All Stories Are Love Stories (3 page)

He swallowed the last of his coffee. He wasn't sure he was ready to kill Franklin's spirit just yet, even if all signs pointed
toward a future in which keeping him alive might mean killing both their spirits just a little. He fished out a generous tip and put his wet jacket on, trying to step back into the joy that had so recently washed over him. Things would be OK, he told himself, dashing back outside and into the rain, darting through Tressider and back toward the Main Quad, passing clusters of people who had decided to wait out the storm under meager shelters along the way. But Gene only hurried more. His class was about to begin.

A few moments later, nine hours into her ten-hour graveyard shift, Vashti Shirah—night baker at Sucre, the Zagat-rated, hipster-hounded bakery on a gently edgy block between NoPa and Alamo Square—woke from a nightmare, drenched in sweat.

She sat up quickly. The oven alarm was going off, and for God only knows how long. She leapt off the baker's cot in the room behind the main kitchen and threw open the door to the oven, rescuing the cakes just in time, slamming them on the counter in her unbalanced rush to save them. Damn. She rubbed her shoulder where she'd banged it on the wall, surveying the cakes' edges for signs of overbrowning.
A lesser baker would let these slide
, she thought, assessing the burnt gold at their rims and shaking the oven mitts off her hands.
Stupid heart-shaped cakes
, she thought, grimacing at them. She'd hated them while she was making them, and now that she'd ruined them she hated them more. She pressed the edge of one lightly. It sprang back dutifully. Maybe she should try to pass them off anyway. They were only Valentine's Day cakes. She could fill in what she didn't shave off. It wasn't as if the ridiculous shades of red and pink icing waiting for them were designed for the subtleties of a perfect pastry. But still—she had standards. Or was everything about her falling apart?

Vashti sat back on the baker's stool, her pulse still racing from the adrenaline of waking suddenly from a restless sleep. She should have expected the dreams to worsen around Valentine's Day: it was his birthday, after all.
You never forget
, he always said, his voice in that gentle, low region that reverberated in her own chest.
Like tigers chuffing to each other
, she told him in the dream, just as she used to tease him. She could still hear it, more the noise of affection than its words. She tried to squelch the insistently rising details of the nightmare that had woken her—they'd dropped their clothes; no, they'd never had them; and then they swam in a dark lake past the body of her late husband, the light snowfall dissolving on her skin and collecting on his lifeless form.

She hated remembering the dreams almost as much as she did having them. Yet try as she might—sleeping pills that would fell a horse or, when those only made her dreams deeper and more vivid, loud music or the TV to keep her awake—they persisted. And recently, they'd become more frequent. Six months ago, when they began, they were intermittent, mingled almost politely among the far more prominent dreams of caring for Dale just before his death. But now, her mind persisted almost every night in dragging her into some new, lustfully macabre terrain with Max and Dale, the three of them playing out some stupidly obvious version of the tale her subconscious insisted on repeating. She as villain, Max as hero, Dale as victim. Or was it Max as victim, Dale as hero?

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, regretting it instantly. God, she was a mess! She sighed, wishing the
bakery had a shower. Her arms and face were caked with a fine dusting of flour, and the sweat from her nightmare still clung to her. Abruptly, the stool she sat on wobbled beneath her. She cursed herself silently; such a mess, she couldn't even sit straight on a chair.

Vashti set the timer for the cakes to cool, knowing she'd have to start frosting before she left at eight. A quick glance at the window told her that it was still as dark as night outside. Her circadian rhythms were hopelessly off. They always were when it rained like this for so long.
Maybe that's it
, she lied gladly to herself,
the run of bad weather
. She wasn't obsessing about a man she hadn't seen in more than a decade because her poorly beloved husband had just died and she was losing her mind from guilt and grief. She was simply tired from the rain.

Her love for Max—or, it might be more accurate to say, her memory of her love for Max—had become like a chronic disease, something she'd tried to deny at first, then wish away. But she had found more peace with it over time, glad for the months or even years when she was asymptomatic, soldiering through the times when his image occupied her mind so often that she could think of little else.

There were times, especially when Dale was sick, that she'd imagined she was cured. Those long, summery months when he was dying at home, the lavender breezes coming through the windows he asked her to open when the baking Sonoma heat had passed and the night crept in, cool and inviting, as tender as what was suddenly between them once the doctors told them that there was nothing they could do
to stop Dale's heart from failing. Although she did not fool herself into thinking that the sort of love she had once hoped for was finally blooming between them, she was pleasantly surprised to find they were developing a new friendship, a deeper, less guarded bond than the stubborn fondness they'd built their marriage upon until then.

Before Dale got sick, any affection between them had been strained and convoluted, as affection in a marriage without passion so often is. She entered the marriage guiltily and never lost her sense of shame, the sense that she didn't deserve what he gave her or that she'd somehow come by it dishonestly. Odd, since the relationship she had with Dale was probably one of the most truthful she'd ever enjoyed.

Still, she kept to her role as a wife on the periphery, tending to Dale's operational needs assiduously, monitoring the edges of the life she couldn't bring herself to enter fully. But once the home grew quiet and all but those charged with guiding him into death had gone, something shifted. Instead of watching as others cared for her husband, now she sat at the edge of his bed, sorting through the simple cotton things he preferred against his thinning skin or lowering and lifting the shades throughout the day so he'd get just the light he wanted. Their conversations remained minimal, but they were now threaded through with an openness they hadn't enjoyed when they thought they had an indefinite amount of time left to figure out how to keep living with each other. Vashti found herself smiling unself-consciously in Dale's presence, spending hours around him without feeling the need to exchange words.
The unavoidable wonder of a nearing death made it suddenly easy to be vulnerable, knowing it wouldn't last long enough to demand more from either of their heartstrings than they had to offer.

After he died, the spirit of that vulnerability lingered for a few precious weeks. It helped her cope with the interrupted sleep, the exhaustion of putting someone recently alive into the earth, then recalibrating to life without illness. She was even good to herself, unusually so.
It's to be expected
, she reassured herself when the dreams kicked in,
that a new widow's sleep would be disrupted and disturbing
. And at first she delivered only manageable nightmares to herself: dreams of Dale that were memories of his pain, haunting images of how he looked just before he died—blue eyes paler than ever, the skin waxy across the forehead. Part of her was glad—nearly triumphant, in fact—that her nightmares immediately following her husband's death were of her husband.
Maybe
, she told herself eagerly,
I loved him more than I realized
.

But those dreams faded quickly.

After just a few weeks, she was dreaming again—despite her best efforts—of Max. She remained properly somber and thoughtful during the day, conscientiously—even sincerely—grieving, but at night her subconscious swept in and took her best intentions hostage. As soon as she let down her guard enough to sleep, another self emerged: a child laughing at the chatter of a squirrel during her mother's funeral; the young adult who denied her baby's doomed genetic code, drinking in the smell of her and marveling at the thin silk of her hair.

Vashti pulled off her apron and splashed some warm water on her face at the sink. She had been stupid to think that taking the overnight shift would mean less sleep, fewer dreams. The half-rested mind, she was now discovering, loved nothing better than to dream, to blur the lines between being awake and being asleep. It was just grief, she told herself, the extreme lurches of the heart dredging up old memories.

Her phone rang. She pulled it off the counter and looked at the caller ID, though she knew who it was: Javi. She never missed Valentine's Day. Vashti answered, eager for a sympathetic ear, already resenting the note of pity that would accompany it.
Wasn't it Javi's fault
,
too
, she found herself thinking,
at least a little?
Falling apart alone was one thing; having a sister who was kind enough to recognize and worry over it was another.

“Where are you?” she answered. She looked up at the clock on the wall. “What time is it?”

“Paris. About to board a plane to Istanbul. We were late to the gate, so I have, probably, almost ten minutes.” There were some garbled sounds in the background before her voice came through again: “. . . sad to say that Parisian airport food is as much of an oxymoron as you'd expect.”

Vashti closed her eyes, the sting of tears threatening to return.
Thank God for modern technology
, she thought, savoring the familiar sounds of her sister's voice. If she kept her eyes closed, she could imagine Javi was right there, maybe sitting right across from her, her elbows on the counter and her hands a folded shelf for her chin, her eyes searching her sister's face for a way to understand what Vashti felt but couldn't say.

“How are you?”

“Fine.”

Javi was silent, waiting for the real answer. More garbled noise. Vashti hated these snatched phone calls, the threat of an abrupt ending always humming in the background. She couldn't remember the last time they'd talked unhurried. But then, hurry was her sister's favorite drug, a sweet distraction from a deep loneliness that was as frightening to her as a child's underbed monster, the sort of loneliness that arose from a loss that could never be recouped. Years ago, Javi could go on vacation for a week or more, but her dependency had gotten the better of her. Now even a day off from work made her shaky and nervous. If only she would come home, just for a little while. Maybe if she could see and touch her, Vashti could make her sister see how far she'd run away. But maybe that was why she didn't come home.

Javi's voice broke through her thoughts. “What is it?”

Vashti focused on the mess of flour on the counter, sweeping it into piles with the side of her hand. “Just not sleeping well.”

Javi raised her voice into the next ripple of static. “Vishy? Are you there?”

“Yes, yes!” she called out, the note of desperation in her voice taking her by surprise. “Can't you hear me?”

“Lost you for a second. You're not sleeping? Is it more dreams?”

Vashti nodded, unwilling to speak. The interference was too loud, Javi was always too far away, she could barely contain the sadness suddenly swelling in her throat.

After a moment, Javi's voice broke in, oddly raspy, almost hoarse. Had she started smoking again? “Listen, Vishy,” she said. Vashti squeezed her eyes shut to conjure up her sister's face: narrowly beautiful, with a long nose and chin, intelligent eyes. “I've been thinking.”

When is Javi not thinking?
Vashti thought irritably.
At least about how to fix her sister's miserably thwarted personal life.
But she listened anyway. This was the implicit arrangement between them: Vashti could complain endlessly about unreasonable romantic desires as long as she spent just as much energy listening to her sister's critical advice. Of course she should
start dating again
,
just put herself out there, see what happens.
And of course, her sister was right. Vashti was primed to step over that invisible but all-important line between being a callous widow and a cautiously available one. And of course,
Dale would understand.

But Javi knew it wasn't about Vashti's dead husband. Or at least not just about him. Her sister couldn't exactly read her mind, but sometimes it seemed like she could hear Vashti's thoughts, just as whales can understand each other by calling out into the spaces between them.

“You should just go see him.”

Vashti's heart slapped once against its cage. “I can't.”

“Why not?”

Vashti didn't answer. She leaned over and fumbled a little to open the window over the sink, stretching her neck to catch a face full of chilly, damp air. Had the rain not been blocking her view, she would have been able to see a few crates and a crumbling brick wall, but not much else. Some
might feel too hemmed in down there, but she liked the cocoon of it, the old basement comfort and the warm ovens.

There were a thousand reasons why not—why she couldn't or shouldn't or wouldn't go see Max—most of which they'd discussed as many times.

“If he'd wanted to see me, he would have said.”

“Why? Because you exchanged a few meaningless hello-how-are-you e-mails a few months ago?”

Well, yes. Because she'd hoped he would send out some kind of smoke signal when she reached out. Something other than the miserably chaste politeness.
What a pleasant surprise. Glad you've moved back to the area. Nice to hear you're doing well.
“I just can't, Javi. You know why.”

“Not really, at least not anymore. Maybe ten years ago, I knew. Now I'm not sure
what
it is, exactly, that's holding you back. Are you?”

“I was the one who walked out, Javi. I walked away,” Vashti said under her breath, the memories flying across time and distance to pierce her as painfully as ever.

There was a pause on the other end of the line. “You did. But that was a million years ago, and you walked away for the right reasons.”

“Maybe. If he actually knew the truth, maybe he'd agree. Or maybe he'd hate me even more.”

“Maybe. But that was then. And he doesn't hate you. I sincerely doubt he ever hated you, Vishy. Anyway, there's really only one way to find out.”