Dark Water - Laura McNeal [78]
Show me, I begged the bottle without speaking. I willed it to be a magic crystal ball that knew everything and fixed all.
“What’s that?” my mother asked. She’d followed me into the grove, so I held out the bottle. Her hands were black and dry, like my mind.
“Just something I found,” I said, and then, trying to restore my old talent for blurting out the truth, said, “He gave it to me once. Amiel.”
The truth made it no easier for us to talk, and she looked like she would gladly have thrown the bottle into another fire.
While I was in the hospital, and then after I came home, newspaper stories kept giving us the numbers: 347,000 acres burned in San Diego County, 9,000 acres in Fallbrook and Rainbow, 21,000 avocado trees, winds in excess of eighty miles per hour, 1,700 homes, ten to fourteen lives, depending on whether the four bodies found in a migrant camp near Mexico were attributed to fire.
I heard tires moving slowly along the frontage road, and I silently begged the car not to contain my aunt and Robby. It was just another family of strangers out gawking at the damage, though. As the mother, the father, and two children watched us sift through bits of rubbish, I thought it was even worse than living in a house that was upside down, and I suddenly laughed out loud.
“What?” my mother asked.
“It’s like we’re hobos,” I said. “Picking through the trash.” I waved, and the passengers looked away.
I wanted, when I felt the ability to want anything besides not having killed my uncle, to go to the river and look for Amiel.
“I want to go for a walk,” I told my mother, holding the melted bottle in my dirty hand.
“No,” my mother said.
“Don’t you think we should go down where they found him and lay some flowers or something?” I’d thought about one of those crosses people put up at the sites of car accidents. But of course my mother knew that wasn’t all.
“The cemetery is the place for that,” she said.
“He’s not at the cemetery.” We still had the funeral ahead of us: tomorrow or the next day.
“When he is,” she said.
“I have to go see if he’s all right,” I said, meaning Amiel this time.
“No, you don’t,” my mother said.
“I hate you,” I said, shocking myself.
“Fine,” my mother said.
We left holding a bowl, three forks, two spoons, the melted bottle, and the blobs of chrome.
Fifty-six
My mother didn’t even listen to my arguments about why it would be better for me to stay home and get a GED than to go back to the high school when it opened.
“I can’t face people,” I said.
“If you can face me,” she said, “you can face them.”
I proposed moving out of town. “Like we could afford to move,” she said.
So when school resumed after the evacuation, I resumed going there. Robby remained at the Gaudets’ in Solana Beach while, as I heard from my mother, Agnès sought to enroll him at the Bishop’s School, where he was soon thereafter accepted on scholarship.
“We’re so sorry about your uncle,” teachers and parents at school said to me if they addressed the subject at all, but mostly they didn’t.
I knew they knew from a series of newspaper articles that Hoyt Wallace, age fifty-two, died trying to get out of the riverbed while he was looking for his niece, who was found in the company of a Hispanic male who fled. I assumed they also read the story in which a San Diego Gas and Electric employee said utility crews working to restore power to the Willow Glen area found evidence of human habitation and fire building in the preserve, which was highly illegal. These things they knew. They didn’t know, and it didn’t help anyone, that I walked around with the image of his burned body in front of my eye like those blobs that sometimes get stuck on the cornea or that I fervently prayed he died