Dark Water - Laura McNeal [77]
I considered writing with my fingertip on my mother’s thin freckly arm: Didn’t have sex. Instead, I used a Post-it note from my hospital tray table.
“Good,” she said.
She didn’t look like she believed me, and I couldn’t blame her.
Fifty-three
Four days after the fire, while my mother was in the cafeteria, I turned on the TV in my room and learned that the fire wasn’t over, that it wasn’t contained, that it still flickered and burned. Power lines were down, and the National Guard still blocked Mission Road at the freeway, turning away people who tried to talk their way in.
The doctor said he couldn’t keep me anymore, even though we’d lost our house, but he gave us the name of a hotel in downtown San Diego that was giving free rooms to people like us. I spent a number of hours there staring at windows that might or might not have been the windows of the condo my father had bought, in which he might or might not have been sitting at a desk that might or might not have been meant for me. I asked my mother if my father was in town.
“Who knows?” she said.
Then she took a call from a person who turned out to be Mitchell the marine.
Fifty-four
Five days after the fire began, most people were allowed to go back home, if they had homes. Louise Bart offered my mother the use of her RV, a little trailer covered in pine needles at the back of her farm on a road called Santa Margarita because it wasn’t far from the river. The very first evening, I tried to go on foot to the trail, but my mother caught me.
“You know they’re trying to determine if a squatter’s camp started the fire, don’t you?” she said.
“It wasn’t his,” I said.
“You’re not going anywhere,” she said, and she locked me in the trailer. A few minutes later, she came back and unlocked it. She called my name through the door and said, “I’m sitting right out here with Louise and her husband. You can join us for hamburgers when you want.”
I didn’t.
Fifty-five
Six days after the fire started, we stood in the ruins of the Lemon Drop Ranch. My mother crossed her arms and walked carefully over the rubbish. High above us, clouds webbed a turquoise sky. The fire had not burned everything evenly. The pine trees were uniformly black, like chandeliers dipped in tar, but the avocado trees were shriveled and brown, with leaves still rattling from limbs. You could see things from the cottage you couldn’t see before, such as the crusty, tangled platter of Robby’s house, where a hired crew was tearing out bits of junk and raking it into piles. Robby and his mother weren’t there. They were at the Berry-Bell and Hall funeral home making arrangements.
Certain things were easy to identify in the crumpled piles of stuff: a mottled fork and a mottled spoon. Wires. A dusty but otherwise undamaged ceramic bowl. In the kitchen, near what used to be the stove, chrome had melted into silvery frosting. Photographs, letters, cabinets, books, sheets, towels, and napkins were unidentifiable dust. The silkworm ball was dust. The couch, the Yahtzee board, the librarian skirt. Quilts it took somebody a million hours to make. We didn’t think of every lost possession right then, but over time, one by one, like a phantom limb.
“Remember when you burned your wedding pictures in the grill?” I asked my mother.
“Yes,” she said.
“I guess you could have just waited.”
She didn’t speak, and I couldn’t think why I’d said such a thing.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I wouldn’t have burned your baby pictures,” she said, and she picked her way around a fallen clump of bathroom tile. It bothered and mystified us both that the iron sewing machine wasn’t just sitting there intact. How could a sewing machine melt in a house fire? Why that and not a salad fork?
I dug around in the cold rubbish for a while and collected another fork, another spoon, and then I got up the courage to go closer to Robby’s house. I was walking there when I realized I was stepping