Heart Echoes

by Sally John

  A banging on her passenger window made her jump. The scrunched face from the car next to hers peered through it. “Are you all right?” he shouted.

  She nodded, took the key from the ignition, climbed out, and spotted the attaché in the backseat. Her laptop inside of it would roast. She got back in, cracked open the sunroof, got out, and wondered about looters. Day off or heyday? The car beeped as she hit the locks.

  At her left sat two vacant cars. Their occupants could have been any of the countless people standing or roaming about. Behind her, two businessmen stood beside an SUV, removing ties, rolling up sleeves. She walked forward, toward the minivan from Iowa. Those people must be going crazy. Her pumps clicked on the pavement. She should get the sneakers out of the trunk. Maybe later. If she had to hoof it home.

  Yes, later. There would be a later. There would be an end to this horrific moment.

  Her steps slowed at the surreal scene before her. It was like being on the set of some B movie, a disaster film with obviously fake props and far too many actors.

  She reached the van and gasped. On its hood sat a chunk of concrete the size of a desk. A spiderweb of cracks covered the windshield.

  Teal leaned inside, through the open side door. A woman sat in the front passenger seat; three kids under the age of ten sat in the back. All four were quiet and wide eyed.

  “Hey.” She gave them a small smile. “Welcome to LA. You okay? I mean, basically overall okay?”

  The woman shook her head and then nodded. A butterfly bandage was on her forehead beneath short blonde curls, fresh blood seeping at its edges. She wore her seat belt. “Yes. No.”

  Teal nodded. “Me too.” She eyed the kids, two boys in the center seats and a girl in the far back. They wore swimsuits. “The good news is the beach will still be there tomorrow.”

  The tallest, a boy, said, “What about a tsunami?”

  Teal swallowed. “No worries. The earthquake would have to start underwater, out at sea. I bet this one came from close by. Inland. No big waves.”

  “What about aftershocks?”

  “You’re a regular walking encyclopedia.”

  The corners of his mouth twitched.

  She hoped it was a smile and not a precursor to bawling. “Most likely there will be an aftershock. Or a few.” As in countless? For days on end? Weeks even? “All the ones I’ve experienced are smaller than the initial quake. But we still need to duck, cover, and hold on to something sturdy when we feel one.”

  “Outdoors?”

  “Uh, no. Then we just stay away from everything that might fall.” She winced. There wasn’t anything left to fall except the other side of the overpass.

  The little blonde in the back said, “Our daddy is a doctor. He fixed Mommy’s head. Now he’s fixing that man.” She pointed over Teal’s shoulder. “I’m a ’cycopedia too.”

  “Yes, you are.” Teal glanced behind her and saw a man wearing a floral shirt, shorts, and a stethoscope.

  The woman said, “He noticed an elderly man in that car and thought he might need some attention.”

  “That’s wonderful. How did you get hurt?”

  “My window was down. Something . . . flew . . . in.” Her hands fluttered. Teal imagined that under normal circumstances, her skin glowed with Midwest peaches and cream.

  “Do you want to get out of the van?”

  “Is it safe?”

  “I don’t know, but maybe safer than that windshield.” She blew out a breath. “What we need to do is get out of here. I wonder if . . . Oh.” She felt the telltale rumble. “Here it comes. Hold on to your zingiezangers!”

  The kids hit the deck before she did. The woman screamed. Teal hopped onto the seat the oldest boy had vacated, bent double, and covered her head. Nobody asked what a zingiezanger was.

  Evidently it didn’t matter. They understood, just as her daughter had understood as a toddler. The word probably explained why Maiya still laughed at earthquakes.

  The neighbor woman who had cared for Maiya while Teal went to school and worked taught the nonsensical word to her. She used it to warn Maiya about loud noises, running in the rain, zipping down slides, swinging high, uncontrollable giggling, and earthquakes. Hold on to your zingiezangers!

  Teal ached. She needed to hold on to her family.

  The chaos escalated.

  Helicopters hovered and whirred and whomped. An amplified voice boomed down from one of them with repetitive, indecipherable messages. Emergency vehicles crept along the freeway shoulders on both sides of the median, moving toward the overpass. Their discordant sirens and flashing lights were nerve-racking.

  A slice of America—every age, race, and culture—roamed between parked vehicles. Some people looked like aimless zombies with blank expressions; others sobbed uncontrollably.

  Teal did her own haphazard wandering, her breath in ragged spurts, her prayers repetitive one-liners. Keep them safe. Keep them safe. Help us. Help us. Her body refused to stop trembling. Walking on pavement she regularly traversed in her car but never set foot on added an eeriness to the entire scenario.

  The worst damage within her vicinity was to the van from Iowa; the worst injury, the woman’s cut forehead. A quarter of a mile ahead was impossible to comprehend. There would not be enough emergency personnel to help everyone in this one area alone. How extensively had the city been hit?

  She and her new best friends hatched an exit plan. The three children and their mother, Carole Swanson, would ride with Teal. Dr. Swanson and the old man with chest pains would ride with Ron, the breath holder, and Joe, a truck driver parked behind him. There was nothing to be done with the out-of-commission minivan. The old man’s car would have to stay put. The semi would not be budging for a long, long time.

  Behind them a domino effect had begun. In the distance vehicles crept back and forth, back and forth, making tight one-eighty turns. Little by little they inched forward, allowing other drivers to start the turn. A line of traffic snaked toward an exit Teal had passed, perhaps half a mile back, hours ago.

  It would take a while before they would have space to turn around. In the meantime, Dr. Swanson from Iowa opened his family’s picnic basket and coolers and distributed food and water to the Californians who had not stocked their own cars on the off chance a quake would strike and leave them stranded on a hot summer’s day.

  Teal drank from her bottle of water because she was sweating and hoped she wouldn’t have to get in line at the nearby RV, whose owners had opened their bathroom to the world. She helped the Swansons transfer their things to her trunk and fielded the eldest boy’s questions about landslides, seismographs, and fires caused by damaged electrical and gas lines.

  It wasn’t the most encouraging topic of conversation, but it beat crawling onto her backseat and passing the time in a fetal position.

  Chapter 4

  The concrete floor rumbled beneath River’s back.

  He eyed the water heater. Strapped securely to the wall, it didn’t budge during the aftershock. The wall stayed put as well.

  “Thank You, God.”

  But more aftershocks were likely to hit, jiggling things that had already been jiggled, loosening things like the gas line that led to the water tank. He needed to get to the shutoff valve.

  River worked at shoving aside books and plastic tubs, a centimeter at a time, in between the hot knife stabbing at his insides and cutting off his air.

  He wondered if the broken ribs had damaged something else. It seemed he would realize if that were true, though, that he would feel worse than he did. Wouldn’t he be passed out or screaming in pain by now?

  More than anything, River hated being helpless.

  He lay flat again, relaxed his neck and shoulders, and grimaced at the rafters. The last time helplessness engulfed him, it had morphed into a good thing.

  It had all started when his sister wanted to divorce her wealthy, philandering investor husband. Jen was her emotionally messy self on steroids at the time. River s
tepped in as he had always done. Even before their parents’ deaths when he and his sister were in their early twenties, he had watched over her.

  Jen chose the all-female law firm of Canfield and Stone, specialists in family law and the primo group for taking rich husbands to the cleaners. River imagined a company of Amazons and feared his sister would get carried away with vengeance. Her husband might deserve it, but he knew his sister. Jen would regret her actions.

  He tagged along with her to the appointment.

  And he met Ms. Teal Morgan.

  Helplessness swamped him. She was nothing at all like an Amazon. The woman was everything he didn’t know he needed. Life radiated from her face and in the touch of her hand in his. Dried-up corners of his heart soaked it in and longed for more.

  “Hi.” She smiled. Those luminous, pale-gray eyes rimmed in a bluish slate never wavered.

  “Hi. Uh, nice to meet you, Ms. Morgan. I hope you don’t mind a big brother butting in?”

  “Not at all. And it’s Teal. Like the duck.”

  He grinned. “I’m River. Like the river.”

  She giggled.

  Later, much later, she swore their future was sealed in that moment. She had laughed, tickled with a sudden understanding: ducks could not survive without water.

  Yes, a good ending to helplessness.

  The shallow breathing was making him light-headed. There was no hope of crawling into his truck; it was parked out on the street. He doubted he could get to his feet. Someone would find him, though. Eventually. Teal or Maiya would come home. Maybe they would feel so bad for him they wouldn’t mention the shelves he had promised to build to hold those stacked tubs now fallen on him.

  At least Jen was not a concern. Husband Number Two, less of a jerk than Number One, had taken her to Paris for her birthday last week.

  Sirens wailed—fire engines, ambulances, police. They grew loud. They faded. More split the air. Far and near. Far and near.

  River groaned, dumbfounded at how slow he could be. He was not helpless nor hopeless nor unable to set things in motion.

  “Lord, in Your mercy, hear my prayer.” He slipped into a cadence that always moved him easily into the presence of God. “Surround my loved ones. For Teal and Maiya, I ask for protection. For our neighbors, I ask for protection. For San Sebastian Academy, I ask for protection. For John, Lynn, Delia, Olie, Mac . . .” He listed his coworkers and then he went on to list every boy who lived at the school, all fifty of them. “And for Jen, I pray she would not hear the news just yet.”

  Chapter 5

  “She looks a lot like you,” Mr. Smarty-Pants Encyclopedia commented on a family photo Teal had pulled from her wallet as they stood near her car. “He looks like a hippie.”

  “And what would you know about hippies, Nick?” By now they were all on a first-name basis.

  “We have hippies in Iowa.” He grinned. The freckles on his nose bunched together. Cute, pesky kid.

  “My husband’s ponytail does not mean he is a hippie. He’s earthy.”

  “Is River his real name?”

  The question no longer bothered her. It came as frequently as the one about how to spell Maiya’s name. “His parents were professors at Berkeley in the sixties.”

  “That explains that.”

  She shook her head. “You’re only ten.”

  “Eleven next week. What’s your point?”

  “That you’re precocious and annoying.”

  “I get that a lot. Would your daughter like me?”

  “She’s too old for you.”

  “But I’m precocious, and she’s a hottie.”

  Teal slid her sunglasses onto the top of her head and gave him her best glare. “I won’t charge you for this piece of advice. ‘She’s a hottie’ is not something you want to say to a mother if you hope to spend any time with her daughter.”

  He blinked a few times.

  She bit her lip, holding back a smile at his sudden speechlessness.

  He said, “Seriously?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But it’s a compliment.”

  “Only to hormone-laden adolescents. I thought you wanted to see inside Joe’s semi over there.”

  He smiled and handed her the photo. “I can take a hint. Don’t leave without us.”

  She murmured to his retreating back. “Maiya would eat you up.”

  Teal retrieved her handbag from the front seat and sat down, her sneakered feet on the asphalt. She shut out the unbearable noise of sirens, helicopters, and crying people and stared at her photo.

  It had helped at first, talking with the boy about Maiya and River. But now the apprehension slammed into her again, a literal twisting of her heart. Where were they? Were they all right? How long would this unknowing continue? How long could she take it?

  And how long could they take it not knowing about her? River would be having an especially hard time of it.

  If he were okay.

  He had to be okay.

  She noted other people checking cell phones like she had been. Sometimes a signal appeared, but the lines were jammed. There was no getting through. Supposedly no one should even be trying to get through except for emergencies.

  She wasn’t sure what this was if not an emergency. It wasn’t dire, though, at least not for her. She was hot and tired and anxious, but she was walking and talking. She could leave soon in her own car. She was not lying under those tons of broken concrete.

  The photo was fairly new. She had done some legal work for a photographer, saw samples of her artistic flair, and decided this year’s Christmas card would include a professional family picture taken far in advance. Teal bribed River and Maiya with the promise of homemade chocolate chip cookies. They dressed for the occasion and grinned on either side of her next to a palm tree with the ocean as a backdrop—Currier and Ives, West Coast style.

  Maiya’s fashion concoctions usually worked. For the picture her black hair was brushed straight back and held in place with a wide tortoiseshell headband. As usual, her vivid green eyes drew attention to themselves. She wore only one pair of earrings—large silver hoops—and a long multicolored neck scarf. Over a white T-shirt hung a loose-knit purple vest and several strands of beads. Black leggings allowed the bun-hugging gray skirt to pass muster.

  River, Teal’s earthy husband, wore his wavy, nut-brown hair as usual in a low, short ponytail but left the ball cap at home. He had exchanged jeans for khakis and put on a red button-down oxford over a white San Sebastian Academy T-shirt. He smiled, his teeth a slash of white in his perennially tanned face, his cobalt-blue eyes all but hidden behind thick lashes.

  Now there was the hottie. Even five years after meeting him she thought so. Totally not her type, though. No one was more surprised than herself when five minutes after he stepped into her office, she was writing down his phone number, and not because he was her client Jenny Nelson’s brother.

  He worked with at-risk teenage boys. He sat with them during drug withdrawals and at parole hearings and taught them how to plant gardens and say please and thank you. She got regular manicures and haircuts and wore suits and heels. When push came to shove, she raked moguls over the coals until they bled money.

  They were an odd threesome.

  But they were a threesome, the sort of three-stranded cord that was impossible to break.

  Teal put the photo back in her wallet. It was best not to think about them.

  Chapter 6

  River sat on the garage floor, his head between his knees. He had managed to stand up briefly before nausea suggested sitting might be the wiser choice.

  It wasn’t so much the pain of cracked bones that sickened him. It was a deeper pain, yanked by its roots up and out of its burial place to sneer in his face.

  “They’re all right.” He gasped the words, determined to fight back. “They are all right. Krissy and Sammy are . . . Oh, God. Oh, God.”

  He was losing his mind.

  Teal and Maiya were all right. Te
al and Maiya.

  Tears stung his eyes.

  What would Sammy have looked like as a ten-year-old?

  “Stop.”

  It was a stupid game to play. Extreme exhaustion brought it on. Sometimes the sight of a towheaded boy in the grocery store. Once his fingers tracing the hollow at the base of Teal’s neck sparked it. He could now add earthquakes to the short list.

  The boy would be blond and brown-eyed like his mother. All rough and tumble like his father.

  Or so River imagined. He’d never held his son.

  “Stop.”

  Would Krissy’s hair still be that white-blonde shade at the age of forty?

  “Stop it!”

  If he knew the answers, then he would not know Teal and Maiya.

  Correction. He would have met Teal because he would have gone with his sister to the law office. But he would not have asked for Teal’s private phone number. No way.

  Had anticipation of dinner with his wife and young son lived inside of him instead of aridity, he would not have looked twice at Ms. Morgan. Had even the impression of his wedding band—then six years gone—been evident to Teal, she never would have made note of his phone number.

  In his mind’s eye he went to the morgue. The morgue. They couldn’t locate him right away. He had been camping in the mountains with students. Krissy had been driving in town, on her way to work. Seven months pregnant. An idiot SUV driver on a rain-slick freeway hit her.

  Teal most likely had been driving when the quake struck, on her way to the office, on the freeway.

  “Stop.”

  She was okay.

  Maiya was with friends not too many blocks away.

  She was okay.

  River put his arms on a plastic tub and pushed himself to his feet.

  He was okay.

  They all had to be okay.

  He took three steps toward the door and sank again to the floor. Rough and tumble disintegrated on the spot.

  Chapter 7

  The hours blurred into one long continuum. The horror came in cold waves, an unending tide of fear and despair with little time to take a breath.