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Chapter One

I.

At dawn, Mom says not to wake the others, but I don’t think anyone’s sleeping. We crouch beneath the low tarp shelter that’s tied to a fence post with the wire of someone’s earbuds. It is barely dawn. One young man doesn’t have a blanket. He lies shivering in damp boardshorts on the packed dirt, beach sand still stuck to his calves. I step over the feet of a woman whose baby is latched to her breast, its eyes opening and closing and rolling back in its head. The woman groans. Shifts. A damp scrape on her shoulder shines in the weak daylight and the baby whines in its sleep. During the night, as I lay awake and frightened, curled against the spine knuckles of a skinny old man, with Mom curled against my spine, my mind continually returned to the image of Mom’s only tattoo, a speckled, faded word scrawled unignorable across her throat. Solidarity.

Mom and I step over a Santa María prayer candle flickering dimly through the night, then out from beneath the tarp and into the crisp air. We straighten. The sun is about to rise into the space between the two lush hills that cradle the valley.

Mom and I choose spots on the perimeter of the pasture, tucked into the hem of the encroaching jungle. I am afraid to be too far from her. We squat side by side with our elbows touching and I listen to the sounds of the world, birds beginning to sing, a rooster crowing somewhere in the valley as if nothing has happened, the gurgle of Mom’s pee gushing into the dirt.

A low growl comes from inside the earth and I jerk to my feet and draw up my swimsuit bottoms. A woman cries out from the shelter, and someone else shouts, “¡No corra!” Mom holds me by the arms. We lower to our knees, and wait. The aftershock passes. Pee has dribbled down my leg.

II.

Dew from the grass dampens our bare feet as we make our way to the road, where already people are in motion. Mom tries to get a look at every face in every passing car, on the back of every motorbike, in every passing group of arms carrying blankets, and even on stubby naked baby legs ending in fat little feet that pat on the dirt. I know she is looking for Charlene.

A motorbike pulls over and stops. The rider raises his helmet and leaves it propped on top of his head. Mom says, “Alfredo!” She throws her arms around him. It takes me a moment to remember him. When we first moved here, in our first week, before our sunburnt skin had finished rubbing off in little dirt-colored worms, I got up at night to get a glass of water and I saw them.

Alfredo says in Spanish to get on. He kick-starts the motorbike and the tin sound of its two-stroke engine floods the quiet valley. I climb up, center myself with my hands between my legs on the warm, rubbery seat. Mom hugs herself to Alfredo and compresses me between them. My head fills with his briny smell, and her floral one. We pick up our bare feet and roll toward Canoa, to see what’s left.

III.

We roll out of pastureland and into a village, the higher ground where many from Canoa spent the night. Here, the valley is awake. The people are moving, searching and rearranging. Surfboards tucked under arms on motorbikes, babies sandwiched in families on motorbikes. Rolled-up bed mats on motorbikes, boys that stand on bumpers of passing cars, people wearing bloody shirts, a man’s bald head taped up with gauze. On one side of the valley floor, amid the red-dirt innards of a fallen-away hillside, full-grown trees webbed with vines are bunched up and sideways, gathered like a tangle of hair. In places, the edge of the dirt road is crumbled like dry dough, breaking apart and rolling into the river. A truck passes on a narrow stretch, its bed full of young children in formal wear—girls in sequined dresses, boys in tuxedos—who, last night, were whisked away from their primary school graduation.

There are cats and kittens. There are people I don’t know and people I know a little. We slow because a car in front of us has stopped and in a yard beneath a tarp shelter is our neighbor María, standing in a T-shirt and white capris beside a blackened pot over flame, her elbows dimpled with fat and loose skin, arms that have hugged me, the roots of her hair starkly white. She notices Mom and me with a start, and kisses her fingertips and waves with both hands and begins to cry and calls, “¡Son las Americanas del hostal! Gracias al Señor, Él no las tomó.”

People stand in the detritus of their former houses. People gather fallen bricks and organize them in stacks, just because. Because it is a natural tendency of people to organize. A pair of children lie on a mat and watch a video on a tablet. A woman in a bra and underwear washes her long black hair in a bucket. Water runs from the ends and she wrings the hair out with her hands and, as we pass her, she looks into my eyes.

A line of cars has stopped. Alfredo steers around them, and we come to a bridge over a gorge, lush jungle, and far below, a gash of rocks. The bridge itself stands undisturbed. But the road on both sides has crumbled and fallen into the gorge, so only a strip of tamped dirt about two feet wide connects to the concrete anymore. Alfredo accelerates and Mom’s arms tighten and a man in his pickup leans out the window to watch, arm flexed against his door. Bump-bump we are on the bridge and then bump-bump we are across it. People on the other side whistle and slap the doors of their cars.

With my hand in the space between my chest and Alfredo’s back, I feel out my heartbeat from the vibration of the bike’s motor, from Alfredo’s rough breathing. We pass into another stretch of pastureland, cows chewing cud. Cold morning air, and its dampness, stings our bare shoulders and legs, even though the sun warms our backs. Mom says something to Alfredo and her voice is ripped away and lost behind us. He twists and says, “¿Cómo?”

I feel her lungs fill against my back. In Spanish, she says, “If something has happened to Charlene, I will die.”

Alfredo responds in Spanish. “Charlene? She went to the house of a man called Barón.”

“Barón? I don’t know him.”

How can she not know him, says Alfredo, everyone knows Barón. How can she not know the man with whom her best friend lives?

I feel Mom bristle against my body. She says she and Charlene don’t talk about their personal lives, which is the furthest thing from the truth. Charlene, the latest object of Mom’s intense friendship.

Alfredo shrugs. Mom lays her cheek on my back, and I lay my cheek on Alfredo’s back. I recall the night when I got up to get a glass of water, and I saw them together. Mom had closed the bar. But she and a man were swaying in the sand. They were pressed against each other, dancing. He was holding her wrists and moving her hands into the space between their hips. She was laughing and pulling her hands away.

When I woke the next morning, Alfredo was in our kitchen. He was cooking. Mom was draped elegantly across a chair. Everyone was sticky with sleep sweat. Alfredo told Mom he had been there before in the hostel’s residence kitchen, stood in that very spot before we Americans lived there. Then, something about expat money, union communist money, and Mom turned cold. Her face went flat and she stood from the chair and climbed into my bed beside me and wrapped herself around me. I was suffocatingly hot. Alfredo brought bread and coffee to her in my bed and she said she wasn’t hungry. He said it was just a joke. She wouldn’t talk to him. After he left, she rolled onto her back. I craned my neck to see her face but she tilted it away from me. She said, “These people don’t know fuck all about American unions and they don’t know fuck all about me.” I didn’t see Alfredo again, until now.

But this is an emergency. People are dead, so little feuds don’t matter. It occurs to me that after this day I will always remember him because he’s someone else who was there when it happened, when we ran for higher ground and shook in the hills, nothing but animal bodies with big, wide eyes, watching the sky over Canoa turn red.

Everything is disorienting. Last night, Mom said I should stay with my body. She said healing pauses when we’re in fight or flight. I asked if it would feel like this forever, and she said no, not if I follow my breath. But she was distracted when she said it, and she added that surely Charlene would be somewhere in the valley.

Charlene. Charlene. Why is she so important when soon you’ll forget about her anyway?

Her hand quivered. I thought it looked like a bird, the way they pirouette in storms, looking for something to land on. And so I wondered if she was with her body, following her breath, taking her own advice, or if her mind was somewhere else.

Alfredo had never pulled his helmet back down over his head. It rests like a crown. I wonder if it’s because Mom and I don’t have helmets. Or because no one can believe they should have survived. Or because he’s reckless. My fingers work into the middle of Mom’s fist that presses against my belly. She’s been holding these all night, since just before the ground started to shake. Three dull coins.

 

Chapter Two

I.

Mom talks about quantum physics and I don’t get it. And I don’t know if she gets it. Sometimes light is a particle. Sometimes, a wave. So, sometimes life is made of stuff that floats, intermingles, and doesn’t really have a direction. At other times, stories happen. Things happen in order. Life crashes forward, and those same pieces that had no direction before become a force. Like terrible water. You can’t stop it, because it flows all around you, and becomes you. Last night, light was a wave that came for us. Particles of light stuck all over us. Everything got light on it, so nothing could not be seen.

I saw how dangerous it is to be alive, how squishy and breakable our bodies are, how big the world is, and how little it cares. Last night, as the sun set, the men across the street smoked like always. Their faces were in shadow, their shirts open, dark nipples and hairy bellies in the circle of yellow streetlight. On a small round table between them stood two green bottles of pilsner. I had a vague pain in my low belly, and I was thinking that maybe it heralded the coming of my period. What would that pain be like? The shedding of uterine lining. Would it be like a burn? Skin peeling on the inside? Mom says it won’t be like I think. It won’t be a lot, and the blood won’t be bright. Everything is not like you think it’ll be.

The night was humid, and I was sweaty. Mom worked behind the bar. Her gray camisole had a dark band of wetness where seawater had soaked into the fabric from the string of her bikini. I remember a man rode bareback on a palomino on the dirt road between the hostel yard and the beach. People went to him to pet it and the man proudly leaned over it and stroked its neck.

Barstools poked out of the sand at odd angles, each one with a person perched on top. There were two locals playing at the billiard table. They had come here before Mom bought the hostel. One complained of the grit that always accumulated, because the pockets emptied into the sand, and when people retrieved the balls, sand found its way onto the green. He pointed with his flat, upturned palm at the line of packing tape holding the felt together at the center of the table. Our cues were bent, and we didn’t have chalk. He hoped, he said, that things would be different now, with the hostel owned by the Americans. But things weren’t different at all.

The hammocks were occupied with sunburnt bodies, arms slung over their eyes. The four wooden coffee tables, really just rounds cut from logs, were covered in plastic cups and glass bottles, green and amber. The beach chairs were full of people, some of them piled, like the girl with the macramé bracelet on the lap of the South African guy, who I knew for a fact she’d met earlier in the day. I scrutinized her face, her bikini-clad breasts, which pointed, but did not hang, and I wondered if she was even that much older than me.

II.

A man walked into the yard, dragging a rolling suitcase through the sand. His top buttons were undone, and his chest was a deep, reddish tan. He appeared to be recently groomed, with thick silver hair, and he smiled a little with his mouth and a lot with his eyes. He took the one empty seat at Mom’s bar.

Mom had her back to him. She lifted the entire heavy blender and held it at an angle and shook it, and the muscles in her arms rippled. The untoned parts of her body jiggled under her sarong. I studied the man studying her, studied him smiling. His hand rooted blindly in the pocket of his shorts for coins.

I tiptoed a couple meters around the back of him and leaned against one of the bamboo supports of the lean-to over the billiard table. His cologne was something musky, but too much like soap.

Mom poured a drink from the blender and handed it to our neighbor María at the bar. María shook out her bottle-black hair and shifted on the stool in her white capris. She was watching her husband, standing in the road, talking to a younger woman.

There was the barely perceptible moment when Mom noticed the man at the bar. She did not look at him, but I could tell she had noticed. I could tell by the way she straightened, and because she avoided facing where he sat. She bantered with María in her newly acquired Spanish, and María listened distractedly. Mom bent, rested her elbows on the bar, her body overfull of life, though she weighs only 120 pounds.

When she turned to the man, she turned all of herself to him. Her lips rolled and smiled, and her eyes burned and shimmered and promised. She said something to him. Bienvenida. He leaned forward on his stool. There was still an airline tag on the rolling luggage in the sand beside him. She nodded, said something else, and he laughed, and I heard him say the word Cleveland. She rested her hands on the weather-warped wood of the bar. In English, she said, “What can I get for you?” He answered. She nodded, turned, and chose a maracuya from the wooden bowl. When she turned back, our eyes met. Though she was across the yard, I knew the pattern of her irises, saw them like they were right in front of my face. I hid myself behind the thick stalk of bamboo. The man said something about looking at condos in Bahía de Caráquez. I peered around the stalk to see how Mom would react to his answer, and she was looking at me. Before I could hide again, she stuck out the tip of her tongue. The man began to turn right as I retreated around the billiard table.

He said, “Is she yours?”

“That’s my Espe.”

“You and your husband expatriate together?”

“No husband. Just me and my first and only love, that kid.”

My heart thrummed. Though, when she says this, she’s about to ignore me for days.

He continued to pry about her husband or boyfriend, and she confessed that she had none, and told him the story of my dad, the key details of which are like the chorus of a song I know by heart. Not on the birth certificate, high IQ, low emotional intelligence, Espe couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. The man said he felt like he’d crossed a line. She pretended to be a little bothered, but I knew she wasn’t. Then she began to ignore him. She took María’s cup and refilled it, and she and María talked in Spanish while she made the man’s drink. María lamented her husband’s wandering eye, and Mom chastised her for failing to understand that all men are like this, and I wondered, as I always do when she says this, how solidarity is possible. She lowered her voice and glanced at me and I heard her say something about Charlene, and I knew they were talking about the horrible thing that happened to her. María shook her head and drew a cross over her chest with her finger, and kissed her little crucifix necklace.

The man cut in.

“Your daughter at one of the local schools?”

“We homeschool.”

“No kidding? Accreditation from the state?”

“It’s off the books. No accreditation.”

“Won’t that come back to bite her?”

Mom’s ironically peace-sign-shaped frown line appeared.

“Do you know a lot of you come through Canoa?”

He sat upright.

“There’s only one of me. And I’ve never been here.”

“And you’ll never be back.”

“No, I will. I’m looking at those places in Bahía.”

“You’re cute and all, but, possibly, I don’t want you to come back.”

“What’s the criterion?”

Movement on the road caught Mom’s eye and I looked and saw Sean—the reason we moved to Ecuador—walking with his arm around the shoulders of a sunburned blond girl. The girl talked with energy, miming her story with her hands. Sean was nodding, but when the girl wasn’t looking, he glanced into the yard at Mom. His eyes, green and red-brown and cold like a pine forest, blinked against his shaggy hair. He and the girl disappeared around the hedge just before the man turned to see what Mom was looking at.

She said, “Don’t know if I’ve worked out a criterion. Buy another drink and I’ll think about it?”

He said, “What’s your name?”

She leaned close to him and stared bravely, moved her eyes from his eyes to his lips—he tracked her movement, I felt him panic—and she said, “You’ll never know it.”

“I’ll know it.”

“What if you could have everything you’re after, and never learn my name?”

“I’d still want to know your name.”

“You’ll never really know me, because you don’t really care. What’s the point?”

I wanted to hear his answer. Because Mom was really asking.

“I care,” he said.

“What is the point.”

“A thing called fun.”

She sighed out her nose. “I’ve had that a couple times.”

“Got vacancy here tonight?”

“Yeah, baby, I do.”

III.

He paid for his drink with three dull coins, and Mom loosely held them in her palm. They had stopped talking, and she had leveled her eyes at him. Her lashes were very low, and very heavy, and her brown eyes so strong, and I could feel the power of her attention, and I could feel him feel it. His mouth was open, and everything in the yard felt strung up by unsaid words.

Then, the pint glasses lined along the counter started to rattle. Everyone at the bar stopped talking. They looked at each other, half smiling, as though becoming aware of a joke made at their expense. Mom’s brow furrowed. There was a low rumble. Her hand closed on the three coins. I thought, Earthquake. And then the earth bucked with impossible violence and all electric lights went out. People leapt from their stools. They started to run, but a single lateral shift stole everyone’s footing and they were all on hands and knees, and so was I, screaming Mom, Mom, Mom, like an animal with no mind, my voice lost in the loudest sound I have ever heard, like being inside a thunderclap, and sustained, on and on, with just traces of human voices, all the faces around me open-mouthed. The lean-to fell over the bar, and I could not see Mom, and the palm trees thrashed like possessed dancers, and one died, burst in half, and the upper floor of the hostel, in the dusky light, threw itself all over the place, barely holding to the frame, and my mind was divided between grasping for reality as it was only seconds ago—Mom was flirting with the man—and wondering how much more the earth could possibly shake.

And then, it slowed. The sound reduced. I felt the quieting percussion of the earth, like gears of a great, intricate machine clicking into place. The people got up. They came to each other, stood near each other, and spoke in shaking voices, disoriented, saying things like, “Was it an earthquake?”

Mom appeared from the shadow created by the fallen lean-to. She was breathing deeper than I knew her lungs to be, chanting Espe, Espe, Espe, with her arms closed around me, holding me in a new way, our bodies in new contact, a smarter, more efficient embrace than we were capable of under normal circumstances, and all everything was, was being held by my mom, who was okay. She was saying, “Thank God,” though I knew she did not believe in God. The contents of my guts had liquified and I squeezed my butthole shut.

Then, someone said, “There’s gonna be a wave.” The whole yard full of eyes turned toward the sea. And suddenly, we were all walking together, breaking into a run where there was space in the crowd, walking again, to the nearest east-west cross street, all our bare feet patting the dirt road. My hand was closed in Mom’s fist, a ball hitch and a trailer, contact second only to umbilical. Mom maneuvered us through the crowd. Sweaty arms brushed against my arms. People called out names, searching and desperate. People held their cellphones above their heads, trying to get a signal. Cars cut through the crowd, and motorbikes, within inches of us, so their riders’ legs brushed my leg as we walked. I could not understand what had happened. My mind tried to attach the moment of a few seconds prior to this moment. It was like a ragged wound, with nothing to stitch.

 

Chapter Three

I.

Alfredo slows the motorbike on the shoulder of the highway at the outskirts of town. Mom and I are barefooted and goose-bumped, in the clothes we had on when we fled last night, her gray camisole and sarong, my swimsuit. At the crossroad, Mom and I climb off and stand in the dirt between the paved highway and the grassy hill that rolls toward the farthest houses from the center of Canoa. Alfredo is going to check the road to the south, which we are told is buried under a landslide. His tank top ripples in the wind as he shrinks into the distance. The sound of his little engine shifting becomes softer and softer and dissipates entirely.

Mom and I begin to walk. Here in Canoa, in town, everything is muted. Not like in the valley. Quiet is not what I would expect. But it is quiet. I can hear the light breeze. Piles of brick lay inert. People stand stunned in the road, staring at scenes of undoing. Canoa is broken and made strange and it doesn’t smell like coffee or meat sizzling in pots of oil. It smells like the sea. It sounds like the sea. A few more blocks and the sea comes into view, glittering and constant as ever. That wave never did come, and the ocean didn’t rise to swallow us, but it still seems like we are in it.

There is nothing that was untouched by the shaking, no house that is fine. And I cannot account for it, because last night, as we ran for higher ground, I saw none of this. I only have a few images. The hostel jostling, palm trees shaking. Thinking it did not look real—it looked like a movie set. And as the whole panicked mass reached the pastures at the edge of town, fireflies congregated under the trees, looking like ornaments on strings, and the moment felt so blessed, I had wanted to cry.

II.

Ahead in the road, five nuns stand silently in a constellation. They wear light-colored blouses and long pleated skirts, almost to their ankles, and white veils pinned to their hair that look like dinner napkins. They watch men working at a hole in the cement roof of a collapsed apartment building, which has bowed nearly to the road, the roof become a ramp. A hill. One man brings a floral sheet from a little girl’s bed. As Mom and I approach holding hands, the men drag a man out of the hole by his limp arms. He is covered head to toe in concrete dust—his clothes, his eyes—and they lay him on the sheet. I squeeze Mom’s hand.

“Don’t let me see anyone dead,” I say.

“Don’t look.”

But I do. They lay him on the sheet and they each take a corner, and they carry the dead man across the road in front of us, while the nuns watch, knowing some secret thing about God. I realize that people have lost everything. There’s a woman on the other side of the street, her curly hair pulled into a ponytail, who covers her silent, opened mouth with her hands and sinks to the stone step, and to her, this man is everything. I see her true form, a disorganized, arcing current of terror, like a catastrophic failure at a substation, and I am more frightened by her than I am by a city of flattened corpses.

We walk a few more blocks, pass a few more revelations. Then, the final corner, then the hostel. Mom lets go of my hand and says, “God,” and tears quiver in her eyes. Our hostel is still there. We braid our arms together and enter the yard. The front wall holds loosely to the frame. I hold closer to Mom.

“It looks okay,” I say.

She breaks free and scuttles to the community kitchen beside the bar, body in a knot. The kitchen is an open-air structure that stands apart from all the guest rooms, and from our private apartment, which is on the third level, and which I do not wish to think about. In the community kitchen, the heavy table is toppled, the spice rack all over, broken glass and oozing meat juice from someone’s abandoned beef cut.

“Shit. Our drinking water.”

Looters have been here. There were several five-gallon jugs and they are gone. Mom opens the nonfunctional oven and falls to her haunches, face in her hands.

“They took the fucking cashbox.”

I know this means they also took Mom’s black Glock, a gift from Sean that she does not yet qualify to legally own in Ecuador, to replace the one she kept close in America.

Our neighbor María floats into the yard. Her eyes are bloodshot. She has a cut on her forehead in the middle of a purple welt that I did not see earlier when we passed her in the valley. She wraps us in an arm each and sobs, and says things that seem garishly impossible. So many children have died, because they had just been put to bed and their houses fell down on them, their bedrooms closed in on them like tombs, their mothers couldn’t protect them. Also, her house collapsed on top of her and her husband. He was knocked out, but he’s alright. My face burns for her. Because, it is unusual to require this much attention, and I am not sure if she’s allowed.

Mom and María have their hard things. They say their secrets out loud that I don’t want to hear. They barter scraps of information, taking turns gasping and gagging on spit. When the tienda principal collapsed, it killed everyone inside. The explosion we saw, the red clouds, was a great fire caused by a cache of propane tanks. A grand hotel was reduced to a stack of floors. Death toll thirty. One seven-floor hotel has become a three-floor hotel. One edificio has come down a floor and wears its top half like a crooked hat. They say it was a shallow quake: 7.8. It was fast, the thunderclap of ripping stone rising to the surface, the concentrically circular blast collapsing bridges, dropping hills over highways.

III.

And then Charlene staggers into the yard. She is supporting Sean, who stumbles, his arm slung over her shoulders. No sign of the sunburned girl Sean had walked with last night. Probably on her way back to America, or Australia, or the United Kingdom. Sean raises a bottle of rum. Sean, never not at least a little drunk. He wipes white froth from the corner of his mouth with a tattooed arm. POW MIA. The sun is still rising over the ocean, and already, his green eyes blink out of sync.

 

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TAYLOR LEATRICE WERNER earned an MFA in fiction at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She has taught creative writing at the Taos Charter School, the DreamTree Project, and the Bellingham Alternative Library. She has words in NAILED Magazine, Sad Girl Diaries, and Labor Notes. Taylor works as a union electrician in Cascadia, where she lives with her son and their one-of-a-kind dog, Gritty, who strongly opposes fascism.

 

Featured image by Erik van Dijk, courtesy of Unsplash.