by Summer Wood
It had been a while since she’d visited a church. Not since her mother was alive, bless her tender skinny little soul, and gently herded them all, scrubbed and freshly dressed, out the door on Sunday mornings. We always have time to go to God’s house, in that voice so soft and quietly persuasive no one gave a thought to disagreeing. Even her father went along, his back bent with the weight of hauling in the nets and offloading the catch at the end of each day. He’d wink at Ruthie at the end of the pew, the tallest, the only girl in a sea of small boys. Ruth didn’t mind church. It was quiet in there, and clean, and all they had to do was listen and pray. She’d considered the convent but there were too many things she’d grown to like that weren’t allowed. Her father thought she’d stay home. And she might have, if Elizabeth hadn’t shown up on the front steps of the library that day.
The river was slow this time of year, but Ruth cocked an ear and caught its whisper. It wasn’t that bad a walk, really. Just the breakneck cliffside descent ahead of her which she’d be lucky to survive and luckier still to manage to haul her sorry butt up the face of when she was heading home. She should have just asked the boy again. Tickled him until he spit it out, or been content to stumble forward in darkness. Ha! As if there were any chance that he could keep anything important from her. From Ruth, who knew him better than she knew the nose on her own face. She creaked forward the last few paces until she had a clear view of the river beach. And then she steadied herself on the trunk of a tree that branched sideways before it climbed skyward.
Well. There was her answer.
Ruth slung the satchel from her weary shoulders and eased herself to the ground. The hot August sun baked a sweetness from the dust and pine duff, and a smile yawned across her face. Wide. Gap-toothed and sloppy and quivering and out of her control, and right behind it a clutch of unattended tears shoved and scrambled their way forward.
He was down there, all right. His blond mop shone in the sun and his plaster cast stiffened his leg straight out in front of him while he reclined on the sand, his arms bent sharply at the elbows to cradle his head. Pitched beside him like a loyal dog was a cheap nylon tent, blaze orange, staked and saddlebacked, its snout pointing toward the water. And coming out of the river was a girl. Skinny-dipped and dripping wet and headed right toward him.
Not all people were born into happiness, like Ruth was. Not all people grew up cherished and honored, as she had. Not everybody—not many at all, really—had the luck (what else could you call it? the undeserved blessing) to find the person who made them more. More themselves. More all right in themselves. Through what they shared. But Ruth was lucky. From that very first day, she had Elizabeth.
Not that Elizabeth knew it, then. Elizabeth thought this baby-faced girl—this teenager—on the library steps was no more than a distraction. Well, a sweet distraction. A confection. A surprisingly complex confection, a much richer-than-anticipated dessert, in fact a meal in herself, really, a nutritious, energizing, luscious, yes—and Ruth had her then, and for the rest of Elizabeth’s life Ruth made sure she never went hungry.
This girl down in the river, climbing out of the river, swaying loose-limbed toward Wrecker—she might not be his Elizabeth, but Ruth was certain he had found a girl who was willing to entertain the possibility. The possibility of him. And what more could she wish for him than that? To have the chance to be seen, to be known—he was built for this, this boy, this blessing, this gift, this kid saturated with love. He’d been the apple of someone’s eye. And then he’d been dealt a blow so severe he might have been made cruel by it. All these years Ruth had watched to see which way he would turn and there were times she’d held her heart in her throat, watching his anger explode. He wanted to blow up the world. He wanted to knock it all down, reduce it to smithereens, and he could—with his fists, with a word, with each choice. It was for him to decide. He could throw himself into the sea as she had done. There was no choice but that, really—to throw himself in, into life, and see what became of him.
A peal of laughter sprang up from below and Ruth closed her eyes, yielded them their privacy. With her eyes closed her heart fluttered—a large leap and several smaller ones—and she was flooded without warning with Elizabeth: the color of her skin, the daredevil glint in her eye, her devotion to books and to justice and to Ruth, the way the sunlight fell across her hair when she slept in Sunday mornings. Ruth could hardly bear it. The feel of Lizzie’s hands on Ruth’s hips, coming up behind her at the bathroom sink as she brushed her teeth. The mash of lips, the taste of spearmint and blood where tooth grazed lip. The urgent drop to the rug. The furious reach and grope—still to want, after so many years, to want so fiercely what you deeply have—and then the wave that arched her from the floor and left her sweaty, gasping, newborn.
Ruth waited for her breath to still.
When Elizabeth died Ruth did as she’d desired: she let the funeral men take Lizzie’s body away and deliver her ashes in return. And just as Elizabeth had asked, Ruth had packed them gently in the old car they shared, set them safely, comfortably, on the front seat, propped by pillows—and driven the long distance to the beach they once had loved. She’d parked the car in the lot, left the keys balanced atop a front tire.
Just shake ’em out, Lizzie had instructed, laughing. Just send ’em sailing. That way, wherever you go in this big world, I’ll have already been there. To its beaches, anyway. Waiting for you.
Ruth hadn’t meant to walk so far. She hadn’t thought she’d walk through the night, wait until morning came to sit, weary, on a drift log. Or that she’d remain rooted there until the sun caught hold of the day and burned back the fog. But then she carefully removed the lid of the box, untwisted the tie that held the plastic bag closed, and reached her trembling hand in.
Soft. So soft.
When she finished, her clothes had come off and she had waded belly-deep into the frigid water. She set the box, a merry little boat, upon the swells. And surrendered herself to the waves.
Ruth lay on the bluff that broached the river, now, and felt that day tremble through her. Her hands opened and closed like bivalves on the soft duff. She felt a rumble in her belly and recognized it as laughter. Her own. Soft and quiet, far too still to carry, but joining the laughter below.
When she woke up that day to Willow’s worried face hovering over her, she knew she’d lost her Liz. She knew she was gone. There was no following her. So she gave up then, at that. She gave up everything. Who she’d been. What she’d had. Even what she’d wished for. And then—more than a year later—Wrecker had come, with his face that switched from a fist to a shining star, and let her love him.
Sitting up now, the voices of the children rising from the river below, Ruth felt the chuckles spill painfully from the side of her mouth. Her ribs hurt. Her creaky aching muscles had tuned up their symphony of complaint. It took a ridiculously long time for her to stand up. Good Lord. She would need a week to recover from this crazy idea. If she made it home in one piece. She was still laughing. It made her side hurt worse. But she would never give that up. She would die laughing. It seemed a better way to go, all in all.
They all had secrets at Bow Farm. This was Wrecker’s, and nothing could make her give it up.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The bus squealed to a stop, opened its gassy maw, and belched its passengers onto the pavement.
Lisa Fay stumbled down the steps and took a long, deep breath. Was that what freedom smelled like? The diesel-tinged, soot-soaked air of San Francisco reeked of catastrophe. She swallowed hard. Behind her, passengers jostled for position by the Greyhound’s luggage hatch and clambered about for their bags. They swarmed as one body and moved off in a mass and left her standing there, hardly able to breathe at all.
“This yours?”
The driver offered her a tattered suitcase belted with duct tape. He gripped the bag firmly and avoided her eyes.
She shook her head. Lisa Fay carried everything she owned in a paper shopping b
ag. They’d issued her a tote on discharge but she’d left that behind at a rest stop on the highway in Coalinga. As soon as she found a place to buy new clothes she’d get rid of the ones they’d provided, too. She wanted nothing of theirs.
“Terminal’s that way.” The driver flopped the suitcase on a cart alongside cardboard boxes and stepped briskly from the bus.
Lisa Fay watched his back recede. It was dusky in the parking garage. Motes of dirt rode the stale air and the buses huffed and whined as they eased into their slots and discharged their cargo. They were a clan of dull-witted creatures, and Lisa Fay was seized with the wish to live there among them, lumbering and dispirited, each day’s demands mapped out in advance. The idea of stepping into the light of the city morning paralyzed her. But the bus driver paused with his luggage scow and fixed her with a suspicious squint. She understood. She was not a bus. She was a free woman, and this was no way for a free woman to act. She tightened her grip on the paper handles of her bag and aimed herself toward the door. It opened for her. She stepped into the Transbay Terminal and felt the air whoosh behind her as it shut.
Inside the terminal everyone moved swiftly. Lisa Fay let the energy propel her toward the ticket windows. She had planned it carefully: buy a bus ticket north, finagle a ride west, follow the map Willow had drawn to Meg’s house. There were no buses into the Mattole Valley. They stopped at Garberville and then passed on to Fortuna, Eureka, up into Oregon—as far north as you wanted to go, but if you were headed west then good luck to you. She had a map of the state that showed the area as a hazy green blur. Lisa Fay knew there were roads where Meg lived. Willow had drawn them in, labeled them in her confident hand. But they were too small to show up on the map of the state; they weren’t real enough, she suspected, to show up. That area, that whole knob of land, seemed like a new growth on the body of California, some untendered, nonnegotiable figment of the imagination, risky for visitors and subject to change without notice. She pictured it a Shangri-La that disappeared behind the mists once the rains started and only reemerged when the sun came back and baked it dry. Which is why she should go now, in October, in the dry time.
Or risk losing him for good. That land was so wild, her friend Alma had told her, a person could get lost in those mountains and never get found. Lisa Fay glanced down at the crumpled map she held. The creases were worn white from the hours she’d spent studying it. Her rib cage ached, her bones, those muscles, her heart—Wrecker couldn’t be lost. There were big trees, weren’t there? She calmed herself with that thought. Enormous trees. You can drive a car through one, Alma had told her. If the land could support giant trees surely it could hold on to one small boy. She screwed her courage and approached the ticket window.
“How much to Garberville?” Her voice was a whisper.
The clerk turned to face her. He had kind eyes, loose and watery, behind thick lenses, and a neck that rested in accommodating folds over a tight collar. “Speak up, dear.” He tapped a bulbous device that wormed into his ear canal. “I can barely hear you.”
“Garberville,” she said, louder this time.
He nodded. His eyelids flickered rapidly, almost imperceptibly, but his gaze remained steady on her face. “Twice a day,” he said. “You missed the first one. Next bus leaves at one fifty. Check back for the platform number. How many in your party?”
Her voice was so soft it barely puffed past her lips. “Only me.”
“Three?” He tilted his head to thrust the listening device closer to her.
Lisa Fay shrank back from the window. His eyes were too friendly. The plastic aid was disturbing, and the next bus would not leave until one fifty. It was 1983, she was forty-one years old, and she’d been waiting fifteen long years to see her son. She could make her own decisions, now; wasn’t that true? She could determine for herself who to smile at, how to move in the world, where to rest and when to move again. And still she would have to wait. Fifteen years. One fifty. Five hours. Five hours? Fifteen long years and for the moment she could remember none of it. Her mind was flooded with the image of his face as he had been, and she could barely stand. A small cry escaped her lips.
“Miss?” The clerk’s eyes glistened with concern.
She turned her back on him and fled into the city.
Lisa Fay stood on the sidewalk and let the sunshine strike her eyelids and warm her cheeks. The city noises filled her ears. The city smells traveled in through her nose to reach that part of the brain that forgets nothing.
She’d meant to write a letter. She had started it a thousand times in her head; a dozen times she put pen to paper. Dear Son. And had gotten no further.
She’d written a letter to Meg, a long one, and heartfelt.
Dear Son.
There was so much to tell him.
A paper cup lay overturned in the gutter; a pigeon lit beside it and gave it an idle, exploratory peck. A bus rumbled by and the draft lifted the edge of Lisa Fay’s untucked blouse. The air smelled better out here. There was salt from the bay and a sweet burnt odor from a coffee cart down the block. It was terrifying to be free and terrifying to be alive and look how that pigeon went on pecking, nonchalant, nearly indifferent to the traffic that sped past. Lisa Fay hoisted the weight of her life onto her shoulders and trudged toward the smell of the water. Remove that yoke and she would blow like a piece of trash in the wind.
The bay was still there, dirty and uplifting. The Ferry Building squatted beside the water and suffered its slosh against the dark timbers of its dock. Lisa Fay set her bag onto a concrete bench and eased herself down beside it. There was bustle but no real rush, and she could sit there in the shadow of the elevated freeway and sink into her thoughts. A young cop lounged like a hoodlum against the building’s weathered marble face. He cupped his hands to light a cigarette and caught her eye, and she quickly looked away.
She wanted her son to know his father. But what could she offer him, to make that true? What, to weigh against the absence? Arlyn was big, and strong, and never once in all the time she’d known him had she seen him put his strength to anything but good. Well, or whimsy. He could lift her in one arm, he could hoist her to his shoulder like a circus girl—and they’d laughed, they’d laughed. He had not meant to leave. She was sure of it. Dear Son, she thought. She despaired. Words were small and Arlyn had been a large man, large hearted, and there was no way she could think to tell him that. Lisa Fay unwrapped the remains of a muffin she had purchased at a rest stop. It tasted grainy and dry, peppered with tiny blueberries that lent texture but no taste. She ate a few bites and then carefully rewrapped it for later.
Arlyn loved food. Cabbage and cauliflower mostly, but The Hook had a sweet tooth, and one time he had bought her a steak dinner, enormous, more than she could eat, and for the first time in her life she got up from the table and left something on her plate. Wrecker loved food, too. Did he still? Dear Son, she thought. And then she wrenched her thoughts back to the privacy of her grief. She didn’t know why he left, or where he went. The concrete bench stored the sun’s warmth. It felt good to her when clouds grayed the sky for moments before scudding on.
She glanced around at the solitaries and small groups moving along the waterfront. Ghosts peopled her life. She could be going along with her business and find herself hijacked by memories forcing themselves onto the shapes of strangers. There were too many who ought to have been there but no longer were. Lisa Fay’s parents were dead. Arlyn had disappeared. That hazy shape of a woman waiting a block away for the bus—that was not Belle.
Lisa Fay closed her eyes; felt the sun return from behind the clouds. When she opened her eyes again, the young cop had moved on. The clock by the Ferry Building read 10:15. She had slept a bit and woke anxious and confused. Everything was different, now. Fifteen years since she’d been in San Francisco, and the city she’d known inside and out, up and down, forward and back, had developed yawning chasms between neighborhoods that wouldn’t allow her to traverse them in her mind. She could
walk along the Embarcadero and eventually she would arrive at the ocean; but if she walked in the other direction, would she know where to turn to reach the Greek grocery? The apartment they’d lived in, was it still up that ratty flight of stairs, sunny in the mornings and ripe with the smell of olives floating in their brine beneath? She pictured the park, the sprawling reach of green, the duck pond where Wrecker loved to play. Which streets should she take to reach it? Her mind preserved memories as sharp as shards floating in a damaged geography. Was heaven like this? Was hell?
Belle would know. But Belle was gone.
Lisa Fay stood. She could get to Belle’s flat. She could picture the way. Belle was gone, but if her building was still there it was one part of Wrecker’s history that wouldn’t be lost. Dear Son, she thought, her legs carrying her urgently across the wide boulevard that hugged the waterfront. Do you remember Belle? Lisa Fay’s eyes watered as she recalled Belle’s mottled hands, her sharp wit and the strength of her love. She brushed away her tears and strode on. The ground inclined up and away from the Embarcadero; the streets narrowed, and the people who traveled them kept their heads tucked with the resolve of someplace to go. The shop signs crowded together and shouted their messages in Chinese. On that corner, there—twenty years ago, an old crone had needed help setting up her produce stand and offered a corner of a storeroom for Lisa Fay to sleep in in exchange. Not just the room but the spoils, too, and sometimes a sweaty, crumpled dollar bill pressed into her palm; and when the old lady’s grandson took over her position Lisa Fay faded into the foliage, slept a few nights tucked unseen among tree roots and tall stands of pampas grass. Later, she’d traded those trafficked spots for her cozy camp behind the DeYoung. Lisa Fay sighed and walked on, slower now, and the sun rose higher. She detoured up Vallejo in search of stairs she knew were there and felt the old familiar pull in her calves as her muscles strained to climb the hill. Back then she’d bounded up these slopes; later, with Wrecker tied like a twenty-pound barnacle to her back, she climbed them more cautiously. It winded her, now. She paused at its crest to gaze at the water.