The Evolution of Love

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  Her arms throbbed from hauling the boat. They stopped often so she could right Vicky’s body or drip water into her mouth. At one stop, Annie peeled an orange and squeezed juice onto Vicky’s tongue. At last they reached the end of Wildcat Canyon Road and the top of Spruce Street. The route slid downhill from there, all the way to the bay. They sat on a curb to rest and Lily made peanut butter sandwiches, spreading with her finger. They filled their water bottles from someone’s functional lawn spigot. Vicky hadn’t been conscious since they’d started rolling, but part of Lily was glad for that. The pain would be more than anyone should endure.

  “I can help pull her,” Annie said again.

  Lily considered the offer, but Annie looked worn out, and they had a long way yet to go. “You stay on the bike. From here, gravity will do most of the work. I’ll just need to control the speed and direction of the kayak.”

  “Who’s Travis?” Annie asked as they set off again.

  “A man who’s lost his way.”

  “Did he tell those guys to beat up Vicky?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Are you delusional?”

  “No.”

  “A woman who’s lost her way?”

  Lily laughed. “I don’t think I’m lost. Not yet, anyway.”

  “You’re not.”

  Annie’s confidence in her was disarming.

  “You know exactly where you’re going,” Annie said.

  That wasn’t true, obviously, but she didn’t need to contradict the kid.

  As they dropped in elevation, the smoke thickened. Soon Lily’s eyes burned and tears streamed down all their faces, even Vicky’s. They encountered more and more people, all of whom headed in the opposite direction, up the hill, mostly on foot but a few crawling along in cars, and so, although they got a lot of strange looks, they didn’t run into any obstacles. No one cared to get ahead of anyone advancing toward the fires and rubble of the wrecked city. At least five people told them that the hospital had closed down again, and that the Red Cross station had just one doctor and dozens of patients waiting. One man said he had room for another passenger in his car. Lily urged Annie to go, but she refused. She might have given him Vicky, but Lily knew her sister wouldn’t be a priority for the people in that car. They might leave her beside the road if she got in the way of their needs.

  Once they reached the flatter part of the city, none of the outdoor spigots worked. More water mains must have ruptured. Lily rationed her sips from the water bottle. The pain and exhaustion—in her feet, eyes, arms, throat—numbed everything. She just wanted to sit down and quit. Her plan was pure lunacy, and there were lots of missing pieces to it. Meanwhile, the girl who loved to complain about everything, from the amount of salt in a casserole to the color of paint on the community room walls, coasted along stoically. Lily guessed that adversity was Annie’s natural medium.

  Halfway down Cedar Street, the smoke became so thick she couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead of her. A block later, they came to an invisible wall of heat. It felt as if, should they take another step forward, their eyebrows and lashes would singe right off their faces. A hot waft of air pushed a hole through the smoke and they caught a brief glimpse of the fire, a two-story home engulfed in flames fifty feet high. Annie and Lily turned left, onto a side street heading south, and continued in that direction until the heat lessened and they could turn west again. Lily kept trying the taps of people’s outdoor spigots, but none worked. With the water mains out, the fire department would need to rely on much slower backup systems that siphoned water from the bay. She heard, but couldn’t see, helicopters.

  Late in the morning, having dodged two more house fires, and with Lily limping, they crossed over Frontage Road and arrived at the edge of the bay. The salty water lay motionless in its basin. The tall grasses stood hearty in the caked shoreline mud. There was no wind.

  Lily half expected the water to be hot, like the air, and felt a surge of pleasure at the icy splash on her face. She rinsed out her bloody T-shirt and carried it, dripping with cold saltwater, to wash Vicky’s wound. Her moan was the most welcome sound she’d ever heard. Still alive.

  The bay was balefully quiet. Even the community living on the flotilla of sailboats had vanished. Would there be a rescue effort this time? No one knew for sure how many people remained in the East Bay. And anyway, maybe today’s shaker only ranked as an aftershock. For the original one, a month ago, hundreds of people had walked down to the water’s edge, some jumping in and swimming to the fleets of volunteers who patrolled the coast looking for stranded people. If any vessels searched the shorelines this morning, Lily couldn’t see them. Surely the San Francisco ferry fleet would be dispatched soon.

  But Lily hadn’t come this far to sit and wait. She strained her eyes to look southwest through the smoky air, then she looked back over her shoulder at her unconscious sister. She had a kayak, she had a plane ticket, and the airport lurked just over there, across that big body of water. Lily knew her idea was preposterous. But what was the alternative? The trick was to act rather than think.

  Lily walked back through the tall grasses to where her companions waited. She put a hand on the top of Annie’s curly head. “Listen to me.”

  “I’ll help.”

  “This bicycle is your safety. You can ride away from a fire faster than you can walk or run. Whatever you do, don’t lose the bicycle.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “I’ll be back,” Lily said, not breaking eye contact, wondering how she could possibly make such a promise. Then she said the words. “I promise.”

  Annie wiped the sweat off her face with the back of her arm. The nylon knapsack stuck to her shirtless back and perspiration soaked her madras shorts.

  “You know where the library is, right?”

  “But I’m coming with you.”

  “I’m taking Vicky across the bay. To the airport.”

  Her big eyes widened with an intense emotion Lily couldn’t read: Fear? Anger? Admiration? Lily wanted to scream with the pressure of it. She hadn’t asked for this child’s tenacious hold on her.

  “It’s her only chance,” Lily said.

  Now Annie narrowed her eyes and screwed up her mouth.

  “Right here, by the water, might be the safest place for now.” Lily glanced behind Annie, up at the city, unsure.

  “I can’t swim,” Annie said.

  “It’s okay. The water is too cold, anyway. But you could stand in it, up to your knees or something, if you had to, right?”

  Lily waited, but Annie didn’t acknowledge the question.

  “I don’t know how long this will take me. I also don’t know if I can get back to this exact spot on the shore. You need to go where it’s safe, and you’re going to have to make that judgment. Okay? You have the bike. Whatever you do, don’t lose it. Go anywhere you need to go to be safe.” Lily gripped her soft shoulders too forcefully. “But look at me, Annie! Listen. If you can, meet me at the downtown library this evening at seven thirty.”

  Lily’s stomach wrenched at the sight of the girl’s trust. She’d done nothing to deserve it. Furthermore, she had no idea if she’d survive the paddle, or if she’d ever make it back to this side of the bay. She knew that if she did in fact get to San Francisco, she should stay there and save herself. She should have made the girl get in the car with that family who offered to take her.

  Annie sloughed off her knapsack and dug inside. She held out the last orange. Lily hesitated, but took it. Then she swung off her own pack. She found a pen and the crumbled piece of eucalyptus bark in an inside pocket. She wrote “I love you” on the intact portion of the bark and stuffed it back in the pack, not knowing who the recipient of the message was supposed to be but needing to say it to someone. Lily then shoved her driver’s license and the folded sheet of paper with the flight confirmation code in h
er bra. She tossed the orange and her water bottle in the kayak. She handed the pack to Annie. “Keep this for me.”

  Annie clutched the pack to her chest.

  “Don’t lose the bike,” Lily said sternly, like some suburban mother on the back porch as her child headed out to play.

  She lugged the kayak, with the dead weight of Vicky inside, through the grasses and over the humped dry mud. The weeds wrapped around the in-line skate wheels, preventing them from rolling and making this last pull grueling. As Lily yanked the boat, hauling it one jerky foot at a time, Vicky yelped in pain. Good, Lily thought, good.

  At last the stern end of the kayak slipped into the water. Lily pushed the rest of the boat in while keeping hold of the bow handle. “Okay,” she said out loud. “Okay.” Keeping her hands on the boat’s deck, she waded out to the rear cockpit. Her feet sank up to her ankles in the mud and for a moment she thought she might not make it into the boat. She’d slowly sink into the bay, sucked to her death by mud, while her sister drifted under the hot sun, baking to death.

  Lily threw her body across the deck of the kayak and kicked backward with her left foot. It popped out of the mud. She did the same with her right foot. The boat tipped onto its side as she slid her first leg into the cockpit, nearly capsizing, but she shifted her weight and angled in the other leg. She wrangled the paddle out of the cockpit and gripped the shaft in both hands, holding it aloft. She let herself float for a moment, catching her breath. A kayak, she remembered Vicky saying, is the perfect aquatic machine. It was true. The way the cold saltwater cradled the sleek vessel, accepting its weight, relieved her tremendously. The pointed ends and slender body would slice right through the bay. Lily took a deep breath and sank a blade into the water. The boat slid forward. She managed a stroke on the other side, and then again on the right, until she achieved a rhythmic paddling.

  Before pivoting in the seat to look behind herself, Lily waited until she thought she wouldn’t be able to see her anymore through the smoke, but she could see her. Annie sat on the bicycle, faced forward, eyes trained on Lily as she slipped away.

  Lily passed under the Bay Bridge, riding a powerful incoming tide. Seawater gushed in the Golden Gate, squeezing through that small opening with such force that once it got released into the bay, it flooded to the north and south ends. She needed only guide the boat’s bow toward South San Francisco and the tide would sweep her, with Vicky flopped in the forward cockpit, to the airport.

  She ought to have been very afraid. Instead, a humming boldness buoyed her. Her arms no longer hurt. She felt downright strong. She paddled with the current and talked to Vicky. She talked nonstop, hoping her voice would keep her sister’s brain firing. She told her all the stories in Wesley’s two blogs. She told her about Binky in the dumpster. She told her about Sal’s remaining two hyenas and the possibility of their changing the entire course of evolution on the North American continent. She told Vicky that human evolution was about choice, selection, and how Vicky needed to select Sal, even if they couldn’t change anything whatsoever in the course of evolution, on this continent or on any other one.

  When the sun hovered directly overhead, Lily saw a small armada of rescue boats enter the bay through the Golden Gate. There was no way she could paddle back, against the current, toward them. She half-heartedly waved her paddle in the air, but they were a good five miles off and no doubt searching the eastern shoreline, not the middle of the bay where she whizzed along with her drooped human load. She needed to stay focused on her plan. If they spied her and had the means to take Vicky to a hospital, that would be good. But she had no flares or any other way of getting their attention.

  So Lily kept paddling and kept talking.

  “I suppose,” she said after she’d exhausted every other topic she could think of, “we need to talk about Travis.”

  She let a few moments of silence pass, as if she were listening to Vicky’s response.

  “Yes,” she said, as if there had been one. “I can’t deny that he sustained me for many years. Just letters. Thin pieces of paper with words on them. I let his stories nourish me. Ha!” Lily laughed hoarsely, inhaling the smoky white air. “That reminds me of something Wesley wrote. You don’t know Wesley. I don’t know Wesley. But that’s never stopped me, has it? Wesley said that he likes stories—he used the word “narratives”—that move into the future. Maybe he’s talking about momentum. I got some of that going now, don’t I?”

  Lily reached the paddle forward and tried to tap her sister’s shoulder, but the weight of the blade on the end of the shaft slipped and she bonked Vicky on the head.

  “Oh, shit. I’m sorry! Are you okay?”

  She was gratified by a moan.

  “Anyway,” Lily gulped forward. She talked about Louise, Travis’s girlfriend, going to the Congo to bring him home, and her ultimatum in Namibia; about his being in love with Renée; Yannick’s distrust; and the last bonobo trader. She moved on to how he came to Berkeley to take cover, and to recover, and how the apartment building collapsed on his lover with the mirrored Moroccan slippers. Lily took extra care with the narratives about her own relationship to Travis. She skipped nothing: the candlelit Craftsman bungalow, sex in the tall grasses, the muddy banks of the San Pablo reservoir.

  “I’m almost glad he lied about being a university researcher. Because the story of the bonobos is my favorite story of all, the most truthful, the most hopeful. I’m glad to unlink Travis Grayson from them. They’re mine now. Separate from him. My own. He lied about himself but he hadn’t lied about the apes.

  “I guess I’ll never know if he told those men to hurt you. But I don’t think so. Not directly. He wouldn’t have. What I do know, though, is that at some point he started to hate. Hatred is the most contagious substance on earth. And yeah, Vicky, it is a substance. I saw it knotted in his muscled back as he heaved that garbage bin through an innocent shop owner’s window. It had begun to flow like a stream of venom in his voice. A person can be the source of violence without ever bloodying his own hands.”

  Vicky sagged in the front cockpit of the kayak like a giant rag doll. Talking and paddling were the only things Lily could think to do, so she kept them up steadily, even as her tongue became a dry stump of wood.

  It must have been about two in the afternoon—the hazy sun tilted west—when she saw the runways extending straight to the edge of the bay. She drew on reserves of physical and mental strength she didn’t know she possessed to paddle the kayak the last mile, pulling right up to the jagged rocks protecting that stretch of the shore.

  She found nowhere to land the boat. That was the point of the border of giant rocks, of course—to keep terrorists, interlopers, and criminals out. Lily paddled a hundred yards in each direction, looking for an opening, maybe a place where the earthquake and aftershocks had shaken some of the boulders out of place, making a tiny harbor.

  She found only deep water sloshing against impossibly sharp rocks.

  The smoke-choked sunlight sat heavy on the bay. Vicky began moaning, a nonstop symphony of low, guttural vocalizations.

  “Now you want to talk,” Lily said.

  A seagull landed on one of the nearby black boulders, lifted its tail feathers, and squirted out a stream of white shit. Lightened, it bent its scaly stalks of legs and pushed off, wings out, and sailed away. Lily thought of Wesley’s character Suzette. Wings would come in handy.

  Vicky’s garble began to sound like words.

  There. A flattish rock. Don’t think, act. It had gotten her this far.

  Lily pulled herself out of the cockpit and slid into the deadly cold water. She worked her way around to the bow of the boat and took hold of the handle. By then they’d drifted several yards away from the flattish rock. She held onto the boat and tried to kick, but the cold already had numbed her legs. The chill reached for her core, pulled hard on her torso, and she struggled to keep her chin up a
bove the waterline.

  “Yeah,” Vicky said. Distinctly, she made that affirmative sound, kind of shouting it as if Lily had just sung a particularly good riff.

  She ordered her brain to order her legs to kick, her one arm to stroke. It was like writing a command in longhand and sending a runner to deliver it. She could see that her arm splashed through the water. Her legs must have been kicking, too, because she moved toward the flattish rock, although from here, at the surface of the water, it didn’t look flat at all. Still holding the kayak handle with her left hand, Lily threw her right arm over the hump of the rock and pulled herself up onto it, the crags tearing the bare flesh of her arm and ripping through her T-shirt, cutting into her belly. She flipped over, onto her butt, pulled the kayak alongside her rock, and leaned forward. She could touch Vicky’s face. She slapped it.

  “Come on.” Another slap.

  “Yeah,” Vicky said again. And maybe, “Where are we?”

  “Your legs are fine. You have to use them now.”

  Vicky’s eyes opened, rolled back, and then closed again. Lily kept talking. She used Sal’s name, conjured her bright hair and toothy smile, her shout-laugh and bawdy sense of humor, her deep affection for one of the planet’s most vicious animals, not to mention for Vicky herself, and her high-stakes play with the biosphere. Lily may have gotten a smile somewhere in that story, so she upped the ante, appealing to her sister’s well-developed prurient side, trying to conjure a verbal display of all the women she hadn’t yet experienced but could if she only got herself out of that kayak. She talked about all the good wines Vicky had yet to drink, the electronic opportunities as yet unexplored. Lily sat on that painfully bumpy rock for over an hour trying to talk her sister into consciousness. Vicky, with her broken arm and ribs and smashed face, had to not just get out of the kayak—she had to climb up these rocks to the runway.