Dark Water - Laura McNeal [76]
When that was done, he tried the number for my uncle.
“Not answering,” he said. I heard in the distance the piercing, repetitive cry a squirrel makes when it senses danger.
“Let’s go,” one of the men said. A crow, black as the trees, floated over our heads.
They told Amiel to follow them because they had thick boots and they’d be able to make or find a path through any still-burning coals.
I was lifted up, and the trees wheeled above me like black snowflakes. It was not like riding in a canoe but a wheelbarrow race, where all four of my limbs were held by other people as they scrambled over uneven ground.
“What were you doing down here?” the foot carrier asked me. “Hiking?”
“Yes,” I stuttered.
“Didn’t you get the evacuation order?”
I closed my eyes. This question would lead to other questions, and then they would be so angry, so I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep until I really did fall asleep. I was asleep when we passed the charred rubber tires of a burned motorcycle. I was asleep when we passed under the burned canopy of Agua Prieta Creek, ghostly and hollow, where Amiel and I had once peeled loquats with our teeth. I was jolted awake by the voice of one of the firefighters saying, “What the—hey! Get back here!”
“Why’s he running?” the one at my feet asked.
When I lifted my head, I saw Amiel running back toward the river.
“No,” I tried to shout, my voice incapable of shouting.
“Should I go after him?” the firefighter who wasn’t carrying me asked the others. He looked young and exhausted.
“No,” the one holding my feet answered. He saw his chance to ask me questions again. “Who is he?”
I started to say Amiel’s name and then stopped. “He worked here,” I said. “He heard that the border patrol is waiting at the freeways t-t-t-to catch them.”
We’d reached Willow Glen. A fire truck was there and an ambulance. To my surprise, the aloe field wasn’t burned. The mailboxes stood in a row, mouths agape. The yellow cottage was still a yellow cottage. The black path of the fire lay to one side, through somebody else’s house, which was now just a chimney and charcoal palms.
They slid me into the ambulance like I was the gingerbread man, and I wanted to jump up and run away, but they popped an oxygen mask over my mouth. They wrapped my arm with a black Velcro cuff and held me down until it was clear that I had nothing to say in the matter, no power to run.
Fifty
One day after the fire, I dreamed Amiel was dead. He was facedown in the water, and the water was gray.
Fifty-one
Two days after the fire, I thought I saw Robby in the hospital room. “The ostrich died,” he told me, his voice a hiss. “You killed it.”
But when I asked my mother where Robby went, she said, “He was never here.”
It still hurt to breathe and talk, and mostly I didn’t want to talk, but a little while later I croaked, “Where’s Hoyt?”
She didn’t answer. The TV was off, and she had a newspaper on her lap.
“Is he mad at me?”
She didn’t answer. The look on her face pressed me back like the force of an airplane gathering speed to take off. She’d been crying, but she wasn’t crying now. She opened her mouth to say something she didn’t say.
“He’s okay, isn’t he?” knowing he was not okay.
She shook her head and I knew that what she’d been crying about was not me or the burned stuff in our house but whatever had happened to Hoyt.
“Did he get burned?” I said. “Is he in the hospital, too?”
More of the look that pressed me back. “He died, Pearl,” she said. “He tried to outrun the fire on a slope.”
Fifty-two
Three days after the fire, I woke up and Hoyt was still dead. I didn’t hope Robby would visit; in fact, I feared now that he would.
Only my mother was willing to visit. “I want you to take a pregnancy test and an AIDS test,” she said.
I shook my head.
“Are you sure,” she said, her voice making it a statement instead of a question. “You know how you get it, right?”
I assumed she meant AIDS, and I nodded.
“You mean you didn’t sleep with him or you used a condom?” she