by Laura McNeal
Show me, I begged the bottle without speaking. I willed it to be a magic crystal ball that knew everything and fixed all.
“What’s that?” my mother asked. She’d followed me into the grove, so I held out the bottle. Her hands were black and dry, like my mind.
“Just something I found,” I said, and then, trying to restore my old talent for blurting out the truth, said, “He gave it to me once. Amiel.”
The truth made it no easier for us to talk, and she looked like she would gladly have thrown the bottle into another fire.
While I was in the hospital, and then after I came home, newspaper stories kept giving us the numbers: 347,000 acres burned in San Diego County, 9,000 acres in Fallbrook and Rainbow, 21,000 avocado trees, winds in excess of eighty miles per hour, 1,700 homes, ten to fourteen lives, depending on whether the four bodies found in a migrant camp near Mexico were attributed to fire.
I heard tires moving slowly along the frontage road, and I silently begged the car not to contain my aunt and Robby. It was just another family of strangers out gawking at the damage, though. As the mother, the father, and two children watched us sift through bits of rubbish, I thought it was even worse than living in a house that was upside down, and I suddenly laughed out loud.
“What?” my mother asked.
“It’s like we’re hobos,” I said. “Picking through the trash.” I waved, and the passengers looked away.
I wanted, when I felt the ability to want anything besides not having killed my uncle, to go to the river and look for Amiel.
“I want to go for a walk,” I told my mother, holding the melted bottle in my dirty hand.
“No,” my mother said.
“Don’t you think we should go down where they found him and lay some flowers or something?” I’d thought about one of those crosses people put up at the sites of car accidents. But of course my mother knew that wasn’t all.
“The cemetery is the place for that,” she said.
“He’s not at the cemetery.” We still had the funeral ahead of us: tomorrow or the next day.
“When he is,” she said.
“I have to go see if he’s all right,” I said, meaning Amiel this time.
“No, you don’t,” my mother said.
“I hate you,” I said, shocking myself.
“Fine,” my mother said.
We left holding a bowl, three forks, two spoons, the melted bottle, and the blobs of chrome.
Fifty-six
My mother didn’t even listen to my arguments about why it would be better for me to stay home and get a GED than to go back to the high school when it opened.
“I can’t face people,” I said.
“If you can face me,” she said, “you can face them.”
I proposed moving out of town. “Like we could afford to move,” she said.
So when school resumed after the evacuation, I resumed going there. Robby remained at the Gaudets’ in Solana Beach while, as I heard from my mother, Agnès sought to enroll him at the Bishop’s School, where he was soon thereafter accepted on scholarship.
“We’re so sorry about your uncle,” teachers and parents at school said to me if they addressed the subject at all, but mostly they didn’t.
I knew they knew from a series of newspaper articles that Hoyt Wallace, age fifty-two, died trying to get out of the riverbed while he was looking for his niece, who was found in the company of a Hispanic male who fled. I assumed they also read the story in which a San Diego Gas and Electric employee said utility crews working to restore power to the Willow Glen area found evidence of human habitation and fire building in the preserve, which was highly illegal. These things they knew. They didn’t know, and it didn’t help anyone, that I walked around with the image of his burned body in front of my eye like those blobs that sometimes get stuck on the cornea or that I fervently prayed he died of smoke inhalation before he burned.
“So, Pearl?” various friends and not-friends asked. “Who were you with at the river?”
“I can’t really talk,” I said, whispering as though my own voice were too damaged to explain the many things that would, if told, exonerate me.
Greenie never asked about that or anything personal again, and though I saw her in the halls and at all the places you’d normally see someone who lived in your town, we either pretended not to notice one another or smiled fake smiles and waved as if we’d once shared nothing more than a few homeroom classes a long time ago when we were other people.
On the horrible sunny day of the funeral, my mother and I didn’t sit by Robby or my aunt, who were naturally near the front. I continued to feign muteness, and my mother, though she knew better, didn’t wise anybody up. She sat beside me at the back even though she was the barefoot girl in the biggest picture that was displayed at the front of the funeral chapel, the one photograph of Hoyt with my mother that hadn’t burned, saved among various other family things by a cousin in Idaho. It showed a fifteen-year-old Hoyt and a five-year-old Sharon Wallace on Hoyt’s first motorcycle. He’s smiling and she’s smiling, and they look like they’re about to go off on a helmetless ride.
My father sent flowers, but he didn’t come.
Robby played something by Mozart on the clarinet, and my aunt, who sat next to several unfamiliar French relatives, nodded when a slim bearded man said he was going to read a stanza from a poem by Agnès’s favorite author, Victor Hugo.
“When the living leave us, moved, I gaze,” he began, and though I kept my eyes focused on my fingers in my lap, I saw the mountain lion turn toward me in the smoke.
The breeze that takes you lifts me up alive,
And I’ll follow those I loved.
The casket was closed. It lay huge and shiny on a bier at the front of the chapel. I watched for Mary Beth, who I thought would surely come to offer her respects to Robby if not to mourn, secretly, for Hoyt. I thought that Agnès was lucky in one thing: Hoyt hadn’t left her for his lover as my father had left us. That was better, wasn’t it? I knew what he’d done, and Robby knew, but Agnès didn’t, and I added this to all the other qualities that made my uncle a good man.
Mitchell the marine was waiting respectfully outside for my mother. He was wearing camouflage, which he apologized for, and he’d come there on, of all things, a motorcycle. “So you’re Pearl,” he said, and I didn’t hear any particular judgment in his voice, no more than I heard in other voices.
I could feel Robby and Agnès and the French contingent watching us and wondering about the soldier. I could do nothing but nod my frozen nod.
“Would you like me to go to the cemetery with you?” he asked my mother.
She was not only red-eyed and trembling but unable to speak. I think what she would really have liked was to ride on the back of his motorcycle to a place far away, as she had once done when she was five and Hoyt was fifteen, but she didn’t do that. She led Mitchell to the Oyster car, and she handed him the keys, and understanding everything perfectly, he drove.
Fifty-seven
On Saturday, Mitchell came to the RV on his motorcycle. This time, he wasn’t wearing his uniform. This time, my mother climbed on the back, locked her arms around his waist, and left me, against her better judgment, alone.
Thirty minutes and nine days after the fire started, I stood on the bank that once led to Amiel. It wasn’t quiet. A cracking, pounding sound came from the grotto, and when I waded across, I found two men and a woman whacking the shell of Amiel’s hut with sledgehammers.
They stopped and stared suspiciously at me.
“What are you doing?” I asked. I surprised even myself with my loud, undamaged voice.
“Removing a fire hazard,” they said.
I didn’t go past them to the roofless homesteader’s house for fear I’d lead them to something they hadn’t yet discovered. I’d have to find another way. I walked downstream, then worked my way around, got lost, and finally recognized the sycamore that led to the front door. I climbed up and sto
od under trees dry and rattly in the blue air, terrified that once I entered the house, what I’d find would be a corpse like my uncle’s.
You knew who, the doves in the trees chided. You knew who knew.
I stepped in. The foundation was clean, just as we’d left it, except for ash. Ash lay over everything. I walked all over the foundation raising little puffs of it with my shoes, looking for a trail that would show me where he’d gone. In one corner, I startled a lizard with a missing tail. A phoebe sat on a stump outside the doorway, waiting for something in her black coat. Nothing in the house seemed left there for me, but I kept walking over the floor and listening to the sledgehammers.
“Ready for lunch?” I heard one of the men say.
“After I get this sucker out,” the other called.
Then I saw it. Amiel’s writing stick, the one he’d balanced upright in his palm, lay against the wall in some leaves, and when I pulled it out, a piece of paper that had been coiled around the tip loosened and dropped. Unfurled, it said BLACK OAK.
“Where did that girl go?” the woman asked the men who were smashing things.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think she’s the one?”
I ducked down and crept along the far edge of the willows until I reached a point where I could wade across the shallow river. I saw the woman’s red bandanna as she dipped down to wet her hands, and I saw her regard me dubiously, but I kept going as if I didn’t care.
There, in the hollow of the burned oak, sat the pale green and black tin. There were the lords and ladies, the filigree, the lute. With shaking, smudgy fingers, I picked off the lid. Under a drawing of an oyster shell and a pearl, Amiel had written:
Vuelvo a México. Recuérdeme.
Simple enough for even me: I’m going back to Mexico. Remember me.
I had another stop to make, and I took the tin and Amiel’s stick with me.
Recuérdeme. The four syllables formed a rhythm in my sick heart. I had to go past the sledgehammer crew again, past the green canopy into the burn zone. Under my feet the hard dirt became thick, powdery ash. Recuérdeme. Black manzanita twisted out of the slopes beneath black oak. Black oak lay down against black sycamore. The plants the boy called hobo pineapples poked fresh and green out of the black earth. I was getting closer now to Willow Glen, closer to the spot where my uncle, according to the description in the paper, had decided to go uphill to get away from the fire. I was wondering how I would know I was there when I saw the roses.
It wasn’t that far from where we’d eaten the loquats. The trees, though burned, still arched above me. Black and white and gray, like snowy woods in winter. And there on the northern slope I saw pile after pile of roses, each bouquet successively older and drier, so that the fresh bunch was still bright red, the one just beneath it dried red and wrinkly, others yellow, some pink, all of them long-stemmed and wrapped with a ribbon like florists use. Among the roses were other things that people had left. One card was signed by the Fallbrook fire department. Another said, A hiker who wishes you well.
Just above the flowers was a wooden cross that had a set of GPS numbers written on it in white ink. Someone—Agnès, I supposed—had tacked a photograph of Hoyt to the cross, and I saw that it was a picture of Hoyt and Robby at Robby’s seventeenth birthday party. My uncle glowed in the twilight like the peaceful ghost I wanted him to be as I knelt down in the ash by the flowers and covered my blue eye instead of the brown one.
“I can’t really see you, Hoyt,” I said, crying as I couldn’t cry at the funeral. “I can’t.”
Still kneeling in the ashes, I took Amiel’s stick and started to write in the dust that was so fine I could feel it rising up to smother me, I’m sorry Robby I’m sorry Agnès I’m sorry Hoyt I’m sorry Mom, but they were not the right words to make the invisible appear, and after a while I had no choice but to walk out.
Fifty-eight
A whole year passed before Mary Beth Fowler came up to me at a Fallbrook High football game and said, “Hi, Pearl.”
I stared at her for a second, stunned, and then at the backs of the girls sitting in front of us. I no longer had any claim to muteness, so I said, “Hi.”
“I’m sorry about your uncle,” she said.
This I never answer anymore.
“You know that Robby told me not to come to the funeral, right?” she said, her hair cut short and brushing against her turtleneck but her face still innocently, childishly pretty.
“No. I didn’t. I looked for you, actually.”
“He acted like it would be really offensive for me to be there, which I didn’t get.”
I hoped that something would interrupt us, such as the cheerleaders asking our section to do the wave. “I guess he just thought it would be weird for you to be there,” I said.
“Why would it be weird?”
“Because of your relationship with his dad.”
Mary Beth stared at me. She didn’t look embarrassed or guilty, just confused. “What are you talking about?” she asked.
“You and my uncle—the affair. Robby knew.” On the field, among the bright red and blue shirts, play resumed.
Mary Beth turned a sort of plum color. “There wasn’t an affair.”
“But he saw you. At the house. Kissing his dad. I guess he was hiding in the bushes trying to figure out why his dad was acting so odd.”
She tugged at her sleeves as everyone around us jumped up and screamed about a play that we weren’t watching.
When they were quiet enough for her to continue, she told me she knew what day I was talking about, but he had it all wrong. She said she came out to the house to drop off a tennis racket she’d gotten re-stringed for Mrs. Wallace. Nobody was home but Hoyt, and he offered her a Coke. They started talking in the kitchen about Paris because Mary Beth was saving up to go there, and he wanted to recommend an apartment his wife’s cousin rented out near the Eiffel Tower.
“He thought he had the address and stuff in his room, in a box, and he told me to come on upstairs, and I remember thinking I shouldn’t go into his room, but if I acted like it was a big deal, then it would be a big deal. So I acted like it was nothing, and while he’s going through the box, showing me stuff, I hear the front door open and shut, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God! Agnès is home! What’s she going to think?’ Mr. Wallace thought the same thing, so we’re like in some sort of play with all these doors opening and shutting. It was kind of funny, but it was incredibly stressful, too, especially when Robby came to the door.
“Anyway, Robby left, or I thought he left, and Mr. Wallace walked me to my car. When we get there, he goes, ‘Well, that was a lot of trouble to prevent the appearance of something that couldn’t possibly happen.’ ”
Mary Beth paused for an unnaturally long time, and she looked into the distance where the other team sat and pressed her thumbnail against her lip.
“This is really hard to explain,” she said at last. “I don’t know if I should even try.”
I didn’t want to hear anything bad about my uncle, and that’s how the story was starting to sound. I just waited.
“Okay,” Mary Beth said. “You’re probably not going to believe me, but this really is the truth. I said to Mr. Wallace, ‘What couldn’t possibly happen?’ and he said, ‘Who would believe that a beautiful girl like you would be running around with an old muttonchop like me?’ He looked kind of sad, you know, and I said, ‘It’s not that impossible,’ and I went to hug him, which I guess was the wrong move. He thought I was going to kiss him, so our lips met, but it was not a passionate kiss at all, more like one of those greetings or farewells where you’re just planning to shake hands or hug but the other person is doing some French thing, first one cheek and then the other.”
I listened to all this while players were smacking and darting across the football field and the cheerleaders were shouting, “Let’s go, Warriors, let’s go!” Mary Beth watched the football players for a second after she finished the story.
“Do you believe me?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, relieved that what she’d brought to me was a better version of my uncle, the one he’d always seemed to be. “I do.”
“Thanks,” she said.
“You should tell Robby,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, staring at the field for a while. Then she shook her head. “I don’t think I could after all that’s happened. After the funeral, which like I said, he told me not to attend, I just decided Rob was a psycho, that he was one of those weird people who want something until they’ve got it, and then they don’t want it anymore. He really, really hurt me.”
I just sat there.
“Maybe you could tell him,” she said. “He’d believe you.”
“Me? He doesn’t talk to me anymore. I’m the last person he would believe.”
She gave me a look of genuine surprise. “Why not?”
“Don’t you know?” I said. “Because it was my fault that Hoyt was—that he died.”
Except for the therapist my mother made me see, no one ever knows what to say to this, and Mary Beth didn’t, either. Dr. Daggett says I went down into the burning riverbed to get my father’s attention. Therefore, according to Dr. Daggett’s line of reasoning, it was my father’s fault that my uncle died. I never believe this.
Mary Beth watched the final play of the game in the unseeing way that I observed all sports—and most other things—and then the game was over and we lost. She touched my hand, putting pressure on it in a way that let me know she was trying to say she was sorry but couldn’t think how. “Take care,” she said, and walked down the bleachers to the friendly-looking guy who was waving to her from the sidelines, and I never saw her again.
