Awake in the World

by Jason Gurley

  Graduation was less than an hour away. Mom and Aaron would be there already. By now they’d be worried, searching for me among my fellow students, all dressed identically. The ceremony—ironically, perhaps—was at the resort that Mom had fed my college money to. And now that resort was high ground.

  Funny. A few hours ago, skipping graduation was just a thing I planned to do. And now, suddenly, that decision had life-or-death consequences. I shed the blanket and ran for the fence. On the other side, I threw the Volkswagen into gear. Zach’s boat fell away in my rearview mirror as I gunned it for Costa Celeste, and for the first time, I found myself grateful he was gone.

  37

  Zach

  Only in Orilly would the powers that be decide to host graduation at a building site. Costa Celeste’s grounds were mostly dirt, turned into mud now by the rain. Earthmovers and dump trucks were scattered about the acreage. None looked as if they’d been moved in a while. The hotel itself was little more than a husk: ten stories of steel and concrete, every floor exposed to the elements, sheets of plastic flapping in the wind.

  The event hall, by contrast, glowed warm against the darkening sky. I remembered the newspaper story about Vanessa’s mother: The council had intended to put the event hall to use as quickly as possible. Weddings, dog shows, trade shows. More money to throw at the forever hotel project.

  The scene at the top of the hill was already near chaos when I arrived. The dirt lot was filled with parked cars, and people streamed about in confusion as the sirens continued to ring out below. I saw a shape flash across a high floor of the hotel, then several more. People had begun to scale the hotel’s concrete stairs, searching for safety within the uppermost floors.

  Vanessa could be among them, but I couldn’t go there yet. Once I’d reached the top of the structure, I wouldn’t be able to get back down. The stairs were clogged with people; the only other way down would be an unfortunate tumble. Inside the event hall, the main room had been arranged for the ceremony: a stage, rows and rows of chairs, ribbons and bunting strung everywhere. Gowns and mortarboards lay strewn about. Purses and jackets. An empty stroller, an abandoned stuffed bear. Everyone had already cleared out.

  I ran outside. First I’d rule out the parking lot, then search for her in the hotel. Surely she was there. If she wasn’t, I’d be trapped—but I’d be safe, too.

  I leaped from the sidewalk to the muddy parking lot and misjudged badly. My feet went in two directions on the slick mud, and before I understood what had happened, I was on my face in the muck. I’d hit something hard—a broken slab of concrete, it turned out—but it wasn’t until I tried to push upright that I realized I’d done something terrible to myself. When I was nine years old, I’d nearly killed myself playing Little League. During a night game, I charged after a high pop fly, lost sight of it, then overcorrected when I found it again. “It was like you hit an invisible clothesline,” Dad had observed later. I’d come down hard on my face and shoulder. We spent that night at the hospital, where I was treated for a collarbone fracture and two cracked ribs.

  This felt worse. Felt serious.

  I tried to get up, but the sensation of bones grinding was awful. My stomach went shaky and sour. I thought I might vomit, and a moment later, on my knees in the mud, I did. My right side had gone cold and tingly, and then numb. I couldn’t figure out what I might have done to myself, but my head felt cloudy. I thought, dimly, that I might be in shock.

  I still had to find Vanessa. I turned toward the parking lot, tried once again to get to my feet. I wobbled, then leaned against a tall light post. The people in the parking lot ran about, leaving little shimmering trails behind them. Yes. You’re in shock. My knees turned to water, and I slid to the ground. I don’t know how long I sat there, head swimming. Someone splashed past me, sending up a fan of mud and grit; someone else nearby said, low and cold, “Dear god, I can see it. I CAN SEE IT.”

  Oh, right. The tsunami.

  People scattered. Screamed. Faces blew by, blurry and strange. I didn’t recognize anyone. Certainly none of them was Vanessa. With a few deep breaths, I managed to stand up, using the light post for support, and blinked and rubbed my eyes until I felt my vision resolve a bit. Below me, I could see Orilly. It looked much larger now, and I realized that the tide had been drawn out, exposing more of the shoreline than I’d ever seen. Farther away, against the horizon, I saw the lights of an oil platform, and then they winked out, as if erased. A moment later, another disappeared, too.

  Please, I thought. Please, Derek, don’t be out there.

  Cars wheeled about in the lot, creating logjams; drivers leaned on their horns. I looked up at the hotel and saw a huge crowd silhouetted between the floors, watching the sea. Things went quiet, or seemed to, and I heard someone shout nearby, though I couldn’t make out the words. My stomach heaved again, and I went to my knees once more. A white roar filled my ears, dull and inoffensive, almost pleasant. I thought of Vanessa and Derek. Of Leah and Mama and the girls. Of Edgar the cashier. I wondered if he’d made it to the aquarium in time.

  I closed my eyes.

  The wave came to Orilly.

  38

  Vanessa

  All night, we waited.

  In the morning, as the sun rose, the damage brought people to tears. I stood on the roof of the hotel with Mom and Aaron. Cece was there with her parents and her abuela; she was holding Ada’s hand. We were drenched. We were freezing. We hadn’t slept. Orilly was unrecognizable. Palmer Rankin seemed to have slid sideways down the hillside, the whole structure slumped over upon itself; strewn all over the coast, sparkling in the sunlight like bits of glitter, were the wrecked remains of homes and shops. And cars. There were cars everywhere that cars shouldn’t be: wrapped around half-uprooted trees, lodged deeply in the earth, upside down inside broken buildings. And water. So, so much water.

  We were brought down from the roof by men and women in bright yellow gear. They loaded people into buses and trucks. Aaron ushered us into a line. We shuffled forward with other—survivors, I guess, would be the word, but it felt wrong. We shuffled forward with the others, and I remembered Aaron’s story about the wind telephone. I hope it never happens again, I’d said. I thought about Zach’s bad luck, how it seemed to have taken up residence inside me. I thought about the last thing I’d said to Cece on the phone.

  I stopped shuffling and looked back at the devastation.

  My fault, I thought. It wasn’t, I knew that, but somehow—cosmically—I felt responsible.

  “Vanessa?” Aaron said.

  “I want to help,” I said. I looked at the nearest woman, wearing yellow gear and holding a walkie-talkie. She gestured toward the bus door, waving me forward. But I turned to Mom. “I have to help.”

  Mom studied my face, and I wondered what she saw there. Guilt? Resolve? Whatever it was, she didn’t hesitate. “We’ll help,” she said to the woman.

  * * *

  Later—after hitching a ride in a cramped pickup truck—we joined the group of volunteers at a makeshift operations center. We stood among a few dozen volunteers and were quickly divided into six teams of eight. “San Luis and Monterey are both sending additional people,” a man with a bullhorn explained, “but for now, we’re short. We’re a lot short. The first few hours are critical. You see a survivor, you shout. Easy as that.”

  Mom and I were assigned to one team, Aaron to another. I’d seen disaster-recovery efforts on television before. Medical tents everywhere, coordinated supply deliveries, whole systems of support. The Orilly teams disabused me of the notion that these things were ever as organized as they seemed. I turned to Mom and said, “I thought they issued bullhorns and flashlights and boats and things.”

  Before she could reply, a boy a few years older than me said, “As if.” The woman next to him—weary eyes, a lined face—added: “The real tech comes later. The first few hours are just turning over rocks, hoping for the best.”

  “Hope you aren’t squeamish,” the
boy said. The woman—his mother?—whacked his shoulder.

  We fanned out and began to work our way through town in a short, broken wave. I sloshed through deep puddles. The tired-looking woman warned against it. “Never know anymore how deep they go,” she cautioned. “I once saw a car cross a puddle like that during a Texas flood. Bloop,” she said, making a nosedive motion with her hand. “Just dropped right out of sight.”

  “You’ve done this before,” Mom said.

  “We help when help’s needed,” the woman said. She kicked over a sheet of soggy plywood. “Last week I was in Mariposa. Controlled burn didn’t want to be. Had a feeling when I heard about the quake we’d be looking at water damage again.” She paused, surveying the rubble around us. “Couldn’t have imagined this.”

  Her name was Adele, and the boy was her nephew, Bo. He was carrying a long wooden stake; I’d thought it was a walking stick until he demonstrated how to use it to pry up debris to search beneath. We all found sticks after that.

  From the northernmost end of our group came a cry: “Got one over here!”

  We swarmed. There, lying facedown in a standing pool of black water, was a man in a hooded jacket, one leg turned at an impossible angle. Adele said, “Roll him,” and Bo and another volunteer did so, and for one awful moment I thought it was Zach. The man turned over, and the shock of red I thought was Zach’s hair wasn’t hair at all, but a torn shred of red tarp.

  That was the first body I saw that day.

  Mom saw me blanch and put her hands on my shoulders. “Are you all right?”

  I nodded. “I thought—I thought maybe it—”

  “Your friend,” she said.

  “But it couldn’t be. He’s gone. He left town.”

  “You’ll get used to it,” Bo said, and he stabbed a red flag into the earth beside the body. “You really will.”

  * * *

  Mom and I walked in silence after that, navigating the ruins, investigating collapsed structures. She still looked fearless, still resolved—but there was something else there, too, swimming just below her expression. We kept going, listening for more shouts, helping other volunteers search when they called for assistance.

  Then Mom said, “We’re done now. Okay?”

  I squinted at her. “What?”

  “This is what happens, Vanessa,” she said quietly, gesturing at the wreckage around us. “This is life. You can’t account for these things. They just come sweeping up, always from your blind side.” She met my gaze. “You have to stop being mad at me.”

  I looked around us. This was where we were going to have this conversation? But immediately I understood. I’d refused to talk to her for so long, I’d put us in such a state that only a natural disaster could have brought us to this moment. And everything had happened so fast, I hadn’t even had time to tell her I wasn’t mad at her anymore. That I’d figured out what—who—had really pissed me off. I’d moved on—and I’d left her in that uncertain, awful place we’d been in for months.

  “I can’t do this again,” she said. She wasn’t just talking about the earthquake, or the tsunami, or the possibility that we could have died without putting right the wrongs between us. “I just can’t.”

  The last year of her marriage to my father had been just like this. Strained silences. A constant heaviness in our home. The sludge of my father’s lies tracked all over the house. They’d slept in different rooms without ever acknowledging it; he was always “just falling asleep” on the sofa. She’d complained he was never home—but when he was, they fought bitterly or treated each other like ghosts.

  Then when she let me down, I’d done the same thing to her. I was my father’s daughter. Through and through.

  Before I could say anything, Mom said, “I called your father.”

  I blinked. “Like—today?”

  “Before.” She bit her lip. She’d learned that trick from a public speaking course. It keeps me from speaking before I’ve measured what I intend to say, she’d told me. “I did a terrible thing. To you. To all of us.” Her eyes opened, focused on me. “I’m so sorry.”

  “You couldn’t have known it wouldn’t work,” I said. Saying it made it real, but it had been real all along. Mom wasn’t a malicious person. She’d taken the money expecting to return it, and then some. Aaron was right: It was time to let her off the mat. “You couldn’t have.”

  “Everybody knew it wouldn’t work.” She drew a deep breath, started walking again. “We fooled ourselves.”

  “I made it about me,” I said. “I thought you didn’t want me to have the thing I wanted most of all. I thought you wanted to punish me for being like him.” I stopped. “I hate being like him.”

  “Vanessa,” Mom started.

  “No,” I said. “Mom, it was just college. I thought I knew why it mattered, but I didn’t. Now I do, and it doesn’t. Not for the reasons I thought.” Then I tipped my head at her. “Wait. Why did you call him?”

  She kicked a rock toward a puddle. “I … thought he could fix what I’d broken. Even if it meant…” Another kick. “Even if it meant he was in your life again. It … seemed like a fair punishment. For how badly I ruined your plans.” She frowned, and I noticed more lines around her eyes than I remembered. Her laugh was mirthless. “I thought he’d write you a check. Maybe help a little with tuition, at least get you started.”

  I could imagine how that telephone call had gone. The things he’d have said to her. Oh, look, he would have said. Of course you need someone to sweep up your mistakes. You haven’t changed at all. Always looking to me to swoop in and fix your shit. And she’d done that—thrown herself in front of the runaway train that was my father—for me.

  If I’d ever doubted it, I was a fool. My mother fucking loved me. And my father … Maybe he never had.

  So I told her the story of the diner, and the FOR SALE sign. She clapped a hand over her mouth in delight. “He named it Andromeda, if you can believe that,” I finished.

  She snorted. “He would.”

  A fresh shout went up, this one from another team altogether. Despite the distance, the desperation in the cry was obvious. Mom and I broke into a run, followed Adele and Bo and the others, skittering down a hillside. At the bottom, Adele threw up an arm and said, “Whoa.” I couldn’t slow myself quickly enough, and I slipped on the mud and landed hard beside a body of water that shouldn’t have been there. It was vast, a lake right in the middle of Orilly.

  Adele pointed at a signpost in the middle of the water. “That sign. Do you know it?” It was the sign for Maddie’s Market, still standing straight and tall—but submerged so that only the topmost letters were visible. “How tall would you say that sign is? Ten feet? Five?”

  “Twenty,” I croaked. “Maybe more.”

  “Holy shit,” Bo said. “Okay, people, let’s back it up.”

  Mom helped me to my feet as Adele said loudly, “Folks, this whole area has collapsed. We’re on the edge of a very large sinkhole. Back to safer ground.”

  On the opposite side of the crater, the other rescue team was still loudly shouting. Bo shielded his eyes, scanning the water. Then he pointed. “There,” he said.

  “Oh my,” Adele breathed.

  Scattered across the center of the lake were islands of wreckage. As I squinted, one of the islands moved. And even at this distance, even under these conditions, I recognized that island’s body language. Something in the way it moved. I knew that island.

  Oh god.

  Zach.

  39

  Zach

  The first thing I noticed: I’d been unconscious way more than a few minutes. When I opened my eyes, the sun was coming up. Water pulled at my clothes; indistinct shapes bobbed past on all sides. Tsunamis aren’t this placid, I thought. There was water in my eyes, my nose, my ears; salt and oil and dirt smeared in a paste on my skin.

  The wave had come, and now I was here. What had happened? I remembered so little. Blackness. Colors that rippled around me, like they
were coming from my own body, like oil gone iridescent in water. For a moment I thought I’d heard my father’s voice.

  And then I’d broken the surface and fought for air before I went under again. Except I didn’t go under. I flailed in the water, surrounded by debris, until I found something to hang on to. I couldn’t swim away. My right side was still … broken, or something. The wires and connections were all severed. I thought I’d been sucked out to sea, so I tried to kick in the direction I thought home might be.

  But only one leg worked. The other exploded as if I’d been jabbed with a thousand needles. My leg was stuck fast, and struggling only made the pain echo up my spine.

  “Hello?” I shouted, but no reply came. I gathered my strength, raised my voice: “Help!”

  Only the sound of water, slapping against debris, against me. I clung to my bobbing hunk of debris—what appeared to be part of an infant’s car seat, I noticed with a kind of dim horror—and tried to be grateful. That I was alive. That I was above the water, not below. And I was. But only just.

  I was still wearing my backpack, I realized. There wasn’t much in it, but it was ballast now, nothing more. Clinging to the car seat, I struggled to remove the bag, then unzip the pocket. My sketchbook was still inside, the pages turning to mulch. The envelope of cash. Clothes. I reached inside and removed the other envelope; then I released the bag. It sank out of sight.

  I removed Dad’s compass from the second envelope. I rested it on my arm and stared at its face. It had survived Dad’s accident. I hoped that it—that we—would survive this, too.

  * * *

  Water lapped against my face, into my mouth, and woke me. Immediately, I heard the voices. Behind me, I thought. Was that west? South? I looked to the compass, but my bad arm had slipped below the water after I passed out. The compass was gone, lost at last to the sea below me.

  There wasn’t time to mourn it, however. Voices.