Just Get Home, page 4
“Nothing. We wait. Either that was it...or...”
“Or what?”
“I don’t know, Dess. There could be more. There probably won’t be. We sit. We watch television. We drink cheap ass wine because we can’t afford better.”
Dessa knew all about aftershocks. But she had been stunned to learn about foreshocks, little quakes that could come before bigger ones. Appetizers and main courses.
“What do we do if...”
“If the Big One hits?” Gretchen made her voice spooky. Like she was telling a ghost story. She took a sip of her wine. “Honestly, it feels like they keep changing it. It used to be stand in a doorway. And then they were like never stand in a doorway. And also you weren’t supposed to go outside, but then they were like, whatever, maybe outside’s cool.”
“Wasn’t there something about a table?”
“Oh yeah. Uh...you’re supposed to duck down next to a thing. Like a countertop or a table. But next to it not under it. That way if the ceiling falls, it’ll fall on the thing you’re next to and not you.”
Dessa seemed to recall this was called “zero-point” though the phrase made no sense to her. An awkward crouch, hands on your neck, balance on the tips of your toes. If it were a yoga pose it would be called “The Coward.”
Eventually she had loosened up; it was clear they weren’t in any danger. Kitty jumped back on the couch, pinning their legs down under the blanket and his considerable heft. Another earthquake didn’t arrive. It had been the main course, not the appetizer.
But later that night, on the porch, Gretchen grew quiet, drawing on her cigarette. Dessa swatted at bugs and looked out at Gretchen’s small patch of yard. The light by the door only reached the edges of the grass, making dim mysteries out of the sad landscaping beyond.
“You know we’re fucked right? If the big one really hits?” Gretchen looked at her. Serious. “All that stuff about making sure you have enough bottled water and a bugout bag? It’s horse pucky. Propaganda to make it seem like the people in charge can do anything about it. Just wait patiently, Good Citizen. Help will arrive.” She saluted, the cherry tip of her cigarette making an arc through the air. “When it happens, the fucking authorities themselves are going to be in the shit. It will be chaos for days. Weeks. There will be looting. Riots. The earthquake isn’t the real disaster, Dessa. The disaster is what happens after.”
“You mean like tsunamis?” Dessa was haunted by the footage she had seen from Japan. A camera positioned at the crest of a hill, picking up no sound but recording the gray line of water as it slowly pushed itself into town. People exited houses and rushed toward the hill, climbing, but Dessa knew that so many more of them were still inside. The same houses that had begun to lift and float, like ships, but not built for travel.
“No. Not tsunamis.” Gretchen shook her head. “People. Panicked scared people are what make it dangerous after any disaster. And that shit is something that making sure you have enough canned food isn’t going to do anything about.”
Dessa laughed, trying to relieve the tension, “Jesus, Gretchen. Dark.”
“Yeah, well...that’s me. Mistress of the Dark.”
“Tell you what, if the big one hits, I’ll come over here and take care of you.”
“Dessa, when the big one hits, you take care of yourself first. That’s what I’ll be doing.”
* * *
Dessa awoke with a gasp, her breath drawing in a lungful of dust-laden air. She coughed in response, the spasm pressing her back into the large something that loomed above her. The blade of her forearm swept against the distinct cool of metal. The car, though Dessa could not see it. She was in a pocket. A small space between the crushed remnants of the car and the section of overpass she had seen tear itself from the bridge above.
Shaking, she reached out in front of her. Her fingers scraped the edges of something small and jagged. Stone. Concrete.
Rubble, thought Dessa. But how much? There could be dozens of feet of debris between her and the open air. The fact that she was even alive, panicked breathing in the dark, was incredible. Her limbs felt fine, sore but working.
But if she started digging, she could upset whatever delicate balance had saved her. She could lose her little pocket of safety and bring it all tumbling down.
Dessa thought about the stories of people found alive in collapsed buildings. Third world survivors pulled from the wreckage four, five, seven days after a disaster. The weak calls that brought their rescuers. The pictures of emaciated dehydrated but living people that accompanied the articles. The lucky ones.
Those articles never showed the multitudes pulled out before them. The not-so-lucky.
Olivia.
The image of her daughter’s face flew into her mind. Her gap-toothed smile beaming at her mother. Pretty baby. Sick before the quake. And after?
How was Ollie now?
A sound burst from Dessa’s mouth. Involuntary. A plea.
This was impossible. She could not be here. She could not be stuck in this place while her daughter was...was...
Dessa’s hand found a jagged piece. The size of a fist. She pulled it toward her, pushing it between her legs. She moved quickly. Moving the rocks into the small spaces around her feet, behind her, wedged up next to the car. She crept into the space she cleared. Pushing her way forward.
She began to sweat, the chalk from the rubble making a strange paste on her hands. The space behind her grew larger but the space before her didn’t seem to have grown any smaller. Dessa imagined herself like Sisyphus or some other Greek figure, punished by the gods for a minor offense. Cursed to spend the rest of her life digging her way through some god-wrought tube of rocks. Making space for herself endlessly, circling back to the beginning until she was moving stones she had already laid her hands upon.
The car groaned, protesting under some new weight. A shift. Dessa ducked, pulling away... But to where? There was nowhere to go. She braced herself. Coward’s pose. She waited.
Nothing came down.
Dessa drew shaky, desperate breaths. Each one a prayer. Please. Please.
The car next to her was silent. No more moans. Dessa tried to wrestle her fear. Put it in a box. Save it for later.
The only way out is through.
She began again.
She did not know how long it took until her fingertips tasted air. She had been reaching down, grasping, and then suddenly there was nothing. Dessa yelped, hope leaping. She turned her wrist feeling the bumpy edges of what had to be a section of the overpass. She moved her hand upward and it brushed something. Long and bumpy. Metal.
Rebar. The long thin poles laid down before pouring concrete. Their purpose to strengthen the structure as a whole.
Dessa swept her hand down. Scooping. A faint light struck her eyes, revealing a narrow gap between the metal bar and the pavement of the street.
It was a bit more than a foot wide, but the space between the ground and the rebar was shallow. Six or seven inches.
Dessa lay down and wiggled her way toward the hole. Far away she thought she could hear someone...wailing.
“Help!” she called. Her voice sounded strange. Hollow and weak.
The wailing continued in the distance. Uninterrupted. No one was coming.
Dessa looked up at the rebar, a carpet of gravel under her head. This was not a place she wanted to get stuck. The earth could shake again and drop the slab on her. She could squeeze her top half out, but then be stuck halfway. A magician’s trick.
She took a deep breath. One arm out, then the other. Shoulders down. Head turned to the side. She pushed herself through, a strange familiarity to the action. A bar passing over her face. A year of Bar and Bat Mitzvahs over a decade ago.
Limbo loo, limbo lye.
Her breasts caught on the bar. She emptied her lungs, for the first time in her life willing them smaller. A push could send the whole thing tumbling. She closed her eyes and pressed herself backward.
A rain of dust slid down on her...but the slab held. Dessa stared up into the heavens, visible because the quake had turned out the city’s lights.
“Stars, Momma,” Olivia would say. Staahs.
“Of course,” Momma would say. And she would turn on the stars.
Dessa thought it was possible Ollie had never seen real stars. Just the fake ones her mother projected onto their walls at bedtime.
Dessa angled her hips out. One side lifted then the other. Feet bare now, shoes lost beneath the wreckage, dead mother’s opinions on such things be damned.
But as soon as she was out, she was reaching back in. Her arm sweeping around in the dark. Plumbing the rocks to find it. There was a moment of fear when she thought she’d left it too far in...that she’d have to go back in.
But then her hand curled around the leather strap. Fish on a line.
Her purse.
Dessa turned it over, dumping its contents on the street. Billfold, sunglasses, lipstick, car keys, tampons. Phone.
She seized it. Her fingers fumbling. “Please work, please work.”
The screen flared to life. Dessa was not the only thing that had survived the quake. She pressed the string of number that would connect her to Hailey’s phone.
Three low tones. Call Failed.
Joe’s phone. Then Hailey’s again. Again. Again. Again.
All met with that same dead line tone. No connection.
Dessa threw up.
She had not sensed it coming. Her body had given her no warning at all. One second she had been looking at her phone screen, thinking about all the implications of those tones. Could be that the network was just down. Could be it was overloaded.
Could be there were no more phones for her to connect to.
She managed to turn her head in time so that the spilled contents of her purse were not covered by the spilled contents of her stomach. The remnants of her dinner with Gretchen and Heidi and Laurel a Rorschach on the street. Food she had eaten four hours and a lifetime ago.
Gretchen, Heidi, Laurel. The sound that had come from the bar before it had collapsed. Dessa retched again. This time choking up bile. Her body spasming.
And then she wasn’t throwing up so much as she was sobbing on her hands and knees. Wails of grief and fear and panic, coming up from her stomach and deeper places. Just as involuntary as the vomiting. As uncontrollable and inevitable as the need to push when she had had Ollie.
Olivia.
Gretchen.
The sound of a woman’s voice reached her ears. A whining wail. Pathetic and feral. Uncontrolled.
It took her a moment to realize it was her own voice. Reflected back to her. Echoing off of the remaining section of the underpass, hovering above.
Dessa held her breath. Choking off the cry. The voice from the underpass ceased as well. There would be time for this later. She wiped her mouth and put the contents back into her purse.
“Just get home,” she said to herself. “Just get home.”
It could be her mantra. Something she could say with every step. A walking prayer. Just. Get. Home. Each word a footfall.
6 PM
(earlier)
LOS FELIZ
7
One of the babies got burned after dinner.
Byron Jay. With the glasses. A little red bubble blister on his forehead. Barb didn’t notice him walking up behind her, sippy held up for juice. He’d walked straight into her cigarette, the ash breaking a trail down his eyebrow to his cheek. He’d started to cry, and Barb had known immediately how much she’d fucked up. Beegie could see it on her face.
Beegie took care of the other children while Barb clucked over Byron. Sitting him up on the countertop. Big worried smile. “Oh you had an accident,” she said, putting a bandage over the blister.
The cigarettes had started over the summer. First the smell of them from under her door after she’d “gone to bed,” but now Barb was doing it openly. With her coffee in the morning. At the kitchen table at lunch. Ashing into the stacked up bowls of soggy Cheerios by the sink.
The drinking, unlike the smoking, had stayed confined to Barb’s bedroom. On weekends, Beegie would watch Barb head to her room one, two, three times before lunch. By the afternoon she was slurry and loose with the littles, watching them in the front yard, slumped on the porch steps.
No good saying anything about it though. To Barb, to Kate, to anyone. If the agency knew, they’d yank everyone, and then who knew where Beegie would end up. So she kept her head down, chin tucked, folding laundry.
But when Byron got hurt, it was her face that betrayed her, not her mouth.
“You got a problem, Baby Girl?”
Beegie shook her head and slammed her eyes down.
“He’s fine.” Barb gestured, wobbly palm open, as Byron ran off to play in front of the television with the other kids. “See?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Right.”
Barb leaned over and plucked the still-lit cigarette up from the edge of the sink. Stared at Beegie while she put it back in her mouth. Defiant.
“I got a phone call today... About you.”
Beegie’s tried to make herself small. Thought of the way Rooster used to roll on his back and pee himself to show Eric he was submissive. That’s what Barb wanted her to do. Piss herself to prove she knew who was in charge.
“They said they’d been calling the people you used to live with, and finally that boy told the school that they needed to call me.”
Beegie felt the back of her neck go hot. “Which boy?”
“I don’t know, Beegie? The older one? It’s not about that. It’s about all the days you’ve been missing.”
The school had been calling the Greelys about the days she’d skipped. Eric on the phone with them. Knowing her business.
Barb was still talking but Beegie wasn’t there. She was sitting at the Greelys’ dinner table, imagining them laughing at her. Mrs. Greely saying that some people can’t be saved and Mr. Greely agreeing with a grunt. Eric nodding and shoving his face full of bread rolls.
“What I want to know is, what are you doing all day?”
“Nothing.”
“’Cause you better not be... I can’t have that around the babies.”
“I never... I don’t.”
“’Cause you missing school like this...it makes what that family said before, it makes it seem like it was true.”
A spark of something lit inside Beegie. An ember of rage and shame.
Barb kept talking. “Ten days, Beegie. You’ve missed ten days of school. Do you know how much trouble I could get into for that?”
“Not as much as for burning a baby with a cigarette,” Beegie mumbled.
“What’s that?”
“I said not as much as for burning a baby with a cigarette.”
Beegie’s voice was louder this time. Not shouting but audible. Each word pronounced and clear. It was a surprise for both of them.
“That was an accident.”
“Just like you being drunk right now is an accident.” The words flew out. She’d been holding them, wasps in her throat, bouncing and stinging against her insides until they had finally found a path out. “Just like you being wasted every night is an accident.”
She caught Barb’s hand before it connected with her head. The older woman screamed at her, a choked cry, other arm flailing down onto her body. She called Beegie a whore. And a liar. She told her she’d have Beegie sent to a group home, like the one up in Riverside. That she knew what happened to girls who got sent up there.
The babies watched. Turned from the television and stared at them. Large-eyed and openmouthed, they witnessed Barb pummeling Beegie. Beegie trying to keep those swats from landing. At some point Beegie felt a faint tickle on the back of her neck, and she realized that Barb still held the cigarette. That the ashes from it were raining down on her, sliding into her clothes.
Beegie turned and ran. Grabbed her bag from its hook and pushed her way outside.
Beegie had that hot feeling in the back of her throat. Like she was gonna cry. Why had she done that? Said that? Stupid, stupid.
Her breath shuddered.
Uh-uh. None of that. She dug a hard knuckle into her eye. If there were any tears there before, there weren’t after. She could be angry at herself without looking weak.
By the time the bus arrived, the hot feeling was gone and she was thinking about more practical considerations. Like where the fuck she was going to go. She couldn’t go back.
Not tonight at least. Barb would only get worse after she put the kids to bed. She’d be sitting in front of the television, getting angrier and angrier and drunker and drunker. If she went back before Barb had slept some of the booze out, they’d just pick up where they’d left off.
In the morning it would be easier.
If Beegie got there when the kids were waking up, she could be cleaning the kitchen before Barb had even had her coffee. Barb might be a drunk but that didn’t mean she didn’t know a good thing when she had it. Beegie made Barb’s life easier.
She flared at the idea of trying to make that woman happy...to go back and pretend she hadn’t hit her. To listen to her yell at her for skipping school. Yes, ma’am. Of course, ma’am.
Fuck that.
But she didn’t really have any choice.
It was deal with Barb or get assigned somewhere else. And just ’cause it was somewhere else didn’t mean it was better. It just meant it was somewhere else.
Like three placements ago. Janelle’s. Beegie told Kate that Janelle had a boyfriend who came into her room at night. And that when Beegie asked him what the hell he was doing there, he had said he was just checking on her, but she knew what he’d been about.
