TRIANGLE OF LIFE

I step onto the down escalator, anticipating that delicious expansion of the lungs, breath turned into Cabernet, that will happen when I catch sight of my son, Gabe.  The voices of my fellow travelers tinkle like wind chimes above the grumble and beep of the baggage carousel below us. A cheerful woman on the PA announces the temporary closure of the airport’s yoga room. California.

My lips buzz with mumbled platitudes as I practice greeting Evie, Gabe’s girlfriend. On my left, a barrel of a porter in a midnight blue uniform glides upwards, headed towards ticketing, chomping on a Polish half smoke. A cloud of yellow mustard and onions trails him like a crop duster’s payload, and I worry it will cling to my hair and catch in the nubs of my tweed tunic. I’ve spent the four hours of the flight from D.C. planning how I want this first contact with Evie to go and stinking like hotdog is not in the script.

I have imagined greeting her, taking her hands in mine, if her eyes ask for that, or, my preference, giving her space, but with a nod, and a smile, not too toothy, and a warm remark referencing our shared affection for Gabe, not too personal. I won’t even mention that, though she and Gabe have dated for two years, she’d always managed to be out of town, for work, when I visited in the past. She’s what Gabe calls a “lifestyle blogger,” which only makes sense in this city. San Francisco has bloggers the way Pittsburgh used to have steel workers.

My magnanimity toward Evie will be a kindness to Gabe, I think as I plot our meeting out in my head yet again, the sort of kindness I did for him all the time when he was a kid, but these days have so little opportunity to deploy. A clipped Spiderman comic in his lunchbox. Curfew thirty minutes later than the most popular kid in his class, even when that kid was the son of a Brazilian diplomat. Ham-Day Sundays, with Canadian bacon, Kraft Singles, garlic dill chips, and Hellman’s on sourdough for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert. And WrestleMania pay-for-view, every time.

I spot Gabe among a crowd of indifferent chauffeurs, European men in white shirts and black pants, holding loosely the signs bearing their clients’ names, like Gallois they forgot to light. I marvel as if for the first time at Gabe’s height, though he’s been a foot taller than me for a decade, since he was fifteen. His haircut, such as it is, a disorganized chestnut pompadour, adds three inches to his 6’4” frame. At his side stands the woman who must be Evie, a man’s blue plaid flannel shirt over a white tank top, dungarees, flip flops. Her head comes up to his ear, which makes her tall too. Her skin reflects bronze in the fluorescent overhead lights, and her afro explodes back from her forehead, as if blown apart by a small incendiary device. Even from here, I can see the black of her eyes fixed with ravening intensity at a spot just above me.  Her mouth is as taut as her face, as if she’s fazed not at all by the recent firebombing of her hair.

Gabe’s always done everything at a lope, and now he locks eyes with me and smiles wide and waves big. Evie raises her arm in an anemic half-salute, and before I can respond, the flash from the diamond on her left hand sucker-punches me in the gut. An engagement ring, of course. I should have suspected. I stay upright, with effort, but clutch the shoulder strap on my carry on–a public radio tote for givers at the $50 level–instead of signaling back. Gabe waves all the harder.

I look down, not at him, or her, and count the escalator’s corrugated steel steps as they disappear into the approaching landing. Four. Three. Two. I grip a handful of my upper right breast along with the tote strap and squeeze tight with mercifully short fingernails. The points of heat where I press into my skin help me recalibrate.

I was prepared to tour their $4000-per-month one-bedroom in the Castro, their favorite Mission District dive bar, and other signs of their burgeoning adulthood. I was prepared to demonstrate, with every sensitive comment and facial tic, that I respect and admire Gabe’s choices and independence. But weathering the touchdown of a stranger in the midst of our family, which has stood firm at two members since Jeremy left us almost twenty years ago? For this, I am not prepared.

I reach the bottom, and go to Gabe, who wraps me up in his bamboo arms. My nose flattens against his sternum, and I snuffle into the scratchy warmth of his thrift store duster. It smells of mold, as these things do, and second hand pipe smoke. But it also smells like Gabe has since he cleared puberty and stopped reeking of a strip mall gym. Now it’s vanilla-scented dryer sheets, the kind I use at home, and pine mulch from Lowes. Nostalgia boils in my gut.

“Mom,” I hear Gabe say. I keep my face hidden in his lapel, and his voice sounds as if it’s filtered through packing peanuts. “Evie, this is my mom. You should call her ‘Mom,’ right Mom?”

God, no, I think.

“God, no,” she says, and I think that was uncalled for.

Gabe pushes me back, holds me at arm length, and beams, and I feel for a moment like a right-sized genuine cashmere sweater he just pulled out of the ten-dollar bin at Macy’s.

“Call me Laura,” I say to Evie. Gabe lets me loose, and Evie nods at me, hands pinned to her sides.

“Okay. Laura,” she says. “Laura.” She nods again.

“Not Basil?” Gabe says and pokes my shoulder but smiles at Evie. Basil is the father of Gabriel in Longfellow’s Evangeline, the epic poem of star-crossed love and Acadian diaspora. Evie’s full name is Evangeline and Gabe’s full name is Gabriel, and Evangeline the poem is a cornerstone of their overdeveloped creation myth. Whenever Gabe brings up Evangeline the girlfriend-now-fiancée on the phone, he also brings up Evangeline the poem. I haven’t read Evangeline. I named Gabe after Gabe Kaplan in Welcome Back Kotter.

“Well, I guess congratulations are in order,” I say. This is what comes of not preparing. I sound like a bit player in a Jimmy Stewart film.

“I wanted us to call you,” says Evie, “but your son…”

Our island of three is suddenly overwhelmed by a family of ten times that many, spilling into and over us from the direction of the nearby elevators. The men all wear white T-shirts and jeans belted below sloping bellies. The women favor pink and tight–shirts, sweatpants, sometimes leggings stamped with vaguely athletic mottos in cursive: Move, Do it Done it, Ride High. These, I have to assume, are aspirational as there’s not a one of them under two-hundred-fifty pounds. The little girls pull shiny roller bags festooned with Disney princesses, and the boys bang each other over the head with plastic cars. The group gurgles and roars like rising flood waters, and the smell of stale tobacco and Panda Express General Tso’s chicken pulses off them. What has to be their matriarch–larger and pinker than the rest–rolls her wheelchair in between me and Evie and Gabriel. I can’t take my eyes off what’s left of her left leg, a stump wrapped in pink stocking tied off in a knot at the end. It looks exactly like a giant bologna.

“Y’all come in from Charlotte?” The woman turns a full moon face to Evie.

“No, DCA,” I say.

“Carousel twelve,” Evie says. “Do you need some help?”

Evie’s kinder than I am, a deflating thought.

“Oh, I got my own people here,” says the woman. “Thank you, darlin’.” She rolls on, leaving Evie and I to face each other.

“It is really great to finally meet you,” she says.

I raise my right hand, intending to shake, but see the wink of the ring again, and decide that’s too impersonal, so I raise the other hand halfway, thinking to grip her shoulders as Gabe had gripped mine. But that’s wrong too. We haven’t spoken ten words about the engagement. I freeze, palms up and outstretched, at waist level. Because of our height difference, I’m pretty sure I appear as if I’m offering her crotch an imaginary loaf of bread.

“We’re not really huggers,” she says.

I assume she’s talking about her family, because Gabe and I have just demonstrated that our family are really huggers. But then I remember she doesn’t have much family left: mother felled by Oxy; father disappeared after Hurricane Katrina; aunt and two cousins poisoned by a leaky furnace; two more cousins killed in Iraq; one grandmother burned up in a Christmas tree fire; one grandfather trampled by a spooked racing filly.

Gabe says it’s forged Evie’s character, made her resilient and fierce. And when she was a more abstract concept, something to talk about over Skype, I bought that, understood how Gabe, who’d grown up with just me, would be attracted. But now that Evie might be here to stay, well, I’m not so sure. All that family tragedy. It’s seems beyond unlucky. I worry for Gabe that it might be catching. It’s always the solitary storm cloud that holds the lightning that gets you.

Evie tugs on a pinch of Gabe’s sleeve and looks up at him. He puts his arm around her and pulls her close.

“Not really huggers,” Gabe says and smiles at Evie.

“Do you want to see the ring?” she says to me. Again, she is kind. Delivering me from my paralysis. She holds out her left hand, and I take it. It’s long and limp and damp and tepid, like something warm-blooded, a ferret maybe, recently dead. The ring, in contrast, pulses life. A center diamond cut into two triangles butted end to end, like a gothic shield, and flanked with small green stones and set in rose gold. It’s like something born of the woodlands, something you would find under a Jack-in-the-pulpit, resting on a soft bed of moss. A tinny Swedish accent behind me pipes hot in my ear “Oh, what a lucky girl.”

The center diamond winks at me, a lover’s secret half smile, and that makes it easier for me to stagger through the subsequent felicitations: the I’m-so-happy-for-yous and the have-you-set-a-date-yets and the I-told-you-you-should-have-called-hers and the when-will-you-come-to-Virginias. I do then hug Evie, my arms wrapped around her narrow rib cage. Her bones feel like river reeds. She smells of the same vanilla Gabe does, but on her it comes across as butter cookie. For an instant I can feel the girl beneath her skin, the one that might be a decent match for my boy.

~~~

That night, I meet Gabe and Evie at the restaurant she picked. The place is all weathered steel and rough boards and sliced globe radishes with unsalted butter for seventeen bucks. I picked up an engagement gift for them at the CVS on my walk over from the Airbnb and presented it to them outside: a car emergency medical kit. I get it, not romantic, but my choices were limited. And I noticed on the ride in from the airport they didn’t have one in their Prius. They’ve been mocking my gift since we sat down.

“That’s so Mom,” says Gabe and tells about the supplies I laid in after 9-11: Canned beets and green beans, a hand crank radio, batteries, MREs for two weeks, bleach, granola bars, twenty-eight gallons of fresh water in gallon jugs, flashlights, surgical masks, Red Cross-issue blankets, $200 in fives and ones, chocolate, plastic sheeting, and lots and lots of duct tape.

“Duct tape?” says Evie.

“For a safe room, in case of chemical attack,” says Gabe. “A place we could consume our granola bars and listen to NPR until the sarin blew over.”

“Don’t forget you could also catch up on your laundry,” says Evie. “Since you’d hoarded bleach.”

Gabe continues detailing the safety precautions that littered his childhood, like the whirligig seed pods that covered our Alexandria neighborhood every fall: backseat until Gabe was twelve; new batteries in the smoke and CO2 detectors every other month; organic only, no trans fats; stranger-danger drills in the backyard, me role-playing the creepy ice-cream truck man, the handsy gym teacher, the psychotic corner store grocery bagger; double wash lettuce, triple wash water bottles, no plastic containers, BPA or otherwise; shoes with good treads; no driving with other teens; always jump never dive; safe sex, no means no, and proper condom application; daily tick checks, don’t forget in the ears. Evie gets the giggles and chokes on a spelt bread stick.

“So this comes as no surprise to you,” she says, holds the emergency kit out to Gabe, who takes it from her and places it under his chair.

“Better safe than sorry,” I say, but no one is listening to me.

The Chenin Blanc I ordered comes in a goblet as big as my head and I sip it, an analgesic for the painful cavity at my sternum. I would have thought that Evie, with all the relatives she had struck down by disaster, might have understood the gift. I wonder if I can make this point without seeming to blame her for her family’s proclivity for dying dramatically. But I don’t because I’m afraid my tone will betray my fear: that she’s genetically predisposed to a cavalier attitude toward basic safety measures.

She and Gabe talk of wedding plans. They pick up what sounds like a well-practiced argument over side salads. I keep my mouth shut and concentrate on which dish emerging from the glass-plated kitchen is the one washing the room in garlic fumes. Myrtle-grilled quail? Pretzel-dusted calamari?

Our first course is delivered in a flurry of bearded men in tight jeans and open-collared red-checked shirts.  Evie throws back the remains of her cardamom Moscow mule. Her second. I gulp the last inch of my wine and order a bottle of pinot noir for the table. Gabe says he’ll stick with water, and I momentarily regret requesting more booze. Jeremy, Gabe’s dad, died a drunk, and this worries Gabe, but surprisingly, not me. It’s pretty much the only calamity I have never envisioned befalling Gabe. He lacks the focus needed to commit to alcoholism.

“Just two glasses, then,” I say to the waiter.

Evie and I finish the bottle over moonfish crudo tossed with red grapefruit and Serrano chilies and stinging nettle fusilli topped with pickled green strawberry and Korean yellow mustard. We decide on another bottle to pair with our entrees. Gabe relents and has the waiter bring him a glass as well. He holds it empty to the light to check for stains. He’s a germaphobe like me, and I miss him more than I have in years. His head is distended by the balloon of glass, and I remind myself to count my blessings. He could have been born hydrocephalic.

After dinner, I opt for an artisanal moonshine coffee drink to pair with my grape sorbet, and Evie orders something off the scroll of bespoken cocktails. We talk about Gabe and Evangeline’s apartment, one of three carved out of a carriage house that remained standing through the 1906 earthquake.

“It was mostly fire back then that did the damage,” says Gabe. “Now everyone’s got sprinklers.”

“There’s a quake every other week,” says Evie. “It’s just none of them are that big. You hardly notice them if you don’t know what to look for. You think it’s a garbage truck until you read the tweet from SF QuakeBot.”

“Which is?” I say.

“A Twitter thing,” says Gabe. “If one gets up around 3.0, there might be traffic issues.”

“Still, you keep fresh water, right?” I say. This is familiar terrain, disaster planning, and I feel Gabe has led us here intentionally, penance for his earlier mocking of the car emergency kit. “And you know what to do if a real quake hits?” Of course he does. I emailed him links to all the FEMA sites when he moved out here. The FEMA one-pager shows how to drop, cover, and hold on. A simple maneuver, but it would be the kind of thing anyone could forget when the tectonic plates start to shift. Drop to the ground before the shaking fells you. Shelter under a table. Hold onto a leg and duck your head to keep debris from battering you senseless.

“Triangle of life,” says Evie. “Get out of the building or, next best, next to some big ass furniture.” She’s starting to slur a little bit. The waiter brings her a flute of something purple and smelling of lavender and gin, and she sips it. “Make yourself a little pocket of air and wait for the rescue dogs.”

“No,” I say. My voice cracks. “Triangle of life is an earthquake survival strategy developed by a 9-11 conspiracy theorist. It’s been thoroughly debunked. The biggest danger is something falling on you. So you stay inside. Drop. Cover. Hold on.”

“The biggest danger’s building collapse,” says Evie and bangs her hand on the table, the left one, the one with the ring. “You need to get out of the building, into the streets. They told us all about it before I did my semester abroad.” She’d gone to Manilla.

“That’s for the third world, where buildings are a thousand years old and made out of mud. Not here.” The ring that beguiled me so just six hours ago winks malevolently. I imagine Evie rushing from a shuddering building, cornices and metal shards raining down on her, disappearing under buckling concrete, just the hand with the ring lying severed on the sidewalk.

“Not here, not in San Francisco,” I repeat, this time in a low tone I mean to sound ominous, but it comes out mournful instead. “Drop. Cover. Hold on.”

Gabe looks up from his empty espresso cup. He puts his hand on mine. “You’re probably both right,” he says. I know from his tone he’s willing me to drop it. He was always willing me to drop it when he was a kid. I was forever quizzing Target sales people about bike helmet ratings or petitioning for seatbelts on the soccer team school bus, or insisting on healthy snacks at the extracurricular activities that required feedings, which seemed to be all of them. I think healthy snacks irked him the most.

“Show me.” Evie’s on her feet.

“Evie,” says Gabe. “C’mon, sit down.”

“No, it sounds like something your mom really wants me to understand,” Evie says. She is drunk. She mouths each word thoroughly and spits it out like a plug of tobacco. “We don’t want to end up like my family.” She sways, lifts one foot then the other. “Show me how to be safe. Laura.”

‘Okay, time to go home,” says Gabe. I stand quickly before he can and grip his shoulder to keep him put. His deltoid tightens and knots under my hand, and I feel like I’m palming a ball of thick twine. A waiter bearing an iced silver tray of opened oysters rounds the table to our right and halts a few feet before Evie’s back. Evie does not turn. A whiff of ocean brine floats over us, and I rock once, as if on a ship.

“We’re looking for the ladies’ room,” I say to him at a volume I usually reserve for non-English speakers and old dogs.

“Behind the bar, by that wooden Native American,” the waiter says. We stare at each other for a moment around Evie’s left arm. He backs out. I look down at Gabe, his head bent. The tips of his ears redden. It looks like someone has attached a bike reflector to each.

“It’s okay,” I say to him. “I got this.”

Gabe hates scenes, and Evie’s about to make one, so that’s got to be good for me, I think. Worst case scenario, she gets some hands-on instruction in drop-cover-hold-on.

“Here comes the earthquake,” Evie says and puts her hands on my arms, like she’s going to hug me, and shakes. “Rattle, rattle, thunder, clatter, boom boom boom.”

“Sit down. Both of you, please.” Gabe’s voice quavers. It must look to him like Evie’s attacking me. Fine.

“Time to drop,” I say, but it comes out garbled because Evie has still got hold of me, and now were doing something akin to polkaing. “It’s harder when you’re tipsy,” I add and try to throw a reassuring look to Gabe, but–I can tell by the way his mouth hangs open–failing to reassure.

I flick Evie’s hands off me and squat next to my chair, “Like this,” I say.

She squats too, so we’re knee to knee on the restaurant floor. She grabs her Boheme leather chair by its steel leg and yanks it out of the way. She places her hands on my thighs. I look down, and for a minute think the ring is gone, replaced with a single gold band, as if she and Gabe had snuck out and married sometime between the fig salad and the almond tuiles. But she lifts her hands, and the gemstones flash, and I see the ring has just slipped around backwards.

“So it’s duck, cover, and roll, right?” she says.

“Drop, cover, hold on,” I say, but Evie’s already rolling. On the way under the table, she cups her palm and scoops at my head to bring me with her. The ring catches my cheek, a sharp flick, the bite of a spider. As we both collapse, I put my hand to the sting.

“Oh God, I hit you,” says Evie, halfway between a laugh and a burp.

“What the hell is going on?” says Gabe from above us.

I lean back against his legs and say, “Everything’s fine.”

Evie settles across from me and crosses her legs Indian style. The table’s not big, Evie is close, and someone has push the chair back in. I like the thought that only Gabe knows we’re down here. A line of light weeps through a crack in the reclaimed barn wood above us and crosses over Evie’s bare knees. Gabe’s jeans smell like hot pretzels, salt and yeast, and he strokes the top of my head and I think I might cry. When I was in second grade back in Michigan we had a nuclear bomb drill, and this feels the same: the sting at my cheek, the piquancy of the air, the uncertainty in Gabe’s touch, the bronze glint on Evie’s skin, the sound of her breath, somehow rising over the noise of the diners above.

“Are you okay, oh my God, I’m so sorry,” Evie says.

I remove my hand and turn my palm up. We both look at the tiny rose petal of blood.

“The emergency kit,” Evie says, with gravity. She dives to my right and pulls it from next to Gabe’s chair.

“I wish you’d come up,” says Gabe.

“Don’t whine,” I say and loop an arm back around his leg to keep him from shifting. And then to Evie: “It’s not that bad.”

She shuts the box. “None of them were my fault,” she says. “I didn’t tell them to blow up or get washed away or swallow 160 mg of Oxycontin.”

“I never said you did.” I keep my voice low, in case Gabe is listening.

“Or blow out the pilot light at Aunt Bessie’s,” Evie mumbled. “Or tell Jerome to lie down in front of the lawnmower.” I look at her. I hadn’t heard that one before.

“Regardless, what’s the harm of learning a few safety maneuvers,” I say. “You live in San Francisco. Drop. Cover. Hold on. It could save your life, or Gabe’s.”

“You think I’m trying to kill Gabe?” says Evie, leaning from the waist over the emergency kit. She’s close now and her face drops, as if the effort of holding up those sharp cheekbones has suddenly become too much. The scent of peach pulses from her at the steady beat of a heart.

“I never saw my dad but once, did you know that?” she says. “On CNN, after Hurricane Katrina. They ran a cell phone video of this giant man, shirtless and sweating. He looked like a burning oil barrel. He was standing in the middle of all these trash bags and smashed chairs. There was a woman in a hospital gown, broken for sure, maybe dead, in a wheelchair behind him. He staring at something above the camera, yelling and waving his arms. Underneath the crawl reads: “Storm victim Franklin Harrison: Do they even know we’re here?”

Evie pushes the emergency kit off her lap and it clatters to the side, spilling Band-Aids and medical tape and antibiotic cream.

“I’m getting the check,” says Gabe.

“Just a minute,” I say.

Evie bends all the way down until her forehead touches the ground, and the back of her head is in front of me, like some sort of ceremonial pot offered to the tribal king. I put both hands there.

“My dad was in a big storm too,” I say.

~~~

I grew up in a small town on Lake Michigan on the northern edge of the tornado belt. Our trailer parks and dead oaks were not scattered by twisters as often as those in the Texas-Oklahoma-Arkansas triad, but we saw enough for our residents to take the beginning of Wizard of Oz personally. Schoolchildren drilled more frequently for tornados than for fire: Open classroom windows to equalize pressure and keep the building from exploding; retreat to the lowest point in the structure, southwest corner; squat and clasp hands behind heads. I performed the maneuvers with the gravity and focus of the guards at the Tomb of the Unknown soldier.

As an only child, and a nervous one at that, I insisted we follow similar precautions at home. When the tornado warnings came over my transistor radio, I would fly about our two-floor colonial, shooing whomever was in the house into the southwest corner of the basement, a narrow, steamy room holding the washer and dryer. My father was one of the town’s two radiologists, my mother was overactive in the local ladies’ golf leagues, and neither was home much. My rescue efforts usually only extended to the maid, Joetta, who was more likely than not already in the laundry room, and Blackie, our partially deaf and mute beagle mix.

My father was home, however, during the storm that spawned the Flower Patch Tornado, named for the newish subdivision it wiped out one town to our east. It was August. Daddy was working his way through his second martini and watching the news in his den. Mother had taken her drink across to the neighbors, where she often went to visit Mrs. Breyer and sneak a Virginia Slim before dinner. I was in my bedroom with my new Panasonic portable cassette recorder, waiting for “Seasons in the Sun” to come on WSJM so I could tape it for my collection of sad songs. My window was open, and I could smell the green static in the air.

The emergency warning squawk filled my room: This was not a test. The announcer’s command, “all within the sound of my voice seek shelter immediately,” crackled with the authority and urgency of one who had seen and felt Armageddon and wanted nothing more than to spare the rest of us the horror. I jumped to.

By the time I reached the first floor, my father was already outside, halfway up the front walk. His thin polyester shirt flapped from the hunch of his broad shoulders, and two tendrils of his combover broke loose and flitted around his pate, like hummingbirds at a feeder. Without turning, he stretched a hand toward the dark and falling clouds closing in from behind the Breyers’ Cape Cod.

It’s not like you’d think, if you’d only seen it on TV. At first, the air is neither all still nor all flurry. Small gusts come in sprays, like arrows, bringing with them foreign smells and sounds. A train whistle, the cry of an unfamiliar child, burnt toast, sulphur. The black triangle, the core of the beast, spreads and shakes and the roar of an empty sea cave fades in and out until it becomes one solid wail and covers all the intermittency with the constant cacophony of the storm.

I yelled “Come in!” and “Emergency!” and even “Fire!” at my father, and, without turning, he yelled back “Come out, Sweet Pea. It’s glorious! Glorious!” I didn’t even consider it. I had drilled so often, I could not conceive of spending the storm anywhere but in an officially sanctioned place of shelter, and I headed to the basement alone.

Crouching under the laundry sink, neck crooked to make room for the plastic drain pipe, I saw his death so clearly, I believed I was wishing it. His clothes ripped off him, his chest slashed throat to groin, his bones shattered and cut through his skin. Long after the house stopped creaking in the wind and the sirens stopped blowing, Mrs. Peoples, the neighbor, found me, and pulled me out from the tangle of extension cords and mop heads. Mother said it was night, though I remember the apricot glow of a sunset. Mother said Mrs. People took me right away to my friend Sarah’s house, though I am sure I wandered the front yard first, through sticks and scattered green leaves, policemen in blue shirts and firemen in grey raincoats. Everyone says it was a heart attack, unrelated to the storm, but I know I saw his body, cut through the chest and opened up wide to the calming sky.

~~~

Somewhere in the telling, Evie has sat up. She is dry eyed, though I am not.

She swivels to her right and back and grabs a table leg with both hands. “Like this?”

“That’s it,” I say and do the same with the leg to my left.

We hold on for a moment.

“Does Gabe know?” says Evie.

“No, but he will if you show him,” I say, even though that’s not what she means.

~~~

The next morning, the mattress jolts me awake at 8:14 a.m. The rippled windowpanes in my bedroom vibrate and beat on dented and cracked wooden frames that hardly hold in the glass. I can hear my hostess’s cat retching outside the door, and it’s about then that I realize it’s an earthquake. Though the room has stilled, I jump out of bed. I knew this would happen.

I sit on the edge of the bed and check SF QuakeBot, which I loaded after I got home last night. 4.0, not insignificant, and yes there will be traffic delays. A Google search pulls up first the familiar FEMA page, which I review while breathing deeply. I have done nothing wrong, like run out into the street and get hit in the head by falling concrete, but I’ve done nothing right either, like get under a table. I read several online news stories about the earthquake, until I notice I’m reading about an earthquake from three weeks ago along the Hayward fault, the same fault, I will soon learn, that stretched and snapped this time. In the course of doggedly acquiring this irrelevant information, I also discover there are such things as aftershocks, which I knew, and foreshocks, which I didn’t know and makes me feel as if a surgeon has implanted a small ice swan in my thorax. Because, if indeed the big one is on its way, I need to warn Gabe and Evie, help them locate a suitable place to shelter, remind them of the appropriate stance.

After last night, I have more confidence in Evie to seek safety then I do in Gabe. He left the restaurant the way he used to leave Little League games during his brief baseball career: ashamed and alone. It would be a few days before he would trust me or Evie again. I call Gabe, but it goes to voicemail. I don’t leave a message.

I think I might vomit.

I exit the room and see that the hostess’s cat has already thrown up and under the table where I would have dropped, covered, and held had the earthquake lasted long enough. I go into my private bathroom and fiddle with the hot rollers I left on last night. My hand shakes as I try to fit the rubber ends into the rubber loops without pulling out my hair. I want to do something normal to forget about the bed shaking just minutes ago but at the same time be on my feet in case the shaking starts again. The big one. Or an aftershock. I call Gabe again; again, no answer.

Once adequately coifed, I climb down the stairs of the yawing town house and wonder whether it tilted so to the left yesterday or whether the whole building was knocked askew by the quake. I stop at the bottom and watch a round man cover his hand in a plastic bag and stoop to pick up a tiny Shi-Tzu’s poop. What if there’s more damage four blocks north, where Gabe and Evie live? I set off in the opposite direction from the dog and his owner, who is now cooing, “What a good boy you are, Peanut.”

I try without success to make the walk a natural one. I’m cold and sweating. I smell of lemons without the sweet, a smell that dances then blends with the human urine pooled in every alley. I’m sweating and panting though I have not gone fifty yards. Up these goddamn hills, my legs become tree trunks, gelatinous tree trunks. I can’t lift my head, so I have to look at the trash that collects in corners when I’d rather look up at the houses, this one alternating periwinkle, lavender, and plum; that one canary, champagne, and orange. The trash is less cheering: a used diaper, not even taped up; stained newsprint; the wax paper that might once have been used to pick up a donut; the middle section of a hotdog, gnawed at both ends.

Every voice I can hear over my wheezing is talking about the earthquake. From a high window, two men discuss their cats.

“She hissed and climbed straight up the swag. Tribal hemp. Vintage. Rustic.”

“Tara ran round and round the living room, ten minutes before. They knew it was coming.”

“But why the tribal hemp?”

Further down the road, an old man with a hump and two black garbage bags clutched in one grime-buffed hand staggers against a kiwi Mitsubishi Mirage.

“I’m still rocking. I’m still rolling,” he sings.

“Don’t pee on that car, Bogie,” says a stout Hispanic woman in a maid’s uniform, “Carmen don’t have a sense of humor about that car.”

I get to the plateau where 19th intersects with Diamond, a half block from Gabe and Evie’s, and I cross the street, my head down for all but the moment it takes to lock eyes with the driver of the Jetta idling before the zebra walk. He smiles and puts one finger to his temple. I remember that this is San Francisco, not the East Coast. People aren’t in as much of a hurry. Pedestrians are rarely plowed down.

The white painted stripes on the crosswalk flash pale red, and I think of the time I saw the Texas State Capitol bathed in pink floods for a breast cancer awareness gala. I think of Pepto-Bismol. I think of the pedicure I got before I took Gabe to Disney World, almost fifteen years ago. I run a catalogue of pale red flashing things in order not to lift my head again and see what I know is there. An ambulance, or a police car, or a fire truck parked in front of Gabe’s apartment, lights spinning.

I lift my head only when I hear him.

“Mom.”

It’s not all he’s saying. But that’s what I hear.

~~~

The ambulance in front of Gabe and Evie’s apartment is not for him, I learn soon enough, but for the woman who died there, or for her body. Over the next few days, we learn several things about her:

That her name is Jenny Wainwright, and she’d been staying at a woman’s shelter a few blocks to the north.

That she has no family in San Francisco but a father and a daughter in Sioux City.

That she was several years younger than me but looked older, and her hair, while listed in her records as blonde, had been darkened to my shade of flat brunette by grease and street grime.

That she was killed by bleeding to the brain, which might have been caused when she fell and hit her head and might have been caused by a stroke. The earthquake might have had nothing to do with it at all.

That for an instant, before he saw me charging at him from across the street, Gabe and Evie thought Jenny Wainright was me.

~~~

From the age of eight to sixteen, Gabe went to a summer camp that swallowed him whole for six weeks at a time. I didn’t miss him as much as I should have. I felt guilty relief at his absence, a joyous buoyancy, something I guessed was akin to what enlightened Buddhists feel when they finally are able to detach.

One summer, early morning on Parents’ Day, when Gabe was eleven, there was a rare East Coast earthquake. The epicenter was in Mineral, Virginia, one county over from the camp. And though the quake was 5.8 on the Richter scale, tied for the largest ever in the mid-Atlantic, the camp experienced no physical damage, and no campers were injured, though they lost power.

When I arrived, I could feel the camp shaking with the compressed energy of a place by which disaster has recently brushed. The boys, white polos and green cotton basketball shorts, milled on the soccer field, tussling and punching. Every minute or so, one would break off, waving wildly or head down, and trot toward a middle-aged couple carrying bags of Cheetos, six-packs of Cokes, and a red-and-white-checked picnic blanket. In the air over the parking lot, the smell of doused campfire and mown grass fought with the exhaust fumes from seventy recently silenced Subaru Outback and Honda Odyssey engines.

Then, Gabe must have spotted me before I spotted him. Now, he cries out as he cried out then.

“Mom.”

I run at him now as he ran at me then. Arms open, eyes wet. Then, I crouched, and he hit me hard with his knobby, starved body. I took a knee to my belly and his chin caught my lip with a crack. We fell together, and he was up before I could hold him, eyes darting back at the field.

Now, he does not crouch as I barrel toward where he stands with Evie, next to the body of the woman, covered to the neck by a blue blanket, face in the concrete. I slow because the body is not Gabe. The ambulance is not for Gabe. I slow because Evie, gasping wet sobs, takes Gabe into her arms and partially collapses toward me.

“Mom,” they both say.

I slow, but I do not stop. It’s ungainly, the hug I slap around them. They are too thin, too unprotected. Where is the table sturdy enough to keep them from falling debris? What leg will they cling to for their triangle of life? I squeeze them and rock them and then we all shake for just a moment, me, Gabe, Evie, the body, the EMT guys next to the body, the policeman behind Evie.

“Aftershock,” he says, and we all shake one last time.

__

KT Sparks is a farmer in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Her short fiction has appeared in The Jellyfish Review, Word Riot, Citron Review, Jersey Devil Press, and WhiskeyPaper and was honored by New Millennium, Bath Flash Fiction, WriterHouse, and The Moth. Her novel, Four Dead Horses, took first place in the JRW Unpublished Novel Contest and was excerpted in Richmond Magazine. Contact KT at KTSparks.com if you want to publish her novel or buy eggs.