All Stories Are Love Stories (15 page)

His father broke his gaze and scrubbed at the stove with a paper towel that was tearing into pieces under his hand.

“You'll miss your bus.”

Gene didn't move. He was waiting. To be brought back, to be drawn back into the realm of fairness and safety. To be forgiven. For what, exactly, he still didn't know, but he didn't care.

“If I have to drive you, I'll be late.”

Gene didn't move.

“It's for your own good, Eugene.”

There it was again, that refrain that meant anything else said would be insignificant.

Gene clenched his fists so his nails hurt the insides of his hands. If it was so good for him, why did he know his father would never do this if his mother were home? If it was so good for him, why were his father's eyes avoiding his? Gene put a hand on his stomach as it clenched in protest. But the fabric under his palm reminded him: soft and smooth, draping over his narrow chest and long legs like a habit or a robe.

He creaked open the screen door and ventured out, keeping his eyes down, the tears streaming without sound. Maybe he'd be out of them before he got to the bus. Maybe he just wouldn't be able to cry, sooner or later.

Later, when the fifth graders stopped laughing and pulled him aside and administered the requisite beating for the twin crimes of being different and homosexual—a beating he had been honestly grateful for, after all that tension of waiting for it—he came home with the bruises his father had wanted to see, the ones he probably didn't have the courage to give Gene himself. Only then did his father pull the dress gently over his son's head and blink into his face as he surveyed the dirty work of others, satisfied and relaxed again as he bandaged the cut over Gene's eye and pulled a bag of frozen peas out of the refrigerator for Gene to put over the swelling on his cheek. As he did, the ice like salve on Gene's skin, his father turned around, wadded up the dress, and threw it into the garbage.

“Enough of that, then,” he declared, his hand on Gene's shoulder, squeezing it firmly in the way you might clench a heart long enough to make sure it was done beating. Then he made them a dinner of eggs and toast and set up two TV trays in front of
Wheel of Fortune,
and together they watched the primary colors spin and spin and the people clap and clap, and before long it was time for bed. Gene crawled under his blankets and stared up at the forever dusty and dancing circus of animals along the border of his walls, wondering why he was surrounded by images of places that didn't exist.

Max stared unblinking into the dark, wondering if he was beginning to see shapes in the things surrounding him or if his mind were already playing tricks on him. He shifted to relieve the spine-tingling ache of being in one place, but it only lit the pain in his leg on fire. He wanted to call out to Vashti, to say anything and everything to her, but if she was sleeping he didn't want to wake her. He tried to refocus, but what was there to focus on? He thought of his mother, the touchstone he'd depended on for years. Would she wonder if he was alive, or would she think he'd died and left her? The silence was so absolute, it choked him. Even if no one could possibly hear them, it suddenly occurred to him, shouldn't they scream for help anyway? He began to fill his lungs, then stopped himself. No, better to save air, wait until they heard something. As hard as he strained his ears, he could hear nothing but the sound of his own breathing.

He tried again to tell himself that it couldn't possibly be all that bad outside. The possibility of San Francisco's being unable to overcome a natural disaster quickly and expediently seemed as unlikely as an alien invasion. Surely they would be rescued; surely most of the city had fared well. After all, twenty-first-century American cities didn't just go down overnight. This total silence spoke to plans in the
making, plenty of foresight about this exact situation. He read about it all the time in the paper, all the retrofitting and seismic technologies and emergency protocols. Heck, every water heater installed in the city came with elaborate instructions in case of an earthquake. People would be turning off the gas and pulling out their earthquake kits and waiting in safe areas for help.

But lying there and listening closely to the relentless silence, he felt a kick to the stomach.

What had been in his own earthquake kit? A few flashlights, some emergency water and food, bandages and gauze. Standard supplies sold as a package at Walgreens. Sold and then tucked away in the back of storage closets, forgotten in overcrowded garages.

“Max?” Vashti finally spoke out into the silence. She was awake! It struck him that even after all that had passed between them, even in the horror of their current situation, it thrilled him that she was nearby. He wondered if couples who'd never lost each other felt the same way. He waited for her to continue, but she was quiet again. He had almost started to drift off when she murmured something so softly he had to strain to hear her. “You do know why I'm here, don't you.”

It was less a question than a statement. A statement of affection and longing, the music in her voice sad and true, the very essence of a beautiful sound. Slowly, ignoring the searing protests of his collarbone, Max crept his hand a little farther so he could wrap his palm around her ankle, his thumb fitting perfectly into the hollow beneath the bone,
transporting him instantly to another place and time when she used to undress in front of him.

She was shy at first—they were both so young—but then they discovered sex, and the exquisite details of its rituals. She'd always begin with her shirt and end with her hair. In between, she unzipped her skirt and slipped it off, or wriggled out of her jeans—he hated to see her stuff herself into them. Some women's bodies, like hers, even when she was newly a woman, were not meant for jeans. After her top and pants were off, she'd look at him and draw the things closest to her skin away from it, folding them as carefully as she did all her other clothes, and then her eyes would lock on his as she pulled out whatever she'd wound or clipped or knotted her hair into. She'd just be reaching up to push the hair that fell in her face back when he'd close the nominal distance between them.

“You must know,” she insisted, her voice so hushed it came to him as tenderly as a kiss.

He didn't answer right away. “Tell me about her,” he said after a moment, closing his eyes. “Tell me what Anita was like.” He had never said her name aloud, and the feel of his daughter's name in his mouth was like the opposite of a trumpet's blare; a taking in of air, a collapsing of sound so essential, it could only resonate internally.

“I didn't want to come.” The tears choked her as she tried to speak through them. “I tried not to. I thought that if I tried hard enough, I could just . . .”

“Please,” he whispered. He could not have said for sure what day or time it was, wondering about tricks of the heart and death. “I want to know.”

“Sick,” Vashti said after she'd collected herself, unspooling information as carefully as she might dismantle a bomb, letting each utterance settle in before she tested the volatility of the next, because truth has a volatility all its own, especially when it is spoken aloud for the first time. “She was sick all the time, right from the start. I had no idea what sickness was before her. I mean, my mom was sick, but I was so young. I didn't see her, they kept me away when”—here Vashti hesitated—“when they knew she was dying, I guess.

“Anyway, I had no idea what being sick like that would be like, what dying would be like. I thought it would be like in a movie or a story, where the mother gives up everything to care for her daughter and it's rough but it ends eventually, and everyone's better for it. I really did think that, Max. Because I only knew about the kind of sickness that has
life
on the other side of it, you know? And she wasn't that kind of sick. She was the kind of sick that, even when she was alive, she was always closer to death than life. Before her, I would never have imagined that babies can suffer like that. At first I thought that maybe if she at least recognized me or smiled, it would be enough. But then she started to do those things, and it just made everything else worse, because she spent most of her life not recognizing me and not smiling. The nurses said I was a good mother. Maybe they believed that. But I was the reason we kept trying, and the longer she lived, the worse it got. More surgeries and stents and medications than anyone should have to deal with, much less an infant, or a toddler. But those surgeries were like a drug to us!
Just one more
, we'd say.
This will be the last one. The one that turns it all around.
I started to wonder, after I learned to love
her a little better, if I'd just been selfish. She'd never asked for life, not really. I don't know why it was so important to me that she have one.” Vashti's voice threatened to drift into nothingness. “I used to wish that a mother could bring about the end of her child's life with as much love as she began it.”

As quick as relief, a sudden image came to Max's mind of a baby with a head covered in black curls, though Vashti was thinking of a girl with pale eyelashes and light brown eyes that shone amber in the light.

“She reminded me of you,” Vashti said. He could hear the tears she was holding back as she continued. “All the time. It felt like all I had to do to bring you close to me was touch her face, but it never worked. She had the most beautiful face. Like one of those babies you see painted on the ceilings of churches: round, with that thin, pale skin and freckles. I always had to cover her from head to foot whenever we went outside.”

He closed his eyes to remember Vashti's face as he'd just seen it, to remember that her hair had come undone and her eyes were older. It seemed important that he see her as she was now. Wasn't that what remembering was for? A revision of someone or something that once belonged to you, a portion of your life reconceived?

He heard sirens as if they were coming from another world, traveling faraway roads that would never reach them. The bomb had been dismantled, but it proved itself to have been laid in a field of great vulnerability and was now openly exposed, the parts that might create a blessedly quick oblivion now rendered ineffectual. There was peace, but there was also powerlessness.

“It was a terrible thing you did,” Max said after an indeterminable amount of time.

“I know.”

“It was cruel,” he added.

“Yes.”

He waited for her to understand that he had more to say and not to interrupt, to hand the story over to him instead, to stop clenching it with such propriety. He imagined her staring up into the dark, trying to control her breathing as well, and he wanted to know how badly she was hurt; though he also didn't want to know, he just wanted to be with her, to focus on the conversation between them, even if it was fraught with old pain and neglected possibilities.

“I might have understood better if you hadn't run away. But you left me with all these extremes, Vashti. Terrible love and terrible anger. Nothing soft to just wash you away with. I've wondered sometimes,” he said, “if it was your way of forcing me to keep you. When you wouldn't let yourself stay.”

“No,” she said. “I wanted you to let me go.”

“Not something I do well,” he said. “You know that. You knew that.” He was no longer angry. He did not know if he was supposed to forgive her, but he did know now that she'd come to him because he was still in her heart, and that meant as much as he'd suspected it would.

“I don't know what to tell you, Max,” she'd said the day before she left. They were standing on the smaller bridge over Stow Lake, a place they'd once loved because it allowed them to be outside and mostly alone. In the early autumn light,
Max stood apart from her, watching her weep. By that point, she'd had nothing to give to him but sadness, and it was of small comfort that he felt bitterly glad about that.

“How is that possible? How can you go without knowing why?”

“It's not that I don't know.” She just couldn't tell him in a way that could make him understand. She wasn't even sure she understood herself. Nothing that had happened recently made the kind of sense she could form into an understanding. It was month after month of indigestible news—first the pregnancy, then her father's reaction (unmitigated shame) and Max's mother's (mitigated shame), then the terrible news about the baby, then Max's trying suddenly to become the man his mother and her father insisted he couldn't be, and Vashti's becoming in the process a person who doubted the boy she loved. It was as if time itself were warped, looping in and over itself, refusing to resolve into any kind of bearable vision of the future. She felt beaten by it.

Eventually, her thinking and heart became bruised beyond recognition, unable to repair themselves properly. After a while, all she could do was bring her hands to her belly and know that time was indeed passing, despite the nightmarish evidence to the contrary; that time would bring them and their baby out of this. And all she knew, after a while, was that Max did not want to believe what she needed him to believe, what she needed to believe herself—which was that the baby, their baby, the one growing in her despite all the chaos and upheaval around them, could astonish them even further by living. Not just for a few hours, as the doctors grimly predicted, but live
and grow up and become a real person, live to convince more than only her mother that she wasn't merely a narrow probability. This belief began to separate Vashti from those surrounding her, singling her out as a zealot because everyone else had lost faith. But Vashti didn't just believe; she was angry. They'd named Anita's defect before they named her:
spina bifida myelomeningocele
, an unpronounceable horror. Even as she grew inside her mother, all anyone wanted to talk about was what would keep her from surviving.

“If the doctors say she won't live,” her father had said with his usual weighted resignation, “she won't live. Do you not understand this?”

“Doctors aren't always right.”

“Neither are mothers, believe it or not.” He rubbed his palm over his face. “You will be left with nothing but a broken heart.” Vashti had kept her mouth closed and her head down, silence the most powerful tool in their household of broken communications and deep ties. She could feel him studying her face. “You can forgive me for wanting to make a plan for you?”
Us
, she thought,
make a plan for us
, but she only nodded.

They were sitting at her father's small kitchen table, the same one on which she'd served countless meals to him, all of them eaten in her father's manner: methodically, attentively, with a quiet pleasure in his daughter's work that bordered on mournful, an inexplicable emotion that never failed to make her want the next meal to be even better, as if it might edge out that tiny kernel of pain in both of them that interrupted the natural flow of their love. He watched over Javi in the store
the same way, more so when she was too young to work there but did anyway, and then again just before she left, bookends of affection though he'd been unable to read much in between.

“And this boy, this Max.” Her father always hesitated over Max's name, as if its very pronunciation mystified him. He had a similar reaction the few times no one could stop their paths from crossing: cordially stupefied, as if baffled to find that the boy was truly real, a boy he seemed to be expecting to disappear. Not because he disliked him, but because he saw no place for him in the daughter he saw as Jewish first, Persian second, and his above all. It did not matter to him that his religious loyalty was ingrained rather than expressed, and that he no longer had anyone in Iran he kept in touch with; his heritage was as much of a fact of life as life itself. No one—especially not Vashti or Javi—had the heart to break it to him that his daughters' lives of curiosity and humor and ambition were nothing like the quiet, similarly sorrowful, duty-bound daughters he felt he was parenting, if only by example. Still, he'd taken the news of Vashti's pregnancy surprisingly well, albeit unsurprised that his life's terrible luck could only get worse.

“This boy will have to go, yes?” He locked eyes with her as the full impact of what he was saying dawned deep within her, his gaze never wavering, reminding her that they had ridden through heartbreak together before, that he could witness hers and would not look away, that if she allowed him to care for her, she would have to accept his way of caring, too. “I have an idea.” He put his hand over hers. “I have someone in mind.” Vashti bit her lip, afraid that if she spoke
she would lose her grasp on the first, timely answer to her prayers, unsettling as it was.