But Santa Lora is a place that has suffered before.
This land is prone to shaking. These hills are liable to slide. And this forest is so fertile for fire that the cautious few among them keep their family photos packed in duffel bags at their front doors, in case of the sudden need to flee.
The tribe that once roamed these woods for game was ravaged by smallpox from fur traders, and a party of pioneers once starved in these mountains. Ten years after that, the first wooden houses, built when the silver was found in the hills, were drowned with three feet of snowmelt that very first spring. You can still find the proof in the antiques store at the corner of Mariposa and Klein: photographs of women in dark dresses, the men in frayed coats, and those children, so serious, so spindly, standing knee-deep in the water, their eyes the eyes of those accustomed to tribulation.
A landslide later swallowed every bungalow on the east side of town, and the tiny city hall, with its dome and its bell, is only a replica of the first one—an earthquake cracked the walls of the original.
The first cemetery, long since closed to new arrivals, is packed with the dead of Spanish flu. Some say their ghosts still roam the mansions on Catalina Street, now shabby and subdivided for students. The people of Santa Lora had known it was coming, that flu. They’d heard word of it traveling west from town to town. They tried to block the one road into town, but the sickness got in anyway, and then it spread through the town like news. Twice as many people died of that flu here as in the next town over, leading some to suspect, back then, that Santa Lora was cursed.
The idea still sometimes surfaces in certain superstitious minds. Whenever a teenager drowns in the lake or a hiker goes missing in the woods, some in Santa Lora wonder if this is a land destined for catastrophe. What if misfortune can be drawn to a place, like lightning to a rod?
5.
If, on the fourth night of that first week, a stranger were to visit Santa Lora, and if that stranger were to go walking at the end of the day, at sunset, maybe, or just before, if he were to drift ten blocks east of the college, he might notice eventually a large yellow house, maybe a hundred years old, once grand but no longer, with a rusted rain gutter and a sagging porch swing and green beans growing out front. If he were to see that house, he might notice a girl. And he would wonder, as he walks, the way strangers sometimes do, what it is she is doing there, this girl at the window, so serious, so still, just standing, looking out.
She is twelve years old, this girl at the window. She is skinny in her cutoff jeans, dark hair. Glasses, bracelets, sunburn. Sara.
She has the feeling already that she will remember this night for a long time. But she feels this way often, a certain simmering. It is a habit of thinking she shares with her father—every ordinary moment holds a potential calamity, and you cannot know when one will rise.
Tonight, there is this: her father is late coming home.
From the window, she watches other cars slide into the other driveways on their street. She hears the opening and closing of her neighbors’ doors. There’s the crinkling of grocery sacks and the ringing of keys and the calm of their voices—other people are always so calm—as they speak to their children and their husbands and their dogs.
“He probably just stopped somewhere on the way home from work,” says Libby, her sister, ten months younger, upstairs with the kittens. Five weeks old, they sleep in a box.
“You always freak out,” her sister goes on. “But it’s always fine.”
“He’s never this late,” says Sara. She turns back to look at the street.
Outside, the birds are calling out from the trees, swallows, maybe, or chickadees. A pair of joggers fly by on the sidewalk. The college kids who share the big house on the corner are lighting a grill on their porch. Her father’s blue pickup does not appear.
She can smell dinner cooking in the house next door, the gray one with the screened porch and the white trim, the house where the new neighbors live with their baby, those professors, as her father calls them, those professors who cut down the pine tree that stood between the two houses for so many years, for as long as their father can remember, since before he was born, which was thirty-five years before the girls were. It was our tree, her father is always saying. He stops often to inspect the stump. It was not their tree to kill.
The last of the light is draining from the sky. Insects have begun to bump against the screens.
When her chest tightens like this, it can be hard to tell if it’s her asthma that’s doing it, or her mood. She fishes her inhaler out of her backpack. Two quick puffs.
She checks the clock on the microwave again. He is an hour and ten minutes late.
But finally: the crunch of tires on gravel, the friendly rattle of the broken tailpipe.
She opens the front door. So many days seem likely to veer toward disaster, but so many turn the other way instead.
“We got hungry,” she says to her father, hiding her gladness at the sight of him. His brown beard is going gray. His blue work shirt is wearing thin. “So I made sandwiches for Libby and me.”
Her father slams the door of the truck.
“And we fed the cats, too,” she says. She steps out onto the porch, bare feet on the splintering wood.
“Don’t come out here,” he says.
She stops where she is. He can get angry. It’s true. But the reasons are usually clear. She waits for him to say why. He doesn’t.
Instead of coming inside, he jogs around to the backyard, his work boots coming down hard on the gravel, his steps quick in the twilight.
Soon, he is uncoiling the garden hose. He is turning on the spigot.
Sara opens the back door.
“What are you doing?” she calls out into the dusk. She can hear the hose running in the dirt.
“Bring me some soap,” he says. He begins to unbutton his shirt. “And a towel, too,” he says. “Quick.”
The buzz of adrenaline comes back quickly to her blood. There’s a skinny bar of soap in the bathtub. She finds a towel in the dryer, where their clean clothes always wait instead of folded in drawers.
“What’s he doing out there?” asks her sister. The tiniest kitten is curled in her hand, his mouth wide open, sharp teeth to the air. You have to really listen to hear that little cry.
“I don’t know,” says Sara. “I don’t know what he’s doing.”
And then she’s back downstairs, watching her father through the window.
It’s hard to see through the screen and the low light, and he has moved to the far corner of the yard by then, beyond the potatoes and the squash. But she looks again and knows that it is true: her father is standing nearly naked in the backyard.
He is wearing only his boxers now, and he is holding the hose over his head.
His chest looks bony beneath that stream of water, his beard pasted flat to his chin. The rest of his clothes are scattered in the dirt, like laundry fallen from a line.
Sara can see the new neighbors sitting in their kitchen next door, wineglasses glittering on their table, the baby in the woman’s arms. They can see you, she wants to say to her father. That woman can see you. But she is too afraid to speak.
“I need that soap,” he says. She can hear him shivering in the dark against the screech of the crickets. A few fireflies blink among the vegetables. “Don’t come too close,” he says. “Just toss it to me.”
The white of the soap as it sails through the air catches in the glow of the neighbors’ porch light. The woman is looking in their direction.
“Now get back inside,” says her father. “Now.”