She comes back a couple of times a week, picking through the ash to look for things from a past life: cup, cracked plate, cheese grater, mixing bowl. The Japanese plum tree is gone. The pool is murky and dark, and she remembers how she had searched for the perfect tiles to catch the sun at certain times of day. All the doors have fallen. The chimney stands like a broken bone. It is quiet amid the black shards, the way it is after a storm.
She wipes a tear, but hangs on to her inimitable air. Her eyes match her coat, which matches her shoes. She is the meticulous one, the one who reads the fine print and never throws away receipts. But there is an unraveling now. The inside kind that stays with her through the day and into the night. It draws her to Altadena, to the charred earth, where once stood the home that held all she was or ever wanted.
“Is putting a mirror to the pain confronting it or making me unable to escape what we’ve lost?” asks Jana Karibyan, standing in what used to be her kitchen before the Eaton fire consumed the Janes Cottage home she moved into 14 years ago. “I look around here and see the time that went into this house. It’s not the things so much; it’s the time that went into them. The time you don’t get back. Does coming here hinder or heal? I don’t know. But it brings me comfort.”
The details one doesn’t anticipate in life are getting done. A sign on her property from the Environmental Protection Agency reads “hazardous materials removal is complete.” She has arranged to remove the rest of the debris this month. Farmers Insurance has started making payments for furniture, clothes and other possessions. She and her husband, Varooj, a Glendale police officer, are working with an architect on designs for a new house.
Yes, she said, things are moving forward, but the necessities of reinvention, like learning the arcane language of the Federal Emergency Management Agency or replacing her daughter’s cheerleading outfit, requires patience and comes at costs beyond price tags.
“We will rebuild. I know that. We’re more fortunate than a lot of people,” said Jana, who is now living with Varooj and her two children — Stephan, 15, and Natalia, 13 — in a rental overlooking a highway. “My fear is, will I feel the same attachment to the new? I wanted the house just like it was before. One story, everything the same. But my husband said it was a chance for us to build a bigger house with a second story.” Jana said they “bickered a bit, but I gave in. I saw his point. He came here as an immigrant. The American dream is a house.”
Night grants and takes away dreams.
Jana remembers those hours early on Jan. 8, her 49th birthday, when, from the Palisades to Eaton Canyon, tens of thousands of Angelenos were overrun by wind, flames and embers that scorched and raced like bullets. Smoke was heavy, she said, and the air howled. The power went off. Chair cushions swirled in the pool.
“I opened the curtains at 2:45 a.m.,” she said, adding: “I saw it. The fire. I said, ‘Babe, we’re out of here.’ ” They packed jewelry, her father’s will, an insurance policy, a few changes of clothes and the paw print of Coco, the deceased family cat. They hopped into two cars, arriving at the Glendale Police Station parking garage at 3:30 a.m., where they waited in one of the cars while the children slept.
The sky was a black flag at first light. Jana said she checked the home security system from her phone. The water alarm was triggered at 8:16 a.m., and the panic button on the keypad by the front door was activated at 8:55 a.m. She knew then that the fire — like a burglar — had entered her home. She and Varooj drove to Ralphs to pick up supplies and later checked into the Hilton Hotel in Glendale. Varooj’s superior dispatched a patrolman to their street, confirming that their house and much of their block, including the houses of a retired teacher and a woman who ran a daycare in her home, were gone.
The fires were still burning days later as Jana sat in a hotel lobby with others who had lost everything. She was tired; her eyes, red. Father Tony Marti from St. Francis High School in La Canada, where Stephan is a basketball player, had called earlier to offer prayers.
She talked about her pool. Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2014, Jana, who for a few years had trouble walking, swam every day as part of therapy. “Varooj built that pool for me when we did renovations several years ago,” she said. “He made that happen for me. It was my refuge, my place.”
She welled up again. It is strange, Jana said, how tragedy does not stop the other chapters of your life from carrying on. They demand attention, like her mother, a former school teacher with early stage dementia, whom Jana moved into a senior living facility in November. There were forms, power of attorney documents, bank accounts, all needing order and constant tending. At times, her mother is mad at her, not understanding why her daughter, the child she sent to Pasadena Christian School and later helped with the down payment on Jana and Varooj’s house, put her in a place she doesn’t want to be.
How do you handle all that? The details. The sorrow of a parent’s decline. The loss of your shoes and carpets. The fact that your insurance policy estimated that there was a zero risk that a wildfire would destroy your home. There are no answers, only emotions colliding into another.
The sky was clear outside the lobby windows. Suitcases rolled past, voices rose and fell. “Varooj’s lieutenant wants to start a GoFundMe for us,” Jana said. “But Varooj wants to wait and see. I asked him, ‘Are you embarrassed?’ He said yes.”
Natalia, a gymnast who saved her mother’s childhood Bible from the flames, was embarrassed too. She didn’t want her classmates to know she had lost so much, but she saw on the TV that there were many victims, and that she was not alone.
Jana looked over the lobby. She didn’t want to feel sad; she wanted to know there was good to come, that there was an antidote for pain and loss. Perhaps a kind of redemption, something she talks about with her therapist. “Things like this can be the ultimate equalizer,” she said. “Life is beautiful and complicated. It’s filled with highs and lows. But it’s fascinating.” She spoke with conviction, although she knew other moments were coming that would make her less certain.
She met Varooj two decades ago at a cafe his family ran in Pasadena. He was 20. She was 27. The age difference bothered her, but not him. He was 5 years old when he arrived in the U.S. after the 1988 earthquake in Armenia killed at least 25,000 people and devastated Gyumri, his family’s home. A relative helped get visas for the family, and Varooj, his parents and his siblings, Eddie and Anush, started a new life in Glendale. Varooj would attend culinary school and then become a cop; Eddie would own a chain of Dollar King stores, including one burned in the wildfires; and Anush, a director at the Glendale YMCA, would also run gymnastic programs.
“My family is very close,” said Varooj, a sergeant who works in community relations, who sat beside his brother recently at Stephan’s basketball game. “My aunt told me, ‘You’re going to be fine. You’ve already done this once. It’s nothing new to our family. You’re going to rebuild.’ ”
He watched the boys whirl past in a blur of jerseys. The St. Francis Golden Knights were playing the Palisades Dolphins. Students on both teams had lost homes or were displaced by the fires. Proceeds from the game, which the announcer noted was played on the fifth anniversary of Kobe Bryant’s death, would go to the victims. The gym — which sits beneath the Golden Knights motto, “Victorious in competition. Steadfast in his Ideals. Loyal to his Alma Mater. Reverent to God” — was full. A raffle was held for movie tickets, Starbucks gift cards and other items.
It was a winter’s afternoon of consolation and reckoning. After the game, a coach on the Palisades team, a real estate broker, said: “I watched $120 million worth of listings burning down in front of me. We should never have developed southern California.”
Varooj had his own calculations. Tall and sturdy, if a bit reticent, he said, “It’s a day by day thing we’re going through. I don’t know any other way. Life happens.” He was 3 years old when his mother was diagnosed with brain cancer. “She passed away when I was in high school. It puts things in perspective. There is no bad or good. You just learn a lot.” He paused and looked around the gym. “I’m not surprised by this humanity, the people wanting to help. When you’re receiving it, it’s amazing. It’s a blessing. But sometimes, you feel guilty.”
On some days, Jana is conflicted too. A child of divorce, she was born in Kansas City, Mo., but was raised mostly in Altadena by her mother and stepfather, a mechanic with the City of Pasadena. “I shuttled between my parents when I was young,” she said. “I didn’t feel settled. But when Varooj and I bought our house in Altadena, I felt settled. I controlled the energy of that home. It was the first time I ever felt at home.”
Years ago, Jana found her way into the world of celebrities. She said she was a personal assistant for two Academy Award-winning actors and a pop star. Nondisclosure agreements prevented her from naming them. She then worked as an executive assistant at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, a law firm that has represented Elon Musk, Alec Baldwin, Jay-Z and other high profile clients. Jana’s father, who owned a construction company, sent her money and gifts, so she could expand her wardrobe.
“That part of my life was so superficial, so Los Angeles in many ways,” she said. “I was so outwardly focused on things like shoes and dinners. My diagnosis of MS might have been the best thing that happened to me. It changes your perspective on life and what’s important. When you can’t walk and have difficulty talking, that changes you.”
Since 2014 Jana has been a stay-at-home mom, and for the moment, that home is in Glendale, rented from a family connection. “The Armenian community is very tight,” she said, sitting in a new living room amid cardboard boxes from an unpacked couch and other furniture. “They have taken care of us. This house is better and bigger than my house. But I want to go home.” She paused. “I feel a lot of guilt because I’m here in this nice house and others might not be. My therapist says that’s not a good way to think. But I have to give back. The other day we got my daughter’s hair braided. I gave a $100 tip on a $135 bill.”
The evening before Valentine’s Day, as a heavy rain fell and flooding and mudslides hit Southern California, Stephan and Natalia sat at their dining room table amid white walls, a chandelier and a spotless floor. Their uncle and aunt had taken them earlier to shop for new clothes, and they seemed settled, at least for the time. Stephan was awaiting a basketball tryout to see if he could play with a team in Armenia this summer; Natalia was preparing for a gymnastics meet in Las Vegas.
“I feel it’s kind of back to normal,” said Stephan, looking out from a hoodie, his voice somewhere between boy and man. “We’re not in our house, but I’m back in school. I have clothes. Nothing has changed except the location. In some ways it’s better. I’m closer to friends and family and the places I usually like to go. But I do miss my bed, that feeling.” He said the fire reminded him of things he should have appreciated more at the old house: the pool, the basketball hoop. “You regret not using those things,” he said, “but you think you’re lucky you even had them.”
Natalia, peering between braids, her voice soft, but gradually finding its weight, said she didn’t want anyone to know what had happened to the house where she had lived all her life: “I didn’t feel comfortable telling my friends about it. I would get mad and irritated. I told my friends to leave me alone. Stop bothering me. No one can know how it feels,” she said. “I think as a family we’ve handled it well. But Stephan and my dad aren’t emotion-type people. My mom and I show more emotion to each other. My mom is not afraid to share her emotions. She’s very comforting.”
The rain blew harder, strafing the windows, and as brother and sister talked, at times teasing one another, they suggested they were learning that life comes in increments of loss and renewal.
Stephan said he felt bad for one of their neighbors: “Theresa. She was older. Her house burned down too. She went missing for a few days and she didn’t know what happened and didn’t have a way to tell her family what happened to her. They found her and she was OK.”
It was a morning of broken clouds when Jana again returned to Altadena. A man was hosing down a roof. A fire hydrant was spraying water. Trees stood skeletal, as if a war had passed. The cold air smelled of ash and dirt, and the mountains beyond stood hard in slants of sunlight. Jana approached her fallen house. She walked its wall-less rooms, cinders crunching beneath her feet. She wept. But only for a moment; she has learned to swallow back tears.
“This will all be cleared away,” she said. “We’re meeting with an architect. We have a construction crew ready.”
But it will take time.
“Yes, time,” she said. “It will take time.”
Things happen along the way, she said, unexpected and otherwise. Varooj relented and accepted the idea of a GoFundMe. Her MS hasn’t relapsed in a while, but she has limited sensation in her hands, feet and ankles, and says she sometimes has trouble with her short-term memory. Every 28 days, she receives an IV infusion of Tysabri, which slows the progression of the disease.
Jana walked to the backyard, past Stephan’s burned and toppled basketball hoop, toward the pool, stepping over a strip of artificial grass, so green and bright, as if the fire had skipped over it, leaving a slender memory of what was. “I felt 15 different kinds of artificial grass before I bought that,” said Jana, smiling at the obsession to make a home perfect. The ivy on the wall behind the pool was brittle and charred, rubble littered the deck, and the water shone like a black mirror.
She lifted her phone and pulled up pictures her around the pool. Her Instagram, which has more than 60,000 followers, shows her posing in clear water. Another image shows Stephan shooting hoops. She had dozens of videos of the days and years before the fire. They brought her refuge, a place, a portal she could step through to remember that the destruction around her was once something else.
“Everything I buy,” she said, “will it be the same? Will it feel and mean the same?”
She walked to the front of the house, where the outside entrance was still standing. The street number was unmarred; bold and defiant as if it were waiting for those who lived here to return. Jana braced against the cold and stood among the ghosts. If she squinted at the doorway, past the palm tree, over the pool and to the mountains, she could pretend that nothing bad had happened.
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