Dark Water - Laura McNeal [80]
You knew who, the doves in the trees chided. You knew who knew.
I stepped in. The foundation was clean, just as we’d left it, except for ash. Ash lay over everything. I walked all over the foundation raising little puffs of it with my shoes, looking for a trail that would show me where he’d gone. In one corner, I startled a lizard with a missing tail. A phoebe sat on a stump outside the doorway, waiting for something in her black coat. Nothing in the house seemed left there for me, but I kept walking over the floor and listening to the sledgehammers.
“Ready for lunch?” I heard one of the men say.
“After I get this sucker out,” the other called.
Then I saw it. Amiel’s writing stick, the one he’d balanced upright in his palm, lay against the wall in some leaves, and when I pulled it out, a piece of paper that had been coiled around the tip loosened and dropped. Unfurled, it said BLACK OAK.
“Where did that girl go?” the woman asked the men who were smashing things.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think she’s the one?”
I ducked down and crept along the far edge of the willows until I reached a point where I could wade across the shallow river. I saw the woman’s red bandanna as she dipped down to wet her hands, and I saw her regard me dubiously, but I kept going as if I didn’t care.
There, in the hollow of the burned oak, sat the pale green and black tin. There were the lords and ladies, the filigree, the lute. With shaking, smudgy fingers, I picked off the lid. Under a drawing of an oyster shell and a pearl, Amiel had written:
Vuelvo a México. Recuérdeme.
Simple enough for even me: I’m going back to Mexico. Remember me.
I had another stop to make, and I took the tin and Amiel’s stick with me.
Recuérdeme. The four syllables formed a rhythm in my sick heart. I had to go past the sledgehammer crew again, past the green canopy into the burn zone. Under my feet the hard dirt became thick, powdery ash. Recuérdeme. Black manzanita twisted out of the slopes beneath black oak. Black oak lay down against black sycamore. The plants the boy called hobo pineapples poked fresh and green out of the black earth. I was getting closer now to Willow Glen, closer to the spot where my uncle, according to the description in the paper, had decided to go uphill to get away from the fire. I was wondering how I would know I was there when I saw the roses.
It wasn’t that far from where we’d eaten the loquats. The trees, though burned, still arched above me. Black and white and gray, like snowy woods in winter. And there on the northern slope I saw pile after pile of roses, each bouquet successively older and drier, so that the fresh bunch was still bright red, the one just beneath it dried red and wrinkly, others yellow, some pink, all of them long-stemmed and wrapped with a ribbon like florists use. Among the roses were other things that people had left. One card was signed by the Fallbrook fire department. Another said, A hiker who wishes you well.
Just above the flowers was a wooden cross that had a set of GPS numbers written on it in white ink. Someone—Agnès, I supposed—had tacked a photograph of Hoyt to the cross, and I saw that it was a picture of Hoyt and Robby at Robby’s seventeenth birthday party. My uncle glowed in the twilight like the peaceful ghost I wanted him to be as I knelt down in the ash by the flowers and covered my blue eye instead of the brown one.
“I can’t really see you, Hoyt,” I said, crying as I couldn’t cry at the funeral. “I can’t.”
Still kneeling in the ashes, I took Amiel’s stick and started to write in the dust that was so fine I could feel it rising up to smother me, I’m sorry Robby I’m sorry Agnès I’m sorry Hoyt I’m sorry Mom, but they were not the right words to make the invisible appear, and after a while I had no choice but to walk out.
Fifty-eight
A whole year passed before Mary Beth Fowler came up