The Evolution of Love

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  Gratefully,

  Wesley

  ◆◆◆

  Dear Wesley,

  That’s the whole thing about evolution. It’s the most exciting narrative of all because it’s about change over time. Real change. Change that sticks. Change that improves the odds for the changed. Change that increases the intricacy of our dependence on one another. There are billions of examples. Like how people need bees to pollinate our crops. That lemon tree, it needs Professor Vernadsky’s body.

  Travis may be crazy. Or ruined. Or just plain sad. But he didn’t lie about the bonobos. I’ve read books and articles. What Travis told me about our link to them, and their capacity for love and compassion, is all true.

  The thing is, when people think of evolution, they think of creatures battling it out for survival. That’s not what Darwin meant by “survival of the fittest.” What if natural selection favors altruism? What if love improves our chances for survival? Maybe love and survival are the same thing!

  I don’t know what love is. I don’t think anyone does. But maybe our human descendants will evolve there, to an understanding of love.

  Lily

  Her time was up, and her phone wasn’t fully charged, but she unplugged it anyway and dropped onto the floor in a corner of the reading room where she checked, every five seconds, for a reply from Wesley. She didn’t have to wait long.

  ◆◆◆

  Dear Lily,

  Are you in Berkeley?

  Wesley

  ◆◆◆

  Dear Wesley,

  Yes. I can’t seem to leave. I’ve been reading your blog posts. You went back to Oregon?

  Lily

  ◆◆◆

  Dear Lily,

  I did, but I’m on my way back down again. I can’t seem to stay away. I love the vibrancy of the community that remains in the East Bay.

  Wesley

  ◆◆◆

  Lily thought of the way, during the motorcycle ride, she’d held her hand over his heart, as bold as a bonobo. She wrote,

  I’d like to see you. Meet me tomorrow at the library? After my shift at 7:30? I mean, if you want. I’ll be there, in any case. I’m off to the church now.

  Lily got to her feet and shoved her phone in her backpack. She felt like she knew Wesley from reading all of The Earthquake Chronicles and Wings on Fire. But that didn’t mean that he knew her. Or even that she really knew him. He’d either come tomorrow or he wouldn’t. She slung on her backpack and set out for the church.

  It was a hot afternoon. A layer of heat shimmered above the pavement. An eerie silence squeezed the air. Weeds grew in the church parking lot cracks, as always, but they looked more aggressive, as if they were now the primary occupants. The sun shone starkly against the pale pink building. Fresh tags, angry hieroglyphics, were splashed in red paint across the lower parts of the walls.

  Where were all the early arrivals? The folks who gathered in the parking lot to shoot the breeze before dinner?

  Lily ran up the cement steps to the community room door. A scrawled sign read: Meals Program Closed. The door was locked.

  35

  Moments after Ron left for the evening, someone pounded on the community room door. Kalisha thought, Lily! She’d been worried all afternoon. Lily hadn’t missed a dinner in three weeks. So Kalisha opened the door, and two white men, one burly with a black beard and the other pale and freckled, pushed in. Just beyond, in the parking lot and pulled up to the stoop, were two black Chevy Blazers.

  The men ignored her completely as they shook open plastic trash bags and began filling them with food from the pantry. Kalisha sat down on a folding chair in the community room and watched. Even if she had any fight left in her, she knew it would be useless against these two goons. When they’d taken all the food out to the trucks, they loaded up utensils from the kitchen. They walked back and forth, carrying armloads and bagfuls of whatever wasn’t nailed down. They even took a dozen folding chairs. In less than thirty minutes, they’d gutted the free meals program, her heart, her life. Each of the men got behind the wheel of a Blazer, started the engine, and drove away.

  Kalisha didn’t hesitate. She didn’t think. She didn’t consider. She didn’t even lock the door to the church behind her. It was getting dark, but there were always vendors on Telegraph Avenue. She walked quickly and arrived in a few minutes.

  There they were, the dealers, so obvious with their hands in their pockets, their smirks, their confident gaits. Her desire skyrocketed. A searing need. God in a needle. Nothing could be simpler. It felt like a script that had been written for her and her alone.

  Kalisha had seen these fellows and experienced these feelings hundreds of times. But tonight was different. Tonight, side by side with the hunger, she felt an urge to laugh. It was a bitter laugh, for sure, but laughter nonetheless. These hustlers looked ridiculous: stripped, raw, savage.

  Young ferals sprawled in the entryways of the closed storefronts. She looked closely at their faces, wondering if any were her clients, but none were, these lowlifes who couldn’t be bothered even with nutrition and certainly not with the community associated with people coming together for meals.

  How dare they. The dealers. To these children. To her.

  And yet a physical stasis held Kalisha at Telegraph Avenue and Dwight Way. The crosshatch of feelings bound her as tightly as a set of ropes.

  “Candles?” said a voice behind her.

  She turned and saw a woman with long, ratty Shakespearean hair and dressed in layers of shirts, gym shorts over warm-up pants, and a moth-eaten cape. She was folding up a card table and at her feet sat a cardboard box.

  “Whatchya looking for?” she asked.

  “Candles,” Kalisha said, wondering if she’d really heard that word.

  “How many you need?”

  Then the biggest joke of all occurred to Kalisha. She hadn’t any money!

  “Another time, maybe,” she said.

  “Look.” The woman opened her box and held up a couple of the hand-dipped candles. “I have all the colors. Most are rainbow. The colors change as you burn them.”

  “They’re beautiful.”

  The woman bent and gathered a big handful, the hard wax cylinders making a pleasant clunking sound as she bundled them. She held them out to Kalisha.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t have any cash at the moment.”

  “But now you have some candles.” The woman shook her full and extended hands, meaning, go on, take them.

  Kalisha did, her own hands covering the candlemaker’s hands for a second as they made the exchange.

  “The box is too heavy to carry when it’s full, anyway,” the woman said. “You’re doing me a favor.” Then she interwove the cardboard flaps on the box top, balanced the load on one hip, and hefted the folded card table in her opposite hand. “Good night.”

  Kalisha spent that evening reading in Pastor Riley’s office. She read bits from all kinds of authors: St. Augustine, Mircea Eliade, Paul Tillich, St. Teresa of Avila, Alan Watts, and William James. Even Aristotle. It felt good to tackle those mountains, revisit her favorite ideas, hold and arrange the shots at truth. She wasn’t denying what she’d experienced today—Lily was a no-show and at least one of those trucks belonged to Travis Grayson—but she wanted to fill her mind with as much faith, grace, and wisdom as she could before drawing conclusions.

  The next morning she went to her regular NA meeting, but she didn’t tell the group that the free meals program had been raided, nor about her trip up to Telegraph Avenue. She didn’t want their murmurs of understanding. What she wanted was a way around her suspicions. But she had a logical mind and she couldn’t stop herself from trying to fit the pieces together. She hated the picture coming into view: Lily knew Travis Grayson; she didn’t show up yesterday afternoon; but Travis’s black Chevy Blazer did.

&n
bsp; After the meeting, that man Carter asked if he could walk her home. They’d talked a few times, standing on the sidewalk out in front of the senior center where the meetings were held, and she liked him. Maybe a lot, she wasn’t sure. He was a slight man, with nice eyes, skin several shades darker than hers, and gray hair, though he wasn’t old. He was a sculptor and a carpenter, bright and kind, but he’d only been clean for two years, and she didn’t trust the strength of his abstinence. Also, he was soupy; his tendency to quote proverbs annoyed her. She needed someone with a bit of razor in his spleen, a man who knew words to be tools.

  Besides, she couldn’t tell him that she lived in a church.

  Before walking away, she heard herself say maybe another time, leave a door open, and she almost turned around to say, actually, no never. She would have, if she could have thought of a way to say that without sounding completely heartless.

  She wasn’t heartless. But the raid of the free meals program had left a void. A massive one. She needed to be very, very careful about what she let tumble in.

  That afternoon she put up a sign telling the clients that the meals program was closed. At four o’clock, she pulled a table over to the wall by the door and stood on it to look out the high window. She could see the entire parking lot, the steps, and the stoop. She watched for Lily. Any moment she expected to see the tall, skinny, crazy white girl come running up, sweaty and maybe bloody again, who knew what she got herself into when not at the church. She’d pound on the door. Explain where she’d been. Kalisha would act angry. She longed for that relief.

  But Lily didn’t come, for a second day in a row.

  Late that night, Kalisha sat cross-legged in front of the altar, watching the last of her Shakespearean candles burn. They were nubs by now, each surrounded by a pool of multihued wax. When she’d lit them the night before, she’d designated one for Michael, one for Professor Vernadsky, one for Lily, two for Ron and his girlfriend, the remaining three for her grandma and two estranged parents, but by now she thought of them as a single glow of forgiveness.

  When you’ve lost everything, that’s really all there is to grasp.

  In the last of the candlelight, she considered her foolish and devastating mistake with heroin, her betrayal of Michael, her high-stakes treachery with her own life, and laughed out loud at the big joke: she’d survived it all. All that was left was forgiving herself.

  36

  Lily wandered around Berkeley for a couple of hours, dirty and hungry and bleary-eyed, asking people if they knew why the meals program was closed today. No one knew; or if they did, they weren’t saying.

  Reckless with despair, she even walked down the full length of Telegraph Avenue looking for Annie. She entertained fantasies of strangling the two boys who’d killed Binky. She had nothing to lose anymore, other than her life, and this afternoon, that didn’t seem all that valuable.

  If she were thinking clearly, she would have known that the closure of the meals program had nothing to do with her not showing up two days in a row. Surely Kalisha could have done the extra work herself. Or someone else could have served the trays. It wasn’t rocket science. But all her thoughts landed in the dump heap of blame; she’d failed the one and only place where she thought she was making a difference.

  Eventually Lily walked up the hill and over to Professor Vernadsky’s house, next door to Vicky’s old place. She went down the side path to the backyard. She crouched on the edge of the professor’s grave, a mound of crumbled soil. She thought of how she and Kalisha had sweat and cried and laughed together. She wondered if she’d ever see her friend again. The sign only said, “Meals program closed.” Maybe it’d reopen tomorrow, but there’d been a finality in the handwriting, a fury.

  An hour later, Lily stepped out of the eucalyptus and bay laurel forest and onto her knoll. It hadn’t rained in three weeks, and the bone-dry dirt clods crunched under her feet as she descended the slope to her campsite. White fuzzy flowers, like shredded cotton balls, covered the coyote brush. A hot wind blew across the hillside, quivering the blue taffeta of the tent and sweeping away any bees.

  The air inside the tent was sweltering, so she lay outside on the ground, the hot wind drying her sweat. She watched the dimming sky, breathed in the scent of the scrub brush. Why was she so stubborn? Why hadn’t she been able to hold still, stay in Fair Oaks, accept a comfortable life? She’d broken her own heart by insisting on having wings.

  Ha! As Vicky would say. Wings like Suzette. What a crazy imagination that guy Wesley had. And what losses, his mother and ex-wife. A broken heart, he’d written, is the same thing as an open heart, by definition.

  Sometime during the night, in her sleep, she rolled onto her front, her left cheek pressing into the dry soil. She mistook the first vibrations for some kind of dream epiphany, an orgasm of the psyche. But it was the ground beneath her that shook. The earth itself rolled, bucked. She could feel its heat, rhythm, fluidity, as if the planet and she were making love, her skin and belly pressed against the earth’s undulations.

  Lily sat up and looked around. A big orange moon was making its slow lob across the sky. The wind had died and the air was perfectly still. Nothing else seemed changed, at least not up here. Exhausted, Lily lay back down and returned to sleep.

  The whooping birds woke her a while later. They were going crazy with their barking and yapping and howling. She imagined them cowering in confusion for that hour after the earthquake, then letting loose their fear and angst.

  They weren’t birds, of course. She knew that.

  The cities looked nervous and murky, but a strange rusty light tinged the western sky. She counted three plumes of smoke, thin and tentative, twisting upward. She thought she saw fire north of Berkeley.

  Lily retrieved her jug from the tent and drained the remaining water.

  Flames exploded over Richmond, the entire skyline blazing red. Four ear-splitting blasts shot through the airwaves. The Chevron oil refinery was on fire.

  Lily turned in circles, as if there were somewhere to go, until she became dizzy and had to stand still, watching the fires scorch high in the sky. Here, a thousand feet above the igniting city, she might be safe. The first siren pierced the orange dawn.

  Lily sat and drew her knees against her chest. As day broke, more and more pillars of smoke rose, creating another kind of darkness. More sirens tore through the streets. More explosions, in other parts of the urban landscape, burst their hot blue-and-yellow flames. Thick black smoke billowed over all of Richmond.

  Then the wind picked up again. For now just a warm breath, but if it strengthened, the city fires could blow right up the hillsides where the dry vegetation would feed the flames much more readily than the buildings below.

  Lily had to find Vicky. Quickly. They’d have to go east, over the hills. She had to make good decisions. Should she take the tent?

  The sound of bicycle tires skidding down the trail toward her campsite startled Lily to her feet. She glanced around, looking for a weapon. She grabbed a large rock and held it over her shoulder, poised for heaving.

  Riding toward her was a fat boy with black curls cropped close to his head. He wore tan madras shorts and no shirt, his stomach and breasts jiggling as he bounced down the trail. He had a small nylon knapsack on his back. On his feet were the black Air Jordans with sparkly red shoelaces. He tossed the bicycle to the ground, and Lily thought he would tackle her, but he stopped short, ten feet away, his face anguished with the effort to not cry.

  “Annie,” she whispered.

  The child bent over, putting her hands on her knees to catch her breath. Then she did start crying, her back heaving. When she straightened up again, a red mess of acne flaming her face, she shouted, “I didn’t steal your bike!”

  “I thought you had.”

  “Hello? It’s right there!” Annie swung an arm in the direction of the dropped bicycle. “I wasn�
�t going to just leave Binky in the filth. There’re flowers all over up here. I picked a huge clump, all the colors, white and blue and pink and yellow, and I took the bike so I could go fast and get to him before daylight. I sprinkled them on top of him.” Choking sobs jammed up her voice again. She took big shivering breaths. “I thought I’d be back before you even knew I was gone but then I got lost trying to find you. And then I did. Find you. Not you, the tent. Yesterday. But you weren’t here. So I went to the church. And it was closed. Now there’s been another earthquake!”

  Her hair was more hacked than cut, but very short. The tan madras shorts were boys’ shorts.

  “Don’t fucking look at me like that.”

  Lily looked away.

  “Besides, we needed food,” Annie said. She slung the knapsack to the ground and opened the drawstring. She pulled out a bottle of water and handed it to Lily, and then set half a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter on the ground. “So you should probably thank me.”

  Lily drank. When she tried to hand the bottle back, Annie wouldn’t take it. “I have oranges, too. And cookies.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Lily ate two sandwiches, an orange, and half a dozen cookies. Annie watched her eat, her long lashes blinking back more tears.

  “I have to go get my sister,” Lily said. “And you need to go home.”

  “I’m staying with you.” The salty streaks of sweat dried on her soft chest and stomach.

  “Where are your parents?”

  “Dead. Duh.”

  “Do you have a guardian?”

  “Grandma said they deserved it for being stupid enough to join the Army. Now she’s saddled with me.”

  “Grandma sounds like a gem.”

  “I’m on my own.”

  “You’re only, what, sixteen or seventeen years old?”

  “Thirteen.” And then, “I said don’t look at me like that.”