California burned down every year, of course, and had all my life. Fire was one of the only seasons we had. But it was getting worse in a way you could see. In May, I’d driven to CSULA to take my last final of the semester with the smoke so thick on the highway I had to turn my headlights on. Here and there, ash fell at the sides of the road.

The fires had raged through mountains and down hillsides, eating up landmarks and houses and trees. It wasn’t like they were that big a part of my life, really, though during the last Topanga fire Harry and I worried that the Getty Villa would burn down. We’d both taken field trips there as kids, and returned a summer ago, back when we were sleeping together again, had gotten told off by a security guard for making out on the lip of a big mosaicked fountain. The fountain was a reproduction of one from Pompeii. The museum didn’t end up burning.

Harry loaded her old Camry to its limits with boxes, and together we strapped a black roof bag to the top. The little cactus she’d spent a year tending on her dorm windowsill was wedged into a cup holder, and her hamster, named Emily Dickinson, sat in a white wire cage belted into the backseat. Harry was going to the University of Michigan to get her master’s in social work. It was a good school for that, she said, the best.

I still had a year of undergrad left, and was flying back after I helped Harry settle in.

We passed through miles of burnt hills in our first few hours. There was something beautiful about the pitch-black ones, which looked like lava rock or certain descriptions of a woman’s hair. But more of the burning was patchy, an uncertain patterning of char against the summer’s usual brown grass. Harry had her music up as high as it would go and was singing along. Recently she liked Joan Baez, so that was what we trailed out our open windows, her long, sweet melancholy, and Harry’s own untuned voice. Harry sang like someone who so, so badly wanted to sing beautifully.

There was the occasional tree still standing against the ash, some of them black through, raising their branches and twigs against the blue sky like paper cutouts, and some inexplicable survivors, scattered, a dusty, living brown, amid their burned brethren.

“It looks like another planet,” Harry said. “Like Mars.”

“Mars is red,” I reminded her, looking away out the window. It wasn’t me leaving California, but I felt like it was, I wanted to look at these hills like I’d never see them again.

“It’ll be gold again next summer. Amber.”