The Mothers(21)

“What was I like?” Aubrey smiled, her fingers dancing on the steering wheel. She always did that, repeated the question. Like she was stumped in a job interview and needed to buy time.

“Yeah, you know, as a little kid. I was a brat. No one could tell me shit. Surprise, right?”

She laughed, then Aubrey laughed. Another one of her habits, waiting for someone else to laugh before she joined in.

“I was . . . I don’t know. I played soccer. I had a lot of friends.” Aubrey shrugged. “My best friend had this trampoline. We’d jump on it for hours. My mom told me not to—she said I’d break my neck. So I always lied to her.”

“What a badass.”

“One time,” Aubrey said, “we were super hungry, so we brought out this leftover cornbread to eat. It was really crumbly, though, but we kept jumping and eating and all the crumbs were flying up with us and we couldn’t stop laughing.”

She smiled, like she was still proud of this tiny childhood rebellion, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes. Another thing she did all the time: smile when she didn’t mean it.

When the fire season began, Aubrey had been living in California for three months. She had not known that wildfires could be a normal part of the calendar year, an event you expected as regularly as snow or rain, and the idea terrified her. Her sister told her that she shouldn’t worry about wildfires, not in Oceanside at least. Along the coast, you were as safe as anyone could be. But she still followed the local news as reporters coughed in fields where flames licked behind them and helicopters swept over scorched ground, and that was how she first saw Upper Room. The church was serving as a temporary evacuation site, and a reporter interviewed the pastor, a large, dark man named John Sheppard.

“We’re just glad to help,” he said. He had a deep, sonorous voice, like the type of man who might narrate a book-on-tape. “We’re grateful God has placed us in a position where we can give back to our community. So if you’ve been forced out your home, come to Upper Room and let us be a home to you.”

Later, she told Nadia, she realized that the pastor’s plea had drawn her in. She was between homes then—she had been between homes her whole life—and she still felt like a guest in Mo and Kasey’s house. Each time she did her laundry, she folded her clothes and returned them to her suitcase, afraid to fill the drawers. But no one made her leave Oceanside, so she’d visited Upper Room one Sunday and that was that.

That year had been the worst fire season Nadia could remember. The local news ran flashy graphics calling October “The Fire Siege” and even after the peak months had passed, fifteen wildfires burned throughout Southern California that winter. If you had to evacuate, the sheriff’s office left an automatic phone call, but her mother had always said that if you waited for the call, it was already too late. A sheriff’s call only gave you a fifteen-minute warning, so last fall, her mother had packed bags in advance and left them by the front door.

“You think this is silly,” she told Nadia, “but you always got to be prepared. Even for things you can’t see.”

She had grown up in Texas, in between tornado and hurricane country, so she knew how to prepare for disaster. Unlike you California girls, she used to tell Nadia, who never thought about earthquakes until the world started shaking right under them.

That winter, her mother’s death would be an earthquake jolting her out of her sleep. But earlier, in September, Nadia had watched her mother pack bags of clothes, water jugs, and photo albums. Then they’d left for church, where a crying girl had appeared in a light blue dress that fit her too tightly around the middle, as if she had just put on weight. Her curly hair was tied back in a ponytail and she wore white canvas sneakers scuffed at the toes. She dressed like someone who had never been to church before imagined she ought to dress. The girl was mourning, and months later, in her own grief, whenever Nadia saw Aubrey at school, she envied how easily the girl had shown her sadness, how completely the church embraced her. Was that all it took, kneeling at the altar and asking for help? Or did you have to invite everyone in on your private sorrow to be saved?

Later, in the dying evening light, the girls swung gently in the ratty old hammock hanging in Nadia’s backyard. Her father never used his hammock anymore—she couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him relaxed enough to enjoy it—but Aubrey had wanted to lie in it as soon as she followed Nadia outside. “It feels like such a California thing to do,” she’d said, so every evening that week, they’d swung in the hammock and talked as the sun lowered in the sky.

Nadia glanced at her father through the screen door. He’d cooked them dinner each night that week and hadn’t complained about fixing Aubrey an extra plate. He seemed pleased to do it, almost. He smiled and tried to tell jokes about his day on base that would’ve been swallowed with mouthfuls of food had he and his daughter been alone. Maybe he was glad to have company again, or maybe there was something special about Aubrey that made him open up.

Across from her, Aubrey licked a dab of ice cream off her thumb and asked Nadia what her father was like.

“What do you mean?” Nadia said. “You know what he’s like. You see him around.”

“As a person. He’s nice, but he doesn’t talk much.”

“I guess he’s nice. I don’t know. Serious. Likes to be by himself. Why? What’s your dad like?”