Sands Rising Read online

  Contents

  1. I Did This to Myself

  2. Sands Rising

  3. Can You Afford This?

  4. I Can’t Forgive Eleena

  5. The $45 Million Dinner

  6. Maine. Who Can Complain?

  7. Three Stories

  8. I’m a Disgrace, and I’m Proud of It

  9. Would You Take a Bullet for Me?

  10. Mom, Why Do You Abuse Me?

  11. I Chose Well

  12. Why Have You Been Kind to Me?

  13. Please Join Us

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Synopsis

  For you.

  1

  I Did This to Myself

  Jon was the thoughtful one. On my birthday, he brought me coffee with a slice of pecan pie, a bouquet of fresh roses he’d bought with his dad, and a smile that filled the room with warmth.

  Jon knew I loved my coffee freshly ground, which made our kitchen smell like little cherubs had infused the air with their intoxicating breaths. He knew to hold the sugar and milk. And he knew that my coffee should be piping hot—so hot it made my tongue tingle.

  Oh, the pecans in that pie!

  Just the memory of them makes me smile.

  Ridged amber delicacies with a slightly creamy aftertaste. Their nutty flavor always comes into its own when baked.

  I fell in love with pecans as a child. Before she mastered the recipe, Mom regularly burned her pecan pies (she called it “accidental over-preparation”), and Dad and I had to enjoy our pecans on their own or roasted, for a time.

  Finally, fresh roses for my birthday!

  How I miss their fragrance in these times! I know, I should say with some embarrassment that I preferred the exotic flowers that appeared on the covers of travel magazines: proteas (Mom’s favorite), gazanias (my mother-in-law’s favorite), and Peruvian lilies (my sister-in-law’s favorite). I’d take a bouquet of freshly cut roses any day over something exotic, though.

  I’ve always been a sucker for roses bred for their fragrance instead of their looks, and the roses from ConfiPrice were still gorgeously fragrant—and very pricey.

  I’ll even admit something I probably shouldn’t.

  The way roses looked mattered less than how they smelled because looks are something you learn to let go of gracefully after a few kids and some delicious carbs leave your hips and stomach with more “love jiggles” than you care to count.

  About eight years ago, the ban on pecans and coffee went into effect in California. So, too, did bans on so many other products we once enjoyed here. Alfalfa and almonds (“the greatest water guzzlers in the history of California”), chocolate (“2,500 gallons of water per pound”), hazelnuts (“1,200 gallons of water per pound”), olive oil (“1,600 gallons of water per pound”), and vanilla (“13,000 gallons of water per pound”) disappeared from shelves throughout the state or became the stuff of an underground market shortly after the California Water Party (CWP) came to power.

  Beef, which the CWP had also considered banning because “beef chews through almost 2,000 gallons of water per pound,” rose to twenty-six dollars per pound at ConfiPrice at one point. A family of six like mine, with a husband built like a linebacker and four growing children (including three boys), went through hundreds of dollars of protein each week.

  I would spend all that money again. I would even spend much, much more for the pleasure, the absolute delight, of just a second or two more with my kids and my husband.

  What a life we had together!

  Nate was the most gifted of my children.

  He skipped not one but two grades. He convinced students in the lower grades that the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I prepared for him and Jon for lunch were made from a rare Sardinian berry known as “Fregula” and from an endangered African peanut called “Africana.” “Fregula,” he told them, grew only outside Cagliari, the capital city of Sardinia, and “Africana” grew only in the remaining jungles of the Southern African Federation. Nate sold strips of his “Mom’s Famous Fregula Africana Sandwiches” for two dollars apiece to those in the grades below him.

  He was making thirty-six dollars a day, and he sold the sandwich strips for just over six weeks before he was suspended from school. By then he had made enough money to buy himself some of the most violent video games I’d ever seen; a baseball bat for Jon so that he’d be able to defend himself if anyone bullied him again at school; a teddy bear for his sister, Nathalie; and toys for his younger brother, Nathaniel.

  Less than a year later, we were homeschooling all of our kids. The weather had turned hostile. It scalded, singed, and dehydrated. It swept up even greater tumors of dust that aged all of us in a few short years in ways it would have only done in decades, a generation or two ago. Schools closed for weeks on end until Governor Trehoviak declared a state of emergency, and with the declaration, California’s compulsory education laws were lifted for a few months.

  Nathaniel was my youngest son and child. He was a twin. He was the quiet one who told us when he was only five that he’d become a missionary to Italy.

  “Why Italy, darling?”

  “Italy or Africa, Mom. Because the desert is moving there. It’s also where we’re from.”

  You couldn’t miss how things had changed. The first cases of a mysterious illness became known to us around 2033. I remember that detail because Jon was almost three, and we wanted to know what the disease was and how we could avoid it. I was thirty-three years old; Mauru, my husband, was thirty-two; I was pregnant with Nate; and the twins were about four years away.

  The first symptom of the disease was a high fever, which turned boys’ eyes the color of beet juice, and people memorably said, “The boy now has the hatred in his eyes.” The beet-red eyes were accompanied by a hoarse cough, which sounded like something lived inside your boy’s throat, and it was trying to expel all his secrets before it died and took him with it. Chest pains followed, so violent that they made boys jerk forward while they held their chests as if someone had repeatedly elbowed them in their guts. Then a brief lull in the illness followed, almost as if the boys were fully restored to their former health. Not too long after, the boys died with blood pouring out of their noses and mouths, always within eighteen months of their first symptom.

  “The Hatred” was said to have begun in Africa. The continent had been hemorrhaging its people to Southern Europe at such a pace that it was a no-brainer, some said, that Africa would send not only its people but also its illnesses to wealthier continents.

  My family and I, of course, rejected such nonsense.

  Because people were so terrified of dying, any explanation providing even temporary relief from the uncertainty surrounding the new illness was deemed truthful by pundits in the media. One day, one thing was said with great certainty about the origins of The Hatred. The next, the opposite was proclaimed with the authority of heaven.

  The Southern African Federation, a bloc of countries formed out of the former Southern African Development Community, had seen such a dramatic rise in malaria cases that the experts said that the new illness’s high fever might instead be the result of a mutation in the parasitic protozoans causing malaria in the region. Malaria also caused high fever, headaches, and exhaustion, among other symptoms.

  The Hatred was then said to have actually arisen in Western Australia, where sandstorms had increased in ferocity since the mid-2020s, so much so that they kicked up something in the soil, previously unknown or ignored, which, when inhaled, triggered something unforgiving in the teenage bodies of boys and killed them before they completed puberty.

  Scientists corrected themselves, yet again, and said that the disease was neither born in the Southern African Federation nor in Western
Australia. Instead, it could—and likely would—arise anywhere the spores of a particularly vicious fungus were kicked up and inhaled by humans. In these drier times, the fungus no longer lay dormant in the soil.

  My sons’ ashes are buried out back.

  Jon was the first to go. Mauru, my husband, and I were sure that Jon suffered from another lung disease called dust pneumonia, which we’d seen on TV and in the press, but doctors said we were wrong. Although dust pneumonia, strep throat, and valley fever—the diseases of another age when the earth had turned against humans and life itself—had returned on a scale unseen since the Great Depression, Jon suffered from The Hatred.

  All the masks we foolishly used in the very first days of Jon’s illness, the sheets, towels, and cloths dipped in water, and the chemically treated “hydration bands” sold in supermarkets and on TV, which were supposed to filter out the dust particles when applied to the face, did nothing to arrest the progress of the disease.

  Jon was placed in the quarantine unit at Golden State Children’s Hospital, which is here in San Diego. Nothing worked, so our contacts got Jon signed up for a series of clinical trials at the Center for Water-Related Illnesses up in Menlo Park, California. In their desperation to find a cure for what was quickly becoming a national epidemic sweeping through Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah, and Texas, the Center for Water-Related Illnesses had already experimented with lung transplants, high-intensity oxygen therapy, lung regeneration, and a more radical and experimental treatment called “Genetic Expression Therapy.” Although some of these treatments were widely mocked, Mauru and I were thrilled when Jon was selected.

  There was hope.

  We took our son up to Menlo Park and weren’t allowed to see him until the program was abruptly shut down nine months after Jon’s treatment began. By then, Jon had only a few weeks to live.

  We brought Jon home.

  Bringing him home was incredibly difficult because it broke the other kids’ spirits to see their brother like that, and it killed us to see our son, our oldest child, in that condition. Mauru and I would have traded places with any of our children, and we would have done that gladly a thousand times over for a thousand years.

  Nate was the second to go.

  I remember the night before we found him lying in a pool of his own blood. We’d had our biweekly meeting of Mothers for Mercy, a group founded by a former White House staffer, who had come out of retirement in Maine and had moved to Washington, D.C., to lobby the federal government to pass legislation prohibiting the state of California’s water rights laws from descending to what she rightly foresaw as a future of “corruption and violence.”

  Nate had insisted on joining me at our meeting the night before he died, and he seemed to be doing better, almost as if he were on the road to recovery. He’d acted as secretary, taking notes for our local chapter, Chapter 820. That night, Mothers for Mercy discussed conscripting the American Liberties Group in our fight against California’s founding of its first water court, which has decided all water-related matters in the state since 2039. Penalties imposed by the Water Court range from fines to imprisonment to the death penalty, and we witnessed some of our friends and neighbors become the Court’s first victims.

  Jennifer de Jong and her husband, Adam, climate change immigrants from the Southern African Federation, were both charged with “theft of water” in 2039, which, in their case, meant surpassing their monthly water allotment for three months. They received a fine equivalent to three months of the de Jongs’s combined pre-tax income—some $45,000—and a fifteen-day stint for both in the county jail.

  Just over three years later, Mr. Martinez, who lived in the building across from us, was also charged with “theft of water,” which meant that the state engineer, who went from home to home in his distinctive green uniform each month documenting exactly how each of us used our water allotment, had discovered banned products in Mr. Martinez’s home.

  From what Mr. Martinez told us—and we’d believe him any day over the state engineer—Mr. Martinez, a chef by training, was getting ready to bake a surprise dulce de leche birthday cake for his wife, Dolores, who was about to turn sixty-two, when the state engineer knocked on their door.

  “Baking when Governor Trehoviak and the California Water Party are just about to ban vanilla for inefficient use of water?” The state engineer asked.

  “Well, there is no water in the cake,” Mr. Martinez responded. “There might be water in the condensed milk, in the evaporated milk, in the cream, and even in the rum, but it’s not yet illegal to eat cake or vanilla in difficult times, sir. Not in the state of California.”

  “Aren’t you a funny one!” The state engineer shook his head.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Mr. Martinez replied. “What does Governor Trehoviak care about when I bake a dulce de leche cake for my wife, sir? As long as I pay for what I use, I can still bake, Mr. State Engineer. At least for now. I can even use all the vanilla I want as long as it’s still legal. And it’s still legal.”

  “Open your fridge—”

  “Why?”

  “Open your fridge, Mr. Martinez. I am authorized to validate that you are not in violation of Water Code Section 1(a)(1) regarding ‘theft of water.’ I’ll read it for you, sir. ‘Any individual or entity, in a period of public emergency, depriving the state of California or the people of the state of California of their right to any of the waters within the state, or who has brought into the state any water, without prior approval, shall be subject to a fine exceeding no more than seven months of her or his salary, imprisonment for no more than seven years, or both. In exceptional circumstances, the Water Court, in its discretion and working with the state engineer, may impose more stringent penalties. The state engineer shall enact regulations consistent with the provisions of this Section.’ This law means, Mr. Martinez, that I can ask you to voluntarily open your fridge and show me that there are no prohibited goods inside, sir.”

  “Prohibited goods?” Mr. Martinez asked. “What do you take me for? How do you get from ‘water’ to ‘prohibited goods,’ state engineer? Who wants to come to San Diego anymore with The Hatred and everything else? Even calling it ‘The Hatred’ is a ridiculous and nonsensical thing, sir. And now you’re ordering me to allow you to poke around my fridge, sir.”

  “Mr. Martinez, I ask you to open that fridge voluntarily.”

  “If I open this fridge, it’s only under protest. Constitutional protest, state engineer.”

  “Constitutional protest, my ass!” The state engineer opened the fridge himself. “Almonds? Alfalfa? Chocolate? Don’t you know how much water these products waste, Mr. Martinez? One almond, just one stinking almond, drinks over a gallon of water to produce something smaller than your thumb. And alfalfa—you can’t make this stuff up with names like ‘alfalfa’—wastes so much water that I honestly want to puke when I think of it. Almonds, alfalfa, and chocolate are no longer produced, imported, or consumed in California. They are banned, Mr. Martinez. You’ve been stealing water, sir, by buying illegal products that engage in inefficient use of water. I’m issuing you a citation and a visit to the Water Court.”

  Mr. Martinez was fined two months of his pre-retirement salary, and he was given six months’ probation with fortnightly visits from the state engineer’s office to ensure compliance.

  The night before he died, Nate was about to fall asleep when he complained that the chest pain, a sharp, burning chest pain that felt like someone was holding a flame to his lungs, had returned. From our experience with Jon, we knew the end was near.

  We gave Nate the powerful painkiller we’d picked up at the pharmacy, put him on the nebulizer the doctor had also prescribed, and told him that we’d take him back to the doctor first thing the next morning. It would all be OK, we promised, and we loved him very, very much.

  We knew a doctor’s visit wouldn’t make a difference because there was no cure. As a parent, however, you’ll d
o and say absolutely anything if it means the slightest sliver of hope for your child.

  We all sat at Nate’s bedside. We held, comforted, and told him we loved him. We remembered the past, Jon, and everything we’d all shared. We talked of how he and Jon were so very much alike, which was why they’d argued a lot. We tried to smile as we remembered Nate’s “Fregula Africana” sandwiches, and we talked about Mr. Martinez’s granddaughter, Stella, on whom Nate had had a crush since he was about nine years old.

  We remembered how Nate couldn’t carry a joke. He always tried to, though, when he came up with variations of “Why did the giraffe cross the highway?” We flipped through our electronic photo album and recalled a different life under friendlier and kinder skies in a different California: a California free from disease, drought, and devastation.

  Nate coughed through the night. Mauru and I sat beside our son until he fell asleep. The next morning, he was gone.

  They removed his body for a mandatory autopsy and with him another part of my soul. We buried his ashes ten days later.

  I stood in Nate’s room, staring at a small pile of books that he had amassed, which he’d wanted to read before he died. I glanced at a few titles and tried to figure out if he’d gotten to read any of them, but then the urge to cry swept through me like a howling wind through a silent forest, and I tried to resist it until I fell to the floor beside Nate’s bed. Remembering my sons and how painful it was to continue in their absence made me groan for their deaths.

  I walked to Jon’s bed, took one of his pillows, walked across to Nate’s bed, took one of his, and sat hugging both pillows as I sobbed into them, snot running from my nose. I wanted my sons back, and I would have given my life—my whole life and all its memories—to make that happen. I threw the pillows aside and went to Jon’s side of the closet, picked up one of his T-shirts, and then took one of Nate’s from his side.