Quake Chapter One

The earth trembled and bucked around me. People started pouring out of buildings, clogging the streets. In the state of California and especially in this neighborhood everyone knew the drill. I clutched my cell phone in my hand so hard my knuckles were turning white.
“What a low life bastard!” I thought, clenching my teeth. “How dare he break up with me and on my facebook page!” Luckily my phone alerts me when I have a new wall post so his note “I think it’s time for us to see other people because baby, I already see one I like” comment was deleted after only being in cyberspace a few seconds. I was not naïve enough to think that out of my two hundred and fifty friends that no one saw it. I just couldn’t believe that after three years together he could just throw me away so easily and so callously. I thought I knew him. I thought I might even love him. My phone vibrated in my hand and it wasn’t caused by the earthquake.

“Honey.” A woman’s sooth southern voice said from the receiver. “I just got a notification on my phone and read what Sean wrote.” The earthquake went up another notch on the Richter scale. “Baby you need to calm down. Take a deep breath. I am on my way to work so I can’t turn on the TV. But I am assuming there is an earthquake going on right now?”

I took a deep breath. “Yes.”

“Oh Shia, you have been doing so well. How long has it been, three months? Please calm down. Think about all the people you could be hurting. Think of all the priceless family heirlooms crashing to the floor right now as we speak. He is just a boy, baby. Trust me there are lots of them.”

“Ok Mom. I am calming down.” I said still deep breathing.

“Imagine yourself sitting on the beach. How about laying in your hammock. Hear the waves crashing against the shore? Maybe you should come home for a nice long visit. It would do you good to get away from all that Hollywood drama.”

“I’ll think about it Mom and call you back.”

“How’s the quake?” she asked.

“What quake?” I asked and hung up. I turned my phone off, not wanting to risk hearing from anyone else and started walking again towards the flat I shared with Sean. A little ripple of energy escaped me as I thought of the possibility of him being there. I doubted it. I was just getting home from a week in South Beach with a friend and auditioning for a part in a daytime soap opera.

“See this is what happens when you leave a guy alone for an extended period of time.” I berated myself aloud. “They find somewhere else to put their private parts.” I rolled my eyes. I had thought Sean was different, even perfect but on reflection he is an aspiring actor so his acting skills must be pretty good right? Was our whole relationship an act? Had I just lived with Sean the actor and Sean the real person was someone I never met? I mulled this over as I rode the elevator up to our fourth story flat. I unlocked the door and tried to brace myself for whatever was inside. It didn’t work. As expected he had already moved out. He had left all of my things in the exact place I had left them. But that wasn’t the shocking part. The shocking part was the whole flat was covered in paint. It looked like he had went to the big box store and bought every paint color from SpongeBob Squarepants. Gallons of bright orange, lime green, neon pink and electric blue were thrown all over everything. My 42 inch plasma was a brilliant shade of yellow, the floor to ceiling windows gave a new meaning to ‘stained glass’. Our bedroom door was open and I saw my beautiful white lacy duvet splashed with electric blue. On reflection it was a pretty good color to describe that area of our relationship. I stood there gaping like an idiot for several minutes then the anger that flashed up in me caused the earth to shutter violently around me and all the windows in the building exploded at once.


****




I sat in the airport awaiting my gate to be called watching the news. Of course the airport was too loud to hear it but I was reading the captions.

“……earthquake in Anaheim a 4.0 on the Richter scale came at 12:56 pm today. The aftershock came in a 4.9, twenty minutes later. The aftershock blew out all the windows in the Shady Palms complex which was particularly devastating for a young tenant who had just come home to find out her boyfriend had dumped her on her facebook wall and had thrown gallons of paint all over the apartment they had shared.” Here the reporter smirks and they show a slow sweeping view of my apartment. My cheeks burned but I kept my energy under control. “Curiously this region of Anaheim has been particularly prone to quakes in the last decade. Fortunately other than the broken windows the damage was minimal with no injuries other than a broken heart perhaps.” The news anchor smirked again at his own joke. My seat shook a little at this and I turned away. I had called the cops before I left and filed charges. The landlord was understandably too busy with glass installers to help us right away but he assured me he would get the hallway surveillance videos to the police. The cop was pretty sure I had an ironclad case against him. It really was silly of him to wreck the flat. I mean we didn’t even break up on bad terms. I rolled my eyes again “Actors….so full of drama.”

****


I arrived in Gulf Shores Alabama six and a half hours later. It was suppertime but I knew as the taxi dropped me off Mom would still be at work. I dropped my suitcases at the backdoor and walked down our old weather-beaten boardwalk to the beach. The sky was clear and a cool breeze ruffled my hair. I collapsed in my favorite spot, the hammock strung between two palm trees. As I lay there I evaluated my life; a twenty seven year old aspiring actress who after ten years had starred in a grand total of two commercials with very minor parts and three scenes in a now cancelled soap opera with the distinguished title of “Bar patron number three”. Never married, no kids, no talent and no future. Oh and lets not forget freak of nature. Can’t forget that little juicy tidbit.

I tried not to. I really did but once a few tears leaked out it was like a dam failing and it all just gushed out. I stared up at the sky with my vision blurred by tears when a man’s head leaned over me, blocking out the sky. I was so startled my body jerked and I flipped spectacularly off the hammock landing on all fours in the sand.

I looked up at the handsome blonde who had wrecked my pity party. “Damn it Dirk. I hate it when you do that!”

Dirk was doubled over laughing. “I’m…sorry….” he got out between guffaws. “was…only trying….to say…hello.”

“Riiiight. Like I believe that.” I said brushing sand of my knees. “What are you doing here anyway?”

“I was wondering the same thing about you little missy. I happen to live here now.”

I looked at him incredulously. “You live here? Mom didn’t tell me that. I thought you were living it up in Atlanta with some politician’s daughter.”

“And so I was.” He said puffing out his chest. He reached for my hand and led me back up the ramp to the patio where we sat down together. “She was a sweet thing.” He said looking up to the sky ruefully. “But alas she started saying these sentences with words like ‘love’ and ‘marriage’ in them so I had to say goodbye to the high life.” He sighed dramatically.

I laughed. “Dirk your such a jerk. Your telling me a rich pretty girl loved you and wanted to marry you so you split?”

“That about sums it up.” He stretched his arms and legs and yawned. “Really sis I just didn’t love her so instead of stringing her along because I liked being with her I packed up and moved home. I thought I was being noble. It hasn’t been easy on me you know, going from caviar living to this.” He turned and gestured to our multiple thousand square foot, beachfront familial home. “This is a far cry from Atlanta penthouses.”

I laughed again. “It’s good to be home. I missed it too.”

He nodded appreciatively. He reached across the table and poked my arm. “Tag, your it.”

So I told him all about the cheating bastard actor Sean. I thought about leaving out the news report but I couldn’t help telling him. He jumped up and went inside with a hurried “be right back”. When he reemerged he had his laptop in hand. He scooted his chair next to mine and pushed play on the screen. We watched the news report on you tube again, and again and again. It had over a thousand hits already. We laughed until we cried. It was so much more comical hearing the news anchor’s voice instead of reading it.

While we were laughing a tall slender woman with short blonde hair and a pretty but lined face walked around the house. Her heels making a clicking noise on the patio stones.

“What’s so funny?” she asked in her smooth as honey southern drawl.

Dirk swiveled the computer screen around and pushed play. My Mom sat down and watched. Her lips quirked but she didn’t laugh out loud. “You got to admit baby, he’s got and eye for color.”

I was horrified but Dirk fell out of his chair laughing. “Gee thanks Mom. Nice to see you too.”

She got up and kissed the top of my head. “I missed you too much baby girl. I am glad your home. You hungry?”

“Yep.” Dirk chimed in before I could answer. “Come on sis, last one to the door is a dead opossum.”

I rolled my eyes but ran after him anyway.

Mom fixed us peanut butter and banana sandwiches, chips and sweet tea. We all stood in the kitchen talking and joking. It was so good to be home. It had always been like this. Just the three of us. Our dad had split on us when I was just over one year old and Dirk was three. Dirk had only a couple vague memories of him and I didn’t have any. Mom didn’t talk about him as a rule. Our Mom was and is a strong woman so we never felt like we were missing anything by not having a father. She came from a well to do southern family and was an only child. When Maw maw and Pawpaw Glick died before we were born Mom got all their wealth and property. She didn’t have to work anymore but she did anyway. She bought a southern cookin’ restaurant on the strip called The Lonely Pelican. Growing up the only family we had was each other and a mysterious Uncle on our dad’s side that visited us every year while until we hit eighteen. He was the only relative of our dads we had ever met or heard of. We never knew when he was coming, he just showed up. He stayed one night with us, gave us money from our father and left. The first few years we asked him about our dad endlessly and asked if there were any other Littletons we could meet. He never answered so we stopped asking. He never talked about himself or his family. He only wanted to know about us. How our schooling was getting on, etc. When we got older he would ask us when Mom was out or occupied how we were getting on with our ‘other’ studies. We didn’t know what he meant at first until he formed a three foot high tornado on the living room carpet. Dirk and I walked around the tornado in awe, plunging our hand or foot into it’s core. Dirk, being a wind worker also proudly showed him all he could do. I however told him that I could do nothing. He was surprised at this at first but kept telling me it would come in time. Dirk didn’t question me on why I wouldn’t make the earth quake for him, he already knew. My abnormality was not something I could hide in my room and work on perfecting like Dirk could. I had no control over my power and spent all my time learning to suppress it while Dirk spent his learning to prefect his. I was jealous of him and his ability growing up but it never made me bitter or resent him. I just wanted to know why I had to be the freakier one. Why couldn’t I just be normal freaky? Uncle Strep, as he told us to call him began to stare long and hard at me when I, year after year maintained I had no ability. I don’t think he ever believed me but at age fourteen he stopped asking. He said if it hadn’t happened by then it wasn’t going to.



The next morning Mom woke me up early and told me to get ready for work. I groaned and grumbled but did as I was told. Mom popped a few frozen waffles into the toaster for me. “Your brother is already gone to open up the Pelican. He gets there at five so the ladies can start making biscuits for the breakfast crowd. It’s Friday so we will be busy. You can take lunch at one till two then get off at four thirty. You will be waiting tables today so you can keep your tips plus a dollar an hour. We are leaving at seven.”

I looked at her cross-eyed. “That is way too many words this early in the morning. You have coffee somewhere?”

Mom sighed and poured me a cup. “Do you still take cream and sugar?”

“Do monkeys eat bananas?”

“Absolutely”. Mom replied passing me the mug. She dug some cream from the fridge and the sugar bowl from the counter and handed it to me. “I am really sorry about Sean. I thought he was a nice boy even if he was an actor.” Mom distrusted actors as a rule and now I was beginning to see her wisdom in it. “But sugar I can tell you why the relationship didn’t work out if you want to hear it.”

I groaned. “What Mom? Should I have cooked him three meals a day? Set his clothes out for him for work the next day? Rubbed his feet after a long day of prancing in front of a camera?”

“The cooking thing sure wouldn’t hurt. There is no quicker way to win a man’s heart than through his stomach.” Mom replied.

“Not any man I ever met. They only want one thing and it isn’t my crème brulee.”

“I said to a man’s heart not his pants baby. And there in lies the problem. As it is ordained by God, and your mother, you should find a man who wins your heart and you have won his and then you get married.” She put extra emphasis on the word. “You will never have a satisfying relationship if you keep shacking up with whatever guy you happen to like at the time. Trust me baby, it will never work out. If a man really loves you he will have the crème brulee first and wait for the rest until your married.”

“There are no men like that anymore Momma!” I said waving my hands in exasperation. “That is not the way the world works anymore.”

“And that is exactly why the world doesn’t work anymore. Everyone wants to do what they want to do, when they want to do it. No one cares about anyone else. Well I am not buying it and I hope and pray I have raised my babies to do the same. Now eat your dad gum waffles and lets go to work.” She strode out of the room, her heels clicking furiously.

I had heard this same speech from Mom several times and it usually ended like this. With arm waving and Mom reduced to her special brand of cursing. This time I must admit I felt finally mature enough to see it’s wisdom and thought God must be on to something, as he usually was. After this horrific blind sight to what Sean truly was I was beginning to realize that I needed to stop looking for love. I should just hang back, lay low and let love find me. Or something like that anyway.