Dark Water Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Laura McNeal

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/teens

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at www.randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McNeal, Laura.

  Dark water / Laura McNeal. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Living in a cottage on her uncle’s Southern California avocado ranch since her parents’ messy divorce, fifteen-year-old Pearl DeWitt meets and falls in love with an illegal migrant worker, and is trapped with him when wildfires approach his makeshift forest home.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89720-7

  [1. Wildfires—Fiction. 2. Illegal aliens—Fiction. 3. Homeless persons—Fiction. 4. Divorce—Fiction. 5. Cousins—Fiction. 6. Family life—California—Fiction. 7. California—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.M47879365Dar 2010

  [Fic]—dc22

  2009043249

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  For Tom

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Chapter Fifty-six

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  Chapter Fifty-nine

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  One

  You wouldn’t have noticed me before the fire unless you saw that my eyes, like a pair of socks chosen in the dark, don’t match. One is blue and the other’s brown, a genetic trait called heterochromia that I share with white cats, Catahoula hog dogs, and water buffaloes. My uncle Hoyt used to tell me, when I was little, that it meant I could see fairies and peaceful ghosts.

  Then I met Amiel, and for six months it seemed true what he whispered in his damaged voice: Tú eres de dos mundos.

  He was wrong, of course. You can only belong to one world at a time.

  Now that he’s gone, I try to see things when I’m alone. I put one hand over my blue eye, and I look south. With my brown eye I can see all the way to Mexico. I fly over freeways and tile roofs and malls and swimming pools. I cross the Sierra de Juárez Mountains and the Sea of Cortés to the place where Amiel was born, and I find the turquoise house with a red door. There are three chairs on the covered patio: one for him, one for me, and one for Uncle Hoyt. I tell myself the chairs are empty because we’re not there yet. I watch for as long as I can and when my eye starts to water, I remove my hand.

  Tomorrow, I’ll look again.

  Two

  People move to Fallbrook, California, because it’s sunny 340 days of the year. They move here to grow petunias and marigolds and palms and cycads and cactus and self-propagating succulents and blood oranges and Meyer lemons and sweet limes and, above all, avocados. They move here to grow them, I should say, or to pick them for other people.

  The houses are far apart when you’re out in the hills, where trees and petunias grow in straight lines for profit, but once you get close to town, the streets look like something drawn by a child with an Etch A Sketch. No overall plan, no sidewalks, just driveways going off in crazy lines that lead to other driveways, where signs point to other dead-end streets named in Spanish or English with no particular theme—La Oreja Place sticking out of Rodeo Queen Drive leading to Tecolote Avenue, which if it were a sentence would read “the Ear on the Rodeo Queen of the Owl.”

  The ear and the queen and the owl are overrun with bougainvillea, ivy geraniums, tulip vines, and star jasmine, and that’s what makes Fallbrook beautiful from a distance but tangled and confusing up close. It’s a place where you can get lost no matter how long you’ve lived here, and there are only two roads out, something we didn’t think much about before the fires began.

  Three

  I first saw Amiel de la Cruz Guerrero on the corner of one of those Etch A Sketch streets, where Alvarado meets Stage Coach. I was fifteen and he was seventeen, although he told employers he was twenty. I was in my sophomore year of high school and my mother was substitute-teaching because my father had left us, and as my mother was constantly saying over the phone when she thought I wasn’t listening, The wolf is at the door.

  Every weekday morning at seven-thirty we’d leave my uncle’s avocado ranch, where we were living free of rent (but not shame) in the guesthouse. My mother would drink her coffee in the car while she drove, and I would eat dry Corn Pops from a Tupperware bowl. Traffic would bunch up as all the cars going to all the schools had to inch through the same four-way stop at Alvarado and Stage Coach, one corner of which was a day-labor gathering site, meaning Mexican and Guatemalan men would stand around on the empty lot hoping to get a day’s work digging trenches, moving furniture, hauling firewood, or picking fruit. The men stared intensely into every car, hoping to win you over before you stopped. Pick me, their faces said. The wolf is at the door.

  But on this morning, the men had their backs to the road. Our car rolled slowly to the stop sign, going even slower than usual because the drivers of the cars were staring, too.

  When we got close enough, I could see a lanky guy in a flannel shirt and work pants doing some sort of act. Fallbrook calls itself the Avocado Capital of the World, so you don’t live here without seeing guys pick avocados. Mostly it’s done on high ladders, but there’s also this funky tool like a lacrosse stick with
a six-foot handle. You stick the pole way up in the tree, hook the avocado, yank, then lower the pole so you can drop the fruit into a huge canvas bag you’re wearing slung over one shoulder and across your chest. That’s what Amiel was doing that morning, only without the pole, the sack, the tree, or the avocado.

  “What in the world?” my mom asked.

  “He’s picking imaginary fruit,” I said.

  She snuck a look. “That’s the oddest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “Can we hire him?”

  She snorted. It was our turn to dart through the intersection just as Amiel de la Cruz Guerrero touched his imaginary avocado-picking pole to a live electrical wire and received an imaginary jolt, which made all the day-labor guys laugh.

  Four

  The next day, he was juggling three actual, not mimed, soda bottles. “Look, Mom,” I said, so she peered over for a second.

  “I hope he doesn’t litter,” she said.

  “That sounded kind of racist.”

  “There’s no trash can on this corner, if you haven’t noticed. And the neighbors will make a stink if junk starts piling up.”

  The day after that, Amiel was standing on his head. While I watched, the guy next to him gave his feet a shove and he tipped over. “I guess the other guys think he’s showing off too much,” I said.

  My mother sighed. “It could be he’s in the wrong field for his talents.”

  On Friday, the boy just stood there, hands in his pockets like the rest of the men. He didn’t even look into our car like the others did. “Why do they come here?” I asked my mom.

  “I don’t know why they pick this corner,” she said.

  “I mean cross the border.”

  “To work.”

  “But they clearly don’t have work.”

  “The hope of work,” she said.

  That’s when I thought of Hoyt. My uncle Hoyt grew so many avocados that he had to employ people year-round to fertilize, water, pick, prune, and patrol fences to keep thieves from stealing bins of fruit worth thousands of dollars, a crime called—I’m not kidding—“Grand Theft Avocado.” All of his employees were Mexican. I asked him about it once, why every farmworker you ever saw in Fallbrook was Hispanic.

  “I don’t know who picks corn in Iowa or lingonberries in Sweden,” Hoyt said, “but white teenage boys don’t pick avocados in California. Neither do grown white men. Not enough money in it for them. Or status.”

  I didn’t ask if his guys were legal, because I knew generally who was and who wasn’t. The legal ones had drivers’ licenses. They could go home to Mexico on planes and come back on planes. The illegal ones worked seven days a week for years at a stretch, saved their money, then went home for about eight months to be with their families. Every time they went home, they had to borrow money to pay coyotes who smuggled them back in.

  “Do you think they’re happy, the workers?” I asked. You could ask Hoyt questions like that and he wouldn’t get defensive.

  “I’ll tell you a story,” Hoyt said. “You know Esteban, right? His kids and wife are here because he has papers. He brought them legally about ten years ago. That was when I was building Robby’s tree house.” My cousin Robby. “I took Esteban’s kids up into the tree house because I thought they’d like to play in it. And you know what his youngest kid said? He looked around with this really serious face and asked, ‘Who’s going to live here?’ ”

  Robby’s tree house was pretty nice, with cedar shingles on the outside and two framed windows and a peaked roof, but there was no electricity or plumbing or even a door, and it was about eight feet square.

  “That’s because,” Hoyt went on, “in the village where they were born, plenty of people lived in places worse than that tree house. I’ll tell you what, Pearl. I’m going to take you and Robby with me to Esteban’s village in Mexico next time I go. I want you to see why he left.”

  On Friday after school, I decided to ask Hoyt if he ever hired guys from the street corner. I found him standing in his driveway, shaking his head in frustration while Esteban talked in Spanish on a cell phone. Esteban kept saying the same phrases over and over again, and I didn’t know what they meant, but I could tell he was calming somebody down.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked Hoyt when Esteban had gone away.

  “They’ve deported one of my guys.”

  “How did they get him?”

  It was a mystery to me how the border patrol made decisions. There were lots of day-labor pickup points like the corner where I’d seen Amiel, and those places didn’t change much, so you’d think agents would know right where to go.

  “He was at the grocery store,” Hoyt said.

  “Does that happen a lot?”

  “It didn’t used to,” Hoyt said.

  “What will happen now?”

  “We’ll get the money together to help him cross again, which means about four thousand dollars, or he’ll give up and go home.”

  “So …,” I said, stalling until I could think of the right words. “Do you need any help in the meantime?”

  “Why? Can you prune avocados?”

  “Well, maybe, but I was thinking of someone you could hire.”

  “Who?”

  I didn’t know Amiel’s name yet, and I fumbled for a way to make a juggling mime sound employable. “This guy I saw at the corner of Stage Coach. You know, where they gather when they want work.”

  Hoyt looked amused. “What, is he handsome?”

  “No. I mean, that’s not why.” I told Hoyt about the mime routine and the headstand. “He just seemed unusual is all. And I feel sorry for those guys. They have it the worst, don’t they?”

  “They’re probably bad workers or they drink too much. If they were good workers,” Hoyt said, “their friends and relatives would recommend them and they’d have jobs.”

  “What if you don’t have any friends or relatives here?”

  “They all do, Pearl.”

  “But how? Somebody has to be first, right?”

  Hoyt just looked at me. “Technically, yeah. But everyone I hire is recommended by a cousin, a brother, an uncle, or a friend. It works better that way.”

  It reminded me of the riddles my dad used to ask me at dinner:

  What can you catch but not throw?

  A cold.

  What goes around the world but stays in the corner?

  A stamp.

  If nobody knows you, how do you ever get a job?

  To this I had no answer.

  Five

  Sometimes on Saturdays, if Hoyt had errands to run in town, he’d talk Robby and me into going with him in exchange for a donut, and that’s what he did the next morning.

  It was late spring, meaning April, and the look of everything just about made you happy even if your father was a louse. The wild grass that had sprouted after the winter rains (my favorite two months of the whole year) had not yet turned to evil poky foxtails that drill into your socks and shoelaces. Most of the hills were a heartbreaking velvety green, and the others, where fruit trees had been stumped and painted white, looked like brown quilts knotted with white yarn.

  I would have gone with Hoyt even if no donuts were involved. I loved riding in his truck because it was an old Ford with bench seats. It smelled like dirt, coffee, grease, and the scratchy wool Indian blanket that covered the front seat. Robby and I called it the Ford Packrat because the foot wells were filled with irrigation tubing, receipts dating to 1985, hamburger wrappers, and rusty iron tools. We had plans to market something called the Ford Packrat XC80 if Robby pursued his planned career in industrial design.

  My cousin Robby no longer speaks to me and is living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, starting his second year at MIT.

  On the day in question, though, that beautiful, green-grass day, I sat in the middle and angled my knees toward Robby. Robby at sixteen was tall and ethereal-looking, like his mother, my aunt Agnès, pronounced Aun-yez, not the American way. She was born and raised in France,
a point of superiority to her way of thinking that made it hard for all of us, except Robby and Hoyt, to do anything but tolerate her. Robby played the clarinet and scored outrageously high on college tests and ran track and collected these cute but obscure figurines no one in America had ever heard of, which depicted the comic-book adventures of a bald-headed kid named Tintin and his white terrier, Snowy. I scored pretty high in English because, thanks to my mom, I read all the time, but Robby was the acknowledged genius in our family.

  First we drove to Miller Pipe and hung around while my uncle picked out whatever pipe fittings he needed for the grove, and then we rode in all that sunshine to the Donut Palace, a tiny store lacquered in yellow Formica that was owned and ferociously sanitized by a Taiwanese family. I always got a chocolate-glazed, Robby always got a jelly-filled, and Uncle Hoyt always got a sugar twist. Hoyt could take or leave the sugar twist, to be honest, but he hated to go anywhere by himself.

  I was still nibbling on my chocolate-glazed when we rolled up to the four-way stop at Alvarado and Stage Coach, and Amiel was in his usual spot, juggling nothing and looking depressed. “That’s him!” I told my uncle. “The mime I told you about!”