My father accepted enthusiastically. He was inappropriately exhilarated, like a kid in an earthquake-themed amusement park. The adrenaline rush had stirred something in him.
“Well, it can’t hurt,” Serena said, trying to justify the excessive exultance. My brother and I got up and moved grudgingly toward the prayer group on the street. I heard Creedence whisper to Timoteo something about the earthquake happening in the Valley because of the porn-film industry. It was a sign from God.
Our neighbors stood in the circle. It was understood we had to be flexible with our religious affiliations in times of crisis. That day we’d have to make do with a generic, all-encompassing God, though the Mormons felt they were the protagonists of everyone’s redemption since they were leading the prayers. I prayed to Mary for the first time since Arash’s death. I asked her to be kind to everyone, just to be kind because we were all so tired.
The Mormons raised their hands toward the center of the circle and I saw a shadow advancing toward our street from the ruins of Victory Boulevard. A Terminator rising from the ashes. He walked hunched forward but unafraid—a duffel bag on his shoulder. I ran toward him.
Henry.
He hugged me close to his chest and kissed my head.
“How did you get here?” I asked.
“I walked.”
“From your store?”
“It’s not my store anymore.” He grinned. “It’s gone. Collapsed, exploded. A fire.”
“What about your mom?”
“She’s fine. She’s happy. We have insurance. Only smart thing she’s done in her life. She’s with our neighbors right now. Her gross canned food is finally being put to good use. They’re eating pinto beans on Ventura.”
“I’m sorry I was a bitch,” I said.
He handed me the duffel bag and made a gesture like we had all moved on. “I brought some stuff I thought you guys might need: sleeping bags, batteries, tents, Snickers bars. I’ll help you through this. Italians don’t know about California earthquakes.”
He was right.
—
Henry camped with us in our backyard for a week. At night we sat around a bonfire watching the flames swell and subside under our command. It felt good to control something. We boiled water on hot coals and went to bed early. Ettore talked about practical things, like how to keep the fire going for a long time with the least amount of wood, how to recycle used water, how to make lemon and mint infusions to quench our thirst. He never once mentioned the Hotel Alexandria and the movie. During those days my brother and I felt like we were allowed to be kids again, relieved from any sense of responsibility that didn’t have to do with mundane duties. We all got along like a normal family and slowly that started to feel natural.
At night sirens still blared, but things were calming down. Before falling asleep I heard the sound of Deva’s body thumping against the rock—a punctual summons that reached me as soon as darkness descended. I was caught in between a feeling of paranoia and a sense of urgency and justice because of what I’d done. I tried to justify myself, but the question remained: Had I really been crazy? Had I imagined things? Once, I woke up to the sensation of my legs tumbling down a hill—the galloping rhythm from my Eagle Rock escape back in my feet. I felt my knees strike against the sleeping bag’s padding. Even with my eyes open I could not stop them. My chest ached. It felt as if a wrinkled hand were keeping the surface of my heart taut, stretching the flesh out so I would know how much more painful things could get. I tried to unclench the grasp, but the hand stayed there, forcing me to feel what I did not want to feel. Slippery Deva, fleeting eyes, swaying hair. I didn’t know who I was without her and without the canyon.
I stepped out of my tent in the middle of the night and stood in my nightgown in front of the fire pit, gazing at the disembodied parts of our home on display at the end of the backyard: the broken plates, the ripped couch, my father’s oak desk. They all seemed so insubstantial now.
My mother came shuffling out of her tent after me, groaning.
“What are you doing up?” she asked, sleepy-eyed. She hugged me from behind in front of the dying fire.
“I can’t sleep,” I said, staring at the red coals.
She kept her eyes half shut as if the conversation might be brief enough to not wake her up entirely. She hated losing sleep.
“We’ll be back inside the house soon.”
“It’s not that.”
She took a breath. “I was so worried about you not coming home. I thought I would kill myself if I lost you,” she said in a hoarse voice.
“You would?” I turned to her. “Really?”
“No, not kill. But I did see how ruined our lives would be without you in them.”
“Thanks.”
“Are you okay?” she finally asked, both eyes open now.
“Mom, I did something bad. I’m worried…”
She nodded reassuringly.
“I know it wasn’t a peaceful sit-in in the desert, baby. I think Dad figured it out too. We were young once and you never gave a shit about the Zapatista army.”
She lifted my chin to meet her eyes and I felt a surge of tenderness for her. Where had they been living all those months?
“Yes, it wasn’t a peaceful gathering.”
I let her fingers stroke through the front of my hair and rested my cheek on her chest. A little longer, I thought to myself. I’d rest there just a little longer.
25
I dreaded the moment when the phone lines would be working again, but that happened one day too. Halfway through February we were at dinner and the fax beeped and began regurgitating home-repair offers—the business of earthquakes was starting to take over the tragedy of it.
“Damaged house? Ruined interiors? We can help.”
I imagined fax machines all across the San Fernando Valley overheating, spewing out papers filled with promises of those organized enough to turn tragedy into opportunity.
“Seismic businesses,” my father grumbled.
We did the house cleanup ourselves, though it still smelled like mildew and rusty water.
I got up from the dinner table and pulled the curly phone cord from its base in the kitchen all the way to my bedroom. We were only one yard sale away from owning a cordless. I turned the lights off, then curled inside my bed under the blankets and made the call.
Chris picked up.
“It’s Eugenia,” I said in a quiver.
“My father is back from the hospital. You fractured his leg. He’s in a cast.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That plus the earthquake. Not great timing.”
“He’s okay?”
There was a shuffling sound and a sigh, but no reply on the other end.
“I thought he would hit Deva.” I tried to raise my voice and beat away the crackle. “He looked like he was going to do it and she was already bleeding, so I—”
“I know. Thank you.” He hung up.
I called back but nobody answered.
I also called Alo to apologize, but he didn’t want to speak to me. He said he never wanted to see me again and to throw away his phone number.
Deva didn’t return to school after it reopened three weeks later. News spread about an outbreak of something known as Valley fever—a respiratory disease caused by airborne fungus spores carried by seismically triggered dust clouds. Valley fever: I imagined that was the reason she wasn’t back—a post-earthquake refusal to return to the vapidity of our high school. Newspapers said the condition manifested itself with heavy chest pains. I felt those. Perhaps we’d both developed a San Fernando Valley allergy. Except I didn’t have anywhere else to go now that she was out of my life.
Days turned into weeks. I still looked for her swinging ponytail and kept my ears open for her laughter, but the school hallways echoed with her absence. I began to lose hope. It turned out Valley fever cases had been limited to Ventura County. If anyone had contracted the disease it was Alo, as if the cancer and b
roken throat weren’t enough.
I bumped into Azar as she came out of a bathroom stall one day. Her hair had grown down to her shoulders, parted by two sparkly butterfly barrettes. It made her head look slightly less huge. She had on a short dress and white tennis shoes with wedges to make her taller. She walked to the mirror with a purple compact and started powdering her nose.
“I almost didn’t recognize you,” I said, smiling.
She turned to me, uninterested, and narrowed her big eyes like she was trying to remember who I was.
“It’s been a while,” she answered. She turned back to the mirror and painted her lips with strawberry gloss. The black hair had disappeared from her arms and her mustache was also gone. She tweezed her brows now, like all the other girls in school.
“Remember when you made me believe you’d protect me after Arash died? You made me think you’d help me,” she said.
“I remember our hug on the field.”
“Well, you never helped. I had to figure it out on my own.”
I looked at her skinny olive legs and didn’t know what to say.
“I like your dress.”
It had daisies printed over a burgundy background. Floral dresses were in style. She fit right in. Unlike me, she had found her place.
“Thanks,” she said.
“If you ever feel like hanging out…” I began, but she clicked her compact shut and raised an eyebrow at me. She walked out of the bathroom.
It was like the first day of school all over. On the football field I looked up at the speakers and thought that maybe Deva was gone for good and the principal would announce it with his crackling voice like he’d announced Arash’s death. I swiped my hands on the fence around the school’s perimeter. I waited for her by the one in front of the side doors, fingering the pieces of wire that replaced the holes that used to be there, our portals to the other side. She never came.
Mrs. Perks told me she’d take me on in her Honors English class for my senior year. She said that was an important year because it was when I had to apply for college. I thought I would feel victorious or proud of myself when that day came, but I didn’t feel anything.
After school at the bus stop, a scrawny guy came up to me. I’d seen him with Chris before, playing hacky sack in the parking lot. He went by the nickname Brain Dead. He had a green Mohawk, pants almost falling off his hips, and safety pins in his ears. His backpack was wider than his back, like a baby gorilla propped on his shoulders, suffocating his entire frame. His face was freckled and the rosy spots on his cheeks matched his mucusy-rimmed eye sockets, pinkish like those of a lab rat.
“I heard you’re looking for Chris,” he said as he sat next to me.
“Deva, really. Do you have news?”
“They’re, like, gone or something,” he replied in a faint voice.
“What?”
“They’re both in continuation school. Chris’s dad put them there until the move.”
“What move?”
“Montana. My stepmom knows their dad through music stuff. She said he built a big recording studio out there. He’s going to go with the kids. It’s cheaper and stuff there.”
“He didn’t build the studio, his children built it,” I replied defensively.
He got up. His bus was approaching. “Whatever.” He shrugged his shoulders at me.
He got on and turned to me as he waited his turn to insert the coins in the slot by the driver. “See ya.”
I crossed the street and started walking in the opposite direction, toward the canyon.
—
The bay-leaf shrubs in Deva’s driveway were overgrown. I thrust my fingers against them like we always did when we came back to her place, except this time I didn’t have to hide the smell of smoke from anyone. The shrubs whipped back at my arms like green armored shields protecting the crooked house—a fortress guarded by unfriendly plants. I pushed them back and kept walking up. The field of oak trees beneath the terrace hummed with the melody of Deva’s laughter. It was the first thing I heard when I approached the house. My heart raced. I was back in that yard. The air smelled of woody eucalyptus, the familiar scent of all the good places I loved. For a moment it made me think maybe we could still take it all back.
Folk music played. Through the front window I saw her father sitting at his desk. His crutches leaned against the wall. Deva stood over him, hair up in a bun, a pen squeezed between her fingers. She was taking notes about something. Her father’s music awards had come off the walls and the house was bare and full of scattered boxes. I couldn’t tell if it was post-earthquake chaos or the looming presence of the move. Her father pulled her to him and sat her on his lap playfully as they picked out a selection of pictures that were displayed on the desk. Deva pushed him back, yanking his shirt with the deliberate gesture of a woman, yet there was something unfeminine about her or maybe it wasn’t the femininity I’d known. Deva the girl was gone, leaving space for a baritone woman. And it was as if my thoughts were audible because she lifted her eyes the moment I conjured her, meeting my gaze through the window. She looked down then tapped her father’s shoulder.
He let her go. Didn’t look up, had nothing to fear now.
Deva came out and let her hair down as she walked to me. It flopped against her back creating the same golden veil she’d had the first time I followed her down to the river.
“What are you doing? You can’t come back here anymore,” she said.
“Is it true you’re moving?”
“My father is filing a restraining order against you. I’m trying to convince him not to. If he sees you—”
“Are you? Are you moving to Montana? Really?” I glanced up at the main house.
“It’s for his work. He got a manager there. Plus a great studio. We’re going in a few weeks. LA is not good for his music anymore.”
“You don’t have to go. You could stay with me once you turn eighteen.”
“I’m never going back to the Valley.”
The bruise on her forehead was almost gone, the bluish tint had turned into a lilac patch of translucent flesh.
“I can help you,” I said and meant it. “You’re not seeing things the way they are.”
She stood there, cold and firm. Her eyes would not blink. They looked small and beady like her father’s. He must have put her on some kind of medication. She was a mask. There was something emotion-purged and unfeeling about her.
“We’re finishing something up. You better leave.”
She looked at my velvet bell-bottoms. They were hers. I wore them almost every day now. “You can keep them.”
“You can’t keep this up. You don’t have to be your father’s assistant.”
A thick vein pumped on her forehead. She was not a kid anymore.
“Go,” she replied firmly. Her eyes trembled with a slight rapid motion. She hugged me and pressed her cold face against my neck for a moment. “Don’t try to stop this. It will be all right.” Then she smiled.
She turned around and walked away. I felt ice-cold all of a sudden. I wanted to run after her, but instead I kept looking at her thick hair bouncing off her shoulders. I caught a final glimpse of her pale freckled cheeks before they disappeared inside the house. The door shut behind her. It was the end of halos and eucalyptus cones, of terraced apple orchards and crooked cottages. The end of the place above. I walked back down her driveway one last time and started to cry. Then I remembered how the trees of the house were like audience members. I tried to stop my tears. I didn’t want them to think I looked stupid.
26
My mother stood over a marble sink holding a dead guinea fowl, ripping its feathers out a few at a time. I hadn’t expected Henry to have a marble sink, but his new apartment was filled with the amenities of a new life. Everything was different after the money from the insurance came through, even his hair. He chopped it off. He didn’t care about showing his missing ear anymore. The new store space on Melrose Avenue was smaller and less
cluttered. This was not a neighborhood where you could sit and stare at a screen or take bong hits in the back. He lived alone in the small apartment upstairs where we now sat—Henry, Phoebe, my brother, father, and I looking at Serena’s clenched teeth as she plucked the dead bird. Henry and Phoebe now took cooking lessons from her. After the quake Phoebe had moved to Agoura Hills, farther into the Valley.
“If I’m to die old and fat I’d rather do it where nobody can see me,” she said. But I thought she still looked beautiful.
When I was ten years old my mother smiled and said, “Taste this,” and put a sweet and gushy piece of flesh in my mouth. It was the tongue of a cow. I didn’t know meat could taste that sweet. I didn’t know cow tongues could be consumed and I got angry at her for feeding me a part of an animal I didn’t want to eat, but that’s how she was. She moved on. Dead birds, cow tongues, veal brains, she didn’t care if her kids thought it was scary or wrong to eat them. The world would adjust. I looked over at her from the dinner table and wondered if I’d ever be at peace with something dead, if I’d find the courage to keep going and move forward even when everything around me said it was too much.
“It’s important to massage the fowl, make it think it’s loved, even if it’s already dead,” she explained to Henry and Phoebe, her hands reeking with bird juices. Her hair was getting longer and her darker roots were growing back in.
Henry signaled me to go to his bedroom. We slipped away. It was the middle of June. The heat wave made everything hot and muggy, but his bedroom had a new remote-controlled air conditioner. We sat on the bed next to each other, and looked out the window onto Melrose Avenue. A group of drag queens in matching outfits stampeded down the street, cackling. I felt I was in a city again, a place where people existed outside the windows.
“Looks like they’re having fun,” Henry said with a smirk.
I turned to look at his face. I never realized how round it was when he had long hair—like a full, pale moon.
“I wanted to ask you something,” he announced uncomfortably. “I want to find and sell treasures. Real treasures. Hollywood is not like the Valley. People actually expect things here. I need help.”
Things That Happened Before the Earthquake Page 26
