Dark Water - Laura McNeal [64]
On September 13, we were the kindling, and a monstrous god leaned over us to breathe. Clouds melted, brush trembled, and the ocean burned white like molten glass. Palm fronds crashed into roads. Leaves swirled in the parking lot. My nose bled and my skin cracked. I breathed cotton-dry breaths through paper lips and dreamed of Amiel in the heat.
By the middle of the night, the wind was like a dry hurricane. It was furious with the house, furious with the trees, enraged by every last one of us. It threw things at the windows and it beat on the roof. I was reading For Whom the Bell Tolls and my mother was dreaming her sleeping pill dreams, and at 2 a.m., exhausted, I put the book down and covered my head with the blanket and repeated my mantra, Go to sleep go to sleep go to sleep.
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.
Forty-two
Fires 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?”