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Earthquake
The Rozens had a swinging bench on their half of the front porch of our duplex, but I used it more than they ever did. I’d get home from work and sit outside to smoke a cigarette or swallow a soda. Mrs. Rozen didn’t mind me sitting there, but she never liked to catch me smoking. It bothered Sasha, she always said. Sasha told me she didn’t care. I quit anyway.
It might have been a Saturday. It was afternoon, and it was winter, and there hadn’t been any real snow yet that year but the rain had hardened into ice on the sidewalks. All the main streets had been salted, but they’d passed over the sidewalks in my quiet neighborhood. I watched from my seat on the porch as Sasha slid down the street towards the house, gliding carefully, arms out to keep her balance.
“Hello Charlie,” she said. She stopped in front of the steps and spun once.
“Nice shirt,” I said. She wasn’t actually wearing a shirt, but instead had on a pale pink leotard with jeans over the bottom.
“I just had ballet,” she said. The leotard was tight and I could almost see her ribs. She was so tiny. She climbed the steps and sat next to me, dropping her bag on the ground. “No cigarette today?”
“Turns out they give you lung cancer,” I said.
Sasha shoved her hands under her thighs and rocked the porch swing a couple times. “My mom told me about your dad,” she said. “How is he?”
“He’s okay,” I said. I hadn’t actually asked my dad how he was doing since I got home for break, but he seemed fine.
“Your mom said you might take a semester off school and live at home for a while.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. My mom wanted me to be home when my father died. I wanted to be as far away as possible, which, for me, was college on the other side of the state.
“Oh. How is school, anyway?”
I shrugged. “School is school,” I said.
“What, no wild college parties?” Sasha smiled and tilted her head towards me.
“Do I seem like the type?”
She gazed at me. I watched her eyelashes as she blinked twice. Man, they were long.
“No,” she said.
There was quiet for a while, then: “How about you?” I asked. “How’s fourth grade?”
Sasha rolled her eyes. “Seventh,” she said. She was smiling again. At least I’d managed to amuse her a little. “It’s good. I learned all the states in alphabetical order. Want to hear?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
I figured she would get up and go inside at that point. She had goosebumps all up her arms. Her little, breakable arms. I considered offering her my coat, but I was sort of cold too.
“Did you feel the earthquake this morning?” she asked.
“There was no earthquake this morning.” As I said it I remembered that I found my clock on the floor when I woke up, and that one of my posters had fallen off the wall.
“Yeah there was. At like seven. The ground was rolling, like waves.”
“I was sleeping.”
“The whole world was shaking,” Sasha said. “How could you sleep through that?”
The oncologist gave him, best case, twenty-four months. Gave. Like the number was the doctor’s choice and he was being generous, so we should open the present and say, “Thank you! We love it! How did you know it’s just what we’ve been wanting?” The way he said it, though, he made twenty-four months sound longer than just two years. I guess he was just good at his job. That’s what oncologists do. They tell people they’re going to die.
It was summer then, eighteen months ago, and my mom dragged me along to the appointment that we all knew was going to be bad news so I could hear all the details. The doctor told us what kind of lung cancer it was, and how it would progress, and then he made up some stupid metaphors so we would understand better. I just stared at my fingertips and tried to tune him out. If you’re going to die in less than two years, does it really matter what it is that’s going to kill you?
“I wish you would spend more time with your father,” she said.
“I spend time with him,” I said. “We just had dinner together. You were there too, maybe you saw us.”
My mom ignored me. That’s what she always did when she thought I was being a smartass.
“You hardly speak with him anymore, and I know that upsets him.”
“We talked at dinner,” I said.
“You chatted,” she said. “You haven’t had a real conversation with him in all the time you’ve been home. You barely even look him in the eye.”
“So what do you want us to talk about, then? Could you maybe write us a script? At least give us a list of acceptable topics.”
“Damn it, Charlie. This isn’t a joke. Your dad is not healthy.”
“I know that,” I said.
“I just wish the two of you could spend some good time together.” She rubbed her face with both hands. She’d stopped wearing makeup when she took time off work to care for my dad. She’d stopped fussing with her hair and always wore it in a bun that loosened during the day, so that by dinnertime it was a mess of frizz that made its own kind of halo. “While you still can,” she added.
The conversation she wanted me and my dad to have was the exact one I was trying to avoid. The “I’ll always be with you in spirit” talk. I didn’t believe any of that anyway. Everything fades.
“I think you should consider taking spring semester off this year,” my mom said.
“I already considered it and decided not to,” I said. It wasn’t the first time we’d had this conversation.
“Well I think you should reconsider. You’re making a mistake, Charlie. You’re making a mistake that you’ll regret for a very long time.”
“I don’t think it’s a mistake.”
“Charlie, this is your father we’re talking about.”
“I know what he is.”
“Well don’t you care? Don’t you care about anything, Charlie? Your dad is sick. Don’t you want to spend some time with him? I know he misses you when you’re gone, and he’d like you to be around. Don’t you want to be around, Charlie? Don’t you want to be here when he dies? Your dad is dying, Charlie.”
“Isn’t it past your bedtime?” I said.
“I don’t have a bedtime.” She sat with her feet tucked onto the seat of the bench, holding her knees into her chest. “I searched online about earthquakes,” she said. “The one this morning was a 6.4 on the Richter scale, which is pretty big. The center of it was like thirty miles away. The city has to do inspections of all the bridges and tall buildings now to make sure they weren’t damaged. An airport runway cracked. Have you ever been in an earthquake before?”
“Once,” I said. “Like nine year ago.”
She looked at me for a while, blinking those long eyelashes just once, slowly. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you crying?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
“I had a fight with my mom.”
“About your dad?” It didn’t surprise me that Sasha knew, whether she’d heard us or just made a guess.
“Yeah. It wasn’t even that bad of a fight until she said my dad’s dying.”
“Well,” Sasha said. She shifted her weight and the swing rocked slightly with the movement. “He is, isn’t he?”
“Yeah. I guess he is. But nobody says it out loud.”
“Oh.”
We didn’t say anything for a bit. I tapped my fingers in restless waves along the arm of the swing.
“I was taking a math test,” I said, “during the last earthquake.”
“Was it scary?”
“No. It wasn’t bad. It didn’t do any damage or anything. We were all pretty calm about it, for sixth graders. Some of the girls were squealing about it and the guys were all talking about buildings collapsing, but we weren’t running around screaming or anything. Then this one kid, this geeky kid who always sat in front of me, asked when we were going to finish the test. We’re all sitting under the desks talking about how the earth’s shaking and he’s worried about math.”
“What was the test on?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember that part. I don’t really even remember the ground shaking. I just remember Michael Davies asking about when we would finish the test.”
My dad was standing on the porch with both palms against the railing. His shoulder peaked higher than normal as he leaned almost all his weight onto his arms. He smiled at me.
“Have a good time at school,” he said.
“I will.”
“Do your work.”
I rolled my eyes. “I will.”
He moved stiffly down the three steps onto the sidewalk and stood next to me on the curb. He laid one hand heavily on my shoulder. He was breathing hard. I was sure he was about to say something affecting, something final and upsetting and my mom would start crying and his eyes might even water a little bit.
“Call us when you get there,” he said.
“Sure. I will,” I said.
He hugged me. He held my shoulders tight and I just stood there awkwardly, because every other time I’d driven off to school he’d just waved from the porch. I put my hands somewhere on his back.
“Bye Dad,” I said, pulling away. “Bye Mom.”
I got in the car and drove away. I didn’t look back. No one ever does, do they?
“Shouldn’t you be in school?” I said from the sidewalk.
“School ended a couple hours ago,” she said. “I’m sorry about your dad.”
“Yeah. Don’t you have homework you should be doing or something?”
“Yeah.” She was scuffing the ground with the toes of her shoes, moving the swing back and forth.
“I’m going to go find my mom.”
“Okay.”
I left Sasha and found my mom in the kitchen, standing over the sink.
“Mom?”
She turned. Her lips were darkened, almost purple, and the skin of her face was blotched like a rash. She sniffed.
“Oh Charlie,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re home.” And then she was hugging me and cradling my head to her shoulder so I had to slouch. I hugged her back and wondered if this was any comfort to her. It was just a hug. How much could it really help?
“He went peacefully,” she said, as if that made the fact that he was dead any easier.
I knew she was lying, he must have gone hacking and gasping, but I let her do it. Maybe it made her feel better.
“Now don’t you see why I wanted you here?” she said.
I didn’t. Would that have changed anything? I couldn’t have saved him.
“Yeah, Mom.”
She sat down next to me with a bag of jumbo-sized raisins. “Your dad loved raisins,” she said.
“I know.”
“I thought it would be nice to eat them today. He used to pass them out at Halloween instead of candy.”
“I know.”
“Do you want some?” She held the bag out towards me. It was bright red and shiny and torn open across the top.
“I hate raisins,” I said.
“Oh.” She let me keep rocking the swing back and forth, pushing raisins into her mouth one by one. “Do you want to be somewhere else?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Let’s drive somewhere.”
“I can’t just leave,” I said.
“Why not? Come on, we’ll be back before everyone leaves.”
“Alright,” I said. “Go get my keys, then. They’re on my desk.”
She hopped off the swing and dropped her bag of raisins in my lap before going back inside. I hesitated, and then pulled out one raisin. It felt old between my fingers. I put it in my mouth and chewed. I had to force myself to swallow. I didn’t feel any closer to my dad, and I still hated raisins.
“Okay,” Sasha said when she came back out onto the porch, swinging my keychain around one finger. “Let’s go.”
I drove around the block once before I asked, “Where do you want to go?”
“Anywhere,” she said. “Where did your dad like to go?”
I rolled my eyes. Of course she would try and make this mean something. I drove in the direction of the city’s open air market, where my dad would take me to buy fresh fish and flowers for my mom every once in a while.
Sasha kept quiet for most of the ride. When we were just a couple blocks away, she started talking.
“You know what I’ve been meaning to tell you?” she said.
“What?”
“Well, in my science class we’ve been studying earthquakes because of the one last month. Did you know that there are tiny little earthquakes all the time? They’re so small that no one can feel them, but they happen every day all over the world.”
“If they’re that small, then who cares?”
“I just think it’s interesting. It makes all earthquakes seem like they’re not that big a deal, doesn’t it?”
“No. Big earthquakes are still rare. And still big,” I said. “Help me find a parking spot.” Parking around there was terrible on weekends but we finally found a spot that wasn’t too far away and walked a block and a half into the market.
There were touristy paintings, huge stands of flowers, and artisans’ little baubles set up on tables along each side of the cobblestone street. As we pushed through people, Sasha’s eyes lingered on handmade necklaces and bracelets. When we passed a stand selling little tubes of flavored honey, I bought two and let Sasha take one. We ripped the ends off with our teeth and sucked out the honey. It occurred to me, as a family passed in big winter coats, that, even though it was sunny, it was pretty cold outside.
“Do you want my jacket, Sasha?” I asked.
She blinked at me. “You don’t mind?” She was holding her bare arms into her chest.
“No.” I slid my suit jacket off my shoulders and held it out to her.
“Thanks, Charlie,” she said as she slipped it on. She looked pretty ridiculous. She was standing in a dirty, crowded market wearing a black dress with white tights and those shiny black buckling shoes that little girls always seem to own, and now she was disappearing into my jacket. I tugged at my tie and unbuttoned my cuffs.
“Oh,” Sasha said, her eyes fixing on a stand somewhere behind me. I turned around.
There was a man with a moustache sitting behind a TV-dinner table with a typewriter on it. Taped to the front of the table was a hand-drawn sign that said “Poems” in red block letters.
Sasha pulled me to him by my sleeve, careful not to touch my skin.
“How much for a poem?” she asked him.
“Five dollars,” he said.
“Will you buy me a poem, Charlie?”
I rolled my eyes because she sounded like such a kid, but I pulled a rumpled bill out of my wallet and paid the poet.
“What would you like your poem about, Darlin?” he said.
“Anything,” Sasha said, and we waited for a while as he thought and then typed and then thought some more. I got bored enough to wander back over to the honey stand and buy another handful of the tubes. When I got back to the poet’s stand, Sasha tugged a honey tube out of my fist and the poet snapped the page out of the typewriter.
“Here you go, Sweetie,” he said.
“Thanks,” she said, taking the page from him. She turned, reading the poem, and started to head back in the direction we’d come. I watched her face as she read. I could never tell what people were thinking just by looking at them.
“Is it any good?” I asked.
She didn’t answer, but she passed me the page. The poem was small and written in that rough-edged lettering that only typewriters can produce.
I want to be an astronaut, but
I don’t have perfect sight and I’m afraid
Of atmosphere and red-fused moments and heat death.
I worry about the cosmos and
Refuse to tie my shows.
I worry that close up, the Crab Nebula
Is not as spectacular a supernova
As some might speculate.
It is six thousand, three hundred light years away and I,
I never floss on Sundays.
My reality is tellurian. At best,
Sublunar
“That doesn’t even make sense,” I said. “I bet you don’t even know what tellurian means.”
“I don’t, but I like it anyway,” Sasha said, snatching the paper back from me.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s not bad.”
She grinned at me. “Come on. We should probably go back home now.”
I’d almost forgotten about all the people packed into my living room and kitchen. “Yeah. We should go home.”
“Do you want dinner?” I asked my mom.
“No,” she said.
I cut her a piece of the chicken anyway with a dull knife that didn’t quite do the job right. As I carried the two plates into the living room, I saw the paper tacked to our fridge. It was stuck under the magnetic letter “e” and was the only thing on the entire surface. It was the poem I had bought Sasha at the market that afternoon. I smiled.
“Where did you go today?” my mom asked. I put our plates on the coffee table and sat down next to her on the couch.
“Pike Place Market,” I said. “With Sasha.”
“Your dad loved that market,” she said.
“I know.”
“Your dad,” she said. She didn’t finish, but I thought I knew what she would have said. Was a wonderful man. Loved you. Loved us. Was brilliant. Was honest. Worked hard. She would say all the things that had been highlighted about him at the funeral.
I imagined how I would have finished that sentence. My dad was friendly. Was strict. Taught me how to read baseball stats. Raised me. Loved me. Died when the doctors said he would. Died of small-cell lung cancer. My dad died and I will miss him.
“Did you know,” I said, “that little earthquakes are happening all the time?”
