Dark Water - Laura McNeal [73]
We reached the plateau as the sun went out, a wide beach where the river could flood when we had heavy rain, though I had never seen it flood. Behind us, the woods fell into cindery darkness. I followed Amiel up a slope near the parking lot where I had once, last spring, climbed out of Hickey’s car. I could just barely make out the De Luz bridge lying four feet above a concrete watershed. Curiously, it had no guardrail and no sides. Only a troll would be able to fit under it without crouching.
But just as we were about to walk out of the trees into the open, Amiel threw out his arm to stop me. A fire engine was wailing its long wail.
“Esperete,” he whispered. Wait.
The siren was deafening as it passed, and not far behind came an echoing wail.
“Why?” I whispered back, so hungry and terrified that I was half ready to jump in the path of the fire engine. “They would save us,” I said, but he wasn’t listening to me or he couldn’t hear me over the noise. He was five feet away, running back into the plateau. The fire engine passed. Then another. And another. I didn’t raise my hand or step out of the trees. I did what I thought was to love him, and I followed Amiel back down the bank toward the sheltering reeds.
Forty-eight
Smoke blotted out the stars. We didn’t have Amiel’s blanket or food or anything, thanks to my plan, so we just sat down in the sand and rocks, far from trees that could catch on fire. I kept listening for the return of the fire engines, and I pictured them stringing out across the riverbed to make a controlled burn that would go east as the other fire came west, thereby putting us right in the path of a whole new fire, but I figured that would be pretty loud and we’d have time for me to run out screaming with my hands up.
The engines didn’t return, and the darkness into which I stared so hard never roared into flame, and soon I stopped hearing, stopped seeing, stopped knowing, asleep as I was against Amiel, who lay like a cowboy in a John Wayne movie with his head on his balled-up jacket. I used him as a pillow and a sort of bed, one leg flung over his. Burrowing and gnawing into my sleep was the memory that I had never called my mother, and that memory chewed sleep to bits until I was awake again thinking, What have I done?
They say that parts of a teenager’s brain aren’t formed yet. That might have been the problem. I’d like to think that rather than a malignancy of heart.
I’m fine, I tried via ESP. I’m fine I’m fineimfineimfine.
I reached into my pocket and felt my phone as if it were a five-dollar bill I’d stashed in my pocket and forgotten. Amiel stirred, and he looked at me.
“I should call my mother,” I said.
He nodded. I wanted to kiss him. I wanted us to be a married couple in deepest Mexico or a married couple in a fable about deepest Mexico.
Instead, I held the button down on my phone and learned that Greenie had sent words (WHERE R U?) and Robby had sent words (CALL MY DAD PLS) and my mother had called six hours ago.
“If you get this message, Pearl,” my mother said, her voice taut, “call your uncle on his cell phone. He’s going back on the motorcycle and he says he’s going to look for you down at the river in some hut where Robby thinks you might have gone. Call him and tell him where you are, Pearl.”
I did it. Right then. There could have been many reasons why he didn’t answer.
He couldn’t hear the ring over the