28. FAULT-LINE
Lawson—
Sevens leads the way into the street, Aidan and I following. A good portion of the kids from the Haven straggle after. A few weak stars peek from between drifting clouds.
Strong stars, rather. Only the strongest of lights can cut through this smog. But they look weak from down here.
The emergency speakers don’t quite fill the night. Old trash blows past, the flutter of plastic mingling with the crunching of gravel and glass beneath dozens of feet. boom—boom—boom tries the New Dance, the fragile beat of a broken heart.
This street is all messy lines and lonely charcoal alcoves. The guards have gone home for the night, and the kids behind me seem like shadows of people, all worn down and used to grief. Every D-towner has an instinct for danger. That’s one of the first things I noticed when I got here. The way, when something is about to go down, every head in the street lifts and turns the same direction.
That internal warning system is a hard-earned gift.
When the first quake hit, no one knew more were coming, that they needed to prepare, that their city might be next. Almost no one. No one had warning, except for us. That’s the irony. The weather station was on in the background of our house. Always. Muted. So it took a few minutes for my parents to notice the pictures flickering across the screen like scenes from an action movie that Mama—the soldier—would never have let me watch.
Bridges collapsing. Streets tearing apart.
Then Dad turned. His ears practically perked up like a dog on scent; he too had an instinct for disaster. The television suddenly blasted. He must have seen the word EARTHQUAKE across the bottom of the screen and turned it up, but it felt like the TV coming into sharp focus on an expanse of crumpled homes.
Dad reached out for Mama. They had been at the sink, doing dishes together, him washing, her drying. He was soapy wet to his elbows, and she easily slipped out of his grasp, continuing to dry, until he said her name, gently, like a secret.
“Sally.”
She turned, her gaze first going not to the TV but to him, confusion washing over her face to see that, after that intimate tone, he wasn’t looking at her at all. Then her gaze followed his.
She dropped the plate.
“It might not be…” She said this like a mother who didn’t want her child getting his hopes up.
Dad’s face was alight, turned on from the inside. “Watch.”
They sat down together at the counter, dishes forgotten. We were one of a handful of families in the world who literally had nothing to do to prepare. Or so my parents thought. I’m screaming into the memory now, like I can turn back time and change the mistake.
Save your work, Dad!
He should have sprinted downstairs to his office and backed up all his files. He should have remembered that just an hour ago he had a breakthrough in his sound research and that Mama called him for dinner before he had a chance to back it up. But he had probably rehearsed this day a thousand times in his mind. In his mental practice, he was ready, everything was saved, so he didn’t remember. He hadn’t slept in forty-eight hours. He only came up for dinner, glowing with celebration, wanting to share his triumph with us. He surely planned to save everything right after the meal, and then to relax, knowing that his life’s work was complete. Knowing that he would be there to play a pivotal role in changing the world whenever the world was ready.
I hate myself, that younger me standing there watching the images of destruction flit across the TV, for leaning forward like it’s my birthday and I’m about to get a present, even though I didn’t know about the files.
When the second quake hit, closer to home but still not very near, Dad looked at Mama. “Go to work, Sally. I’ll take care of Lawson.”
He said it before her phone rang but only by a beat, and then she was on-duty Mama, out the door with a peck on the top of my head and another on Dad’s lips.
“Come here.” He patted the counter, and I jumped up to sit next to his portable computer. He brought up a map with little dots and started changing it, altering landscapes with his fingers. His phone rang. He laid a hand on my back, activating his phone earpiece with the other.
“San Francisco, I bet.” He laughed and said a high number. “I know, I know. I’ll personally design your computer system.”
He hung up. Not too long after, a beeping blared from the television. A red band scrolled across the screen, in strange contrast with the normalcy of the kitchen.
“San Francisco!” Dad said again, this time like a jackpot winner. “We need another big one. Come on, give us at least a nine.”
I’m not sure what the last words to flash across the screen said, because Dad’s eyes widened. His arm went slack around me. Maybe he’d gotten the big quake he hoped for. For sure he somehow knew where the next one was going to hit. He yanked me off the counter and, leaving the computer, dragged me into the garage.
“There goes cell reception,” he said and just let his phone fall to the floor.
It shattered—that object that mattered, that he never let me play with—and he walked right over the pieces.
A car I’d never been in was parked in the garage, a tiny little thing with a very full back seat. He strapped me in, ignoring the fact that I’d been putting on my own seatbelt for years, and backed us down the driveway. The exact moment when he remembered is impossible to miss, thinking back. He didn’t stop driving, but the whole atmosphere in the car changed. He reached for the black box, the shortwave radio, attached to the dashboard and fiddled with it then picked up the mouthpiece with shaking hands.
“Sally. We’re next.”
“You’re a step behind the military.” Mama sounded calm. She was always at her best in a crisis.
Dad actually took the twenty seconds necessary to say, “Am not. We’re already out of the house. Sally, keep our son company for a minute, okay.”
“Zack—what?”
“I’m going back in. I forgot to back it up.”
“Okay, don’t panic. You have last night’s copy, right? You can make up the gaps—”
“You don’t understand! I worked all night. I don’t have any of it. I’m going back in.”
“Zack!”
“Don’t worry about it, we aren’t directly on the fault-line.”
I was so caught by the interplay, the growing tension in Mama’s voice, I didn’t process Dad climbing out of the car, until he handed me the radio mic like I knew how to use it. Those were his last words to Mama. We aren’t directly on the fault-line.
“What’s your dad doing, Lawson?”
“Dad went inside,” I said, very clearly, without pressing the button on the mic.
“Lawson?”
“Mama.”
“Lawson!…Okay, listen honey, do you have the little square thing attached to the wire?” Eventually, she was able to explain how to operate the radio.
The car tilted like an amusement park ride, and I clung to my seatbelt. When the shaking stopped, flames filled the front windows of my house. Dad had left a larger portable computer on his seat, and images flashed across the screen. Numbers, graphs, and then the machine gave a human cough.
Dad’s voice came out of it, muffled. “Lawson, I”—cough—“you. Sent research…car. Tell Mama.” Cough. “—kay?”
And that was that. He didn’t know—I didn’t realize—that I was holding down the button on the mic.
Crack, crackle. The sounds of Mama dropping her radio? Then she too was gone.
I sat in the car in the street until the fire department came. That must have been my mother’s doing, that they came to our street with so much of the city burning, flooding, sinking. But they couldn’t do much to help—the water pipe to our house had broken along with the gas line.
Something told me to hide Dad’s computer under the pile of stuff in the back. Soon after, Dart’s mom opened the car door and got into Dad’s seat. Her flowing dress was oddly untouched by the chaos.
“I’ll take you to your mom,” she promised.
Instead she drove the car out of the city to an ecovillage with earthen houses, gardens, and free-range chickens. Frazzled-looking people were putting up tents in every available space. I spent most of the time curled in my tent, waiting for Mama. When she finally came with food, I gave her Dad’s computer. She plugged a headset into it and covered my ears with pillowy earphones, and then everything was okay.
It was okay until D-town.
Now, I watch Aidan’s blank face as we near the Ashram. I’m already flinching, dreading the corpses waiting for us. I want to pull Aidan back, offer to look instead, but that seems insane. No way can I face death better than Aidan can.
That one walks beside me, as far out of reach as the sun. A light shines from underneath Aidan’s skin, a beauty.
I’m not immune to the pain of living, Aidan said. I just don’t take it too seriously.
But I do. I know what I have to lose.