Dark Water - Laura McNeal [67]
“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.
Forty-four
When 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.
My phone made its first warning beep, and I ignored it. I knew I had to call my mother again, but I wanted to find Amiel.
The smoke was air and the air was smoke, like standing upwind of a bonfire you couldn’t see. The reeds along the river were scissor gray, and water flowed through them with no particular hurry except where wind ruffled the surface. I could see the upper story of trees bending near Amiel’s house, and I wanted to scream, “Amiel,” but something told me to wait. I tore off my shoes and started sloshing.
Right away I could see something was wrong. Sometime in the last two days, sticks and twigs had been thrown everywhere, some of them the size of tree limbs. Amiel’s tin pot lay beside a plastic bag. One of his T-shirts had been ripped and thrown into a tree. “Amiel?” I said. When I’d walked a few more yards, I could see that his carefully woven wall of branches had been torn apart, exposing his house.