In the post he’d written about buying the Harley, Wesley called Lily “the motorcycle girl.” “I can hardly remember what she looked like,” he wrote, “but she had an unedited presence, as if there were none of the usual veils between her and the rest of the world.”
Lily had never read about herself in the third person before. The words jarred her. Were they true? Perhaps they had been on that day: she’d just found Vicky, alive.
Every day Lily looked for Wesley in the library, but she never saw him again. When a new post appeared in The Earthquake Chronicles, she learned that he’d taken his trip to Oregon. After visiting his two sons in Eugene, he rode the Harley down the coast on Highway 101, going nowhere at all, doubling back to ride the most beautiful sections two or three times. At night, he camped on the beaches, cold and windy, wrapped in gray fog. He lay in driftwood shelters listening to the sound of the surf. Sometimes the clouds parted and he stared into the black star-studded sky. He wrote that the salty air, sloshing sea, and starlight were intensely beautiful, as if his losses dialed up his ability to feel, hear, and see. A broken heart, he wrote, is the same thing as an open heart, by definition.
At night, after serving dinner at the church, Lily slept in a motel room at the intersection of Cedar Street and San Pablo Avenue. The owner only took cash, so it wasn’t a long-term solution. But at least for a few nights she had a roof, a door that locked, and plumbing that worked.
On her fourth morning in the motel, the ring on her phone trembled through her dreams and she awoke with a gasp. It was her slippery sister. She fell back on the motel bed and closed her eyes. “Where have you been?”
“Didn’t you get my emails?”
“You know I got them. I answered them. But you haven’t told me where you are.”
“My email could be hacked. I don’t like sharing sensitive info online.”
“Like where you live?” Even as Lily scoffed the question, she thought of shifty Paul. Waiting for Vicky in her own house.
“No lectures today. Guess what! I’ve got an awesome studio apartment. Right by the Oakland airport. Cool, huh? Excellent access.”
“Access to what? The airport is closed.”
“Yeah, but when it does open, I’ll be able to walk to the terminal.”
“I thought you lost your phone.”
“I found it!” Vicky crowed. “Guess where.”
Lily let her spine sink into the mattress, corralled patience. “Where?”
“You have to guess.”
“In one of the in-line skates.”
“Ha! Good guess. But no. It was under the cushion of the bubble chair!”
“Okay.”
“And, even better, I was able to pay my bill. They were going to disconnect in one day. My usual good luck.”
“I’ve been worried about you.”
“No need. It’s awesome out here. A lot of Oakland is still without power, but since the Air Force is working from the airport, we’re up and running. All kinds of amenities.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“I’m working for the Hegenberger Cluster. I love this neighborhood. It’s awesome.”
“You’ve joined a Cluster?”
“I don’t know about ‘joined.’ I’m helping them rig solar and build a few computers. This is anarchy at its best. People figuring out our needs and taking care of them. I’m off the grid, baby.”
“With the Air Force next door? You’re not exactly on your own.”
“And guess what. This will make you happy.”
Vicky wouldn’t go on until Lily said, “What?”
“I have all the chairs. They’re safe and sound, right here with me.”
“How’d you do that?”
“With a great deal of difficulty. I hired a couple of guys who had not only a truck but one with gas in the tank. You can imagine what I had to pay them. Anyway, mission accomplished.”
“Okay.”
“Yep. Everything is turning up roses.”
“Okay.”
“You sound kind of sad.” It wasn’t the sort of observation Vicky usually made.
“I’m fine.” She had no idea how to tell Vicky about Tom.
“Hey. Another plus about my new digs. Miles away from Gloria.” Vicky waited for Lily to say something. “I thought you’d approve. She has no idea where I am.”
“It would be smart to keep it that way.” She could just see Vicky texting Gloria in one of her irrationally buoyant moments.
“You still at Joyce’s place?”
Lily cleared her throat instead of answering. It was stupid to be prideful. But she didn’t really want to admit that in fact she was now the homeless one.
“You can stay with me, you know. Come on out. My place is kind of tiny. But you’re totally welcome. You know that.”
“Just be safe,” Lily said.
“This isn’t Kansas anymore, Dorothy.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Call me!” Vicky’s optimism, as usual, was sincere.
19
Lily checked out of the motel. She couldn’t squander the rest of her cash on the room. She’d heard there was an intermittently functioning ATM in downtown Berkeley. She’d also heard that the armed guards the bank had hired were as likely to take your cash as anyone. In any case, the money in their checking account wouldn’t cover many more nights in a motel and it wasn’t hers alone to spend. Withdrawing her half of their savings made a statement she wasn’t ready to make.
She shoved her remaining cash in her bra, stuffed her belongings into her backpack, and rode her bicycle up the hill. When she reached the house on Ridge Road, she tried the garage door, but it was locked. There was a window to the garage, but it was too high to reach and awkwardly placed above the stairs leading down to the front porch. She unearthed another flagstone, a small one this time, and shoved it in the front of her jeans. Then she climbed up on the stairway’s railing, her fingers clutching the windowsill. In order to bash in the window with the rock, she’d have to let go with one hand. She looked down at her feet, tentatively braced on the thin metal railing, and carefully reached for the flagstone tucked in her jeans. She began to totter and had to use both hands to grasp the sill again. She considered using her skull to knock a hole in the glass, but that was a pretty stupid idea. She’d just have to will good balance. Again she reached for the flagstone, lifted it to the glass, and bashed. The window shattered. She managed four more bashes before she fell, landing hard on her hip. She climbed back up on the railing and this time smashed out the entire window. It took her nearly half an hour to pick out the small crags of glass in the sill. She emptied her backpack and laid it across the bottom of the window to protect herself from any remaining shards, then hefted herself up and into the garage.
From inside, it was easy to manually open the garage door.
Lily tried to make quick decisions. She grabbed the tent and a sleeping bag. Then, against all reason, she hoisted the red plastic double kayak by its bow handle and wheeled it out of the garage. She put the tent and sleeping bag in the front cockpit and shoved the paddle alongside the gear, securing one end under the bow and laying the shaft alongside the seats.
After shutting the garage door, Lily started down Ridge Road pushing her bicycle in one hand and pulling the kayak with the other. Lake Anza, an artificial lake made by damming Wildcat Canyon Creek, was just a quarter mile away. A boat belonged to water. She’d take the kayak there. She stopped next door and hid her bicycle in the brambles in front of Professor Vernadsky’s house. He hadn’t been at the church the last couple of nights. She would check on him after she stashed the kayak.
At the bottom of Ridge Road, Lily crossed Wildcat Canyon Road and began the gentle descent of Central Park Drive toward the lake. Vicky had done an excellent job converting the kayak; the wheels turned with silent ease.
&
nbsp; Lily’s mind, on the other hand, was not working so well. She was having trouble assembling her thoughts, focusing on a plan. She inventoried her possessions: bicycle, tent, sleeping bag, maps, flashlight, toothbrush, phone, packet of letters from a bonobo researcher. Some cash. A wheeled kayak. She remembered reading somewhere that homelessness triggered mental illness in a shockingly short period of time.
There was, of course, the plane ticket. It would deliver her to a wrecked marriage and a handful of winter gardens, covered with snow, waiting for her labor.
These past three days as she read in the library, served dinners in the church, and slept in the motel, she’d been waiting for Tom to call back. She’d fully expected him to. But he hadn’t. He meant it. He meant Angelina.
Lily straddled the rear cockpit of the kayak and lowered her behind onto the seat, hooking her knees over the lip so that she could use her feet as brakes. She held the paddle aloft and began to ride the kayak down the hill. She rolled slowly, gliding along the woodsy road into the regional park, disappearing herself into the vessel’s sensuality, with its pointed ends and swelled middle, the way it slipped through the air.
The ride reminded her of sledding that first time with Tom. They were eleven years old, and she a good foot taller. She’d pulled the sled to the top of the hill on the Knickerbocker place, where they all sledded in the winter, and she called his name, as if she were choosing him for a team. They joked about that years later, the way she’d said, “Hey, you, Tommy. Come here,” and he did. She pointed at the sled and he climbed on, placing his feet on the steering bar, taking hold of the rope. “Lie down,” she told him. So he did that, too, swinging his legs around and pressing his belly against the wooden sled slats. It was Lily’s father’s old Fearless Flyer, nearly an antique, and she’d inherited his pride in it. She climbed on Tommy’s back, the length of her against him. She put her head to the side of his, her face in his neck, and breathed in what was still a little boy smell, sugary cereal and milk and a sweet kind of sweat. “Go,” she said. He gripped the steering bar and pushed off with a foot. They flew, the iced air sheering her face, his buttocks under her pelvis, her budding breasts sore as they pressed against his back. She could feel him steer with his whole body, using lean and their combined weight. She closed her eyes, sank more deeply into him, and felt that first inkling of eroticism. The speed and his nearness lodged in her throat, and she cried out with joy, wanting the ride to never, never ever, end. When it finally did, when they sailed onto the flats of the Knickerbocker farm, neither of them dragged their feet to slow the sled. They let the momentum take them as far as it would, and even after they came to a complete stop, she lay on top of Tommy for a few more seconds before rolling off. You would think they could have laughed then, but the moment was too potent, too loaded with the future, and Lily jumped up purposefully and strode away. They didn’t touch again for three years.
The kayak picked up speed, careening down the hill, and Lily didn’t know if she could control it. She tried to drag her feet, but she was going too fast and contact with the road wrenched her ankles. She knew she’d ruin the plastic paddle if she tried to slow her ride by jamming it against the pavement. So she gave up and flew down the hill in her crazy vessel, hoping there were no earthquake-severed sections of the road. The oak, pine, and redwood trees blurred on either side of her. When she came to a moderate turn, she used lean and her body weight, just as Tommy had, and the wheels on the bottom of the kayak responded beautifully, taking her along the curve of the road. Down they went, as if the kayak had a mind of its own, as if it were determined to reach water.
She approached a four-way stop at the bottom of the hill, with the lake off to the right, but she couldn’t turn that sharply. Nor could she stop. So she sailed right on through the stop sign and coasted up the short incline, finally rolling to a stop. She climbed out on shaky legs and looked around.
She was alone in the trees, under the cold, blue sky.
She could have called Tom back herself. But she hadn’t. Instead, she was choosing homelessness over the American Dream. Now she just had to find out why.
Lily wheeled the boat around and pulled it the rest of the way down the hill to Lake Anza. She was surprised to find the place deserted. Maybe it was just another myth that a community of earthquake refugees—the Lake Anza Cluster, people at the church called them—lived near its shores. The pale green water lay flat and opaque, bringing to mind the expression, “a body of water.” There appeared to be nothing here, no ducks or snakes or even insects, nothing at all. Silence thickened the air.
She pulled the kayak across the top of the spillway, which shouldn’t have held up in the earthquake but had. Big gray boulders butted up against the far shore, and a stand of tall reeds flanked the edges of the rocks. Overhead, the leafy eucalyptus branches shivered in a sudden breeze. The water rippled like a traveling message.
She stopped for a moment and listened, hoping for clarity or direction. Nothing.
When she reached the other side of the lake, she dragged the boat into the woods, forcing her way through the undergrowth. Then she flipped it over, sat on the hull, and wiped the sweat from her face with the bottom of her T-shirt. She had no imaginable use for a boat. Yet her urge to hoard had begun to feel primal.
Taking the tent and sleeping bag with her, Lily pushed her way back out of the brush and continued walking along the path that circled the lake, trying to be practical, considering her camping options. When she heard a splash behind her, she turned to see a long-haired little boy, no more than eight years old. He crouched at the water’s edge, wearing only a T-shirt, sloshing what looked like a pair of pants in the lake. He smiled at her, and then stood suddenly, his little penis bobbing. He held up the dripping jeans. “I peed them,” he said. He folded the jeans in half, wrung them as hard as his twig arms would allow, and then tossed them over his shoulder. He sat on a rock, pulled on and tied a pair of dirty sneakers. “Bye!” he called. The naked little boy scampered up the steep bank, heading straight into the park wilderness.
Lily thought about following him, but she wasn’t ready to join a Cluster, to live with strangers. Lake Anza was too obvious a camping spot.
She carried the tent and sleeping bag back up to Ridge Road and stopped in front of Professor Vernadsky’s house. The gate had rusted off its hinges and the rotting boards lay against towering blackberry brambles. She pushed through the small opening in the stickers and dropped her gear on the professor’s front patio.
The earthquake had toppled his chimney and shifted a portion of the house off its footing, opening up a jagged crack in the siding big enough for a small body to slide through, but the house clearly had been disintegrating, returning to a state of nature, for years, since long before the earthquake. The paint was all but gone, dry rot marbled the siding, trees grew up through cracks in the patio, and thick moss covered the roof.
His walking sticks lay in front of the door, one crossed over the other, and the door was ajar. Lily knocked, and when there was no answer, she knocked harder. She called out his name. That didn’t rouse him, either, so she gently pushed open the door.
A terrible stench filled the air. With its long south-facing windows, the house was a giant solarium. One of the windows had busted out altogether, and a small greenway grew in from the backyard, grasses and strawberry plants and even bright orange nasturtiums. Termites nibbled away at the rotting wooden floor. The professor sat, with his back to Lily, on what was left of the couch. Wads of its stuffing spilled out of the fabric, and mice were busy burrowing into the homes they’d made there. A blue jay roosted on top of his head, pecking its beak at his white hair, like a little passerine hairdresser.
“Professor,” Lily said, approaching slowly so as to not scare him. “Professor Vernadsky, it’s me, Lily.”
The blue jay flew across the room, perching on a lamp, but the professor still didn’t turn around, so she
inched closer and put a hand on the back of his shoulder. Using her hand as a pivot, she circled around to the front of him.
His eyes, his beautiful lobelia-blue eyes, were already gone. Lily dry retched so hard it felt as if her stomach might heave out her mouth.
She didn’t trust herself on the bicycle, so she left it along with her tent and sleeping bag, hidden in the professor’s blackberry brambles, and ran down the hill to the church.
She poured drinks and set out trays. She served hamburgers, tater tots, bean casserole, and carrots. She even smiled at the clients, chatted with regulars, commented on how Herbert had more color in his cheeks, and snuck him extra milk.
The horror of what she’d seen held her up like a broomstick holds up a scarecrow, a rod through her center. She was glad for all the diners, their living vibrancy, even for Annie. At least the ill-tempered girl was still safe.
“Give me the vegan option,” she told Lily.
“You’re not vegan.”
“I said give me vegan.”
“You drink milk and ate my cheese. That’s not vegan.”
“I’m not through with you,” Annie said, grabbing a burgerless tray.
“Keep moving,” Lily said. “There’s a line behind you.”
“Just wait to see who knows how to use a knife, bitch.”
Joyce had been the one wielding a knife, not Lily, and she almost made that correction but caught herself in time. “Move along.”
Annie pulled the tray close to her face and sniffed. Lily expected her to wrinkle her nose, fake a gag, comment on the bean odor, maybe even drop the whole mess to the floor, but she breathed in slowly and quietly, as if the casserole reminded her of something she loved. “Give me one for Benjamin.”
“Benjamin?”
“Binky.”
They did keep to-go boxes for special situations, like the guy who had a bedridden wife. Lily scooped a large serving of bean casserole into one of these, closed the lid, and gave it to Annie. The girl hesitated, as if about to accidentally say thank you, but instead said, “Milk, too.”
The Evolution of Love Page 13