Dark Water (22 page)

The fire was coming toward us, and the wind was coming toward us, and I knew I couldn’t spend a whole night waiting for the moment when we should submerge ourselves in a place where the river was just twelve feet across and two or three feet deep.

“There’s deeper water,” I said, remembering the spot on the river where Hickey and Greenie took me the day we ate lunch together. “Farther west of here. On the other side of the road. It’s wider there, too, like a big pool.”

Amiel looked at me like I made no sense, so I said, “I mean the De Luz Road. That way.” I pointed west, away from the fire.

Amiel shook his head and pointed out the doorless door at the nearest bank of the river.

“Have you been that way? To the end of the trail?”

He shook his head again and kissed my neck. I wondered if there was a name for what we’d just done together. It wasn’t sex, exactly. It wasn’t necking, certainly, and it wasn’t petting.
I wondered if it was normal to worry about sex things while you were also worrying about burning alive.

“We can walk along the water and not go uphill,” I said in a shaky voice. “We can stay right near water the whole time so that if it catches up …”

But it was September, when the water was so shallow in places that you could never get all of yourself under it. I was unable to conjure a single part of the river that was fireproof. No matter where I went along the trail or the road from De Luz, black trees stuck out of the ground. Still, it had to be safer to move farther west, away from the fire they were talking about and into a place where the trees on either bank weren’t so close together.

I reached out for Amiel’s hand and he laced his hand into it. “Please,” I said. “Please let’s go to the deeper water.”

He let his eyes look into mine with full force, as if my head were a room in which he would find something he’d lost. “
Si quieres,
” he managed to say.

Not “yes.” Not “okay,” but “if you want.”

M
y mom used to tell me every time we went camping or hiking or even to the park on a crowded summer evening, “If you get lost, hug a tree,” the idea being that she could only find me if I stayed in one place.

I think now we should have followed Amiel’s plan. If we had, we would have stayed in the place where Robby told my uncle to look, and he would have found us.

The timeline, as I have pieced it together, goes like this.

My mother pulls over, as she threatened, and gets out of her car. People in other cars stare at her. They ask if she’s out of gas. She shakes her head. Most of the people have dogs in their cars. In a minivan, she sees a pair of llamas. They gaze at her with their long-lashed eyes, necks slightly bent. Trailers full of horses inch by, cats stare out of rear windows, fish float in aquariums, and birds fly in birdcages. Some people are
holding goats. The whole exodus through Camp Pendleton is like a car-trip Noah’s Ark, and my mother, standing to watch it, dialing my uncle, draws the attention of an armed marine in uniform, who drives along the shoulder from some sort of a checkpoint to ask her what she needs.

“My daughter’s still in Fallbrook,” she says. “I thought she was with my brother, but she isn’t. I have to go back.”

The marine says she can’t go back. “How old is she?” the marine asks.

“Fifteen,” my mother says.

The marine thinks it’s one of those misunderstandings, a natural mistake, an innocent girl left alone in her house!
Poor thing!
he’s thinking.

“Where’s your house, ma’am?” the marine asks. He’s all ready with his walkie-talkie.

“She’s not there,” my mother has to admit. Then she has to confess she doesn’t know
where
I am and worse, that I won’t tell her.

What kind of girl acts like this during the Largest Evacuation in State History?

“Do you want me to call the sheriff?” the marine offers. He’s clearly stumped. “Hey, don’t cry, we’ll figure something out” comes along pretty soon after this. I know what this marine looks like, silver-haired and blue-eyed, and I know his name is Mitchell and that he’s forty-eight and divorced because he called my mother a few days later to ask if she found me okay, which led to her telling him the whole story, which led to him saying would you ever want to have dinner
with me, and her saying that would be nice, and the two of them going to the same Ruby’s on the pier where I went for my birthday a million years ago when I learned that scallops are sometimes the flesh of bat rays shaped with cookie cutters.

But for now my mother is still having a breakdown on the dirt shoulder of a marine base road. She’s placing the missing persons report. And she’s saying she’d like to make one more call, which the marine says is okay, and then he’ll help get her back into the flow of traffic and out of harm’s way.

She calls Hoyt.

Hoyt is just reaching the Gaudets’ beach house. It’s on a cliff in Solana Beach. A post-modern castle the color of burnt cream. My uncle has his motorbike lashed upright in the back of his truck and he’s already planning how to sneak back through the roadblocks and check on his ranch, see if there’s anything he can do to save it himself. He doesn’t know it’s already burning. The fire reports aren’t that specific yet.

“Don’t worry, Sharon,” Hoyt tells my mother. “I’ll call Marco, okay? My friend that works for Verizon. He can trace her phone, I’ll bet, and figure out where she was when she called you.”

Robby is standing there on the cliff in Solana Beach. He’s been carrying boxes of his mother’s things into the Gaudets’ marble entryway. He’s been toting suitcases and file folders and shoes.

“Who?” Robby stops to ask his father. It’s still early in the afternoon. “Where
who
was when she called?”

“Hey, do you know where Pearl is?” my uncle asks Robby.
Hoyt tells my mother to hang on a sec because Robby might know.

Robby takes the phone from my uncle and my mother says right away, “Robby, does Pearl have a boyfriend?”

Robby can’t think of one. “No,” he says. “I thought she was kind of interested in that guy my dad hired, but I don’t think it went anywhere.”

My aunt Agnès is still moving in and out of the marble entryway of the Gaudets’ stone house. She can see the worried looks, hear part but not all of the questions. Hoyt explains that I’m still in Fallbrook where I ought not to be and that I won’t say who with.

In French or in English, Agnès comes to the right conclusion. Aunt Agnès knows the parakeet can’t live with the tortoise, but it will certainly try.
Cherchez la femme
, I guess she thinks, though in this case it would be
Cherchez le hombre
. Agnès says it could be that worker, Amiel, and this dredges up Robby’s memory of the jar of shells in the tree house and the day I made Robby promise he wouldn’t tell anyone about the squatter’s house.

Within the hour, my uncle is on his motorbike. He’s wearing a helmet, leather jacket, and gloves. He’s speeding in the wrong direction, against all the traffic streaming away from the fire, through air turned orange with ash.

Y
ou know what California looks like when it’s burning. Oakland, Santa Barbara, Malibu, Ramona, Escondido, Esperanza—from the air they all look the same: a white-hot fluttering edge of flame, smoke the color of chocolate milk, and, when night falls, the blackness that the bright edge of flame is devouring, foot by foot, mile by mile, bush by bush. You can’t look away as it burns. You can’t help but feel yourself in thrall.

I could hear planes overhead as we hurried west. Now and then we looked up to see helicopters. They were usually going the opposite direction—toward Willow Glen, Rainbow, and the Lemon Drop Ranch. I was always listening for what I imagined to be the sound of a traveling fire: a crackling hiss like what I heard in the fireplace but with the volume turned way up. I was always turning my head to see if the heat I felt on my back was a wall of fire, but when I looked back, I saw the
same lifeless colors behind us: ink blue and ink brown. No candles of flame, no inferno, no reason to throw myself in the water we kept sloshing through or skirting around, more often than not no deeper than water running down your driveway when you wash the car.

We reached the plateau as the sun went out, a wide beach where the river could flood when we had heavy rain, though I had never seen it flood. Behind us, the woods fell into cindery darkness. I followed Amiel up a slope near the parking lot where I had once, last spring, climbed out of Hickey’s car. I could just barely make out the De Luz bridge lying four feet above a concrete watershed. Curiously, it had no guardrail and no sides. Only a troll would be able to fit under it without crouching.

But just as we were about to walk out of the trees into the open, Amiel threw out his arm to stop me. A fire engine was wailing its long wail.

“
Esperete,
” he whispered.
Wait
.

The siren was deafening as it passed, and not far behind came an echoing wail.

“Why?” I whispered back, so hungry and terrified that I was half ready to jump in the path of the fire engine. “They would save us,” I said, but he wasn’t listening to me or he couldn’t hear me over the noise. He was five feet away, running back into the plateau. The fire engine passed. Then another. And another. I didn’t raise my hand or step out of the trees. I did what I thought was to love him, and I followed Amiel back down the bank toward the sheltering reeds.

S
moke blotted out the stars. We didn’t have Amiel’s blanket or food or anything, thanks to my plan, so we just sat down in the sand and rocks, far from trees that could catch on fire. I kept listening for the return of the fire engines, and I pictured them stringing out across the riverbed to make a controlled burn that would go east as the other fire came west, thereby putting us right in the path of a whole new fire, but I figured that would be pretty loud and we’d have time for me to run out screaming with my hands up.

The engines didn’t return, and the darkness into which I stared so hard never roared into flame, and soon I stopped hearing, stopped seeing, stopped knowing, asleep as I was against Amiel, who lay like a cowboy in a John Wayne movie with his head on his balled-up jacket. I used him as a pillow
and a sort of bed, one leg flung over his. Burrowing and gnawing into my sleep was the memory that I had never called my mother, and that memory chewed sleep to bits until I was awake again thinking,
What have I done?

They say that parts of a teenager’s brain aren’t formed yet. That might have been the problem. I’d like to think that rather than a malignancy of heart.

I’m fine
, I tried via ESP.
I’m fine I’m fineimfineimfine
.

I reached into my pocket and felt my phone as if it were a five-dollar bill I’d stashed in my pocket and forgotten. Amiel stirred, and he looked at me.

“I should call my mother,” I said.

He nodded. I wanted to kiss him. I wanted us to be a married couple in deepest Mexico or a married couple in a fable about deepest Mexico.

Instead, I held the button down on my phone and learned that Greenie had sent words (WHERE R U?) and Robby had sent words (CALL MY DAD PLS) and my mother had called six hours ago.

“If you get this message, Pearl,” my mother said, her voice taut, “call your uncle on his cell phone. He’s going back on the motorcycle and he says he’s going to look for you down at the river in some hut where Robby thinks you might have gone. Call him and tell him where you are, Pearl.”

I did it. Right then. There could have been many reasons why he didn’t answer.

He couldn’t hear the ring over the motorcycle engine.

He couldn’t hear the ring over the motorcycle engine.

He couldn’t hear the ring over the motorcycle engine.

I spoke into whatever is listening when no one answers. I said, “It’s me, Pearl.” I was quiet for about ten seconds. Then I said I was by the De Luz bridge.

My impulse after saying these things was to erase the message, but I had reached a point where I didn’t know a way to make things better and I feared making them worse. I didn’t erase the message. I just hung up.

Amiel looked at me, and in my life that was not a fable, I told him that my uncle was looking for us at his house. “That way,” I said, and pointed in the direction of the fire, which was also the direction of Amiel’s house. “I’m afraid,” I said, “that he won’t leave” (punctuated by useless tears), “until he finds me. And he’ll burn.”

I wondered, as I tried to call my uncle again, what a phone that has burned in a fire would do with incoming calls. Did the fact that his phone didn’t ring at all, that it went right to a recording of his voice saying,
Hello, hello, hello, please leave a message
, mean he was talking to someone else or listening to my last message? I hung up.

The water flowed fast and dark beyond the reeds. I looked down at my dirty shoes, pressed hard on my eyes, and wondered what would make this all come out right.

“
Ven,
” I heard Amiel whisper, “Come,” and he stood up. “To find him.”

He walked, sure-footed, ahead of me, and I stumbled
along, my hand in his. The rhythm of a story my mother used to tell me got stuck in my aching head:

Going on a bear hunt
,

We’re not afraid
.

What a wonderful day!

Over and over, through the not-wonderful dark, scared and stumbling, between branches and trunks,
going on a bear hunt
. My hand stayed gripped in his hand,
we’re not afraid
, and at last we thrashed our way through a stand of willows and
What a wonderful day
we were breathing hard and shivering at the edge of the grotto, so I called out, “Uncle Hoyt?”

We’re not afraid
.

I listened for a motorcycle engine and then remembered that on these narrow, rocky trails, in this smoky darkness, he would surely have to be on foot.

I pushed the button on my phone, but nothing happened. The battery had died while I was walking.