She’d been in the stockroom at the salon, mixing dye, when the earthquake had hit. The shelves had fallen, and there was damage to her lungs. The surgical team was prepping . . .
Everything became a dull roar, like the ocean was crashing into me. I sank down, down, into freezing darkness. He kept talking. It didn’t matter. It didn’t fix anything.
My grandparents came, driving straight from Bayport. They didn’t even drop their bags off at the nearest Hilton, which is the first thing my grandmother said when she saw me, wrapping me in a hug that smelled of expensive perfume. My grandfather took one look at my mom on the ventilator, having just come out of surgery, and disappeared, his face ashen. He returned half an hour later with hot chocolate from the vending machine that no one drank.
It was tense and awful, sitting there, the news cycling over our heads, the real tragedy unfurling right in front of us. We were poised on the edge of something, together, and there wasn’t a plan for what came next. I didn’t know what we were waiting for, or if we even wanted to be waiting for it.
But the worst part, the absolute worst, was that, even though I’d heard the doctors warn otherwise, I still believed my mom would pull through. Even as the nurses wheeled in a bright red cart, as the doctor shouted for someone to “get them out of here.” Even then, I still thought, When she wakes up . . . After she gets better . . .
Here’s something I didn’t know about hospitals until the moment it happened: They kick you out of the room when someone’s dying who isn’t supposed to be. You don’t get to hold their hand, or say goodbye, or hear them say it’s okay, and I love you, and be brave. Instead, you’re shoved outside while a nurse rushes in with a cart full of emergency equipment. You watch from the hallway while a doctor runs the code, calling out numbers like she’s on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.
Numbers that fail to restart your mother’s heart.
She says it out loud, the time of death. Not for you, sobbing in the hallway, but so she can write it down on her chart.
11:52 p.m.
I drifted, listless, through my mother’s funeral. For some reason, I couldn’t remember who anybody was. I looked to my left, and I didn’t know who that lady was. And I looked to my right, and I didn’t know who that man was, either. They were all faces I recognized, but I couldn’t put the pieces together in any meaningful way.
My mom was dead, so what did it matter if the bald man who smelled of mouthwash or the plump lady with the pixie cut was a cousin or a neighbor or a coworker? What did any of it matter, when none of it would bring her back?
She was gone. The world had ended, and for some reason we were all still here. In this funeral home where the parking lot was horribly full. Standing around a beige room decorated with an enormous beaming photo of her that I’d taken six months ago, on my birthday.
The last thing I wanted to do was talk, about anything but especially my mom, and yet all people did was come up to me and start conversations about her. And when they’d had their turn telling me everything happens for a reason, or she’s in a better place, or whatever, they drifted away, toward the food.
My grandmother was responsible for the spread. She’d fussed with the fan of napkins almost to the point of hysterics. There were six kinds of fancy crackers. Three flavors of brie, all with the labels cut off and placed to the side, like descriptions of paintings in a gallery. Duck liver pâté. Four varieties of French olives. Crab dip studded with little green capers. Melba toast. A jar of caviar. And the crowning glory, a bowl overflowing with everyone’s spit-out olive pits, which felt, for some reason, unspeakably gross.
My mom would have loved that, I thought. We would have laughed about the olive pit spittoon as we sat in freeway traffic, leftovers resting at my feet. “Eleanor Bloom, ladies and gentlemen,” my mom would say, rolling her eyes. I couldn’t wait to tell her about it, or about how—I stopped. I couldn’t tell her anything, ever again.
The idea that I was all alone now astonished me. My chest clenched, and my breath hitched, and I tried not to think about the dull thud her casket had made when they lowered it into the ground.
And so, I thought about the eels.
It had been all over the news, back when the news was something that happened to other people, in other places. I’d been fascinated as the reporter explained that, up in Alaska, eels were falling from the sky. Birds scooped them out of the water and carried them off for dinner, but some of the eels got loose. They fell in fields, suburbs, a grocery store parking lot. They fell mouths first, full of sharp teeth.
But there was one thing the reporters got wrong. They all talked about eels falling from the sky as though the eels were the problem, frightening innocent people who were going about their ordinary afternoons. Except I knew the truth: The eels weren’t the monsters. They were the victims. Their lives had been shaken apart by something they never saw coming. And in trying to get free from their unwanted fate, they’d only managed to make things that much worse.
Chapter 4
TWO DAYS AFTER MY MOTHER’S FUNERAL, I sat in the back seat of my grandfather’s car, headed south to Bayport, California.
After someone dies, you’re supposed to pick up the pieces and carry on with your life. Except I couldn’t, because there weren’t enough pieces left. So instead, I was the one who had to be picked up and carried on.
I fell asleep just past Corona, lulled by the steady hum of our tires and the white noise of the freeway. When I woke up, it was late, and we weren’t on the 91 anymore. We were speeding down the Pacific Coast Highway, the ocean stretching dark and wide on our right, and the bluffs of Laguna Canyon rising tall on our left.
This wasn’t the California I knew, full of dull strip malls and beige tract homes. This was a tropical, glamorous California, the one with movie stars and convertibles. The kind of place you see on TV and think it can’t possibly be real, until suddenly you’re driving through it, and it is.
“Well, here we are,” my grandmother said.
Here we were. The three of us.
It had never been just the three of us before. Not even for a weekend. Not even for a day at Disneyland.
We weren’t close, my grandparents and me.
I knew facts about them, but that wasn’t the same as really knowing someone. I knew that my grandmother did Pilates and planned charity benefits, all in a cloud of expensive perfume and a tasteful leather jacket. I knew that my grandfather was a mildly terrifying lawyer who doted on their tiny dog in a way that was almost too pure for someone so buttoned up. Even in their vacation photos, he posed stiffly in front of the Trevi Fountain or the Acropolis in pressed khakis and tasseled loafers. You could just imagine my grandmother ordering him to stand there and smile as she counted down from three. It was a mystery where my mom had come from, and a no-brainer why she hadn’t gotten along with them.
And yet, Eleanor and Joel Bloom were my guardians now. They were stuck with me, this fragile, fractured teenager. And I was stuck with them, thrust into a bizarre repeat of my mom’s old life, right down to the house she’d grown up in.
“You’ll recognize it in a second,” my grandfather promised, as though it was the town I was having trouble picturing, and not what it would be like to live there.