountaingrove neighborhood north of Coffey Park.
“All these people with million-dollar homes got huge payoffs,” Astrid said. “Now they are looking for homes, too. We couldn’t win. We were going crazy with those numbers. Every time you are outbid, you’re crushed.”
They had discussed moving to the retirement community of Oakmont, but all Astrid saw was a stream of cleaning ladies and therapists coming, then the ambulance arriving to pick up the residents. She was now 62 — too young for that. It might be OK for Henry, who was in his 70s. But not her.
They began arguing, more than they had in four decades of marriage. They were going to go broke buying a home. They scraped nearly every cent they had from their savings and retirement accounts.
One Sunday afternoon, their real estate agent took them to tour some listings in the North Bay. One in Rincon Valley had a pool. Another in Windsor was beautiful but too expensive. The last one was 1,300 square feet with three bedrooms. Astrid nearly dismissed it on sight. The exterior color was terra-cotta. It was ugly.
But she walked inside and knew. This was it. There were fountains in the backyard and boxes of lavender on the front porch, and even a hot tub. The women who owned the home were moving to Oregon. The Grangers made an offer, and they accepted it. Henry was triumphant. Astrid drank a glass of red wine to celebrate.
After they went into escrow, a man they had outbid knocked on the front door of the terra-cotta house. The women, who were still living there, answered. He wanted to buy the home out from under the Grangers. They said no.
“The audacity that he did that,” Astrid said, her voice cracking. “The nerve of him. But that’s how desperate people are. The man who did that lost his house in the fire, too.”
They had been in limbo for almost a year. Not anymore. Astrid stood in the rented town house where they had lived since December and wrapped tea cups and a pink candy dish in newspaper. The floor fan pushed humid air around, and sweat beaded on her face. The TV was showing a World Cup soccer match — her native Germany, the defending champion, was out. Astrid couldn’t believe it.
“Winners never think they
“We didn’t think we would make it. But we did.” Henry Granger, as he and Astrid settle into their new home in Windsor
have to fight,” she said.
A push of the remote button took her to a newscast showing a fire in Yolo County. But it barely registered with her. California was a disastrous state — fires, floods, earthquakes. She was surprised it was flames that had gotten them, rather than the ground quaking and opening up or the Russian River overflowing its banks.
Not long ago, Astrid had returned to Coffey Park. She was no longer sure where their house had been. The frameworks of a dozen new houses were rising from the dirt. It no longer looked familiar. The redwood tree in their old backyard, tall and massive and seemingly permanent, was gone. Crews had cut it down.
Coffey Park wasn’t home anymore.
The healthy flush seeped from Ollie’s chubby legs. His lips tinged blue, then violet. The medical machinery surrounding his bassinet went from making languid pinging noises to something much more urgent.
Melissa called for the nurse. It was just before Labor Day, and they were back at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in San Francisco for the third time. One week earlier, surgeons had spliced the living section of Ollie’s large intestine with his stomach and removed his ileostomy, a fleshy circle of pink tissue poking from his belly.
Ollie had used a colostomy bag almost since birth. The operation had gone well. “Is this the surprise?” Cole asked himself.
Ollie’s plumbing finally worked. Melissa and Cole practiced changing his diaper. It was easier than cleaning the plastic bag taped to his stomach, which sometimes leached stinking liquid and required two sets of hands to change.
They were about to be discharged. Then Ollie caught a cold.
Ollie’s heart has only one ventricle instead of two, so oxygen saturation levels in his blood are 75 to 85 percent of normal, and will be until he has a more invasive heart operation as a toddler. Now, that figure was plummeting.
Sixty percent. Forty percent.
Cole caressed the baby’s fontanel, trying to calm him down. He wanted to hold his son against his chest and rock him and kiss his cheeks, but the baby was covered in tape and tubes. Ollie cried louder, tears seeping from the corners of his slitted eyes. The sight tore at Cole.
Thirty percent. Doctors rushed into the room.
“We need to sedate him right now,” one said.
It was taking too long. Melissa’s heart hammered in her chest. A dozen people in scrubs were crammed into their room in the annex of the cardiac intensive care unit. The doctors were vacillating on which narcotic to inject. They spoke in jargon, and she caught only snippets of sentences. “Intubation,” someone said. Nineteen percent. Oxygen deprivation can cause brain damage. Eventually, the body shuts down, tissues suffocate and die, and the damage becomes irreversible. Ollie wasn’t getting enough oxygen. He was too worked up to get a full breath of air.
Melissa felt something inside of her break. She backed out of the room, away from her husband and the cluster of doctors and nurses scrambling to save her son’s life. She slumped on the tile floor in the hallway. It was cold.
“It feels too good to be true. I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop . ... I’d like to think we have wrapped up enough karma for something to go our way.” Melissa Geissinger, of the house they are renting while their home in Coffey Park is being rebuilt
But she couldn’t cry — she felt numb, like her system had short-circuited.
Moments of light were so ephemeral. Days before, everything had seemed perfect. But Melissa knew perfection had an expiration date. Her stomach would tighten with dread, ruining even the happiest of days. Maybe she wasn’t entitled to joy.
The darkness always returned.
When Henry had first moved to California, the siren song of the ocean called him.
He drove up Highway 1 near Monterey, pulled off at a random exit and walked to the water’s edge. The blue was vast and endless. It overwhelmed him. Waves lapped at his feet, soaking the hem of his pants. In all his travels, his path had ended here. Not Washington or Oregon or Canada, like he had once dreamed. California.
“This is it,” he thought. “This is as far as I can go.”
He retired from the military soon after, in 1981. He no longer craved adventure — not the way he had when he was 18 and enlisted in the Army to escape the segregated South.
His parents were sharecroppers and had raised Henry and his seven siblings in Homewood, Ala., 5 miles outside of Birmingham. They were a good, churchgoing family. His father was a deacon, and his three sisters sang in the choir. But there were few opportunities for a black man in the town of 25,000 people.
Henry could play only at certain parks, swim in certain pools and enroll in a certain high school. He got his first job at 15, as a houseboy for a white family. He scrubbed their floors and cut their grass, saving his money and buying a car before his own father did. And then Henry left, never looking back.
As a tank soldier, he had fired nearly every military weapon and driven most of the Army’s vehicles. As a husband, he had paid off the mortgage on his Coffey Park home and bought Astrid a new one in Windsor. As a fire survivor, he had grappled with trauma and made peace with it.
“Living in Coffey Park and all that, you think, ‘This is it,’ ” he said. “We never realized the fire was going to come and take everything. Never did anyone in a million think the fire would jump the freeway and come our way.”
Now, he felt himself reaching the end of the line. As September returned with its fierce summer blue, and the one-year anniversary of the Tubbs Fire approached, Henry and Astrid settled into their new home. It was just a small place, nothing pretentious, but decent. They celebrated Henry’s 78th birthday.
Their lives had regained rhythm and purpose. Different from before, but fuller and better. They were settled. It was enough.
“We didn’t think we would make it,” Henry said. “But we did.”
This was as far as they could go.
Desperation pulled them west, where it was calmer, and they followed on a whim.
Melissa looked up rental properties online. Ollie was healthy again, growing chubbier and more expressive with the passing days. He shimmied side-to-side to songs by the rock band Thrice and loved hugging his stuffed bunny named Bash. The 9month-old had survived the latest hospital scare, and there was no lasting damage from the oxygen deprivation.
All of them needed a respite. Melissa and Cole had loved living in Sebastopol with her parents, where they felt both safe and sad. But nearly a year had passed since the fire, and they wanted their independence.
They were rebuilding in Coffey Park, even though money for their home remained in flux. Ollie’s surgeries still hadn’t been tabulated and billed by their insurance. Melissa and Cole applied for state funding earmarked to help pay the medical bills of chronically sick children.
It would be another year, probably more, before they could move back to Santa Rosa. They couldn’t stay with her parents that long. With so many people crammed in a small space, conflict brewed. One afternoon, Melissa lost her temper and screamed so loud that her mother thought she would have to grab Ollie and head somewhere, just for a while until Melissa cooled off.
It was time for them to leave.
On Zillow, Melissa spotted a beachfront listing in Bodega Bay. It was 25 minutes from her parents’ home. Its windows looked out on the coastline, south to Point Reyes. The water was beautiful and blue. It was endless.
“What the hell,” she thought. “Let’s go check it out.”
Cutting through Sonoma County on the drive to the ocean, Melissa felt a sense of peace that had eluded her for nearly a year. Cole was excited — more excited than he had been in months. Where would their grocery store be? Would they host parties? It was a fever dream. It seemed unreal that they would actually move to the coast.
But they fell in love with the house. It felt like a sanctuary, with its soft carpets and hazy morning light. Two days later, they signed a lease. Insurance money would pay rent for the next year. After that, they would figure something out until construction of their home was complete.
“It feels too good to be true,” Melissa said. “I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. Like, no, the universe still hates you. I’d like to think we have wrapped up enough karma for something to go our way.”
For once, it had. On an early autumn morning, she sat on the back porch, looking out over the water, cradling Ollie in her lap. She and Cole planned to renew their vows soon. Maybe right here, with a few friends.
The fog blew across the coast. Seagulls flew through the air.
They had come so far. They had survived.