“Yes,” he said flatly. “You can be sure.”
They had agreed. Before they got married, they had agreed. Rose had made sure of that. When she told him, when it became finally clear that her I-can’t-have-children meant, in fact, I won’t have children, when she tried to explain, she started talking about going to the cinema. She loved movies. She loved so much about them—the immense screen, the velvet seats, the expectant hush as the lights dimmed and the music kicked up. And yet nearly every time she went to the cinema, sat in a crowded darkened movie house filled with strangers, she felt a volley of panic, fought an urge to leave. Why was everyone sitting here, together, so close, so calm? What enabled them to do that? Wouldn’t someone somewhere do something terrible?
Thomas had listened. He had let her speak, didn’t ask any questions. She loved him for that.
“I feel so fortunate with you,” she had said then. “So uncommonly lucky.” She felt something spiky lodged in her throat, and try as she might, she couldn’t swallow it down. “I’m afraid of ruining it.” That was the closest she came to articulating the question that terrified her: How in the world can you protect that which you love?
He knew that too, of course. “But you go to the cinema,” he said softly. “You don’t avoid it altogether.”
She dropped his hand. “I’m not talking about the cinema,” she said. They were back in her tiny room in Belsize. She remembered concentrating on the clank of the radiator, trying to focus on that and not Thomas’s words.
“Sometimes I think that you think you don’t deserve this. But you do,” he said. “You have a life. We can have a life together. You have to try.”
“I am trying. I just don’t think I want children. I don’t.”
“But I think I do,” he said, and with that he left. She spent nearly a week catatonic with fear. But he came back. “I love you,” he had said.
Now, more than a decade later, she touched her husband, a body that she knew as well as her own. She wanted to climb inside of him, to feel completely surrounded. “I love you,” she said now, reaching for him, but Thomas rolled over.
“Love you too,” he said. “I have a long day tomorrow,” and he clicked off his bedside light. Rose was left alone in the dark, a loneliness all the more acute because she knew she had brought it upon herself.
Two days later, the rains began. A relentless rain, a rain that seemed otherworldly in force. The city was not built for such deluge: Olympic and Pico flooded, rocks tumbled, mudslides ensued. PCH was shut down. Much of this Rose and Thomas read in the paper or saw on the news, grateful for their dry second-floor apartment near Fairfax.
That morning, when Rose left for work, she passed the building’s super, Mr. Osaka, in the lobby. “You really driving in this mess, Mrs. Downes?” Mr. Osaka said as she darted through the lobby back out to the uncovered parking lot. The driving rain made a racket on the roofs of the cars, pelted against her umbrella. She could hardly see. Just as she was trying to manage both her umbrella and the key (she and Thomas had bought a used Chevy after she began teaching at Eastgate: “A two-car family,” Thomas had said. “Now we’re truly Angelenos”), something caught her eye. It was a shadowy something. Discarded piping from one of Mr. Osaka’s projects? The piping began to move: a snake, glistening among the deepening puddles, pocked by the raindrops. A moving living snake. It was coppery brown, undulating through the shallow waters with ease.
Rose stared, stiffening. Her back was getting wet, her ankles dampened by rain, but she barely noticed, stunned by fear. She had never seen a live snake before. It wasn’t small. She watched it oscillate beneath a neighboring car. Then she ran back through the puddles of the parking lot and into the lobby.
The super was still inside, now atop a stepladder, replacing a light bulb.
“Mr. Osaka, there’s a snake out in the parking lot.”
“Oh?”
She nodded, breathing audibly. She rubbed her damp cheek with her hand. “Whom shall we call? Who removes snakes in these situations?” She tried to laugh.
“He’ll go away on his own. Sometimes they come out in the rain,” Mr. Osaka said, shrugging. “Other times heat, the dryness, brings them out.”
This was Los Angeles to Rose. A surreal landscape, whether it was the rains, the Santa Anas, the coyotes that roamed the jagged canyons, the brush fires, the cactus flowers that inexplicably bloomed from dust and rock. Even on its many gorgeous days, the beauty of Los Angeles had an underlying hardness. There was nothing soft about it, and she loved this—the city’s sharp lines and wild heart even when it tried to disguise them. Los Angeles had made itself. Everything was imported—the water that was pumped in from the north, the palm trees for which the city was celebrated. Everyone and everything here came from somewhere else.
When she managed to drive through the churn that Sunset had become and at last arrived at Eastgate, only five students were in her second-period class, four in her third. By noon, the administration had moved to shut the school for the afternoon. The classroom was chilly, the radiator barely emitting heat, seemingly resentful that it actually had work to do. But Rose decided to stay for the hour to catch up on papers she had to grade, go over lesson plans. She was dreading the drive home.
At two o’clock, ten minutes after sixth period usually began, Rose heard footsteps, a knock at the open door. She looked up to see Helen Peale, clad in a soaked yellow plastic poncho.
“I know I’m late,” Helen said.
“Didn’t you hear?” Rose asked. “Class is canceled.”
“I know,” Helen said. She remained in the doorway, the plastic crinkling as she moved, forlorn in bright yellow. “But I’m here at school. So here I am.” In the poncho, she looked closer to ten than her fourteen years.
“Well, then,” Rose said, sighing. “Take that wet thing off; you’re dripping all over my classroom.” Helen hung the poncho up, and went to her usual spot, but Rose gestured to the front row. “Come, to Susan’s seat. No reason to hide back there. Bring your Versification book and turn to page ninety-three.”
Helen’s expression was solemn as she studied the book. “Robert Frost’s ‘Fire and Ice.’ It is a compact poem, but it is not small,” Rose said. “Scholars say that Frost had Dante’s Inferno in mind when he wrote it.”
She asked Helen to read it aloud. The sound of Helen’s clear girlish voice reciting Frost’s words, the rhythmic patter of rain against the roof, combined to make Rose feel warmer. They were the only two in the classroom; were they the only people left in the building?
“How do you think the world will end?” Helen asked when she finished.