We’d been in our respective beds for what must have been an hour when Morie called to Pie and asked if she’d like to chat. My sister gladly joined Morie in bed. I could hear their giggles and sighs as they savored the night—the magnificent dresses, the ugly duke, and Caruso, talented but, oh, the opera went on far too long.
On the ride home, I had tried to tell them about my backstage adventure, but they were too full of their own impressions to be taken with mine. Morie scolded me for giving them an awful fright. “What would happen,” she asked, “if you disappeared?”
In my room, Rogue refused to settle. One o’clock, two o’clock, he paced from the bed to the window, and stood there, his feet planted, hair erect along his spine, his snout poking at the cool glass. He barked and barked at phantoms. When he paused to listen, another dog in the neighborhood started up and Rogue, honor-bound, had to answer.
“What’s the matter, boy?” I kept asking. He tried to convey his troubles with an unblinking stare. When I failed to comprehend him, he whined.
I woke with Rogue standing over me, his paw pinning me to the sheets. In my confusion, I thought the growl—low and deep—was him.
It was the sound of the earth breaking. The quake climbed through thousands of layers of soil and bones and dinosaurs and fossils and bodies of ancestors, known and unknown, through the roots of a million trees.
Next it was the moan-cry of the house, the old-growth redwood weeping as it bent, or tried to.
Forty-five seconds is an eternity. Time it, if you don’t believe me. The shaking went on and on and on. Furniture collided, sections of the ceiling split and fell—no one thing distinct from the next, a cacophony of collapse. In the moonlit shadows, my bureau danced foot to foot then fell on its face; the bookcase leaped, tripped on the rug, and crashed. The windows bent in their sleeves, straightened audaciously, then burst. The floor undulated in short, choppy waves. The bed, with Rogue and me riding its top, sailed as if it were a flying carpet. Rogue jumped off and I had the wits to follow as the headboard hit the windows, busting the last panes of glass.
Then, mercifully, a pause. I got as far as the door.
The next temblor started under the house. It thundered as it traveled upward, building, expanding, this one stronger than the first. The earth was a bucking bull that wouldn’t quit until it had tossed us from its back.
I tried to hold on to the door casing, but a jolt sent me flying, facedown, into the hall. I shielded my head and hoped I wouldn’t get beaned by the chunks of plaster falling all around me. That’s when Rogue decided to run. He leaped over me and bounded for the stairs. I heard him cry as he tumbled down.
I kept thinking: This can’t be it. Oh my God, it is.
Then, abruptly, the shaking stopped. Then one more shift—a hip check, deep and low. The house swayed, and kept on swaying, even after the earth stopped, the house rolling as if on wheels.
That’s when the front chimney gave way: a thousand tumbling bricks.
“Pie? Pie!” I crawled toward her, bloodying my hands and knees on the rubble. Her room, what little I could see in the shadows, looked as if someone had tossed the furniture against the walls. In place of the front wall, where the windows had been, there was no wall at all, only the predawn sky.
“Pie! Pie, where are you?”
Then I remembered: she was with Morie.
Moments before the quake, Pie had awakened with a full bladder. She was squatting over the chamber pot when the chimney roared down, taking with it a side of the house. She watched the wave of brick, like a great black shadow, roll toward her, burying the bed where she’d just been. So many heavy bricks fell onto the iron bed, it gave way, crashing through the floor, the whole business falling—with Morie asleep, buried beneath the beams and bricks and plaster in the parlor below.
“Pie!”
She’d managed to hold on to a narrow strip of floor that clung to the wall. She was rocking, hugging her knees.
“Pie, look at me. Piper!”
Slowly she looked up, her eyes huge and unblinking, from the hole into which Morie had fallen.
“Pie, are you hurt?”
She’d taken a good knock on the head, that much I could see, now with the first light of dawn coming on. That, and she was soaked in her own piss, the chamber pot tipped on its side, her hair and nightgown coated with a suet of plaster and dust. My angel Pie.
I crawled toward her, inch by narrow inch. I tried not to think about falling, or the raw gaping hole, or the next shaker. I tried not to think about Morie.
“Here we go,” I whispered. “Pie, don’t look down. Here, this way.”
She clung to me, to my back, her arms wrapped round my neck. Inch by inch I got us to the hall as the next shaker rumbled toward us.
And the aftershocks kept coming, followed by the slide and combustion of more bricks and glass, and, from out on the street, the cries of animals, horses mainly.
The house rolled and swayed. Any moment, I was sure, it would all come down.
“Here, Pie, quick, put these on.” I handed her a pair of boots, but she only cowered, limp as a doll. I put them on her, cursing her idle feet. And I got my boots on too.
“Pie. Goddamn it, stand up,” I cried hoarsely, the dust coating my throat.
She fell, as if her strings had been cut.
Once more, I
