You Don't Live Here Page 2

  I stared down at the quarter page of our yearbook celebrating how well liked and popular Tara was. If the headline were accurate it would read, Worst Personality: Tara Angel.

  Actually . . . I clicked the little text box. And then, my heart pounding, I changed it. I added her picture, and for one glorious moment, everything was perfect. The caption revealed her. Her eyes seemed mean, and her smile fake in a way that it hadn’t before.

  There was a chance no one would catch it. And if they did, they’d never know it was me. Still, the stress of doing something wrong made me feel ill. I didn’t upset the status quo—I tiptoed around it. By the time the bell rang, I’d put everything back to the way it was supposed to be.

  I biked to the museum that afternoon thinking about alternate captions for the yearbook, ones that exposed a truth far deeper than best hair or most class spirit. Mentally, I sorted through my classmates, choosing who would win worst lab partner, or dirtiest gym clothes, or most desperate for Instagram likes.

  I spent my afternoon sitting in the museum gift shop, reading about Zelda Fitzgerald and trying to stop eraser thieves and forget about Tara Angel.

  And then, miles away, deep beneath the ground, the San Andreas Fault shifted at exactly 5:02 p.m., and with it, my entire life crumbled to pieces.

  Chapter 3

  WHILE EVERYTHING LEADING UP TO THE earthquake is as clear in my mind as a page of study notes, everything immediately after is blurry and fractured, as though, in all of the chaos, the pen slipped, leaving a smudged, illegible trail down the page.

  And so I can recall very little from the rest of that day. Even now, there are only fragments: strangers exiting the museum, shaken and trying to get cell service. The eraser thief shouting “Mama! Mama!” and launching himself at some spiky-haired woman in a navy tracksuit. Sirens in the distance. Sirens getting closer. The dark plumes of smoke that signaled us from town, from my suburb, from the next suburb over. The choke of cars on the road. The five tries it took to unlock my bicycle with shaking hands.

  And in the background of all of these flashes, the unbearable silence from my mom. The lack of missed calls. The way she wasn’t answering her phone. The frantic stack of texts I sent, all asking the same question over and over: Mom, where are you?

  When I’d left the apartment that afternoon, hastily changing out of my school clothes into a button-down shirt for the museum, I’d thought: turn off the lights, lock the door, did you forget anything, got your keys?

  Except it turned out none of that mattered. When I finally made it home, the sky hanging dark overhead, I didn’t need my keys. The large apartment building on the corner had collapsed, debris and concrete spilling into the street. A row of cars was crushed under a fallen oak tree. The houses, small one-story cottages, slanted crookedly, a collection of sagging roofs and smashed porches.

  There was a surreal quality to all of it, as though I were seeing a simulation of a disaster, instead of numbly witnessing the real thing. The electricity was out, and the streetlamps should have come on by now. Without them, everything was in shadow, twisted and wrong. The neighbors, instead of going for their nightly jogs, were digging their cars out from under debris.

  I called my mom again, getting her voice mail. Despairingly, I tried the salon and then considered calling the police. But what could they do? She wasn’t missing. They probably had real emergencies. Car accidents. Wrecked buildings. People stuck in elevators. Any minute now, her red Civic would pull up. Any minute, my phone would ring.

  I didn’t know what else to do except wait, so I sat down on the curb, feeling shaky and unglued and a little dizzy.

  Living in California meant we were always teetering on the cusp of disaster. Between top forty hits on the radio, commercials urged us to earthquake proof our homes, and then to buy a season pass for Six Flags. Every few months, there was a wildfire, a landslide, a drought. Everyone knew it was just a matter of time before something like this happened. So we’d kept on living in denial, figuring that, when the big one did strike, it wouldn’t hit so close to home.

  It was going to be fine, I told myself. My mom’s phone could be broken, or dead.

  But then again, she could be broken, or dead.

  A harsh light flooded over me, and I shielded my eyes, squinting up. An eyewitness chopper circled overhead. I imagined its camera pointed right at the breaking news, the way my classmates did at parties with their phones.

  Let’s go to our reporter on the scene, where a 6.0 earthquake struck the San Bernardino Valley this evening. Devastating. Just devastating. Thoughts and prayers go out to the victims as hashtag San Bernardino Quake is trending worldwide. You can text SANB to the number below to donate ten dollars to the Red Cross. How’s it looking out there, Bill?

  That’s what all the news reports said, more or less. But of course I wouldn’t know that until later, at the hospital.

  Is this part important? The part between the earthquake we all experienced and the aftershock that was mine and mine alone? I don’t know. When I close my eyes sometimes, I can still see bodies being pulled out of the crushed cars. I can still remember how it hurt to squint into the searchlight of the eyewitness chopper. To sit there, waiting, my unease giving way to panic, even before my phone finally rang.

  An unfamiliar number flashed across my screen, but still, I scrambled to answer it.

  “Hello? Mom?” I said, my voice tinged with desperation.

  That was the last time I’d ever answer the phone thinking she was on the other end.

  Earthquake footage was playing on every television at the hospital. It didn’t feel real. But then, bad things never do, at first.

  I don’t remember getting to the hospital, or what they said on the phone after realizing I didn’t count as an emergency contact because I was only sixteen.

  I just remember the doctor in his green scrubs, his eyes shadowed, his mouth a thin line as he told me what I didn’t want to hear: that my mom was in critical condition. That she was undergoing emergency surgery.

  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, s
obbing 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.

  The road curved, depositing us straight into the glittering sprawl of Bayport’s main drag. We drove past luxe yoga studios, designer clothing boutiques, and upscale seafood restaurants, all of them closed for the evening. The dark silhouettes of palm trees thrust upward from a center divider. Occasionally, a colored spotlight cast dramatic shadows through the fronds.

  After a few blocks, the shops gave way to a marina, full of ghostly white sails. A country club, lit up behind iron gates, was hosting an event, orchestral music floating down the curved driveway. And then there were the houses: overgrown foliage shielded us from peering in, but every so often, the hedges would dip, revealing a set of pillars and a gatehouse, along with the name of the subdivision.

  Old Bluffs. Back Bay Estates. Pelican Crest.

  The few houses that I could see, way up on the cliffs, were all glass windows and enormous balconies. It was hard to believe my laid-back mom, who padded around the house in thrifted men’s flannels, had grown up here. When we drove down last Christmas, she’d muttered about rich Republicans driving Porsches and gluten-free housewives in designer yoga pants. Which, ironically enough, was a fair description of my grandparents.

  We paused at a red light, and a Land Rover full of teenagers peeled out of a subdivision, windows down, music blasting. A blond boy drove, and a dark-haired boy sat in the passenger seat, grinning. The back was crammed full of laughing girls with long, wonderful hair that unfurled in the wind. They were all so beautiful, so perfect, like something out of a movie. I couldn’t even imagine what it was like, being them. Their lives seemed easy and safe, unmarked by even a hint of tragedy. And then the car sped away, leaving me with the disappointing sensation of having glimpsed something that would never, ever be mine.

  My grandparents’ house was spotless. That was the first thing I noticed, how frighteningly clean it all was, more like a showroom than a place where people actually lived. They’d left in a hurry, I knew, shoving clothing into overnight bags, and yet, not so much as a throw pillow was out of place. I wasn’t sure whether to be impressed or concerned.

  The sharp tang of citrus disinfectant followed us down the white hallways, past rooms filled with pale furniture and enormous pieces of abstract art. I stopped at a table displaying framed photographs: black-and-white pictures of relatives I’d never met, my grandparents outside city hall on their wedding day, a family portrait with my mom in a pink ruffled dress. There was her high school graduation, the two of us at the beach when I was a baby, my yearbook photo from second grade with the missing front teeth.

  And then there was the picture that had been blown up for her funeral. Her hair was wild and lovely, her smile genuine. She’d just b
ought me a portrait lens for my birthday, and she’d been a champion when I’d spent the entire weekend trying it out on her.

  I realized with a start that I would never have any more pictures of her. And the force of that realization almost knocked me over. Now, she was an old photograph. A memory. This was the town she’d grown up in, the house she’d lived in, and she wasn’t here. She wasn’t anywhere.

  I hadn’t taken enough pictures. I hadn’t saved enough videos, or kept enough voice mails, or known I would need things to remember her by. And now I didn’t have them. I’d never have them.

  I didn’t realize I was shaking until my grandfather put a soft hand on my shoulder, as if to steady me.

  He was carrying Pearl, their fluffy white mop of a dog, whom he’d tucked under his arm like a football. She stared at me, squirming, her little pink tongue hanging out.

  Wordlessly, my grandfather handed me the dog, her body soft and warm against my chest. I cuddled my face into her fur, and she licked my arm, where my cuts from the earthquake were fading into pink welts, and didn’t stop licking for a while. It sort of helped.

  “I had Magda put fresh sheets on your bed,” Eleanor said, pushing open the door of my mom’s childhood bedroom. It had been frozen in time, from the window seat crowded with Beanie Babies to the No Doubt poster over her desk. There was a bed with a white wicker headboard. A Laura Ashley duvet. A bookshelf decorated with blown-glass figurines prancing in front of worn paperbacks. A lava lamp on the nightstand, filled with silver glitter.

  A portrait of the artist as a young woman. The sorrows of young Alice. A room of no one’s own.

  “Oh,” I said, staring.

  I hadn’t been expecting it. I’d figured there was a guest room, or that my mom’s bedroom would have been dismantled finally, the way Eleanor was always threatening, and converted into a craft room or a gym. Of course, my grandparents had plenty of other bedrooms for that. Their house was enormous, and I couldn’t imagine how big it felt with just the two of them. No wonder they’d gotten the dog.