Fiona Maazel - Woke Up Lonely

“You could help us here,” Max said. “You do have one foot that still works.”

“Or maybe we could just be hikers who lost track of time,” she said.

“Some hikers,” Max said. “The one thing we had to make that story work, and sonny boy throws them down the hill.”

“I got them back,” Larissa said. And it was true; the binoculars were slung around her neck.

Ned kept his eyes on the halogen. What might his sister not like in all this? How about a creepy brother come to her door with the horrible parents who rejected her.

They made it to the outlays of the house, where management started: a gate, a path.

“What now?” Max said, though he got no answer.

There were bighorn in the mountains; they lowed and baaed, and the sound traveled for miles.

They neared the barn. Ned was the first to stop. He cocked his ear. They were twenty feet from a window open a crack. He was about to press on when a child’s voice sniped at the air and decked his parents. They were on their bellies fast. He just stood there.

“Ned,” Max whispered, and he reached for his son’s calf.

“Neddy,” Larissa said, and she reached for the other.

He looked down at them. Max had served in Korea and been awarded a silver star. Larissa had served as a nurse at the Eighty-Fifth Evacuation Hospital in Qui Nhon. They knew how to take cover. A man’s face in the window, and Ned got on his stomach, too. Listened hard. The voice, after all, was his nephew’s. His nephew, Willard. He tried to memorize its timbre. The high notes. The jazz. He’d been told the boy was just over two. He heard running through the house and a man saying, “I’m gonna get you!” and the child shrieking and laughing and yelling, “No no, Dada,” and collapsing on the floor while his mother nibbled his arms and neck, threatening to eat her boy for dinner because he was soooooo tasty.

Ned rolled on his back. So did Max. Larissa, too. They were soaked and filthy and staring at the nimbus overhead. For everything he’d been through, it was hard to imagine it was clouds up there and not a larder of tears.

He went back to listening. This family inside was a miracle. The boy romping through the house, saying: “Willard’s bear. Willard’s shoes.” The parents keeping an eye on him but retreating to the kitchen to talk it over. The man who’d come to see them before? He was a representative from L.A. County’s flood control division saying that if it rained big again, tonight or soon, probably there’d be a debris slide headed right for their barn. The fire season being what it was, the basin uphill was just not basin enough. Tracy saying, “You believe that? I don’t believe that,” and Phil saying, “Me neither,” but both of them watching their son and believing it wholeheartedly.

“He said if there’s rain, we’ll have just twenty minutes before the mountain comes down,” she said.

“I know.”

“He said in ’seventy-eight, there was such a bad flow, all the graves at Verdugo went loose and there were dead bodies upright in people’s living rooms when it was over.”

“I know.”

“Maybe let’s make an emergency bag if we have to leave in a hurry? Sort of like how when I was pregnant, we had that bag ready?”

“Okay, but what should we pack? There’s nothing important in this house but the memory of us in it.” He touched her cheek.

“I’ll grab the pictures of Mom and Dad in the living room,” she said.

“You’d better. Your parents will have a fit if they find out you didn’t save their pictures.”

“Oh, stop.”

They reconvened on the couch, him with the albums and her with a box of miscellany. Will’s first rattle. A corsage from their wedding.

They went through everything, and the hours went by. Finally, they put the pictures and mementos, title to the house, and some insurance papers in a duffel and put it by the front door. Only then did they turn on the radio. A severe storm alert was in effect. Rain imminent.

“I’m scared,” she said. “This house is all we have.”

“I know.”

“I love you?” she said.

“Check.”

Their son came waddling into the living room and mounted the couch. He sat between them.

“Willard’s book!” he yelled. “Oooooh, airplane! Flap, flap!”

“No way,” Tracy said. “Who could fly in this weather? Come on, baby, let’s get your boots. We’re going on a trip!” She picked up her son, who flapped in her arms.

“Flap, flap!” he said.

Tracy smiled. “Silly boy,” she said, though she was wrong. Because not two hours ago, a twin brother had talked his parents into reboarding his Lear jet and racing for the cloud decks off the California coast. The plan? Seed the clouds to make it rain well afield of a ranch on Alpine Way, so that when his sister was spared, Ned would know himself equal in love to whatever the universe could do for her. He set their course, he kissed the sky. And their lives were bound up for good.

Olgo Panjabi, a man sees, hears, feels, and absorbs

as much as he can understand.

Say you had this cult whose impetus to knit people together had turned terrorist — did that mean you forwent the instruments of community the second things got rough? That you divested your cult compound of a way to reach the outside world? If no, then what the hell, the Helix House was a nightmare; it had no cell-phone reception, no bars, which was colossal in the extent of its horror for Olgo Panjabi because if he could just get his voicemail, his life would start over. He had a rash, he was scared, but still, this kidnapping in its grandeur was like the Christ birth, a demarcation of time. Whatever had happened before belonged to a different epoch, and what tragedies it sustained were receded into it, among them adulteries committed by his wife. In this new era ushered in by High Event, his wife would come back, she was on her way, he just needed it confirmed by the message on his voicemail.

He had heard the others leave — Anne-Janet brawning her way out, Ned following suit — and he had wanted to go, too, only he was frantic and when frantic, paralyzed. If not for the expected message from his wife, he might not have left at all. As it was, he’d crawled his way across the floor and poked his head through the exit Anne-Janet had made for them. Looked left, right. The rash meant he’d been released from his hood ages ago; likewise the handcuffs, because he had to scratch, and so he was versatile with the actions required for this escape. He’d crawl all the way home if he had to.

Phone in his pocket. Checking for bars every few feet. Meeting no one. Meeting someone, a tree of a woman with an accent from the heartland telling him to make for a closet, find the hatch, something something tunnel, which did not appeal to the logic of finding high ground for best reception but which did mean a way out of this dead zone.

It was dark in the tunnel; he had no idea where he was going. He worried he’d deplete the battery for checking the phone every three seconds. Couldn’t remember the directions but kept walking. The plan?

Go home posthaste. Wait for his wife unless, oh-ho, she was waiting for him. Debrief in bed with kefir smoothies. The tunnel went on and on, but he could hear the rumble of cars overhead, and soon: a manhole. Ladder, life. A cover that could not be moved without a crowbar. Several such, and so he got filthier and angrier and more exhausted until, at last — a temp cover, resin grate, he could easily remove.

He ran to the sidewalk. Ran with no regard for the spectacle of himself sprouted from the nethers, waving his phone. Not that anyone cared and probably not that anyone even noticed. He waved his cell for the interminable seconds it took this device to realize it was aboveground. One bar, two. He called his number and listened to the outgoing, dialed his password, got it wrong, fingers like egg rolls, got it right, thank God. Many messages, jumping for joy. The first from Erin — Dad, where are you? — and another — Oh my God, Dad, are you okay? — and finally just her crying, saying everyone was so scared, she knew he wasn’t going to get this message, but she loved him, they all did. All? A call from the fraud department of his bank, because there’d been so much activity on his debit card — had it been stolen? — and then a reporter from ABC news, just in case.