Dark Water (20 page)

I was hoping, like everyone else who lay awake listening to the wind, that no pyromaniacs were out there, trembling in thrall beneath the god monster, reaching for a match.

Go to sleep go to sleep go to sleep gotosleep
.

I said it, but I didn’t listen. Then finally, around three o’clock, I guess I did.

F
ires started twice when my father was still at home, always in October, always to the west of us, where most of the hills were used for training by the marines. Both times, my father kept saying casually, “It’s farther than it looks.” He said it the year forty-seven houses burned in Fallbrook, and he was right. Those houses were three miles from us, not three hundred feet, as it appeared in the dark.

From our former house, which was on a hill, we could watch fires as they licked their way up hillsides in the dark, and we could follow the tiny red lights of planes dropping scoops of water, and we could hear the sirens as the fire engines screamed west on Mission Road, and we barely slept on those nights, getting up every half hour to go to the windows and see if the fire had moved any closer.

Just before dawn on September 14, I heard my mother’s
cell phone ring. It was the school dispatcher giving her a job subbing at Mary Fay Pendleton, the elementary school out on the marine base. It was second grade, which she liked, because at that age kids still wanted to hug you, even if you were just there for one day, and the worst thing that ever happened was a kid shouting, “My tooth fell out!”

“I smell smoke,” I said.

“The power’s out,” my mom said, flipping the light switch to no effect.

I looked at the empty face of the digital clock and turned the button on the radio. Nothing.

We went outside in our pajamas. Lavar’s house was low inside the grove, and you couldn’t see anything but avocado trees. The god monster was still blowing hard on all of us, and the branches shook.

“Where do you think it is?” I asked, turning around and around. It was already warm outside, like an oven you’ve just turned on.

We looked at the sky again, and I spotted the plume.

“It’s always farther than it looks,” my mother said, shielding her eyes, and then she turned to walk indoors.

I wondered if she knew she sounded like my father. “Don’t you think we should stay home?” I asked. I wanted to go to the river and find Amiel.

“Oh, it’s probably thirty miles away and ninety percent contained,” she said, letting the screen door flap shut. “Hurry or we’re going to be late.”

I was still dubious, but my uncle Hoyt called my mother to
say he’d checked with the high school and they had electricity. I could hear his voice from clear across the room. “School’s in session, they told me,” he said. “Robby’s going.”

“Is Robby going to drive?” I asked her to ask him. I wanted to ride with Robby instead.

“He’ll drive if he can find his car keys,” came the voice.

“Robby can ride with us,” my mother told him. “We’re leaving in fifteen minutes. Do you know where the fire is?”

“East,” the phone voice seemed to shout. “I’m going to hop on my bike and check it out. I’ll let you know later on, okay? Keep you updated.” When Hoyt said “bike,” he meant his off-road motorcycle, so my mother said okay.

My only option was to pretend it was a normal day, except that you couldn’t run a hair dryer, coffeemaker, microwave, or toaster. You couldn’t see yourself in the bathroom mirror because the bathroom was so dark. My mother stood by the living room window and looked in the mirror over the fireplace to put her hair up in a bun. I did a ponytail the same way. She took an Excedrin to replace her cup of coffee. Robby, frazzled and furious from not finding the car keys, met us at the Oyster.

“I even looked in the pool,” he said.

It wasn’t until we reached the overpass that I had a good look at the eastern sky. West of us, above Fallbrook and the river, the sky was blue, but behind us, it was Armageddon brown.

“I think we should turn back,” I said. “We should pack our stuff.”

“I can’t be late,” my mother said.

Robby twisted his head around to scrutinize the cloud. “Relax,” he said. “My dad’ll check it out. He’ll get pretty close and let us know if there’s any danger.”

“Right,” my mother said, accelerating.

She kissed me goodbye on the cheek in the high school parking lot. She didn’t normally do that anymore, and it made me nervous. The air still had that campfire smell, but from the parking lot, the huge milky stain in the sky was invisible. Some hills and houses were blocking it.

“Whatcha
le
think?” I asked Robby. I stood looking in the direction of the hidden smoke.

“About the fire?” he asked. He shrugged. “I think air quality’s gonna be low, so they’ll cancel PE today.”

I thought of this as a positive, but Robby looked glum.

“See you at lunch?” I asked.

“Right,” he said. “Meet you by the flagpole.”

But we didn’t make it to lunch. At the end of second period, Mr. K. came on the loudspeaker and announced that school was canceled. Buses would run. Parents had been notified. Evacuation orders had been issued to parts of Fallbrook, Rainbow, and Pala, so we should proceed home.

Kids in my history class pulled out their cell phones and turned them on. I did the same, and as we all lifted our heavy backpacks, the doors of every classroom clanked open and out flowed a river of students with phones clapped to their ears. Soon the quad was a sea of backpacks and people staring nervously into space as they had conversations with people who weren’t there.

My mother had already left me a message. She said she had to stay in her classroom until every single child was signed out. “Go home with Robby and Uncle Hoyt,” she said. “Stay with them, and I’ll meet up with you when I can leave here.”

Robby was standing at the flagpole, his backpack slumped casually by his feet. “Weren’t you just totally Cassandra this morning?” he said.

“Who’s that again?” Robby disliked all fiction except Tintin and Greek mythology, so I assumed Cassandra was Greek.

“She foretold the future, but she was also cursed so that everybody always doubted her.”

“Yes, then. Cassandra,
c’est moi.
”

“My dad said my mom’s freaking out and packing stuff. We got a reverse 9-1-1 call.”

I’d never heard of this.

“They dial
in
instead of
out
,” he said. “Instead of you calling the emergency people, they call you.”

“Oh,” I said. “Did your dad go see the fire?”

“He said he tried. It’s not that far away. He said he’s filling the truck up with gas and we’ve got to find a place to stay.”

“Where are we supposed to go?” I asked.

“Not up 15,” Robby said. “The freeway’s closed.”

It was as if he’d said the sky was closed. “Closed? Then how’s everyone going to get out?”

“The other way,” he said. “You have to get to the 5,” which was the other eight-lane freeway going north or south but along the coast. Getting to the coast freeway could be difficult even on Sundays, when people in Fallbrook and Temecula and
Vista tried to go to the beach on a winding road that was just two lanes wide.

In other words, we were in a maze with two exits, and one of them was on fire.

Just then Greenie and Hickey found us. “Can you believe this?” she said. “How’re you getting home?”

“My mom can’t leave her school until all the little kids get picked up,” I said. “So we’re waiting for Robby’s dad.”

Hickey said, “Call him and tell him I’ll take you. I’ve got my car.”

Robby thought about it for a few seconds, and then he called his dad. He said the school parking lot was a mess so it’d be faster to go with Hickey.

“I’ll meet you at Greenie’s house, then,” I heard Hoyt shouting through Robby’s phone. “The line at the gas station is getting really—hey, it’s my turn, all right? I’ll see you there.”

T
he Coombs house was chaotic. They hadn’t received an evacuation order, but they were packing both cars, anyway. Boxes of baby pictures, file folders, suitcases, and a tub of dog food sat by the front door. Greenie’s brother was packing his Star Wars action figures and Mr. Coombs was calling hotels in Las Vegas.

“You’re going all the way to Las Vegas?” I said to Greenie. It was a four-hour drive.

Greenie said, “That’s weird,” and went upstairs to find her mother.

Robby, Hickey, and I sat uneasily on the couch. The huge TV was on, and we couldn’t help watching the news, which was mostly aerial pictures of burning hills, the strange empty lanes of the closed interstate, the slow thick lines of cars moving south where the freeway was open. Clouds of smoke the
size of continents rose above them. Sometimes the camera zoomed in to show fire licking at bushes and roaring out of trees, but when the newscaster talked about where the fire was moving, he identified towns and neighborhoods far away from Fallbrook. There was more than one fire burning at the same time, and the one we were watching was near San Diego.

“I don’t get it,” Robby said. “Is that the reason we’re being evacuated? That fire’s like thirty miles away.”

We watched some more, and the screen went to a map that showed a series of red dots. Each dot had a name. Each dot was a different fire. The one by Fallbrook was called “Agua Prieta.”

“There’s our fire,” Hickey said.

Agua Prieta was the creek where I’d eaten loquats with Amiel, and if the fire was burning there, he was right in its path. “All of Fallbrook is under mandatory evacuation orders,” the newscaster said.

With a sick feeling I couldn’t tell Robby or Greenie about, I went to the backyard so I could look into the canyon. The sky was a dull peach color, not blue, and the air in front of me was flecked with bits of ash. The trees in the canyon looked dry in the haze, not green but khaki, and the wind made them lean and rattle. Would Amiel know if a fire was coming? He had no television and no phone. I’d never even seen a radio.

From where I stood, I heard Greenie’s voice. “If we’re going to Las Vegas,” she asked, “can Hickey come?”

“No,” her mother said. “No! Of course not. He should go home right now. Isn’t his family worried about him?”

“Of course they’re worried about him. But he was making sure I’m okay. He brought me home first, if you didn’t notice. And Robby and Pearl.”

“I appreciate that,” Greenie’s mother said. “But he should go now. You can bring Pearl with you to Las Vegas if you want. She’s welcome.”

Greenie didn’t answer, or if she did, she’d moved too far away from the window to be heard. I walked to the edge of the yard, where a dry lilac bush clung to a rocky slope. I snapped off a sprig and crushed it easily to dust. It would only take ten or fifteen minutes to hike down to Amiel’s house and see if he was okay. Then we could walk back out together.

I heard a chugging engine, and when I turned, my uncle was pulling to a stop by the mailbox and opening his door. He started to adjust the straps that held his dirt bike upright in the truck bed, and for some reason—fear, maybe, or an awareness of how quickly I would have to act in order to hide the details of my plan from everyone—I ran toward him.

“Hi, Pearly,” he said. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Just a little scared.” I was shaking all over, so he hugged me.

“Well, let’s go, all right?” he said. “Is Robby inside?”

“Yeah, but Hoyt?” I said. “The Coombs are going to Las Vegas.”

“Do they have relatives there?” he asked.

“No,” I said, pulling my hair out of my mouth. The wind was stronger at the front of the house where there were no trees to block it. “But they’ve invited me to go with them,” I said. Which was true. I’d heard that.

“Did you call your mom?” Hoyt said.

“She didn’t answer her phone yet. I’m going to keep trying.” And I was going to keep trying. I was going to keep trying to tell her I was going to Las Vegas.

Just then the front door of the Coombs house opened. I expected it to be Mr. or Mrs. Coombs, and if my uncle said something about how I was going with them to Las Vegas, I would really have to go, and Amiel would burn to death in the canyon because he had no television, no radio, no phone, and no car.

But it wasn’t Mr. or Mrs. Coombs. It was Robby. “Hey, Dad,” he said.

The door closed behind him.

“Pearl’s going to Las Vegas with Greenie,” Hoyt told him. “We’d better get going before your mother calls me again.”

“Where are we going?” Robby asked.

“To the Gaudets’,” Hoyt said. “They have room for us and they’re near the 5.”

I didn’t know who the Gaudets were, but it turned out they were a family from the Alliance Française of San Diego.

“Oh, great,” Robby said. He walked over to the truck and slung his backpack into the truck bed. I wanted them to leave. I wanted them to hurry. If they stayed in front of the house for ten more seconds, I knew Mrs. Coombs would come out.

“Well, bye,” I said, and I started walking backward.

“Keep your phone on,” my uncle said, and I hugged them both, even Robby, which felt weird because Robby and I weren’t huggers.

“I will,” I said, but some part of me that wanted to be truthful said, “The battery’s getting low, though. I forgot to plug my phone in last night, and we didn’t have any power this morning.”

Hoyt stopped walking to the driver’s side of the truck. He stood still and looked into his phone.

“Here,” I said, my whole body listening for the front door to open and the screen door to creak. “Give me your phone, Robby.” I typed Greenie’s number into Robby’s phone, and then I turned around. “Greenie’s waiting for me,” I said, and I hoped Robby and Hoyt wouldn’t think it strange that I went to the backyard instead of the front porch. I held my breath when I got out of sight, still shivering all over, and I held my hand to the rough stucco of Greenie’s house until I heard the roar of the Packrat’s engine. Then, taking just one more glance at the house, I ran to the lilac bush and began to pick my way down the rocky slope to the river.

W
hen I reached the bottom, the sky was yellow-brown and my shoes held buckets of dirt. My teeth clacked together, but the air was hot and I felt like a turkey trapped alive in one of those super-smokers. I tried not to think about the family in Valley Center that had tried to evacuate in the last fire like this. Two sisters were in a car trying to outrun the flames, but the flames caught up. One girl died, and the other lived in a burn unit for most of the next year.