Dark Water - Laura McNeal [71]
I sat up, and Amiel did the same. We didn’t look at each other as we listened. The sun was far enough in the west that it had taken on a weird, coppery glow. The fire chief said they were hoping for a change in the wind and that firefighters were on their way from Northern California and Oregon, but the fire had jumped I-15 at Rainbow and was burning through residential areas along East Mission Road, which meant Willow Glen.
The fire was coming toward us, and the wind was coming toward us, and I knew I couldn’t spend a whole night waiting for the moment when we should submerge ourselves in a place where the river was just twelve feet across and two or three feet deep.
“There’s deeper water,” I said, remembering the spot on the river where Hickey and Greenie took me the day we ate lunch together. “Farther west of here. On the other side of the road. It’s wider there, too, like a big pool.”
Amiel looked at me like I made no sense, so I said, “I mean the De Luz Road. That way.” I pointed west, away from the fire.
Amiel shook his head and pointed out the doorless door at the nearest bank of the river.
“Have you been that way? To the end of the trail?”
He shook his head again and kissed my neck. I wondered if there was a name for what we’d just done together. It wasn’t sex, exactly. It wasn’t necking, certainly, and it wasn’t petting. I wondered if it was normal to worry about sex things while you were also worrying about burning alive.
“We can walk along the water and not go uphill,” I said in a shaky voice. “We can stay right near water the whole time so that if it catches up …”
But it was September, when the water was so shallow in places that you could never get all of yourself under it. I was unable to conjure a single part of the river that was fireproof. No matter where I went along the trail or the road from De Luz, black trees stuck out of the ground. Still, it had to be safer to move farther west, away from the fire they were talking about and into a place where the trees on either bank weren’t so close together.
I reached out for Amiel’s hand and he laced his hand into it. “Please,” I said. “Please let’s go to the deeper water.”
He let his eyes look into mine with full force, as if my head were a room in which he would find something he’d lost. “Si quieres,” he managed to say.
Not “yes.” Not “okay,” but “if you want.”
Forty-six
My mom used to tell me every time we went camping or hiking or even to the park on a crowded summer evening, “If you get lost, hug a tree,” the idea being that she could only find me if I stayed in one place.
I think now we should have followed Amiel’s plan. If we had, we would have stayed in the place where Robby told my uncle to look, and he would have found us.
The timeline, as I have pieced it together, goes like this.
My mother pulls over, as she threatened, and gets out of her car. People in other cars stare at her. They ask if she’s out of gas. She shakes her head. Most of the people have dogs in their cars. In a minivan, she sees a pair of llamas. They gaze at her with their long-lashed eyes, necks slightly bent. Trailers full of horses inch by, cats stare out of rear windows, fish float in aquariums, and birds fly in birdcages. Some people are holding goats. The whole exodus through Camp Pendleton is like a car-trip Noah’s Ark, and my mother, standing to watch it, dialing my uncle, draws the attention of an armed marine in uniform, who drives along the shoulder from some sort of a checkpoint to ask her what she needs.
“My daughter’s still in Fallbrook,” she says. “I thought she was with my brother, but she isn’t. I have to go back.”
The marine says she can’t go back. “How old is she?” the marine asks.
“Fifteen,” my mother says.
The marine thinks it’s one of those misunderstandings, a natural mistake, an innocent girl left alone in her house!