Dark Water (21 page)

My phone made its first warning beep, and I ignored it. I knew I had to call my mother again, but I wanted to find Amiel.

The smoke was air and the air was smoke, like standing upwind of a bonfire you couldn’t see. The reeds along the river were scissor gray, and water flowed through them with no particular hurry except where wind ruffled the surface. I could see
the upper story of trees bending near Amiel’s house, and I wanted to scream, “
Amiel,
” but something told me to wait. I tore off my shoes and started sloshing.

Right away I could see something was wrong. Sometime in the last two days, sticks and twigs had been thrown everywhere, some of them the size of tree limbs. Amiel’s tin pot lay beside a plastic bag. One of his T-shirts had been ripped and thrown into a tree. “Amiel?” I said. When I’d walked a few more yards, I could see that his carefully woven wall of branches had been torn apart, exposing his house. His frying pan, his blanket, his enameled tin box, and a smashed package of ramen noodles had been flung down and soaked with water. On the wall, someone had written in red paint,
YOUR NEXT
.

“Amiel?” I called. I checked the fork of the flapping sycamore tree where he’d hidden from me once, but the fork was empty.

I went to the thicket where he normally hid his bicycle, but it wasn’t there, and again I heard my phone beep. This time, I looked at it and saw the message:
low battery
.

Sometimes, when my battery is low, the best thing to do is turn off the phone. I always have more power when I turn it back on later. I held the button down like I was smothering a small plastic animal.

“Amiel?” I called, feeling a new level of panic. I tried to think he could be at work. He could be doing his regular Tuesday job, which was gardening for a friend of Hoyt’s, and that’s why his bicycle wasn’t there. If Amiel was at work,
maybe he didn’t know his house had been torn apart by people with poor grammar skills.

It didn’t seem likely, though. If you get a reverse 9-1-1 call to evacuate your house, do you tell the gardener to keep trimming the hedge?

I stuffed my sandy feet into my shoes, leaving my wet socks in the wreckage of his house, and I forced my way through the willows to the other slope, the one that led up to the homestead where we cooked. “Amiel?” I called again.

I heard a strange foghorn call, a low hoot like a cowbird or a bird-cow. It was coming from inside the roofless house.

When I stumbled through the open door, I found Amiel sitting on the floor, holding his hands to his lips like a mini–conch shell.

“What happened?” I asked.

He put one finger to his lips. I expected his body to be warm, but when I crouched down and tried to hug him, his arms and chest were as chilled as my sockless feet. He was solid and tense and still. It felt very good to be out of the wind.

“Yesterday,” he whispered. “While I am working.”

“We have to get out of the river,” I said. “The fire is really big. Really, really big.”

He nodded. He didn’t move.

“Where should we go?” I asked. I was feeling all prickly inside.

He didn’t shake his head or nod or make a suggestion. He stayed down.

“No,” I said. “I mean we
can’t
stay here.”

It could be that Amiel always had a radio, and I just didn’t notice it before. He had a small handheld radio now, in any case, and he turned it on. Two men were speaking Spanish to each other and then to a caller, who was a woman, and she sounded pretty upset. There are certain words everyone knows if you live near the border.
La migra
, for example, means “border patrol.”

“I don’t think the border patrol would arrest people fleeing from a fire,” I said.

He looked at me with conviction. “
Sí,
” he whispered. “Listen.”

I listened to the Spanish voices, but I couldn’t get more than a few words.

“Three people!” he said, and held up three fingers. “
Se los tomaron.
” The words, or maybe the smoke, made him cough.

“They won’t take you if you’re with me.”

Again, the expression that he knew so much more than I did. I stood up to look east, in the direction the fire had been burning when I left home hours before, and I couldn’t see a plume. For all I knew, that meant we were
in
the plume. “We have to get out of here!” I shouted. “Don’t you understand me?”

Amiel took my hand and led me to the water and set me down on the bank. Then he stepped in and slipped his body lower and lower until he was sitting on the bottom. With his legs out, he could lie back and be completely submerged. “
Así,
” he said, when he raised his head above the water and breathed. “Like this.”

He meant we could survive in this shallow part of the river if the fire came, and I remembered something. During the Fallbrook fire we had watched from our house when I was twelve, a group of people who didn’t evacuate fast enough got surrounded, the road was blocked, and they all survived by huddling in a backyard pool.

“No,” I said. “I can’t. I’m too scared.”

“Go,” he told me, his voice raspier from all the smoke. “
Yo estoy bien.
”

An hour had passed since I’d left Greenie’s backyard. I sat on the bank beside Amiel and dug my phone out of my pocket. I shivered. I still hadn’t talked to my mother, so I turned it on. When the phone woke up enough to show me messages, I listened to my mother say, “
I talked to Hoyt and I’m hoping to get out of here soon. I wish you had asked me before you went with someone else. Kind of worries me to be separated. Anyway, I’m glad you’re safe. Should we let your dad know, maybe? Call me.
”

The next message said, “
Call me.
”

And the next.

And the next.

Then she said, “I’m going to try Greenie’s mom.”

I was sitting there trying to think what to do when the phone began ringing in my hand. The screen said the person calling was my mother. I was conscious of Amiel lifting himself out of the river, of water running off his clothes, of muscles and skin that I wanted to touch the way that I wanted to breathe.

“Where are you going?” I asked, and he pointed toward his
house. I wanted to turn on the radio and hear someone say, in English, that the fire was one hundred percent contained.

Instead, my phone rang again. I stared at it the way you might stare at the inside of your front door when you know it’s either the police or the psychopathic killer on the other side.

Either my mother knew by now that Greenie’s mom had no idea where I was, or she hadn’t been able to reach Greenie’s mom and I could, by answering the phone, put off that discovery a little longer.

“Mom?” I said.

“Where
are
you, Pearl?” my mother said, and I knew I’d opened the door at the wrong time.

“I’m fine,” I said automatically, as if that would help.

“Where are you being fine? I just talked to Greenie’s mom.”

“I had to check on someone,” I said.

“You had to
check
on someone?”

My ability to lie was like my ability to speak Spanish. I didn’t have the speed, the fluency, or the verb tenses. “I just, yeah, I had to.”

“I’m driving to the coast,” she said, enunciating all the words you would capitalize in the title of a story or play. “Hoyt and Agnès Are Driving to the Coast. We Are Driving to the Coast on Separate Roads and
We Are Meeting There
. Do you have any idea what’s going on here, Pearl? Are you still in Fallbrook? Is that what you’re not telling me?”

“Yeah, but I’m fine. I have a way out,” I said. I was looking at the water and thinking about what it would be like to sit in
the river while a fire burned over us. Wouldn’t we die from inhaling smoke? How would we breathe?

“With whom?” my mother demanded.

I had no power to answer.

“With whom, Pearl?” my mom said. “Okay, I’m stopping the car. I’m going to have to turn around. If they’ll let me. I’m still on Camp Pendleton, you know. They’ve opened the road to civilians to make another road out. Opened the road through the
base
, Pearl. Do you have any idea how serious this is? Oh my God. It’s a boy, isn’t it? You’re with a boy. Just tell me how he’s getting you out of there and I’ll meet you at the pier in Oceanside. I don’t care who it is. Just stop lying to me.”

I turned around and watched Amiel’s wet back.
Wetback
, I thought. The ugly name for immigrants who swam across the Rio Grande. Just then my phone beeped to tell me my time was running out.

“Um, my battery’s going dead,” I said.

It was good, in many ways, that my phone was dying. A near-dead phone keeps you from knowing, for a while, that your father, during the largest evacuation in state history, doesn’t call to see how you are. Not once. Nada. No thought whatsoever for your safety. A near-dead phone keeps you from talking to the best friend you’ve used as an alibi. It keeps you from stumbling through another set of half lies to explain to your mother why you’re walking to a ruined house with a boy who’s more afraid of police than of wildfires.

“I’m pulling over,” my mother said. “I’m going to find a
policeman or a marine or something, and we’ll get to you. Tell me where you are.”

“I’ll call you with another phone as soon as I can,” I said. “I promise.”

I had to close the phone. I had to turn it off. Or I had to say, “I’m at the river with that boy we saw at the day-labor site, the one who works for Uncle Hoyt.” I wanted to admit that to her, but there are things you think you can say, things you say in your mind, that never pass your lips. “I really will call you,” I told her instead, and I closed the phone. Then, just before I followed Amiel to the house that gave no shelter, I pushed the button to Off.

W
hen I was little, my mother used to do crafts with me. We’d press flowers and make waxed paper cards, or we’d sew pincushions out of felt and stuff them with sawdust from the neighbor’s garage. But my favorite thing was this paper that made really primitive photographs called “sun prints.” You set a piece of lace or a leaf or a skeleton key on the paper and let the sun shine on it for a few minutes, and then you dipped the paper in water. The paper turned blue, but the shadow of the object turned white.

When Amiel and I got back to the house, I turned the radio to a station where the news was in English. I sat down in front of it as if the foundation of the house were a giant piece of photographic paper. Amiel went away and changed his clothes and came back, dry except for his hair. It was two o’clock, and the sun was purple. I felt sick from breathing the
smoke and sick from fear. I lay down, finally, on the blanket Amiel had placed beside the wall. I said, “We could go up to a neighborhood and find a car.”

This made no sense. What car? I was going to steal a car?

“We could get a ride with someone,” I clarified.

All I’d have to do was explain to someone that my name was Pearl and I was separated from my mother because she was a substitute teacher who was out on the base today and my cell phone was dead.

Anyone would help me. Anyone at all.

And this is my friend, Amiel
.

They would help him, too. They’d think he was a student at Fallbrook High. They wouldn’t ask questions. Not during a fire.

I went through this in my mind until I was satisfied, and then I told Amiel how it would work.

He regarded me briefly, then said we shouldn’t climb now. “
El fuego,
” he said, his voice worse and worse, choked as if he had laryngitis, “
se suben rápido.
” Fire. Rapid. I got that part. He used his hand to show something in flight, something zooming upward. The fire drills and assemblies of my childhood had taught me this,
hot air rises
, but I didn’t know that it burns fast going uphill and slow coming down.

I tried, weakly, to say that we could go east, where it would be flat for a long time. He picked up the radio and turned the dial until he found an American station. “Well, at this point,” a man was saying, “all four fires in San Diego County are zero percent contained. Rainbow, Fallbrook, Escondido, Rancho
Bernardo, Ramona, and parts of Julian are under evacuation orders. Winds are very high. If you haven’t gotten out of those places, you need to get out now.”

“Oh my God,” I said.

Amiel sat very still and calm, watching the sky to the east. I lay down with my fists covering my eyes, my face toward the wall, knees locked in despair. In a sun print, I would have been the skeleton key.

I lay there thinking and trying not to think, trusting him to know when we should get in the water and fearing that no one could know when to get in the water. I felt his shadow and heard the scrape of his feet. He lay down beside me and put one arm over my waist, and we lay there front to back until I took the fists away from my eyes and turned around.

If you move something in a sun print, the edges blur. I felt the edges of myself blur into nothingness as I kissed Amiel and he kissed me, and I found in the abandon of kissing him, clothes on, bodies moving, a physical way to go where my mind had already gone: deep down into water that would let the fire pass over us. I sank deeper and deeper, swimming without effort or resistance, and he swam deeper, too, until we became the same swimmer, the same water, and were drowned.

All the time the radio voices were talking, but they weren’t talking about any places we knew, and I began to shiver afterward and to hear them clearly again, and the voice said, “We go now to a press conference with the chief of the North County Fire District, and he’s going to bring us up to
date on the Agua Prieta Fire up by Rainbow and eastern Fallbrook.”

I sat up, and Amiel did the same. We didn’t look at each other as we listened. The sun was far enough in the west that it had taken on a weird, coppery glow. The fire chief said they were hoping for a change in the wind and that firefighters were on their way from Northern California and Oregon, but the fire had jumped I-15 at Rainbow and was burning through residential areas along East Mission Road, which meant Willow Glen.