Lily would never know if her words made any difference. Maybe some dream of Vicky’s own, some life narrative, some hormone surge that makes people do extraordinary things, kicked in. In the late afternoon, Vicky supported her broken ribcage against the lip of the cockpit and started to pull out her legs. Lily sat on the rock, leaned forward and wrapped her arms under Vicky’s armpits and pulled. Vicky passed in and out of consciousness. When out, Lily had to hold her, in whatever position, and wait in the barbecue heat of smoke and sun, until she came to again. But each time Vicky did, she kicked her legs and moaned with pain as Lily pulled whatever part she could pull.
Then—and later, Lily wouldn’t be able to recount how exactly—Vicky was draped on the rock. Gulls circled overhead, like she was some fish carcass they were eager to sample. The kayak had gotten away, but thanks to slack tide, it lulled against the rocks just a couple of yards down. Lily left Vicky on the rock and climbed over the boulders to fetch it. She pulled the boat up out the bay and left it cradled between two rocks.
As she returned to Vicky, she heard the high whine of a plane engine. She couldn’t see anything from her vantage on the rocky shore barrier until it was nearly upon them, hurdling down the runway, gathering speed, headed straight their way. The underside of the long fuselage, the jet engines like bulging triceps on the bottoms of the wings, soared just a few yards over their heads. Four sets of black wheels sucked up into the plane’s interior. Slowly the aerial scream faded.
The moment of pure terror ended, but Lily thought she might have permanently lost her hearing. She sat touching her parts—her heart hadn’t ruptured, no skin had been sliced away, and she could in fact still hear—until she realized that Vicky was on the move. The fright must have discharged a massive dose of adrenaline, because Vicky began using her legs and one good arm like a crab, scrabbling herself across the boulders, making almost better time than Lily who followed with four good limbs.
They made the runway. Vicky lurched to her feet, eyes opening and shutting. Lily took her sister’s good arm and wrapped it around her own neck. She grabbed the back of Vicky’s jeans, like a mother cat with a kitten, and began to haul her along.
This is the moment Lily would remember best: her limping, saltwater sundried on her skin and, for all she knew, bits of seaweed in her hair; Vicky ambulating, eyes rolling; both of them advancing across the tarmac. For those few moments, the entire world seemed to hold still.
The calm, if you could call it that, was soon disturbed by the sound of another engine, this time that of an SUV. It roared down the runway as if the plan was to simply mow them down. Lily and Vicky both dropped onto the tarmac, all the way down on their stomachs, animals in submission.
The SUV stopped a few feet in front of them and two men jumped out of the truck and drew guns. Both were white, young, and quite ready to shoot.
Slowly, the absurdity of the threat dawned on the two guards. They weren’t facing machine-gun-toting operatives spouting angry rhetoric or shouting demands. Instead, they had two unarmed women on their stomachs, whimpering. One was sunburnt, skinny, in a bloody and shredded T-shirt, visibly wasted. The other was barely conscious and broken in several places. The men lowered their guns.
The curly-headed one kept his face hard and expressionless, but Lily saw a bit of concern soften the face of the towheaded one.
“How the hell?” the latter asked.
“I paddled our kayak.” Lily reached into the neck of her T-shirt and they both raised their guns again. Curly-head spread his legs and held his gun with both hands. Lily pulled the soaked folded sheet of paper and driver’s license out of her bra.
“San Francisco/Omaha. A fully paid open ticket for my sister, Lily Jones. She has a broken arm and some broken ribs. A bad cut on her face. I need to put her on a plane.”
Towhead glanced at his colleague, who scowled and said, “You can’t do that.”
“Do what?” Lily asked.
The man waved his gun, pointing behind her, over her head. He didn’t know what she’d done. But she did. She’d survived an earthquake, paddled across the bay with an unconscious body in a double kayak, scaled the rock barrier herself, and somehow motivated her sister to do the same. She had to seize the uncanny moment, this window of humanity, before procedures and rules slammed into place.
“The East Bay is on fire,” she said. “The water mains are out. I have a plane ticket, all paid for. All I want is to put my sister on a plane.”
“Can she walk?” Towhead asked.
“Yes. She can walk. Get up, Vicky.”
“You said ‘Lily,’” Curly-head said.
“Get up, Lily,” Lily said.
Towhead came over to help Lily lift her.
“What are you doing?” Curly-head asked his partner. “We can’t do this.”
Lily refrained from asking him what he thought the alternative was. Shoot them dead and throw them to the gulls?
She and Towhead fitted Vicky into the back of the SUV. She gave him the wet piece of paper with the confirmation code and her driver’s license.
“We have to arrest her. But at least she’ll get her arm set and her face stitched.”
“Thank you,” Lily said.
Curly-head reached for Lily’s arm, and she shook him off.
“You’re under arrest.”
“I’m leaving now.” She walked backward. “There’s no real point in arresting me. I’m leaving. I’m unarmed. I’m no threat to anybody. I probably haven’t even broken any law. Besides, I’m guessing you have your hands full with a whole lot of more important stuff.”
“Stop,” he said. “You can’t just walk onto the tarmac of an international airport.”
“I’m leaving,” Lily said again. She’d backed up enough so that the lowering sun shined right in her face. She couldn’t see the two security guards at all, just a bright yellow burst of light. She could only imagine what she looked like to them. Her thin hair was plastered to her head. The white serrated scar on her chin would be exaggerated by the surrounding sunburn. Her T-shirt and pants hung loosely, blotched with watery bloodstains. Skinny and ragged. Not even a little bit fierce. A woman stripped down to biology. Just another animal trying to survive.
And they were just men. They ate, shat, and made love. They didn’t have a single reason in the world to shoot or detain her. Lily turned her back and ran. She pounded across the tarmac, the smoky air burning her lungs, her ankles shrieking with pain, her stomach hollow with hunger. She leapt over the shore rocks and shoved the kayak into the water. She splashed after it, dunking all the way under, gasping as she surfaced, and clutched the combing of the cockpit. It took her half a dozen tries to heave herself out of the numbingly cold water and onto the top of the boat, but she managed at last and threw herself into the rear cockpit. Without Vicky’s weight in the other one, the bow of the kayak bobbled out of the water, making steering difficult. But she paddled as if her life depended on it, which it did.
Once she felt reasonably certain the security guards weren’t going to shoot her, she laid the paddle across the deck and rested. Annie’s orange had rolled to the back of the kayak interior and it took enormous effort to retrieve it, but she did, as much for the comfort of having Annie’s gift as for the sustenance of the fruit.
She bit into the first section, and the bright sweet citrus juice spilled across her tongue. The taste matched the color of the sky reflected on the bay. Lily finished the orange, secured the paddle by sliding it inside the kayak, and then closed her eyes to nap.
40
Lily guessed it to be at least six o’clock in the evening when she awoke. It would be dark in a couple of hours. The tide must have turned because she was drifting north. Lily withdrew the paddle from the cockpit and began paddling.
She paddled and paddled, resting when she could no longer pull another load of water. By now, the tide ripped
out the gate at maximum ebb. This helped for as long as the San Francisco peninsula blocked her to the west, but when she reached the broken expanse of the Bay Bridge, the tide wanted to suck her west and out the gate. Her arms were jelly. Even the ache was gone. They were just numb and limp. But with the strength of the current, she couldn’t afford to rest for even a second. Rather than angling for Berkeley, she headed directly across the bay, going for the Oakland harbor, where she hoped she could ride a countercurrent close to shore.
In the middle of this most strenuous paddling of the entire day, someone finally spotted her. The man piloting a Chris-Craft motored over and drew up alongside.
“Come on board,” he called out. “Grab the ladder.”
People packed the deck of the small boat, their faces gyrating with panic. Lily didn’t know a lot about boats, but even she could see that the Chris-Craft was too small to safely navigate out the Golden Gate and into the open ocean, especially with this heavy of a load. They were probably headed south, from where she’d just come, to disembark in Newark or Redwood City.
Lily shook her head.
The man ignored her refusal and tossed a white lifebuoy, holding onto his end of the rope. Lily didn’t have the words, hardly even the voice, to say that she wasn’t climbing on board the Chris-Craft, motoring south with this group of strangers, stepping on land too many miles away from anything she cared about.
She let the lifebuoy flop into the water. She dug in her paddle and propelled herself away from the boat.
“It’ll be dark momentarily!” the captain yelled to her retreating back. “You can’t just float out here in a kayak all night!” With that, he pulled up alongside her a second time.
“I need to get back to Berkeley,” she told him, her tongue so dry and her thirst so great that she could hardly understand her own words. “Can you drop me there?”
“Honey, Berkeley is ruined. The lucky ones are leaving Berkeley.”
“She isn’t making sense,” a woman on board said. “We need to just haul her up and get going.”
“You can’t haul someone onto a boat who doesn’t want to get on it,” the captain said. Then back to Lily, “Come on, honey. Grab the ladder.”
“The tide’s gonna take her out the gate,” another passenger observed.
“Berkeley,” Lily said to the boatload of refugees, jutting her chin toward the east. Then she paddled away in earnest, not looking back. The motorboat didn’t pull up alongside her a third time, and she didn’t watch its retreat, but she heard its engine fading to the south.
Though the smoke had thinned, what remained saturated the colors of dusk. The sun sank into the sea, the struts of the Golden Gate Bridge a blurry purple against the creamed crimson sky. Lily tried to imagine what Suzette would look like flying over the bridge.
For the longest while, Lily paddled in place, moving neither forward nor backward, the current equal to her effort. For five minutes? For an hour? She didn’t know. She maintained a stasis of survival: here, now, alive. Behind her, the wide Pacific Ocean, miles deep, deathly cold, raucous with waves. Ahead of her, the possibility of drinking water and companionship. Overhead, the sky cradled a half-moon, rocking, humming, glowing, as if reminding Lily of her promise.
Then, as the last bit of day blackened into night, a breeze blew in off the ocean. It squeezed between the peninsulas and shoved Lily’s kayak toward the eastern shore of the bay. If she were ever to believe in God, this would be the moment to do so. It was as if someone’s will moved her.
She knew that this new wind could also fuel the fires. But for now, the shocked geometry of the city looked quiet, deserted, near dead. Nothing moved. In the stillness, she could practically see night fall. Having made it to the far side, Lily hugged the shoreline and paddled toward Berkeley.
The breeze quickened and cooled. She thought she imagined the first sign of dampness, just a cool softness in her nostrils, but soon tiny droplets wetted her forearm hairs. She licked them. Now a mist moistened her face, too.
Lily paddled in front of the Berkeley Marina breakwater and into the harbor mouth. The moonlight made a path of sparkles and she followed it to the black shapes of the docks and the wide opening where she found a paved boat launch. As the bottom of the kayak scraped against the floor of the inclined ramp, Lily laughed out loud at Vicky’s invention. Her land-worthy boat was like the technological equivalent of the first sea creatures who grew legs and crawled onto land. Lily felt like one of those original creatures herself. Her legs buckled as she took her first steps.
Lily rolled the kayak to the top of the ramp so that it wouldn’t get washed away with the next tide. Someone else might be able to use it. The water fountain at the edge of the marina parking lot worked! Lily drank. Then she said goodbye to her most worthy vessel and began to walk.
The cool drizzle bathed the smoky air. Lily walked up the middle of the dark and deserted streets, navigating around rubble, tripping on debris. She passed piles of embers from fires that had burned earlier in the day. These, along with the moonlight, helped light her way. She stopped when she got to what remained of City Hall, afraid to go the rest of the way. Maybe this was what madness felt like: forward motion directed by the finest filament of hope, surrounded by a firestorm of fear and doubt; action based on a wild departure from the odds. She was at least three hours late.
As the marine layer, a thick bank of fog, rolled eastward, the air got cooler and wetter. Lily wanted another nap. Why not? Why not lie down right here in the field where she and Travis had made love and sleep a bit? She could put off finding out what remained for her.
Sleep or run, that was the choice. Lily ran. She turned right on Milvia Street and then left on Kittredge, her eyes well adjusted to the urban night. The library hulked grandly as ever, housing all the wisdom people had amassed over the centuries. Parked in front, at the top of the stairs leading down to the front door, was the dark shape of a motorcycle, and next to it, on the ground, the lean skeleton of a bicycle. Sitting on the stairs in front of the library were the dark silhouettes of Wesley and Annie.
41
No one hugged or even spoke for several long moments. Wesley stared, that gaze of his simultaneously hesitant and intense, as if he wanted the relief of looking away but couldn’t do so. He wore his usual white T-shirt, black jeans, and worn-out dress shoes, all damp from the drizzling rain. His black leather jacket lay on the cement next to the bike.
“He said three can fit on the motorcycle,” Annie announced loudly, as if Lily and Wesley might otherwise jump on the Harley and leave her alone in the dark on the library steps. She still wore the Air Jordans and her madras shorts, and sometime during the day she’d acquired a zippered warm-up jacket with dark stripes down the arms.
“You’re here,” Lily said.
“Duh,” Annie said.
“We should go,” Wesley said.
Lily hugged Annie and then put a hand on Wesley’s arm. He started to step back, as if bearing touch was difficult, but stopped himself. She wanted to tell him how thinking about Suzette had helped.
“We saved this for you.” Annie produced a hunk of cheese and a box of crackers. They had water, too, and a bag of raisins. Lily stared at the food, evidence of their trust, afraid that if she reached for it, the mirage would evaporate.
“Did you get Vicky on a plane?” Annie asked.
Lily wanted to eat, not talk, and anyway, that was a story, not an answer, and so she merely nodded. She bit into the cheese hunk. The sharp, creamy moldiness punched her taste buds.
“Hurry up and eat,” Annie said. “We need to get out of here. Here’s your backpack.”
Lily sat on the step and ate her supper. The food strengthened everything. She thought she could feel the calories course down her arms and legs, motivate her fingers and toes. “Okay. Let’s go.”
“Up and over the hills?” Wesley asked.
“Can we do one thing first? I need to swing by the church. It’s just a few blocks away.”
“Hello?” Annie said. “Excuse me? We’ve been like waiting here for hours, literally.”
“I know,” Lily said. “It’ll just take a minute.”
“We have to go,” Wesley said, climbing on the bike and starting the engine. Soft, fine raindrops glistened in the headlight’s yellow beam. He opened the throttle and motioned for Annie to get on, which she did, scooting to the very back of the white leather seat. Both of them looked at Lily. Annie patted the thin space between their two bodies where they expected her to squeeze in. But Lily picked the bicycle up off the cement. “Please,” she said, even though she knew they couldn’t hear her over the motorcycle’s engine. She took off pedaling toward Trinity Church.
Lily dropped the bike in the church parking lot. The community room door was locked, and so she ran around the block, trying all the other doors to the church. She found a corner entrance completely blackened by fire. The charred stench let her know the fire hadn’t been out for long. Lily approached slowly, holding her hands out to feel for hot spots. She heard the rumbling purr of the Harley rolling slowly up the street behind her, and she glanced back at the pair of them, her follow team.
Afraid to touch the brass doorknob, Lily kicked at the burnt door and it crumbled.
“Be careful,” Wesley shouted.
“Kalisha!” Lily hollered into the hole she’d made.
She kicked out an opening big enough to step through and went in. She moved slowly, checking the walls for heat, but luckily the fire hadn’t penetrated past this corner entrance. She heard Wesley and Annie at the door behind her, and then a moment later felt the child’s hand on her back.
She had so little to go on. The way, when she’d asked, Kalisha had looked briefly over her shoulder toward the interior of the church. The way Lily had never seen her leave the building after work. The place was a maze of hallways and classrooms, all dark.
The Evolution of Love Page 26