Alaska’s worst babysitter had left the front door open, and I watched as Muffles, our tabby, went dashing out. Once I’d gotten Debbie and Dirk outside, I pulled them away from the house, which seemed to be shaking itself into something that we probably wouldn’t even be able to live in anymore, and Dad’s Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser station wagon, which he couldn’t drive until the transmission got fixed, started looking like Colonel Steve Zodiac’s space rocket ramping itself up to blast right off. What surprised me the most, though, was what the ground around the house was doing. It was cracking right open just like it did in that movie, The Last Days of Pompeii, even though my teacher, Miss Sabatini, said that earthquakes aren’t supposed to make crevices big enough for people to fall into. I later learned what my eyes had already told me: earthquakes of 9.2 magnitude can rip the ground open like a can opener, and this one was doing just that, as Debbie and Dirk and I hung onto the big tree in the front yard and waited for what seemed like an eternity (four minutes is a very long time for an earthquake to last) until everything got still and quiet again.
Once it stopped and I could hear the sound of my own voice, I said to my sister, “What hole?”
Debbie pointed to the obvious choice: a five or six-foot-wide trench that had suddenly appeared in the front lawn.
“You stay right there.” I’d read about aftershocks that could be almost as strong as the original quake. (What I didn’t know at the time is that the ’64 Alaskan quake would be followed by an almost record number of them). I walked with unsteady legs over to the trench and looked down into it. It was eight or nine feet deep and there, sitting at the bottom, was Marina. She was rubbing her knee and looking up at me.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“I think I broke my leg.”
“It’s broken?”
“That’s what I just said. Can you go find somebody to get me out of here? I think I have to go to the hospital.”
I didn’t say anything. As upset as I was from the terrible quake, I was enjoying seeing this World’s Worst Babysitter (who I hated more than anyone in the world — and that includes Soviet Communists, who my dad says are going to overrun this country someday and steal our liberty) sitting at the bottom of a big hole. In fact, I was enjoying it so much that I almost smiled. This was where she deserved to be. Why? Because she had abandoned the three children SHE WAS BEING PAID GOOD MONEY TO TAKE CARE OF just to save her own sorry self.
“Why are you just standing there looking at me?” asked Marina. I hated that name: Marina. It wasn’t a name for a person. It was a name for a boat basin.
“I just wanted to say, Marina, that you wouldn’t be in this predicament if you hadn’t abandoned your post. What if this had been an attack by the Siberian Communists? Debbie and Dirk and I would be taken prisoners by the Red Guard and you would be entirely to blame.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“You’re irresponsible.” I folded my arms. Debbie and Dirk, in spite of my orders, now came over to look down into the hole with me. I wondered if my brother and sister thought that Marina looked as stupid as I thought she did.
“If you don’t get somebody to come and pull me out of here, Darlene, you are going to be in the worst trouble of your life. My parents are probably worried sick about me right now, and they don’t even know that I’m sitting underground with a crippled leg.”
“I’m not going to go and get you help, Marina, unless you tell me why you ran out on the three of us. We lost my mom’s china cabinet because of you, and the TV set almost fell on top of Dirk.”
“I was scared.”
“That doesn’t cut it, missy.”
“You can’t talk to me like that.”
“You’re a terrible, rotten babysitter. You talk on the phone to your boyfriend for hours and hours and your spaghetti tastes awful and I don’t think you deserve to get rescued.”
Marina fumed in silence for a few seconds while she rubbed her knee. Then she started moaning. “Can’t you see I’m in pain?”
“I could be dead, Marina. That china cabinet must have weighed a ton.”
“Suit yourself. I can only imagine what kind of punishment awaits you for leaving me down here.”
I was about to say some other things that Marina did and didn’t do that got my goat, when my little brother Dirk picked up a clod of dirt and threw it at Marina. It hit her in the shoulder and she cried out, more in surprise than in pain.
“Don’t throw dirt down on the babysitter, Dirk,” I reprimanded him.
Now Debbie picked up a handful of soil and dropped it down into Marina’s lap. She screamed again.
“Enough of that, Debbie,” I said in a mature, responsible voice — the kind of voice I would naturally have used if my parents had done the right thing and entrusted to me the care of my two younger siblings, instead of bringing in this awful teenage girl.
“I think my brother and sister want to bury you alive, Marina. What do you think of that? Because they happen to agree with me that you’re perfectly awful.”
“Please get me out of here.” Marina wasn’t whining anymore. Now she sounded genuinely distressed. Maybe she was thinking just what I was thinking at that moment: that there might be a bad aftershock that would close up the fissure and bury her alive. “You’ve had your fun,” she pleaded. “Now please help me!”
I turned to Debbie and Dirk. “What do you think we should do? Do you think we should get Marina some help, even though she only thinks of herself and her boyfriend and John and Paul and George and Ringo?”
Dirk shook his head. Then he picked up a handful of dirt and threw it down on Marina’s head so quickly that some of the hard perma-frosty soil got in her eyes. She cried out and I felt really bad for her. I felt bad again when Debbie picked up a pinecone and threw that. It missed Marina’s arm by a few inches but it might as well have hit her for how much she shrieked.
“You need to stop doing that,” I said to my brother and sister. I looked around to see if anybody was coming to check on us. I figured that somebody would show up soon, but for the time being we were still on our own. It looked like I really would have to go and get help. “You two promise me that you’ll be good and if the ground starts shaking again, you’ll go over there and hold onto that tree?”
Dirk and Debbie nodded. Then Dirk kicked some more dirt into the hole. I remembered that Marina had said that Dirk couldn’t watch Fireball XL5 until he’d cleaned up his room, and then the time came for the show to start and his room still wasn’t straightened up, so there had been a shouting match and Marina was just about to go and turn off the set when the earthquake started and she felt a sudden need to run like a dastardly Communist right out of the house.
I went to the Chigniks’ house next door, but nobody was home and I figured that they were either lying crushed beneath their own china cabinet or were off at Good Friday services. I was about to go to the Pottersons’ house across the street, but at just that moment a young woman came up to me. She was wearing a stewardess’s uniform and looking frightened. She said her name was Miss Dunston, and that she worked for Flying Tiger Airlines. She said she was on her way to the hospital to see if they needed any help, since she had some nursing experience, and I explained that our babysitter had slipped into a crack in the ground and could use her help if the stewardess really wanted to make herself useful.