Aftershocks

by Marisa Reichardt

  She pointed across the street and his gaze followed. My own gaze snagged on Sundial Circle—the stretch of sidewalk in the middle of town where all the skaters hung out. I scanned the crowd for Leo but only spotted a girl I knew from my astrophysics class as she went flying off a concrete bus bench on her board with her arm stretched out behind her. All I could think was how much more I wanted to be skateboarding over there than talking to this guy over here.

  “You girls are a trip,” the guy said, shoving the ten into his back pocket. “I’ll meet you in five.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  6:42 P.M.

  I try calling my mom again but still can’t get a connection. I think of our last conversation. About Coach Sanchez. And the romantic getaway. And me losing my shit. You’ve ruined my life. Some of the last words I said to her.

  And why? Because she fell in love? Because she found someone she actually wants to be with after I leave for college? Is that really the worst thing that ever could’ve happened to me? Because it could very well be the best thing that ever happened to her. After my dad died when I was four months old, my mom sank all her energy into a doctorate degree and work. But now she could have love, too, and I don’t want her to. All because I’m afraid of how it will make me look.

  I’ve got only thirty-seven percent left on my phone’s charge, but I allow myself one more glance at my lock screen. It’s a photo Leo took of us in front of my locker before the first-period bell rang on the first day of school. He told me to smile at the camera, but then he surprised me with a kiss on my cheek at the last minute. The picture is slightly blurry and a little bit sideways, but it captures me laughing and happy and whole, so the sight of it makes my heart hurt.

  I dial Leo at the risk of losing another percentage point on my battery, but nothing happens, so I let the screen go dark and picture him in my head instead. I see him with his skateboard dangling from his fingertips and his backpack slung over his shoulder, waiting for me outside the gate of the pool deck. Telling me about his own afternoon workout or his homework load for the night. Leaning over and kissing me even though I smell like chlorine and sunblock. I want to be there with him now. But instead I’m sweaty and cold all at once, with sticky armpits and a bloody sweatshirt and chattering teeth. I smell like this laundromat. Like dirt and wood rot and the dank mildew scent of leftover washing machine water. I’m sure that smell has crept into every square inch of my skin and hair follicles. Festering.

  The blood on my sweatshirt is dry now. The sleeve is hard and crackly and pulling at the fine hairs on my arm as the winter darkness of a February evening takes over. There isn’t light coming from that sliver above me anymore. A little less hope.

  I try to stretch my back. I twist one way and then the other. My muscles are cramping, and I want to be able to stand up and extend my arms high over my head to stretch the way I do before a game. But nothing in here is the way it is out there.

  This space is too quiet.

  Charlie is too quiet.

  I whisper his name through the dark.

  He doesn’t answer, and I call out louder.

  More silence.

  What if ?

  No. I can’t think it.

  “Charlie!” I yell. “Answer me!”

  “Shit,” he hisses. “What is it? I’m here.”

  The sound of his voice is a relief. Hope again.

  “Don’t do that. Don’t make me think I’m here alone.”

  “Don’t worry. It was just a catnap.”

  A catnap. That’s what my mom used to tell me when I was four and started protesting weekend naps because I’d gotten old enough to know what I’d be missing while I was asleep. Sprinklers and swings and snacks and shows. Time with her after a long week of work and school. My mom would settle me in her own bed, surrounded by her pillows and her safe mom scent. She’d smooth my hair back from my face.

  “It’s just a catnap,” she’d say.

  “Meow,” I’d say back, and she’d smile.

  “Sleepy kitten. Close your eyes. Think of balls of yarn as blue as the sky. And walking through the tall green grass. And bowls of cold milk.”

  “Meow,” I’d say again, softer this time. I was seeing all she wanted me to imagine and I’d push my hand across my face, pretending it was a paw. “Meow.”

  My mom would keep petting my head, a relaxing, perfect rhythm that made my eyelids heavy.

  “Sleep, little kitten,” she’d say. “There will be plenty of time to play and see the big wide world when you wake up again.”

  “Hey, Ruby?” There’s an uptick in Charlie’s voice that interrupts my kitten dreams. I can tell he has a new thought. A new worry.

  “Yeah?”

  “Should we be concerned about a gas leak or carbon monoxide poisoning? Asking for a friend.”

  I hadn’t even thought of those things. What does carbon monoxide poisoning feel like? Would we drift off to sleep and not know we were dying?

  “Ruby? Did you hear me?”

  “I’m thinking.” Wouldn’t we already be dead if there was a carbon monoxide leak? “Isn’t that what those switches were on that panel? The ones the lady turned off ?”

  It’s a flash of a memory. That woman’s final act of heroism. Trying to save a laundromat from going up in flames. Trying to save Charlie and me from whatever could’ve happened if those switches had stayed on. How did she have the good sense to do that but then run out into the parking lot where she could’ve been killed by flying debris? Electrocuted by a downed power line. She probably didn’t survive. Sometimes people know one thing but not another when it comes to earthquake safety. There are people who think you’re still supposed to huddle in a doorframe, but I learned from drills at school that they changed that a few years ago. Maybe she was trying to get to the doorway but decided outside looked like a better option.

  “I thought that was an electrical panel,” Charlie says.

  “I think it was an emergency shutoff system for everything. Don’t you have to have those in California? We have one at our house. You barely have to jostle it and it turns off. I hit it once when I was moving the trash cans to the curb, and my mom lost hot water in the middle of her shower.”

  “So you think we’re okay?”

  I feel the pressure of having to say the right thing because when Charlie isn’t calm, I’m not calm. And we have to stay calm. I need him to stay calm for me.

  “I’m sure. That lady saved us, Charlie.”

  “I wish we could thank her.” I hear that tiny tick of worry finally slipping like fingers loosening their grip on the wet rungs of a ladder.

  “Yeah,” I say, even though my words aren’t entirely true.

  Because that woman might’ve saved us from gas leaks and carbon monoxide poisoning, but she didn’t really save us.

  We’re still here.

  CALM

  I met Leo outside the gate of the pool after practice yesterday.

  He held my hand as we took a shortcut through the back parking lot. I wanted to keep our fingers twisted together forever. We walked two blocks to his car on the hill by the house with the mailbox that looks like a lifeguard tower. Red rescue can and all.

  We drove the streets home without talking. We didn’t need to.

  We stood in my kitchen, where I made toast and swept up the crumbs with my hand. Leo ate four pieces with peanut butter while I went for cinnamon sugar.

  He was standing there the way he always was. Looking the way I liked. Comfortable. Assured. Beautiful.

  So I led him to my room.

  Where it was only us.

  Only then.

  We ignored the knock on the front door from the UPS driver.

  We ignored the minutes passing.

  And the weather.

  And the airplanes overhead.

  The only thing we paid attention to was the moment. And the music on low. And the violet scarf over the lampshade that made my room look like twilight while our skin melded and our
breath hitched.

  CHAPTER SIX

  8:00 P.M.

  My right calf muscle cramps. Like it’s being held tight in someone’s fist. Clenching. Clawing. Pulling. I point my toes up. Stretch. It’s not deep enough. It won’t untwist. I grunt through the spasm.

  Charlie hears me. Asks what’s wrong.

  “Leg cramp.”

  “Oh, yeah. I’ve got those, too.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “Didn’t want to complain.”

  “I’m not complaining.”

  “You’re definitely in the ballpark of complaining.”

  “Nope. I’m okay. I’ve handled worse pain in water polo.”

  Why am I so proud of this? Why do I need him to know? Why do I want to explain that my sport is pain? That I know the slice of someone else’s fingernails digging into my skin as I fight for position in front of the goal. I know twisted nipples and thighs left purple and bruised. I know kicks to tender spots and private parts. I know scratches so deep they need Neosporin. I know muscles longing for ibuprofen and a body that feels like it can’t walk another step without collapsing.

  Maybe I need to remind myself because playing water polo makes me feel all the things I don’t feel right now. Strong. Confident. Powerful.

  When you’re on a swim team, you eventually see water polo. The first time I saw it, I was ten years old.

  I wanted to be like them.

  It was so much more exciting than swimming back and forth by myself, from one end of the pool to the other, following a single black line and the thoughts in my head.

  “I want to do that,” I told my mom as she shoved my goggles and swim cap into the bag over her shoulder.

  I went to my first practice two weeks later. I loved it from the second my hand touched the ball. I’d found exactly where I belonged in the water.

  “I’m okay with the pain here,” I say to Charlie. “But I could do without the fear.”

  “And the hunger.”

  “Yes. My stomach feels so empty.” Hunger has crept in on tiptoes, punching at the hollow space of my belly. Grumbling. Growling. “I want a cold fruit and yogurt smoothie. Extra ice.” I want it to slide down my dry throat, coating and cooling until it settles in my stomach and fills the emptiness inside me. “The last thing I ate was a bagel at breakfast.” Breakfast. Where Mila was obnoxious. That already seems so long ago.

  “I had a banana. We definitely could’ve done better.”

  My hollow belly rumbles. “Well, my stomach just growled over a banana, so. . .”

  Charlie laughs. “Yeah. Same here. Not to mention your smoothie with all the ice.”

  I think of eating dinner with my mom. I think of her wavy hair and her eye crinkles and her belly laugh and her recipes and her no-phones-at-the-table rule. I think of backyard meals in the summer and bowls of soup on the couch in the winter.

  I think of dinner last night and yelling and pushing my chair back and stomping off. If I could go back there now, I would. I would stay at the table for the rest of my life if it meant I could talk to her. I would explain why I was upset. That her dating my coach hurt me, and made me feel left out in my own life. But then I would listen to her, too.

  If I had known what today would be, I would’ve let her in my room last night. I would’ve felt the way my bed shifted when she sat down. I want to be in my room again. With my mom. Where our problems are so much smaller than these ones.

  Because it seems too easy to be left here.

  With the fear of never seeing her again.

  Never being able to tell her I’m sorry.

  And that knowledge is the worst pain of all.

  MOM AND DAD

  My mom likes to tell me the story of the day she met my dad. It was in a beach town in Italy in the summer after her last year of college. She says she tells me the story so I’ll remember him somehow, even if it’s my mom who needs to remember.

  Sometimes I feel bad that I don’t hurt the way she does. But how am I supposed to mourn the loss of someone I never knew?

  “He had earrings and this mass of Kurt Cobain hair. He looked like he should be in a band. He was cool. Cooler than me.”

  My mom’s thinking long hair and earrings were cool always makes me smile.

  When she talks, I can hear the drift in her voice as the memories seep in. She is twenty-two. She is seeing the world with a backpack and a best friend. She is suddenly in that beach town, with that sea breeze and her sunburn, and she’s seeing my dad for the first time, as the salty wind whips his hair around.

  Okay, maybe they were kind of cool.

  “He thought I was someone he knew,” she says, and smiles. “And when I wasn’t, he said, ‘Well, then, you’re someone I would like to know.’ ”

  So cheesy. But I could never make fun of her love story.

  She tells me often about the way he surfed. And the way he told jokes. And the way he laughed. And the way he lived.

  “He really, really lived,” she always says then sighs. And maybe that makes it better somehow. That he crammed more into thirty years than most people cram into a lifetime.

  There were Santa Anas on the day my dad died. Hot, dry winds that made the coast feel like the desert. There’s a history behind them. A lore. People think they’re ominous, ushering in change and madness, unsettling the balance of things, uprooting trees and rustling your hair like ghostly fingers scratching at the nape of your neck. My mom always spoke of them with such reverence that, when I was younger, I thought they had been a critical piece of my dad’s story. As if they’d officially played a role. As if they’d had the literal power to scoop up my dad and turn him into wildfire ash at the charred foothills of Southern California.

  My mom pushes her wavy hair behind her shoulders when she tells me memories, twists a curly strand around one finger. Drops it. Twists another. Lost in thought. She has the same wavy hair as me, minus the damage from years of pool water and sunshine.

  My mom smells like summer. Like gardenia flowers and lemonade.

  She talks back to Siri like they’re having an actual conversation. She even tells her thank you when she’s done taking directions.

  She sneaks zucchini layers into her lasagna and I pretend not to notice.

  She loves fireplaces and poems and beach days in no particular order.

  She thinks she takes good photos but half the time someone’s head is cut off or the frame is crooked or the light is bad.

  I got my hair and my love of sunsets and beaches and bad reality TV from her.

  My mom says I got my height and my love of the water from my dad.

  My parents spent three weeks together in Italy after they met. When my dad went to Greece, they thought it would end. But it didn’t.

  “That’s what love is,” my mom says when she talks about it. “Never-ending.”

  My mom’s original intent that summer she met my dad was to come home in August and start her dream job of working to save the oceans. Instead she said goodbye to her friends at a train station in London, then spent the next year passing through quaint villages and seashore towns with my dad. And when that year of travel ended, they came back to California and got married a few months later on an autumn evening at city hall right before closing time.

  Five years later, she got pregnant with me.

  But on a Monday morning four months after I was born, my dad was walking in the middle of a crosswalk with a cup of coffee in his hand and was hit by a distracted driver. He spent four days in the hospital on life support, waiting for his mom and dad and brother and sister to have a chance to say goodbye. And then my mom signed the papers to let him go.

  I hate hospitals. Hospitals are where people go to die.

  My dad’s family went home after the funeral and then it was just my mom and me.

  And my mom became weighed down by the memories of what was and the dreams that would never be.

  But last night at dinner, my mom said Coach Sanchez wa
s special. The look on her face told me it was real. It’s taken her so long to get here. It’s not about me. But last night I made it that way.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  9:19 P.M.

  The earth bucks underneath me. I think it’s a bad dream at first. I want it to be a bad dream.

  But then I remember.

  It’s happening again. An aftershock. Why is it happening again? I clamp down on my fear. I knot my hands and squeeze my eyes shut.

  “Goddammit!” Charlie shouts.

  I tell myself this is normal. That after earthquakes there are aftershocks. Smaller swells as the earth settles into its new space. The ground sways. Things that didn’t crash to the ground the first time crash to the ground now. I can only hope the teetering table and the fragile walls around us won’t break down completely. If they do, we’ll be crushed. We can’t get lucky twice. We might not even be lucky once.

  I am a pill bug in the middle of my kindergarten rug.

  Scrunched. Clenched. Unsure.

  I can’t see what’s happening through the dark.

  This jolt is big enough but it’s nowhere near the original magnitude 7.8. It rains more dust. More dirt. It lands like hard sprinkles on my face. It reminds me of the strangest thing. It reminds me of my mom grating fresh Parmesan cheese over my spaghetti noodles when I was five.

  “Say when,” she’d say, but I’d never say it. “When?” she’d finally ask me again, and I’d nod.

  I am spaghetti noodles. I am limp arms and lifeless legs. I am mush.

  The rumbling ground smacks against my helpless body.

  Until it stops.

  Charlie and I lie still in the silence, bracing ourselves for the earth to move again. Holding our breath. Waiting to speak.

  “Well, that sucked,” Charlie finally says.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Think so.” He coughs. “That was one hell of an aftershock.”

  My brain can’t hide my fear. What if something bigger hits? That’s what happened in Ridgecrest in July 2019. On the morning of the Fourth of July, there was an earthquake, a magnitude 6.4, and it was big enough for some people to feel it up and down the coast even though the damage was minimal. But the next day, there was a bigger one. A magnitude 7.1. And experts talked about foreshocks and how what you feel the first time might only be a hint of what’s to come. Can this laundromat survive something bigger? Can we? I try to picture the earth settling in a more peaceful way. Of cracks and crevices spooning each other, then falling asleep. Anything to calm me down. But it doesn’t help. “I’m kind of freaking out, Charlie.”