Dark Water - Laura McNeal [69]
The next message said, “Call me.”
And the next.
And the next.
Then she said, “I’m going to try Greenie’s mom.”
I was sitting there trying to think what to do when the phone began ringing in my hand. The screen said the person calling was my mother. I was conscious of Amiel lifting himself out of the river, of water running off his clothes, of muscles and skin that I wanted to touch the way that I wanted to breathe.
“Where are you going?” I asked, and he pointed toward his house. I wanted to turn on the radio and hear someone say, in English, that the fire was one hundred percent contained.
Instead, my phone rang again. I stared at it the way you might stare at the inside of your front door when you know it’s either the police or the psychopathic killer on the other side.
Either my mother knew by now that Greenie’s mom had no idea where I was, or she hadn’t been able to reach Greenie’s mom and I could, by answering the phone, put off that discovery a little longer.
“Mom?” I said.
“Where are you, Pearl?” my mother said, and I knew I’d opened the door at the wrong time.
“I’m fine,” I said automatically, as if that would help.
“Where are you being fine? I just talked to Greenie’s mom.”
“I had to check on someone,” I said.
“You had to check on someone?”
My ability to lie was like my ability to speak Spanish. I didn’t have the speed, the fluency, or the verb tenses. “I just, yeah, I had to.”
“I’m driving to the coast,” she said, enunciating all the words you would capitalize in the title of a story or play. “Hoyt and Agnès Are Driving to the Coast. We Are Driving to the Coast on Separate Roads and We Are Meeting There. Do you have any idea what’s going on here, Pearl? Are you still in Fallbrook? Is that what you’re not telling me?”
“Yeah, but I’m fine. I have a way out,” I said. I was looking at the water and thinking about what it would be like to sit in the river while a fire burned over us. Wouldn’t we die from inhaling smoke? How would we breathe?
“With whom?” my mother demanded.
I had no power to answer.
“With whom, Pearl?” my mom said. “Okay, I’m stopping the car. I’m going to have to turn around. If they’ll let me. I’m still on Camp Pendleton, you know. They’ve opened the road to civilians to make another road out. Opened the road through the base, Pearl. Do you have any idea how serious this is? Oh my God. It’s a boy, isn’t it? You’re with a boy. Just tell me how he’s getting you out of there and I’ll meet you at the pier in Oceanside. I don’t care who it is. Just stop lying to me.”
I turned around and watched Amiel’s wet back. Wetback, I thought. The ugly name for immigrants who swam across the Rio Grande. Just then my phone beeped to tell me my time was running out.
“Um, my battery’s going dead,” I said.
It was good, in many ways, that my phone was dying. A near-dead phone keeps you from knowing, for a while, that your father, during the largest evacuation in state history, doesn’t call to see how you are. Not once. Nada. No thought whatsoever for your safety. A near-dead phone keeps you from talking to the best friend you’ve used as an alibi. It keeps you from stumbling through another set of half lies to explain to your mother why you’re walking to a ruined house with a boy who’s more afraid of police than of wildfires.
“I’m pulling over,” my mother said. “I’m going to find a policeman or a marine or something, and we’ll get to you. Tell me where you are.”
“I’ll call you with another phone as soon as I can,” I said. “I promise.”
I had to close the phone. I had to turn it off. Or I had to say, “I’m at the river with that boy