Dark Water - Laura McNeal [70]
Forty-five
When I was little, my mother used to do crafts with me. We’d press flowers and make waxed paper cards, or we’d sew pincushions out of felt and stuff them with sawdust from the neighbor’s garage. But my favorite thing was this paper that made really primitive photographs called “sun prints.” You set a piece of lace or a leaf or a skeleton key on the paper and let the sun shine on it for a few minutes, and then you dipped the paper in water. The paper turned blue, but the shadow of the object turned white.
When Amiel and I got back to the house, I turned the radio to a station where the news was in English. I sat down in front of it as if the foundation of the house were a giant piece of photographic paper. Amiel went away and changed his clothes and came back, dry except for his hair. It was two o’clock, and the sun was purple. I felt sick from breathing the smoke and sick from fear. I lay down, finally, on the blanket Amiel had placed beside the wall. I said, “We could go up to a neighborhood and find a car.”
This made no sense. What car? I was going to steal a car?
“We could get a ride with someone,” I clarified.
All I’d have to do was explain to someone that my name was Pearl and I was separated from my mother because she was a substitute teacher who was out on the base today and my cell phone was dead.
Anyone would help me. Anyone at all.
And this is my friend, Amiel.
They would help him, too. They’d think he was a student at Fallbrook High. They wouldn’t ask questions. Not during a fire.
I went through this in my mind until I was satisfied, and then I told Amiel how it would work.
He regarded me briefly, then said we shouldn’t climb now. “El fuego,” he said, his voice worse and worse, choked as if he had laryngitis, “se suben rápido.” Fire. Rapid. I got that part. He used his hand to show something in flight, something zooming upward. The fire drills and assemblies of my childhood had taught me this, hot air rises, but I didn’t know that it burns fast going uphill and slow coming down.
I tried, weakly, to say that we could go east, where it would be flat for a long time. He picked up the radio and turned the dial until he found an American station. “Well, at this point,” a man was saying, “all four fires in San Diego County are zero percent contained. Rainbow, Fallbrook, Escondido, Rancho Bernardo, Ramona, and parts of Julian are under evacuation orders. Winds are very high. If you haven’t gotten out of those places, you need to get out now.”
“Oh my God,” I said.
Amiel sat very still and calm, watching the sky to the east. I lay down with my fists covering my eyes, my face toward the wall, knees locked in despair. In a sun print, I would have been the skeleton key.
I lay there thinking and trying not to think, trusting him to know when we should get in the water and fearing that no one could know when to get in the water. I felt his shadow and heard the scrape of his feet. He lay down beside me and put one arm over my waist, and we lay there front to back until I took the fists away from my eyes and turned around.
If you move something in a sun print, the edges blur. I felt the edges of myself blur into nothingness as I kissed Amiel and he kissed me, and I found in the abandon of kissing him, clothes on, bodies moving, a physical way to go where my mind had already gone: deep down into water that would let the fire pass over us. I sank deeper and deeper, swimming without effort or resistance, and he swam deeper, too, until we became the same swimmer, the same water, and were drowned.
All the time the radio voices were talking, but they weren’t talking about any places we knew, and I began to shiver afterward and to hear them