The Fire, the Water, and Maudie McGinn: Chapters 1–12

He led me out into the empty hall, leveled his big brown, tired, reproachful, baggy old teacher eyes at me, and said, “Maudie, you’re in sensory overload.”

There’s this theory of autism that’s called intense world theory. It basically says that the world feels different to us. A deluge of sensory stuff. Everything’s too loud, too bright, too prickly, too much.

A deluge of sensory stuff. Everything’s too loud, too bright, too prickly, too much. Intense world theory makes a lot of sense to me, because I always feel like I’m drowning in sounds, smells, and visual flashes—churning in waves of too-muchness.

It was nothing. It was a flea of nothing. Utterly nothing at all, compared to the too-muchness of right now.

The Molinas emergency shelter is packed with stressed-out neighbors, grim-looking police, and frantic aid workers handing out things like water bottles and crinkly silver emergency blankets.

SOUNDS
kids crying
a couple arguing in staccato Spanish

SOUNDS
kids crying
a couple arguing in staccato Spanish
an old man coughing and hacking up something wet and gross into a Kleenex, ugh

TOUCH
this silver emergency blanket, which feels like slippery aluminum foil
this sweaty plastic-pellet mattress under my butt and legs
burning eyes, like my lashes are gunked with hot grit
headache, blaring and pounding at my temples like a vise
a strange iron-band feeling around my chest, keeping me breathless

I want to put my arms around his neck and hold on tight and have him fly us right out the grimy basement window to somewhere safe.

When Mom and Ron got married, it was a positive change, in one major way: it solved Mom’s money worries. And it got us out of our sad, shabby, roach-infested apartment, and into Ron’s super luxury condo in a golf resort.

They’d made the road all one-way heading downhill back into town—except for a lane on the far left, reserved for engines coming in, sirens blaring.

I twisted around in my seat and saw a fringe of flame behind the ridge. Smoke was creeping, acrid, into my nostrils.

We jostled for position like bumper cars, frantically trying any which way to get up onto the main road—all trying to merge at once.

A worry burns in me
with crackling, hissing heat.
A worry flickers in me
like stubborn candle flame.
Forget it!
Douse it!
Drown it out!

I eavesdrop on Mom and Ron, still squabbling a bit.

“Maudie, I do believe that’s more sentences than I’ve heard you string together all year. And here you are, issuing me an ultimatum. Just who do you think you are, missy?”

“Whatever happens, please, Dad, I have to stay with you.” I say it in the most intense voice I can muster.

“She’s no trouble! Not ever! I love having her. I can handle this—I have a plan! Give me some credit, okay? I don’t know why you assume I can’t...”

That’s the type of thing I would have actually gone ahead and done when I was younger, because I had impulse-control issues then, but not anymore.

I don’t like that nickname, “Mouse,” but I can understand why I got it. I’m small, quiet, nervous, and twitchy. I have mousy brown hair, pin straight, past my shoulders.

The next year, she went candid and surprised me.

Ron has a deep voice, piercing dark eyes, and a bright white smile.

He’s bald, and he wears a giant gold school ring the size of a walnut on his sausage-sized finger, and he always has an American flag pin in his lapel, because he says the American flag is good for business.

Ron said the fence is to “keep the riffraff out.”

I’d never heard that word before: riffraff. I pictured zombies in ragged clothing, with voices like the ones I used to hear at our old place, rummaging in the dumpsters.

He has a needlepoint pillow on our couch with a picture of a drunk golfer that says “If you drink, don’t drive. Don’t even putt” and another pillow that says “Only boring people have immaculate homes,” which is laughable because everything has to be spotless for him.

His hair’s a shaggy mess, and the blond stubble on his chin glints like beach sand in the late afternoon light.

Swallow it all down,
lock it all behind that imaginary door
in my chest.
Two bad secrets
burn
and roil in there.

That’s how it feels
when I listen to people talk.
Like there’s a glitch in the dubbing.
By the time I figure out your first sentence,
you’re already on your second sentence,
and I’m scrambling to keep up.

In the predawn light, I can just make out the dim outline of plywood cabinets. A scuffed wooden table with built-in bench seats.

I can just barely make out farther arcs of other beaches, which keep curving away in scalloped crescents for miles to the south—I’m seeing probably all the way down to Mexico.

I don’t know how long I’m there, at the edge of the water, staring, mesmerized.

She’s got a thermos out of her duffel and is pouring coffee. Its smell wafts over to me, bitter and rich.

I look out at the churning water. “Is it dangerous?” I finally ask.

But kooks, that’s just what we call the rude ones, the mean, loud, arrogant ones, the ones who don’t know what they don’t know, you know? The ones who cut in line, who think they own the ocean, and don’t have to follow the rules.

He glared at me and lowered his voice. “She’s gonna eat it now. While it’s hot.”

In the car on the way home, I kept silent while Mom told me what a godsend Ron was, entering our lives just like a miracle. How he’d bought her a fancy professional-grade videographer’s camera and tripod, and now he even wanted to replace our broken-down clunker car with a newer model, because he wanted us to be safe on the road.

“Structure and discipline and a proper fatherly influence. It’s important—especially for a kid like you, Maudie.”

“Religious folk charms from Mexico. But you don’t have to be religious to carry them. They’re also just, I don’t know, like, kinda fun and funky to keep in your pocket or whatever.”

The truth is, I never know what to believe, so I pretty much give every idea the benefit of the doubt. The world is too confusing not to. Every time I think I understand how something works, I turn out to be wrong. So, what do I know?
But Dad’s still looking skeptical.