I call for Kat as I run, but my voice is lost in the deep groanings of the earth. And then as quick as it started, the roaring stops. The quaking ceases, but everything within me senses that the beast has not yawned and gone back to sleep. The air around me crackles with foreboding.
I see Kat and Belinda at the top of the stairs. Belinda has her arm across her abdomen and another protectively around Kat, whose eyes are wide in terror. Plaster has rained down on them like confetti.
“Come to me!” I shout as I reach for the banister to rush to meet them. Belinda and Kat start down the stairs as I start up. We are halfway to meeting each other when the roaring and pitching and violent twisting start up again, worse this time. The beast tosses us to the wall and I scream for Belinda and Kat to get on their bottoms and scoot as the landing above us splits and the staircase begins to sway.
I can hear dishes breaking, doorframes splitting, floorboards snapping, as Belinda, Kat, and I make our way, half crawling, down the buckling stairs. I throw open the front door and grab our travel cases and the files as Belinda and Kat stumble past me.
The earth is rocking like a ship on a furious sea as we stagger out into the amber light of daybreak. Chimneys from houses up and down the street are crumbling to the street as I pull Kat to me. Belinda cries out, and I turn to her, thinking she’s been hit by falling bricks, but she’s holding her stomach as blood and water gush to her feet.
The familiar moment returns to me.
I’ve been here before, too.
15
The world is still writhing as we stumble away from the house and into the street. I remember too late having been instructed by Martin from the very beginning to run to a sturdy inside doorframe in the event of an earthquake, and not to run outside and risk being crushed by toppling buildings. But we are already out on the rippling pavement and I am not going back inside that trembling house. I toss the travel cases down. Clutching the documents in one hand and Kat with the other, I stumble toward Belinda. We could die this way, I’m thinking, having escaped Martin only to be undone by a bigger monster.
When I felt my first temblor months ago and Martin told me it is the nature of the earth to quake from time to time, I looked up what he meant in a book at the library. I read that the world is a spinning ball on a giant dance floor and inside its core are giant slabs of stone that sometimes get too close to one another. When they touch, they must move away. They must. The ballet haltswhen the slabs collide and as they find their places again. In place of the usual spinning dance is the quaking and shuddering and rumbling, and then the quiet ballet resumes.
But this feels like the slabs have forgotten where they belong. They have forgotten the dance completely. The earth cannot keep itself together without the dance, and I wonder if it will hurt terribly to be swallowed up in the chaos of the danceless world folding in on itself. I bend over Kat to be a cushion for whatever awaits us.
And then, just as before, the quaking stops, and the world above seems to let out the breath it was holding while the world below thrashed. I am afraid to say anything and break the calm, but my mother-heart is still pounding like a hammer and I start saying to Kat, “’Tis all right, it’s over. ’Tis all right, it’s over,” even before I am sure that it is. The sun, low in the sky, now seems hesitant to rise as it peeks at us through a filmy drape of dust. A couple of seconds tick by and the earth beneath us remains steady, like it always is, as if it has no memory of all that just happened.
Belinda cries out, her hands cradling her stomach. She is looking down in terror and disbelief at the rosy pink puddle at her feet.
I know why she sees blood and water.
“When is the baby supposed to come?” I say to her, but she cries out again in either fear or pain, perhaps both, and does not answer me.
“When is your time?” I shout.
She looks up at me with fearful eyes. “Not until next month!”
“We’ve got to get you to a doctor or hospital.” I release Kat for just a moment to grab my travel case. I open it and stuff the documents inside on top of my clothes, Da’s word book, and thestrongbox. When we made our plans last night, I thought Belinda would be carrying one of the travel cases, but that will be impossible now. I need help. I need a carriage.
The street is now full of neighbors in their nightclothes staggering out of their houses and looking up and down the street. I look to Libby’s sturdy brick house, grateful to see that it appears mostly undamaged. Her chimney has partially toppled, but that is the only change I can see.
“Wait here,” I tell Belinda and Kat. “Just wait here and I shall be right back. I’m just going to see if Libby can help us. Stay with Belinda, Kat.”
I leave them in the middle of the street and run to Libby’s front door, pounding on it and trying the knob and only then remembering that Libby and her family are out of town. I dash back to Kat and Belinda, glancing up at my own house. I had forgotten just for a moment that Martin is inside it among the shattered dishes, splintered doorframes, and chunks of fallen ceiling plaster. There is no help for us inside that house, only trouble. I don’t care a whit that now Martin must wait, unable to call out for help and surrounded by brokenness. In fact, it’s rather fitting, since he is a man who excelled in crushing people.
“Let’s start down the hill,” I say as I pick up the two travel cases. “We’ll find a carriage or something, Belinda. We’ll go to the emergency hospital at city hall. It’s new. It’s nice, I’ve heard. Hold on to my skirt, Kat.”
We start down the hill, passing neighbors in a daze. One is holding a bloodied handkerchief to his head. I ask another if his telephone is working and he says it isn’t. No one’s is.
We continue down the hill, stopping every few minutes as Belinda doubles over in pain. Every chimney on every house is a pileof bricks on the ground. Windows are broken, pavement is upended, and one house leans slightly to the left. As we near a cross street, three men are clawing at the crumbled front entrance of a two-story house. They are calling someone’s name—Lila, I think. A little dog with plaster clinging to its fur is barking at the men.
At California Street, where the cable car would stop if the cable car was running, a milkman is trying to calm his spooked horse. Broken milk bottles cover the cart bed, and creamy milk is dripping through the slats onto the twisted rails below. An old man, covered in dust, zips by on a bicycle with a squawking parrot on his shoulder. The horse nickers and starts to rear and the milkman pulls on the reins and says, “Whoa, there, Ginger!”
I approach him. “Please, sir. We need help. My friend is having her baby. Could you take us in your wagon to Central Emergency Hospital? Please?”
At first I think the milkman will refuse. He gapes at Belinda as if to say,Why on earth would you be having a baby now when the world has just turned itself upside down?But then his countenance softens and I think perhaps he is a father or a grandfather and knows there is no stopping a baby from coming when it starts to come.
He tells Kat and me to climb into the wagon and sit where his bottles would be if they hadn’t all toppled over and been smashed, and that Belinda can ride on the seat up front with him. Belinda looks at me with worried eyes as she grimaces through her pain.
“We’ll be right behind you, Belinda. Right behind you. We’re not leaving you. Up you go.”
The milkman and I help Belinda onto the passenger side of the seat, and then Kat and I find milk-spotted seats in the wagon on wooden shelves where the metal milk crates usually sit. My skirtis made immediately damp. Kat seems unaware of the spilled milk soaking into her dress.
