Dark Water - Laura McNeal [72]
“Where’s your house, ma’am?” the marine asks. He’s all ready with his walkie-talkie.
“She’s not there,” my mother has to admit. Then she has to confess she doesn’t know where I am and worse, that I won’t tell her.
What kind of girl acts like this during the Largest Evacuation in State History?
“Do you want me to call the sheriff?” the marine offers. He’s clearly stumped. “Hey, don’t cry, we’ll figure something out” comes along pretty soon after this. I know what this marine looks like, silver-haired and blue-eyed, and I know his name is Mitchell and that he’s forty-eight and divorced because he called my mother a few days later to ask if she found me okay, which led to her telling him the whole story, which led to him saying would you ever want to have dinner with me, and her saying that would be nice, and the two of them going to the same Ruby’s on the pier where I went for my birthday a million years ago when I learned that scallops are sometimes the flesh of bat rays shaped with cookie cutters.
But for now my mother is still having a breakdown on the dirt shoulder of a marine base road. She’s placing the missing persons report. And she’s saying she’d like to make one more call, which the marine says is okay, and then he’ll help get her back into the flow of traffic and out of harm’s way.
She calls Hoyt.
Hoyt is just reaching the Gaudets’ beach house. It’s on a cliff in Solana Beach. A post-modern castle the color of burnt cream. My uncle has his motorbike lashed upright in the back of his truck and he’s already planning how to sneak back through the roadblocks and check on his ranch, see if there’s anything he can do to save it himself. He doesn’t know it’s already burning. The fire reports aren’t that specific yet.
“Don’t worry, Sharon,” Hoyt tells my mother. “I’ll call Marco, okay? My friend that works for Verizon. He can trace her phone, I’ll bet, and figure out where she was when she called you.”
Robby is standing there on the cliff in Solana Beach. He’s been carrying boxes of his mother’s things into the Gaudets’ marble entryway. He’s been toting suitcases and file folders and shoes.
“Who?” Robby stops to ask his father. It’s still early in the afternoon. “Where who was when she called?”
“Hey, do you know where Pearl is?” my uncle asks Robby. Hoyt tells my mother to hang on a sec because Robby might know.
Robby takes the phone from my uncle and my mother says right away, “Robby, does Pearl have a boyfriend?”
Robby can’t think of one. “No,” he says. “I thought she was kind of interested in that guy my dad hired, but I don’t think it went anywhere.”
My aunt Agnès is still moving in and out of the marble entryway of the Gaudets’ stone house. She can see the worried looks, hear part but not all of the questions. Hoyt explains that I’m still in Fallbrook where I ought not to be and that I won’t say who with.
In French or in English, Agnès comes to the right conclusion. Aunt Agnès knows the parakeet can’t live with the tortoise, but it will certainly try. Cherchez la femme, I guess she thinks, though in this case it would be Cherchez le hombre. Agnès says it could be that worker, Amiel, and this dredges up Robby’s memory of the jar of shells in the tree house and the day I made Robby promise he wouldn’t tell anyone about the squatter’s house.
Within the hour, my uncle is on his motorbike. He’s wearing a helmet, leather jacket, and gloves. He’s speeding in the wrong direction, against all the traffic streaming away from the fire, through air turned orange with ash.
Forty-seven
You know what California looks like when it’s burning. Oakland, Santa Barbara, Malibu, Ramona, Escondido, Esperanza—from the air they all look the same: a white-hot fluttering edge of flame, smoke the color of chocolate milk, and, when night falls, the blackness that the bright edge of flame is devouring, foot by foot, mile by mile, bush by bush. You can’t look away as it burns. You can’t help but feel yourself in thrall.
I could hear planes overhead as we hurried west. Now and then we looked up