All Stories Are Love Stories (18 page)

Again, the rueful smile. The taste of regret. He
had
missed something. Or someone? Something more than missing the chance to help others with what he knew, as she had done. Was the key, maybe, knowing when to help instead of how? Was that it? He felt like the kid who was too young to understand, the one who'd missed the joke, the punch line that drew everyone else together. “I'm going home,” she said kindly, as if that were the simplest explanation and also the most difficult to understand.

Gene looked involuntarily north, toward the fire. He wanted to tell her that her home was probably gone or a danger to her. That she wasn't heading into safety. That he knew exactly what sorts of dangers might lie ahead for both of them. Instead he stood up, too, though his legs were stiff and painful. “I thought I was taking him to a hospital,” he said apologetically.

She scoffed, a laugh playing at the corners of her mouth. “No,” she said, “he would never have wanted a hospital, that far gone.”

“Oh,” he said. Of course. The man had seen death differently. Gene would have, too, if he'd taken a moment to get out of his head and pay attention to what was in his hands.

“Don't worry,” she said, “you did the right thing.”

How could she know he'd done the right thing? Was she really as free of doubt as she seemed?

Sirens sounded in the near distance, evacuation warnings amplified through speakers so powerful that the windows trembled in their frames. When she told him to get to safety, she must have meant the evacuation zones, the places where people fled when they had nothing else to lose. From a corner of the largest window facing the street, Gene could see the fire a few blocks to the north, temporarily occupied with a multistory apartment building burning from the inside out.
In Chinatown
,
someone is always home
. The echo of an old lecture came back to him, the chief of police speaking to the unavoidable dangers of fire after earthquakes. In a big city, the most vulnerable to fire were the ones who kept homes and cooked, who were alone during the day with an assortment of ignitable hazards that could jump quickly from surface to surface, room to room, apartment to apartment, building to building.

“I knew,” Gene said suddenly, blurting out his confession. “About this. The earthquake, I mean. Or at least I think I might have,” he said quietly.

“Where did you say you came from?” The girl's voice lifted skeptically.

All at once he saw himself as she must see him: dirty, bloody, unshaven, harrowed, harrowing. He would have fit in perfectly among any crowd of deinstitutionalized homeless citywide. Well, it wasn't exactly wrong to say that he was on his way to becoming deinstitutionalized, and, for all he knew, he might be homeless as well.

“I didn't,” Gene answered. “But I'm on my way home, too. North Beach.”

“Oh,” she said. She took in his trousers and button-down shirt and patched together an uncanny guess at the truth. “No one knew about the earthquake. I don't know who you think you are, but if you'll pardon my French, bullshit.” She smiled with kindness and good humor, the warmth entering him like a laser that only drew attention to the cold.

He nodded, unsmiling. A tiny, steel-haired woman ran between them as if they weren't there, knocking Gene in the knees with one of several thin pink plastic grocery bags stuffed to transparency with all the contents of her life that she could carry.

“North Beach, huh?” The girl looked cordially in that direction.

Gene looked in that direction, too, into the fire.

“It's an inn, actually,” he said. “We live in an inn. Right across the street from Washington Square Park, so there are great views from every window.” No, he'd never been to a funeral in Chinatown. All the funerals he'd attended had been formal, never occasions for celebration. Who would have thought death could be celebrated? Or that the parts of life that were lost could be remembered without pain? Recollected, even. The girl was waiting, listening to him like an animal temporarily tamed. He could see the desire to return to her nest in her eyes, not because it would be as she knew it that morning, but because it was where the meaning of shelter lived.

“On a clear night, you can see the bridges from the roof
deck, both of them lit up. If the wind is right, sometimes you can hear people laughing at the restaurants nearby. Sometimes there's music. Sometimes we invite a jazz band in, and the trumpeter always wants the window open so the whole neighborhood can hear.”

A boy was crying, too tired to walk, and the pinch-faced woman who had been shepherding him along stopped, scooped him up, and kissed him irritably before breaking into a broken trot. “Did you know,” Gene said after another luxuriously unhurried moment of thought, a suspension of time that sometimes materializes between two strangers who find an unexpected comfort in each other and cannot quite leave willingly from relief, transient though it might be, “that there are ships buried beneath the city's streets?” The girl turned to him, her mouth softening from a teasing smile into a more genuine one. “The Gold Rushers abandoned their ships and headed for the hills. When most of them didn't return, those who remained made a city over what they'd left.

“Anyway, someone once told me, or I read it somewhere,” he said, letting down who he was, who he needed to be, as stiffly and carefully as he might lay a body to rest on a cold sidewalk, “that if a really big earthquake hit the city, the ships might just resurface, rising up through the streets. I'd like to see that, I have to admit, even now. That would be a pretty wonderful thing to see.”

Ellen had been brilliant to hold on to her nerd just a little bit longer. Their camera feed was uneven, but it didn't matter; every aerial news team within flying distance was competing to get whatever it could, and images just kept coming. And her city-planning expert proved himself to be interview gold. Platinum. Bringing back that soft touch when the footage edged into the dangerous territory of being too overwhelming, bringing the tragedy so close to home that people wound up turning the TV off. He was practically making her career for her with this interview alone.

As the footage unspooled and they watched it together, she saw aerial images of downtown with its usual spikes of industry tilting and leaning into and on top of each other like so many steel pins bowled partway over, and he spoke of the buildings that stood, the advances in retrofitting technology and the sincere, dutiful efforts on the part of the powers that be to take ongoing advantage of the safety mechanisms at hand; confronted with actual evidence of his prediction, grainy images of homes collapsing into themselves on the coast, he spoke of early evacuation plans no doubt in effect; at the sight of the patchy acres of lake that had once been Golden Gate Park, he spoke of the animals nearby in the zoo, how well their habitats had been designed; and when the
aerial cameras panned to their finale, the city from all angles, small fires too numerous to pinpoint, he spoke of efficient evacuation plans and FEMA's many-levered, resourceful responders on their way.

Ellen listened dutifully and nodded somberly, asking all the right questions. But as the interview wore on and she steered her ship steadily, she could feel the waters beneath her begin to rock, then churn. She was human, after all, and there was only so much she could stand to witness.

During a commercial break, Ellen sneaked out the back door, but it slammed loudly behind her. Damn. She pulled a cigarette from the pack she'd stolen from the cameraman and lit up, her fingers trembling with the cold. It would be so cold in the city. She began trembling all over. At least Si couldn't see her.

The door behind her slammed again.

She didn't need to turn around. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and here she was about to lose her shit. Did he guess? Could he smell fear in the water?

A few moments passed before she put a cigarette into his outstretched palm.

“Beautiful night,” he said after lighting up. The smoke from his mouth came out in rings. She hoped he couldn't see how much she shook, furious with herself, desperate to pull herself together. She wondered if she should explain. How much he'd noticed.

“When'd you move?” he asked casually.

“What?”

“In the broadcast. You mentioned you used to live in San Francisco.”

“Last April,” she replied. “To Marin.” She stomped out her cigarette. He'd been one of her references.

He inhaled deliberately. If he'd learned anything about women, it was not to look at them when they got emotional. “Too bad. Must be worth a pretty penny now.” Had he even been listening to the broadcast, or was he being deliberately dense? “You miss it?” His tone was casual, but the weight of the question hung in the air.

Did she miss it? The café underneath her apartment that brewed fresh coffee every morning so she woke to the fragrant smell, the sun slanting in through the picture window that led out to a tiny strip of grass and a modest garden she'd shared with the other tenants, though they were always the ones tending it. Nicely, too. They'd probably been too nice, often inviting her to join them, though she never went. She'd meant to, even bought a pair of gardening gloves, but she was always at work, then exhausted when she wasn't. Then someone new moved in across the hall from her, and the only other unit on her floor was sublet, leaving no one she knew anymore. It didn't matter. She probably wasn't ever going to be the homey type. “No,” she said, remembering herself, “I don't,” but she spoke too sharply, and she'd been lost in thought too long.

Several more moments passed, hours in news time on a night like this.

“You ready?”

No
, she thought, still trembling, but she nodded, filling her lungs with cold air.

“El.” Si waited a moment. “You sure you're OK? You want me to call someone else?”

“No,” she said immediately. Absolutely not. “I'm fine. I just needed a little air.”

The earth rumbled and muttered, waking Max, or at least keeping him from resting peacefully. Max thought he might be able to see something, now that his eyes were used to the dark. He strained to make out the structure of the things that surrounded them even as they held him so tightly that he could barely turn his neck to see.

“Tell me more about her,” Max said softly, “tell me about Anita.” He knew that saying her name would keep Vashti's mind off the unthinkable. But he also knew that meant they'd have to talk about her death. “How old was she?”

“Eighteen months,” she replied softly. “Eighteen months, two weeks, five days.”

He tried and failed to imagine eighteen months of a life he'd once hoped to know.

“It's too much to tell you all at once.”

“When else would you tell me?”

“After. Later.”

The quiet was so powerful, it buzzed. He wondered with a sort of detached curiosity if they were going to die there, and if they would die peacefully or painfully, together or alone. He wanted to try the experiment several times so it wouldn't seem so frightening.

“I always imagined,” Max continued, “that we could look for a place to live somewhere in the city. Not where we grew up. It's too foggy in the Sunset, and everyone sticks close to home. Somewhere closer to the city center, maybe over a nice café we could go to in the morning. Somewhere small, but with a few big windows so that when we did get sun, it would warm the front rooms.”

“Are you sure we're not asleep, Max?” Vashti asked, wondering. “Are you sure we're not dreaming?”

“It does sound like a dream,” he agreed. “Seems like one, I mean.”

“I thought about leaving him, you know,” she whispered. “Many times.”

“But you didn't,” he said, finishing the thought for her.

“No.”

Once, on a hot, hot day, when the acres of vineyard hung limply and lifelessly together and the lizards scurried between stones and the summer sun scalded the back of her neck as she lifted the stroller out of the car and strapped in her fussing daughter, Vashti had driven without a thought of anything but leaving that breathless, overly fragrant, yawning acreage and the man who had come with it. But Anita was soon shrieking, and Vashti had to stop the car in a small, nearly forgotten town on the 128, leaning her arms against the steering wheel with her head in her hands, her own shaking sobs drowned out by the sound of her daughter's. After a while, she'd wandered into the cool, dark grocery store near the gas station, letting the chemical coolness dry her cheeks,
marveling at the dense miasma of things that shouldn't hold together but did: vodka and Nutter Butters on the display marked
Sale!
; fresh produce lovingly displayed in the window and out of reach; trial-size packages of razors and condoms and laundry detergent by the register; dusty back shelves filled with beer and caulk and hammers and cheap paper towels stenciled with blue flowers. It was a place that held no identity, frequented by the dusty, aching poverty of the immigrant vineyard workers and their families; the clean white shorts of women passing through on their way to weekends in Calistoga or Napa; the regular, everyday middle class that America forgot: slightly bland, slightly bloated white families who lived there in the miserable conviction that the world held no other place for them. Vashti came to love this town, to return regularly, anonymously, to escape in the car and drive the winding roads to a place where no one really knew her and a store where she didn't really need anything and where there was a cashier who noticed new things about Anita every time and smiled at her without needing to know her name.

“Max.”

“Yes.”

“How long can we last down here?”

“Who knows? A while, I'd say.”

She considered this. “Are you hurt?” She made herself ask the question.

“Nothing too bad,” he lied, the pain in his leg becoming a voice of its own. “My leg. Maybe my shoulder, or my collarbone, too. What about you?”

“I don't know,” she answered honestly. “It's hard to breathe or move. Max?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe it's better that we never got that apartment.”

He laughed a little.

She smiled, her face breaking its stiffness. But the levity was short-lived. “Do you hear something?”

“No,” Max said. It was agonizing, to wonder if any sound was the sound of salvation, if it was even coming. All that talk of hope made him understand why she'd imagine the sounds of help before it came. He might have done the same thing. He was glad for it. Glad for her again. “But don't worry. They'll come. The city didn't just collapse. Cites are like people. They don't just disappear into thin air.”

“Yes,” she said, her head suddenly pounding.

“And it's San Francisco!” he added with false hope.

“At the very least, I'm sure they'll come for those girls. And find us when they do.”

“Of course.” Then he remembered that he had promised to get help. What made him promise such a thing?

The priest was trying to find a way to make the awful space of their shared tragedy into something that seemed bearable, an act for which he had no props. He had managed to elevate Ally's lower leg on a stray board. On close inspection, it seemed to no longer be broken, and he drank in his own tonic, smiling with pleasure at what he could.

But to Tia, her sister's seemingly insurmountable brokenness and pain suddenly over, everything seemed even
weirder and thus worse. Ally had started asking stupid questions again, and now the priest was trying to act like he was feeling normal, too, like nothing had happened, like they hadn't just turned over the trust of one of her sister's limbs entirely over to him. Tia didn't know whether to laugh or cry at what had come and gone so quickly, so she held herself stiffly, even more unsure.

Ally stopped midsentence, catching her sister's expression. “What?”

Tia just shook her head.

Ally looked back at the priest, biting her lower lip almost comically. It was clear she'd been at least temporarily silenced. He sighed. She was a nice little thing, easy to talk to. A few minutes passed with no words exchanged among any of them. The priest cleared his throat. What on earth had people talked about on a winter's night before they were able to turn the lights on? Maybe they'd just learned to sleep more. There wasn't that much to be said, after all, once the sun went down and voices became odd echoes of the dark.

“Do you have a family?” he asked Phil politely, the question as awkward in his mouth as it had been in his head.

“In Bernal Heights, yeah,” the boy Phil replied. “They know I'm here.”

“Well,” the priest replied vaguely. “That's good.”

“How about you?” Phil asked Tia, finally working up the courage to speak directly to her.

Tia glared at him. She reminded the priest for all the world of a bulldog his elderly mother had owned just before she died: the animal had taken up residence in the front yard
and by her chair as she grew closer to death, in a constant stance of hostile vigilance. It had been oddly endearing, the clumsy way in which the creature had devoted itself to the cause of protecting his indefensible mother. But what was Tia protecting? Both sisters looked too well and neat to be neglected, certainly not abused. But he had mistaken such things for better scenarios in the past.

Tia tucked in her chin but answered Phil. “Our mom's at work.”

“And where is that?” the priest asked, keeping his voice light.

“A grocery store.”

“In the Mission,” Ally added. “That's where we live.”

Her sister jabbed her with an elbow, a reminder that she was holding them both in place, that she was in charge of their borders.

“I remember her,” Phil said softly. “She came to drop you off one day.”

“That was our cousin,” Tia replied curtly.

“Yeah,” Ally agreed slowly, looking at her sister's closed face for confirmation. Her sister broke her scowl for a second to shoot her a glance. “What?” Ally squeaked. “I didn't say anything!” Tia glared at her, her body rigid with warning and fear. “I wasn't going to say anything!”

The priest had seen that expression hundreds of times before, the shut-down misery of a dog too naive and small to protect anything in actuality, despite what it felt called to do. The expression of a kid who realized she was a better parent
than her own parent for whatever reason, and who wears the pride and shame of that fact all over her face. It was funny how you could sustain the worries of your life, even when they were threatened.

“But why . . .” Phil blurted out, concern written all over his face, unable to heed the warning signs because he cared more than he should have, because he'd seen these girls for months, and he'd watched one of them too closely. Was that why he liked her so much? Because he could know her so well just by watching her? “Why doesn't your mother come?”

Tia didn't answer. Or she did, but it was wordless. There was a great story about her mother's return to Mexico in a frenzy of grief after their father died, about the aunt she'd left them with who didn't see them as anything but a burden, who drank tea spiked with rum and glared at them if they came near her after she'd slapped some microwave dinners down for them and turned on the TV. A story about the aunt who'd decided they were big enough to take care of themselves at that age because girls did such things when she was growing up, and their cousin down the street who rolled her eyes whenever they needed a ride somewhere, and about how their share of the rent was paid by envelopes from Mexico that didn't always come, though their aunt's threats always did. A whole story too awkwardly terrible to share with anyone, it made Tia feel that her family was a failure she could not separate herself from. But the external tragedies around her had shaken her protected ones loose so that they rose to
the surface. As the others watched, Tia's face changed, the fury peeling away to reveal another, deeper level of grief, something too raw and close to the bone to be finessed into words, and although she never cried or looked up, she told them of her heartbreak without admitting to a thing.