“Ruby? Did you hear me?”
“I’m thinking.” Wouldn’t we already be dead if there was a carbon monoxide leak? “Isn’t that what those switches were on that panel? The ones the lady turned off ?”
It’s a flash of a memory. That woman’s final act of heroism. Trying to save a laundromat from going up in flames. Trying to save Charlie and me from whatever could’ve happened if those switches had stayed on. How did she have the good sense to do that but then run out into the parking lot where she could’ve been killed by flying debris? Electrocuted by a downed power line. She probably didn’t survive. Sometimes people know one thing but not another when it comes to earthquake safety. There are people who think you’re still supposed to huddle in a doorframe, but I learned from drills at school that they changed that a few years ago. Maybe she was trying to get to the doorway but decided outside looked like a better option.
“I thought that was an electrical panel,” Charlie says.
“I think it was an emergency shutoff system for everything. Don’t you have to have those in California? We have one at our house. You barely have to jostle it and it turns off. I hit it once when I was moving the trash cans to the curb, and my mom lost hot water in the middle of her shower.”
“So you think we’re okay?”
I feel the pressure of having to say the right thing because when Charlie isn’t calm, I’m not calm. And we have to stay calm. I need him to stay calm for me.
“I’m sure. That lady saved us, Charlie.”
“I wish we could thank her.” I hear that tiny tick of worry finally slipping like fingers loosening their grip on the wet rungs of a ladder.
“Yeah,” I say, even though my words aren’t entirely true.
Because that woman might’ve saved us from gas leaks and carbon monoxide poisoning, but she didn’t really save us.
We’re still here.
CALM
I met Leo outside the gate of the pool after practice yesterday.
He held my hand as we took a shortcut through the back parking lot. I wanted to keep our fingers twisted together forever. We walked two blocks to his car on the hill by the house with the mailbox that looks like a lifeguard tower. Red rescue can and all.
We drove the streets home without talking. We didn’t need to.
We stood in my kitchen, where I made toast and swept up the crumbs with my hand. Leo ate four pieces with peanut butter while I went for cinnamon sugar.
He was standing there the way he always was. Looking the way I liked. Comfortable. Assured. Beautiful.
So I led him to my room.
Where it was only us.
Only then.
We ignored the knock on the front door from the UPS driver.
We ignored the minutes passing.
And the weather.
And the airplanes overhead.
The only thing we paid attention to was the moment. And the music on low. And the violet scarf over the lampshade that made my room look like twilight while our skin melded and our breath hitched.
CHAPTER SIX
8:00 P.M.
My right calf muscle cramps. Like it’s being held tight in someone’s fist. Clenching. Clawing. Pulling. I point my toes up. Stretch. It’s not deep enough. It won’t untwist. I grunt through the spasm.
Charlie hears me. Asks what’s wrong.
“Leg cramp.”
“Oh, yeah. I’ve got those, too.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Didn’t want to complain.”
“I’m not complaining.”
“You’re definitely in the ballpark of complaining.”
“Nope. I’m okay. I’ve handled worse pain in water polo.”
Why am I so proud of this? Why do I need him to know? Why do I want to explain that my sport is pain? That I know the slice of someone else’s fingernails digging into my skin as I fight for position in front of the goal. I know twisted nipples and thighs left purple and bruised. I know kicks to tender spots and private parts. I know scratches so deep they need Neosporin. I know muscles longing for ibuprofen and a body that feels like it can’t walk another step without collapsing.
Maybe I need to remind myself because playing water polo makes me feel all the things I don’t feel right now. Strong. Confident. Powerful.
When you’re on a swim team, you eventually see water polo. The first time I saw it, I was ten years old.
I wanted to be like them.
It was so much more exciting than swimming back and forth by myself, from one end of the pool to the other, following a single black line and the thoughts in my head.
“I want to do that,” I told my mom as she shoved my goggles and swim cap into the bag over her shoulder.
I went to my first practice two weeks later. I loved it from the second my hand touched the ball. I’d found exactly where I belonged in the water.
“I’m okay with the pain here,” I say to Charlie. “But I could do without the fear.”
“And the hunger.”
“Yes. My stomach feels so empty.” Hunger has crept in on tiptoes, punching at the hollow space of my belly. Grumbling. Growling. “I want a cold fruit and yogurt smoothie. Extra ice.” I want it to slide down my dry throat, coating and cooling until it settles in my stomach and fills the emptiness inside me. “The last thing I ate was a bagel at breakfast.” Breakfast. Where Mila was obnoxious. That already seems so long ago.
“I had a banana. We definitely could’ve done better.”
My hollow belly rumbles. “Well, my stomach just growled over a banana, so. . .”
Charlie laughs. “Yeah. Same here. Not to mention your smoothie with all the ice.”
I think of eating dinner with my mom. I think of her wavy hair and her eye crinkles and her belly laugh and her recipes and her no-phones-at-the-table rule. I think of backyard meals in the summer and bowls of soup on the couch in the winter.
I think of dinner last night and yelling and pushing my chair back and stomping off. If I could go back there now, I would. I would stay at the table for the rest of my life if it meant I could talk to her. I would explain why I was upset. That her dating my coach hurt me, and made me feel left out in my own life. But then I would listen to her, too.
If I had known what today would be, I would’ve let her in my room last night. I would’ve felt the way my bed shifted when she sat down. I want to be in my room again. With my mom. Where our problems are so much smaller than these ones.
Because it seems too easy to be left here.
With the fear of never seeing her again.
Never being able to tell her I’m sorry.
And that knowledge is the worst pain of all.
MOM AND DAD
My mom likes to tell me the story of the day she met my dad. It was in a beach town in Italy in the summer after her last year of college. She says she tells me the story so I’ll remember him somehow, even if it’s my mom who needs to remember.
Sometimes I feel bad that I don’t hurt the way she does. But how am I supposed to mourn the loss of someone I never knew?
“He had earrings and this mass of Kurt Cobain hair. He looked like he should be in a band. He was cool. Cooler than me.”