Dark Water

by Laura McNeal

  They say that parts of a teenager’s brain aren’t formed yet. That might have been the problem. I’d like to think that rather than a malignancy of heart.

  I’m fine, I tried via ESP. I’m fine I’m fineimfineimfine.

  I reached into my pocket and felt my phone as if it were a five-dollar bill I’d stashed in my pocket and forgotten. Amiel stirred, and he looked at me.

  “I should call my mother,” I said.

  He nodded. I wanted to kiss him. I wanted us to be a married couple in deepest Mexico or a married couple in a fable about deepest Mexico.

  Instead, I held the button down on my phone and learned that Greenie had sent words (WHERE R U?) and Robby had sent words (CALL MY DAD PLS) and my mother had called six hours ago.

  “If you get this message, Pearl,” my mother said, her voice taut, “call your uncle on his cell phone. He’s going back on the motorcycle and he says he’s going to look for you down at the river in some hut where Robby thinks you might have gone. Call him and tell him where you are, Pearl.”

  I did it. Right then. There could have been many reasons why he didn’t answer.

  He couldn’t hear the ring over the motorcycle engine.

  He couldn’t hear the ring over the motorcycle engine.

  He couldn’t hear the ring over the motorcycle engine.

  I spoke into whatever is listening when no one answers. I said, “It’s me, Pearl.” I was quiet for about ten seconds. Then I said I was by the De Luz bridge.

  My impulse after saying these things was to erase the message, but I had reached a point where I didn’t know a way to make things better and I feared making them worse. I didn’t erase the message. I just hung up.

  Amiel looked at me, and in my life that was not a fable, I told him that my uncle was looking for us at his house. “That way,” I said, and pointed in the direction of the fire, which was also the direction of Amiel’s house. “I’m afraid,” I said, “that he won’t leave” (punctuated by useless tears), “until he finds me. And he’ll burn.”

  I wondered, as I tried to call my uncle again, what a phone that has burned in a fire would do with incoming calls. Did the fact that his phone didn’t ring at all, that it went right to a recording of his voice saying, Hello, hello, hello, please leave a message, mean he was talking to someone else or listening to my last message? I hung up.

  The water flowed fast and dark beyond the reeds. I looked down at my dirty shoes, pressed hard on my eyes, and wondered what would make this all come out right.

  “Ven,” I heard Amiel whisper, “Come,” and he stood up. “To find him.”

  He walked, sure-footed, ahead of me, and I stumbled along, my hand in his. The rhythm of a story my mother used to tell me got stuck in my aching head:

  Going on a bear hunt,

  We’re not afraid.

  What a wonderful day!

  Over and over, through the not-wonderful dark, scared and stumbling, between branches and trunks, going on a bear hunt. My hand stayed gripped in his hand, we’re not afraid, and at last we thrashed our way through a stand of willows and What a wonderful day we were breathing hard and shivering at the edge of the grotto, so I called out, “Uncle Hoyt?”

  We’re not afraid.

  I listened for a motorcycle engine and then remembered that on these narrow, rocky trails, in this smoky darkness, he would surely have to be on foot.

  I pushed the button on my phone, but nothing happened. The battery had died while I was walking.

  “Hoyt!” I shouted. Darkness, smoke, heat, and water swallowed the words.

  Two things happened next that are still hard to believe, so dreamlike and monstrous did they seem. Amiel plunged into the water, and I, still connected by his hand, plunged in after him. The air was quivering with heat, and it smelled different. I became aware of a crackling sound and a rosy, hazy, blossoming glow. It was pink and orange and lathery. I was looking at the glow, which I knew was the fire, and I was sinking down into the water, which came only to my waist, when a light-colored shape streaked along the path where we’d been standing and was gone.

  “El léon,” Amiel said, pulling me lower into the water.

  I wanted to laugh and tell him there are no lions in California. What did he think? That we were in Africa? Then I remembered the stuffed mountain lion in the glass cage of the Museum of Natural History. The air was so hot that I couldn’t think about the lion anymore, and I could see the flames now fingering the tops of trees.

  What a wonderful day.

  The fire cracked branches like bones, and then flames reached for another tree, and we sat in the cold water up to our necks, our legs straight out on the slimy river bottom, and then Amiel pushed my head under, which made me cough and strike out, but when I could see again, vaguely, he was ducking his own head under and I thought, with what little reason I still had, that he was dousing my head so it wouldn’t be the next candle, and I felt so very sick, as if I were a hot air balloon that had to go on sucking up the heat of a fire burning directly beneath me. I swallowed the heated air because I had no choice, and my head went high into the darkness and became heavy and came back down. The fire went on cooking and eating the trees and we stayed where we were, hiding from it, hoping it would pass us by. I was fully conscious and I was delirious, freezing but not frozen, for hour upon hour upon hour. The fire never completely encircled us but burned along one side. We stayed where we were even after it burned past us, Amiel’s arms tightly fastened around me. Toward the end of the long night, I began to imagine I had seen the long ghostly body of the mountain lion very clearly, that it had turned to regard us as it ran, and that it had cracked-marble, blue-brown eyes.

  Forty-nine

  I woke to a world that wasn’t black but gray, and on the surface of the water below my chin floated soapy flakes of ash. Amiel felt me jerk awake and he released his hold on my waist. He stood up slowly, his clothes heavy with water and mud, and I did the same, an ache in my head so sickening that I shuddered. There was something heavy in my pocket: the drowned phone. In no direction could I see flames, though I suspected that the ashes on the burned side of the river would hold, like the ashes in a fireplace, pink burning coals. Even the water smelled like smoke.

  A low droning sound became a loud droning sound, then a deafening thwap. The helicopter was low enough that I could see, briefly, a human being inside, and I imagined that the human could see us. The helicopter turned around and made another pass. Yes, someone was looking at us, but I couldn’t think whether this was salvation or doom.

  Most of the blackened trees were south of the river, but Amiel’s side of the river was still green, so that was where we climbed out. I was shaking so hard I could barely walk. I hate to throw up, but I threw up. I kept walking so that I wouldn’t be near the vomit and after a few steps found I couldn’t walk anymore.

  “I have to sit,” I croaked to Amiel, wondering if this was how his throat felt most of the time. He turned and gestured to me to wait, and when he returned, he had a blanket for me. He’d brought a can of beans and a knife, which he used to punch a hole in the lid, but I couldn’t swallow the beans he tried to feed me.

  The droning sound returned, grew louder, hesitated, and went away. I shivered in the blanket, laid my head on Amiel’s lap when he pulled me to him, and then was not conscious of anything beyond the long gliding mythical body of the mountain lion as it turned its head to see what I’d done until I heard voices and saw beside us the thick black boots and yellow tarp-like pants of a firefighter. Not one but three. The one with a cleft chin and a voice like cold water knelt down and started checking things a doctor would check.

  “How’d you get down here?” he asked. He didn’t sound angry, but I thought he would be angry soon.

  “Have you found anyone else?” I asked, my voice not only hoarse but trembling. I kept expecting the air to heat up again and rush burning into my head. Amiel stood off to one side, coughing hard.

  “What do you mean
?” the firefighter asked. “Were there more of you?”

  “My uncle came to look for us. On his motorcycle.”

  He didn’t answer me, but he pressed his lips together and I saw the narrow-faced one exchange a look with him, then go off a little way to talk into his radio.

  When two of them put me on a stretcher, I saw in Amiel’s face the same look that the mountain lion had in my dreams, and I said they should put Amiel on a stretcher, too, but Amiel shook his head, and they thought he couldn’t speak English.

  “¿Hablas inglés?” the water-voiced man asked Amiel, but Amiel didn’t respond.

  “He saved me,” I said. “We should call my mother,” I finally thought to say. I was stuttering now. “And we should call my uncle.”

  The man with a narrow face who had talked into his radio asked for the phone numbers and I chattered them out through my teeth. In a few minutes I heard him say, “Mrs. DeWitt? This is Larry Greenworth of the fire department. I’ve got your daughter here and I just wanted you to know she’s fine. Looks like shock and hypothermia, some smoke inhalation, but we’re going to take care of that.”

  Pause. “The river bottom,” he said. “Santa Margarita.”

  Pause again. “No,” he said. “She mentioned that. We’re going to look for him.”

  When that was done, he tried the number for my uncle.

  “Not answering,” he said. I heard in the distance the piercing, repetitive cry a squirrel makes when it senses danger.

  “Let’s go,” one of the men said. A crow, black as the trees, floated over our heads.

  They told Amiel to follow them because they had thick boots and they’d be able to make or find a path through any still-burning coals.

  I was lifted up, and the trees wheeled above me like black snowflakes. It was not like riding in a canoe but a wheelbarrow race, where all four of my limbs were held by other people as they scrambled over uneven ground.

  “What were you doing down here?” the foot carrier asked me. “Hiking?”

  “Yes,” I stuttered.

  “Didn’t you get the evacuation order?”

  I closed my eyes. This question would lead to other questions, and then they would be so angry, so I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep until I really did fall asleep. I was asleep when we passed the charred rubber tires of a burned motorcycle. I was asleep when we passed under the burned canopy of Agua Prieta Creek, ghostly and hollow, where Amiel and I had once peeled loquats with our teeth. I was jolted awake by the voice of one of the firefighters saying, “What the—hey! Get back here!”

  “Why’s he running?” the one at my feet asked.

  When I lifted my head, I saw Amiel running back toward the river.

  “No,” I tried to shout, my voice incapable of shouting.

  “Should I go after him?” the firefighter who wasn’t carrying me asked the others. He looked young and exhausted.

  “No,” the one holding my feet answered. He saw his chance to ask me questions again. “Who is he?”

  I started to say Amiel’s name and then stopped. “He worked here,” I said. “He heard that the border patrol is waiting at the freeways t-t-t-to catch them.”

  We’d reached Willow Glen. A fire truck was there and an ambulance. To my surprise, the aloe field wasn’t burned. The mailboxes stood in a row, mouths agape. The yellow cottage was still a yellow cottage. The black path of the fire lay to one side, through somebody else’s house, which was now just a chimney and charcoal palms.

  They slid me into the ambulance like I was the gingerbread man, and I wanted to jump up and run away, but they popped an oxygen mask over my mouth. They wrapped my arm with a black Velcro cuff and held me down until it was clear that I had nothing to say in the matter, no power to run.

  Fifty

  One day after the fire, I dreamed Amiel was dead. He was facedown in the water, and the water was gray.

  Fifty-one

  Two days after the fire, I thought I saw Robby in the hospital room. “The ostrich died,” he told me, his voice a hiss. “You killed it.”

  But when I asked my mother where Robby went, she said, “He was never here.”

  It still hurt to breathe and talk, and mostly I didn’t want to talk, but a little while later I croaked, “Where’s Hoyt?”

  She didn’t answer. The TV was off, and she had a newspaper on her lap.

  “Is he mad at me?”

  She didn’t answer. The look on her face pressed me back like the force of an airplane gathering speed to take off. She’d been crying, but she wasn’t crying now. She opened her mouth to say something she didn’t say.

  “He’s okay, isn’t he?” knowing he was not okay.

  She shook her head and I knew that what she’d been crying about was not me or the burned stuff in our house but whatever had happened to Hoyt.

  “Did he get burned?” I said. “Is he in the hospital, too?”

  More of the look that pressed me back. “He died, Pearl,” she said. “He tried to outrun the fire on a slope.”

  Fifty-two

  Three days after the fire, I woke up and Hoyt was still dead. I didn’t hope Robby would visit; in fact, I feared now that he would.

  Only my mother was willing to visit. “I want you to take a pregnancy test and an AIDS test,” she said.

  I shook my head.

  “Are you sure,” she said, her voice making it a statement instead of a question. “You know how you get it, right?”

  I assumed she meant AIDS, and I nodded.

  “You mean you didn’t sleep with him or you used a condom?” she said. She wasn’t good at this kind of conversation, or maybe I never seemed like the type to need it, and I could tell it pained her to ask.

  I considered writing with my fingertip on my mother’s thin freckly arm: Didn’t have sex. Instead, I used a Post-it note from my hospital tray table.

  “Good,” she said.

  She didn’t look like she believed me, and I couldn’t blame her.

  Fifty-three

  Four days after the fire, while my mother was in the cafeteria, I turned on the TV in my room and learned that the fire wasn’t over, that it wasn’t contained, that it still flickered and burned. Power lines were down, and the National Guard still blocked Mission Road at the freeway, turning away people who tried to talk their way in.

  The doctor said he couldn’t keep me anymore, even though we’d lost our house, but he gave us the name of a hotel in downtown San Diego that was giving free rooms to people like us. I spent a number of hours there staring at windows that might or might not have been the windows of the condo my father had bought, in which he might or might not have been sitting at a desk that might or might not have been meant for me. I asked my mother if my father was in town.

  “Who knows?” she said.

  Then she took a call from a person who turned out to be Mitchell the marine.

  Fifty-four

  Five days after the fire began, most people were allowed to go back home, if they had homes. Louise Bart offered my mother the use of her RV, a little trailer covered in pine needles at the back of her farm on a road called Santa Margarita because it wasn’t far from the river. The very first evening, I tried to go on foot to the trail, but my mother caught me.

  “You know they’re trying to determine if a squatter’s camp started the fire, don’t you?” she said.

  “It wasn’t his,” I said.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” she said, and she locked me in the trailer. A few minutes later, she came back and unlocked it. She called my name through the door and said, “I’m sitting right out here with Louise and her husband. You can join us for hamburgers when you want.”

  I didn’t.

  Fifty-five

  Six days after the fire started, we stood in the ruins of the Lemon Drop Ranch. My mother crossed her arms and walked carefully over the rubbish. High above us, clouds webbed a turquoise sky. The fire had not burned everything evenly. The pine trees were unifor
mly black, like chandeliers dipped in tar, but the avocado trees were shriveled and brown, with leaves still rattling from limbs. You could see things from the cottage you couldn’t see before, such as the crusty, tangled platter of Robby’s house, where a hired crew was tearing out bits of junk and raking it into piles. Robby and his mother weren’t there. They were at the Berry-Bell and Hall funeral home making arrangements.

  Certain things were easy to identify in the crumpled piles of stuff: a mottled fork and a mottled spoon. Wires. A dusty but otherwise undamaged ceramic bowl. In the kitchen, near what used to be the stove, chrome had melted into silvery frosting. Photographs, letters, cabinets, books, sheets, towels, and napkins were unidentifiable dust. The silkworm ball was dust. The couch, the Yahtzee board, the librarian skirt. Quilts it took somebody a million hours to make. We didn’t think of every lost possession right then, but over time, one by one, like a phantom limb.

  “Remember when you burned your wedding pictures in the grill?” I asked my mother.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I guess you could have just waited.”

  She didn’t speak, and I couldn’t think why I’d said such a thing.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t have burned your baby pictures,” she said, and she picked her way around a fallen clump of bathroom tile. It bothered and mystified us both that the iron sewing machine wasn’t just sitting there intact. How could a sewing machine melt in a house fire? Why that and not a salad fork?

  I dug around in the cold rubbish for a while and collected another fork, another spoon, and then I got up the courage to go closer to Robby’s house. I was walking there when I realized I was stepping over the former site of the tree house, which was now a few metal braces and beams and piles of flaky charcoal. I found a stick and poked around until I felt something hard in the ashes. It turned out to be the blue bottle Amiel had given me, melted into a bent sapphire clump, the neck curved forward and open in a strange fish mouth of need.