I don’t remember much of the earthquake. The screaming, mostly, and the house collapsing on us. I remember my mom wrapping herself around me, and a cold wave of something, in the LA heat. She uttered some words— something that wasn’t English or Spanish, Latin or any other language I’d heard so far. Then the world went up in flames. Roaring, tall red that ate everything I’d ever known.
Everything went dark for just a split second. Like God pressed the pause button and the whole world stopped. I don’t believe in God, by the way, but dad did. I wish I could believe too; maybe then dad’s rosary would mean more. Maybe it wouldn’t feel cold against my chest, or maybe it would give me hope.
The people who found me didn’t believe that I hadn’t been alone in the house. There was no sign of my mom ever being there, except for the cross I clung to after she had pressed it onto my palm. (“Crucifix,” I heard my dad remind me, even though he’d been dead for four years by then.)
I felt bad for not crying — you’re supposed to cry, right? You’re supposed to feel like your world has come crushing down and nothing else matters anymore, and you’re supposed to feel alone and scared and unbelievably sad. But I didn’t feel particularly sad or alone. I’m not sure I felt at all.
My mom didn’t cry when dad died, or at least I never saw her. She let me do all the wailing. But she wasn’t there anymore to hold my hand and say that dad was watching over us, or to sing me a foreign lullaby when the world felt too dark at night.
It was comforting, at least, to think that maybe they were together again.
Uncle Killian, whom I’d only met once before, lived in San Fransisco. I don’t recall falling asleep in his Mini, but I woke up watching the approaching city and the fiery red sky as we made our way across Golden Gate Bridge.
I didn’t know why we were crossing the bridge even though we were coming from the south, and I never remembered to ask. I probably should have. There were a lot of things I should’ve asked him when I still could.
Uncle Killian was, and had always been, an eccentric man. He had a British accent, a brown mullet like Billy Ray Cyrus, aviator glasses and only one arm. (Every time I asked how he lost the other one, he told a different story; my favourite one involved an alligator and three prostitutes.) He owned a second hand bookstore and so many old books I was sure he never actually sold any, just kept them to himself.
He had three ultimate rules:
1. Always be home for dinner. Uncle Killian let me go wherever I wanted as long as I was home by 7 o’clock. He said dinner was the most important time of the day even though he only knew how to make spaghetti and meatballs and mac and cheese.
2. Family doesn’t lie. He didn’t pressure me to talk about anything I didn’t want to talk about, but lying was not tolerated. Uncle Killian, in turn, never lied to me. There were many things he left unsaid, but I could trust that the few things he did say were the truth.
And finally, 3. Don’t go out on a full moon. He never explained this one. I figured it out on my own, some time later.
If you’ve ever lost a parent, or anyone you’ve spent a majority of your life with, you’ll know the emptiness. Where I would have heard my mother laugh at a dumb joke, there was silence. Where I would’ve seen her smile, there was a blank space.
Adjusting was hard. The first two weeks I barely spoke to Uncle Killian. I was convinced that my mom was somehow still be alive and would come get me. She never did. Killian was good about everything, though. He didn’t make me talk about my feelings or ask me if I was okay every ten minutes like some of my teachers had when dad died.
I started my new school two weeks after the earthquake. Killian said I could take as long as I wanted to, but I was never great at school and knew that I was already behind. My new school was called Westside Middle, which was next to Westside High. It was a fairly big school, but not as big as the one I’d attended in Los Angeles. Westside Middle also had a cleaner, more modern building and teachers who didn’t reek of beer or cigarette smoke.
January wasn’t a great time to start at a new school because everyone already knew each other. People were nice to me at first, offered to sit with me at lunch and showed me around, but the excitement of meeting the new kid died soon and I was left alone.
I didn’t mind being alone. I hadn’t had many friends back in LA either, and I preferred Killian’s company anyway, even if he was a little weird.
My 13th birthday was a little over a month after the earthquake. Uncle Killian and I celebrated it with an apple pie and vanilla ice cream. He said that birthday cake was for boring people. I think he just didn’t like the frosting, but since then I’ve always had pie for my birthday.
Elvira and Fiona, who lived just across the street and knew Uncle Killian very well, were there too. Fiona was the one who baked the pie.
Fiona was a small woman with a warm smile and an Irish accent. She smelled of cinnamon and ginger, and I was always welcome to do my homework at the round table in her kitchen while she hummed a familiar melody and ground dried herbs. She grew them herself; her garden bloomed year round.
Elvira, in turn, was tall, dark and brooding. She wore heavy boots and a leather jacket, had big hair and rode a loud motorcycle. She taught me how to smoke cigarettes when I turned 15, which Fiona and Killian didn’t appreciate, but I thought it was pretty cool of her at the time. She was one of the funniest people I’d ever met, once I got past her intimidating side.
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Uncle Killian let me stay alone whenever he had a “business trip”, as he called them, although I didn’t understand what kind of business trips a bookstore owner could possibly attend so often. He had those at least twice a month. I had the option to stay at Elvira and Fiona’s, of course, but I preferred the alone time. I liked staying up all night with Killian’s Gameboy and raiding the cupboards for snacks. Fiona usually dropped by to bring me food. (I knew how to heat pizza rolls in the oven on my own; she still insisted.)
By the summer of ’94 I had settled in well enough to not get lost when exploring the city. I liked Mission District especially; it was rough and scary and probably not the place to be for a 13-year-old, but that’s where Amelia lived.
Amelia was a year older than me, wore a different plaid over a different band shirt every day and lined her eyes even more than Elvira. She had multiple piercings in her ears, as well as one on the side of her nose, and she painted her nails black. The polish was always chipped, but it looked cool enough that I let her paint mine sometimes.
She liked punk rock and skateboards, but also sappy love songs and talking about boys. We had many sleepovers that summer, during which she let me in on the latest gossip in her school despite the fact that I didn’t know any of the people. She didn’t mind that I was an outsider; she seemed happy just talking to someone.
Amelia lived with her brother Dennis in a cramped apartment on 17th Street. It was only a short walk away from Dolores Park, which I was not allowed to step one foot in. Amelia and Dennis knew to stay away from it as well.
Uncle Killian knew Dennis. It felt like he either knew most people in San Fransisco, or I just happened on the ones in his social circles. Either way, Dennis — along with Elvira, Fiona and old Hattie Graves — was not an unusual sight at our dinner table. More often than not, one or more of those people stayed after dinner and retreated into Uncle Killian’s office to talk in hushed voices.
I was curious, of course. I tried to listen in, and so did Amelia, but the door was always closed and the voices were too muffled to make sense. I suspected that Killian led a gang or a drug ring, but Amelia wasn’t convinced. God knows why, because San Fransisco was riddled with crime.
I assumed that one of the reasons Killian always wanted me home by seven was the persistent flow of dead bodies that were discovered weekly. The police didn’t do much about it, but no one really expected them to.
To adults, the murders were scary. To kids like Amelia and I, who consumed too many scary books and detective stories in our free time, they were an adventure, a mystery to solve. We thought highly of ourselves, certain that we could be the heroes of the story and catch the killer. Save the day. That’s how stories go, right?
Obviously, we solved nothing. We were kids. But as the number of people killed grew bigger, so did the tension at dinners. Fiona’s smiles weren’t quite as warm. Elvira’s jokes didn’t land. Dennis poked at the food he usually wolfed down. Killian was quiet. It was infuriating.
One day, when it was me, Amelia, Killian, Dennis and Hattie Graves, I asked: “Are you trying to solve the murders?”
“What are you talking about?” Killian asked in a calm voice. He wasn’t calm, though, not really. He hadn’t been in months.
“Well, you’re up to something,” I said. “Either you’re solving ‘em or committing ‘em, and I’d rather you did the first.”
“Whatever makes you think that?” asked Hattie Graves, who was a 60-something-year-old woman with hazy eyes and a sharp tongue. She stank of smoke, but not in the familiar late night on the porch way that Elvira did. Her clothes and hair were stained with it. I tried to always sit on the opposite end of the table from her.
“You’re always cooped up in there, plotting,” I said, nodding towards the closed door that opened to Killian’s office.
“Listen, lad,” said Killian. He rarely called me by my name; it was always kid, lad, or son, or if I was being particularly nasty, knobhead. “There are some things going on. You’ll know about them one day, but not today. That’s all I can say.”
There was no point in arguing further, but I tried anyway. And failed. All I got out of them was that there was something more sinister than gang wars going on and that knowing more was a Bad Thing. I didn’t know why. Amelia suggested that it was one of those things when the more you know, the more dangerous it gets. I had no idea what she was talking about.
Fall arrived at an alarming pace and a new school year started without a warning. The murders continued, and so did the intense meetings in Killian’s office. Amelia took me to Twin Peaks on the first weekend and we watched the city light up as the night fell. She sat very close to me, close enough that whenever she shifted, her arm bumped against mine and sent a nervous jolt up my body. Then she walked me home — though something in the back of my mind told me that it should’ve gone the other way around — and kissed me goodnight on the cheek.
It probably wasn’t a big deal, but it sure felt like one. Killian wasn’t home that weekend, hence the staying out so late, but I told him as soon as he got home. If he was disappointed with me he didn’t show it. Instead, he sat me down and we had a long talk about respecting boundaries, consent and such.
“How do I know if she likes me like that?” I asked awkwardly.
“Do you want her to like you like that?” Killian mumbled around the old pipe he only lit for late night chats. He never smoked cigarettes, even when he was antsy and Elvira offered.
“I don’t know,” I said sincerely, fidgeting. Amelia was cool and pretty and I cared about her a lot, but I didn’t know if I liked her, liked her. “Am I supposed to?”
“That’s up to you, lad,” Killian said. “If you don’t fancy her, say so. It’s better to talk and be a little awkward than not talk and ruin your friendship.”
So, I talked to her. I told her, very maturely in my mind, that she was important to me but I didn’t have feelings for her. She stared at me for a couple of torturous seconds, and then laughed. For a moment I was embarrassed, but then she threw a slim arm around my shoulders and said: “It’s all good, hon.”
I decided then, that if I had liked Amelia that way and she liked me that way, I would be hopelessly in love with her and ask her to every prom there would ever be, and write love letters about her smile and her hair and stuff them in her locker. Luckily neither of us had to go through that.
Amelia and Dennis were both out of town for Halloween, and so was Uncle Killian. Instead of dressing up and TP’ing houses, I helped Fiona make pumpkin-shaped cupcakes and watched Elvira repair her bike. We had stuffed peppers and Elvira let me sneak a sip of her wine, but it tasted horrible.
Killian didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving (but we did eat dry turkey with Hattie Graves) so the next holiday was Christmas. I got a secondhand Walkman from Killian and two albums for it from Fiona and Elvira. They were Green Day’s ‘Dookie’ and Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’ — I listened to both enough times to know every lyric by the end of the year.
I didn’t look forward to New Year’s Eve. A new year meant January, and following January was February.
I wasn’t ready to face February, but it came nevertheless because that’s how time tends to work. The anniversary of my mom’s death was painful and melancholic. Just like any other bad thing, however, it did pass.
My first year in San Fransisco was the last peaceful one.