One day when Carlos was at work, the little girl dared to ask her mother why she had allowed him to move in.
The contempt in her voice was impossible to conceal, and her mother slapped her for it. The girl gaped and raised one hand to her wounded face. Her cheek was on fire.
The girl’s mother flushed. “We’re not in a position to choose,” she said fiercely. “Look at me! Am I young? Am I pretty? Look! Am I rich?”
And the girl observed for the first time that her mother was none of these things.
“He brings money in. Maybe you don’t know what that means. You don’t look at your plate when you eat. Maybe you should. There’s meat there. Meat! And green vegetables. You have clothes. You don’t go hungry.”
So we are poor, the girl thought. Carlos was the curse of their poverty.
These things astonished and frightened her.
She might have adjusted, even so. Except that now Carlos himself began to change. Bad as he was to begin with, he grew worse. His drinking intensified. The girl’s mother confided that Carlos was having trouble on the job, fighting with the foreman. Some nights the grunting and moaning in the next room would end in muffled curses. Carlos would not make jokes the next morning, merely glower at his breakfast. His casual intimacy with the girl’s mother became more aggressive; he tossed her back and forth in his arms in a way that made the girl think of a woman being mauled by a bear. Increasingly that was what Carlos seemed to her to be: a large and powerful animal fuming in a cage. But the cage was insubstantial; the cage, its restraint, could vanish at any moment. She didn’t like to think about that.
He began to touch her more often.
She accepted this at first the way her mother accepted it, with passive resignation. She was aware of her mother watching closely when Carlos coaxed her into his lap. Carlos had hands like hairless animals, hands like moles. They moved with a blind volition of their own. They touched and stroked her. Usually when she had endured this for a time, Carlos would stand up abruptly, scowl at her as if she had done something wrong, take the girl’s mother off into the bedroom.
Her mother apologized one day. They were alone. The float shack rose in a gentle swell; rain beat against the roof and the bilge pumps rattled under the floor. “I’m sorry,” her mother said. “What’s happening … I didn’t expect it.”
The girl felt an anger well up in her, huge and unexpected. “Then make him leave!” She astonished herself with tears. “Tell him to go away!”
Her mother hugged and soothed her. “It’s not that easy. I wish it were. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s hard to be alone. You don’t understand that. It’s been difficult. Difficult to be alone. I thought he would help, you know. I really thought he would.” She stroked the girl’s hair. “I thought he might learn to love us.”
That night, when Carlos began to touch her, her mother told the little girl to go to her room. She listened through the door as the two adults spoke and then shouted. There was a scuffling, the girl’s mother cried out, a door slammed. The little girl waited but there was no more sound. She was afraid to go out. She slept finally, trembling in her sleep.
In the morning Carlos scowled at her and left the shack wordlessly. The girl’s mother had a blackened bruise across her cheek. She touched it periodically and with an expression of wonder, as if it had appeared there by magic. Her face, with the bruise, looked terribly old. The girl gazed at it in confusion. When had those lines grown out from her mother’s eyes? That webbing of brittle skin beneath her jaw?
Now it was the girl who wanted to apologize. But the room was full of awesome silences, and she was not sure how to begin. When she did, it was a disaster.
“Mama,” she said, “I’m sorry if—”
“Sorry!” Her mother turned on her. Grease spilled from the stove in a sizzling puddle. “You’re sorry! My God! If it weren’t for you—”
Her hand leapt to her mouth. But of course it was too late. The words had escaped. The girl held them in her mind. The words were like hot coals: impossible to touch, but intensely interesting. She was both stricken and curiously pleased. Pleased, because she understood things at last. How simple it was! It explained everything. It explained the foul looks Carlos had given her. It explained the bruise on her mother’s cheek. She had caused it. She was at the center of this tempest. She had tempted Carlos somehow—seduced him. She had not been conscious of it. It was not something she had set out to do. But she had tempted him, and Carlos had enacted his anger and frustration the only way he could—with the girl’s mother. In bed. And with his fists.
She told herself that this was an adult thought and that she should be proud of herself: she was not being childish anymore.
The good little girl understood that she was not such a good little girl after all.
Byron leaned into the camera angle of the telephone, absorbed. Keller could only stare at Teresa. He had never seen her like this. Her eyes were moving wildly under the lids; tears streaked her face.
It was obscene. He couldn’t let it go on. He must not let this happen to her.
You see somebody hurting, Keller thought wildly, the thing to do is help. He had learned that. A long time ago.
Byron turned away from the phone and said, “Hey, no—Ray—”
But he was already reaching for her.
The fire began at an oil terminal by the sea wall.
Later, people would say it had been inevitable. The Floats possessed only the most rudimentary public facilities. There had been no zoning laws, no building codes, no safety commissions. It was a community made of wood and paper. Some places, oil runoff had filled the water beneath the factories and the balsas. The fire began as a trivial industrial accident involving an acetylene torch; it quickly became something else.
The little girl was home that day. Carlos was at work; her mother was patching the kitchen wall with plaster. The little girl climbed out onto the flat tin roof of the shanty float—it was a sunny morning—and was surprised to see a line of smoke rising from somewhere north along the sea wall, punctuating the seamless blue arc of the sky. The smoke seemed to be drifting straight up; in fact the wind was carrying it almost directly toward her. She was fascinated by this.
Humming to herself, lulled by the wash of the sunlight, she watched for a time. The line of smoke slowly broadened and became a kind of wall, a clouded turmoil sheeting the sky, and when she stood on tiptoes she imagined she could see the flames at the base of it, still far away, licking up from the float shacks miles down the placid canal.
Shortly before noon a fine rain of ashes began to fall.
The girl’s mother called and, when she didn’t answer, came up the ladder to the roof. “My God,, girl! I thought you were lost! I thought—”
“Look.” The little girl pointed. “Fire.”
Her mother stood for a moment with her mottled housedress billowing in a wind that had grown stronger and tindery dry. Then she crossed herself wordlessly and clasped her broad brown hand on the girl’s arm. Her voice when she spoke was toneless. “Come help me.”
As they were descending, a County of Los Angeles helicopter clattered overhead toward the fire, then veered and hovered a moment.
The girl felt her own first tingle of fear.
Her mother was muttering to herself. She began moving in large purposeful strides across the peeling tile, stacking things on a bedsheet in the middle of the room: clothes, welfare documents, canned food. Dazed now, the girl peered out the shack’s single window. The snow of ash had grown much denser. There were people on the pontoon walkways in knots, and they gazed up apprehensively at the pall of smoke. The sky had grown dark with it.
Her mother pulled her away. “We can’t wait any longer.” Her voice was distracted and she swiveled her head nervously. The girl understood—another adult intuition—that this was how her mother must have looked crossing the border from Mexico : this animal f
ear in her. “I would wait for him, you understand? For Carlos. But there isn’t time.”
She folded the sheet with their meager possessions in it and carried the bundle out to their tiny single-engine motor launch. It was hardly more than a canoe with an engine bolted to it, and it wallowed under the load. Their shack backed onto a small tributary feeding one of the larger canals, but the ordinarily quiet water was already crowded with boats. In some of them the people were weeping. The girl wondered what catastrophe this was that had overtaken her life. The ashes came down like snow around her.
Her mother led her back into the shack one more time. “You look around,” she said. “Anything you need or can carry, you take it. One minute! Then help me with the rest of the food.”
The girl picked up an old flea-market doll, the first toy she had owned. She didn’t care much about it now. But it seemed like the kind of thing she ought to take. She tucked it under her arm, satisfied.
It was then that Carlos came home.
He pushed through the door laughing a screaming, drunken laugh. Instinctively the girl slipped into the gap between the kitchen door and the wall. The smell of new plaster was suddenly pungent in her nostrils. She squeezed her eyes shut. She covered her ears.
She heard it all anyway.
Carlos had left work early. The whole morning shift had been dismissed because of the fire. They assumed it was a joke at first; they went to a bar by the tidal dams and began to drink. But then the fire spread until most of the industrial buildings were burning, and it was obvious then that something terrible had happened and was continuing to happen. One by one the men joined the growing exodus toward the south. Carlos had battled through the crowds with a bottle in his hand. The bottle was still in his hand now, but empty.
He was very drunk and very frightened. The girl’s mother tried to soothe him but the fear was in her voice, and Carlos must have recognized it. “We’re leaving,” she told him. “We can follow the canals to the mainland. There’s time. There’s still time.”
“The canals are full,” Carlos said. “Nothing’s moving. The canals are fucking burning. Is that what you want?”
“We can walk, then—”
“Walk! Have you seen it out there?” He waved his bottle recklessly. “The fire’s coming too fast. There’s nothing we can do—nothing!”
And he was probably right, the girl thought dizzily. She could hear the screams coming from the pontoon bridges only yards away.
“Then why come back here?” the girl’s mother said. “Why torture us?” Fear and a kind of petulant outrage mingled in her voice. “To hell with you! I’m leaving! We’re leaving!”
But Carlos said they would die together because they were a family and because he was afraid to die alone. Then the fighting began. The girl listened, paralyzed. There was a terrible dull thudding noise, the sound of fists on flesh. She couldn’t help herself: she stepped out from behind the door.
Her mother was moaning; her face was bruised. Carlos had pushed her against the kitchen table and hiked her dress above her thighs. The fire burning so close, and all he could think to do was rape her. It made the girl angry, and for a moment she forgot her fear. “Stop it!” she cried.
Carlos looked around.
The alcohol and the fear had done some terrible thing to him. His face was livid, choked with blood. His eyes were all whites. Seeing him, the girl experienced a kind of awe at what he had become. “You,” he said. And went to her.
His hands mauled her. His hands tore at her clothes. She experienced a sudden lightheadedness that seemed to lift her out of her body; she floated aloof from herself and was able to see Carlos, the window, the ash-laden sky, all with a strange and curious impassivity. His hands were to blame, she thought. It was his hands she hated. Carlos was probably innocent. Her mother had said as much. My fault, she thought. She had seduced him. Worse, somehow she had seduced his hands.
She could not clearly see her mother, who lay stunned across the peeling tiles. She did not see, therefore, when her mother roused from her stupor and blinked at the act that was proceeding before her, stumbled in horror to the wooden cabinets by the sink and drew out a knife from the cutlery drawer. The girl was not aware of anything much until Carlos gasped and stiffened above her and then rolled away. His blood, mysteriously, was on her dress. Carlos lay noisily dying, his hands closing on air. The girl’s mother looked down at her with eyes gone as wide as an animal’s. “God help us,” she whispered. “Come on now.”
They ran to the motor launch, but the press of boats in the tiny canal had beaten it against its moorings until it listed into the water and capsized. They gazed at it only a moment. The fire was close enough to smell. It was a sour, rubbery smell. It was acrid and hurt the girl’s nose. Smoke eddied down the canal among the boats and beneath the pontoon bridges crowded with refugees. People were everywhere, fleeing. They had not yet panicked, but she could tell panic was only moments away. And then they would begin to push and run, the girl thought, and what then? What then?
Her mother tugged her forward. They had nothing to carry. Their possessions were all lost. Carlos was lost. Carlos, if he had not already died, would surely perish in the fire. A secret part of her exulted in that, and another part of her recorded the exultation: she had been the occasion of his death and, worse, his death had pleased her.
They traveled a half mile to the south and east with the fire on their heels—a burning as vast as the girl had ever seen, and the fire ’copters helpless in the face of it— before the crowd began to panic. The girl’s mother lifted her up and carried her for a time, but she was heavy and her mother was no longer a young or healthy woman. They toppled together against a mesh-wire restraining fence. More bodies fell against them until the fence gave way at last and dropped them into a waste canal. The girl sank deep into the foul water, and she might have died there—wanted to die there. But it was as if she had become two people. Her body strove for the surface. Her legs pumped, her lungs gasped for air, she splashed until she saw the flames licking up behind her. She dog-paddled down the mesh- and concrete-lined canal until she could scramble up a pontoon and rest there, gasping.
She looked for her mother, but her mother was gone.
Her mother and Carlos. Both gone.
It was, of course, her fault.
The fire too. She might have willed it into being. She had wished for it often enough, she realized now: an apocalypse to devour Carlos and erase her untimely adulthood. And wishes count. “Be careful what you wish for,” her mother used to say. “You might get it.”
The heat was agonizing on her face, the massed screaming of hundreds of voices awesome. The little girl realized that she was talking to herself. “If wishes were horses.” Under her breath, low and staccato, as she joined the fleeing mob. “Then beggars would ride.”
Knees jostled her. Once, a woman tugged at her hair in an effort to climb around her. But she moved steadily and without panic. If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. If wishes were horses … If wishes…
She walked herself into unconsciousness in the guilty knowledge that she should have died in the fire. In some real sense she did die then. The thing she had been was dead. Be dead, she thought; be dead with Carlos; be dead with Mama. She willed herself to die. And died, though her body sustained her through the crush of frightened adults. The hours that followed were obscure and anarchic, but it was enough to know that she had awakened, her face singed hairless and her lungs thick with fluid, a fever raging in her—but alive—in a Red Cross camp on the mainland. She was a new creature now, blank and anesthetized, without history, nameless, with only a single certainty: that she was not a good girl and never would be.
All this Teresa had seen.
But the girl wasn’t gone. The girl was the girl in her dreams, and she stood now in her twine shoes and with her large eyes, not a memory but someone tangibly real, a separate entity. The
y stood in limbo, and she understood that this was a place inside herself, a place the dreamstone had brought her, the place the little girl lived. And if the girl is here, Teresa thought, and if she can speak, doesn’t that mean she’s alive somehow still? Alive inside me!
“You know who I am,” the little girl said solemnly.
She did, of course. The girl was herself. But more than that. A kind of ghost. A ghost of what she had been, a ghost of what she had never become.
It was possible to see all this, to understand it; it was possible, she thought, even to forgive. The girl had done nothing wrong. But the vision had been vivid and shocking, and the idea of stepping back inside that abandoned shell, of becoming, in some sense, this ragged girl again—
“But you have to,” the girl said. “Seeing isn’t enough.”
No. It was impossible. Too many layers of scar, a life built on that denial. To own all that torment, to own her mother and Carlos and the fire … it was terrifying.
Fire and guilt had made her what she was. She was Teresa; she could not put aside Teresa.
The girl stepped closer. Not really a little girl anymore, Teresa thought: more like a reflection in a mirror, but tousled and frightened. “I didn’t die. I walked you through the fire. I walked you to the mainland. You tried to kill me. You tried to kill me with the pills. But you can’t do it that way.”
Go away, she thought dazedly.
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