My mom’s thinking long hair and earrings were cool always makes me smile.
When she talks, I can hear the drift in her voice as the memories seep in. She is twenty-two. She is seeing the world with a backpack and a best friend. She is suddenly in that beach town, with that sea breeze and her sunburn, and she’s seeing my dad for the first time, as the salty wind whips his hair around.
Okay, maybe they were kind of cool.
“He thought I was someone he knew,” she says, and smiles. “And when I wasn’t, he said, ‘Well, then, you’re someone I would like to know.’ ”
So cheesy. But I could never make fun of her love story.
She tells me often about the way he surfed. And the way he told jokes. And the way he laughed. And the way he lived.
“He really, really lived,” she always says then sighs. And maybe that makes it better somehow. That he crammed more into thirty years than most people cram into a lifetime.
There were Santa Anas on the day my dad died. Hot, dry winds that made the coast feel like the desert. There’s a history behind them. A lore. People think they’re ominous, ushering in change and madness, unsettling the balance of things, uprooting trees and rustling your hair like ghostly fingers scratching at the nape of your neck. My mom always spoke of them with such reverence that, when I was younger, I thought they had been a critical piece of my dad’s story. As if they’d officially played a role. As if they’d had the literal power to scoop up my dad and turn him into wildfire ash at the charred foothills of Southern California.
My mom pushes her wavy hair behind her shoulders when she tells me memories, twists a curly strand around one finger. Drops it. Twists another. Lost in thought. She has the same wavy hair as me, minus the damage from years of pool water and sunshine.
My mom smells like summer. Like gardenia flowers and lemonade.
She talks back to Siri like they’re having an actual conversation. She even tells her thank you when she’s done taking directions.
She sneaks zucchini layers into her lasagna and I pretend not to notice.
She loves fireplaces and poems and beach days in no particular order.
She thinks she takes good photos but half the time someone’s head is cut off or the frame is crooked or the light is bad.
I got my hair and my love of sunsets and beaches and bad reality TV from her.
My mom says I got my height and my love of the water from my dad.
My parents spent three weeks together in Italy after they met. When my dad went to Greece, they thought it would end. But it didn’t.
“That’s what love is,” my mom says when she talks about it. “Never-ending.”
My mom’s original intent that summer she met my dad was to come home in August and start her dream job of working to save the oceans. Instead she said goodbye to her friends at a train station in London, then spent the next year passing through quaint villages and seashore towns with my dad. And when that year of travel ended, they came back to California and got married a few months later on an autumn evening at city hall right before closing time.
Five years later, she got pregnant with me.
But on a Monday morning four months after I was born, my dad was walking in the middle of a crosswalk with a cup of coffee in his hand and was hit by a distracted driver. He spent four days in the hospital on life support, waiting for his mom and dad and brother and sister to have a chance to say goodbye. And then my mom signed the papers to let him go.
I hate hospitals. Hospitals are where people go to die.
My dad’s family went home after the funeral and then it was just my mom and me.
And my mom became weighed down by the memories of what was and the dreams that would never be.
But last night at dinner, my mom said Coach Sanchez was special. The look on her face told me it was real. It’s taken her so long to get here. It’s not about me. But last night I made it that way.
CHAPTER SEVEN
9:19 P.M.
The earth bucks underneath me. I think it’s a bad dream at first. I want it to be a bad dream.
But then I remember.
It’s happening again. An aftershock. Why is it happening again? I clamp down on my fear. I knot my hands and squeeze my eyes shut.
“Goddammit!” Charlie shouts.
I tell myself this is normal. That after earthquakes there are aftershocks. Smaller swells as the earth settles into its new space. The ground sways. Things that didn’t crash to the ground the first time crash to the ground now. I can only hope the teetering table and the fragile walls around us won’t break down completely. If they do, we’ll be crushed. We can’t get lucky twice. We might not even be lucky once.
I am a pill bug in the middle of my kindergarten rug.
Scrunched. Clenched. Unsure.
I can’t see what’s happening through the dark.
This jolt is big enough but it’s nowhere near the original magnitude 7.8. It rains more dust. More dirt. It lands like hard sprinkles on my face. It reminds me of the strangest thing. It reminds me of my mom grating fresh Parmesan cheese over my spaghetti noodles when I was five.
“Say when,” she’d say, but I’d never say it. “When?” she’d finally ask me again, and I’d nod.
I am spaghetti noodles. I am limp arms and lifeless legs. I am mush.
The rumbling ground smacks against my helpless body.
Until it stops.
Charlie and I lie still in the silence, bracing ourselves for the earth to move again. Holding our breath. Waiting to speak.
“Well, that sucked,” Charlie finally says.
“Are you okay?”
“Think so.” He coughs. “That was one hell of an aftershock.”
My brain can’t hide my fear. What if something bigger hits? That’s what happened in Ridgecrest in July 2019. On the morning of the Fourth of July, there was an earthquake, a magnitude 6.4, and it was big enough for some people to feel it up and down the coast even though the damage was minimal. But the next day, there was a bigger one. A magnitude 7.1. And experts talked about foreshocks and how what you feel the first time might only be a hint of what’s to come. Can this laundromat survive something bigger? Can we? I try to picture the earth settling in a more peaceful way. Of cracks and crevices spooning each other, then falling asleep. Anything to calm me down. But it doesn’t help. “I’m kind of freaking out, Charlie.”
“Don’t freak out.” He shuffles in his space. “Can you just close your eyes?”
“Done.”
“I guess I’ll have to trust you.”
“Duh.”
“Think of someplace big. Somewhere with wide-open space.” I feel the peace in his voice, the calm he’s extending to me. I bet his eyes are closed, too, trying to go to that wide-open space with me. “Feel it. Smell it. Like you’re there. Like you’re home.”
I suck in a breath, trying to transport myself. Trying to imagine.
“Where are you?”
“The beach. Hawaii.” The sun’s heating my toes and fingertips. I see Mila on a towel next to me, the fuzzy buzz of a pop song seeping out from her AirPods, interrupting my calm. I want to yank her AirPods out and make her go away.
“What’s the water like?”
“Turquoise blue. Clear.” I’m glad Charlie’s question makes me focus on something else. On the waves lapping the wet brown-sugar sand.