When Jess turned 18, she moved to Chico so she could be closer to her job as a cashier at a big-box store. It was the first house he’d been able to buy since moving to California, some 20 years earlier. Jess remembers how proud her dad was to move in. In the evenings, the staff at the Cozy Diner across the street would give Jess leftover food from the salad bar, usually rolls and vegetables.Įventually, her family moved to a three-bedroom, light-beige house off Dolores Drive in Paradise. Their small motel room had thin walls and one bed Jess slept on the floor. For the first year, she lived at the Lantern Inn, with Tommie and Annette. Jess, now 36, had moved to Paradise from Wyoming when she was 16. No sign of Tommie and Annette’s green truck, damn.
Sedans piled with so many people their heads hit the ceiling, deep breath. A woman with six kids inside her vehicle, good. She called her family back 60, 70, 80 times, but the cell towers were burning like pitchforks and service was unreliable.įor an hour, she scanned the panicked faces inside every car that went by, looking to see if she recognized them. So instead, Jess stood at the mouth of the scenic highway known as the Skyway, near the Walmart parking lot, and watched as cars streamed away from Paradise. She jumped in her car, pointed it toward Paradise, and went almost nowhere before realizing that the roads had already been closed. The call left Jess panicked, and it got her thinking that “I don’t know” must mean that they didn’t know if they were going to get out in time.
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