I wonder if the phone is sitting in some pocket of his shell jacket or if it’s in the fire truck. And I wonder where he is, if he’s running or if he’s digging or if he’s taking a water break, but it doesn’t matter, because it rings and it rings and he doesn’t answer.
This is Brooks. Leave a message after the Robot Lady.
And it’s funny. I didn’t know that’s where I got the term Robot Lady. The GPS on my phone, Robot Lady. She came from Brooks.
“It’s me,” I say, not knowing what I’m going to say, but knowing I’m done, knowing my voice sounds strong because I am strong, I am. “You need to call me. Now. I talked to your dad. He told me about Cameron, what I told you I already knew. Brooks, you need to call me—”
I’m rubbing my eyes and I’m pushing off from the ground and brushing the dirt from Grace’s shorts and my voice sounds good, sounds steady because I am steady.
“Your dad,” I say, wondering if Brooks will hear the rage of the road, of the rushing cars and the wind. “Your dad asked me if you started the fire. He said you were blamed for Cameron—” I inhale. “Brooks, you better as hell be alive, you better be okay, because you need to call me because I can’t lie anymore and I want to hear you say it, the truth, and if you don’t call, I’ll turn myself in. I’m going to tell. People are homeless—all the homes.We need—”
The voicemail beeps, cutting me off. I’m not done, but I don’t mind. It’s enough. He’ll listen to it. He listens to and saves every message I leave. He’ll call me eventually. He’ll hear me.
So I climb into the truck and turn on the engine and push it into drive. Click on the blinker and accelerate into the flow of traffic and heed Robot Lady’s advice and take the on-ramp for the I-5 N to my little sister.
43
THURSDAY
Late Thursday night, Brooks texted me.
Come outside? Wear sneakers.
I was writing back, asking why, when he sent:
It’s a surprise.
I hadn’t seen Brooks since Luis’s work party Saturday night, so I snuck out the back door.
* * *
* * *
We climbed the bank across the street from my house, the dry brush snapping beneath our feet. Brooks walked ahead, moving up the slope diagonally. I hadn’t climbed the hill in years—it only leads to more scrubby hills of dead spiky weeds and stubby cacti and dried-up flowers, to trails that twist behind Coto de Caza through the 460,000 acres of rolling land. Nowhere.
Brooks carried a large pack and wore his black work boots, black baggy pants. No beanie on his head. He looked ready for a bank heist. Or a fire. His arms were bare. The hot wind was sharp. We ascended the ridge, and I looked back down at my home: so small and insignificant at the curve of my dead-end street, only our back porch illuminated—a beam to lead me back.
I headed with Brooks deeper into the inky night. Round a bend, a few steps farther, and we were on the trail. Brooks pulled out a corked bottle of red wine, and we passed it back and forth. I took too many sweet gulps.
“The trail closes at sunset,” I said. “You know that, right?”
“Of course.” He reached for my hand. “Do you trust me?”
The silence was loud. Our feet hitting the hard ground, frogs croaking, the chattering of crickets, a howl far off. I gripped his hand. There is no real fence protecting the protected land—the occasional rusted gate, the random warning sign, a sagging string of barbed wire that gives way to cacti and bottleneck brush. Brooks trekked as if he’d studied the trail, as if he knew the land like he knew fire. We left the path and pushed into the knee-high crackling grass, down another slope, wind whooshing across the valley.
Brooks stopped, pulled me into him, and kissed me deep. I was dizzy.
“Happy anniversary,” he said.
44
3:00 P.M.
I walk into the Children’s Hospital of Orange County and am greeted by fluorescent lights and sunshine-and-ocean murals. It took me twenty-six minutes to finish the drive. My cell is in the back pocket of Grace’s shorts. It has yet to ring.
Right now, the priority is Maya. I hold her stuffed elephant against my chest. If Maya were ever to admit that she still clings to Donny, it would be while hooked up to an IV.
And, okay, fine: I needed the stuffed animal’s comfort too.
I see Mom before she sees me. I call to her, which is a mistake, because it startles her and Mom is a crier and crying is more contagious than yawning when the crier is my mother. She rushes to me and holds me tight. I’m so grateful I showered twice, that I’ve consumed bacon and eggs and more coffee than one should ever consume, because my morning rum-breath stench has been replaced with positive I Am Healthy I Ate Breakfast evidence.
Ignore the fact that I puked it all up on the side of the road.
Thinking about bad breath is a good way to not think about crying.
Thinking about bad breath is preferable to thinking about why I’m close to crying.
“Oh, honey,” Mom is saying. “This is a day for the books, isn’t it? Look at you.” She shakes her head. “You should have come with us.”
“No one would’ve been home to save our stuff if I had,” I say.
Mom touches my cheek, soft, so soft. She’s in her Mother audition clothes. Pressed linen pants, peach silk blouse, a brown scarf draped around her neck. “I don’t care about stuff.” Her dark hair is swept back in a bun, turquoise drop earrings bright against her white skin. “You shouldn’t have had to experience that. I wouldn’t even know how to react—”
“Mom, Maya,” I say. “Can we focus on Maya?”
Mom shakes her head, not a no, but a denial, an it’s fine it’s fine it’s fine headshake. “She’s okay, going to be fine. I don’t think it’s the lymphoma, I don’t think—” She brushes back my hair. “I’m just so relieved you both are okay.”
Yeah, we’re okay. We’re so okay.
Maya is still under the lights of her MRI and CT and a PET, tests with results that will eventually reveal what’s under her skin, so we have time. Mom leads me to the bathroom, where I blink at my reflection, and she wields her magic wand of cover up—mascara, blush stain, lipstick. She insists that I’ll feel better with a fresh face (she and Grace must be conspiring) and wipes my skin with a cleansing cloth (always so prepared with her oversize leather purse). I think it makes her feel better.
Mom holds my chin and explains the morning’s events. A standard beginning: Maya stretching, Maya drinking coffee, Maya complaining about not having access to her cell phone, Maya eating the aforementioned light breakfast, Maya begging Mom to have five minutes with her cell phone, Mom not relenting, Maya quiet during the short drive from the hotel to the school, her legs shaking, nerves, the standard nerves.
Mom asked Maya how she felt, and Maya smiled and said fine.
“Mom,” I say. “Fine never means fine.”
She uses her thumb to blend in blush on my cheek. “You and your clichés.”
“Obviously I’m right. She passed out.”
“Well, fine didn’t mean fine this time.”
They signed in for the audition and Mom kissed Maya’s cheek and Maya vanished into the leotard sea for warm-ups and barre and floor and, later, when she was one of the fifteen selected from the fifty, her stage solo—the final round.
And then Mom had to wait. She read a book in the lobby with a twitching foot (because one daughter was auditioning and her other daughter was alone in fireland). But then she heard the sirens, and Maya was wheeled out on the stretcher after collapsing onstage—not a failed leap or a twisted ankle, but a hard fall; she passed out and hit her head on the rise, cutting her scalp.
“Audrey, please don’t cry.” Mom sighs. “She’s okay. It’s okay. I’m sure it was only exhaustion. The last time she relapsed—she was sick for months—it was gradual, remember? She’s healthy.
” Mom nudges me to face the mirror and combs my tangled hair with her fingers, starting a braid.
My jaw throbs from clenching. I want to sink to the tile floor and cry into my knees and let Mom hold me. I’m far gone—this summer and last weekend and Thursday night and last night and the fire flickering secrets to the sky. I am so afraid. I am afraid Brooks will die in the fire. I am afraid Maya is sick-sick again.
I want to show Mom my bruises, the ones under my shirt and the ones she wouldn’t see. I want her to feel the blister on my palm, its heat, and I want her to tell me I don’t have to be strong, that I can call it quits on today, call it quits like I did with ballet.
Mom’s braiding tighter now, tugging at my head, inspecting my reflection in the mirror. So I inspect her: her skin dull in the bathroom light, her exhaustion intensified—the inward drop of her usually pulled-back shoulders, the weight beneath her dark eyes, the deeper lines in the angular slope of her face. She yanks my braid and twists it up into a tight coil.
“I’m scared,” I say.
“Oh,” she says, and the shiver in her speech scalds so deep. “I know, baby,” she says, and I’m still hearing that waver in Luis’s voice—a father so broken and scared—and I’m wondering how my mom isn’t on the floor herself, how she isn’t crying into her knees.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I should have been there. Last night, today.”
Mom massages her fingers against the back of my neck. “You’re here now. Are you okay?”
I only shrug, smile, because I am not okay. Not yet. Because I don’t know what to do and maybe I’m not ready to tell all the truth and nothing but the truth.
“You were so happy this summer,” Mom says. “But the past few weeks . . .” and I hold my breath because I hate that she’s noticed, I hate that I’ve made her worry. “And now today.” I hold my breath. “Audrey, what’s going on?”
I can’t give her another reason to cry. “There’s a fire,” I say. “We were evacuated—and now Maya—what’s happening is I’m worried about Maya.”
I turn back to the mirror, and I smile because my makeup is complete and my hair is braided back into a twist. My face is fresh. I don’t look like a daughter who drank too much the night before, whose face got chafed from her boyfriend’s scruff. I don’t look like a daughter who was woken at 5 A.M. to a huff-puff-puff on the front door and who puked at the sight of her house surrounded by fire only to run straight into it.
Mom rubs my shoulder. “Honey?”
“I need to see Maya.”
In the mirror, I look like me. Perfect posture beneath the slouch-friendly oversize hoodie, muddy eyes and angular rouge-smacked cheeks. I look like my mother’s daughter. My sister’s sister.
45
First Day
On the first day of the semester, after Psychology, I admitted to Hayden that I was hesitating on taking AP Literature.
He narrowed his eyes. “Why?”
“I’m not sure if it’s worth it,” I said. “The time, the effort—”
“You can absolutely handle the extra effort,” he interrupted. “And it could make a difference. I’ve heard you talk about your dream to go to that small school in Colorado. You want to get in? Work for it.”
My breath caught on the word dream, had I used that word? Yes, I was intrigued by the Rocky Mountains, a small college campus, an education that pushed me, a chance to explore, but was it a dream?
Hayden opened the classroom door, and we walked out into the hall.
“It’s easy for you.” I shrugged. “School stuff—it all comes naturally.”
He shook his head. “That’s quite the assumption.”
We exited the hallway into the dry heat of the courtyard, and I turned to face him. “Well, aren’t you making an assumption? Claiming I’m not working for what I want?” But then I added, “And maybe I don’t care about school like you do. What if I don’t want to work as hard?”
Hayden raised his hands up in defeat. “Fair enough,” he said. “But think about AP Lit, will you? Archer is a fantastic teacher. I think you’d love the class.”
“Sure, whatever,” I said, like a child, like his little sister’s friend.
But he smiled. “Do as you please, Miss Round Table.”
* * *
* * *
I spent two days in Junior English, bored and sketching outlines of maps and mountains in my notebook, and I thought about what Brooks had asked the first night we met. What do you love? And I’d said school, learning something new that I never thought I could understand.
Like in ballet. The feeling of nailing down the most complicated piece of choreography after working on it for weeks—nailing it three times in a row, that hum in my body, the adrenaline in my heart, the euphoria.
In class, drawing in my notebook, I realized I was missing that. Challenging myself with something new—the promise of effort and reward, no matter how slight.
And so I transferred into Archer’s AP Lit, and not because I needed to believe I had a thing but because I realized that the trial and error of learning and eventually understanding was the most satisfying experience I’d yet to find.
46
3:36 P.M.
The ER isn’t a sea of pastels and rainbow murals. It’s pale and gray and smells like bleach; a long room broken by limp curtains with a soundtrack of wailing babies and sobbing kids and beeping machines. I hold my breath and follow the nurse to the end, Mom behind me, until we reach my sister, who looks more bored than sick, more amused than devastated.
“Hey, you made it for my final act!” Maya calls, sitting on the edge of her raised bed, swinging her legs, an IV taped to her hand. “I call this the Dance of the Pathetic: a seated allegro of death.” She raises a pointed foot for a rond de jambe. She’s not yellow and collapsed and pinned to her bed. She’s restless and glowing. Apart from the IV, she doesn’t fit the scenery.
I rush to her, hug her, laugh into her hair. “You’re alive!”
“Did you expect a corpse?” she asks.
“Cold and stiff,” I say.
Mom swats my shoulder. “Not funny!”
Maya sticks out her tongue at Mom, and we’re both laughing when an emergency physician sweeps past the curtains with his tirade: low blood sugar + low blood pressure + high stress = Maya probably experienced an everyday vasovagal attack. No reason to raise an alarm. A perfectly normal event in a perfectly healthy human, even if said healthy human was once whittled down with lymphoma. Fainting accounts for 3 percent of ER visits. And though Maya hit her head hard enough to merit six stitches in her scalp, she’s concussion-free. Eating nuts throughout the day will help prevent future incidents, the physician explains.
The oncologist is next to arrive with the real-deal verdict. Good old Dr. Shoe and her high blond ponytail and bundle of folders under her arm. She’s all hugs and smiles and look at you girls! She claims I’ve grown, but I know I haven’t, and I’m going to stomp her feet if she doesn’t get to the point, because my heart is riling up and I need an official answer stat.
She repeats what the EP shared: this is no reason for a freak-out. Not all of Maya’s results are back, but what has returned points to near-perfection—tumor-free scans and in-range numbers. Her body is still behaving like a body in remission, a body that simply had a minor glitch this morning.
“We won’t have the final results for a few days,” Dr. Shoe says, “but I’m confident we’re in the clear.”
She goes on and on and on and laughs and jokes about Maya needing to eat before four-hour dance auditions, but I’m not listening, and I don’t think Mom is listening either, because I’m kind of crying and Mom is totally crying and Maya is rolling her eyes.
She’s okay she’s okay she’s okay.
But I have to tell her about Shadow.
Mom follows Dr. Shoe out to circulation to sign her name o
n a dozen forms, and a nurse arrives to check Maya’s vitals prior to release. Her heart and her lungs and the pumping of her blood. I can’t stop staring at her.
I hug her again. I’d wrap her in bubble wrap if I could, if she’d let me. I clutch Donny against my chest.
“Were you afraid?” I ask. “When you fainted. When you woke up.”
Maya shrugs. “I was more confused.”
Years ago, when I was scared for her and she walked in on me crying in bed, she rubbed my back and told me not to worry, that she knew she was going to beat stupid cancer because she was stronger than it. She was my little sister and I was her older sister and she comforted me. Bald, thin, and with sores in her mouth from the chemo, she’d dance around the house, telling me she was going to be the first bald prima ballerina. She’d taunt me with her glissades and promenades, laughing, Do one! Do one! Mine are way better than yours. I’m so more prima than you!
And I wish I could tell her this—how it’s because of her that I’m not total dust—but I don’t because she’d pretend to gag, call me cheesy, oh so dramatic, which yes, fine, I am.
The nurse asks Maya if she needs help getting dressed, and Maya waves her away, nodding at me, telling the nurse she has me. She has me. The nurse leaves for another curtain room and another damn rock sits in my throat, ready to crack from the heat. I have to tell her about Shadow.
“What’s up with you?” she asks, eyeing me, my made-up face and braided bun, Grace’s shorts and hoodie. “And what are you wearing?”
The gray tile floor is speckled with gray. Gray on gray on gray. An ER in a hospital for kids. Just a little kid, Luis said. Just an idiot kid. How can I tell her about the fire, the evacuation, her poor cat?
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