by Laura McNeal
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.
Forty-five
When 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.
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 l
ooked 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.”
Forty-six
My 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.
Forty-seven
You 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.
Forty-eight
Smoke 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?