by Laura McNeal
“Robby can ride with us,” my mother told him. “We’re leaving in fifteen minutes. Do you know where the fire is?”
“East,” the phone voice seemed to shout. “I’m going to hop on my bike and check it out. I’ll let you know later on, okay? Keep you updated.” When Hoyt said “bike,” he meant his off-road motorcycle, so my mother said okay.
My only option was to pretend it was a normal day, except that you couldn’t run a hair dryer, coffeemaker, microwave, or toaster. You couldn’t see yourself in the bathroom mirror because the bathroom was so dark. My mother stood by the living room window and looked in the mirror over the fireplace to put her hair up in a bun. I did a ponytail the same way. She took an Excedrin to replace her cup of coffee. Robby, frazzled and furious from not finding the car keys, met us at the Oyster.
“I even looked in the pool,” he said.
It wasn’t until we reached the overpass that I had a good look at the eastern sky. West of us, above Fallbrook and the river, the sky was blue, but behind us, it was Armageddon brown.
“I think we should turn back,” I said. “We should pack our stuff.”
“I can’t be late,” my mother said.
Robby twisted his head around to scrutinize the cloud. “Relax,” he said. “My dad’ll check it out. He’ll get pretty close and let us know if there’s any danger.”
“Right,” my mother said, accelerating.
She kissed me goodbye on the cheek in the high school parking lot. She didn’t normally do that anymore, and it made me nervous. The air still had that campfire smell, but from the parking lot, the huge milky stain in the sky was invisible. Some hills and houses were blocking it.
“Whatcha le think?” I asked Robby. I stood looking in the direction of the hidden smoke.
“About the fire?” he asked. He shrugged. “I think air quality’s gonna be low, so they’ll cancel PE today.”
I thought of this as a positive, but Robby looked glum.
“See you at lunch?” I asked.
“Right,” he said. “Meet you by the flagpole.”
But we didn’t make it to lunch. At the end of second period, Mr. K. came on the loudspeaker and announced that school was canceled. Buses would run. Parents had been notified. Evacuation orders had been issued to parts of Fallbrook, Rainbow, and Pala, so we should proceed home.
Kids in my history class pulled out their cell phones and turned them on. I did the same, and as we all lifted our heavy backpacks, the doors of every classroom clanked open and out flowed a river of students with phones clapped to their ears. Soon the quad was a sea of backpacks and people staring nervously into space as they had conversations with people who weren’t there.
My mother had already left me a message. She said she had to stay in her classroom until every single child was signed out. “Go home with Robby and Uncle Hoyt,” she said. “Stay with them, and I’ll meet up with you when I can leave here.”
Robby was standing at the flagpole, his backpack slumped casually by his feet. “Weren’t you just totally Cassandra this morning?” he said.
“Who’s that again?” Robby disliked all fiction except Tintin and Greek mythology, so I assumed Cassandra was Greek.
“She foretold the future, but she was also cursed so that everybody always doubted her.”
“Yes, then. Cassandra, c’est moi.”
“My dad said my mom’s freaking out and packing stuff. We got a reverse 9-1-1 call.”
I’d never heard of this.
“They dial in instead of out,” he said. “Instead of you calling the emergency people, they call you.”
“Oh,” I said. “Did your dad go see the fire?”
“He said he tried. It’s not that far away. He said he’s filling the truck up with gas and we’ve got to find a place to stay.”
“Where are we supposed to go?” I asked.
“Not up 15,” Robby said. “The freeway’s closed.”
It was as if he’d said the sky was closed. “Closed? Then how’s everyone going to get out?”
“The other way,” he said. “You have to get to the 5,” which was the other eight-lane freeway going north or south but along the coast. Getting to the coast freeway could be difficult even on Sundays, when people in Fallbrook and Temecula and Vista tried to go to the beach on a winding road that was just two lanes wide.
In other words, we were in a maze with two exits, and one of them was on fire.
Just then Greenie and Hickey found us. “Can you believe this?” she said. “How’re you getting home?”
“My mom can’t leave her school until all the little kids get picked up,” I said. “So we’re waiting for Robby’s dad.”
Hickey said, “Call him and tell him I’ll take you. I’ve got my car.”
Robby thought about it for a few seconds, and then he called his dad. He said the school parking lot was a mess so it’d be faster to go with Hickey.
“I’ll meet you at Greenie’s house, then,” I heard Hoyt shouting through Robby’s phone. “The line at the gas station is getting really—hey, it’s my turn, all right? I’ll see you there.”
Forty-three
The Coombs house was chaotic. They hadn’t received an evacuation order, but they were packing both cars, anyway. Boxes of baby pictures, file folders, suitcases, and a tub of dog food sat by the front door. Greenie’s brother was packing his Star Wars action figures and Mr. Coombs was calling hotels in Las Vegas.
“You’re going all the way to Las Vegas?” I said to Greenie. It was a four-hour drive.
Greenie said, “That’s weird,” and went upstairs to find her mother.
Robby, Hickey, and I sat uneasily on the couch. The huge TV was on, and we couldn’t help watching the news, which was mostly aerial pictures of burning hills, the strange empty lanes of the closed interstate, the slow thick lines of cars moving south where the freeway was open. Clouds of smoke the size of continents rose above them. Sometimes the camera zoomed in to show fire licking at bushes and roaring out of trees, but when the newscaster talked about where the fire was moving, he identified towns and neighborhoods far away from Fallbrook. There was more than one fire burning at the same time, and the one we were watching was near San Diego.
“I don’t get it,” Robby said. “Is that the reason we’re being evacuated? That fire’s like thirty miles away.”
We watched some more, and the screen went to a map that showed a series of red dots. Each dot had a name. Each dot was a different fire. The one by Fallbrook was called “Agua Prieta.”
“There’s our fire,” Hickey said.
Agua Prieta was the creek where I’d eaten loquats with Amiel, and if the fire was burning there, he was right in its path. “All of Fallbrook is under mandatory evacuation orders,” the newscaster said.
With a sick feeling I couldn’t tell Robby or Greenie about, I went to the backyard so I could look into the canyon. The sky was a dull peach color, not blue, and the air in front of me was flecked with bits of ash. The trees in the canyon looked dry in the haze, not green but khaki, and the wind made them lean and rattle. Would Amiel know if a fire was coming? He had no television and no phone. I’d never even seen a radio.
From where I stood, I heard Greenie’s voice. “If we’re going to Las Vegas,” she asked, “can Hickey come?”
“No,” her mother said. “No! Of course not. He should go home right now. Isn’t his family worried about him?”
“Of course they’re worried about him. But he was making sure I’m okay. He brought me home first, if you didn’t notice. And Robby and Pearl.”
“I appreciate that,” Greenie’s mother said. “But he should go now. You can bring Pearl with you to Las Vegas if you want. She’s welcome.”
Greenie didn’t answer, or if she did, she’d moved too far away from the window to be heard. I walked to the edge of the yard, where a dry lilac bush clung to a rocky slope. I snapped off a sprig and crushed it easily to dust. It would only take ten or fifteen mi
nutes to hike down to Amiel’s house and see if he was okay. Then we could walk back out together.
I heard a chugging engine, and when I turned, my uncle was pulling to a stop by the mailbox and opening his door. He started to adjust the straps that held his dirt bike upright in the truck bed, and for some reason—fear, maybe, or an awareness of how quickly I would have to act in order to hide the details of my plan from everyone—I ran toward him.
“Hi, Pearly,” he said. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just a little scared.” I was shaking all over, so he hugged me.
“Well, let’s go, all right?” he said. “Is Robby inside?”
“Yeah, but Hoyt?” I said. “The Coombs are going to Las Vegas.”
“Do they have relatives there?” he asked.
“No,” I said, pulling my hair out of my mouth. The wind was stronger at the front of the house where there were no trees to block it. “But they’ve invited me to go with them,” I said. Which was true. I’d heard that.
“Did you call your mom?” Hoyt said.
“She didn’t answer her phone yet. I’m going to keep trying.” And I was going to keep trying. I was going to keep trying to tell her I was going to Las Vegas.
Just then the front door of the Coombs house opened. I expected it to be Mr. or Mrs. Coombs, and if my uncle said something about how I was going with them to Las Vegas, I would really have to go, and Amiel would burn to death in the canyon because he had no television, no radio, no phone, and no car.
But it wasn’t Mr. or Mrs. Coombs. It was Robby. “Hey, Dad,” he said.
The door closed behind him.
“Pearl’s going to Las Vegas with Greenie,” Hoyt told him. “We’d better get going before your mother calls me again.”
“Where are we going?” Robby asked.
“To the Gaudets’,” Hoyt said. “They have room for us and they’re near the 5.”
I didn’t know who the Gaudets were, but it turned out they were a family from the Alliance Française of San Diego.
“Oh, great,” Robby said. He walked over to the truck and slung his backpack into the truck bed. I wanted them to leave. I wanted them to hurry. If they stayed in front of the house for ten more seconds, I knew Mrs. Coombs would come out.
“Well, bye,” I said, and I started walking backward.
“Keep your phone on,” my uncle said, and I hugged them both, even Robby, which felt weird because Robby and I weren’t huggers.
“I will,” I said, but some part of me that wanted to be truthful said, “The battery’s getting low, though. I forgot to plug my phone in last night, and we didn’t have any power this morning.”
Hoyt stopped walking to the driver’s side of the truck. He stood still and looked into his phone.
“Here,” I said, my whole body listening for the front door to open and the screen door to creak. “Give me your phone, Robby.” I typed Greenie’s number into Robby’s phone, and then I turned around. “Greenie’s waiting for me,” I said, and I hoped Robby and Hoyt wouldn’t think it strange that I went to the backyard instead of the front porch. I held my breath when I got out of sight, still shivering all over, and I held my hand to the rough stucco of Greenie’s house until I heard the roar of the Packrat’s engine. Then, taking just one more glance at the house, I ran to the lilac bush and began to pick my way down the rocky slope to the river.
Forty-four
When I reached the bottom, the sky was yellow-brown and my shoes held buckets of dirt. My teeth clacked together, but the air was hot and I felt like a turkey trapped alive in one of those super-smokers. I tried not to think about the family in Valley Center that had tried to evacuate in the last fire like this. Two sisters were in a car trying to outrun the flames, but the flames caught up. One girl died, and the other lived in a burn unit for most of the next year.
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 burnin
g 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.