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Chapter 1

On the day of the La Grieta earthquake, my life changed.

Everyone knew what happened almost seventeen years ago this October when I was five…no. I would have to explain, because the whole shaking/quaking thing wasn’t the important part, not for me. It was significant because I was listening to storytime in the Children’s Reading Room and—

Maybe I should have begun by saying that a trip to the library in itself was a really big deal. We hardly ever left the commune and went to what we had called the city, which was not a city. La Grieta, California was tiny. Its center was two cross streets lined with historic buildings, some of which dated to the 1800s when the town was established as a railroad stop. That cute part was surrounded by a ring of a few big box stores, rundown ones, and various fast-food places that had also seen better days. The real big city, the closest one, was Los Angeles, but we would have been more likely to visit the moon than to go there. Except my mom didn’t believe NASA had ever really done the Apollo stuff. She had an idea that the moon was a goddess, and no one was landing a spacecraft on a goddess.

But all that wasn’t important to the story of my life-changing event. What I was saying was that I was in the library on the main street of La Grieta, a building built in 1908 thanks to a grant from Andrew Carnegie. Many people weren’t aware of how many public libraries he funded with the massive fortune that he—

That also wasn’t important.

Anyway, there I was at the La Grieta Library and a nice librarian was reading to us. We didn’t have books at the commune because my mom didn’t believe in them. She thought that my mind needed to be free from all restrictions, including the printed word, in order to blossom and bloom. It was special that I got to be there that day and I was thrilled.

I also loved the story that I was listening to. It was about some kind of anthropomorphic bird (maybe a duck). As I remembered it, she went around asking lots of other animals to help her bake a cake, but they all said no. She ended up doing every single step herself and she did a great job.

It was too bad that right before we got to the end of the story, the earthquake hit. Tall shelves started rocking and then toppled, and books scattered across the floor. People screamed, the windows broke. The power went out, too, and there was a gas leak that made everything smell like rotten eggs and caused my head to ache. I’d had to huddle under a table for a really long time until a firefighter found me there.

And then, not too much later, we did end up having to leave the commune. The building we lived in had fallen down, every other structure was shaken off its foundation, and the well had collapsed. We had moved there to start an organic fern nursery (although La Grieta was in the baking, dry Mojave Desert) but that was impossible without the well, even in my mother’s mind. So we’d had to say goodbye to that town and move on.

From my experience with the earthquake, I probably should have gleaned a lot about safety during natural disasters and especially about emergency preparedness, because we sure hadn’t been ready for any of it. I did become more aware of my personal safety, but my big takeaway from that day was the story I’d heard about the turkey (or goose, or whatever kind of bird that it was). For my whole life up to that point and for the rest of the years until I moved out on my own, I was taught that we had to depend on others. We had to work together. We had to be part of a unit and we had to function as a team.

We, we, we. I had learned an important lesson from that book: if a bird could go it alone, then so could I. I didn’t need anybody to help me bake a cake or to do anything else, either. I started to develop a plan to be on my own, sola, solitary, just me. It had sounded like heaven.

It had led me here. I put down my suitcases and the noise echoed a little in my empty apartment. My apartment, which had one bedroom because it was meant for only a single occupant, me.

It was quiet, which I also appreciated, even though the whole city of Detroit was just outside my first-floor window. When I’d taken the tour, the manager had stated that the building had gone up in 1925 “when they knew how to do things.”

Then Mrs. McGlothen had nodded at me, her eyebrows raised, as if I also knew all about construction and would have understood what she meant. She had explained more, though. “Real walls—no paper! That’s masonry! There’s concrete under this wood.” She’d stamped her foot on the floor. “The Milaflores Building was made to last. The Eleusinian Corporation constructed this place. Have you heard of that?”

I hadn’t but I hoped that she was right and the building would last forever, because I planned to stay here for a very, very long time. A major component of my early life had been movement. My mother’s actual name was Journey, and either my grandparents were very prescient or Mom had decided that she had a lot to live up to. At one point during college, I’d written down all the places we’d lived. I had gotten up to thirty-four different locations and that was without including everything that happened before I was old enough to remember. I could have forgotten a few from the later years, too, because some had been so brief and some had been so awful.

I thought about making another list now, a To Do/Purchases list, because I did need a few things for this new apartment. As soon as I’d signed the lease, I’d started thinking about tall bookshelves that I would fill and a comfortable bed where I could lounge away my Saturdays. But now that I stood in here again, I thought that the first thing I would need was curtains. My apartment was on the first floor, not the ground floor, but I wasn’t high enough to prevent prying eyes. Also, a lot of sunlight came through these big windows. The whole place was bright, which was fine. As long as I could block it.

For now, I went to inflate my bed and hang up the clothes from my bags. I traveled light, a habit which I had acquired because of all those location changes with my mom. I’d had to carry my own stuff and more, so if I packed a lot, then I got tired. I had always been careful not to accumulate much and I didn’t need much to live, either. When I had first arrived at my college dorm room, my roommate had been shocked by how unprepared I was.

“Where are your sheets? Where are your towels? Where are your accessories?” she had wanted to know. She had been bothering me for a few months about coordinating everything and her side of the room had already looked like it was someone’s mood board come to life.

I had stopped answering her texts, which had apparently given her the impression that I was falling in line and would purchase the polka dot comforter that matched hers and the battery powered sconces she insisted we had to have (she had sent me links for everything). For the rest of the fall and spring semesters, my side of the room had continued to look basically unoccupied while hers gradually lost the perfection that she and her mom had created on the move-in day. After that, I lived on my own for the next three years, until graduation last June.

I still didn’t have much of the stuff that she’d thought was impossible to exist without, like the framed pictures she’d hung on sticky hooks on the walls. Those were shots of her family and of her many, many friends. I did get myself a set of sheets but I had never purchased strings of lights or fluffy rugs. I hadn’t bought the sconces, either.

Now I used those sheets to cover the air mattress but before I got in them for the night, there was more to do here. The place wasn’t as clean as I wanted, which was something that I demanded for myself. My college roommate had only changed her own linens when her mom was coming to visit, but I’d been careful about doing my laundry and also about keeping my half of the room vacuumed and dust-free.

I worked for a while on my new apartment, but it was already in fairly good shape. Mrs. McGlothen, the manager here, had told me that this place would come “clean. Clean!” She had stamped her foot again to show that she wasn’t kidding about that, and she’d been correct. I did spend longer in the bathroom, thoroughly scrubbing the tub, because it was something I’d been looking forward to using. I hadn’t ever lived anywhere with a real bathtub before, not in any of the thirty-four plus places with my mom, at my one boarding school, or in my four residences during college, either.

The whole room smelled pleasantly of bleach and I decided that it was the perfect time to try out a bath and soak for a while. I got my book, one I’d bought and was going to keep because soon, I would have the bookshelves I’d pictured. There wasn’t much seismic activity in Michigan so I wouldn’t have to worry about them falling over.

I moved the lever up to close the drain and adjusted the water to the correct temperature. As the tub filled, I let myself imagine baking a cake, just like the raven in the book I’d listened to seventeen years before. Almost that long. It was only August and, as everyone knew, the La Grieta earthquake had occurred in October.

The water pounded out of the faucet. But despite that noise, I suddenly thought that I heard music. It was far away and faint, but if I strained to listen, I could definitely hear a song. It wasn’t loud enough to identify or even to determine if it was vocal or instrumental, but there was something.

Thick walls? Masonry? Concrete? I shook my head, remembering how Mrs. McGlothen had talked about the wonderful construction on my tour. This apartment was no better than something built recently, just as cheap as the place where I’d lived during my junior year when my next-door neighbor let his alarm blare for hours in the morning instead of turning it off. He’d always apologized to me through the wall for being such an ass, and I had been able to hear him perfectly well.

The music was faint, though, and when I reached to turn off the tap so I could determine where it was coming from, I couldn’t hear it at all. Good, my new neighbors must have fixed the volume. I turned on the water to finish filling the tub and then walked out of the room to grab a towel. But as soon as I returned? I heard it again. It could have been the same song as before but it really was too soft to catch.

I stood there fuming for a minute, but then realized that I was being silly. If the worst thing about this apartment was that my neighbor listened to music sometimes, then it wasn’t bad at all. I had lived in plenty of places with problems that were so much worse and I was nitpicking.

It was just that I’d had an idea worked out of how things were going to be once I moved in here: I’d have that comfortable bed, the bookshelves, and probably a couch to sit on. I’d have a desk where I could work with an ergonomic chair, and I’d keep bowls of cut-up cucumbers in the fridge that I could access whenever I felt either hungry or thirsty. Cucumbers were great for both of those issues. I would take baths, like I was just about to do right now, and everything was going to be perfect.