Whereas I—
—I didn't want to think about that right then. I picked up my bags and made my way down to the car.
Odd as it might sound, I almost enjoyed the drive. Because I was able to get on the road around one o’clock, I made it across the San Fernando Valley and out to the coast before the afternoon traffic began to pick up. The Pacific Ocean gleamed a deep sapphire off to my left as I headed north. The hills were a warm dun color, broken up by the dull olive of California live oaks, and although the day was mild and warm, it felt somehow autumnal. Maybe it was just the mellow, golden quality of light that fell around me. I didn’t know for sure; I only knew that as I put more miles between Los Angeles and myself, I began to feel slightly more at peace.
Oh, it hurt. I knew I’d never forget the cold, flat tone in Pieter’s voice as he told me he no longer required my services. Nor would I ever forget the way he’d refused to meet my eyes. Maybe that refusal had given me false hope. If he hadn’t cared at all, would he have been so evasive?
Impossible to say. I could be second-guessing his reactions, trying to read positives where there were none. A lit professor I’d had in college once argued that hope was the very worst of the pestilences contained in Pandora’s box, since hope made us stupid humans push on when common sense would have otherwise told us all options had failed. I didn’t know if I was quite that cynical yet, but for the first time I thought I saw his point.
I stopped in San Luis Obispo at a fast food restaurant to grab a burger and an iced tea and use the restroom. After that I pushed forward. I probably drove too fast on the narrow, winding highway north of the town, but the C-class seemed to enjoy the challenging road. Poor thing was probably glad of a real highway instead of the surface streets around Glendale.
I was fairly certain I’d make it to Berkeley before nightfall, but I didn’t want to press my luck. Navigating an unknown town in full dark was no fun; I’d arrived in L.A. at around six o’clock on a rainy January night, and the experience had been so daunting I’d almost turned my car around and headed back to Billings. At least my destination now was Berkeley and not San Francisco itself. I’d heard horror stories about driving in the city by the Bay and had no real desire to find out whether they were true or not.
The sun had started to dip toward the horizon when I hit Berkeley’s city limits, but there was still plenty of light to guide me toward my destination. Things had been a little dicey as I left the 101 to make my way along the 880 following the eastern shore of the San Francisco Bay. It felt as if I were going in the wrong direction, even though the signs told me I was headed the right way. I still managed to get off the freeway at the correct point and maneuver through Berkeley to the quiet neighborhood north of the university where my brother made his home.
It felt very different from Southern California. The houses were older, for one thing—the only other place I’d seen that many vintage homes clustered together was in certain sections of Pasadena. People up here didn’t seem quite as obsessed with having the newest and shiniest. I saw a lot of older Volvos and battered Land Rovers interspersed with the odd Prius or other hybrid. One ancient Mercedes sedan bore several bumper stickers proclaiming it to be powered by used cooking oil. Other bumper stickers trumpeted various Democratic candidates from elections spanning the past twenty years or announced the cars’ owners as supporters of Greenpeace or PETA. You didn’t see as many bumper stickers in L.A. Most likely people didn’t want to mess up their new cars.
Alex’s house was a big brown Craftsman located on an equally large corner lot. Thank God there was an open space along the curb in front. I pulled in gratefully and then turned off the engine. The C-class had performed like a trooper all the way here, but I had to think it was probably as glad as I was that we’d reached our destination.
Since I didn’t have much luggage, I pulled it out of the trunk and brought it along with me to the front door. Alex hadn’t sounded as if he was totally overjoyed to have me invading his space. Asking him to do porter duty would just be adding insult to injury.
I rang the doorbell. I’d called Alex as I was leaving San Jose’s city limits just to let him know I was about an hour away, so I knew my arrival wouldn’t be a complete surprise.
After a few seconds, he opened the door. It had been a while since I’d seen my brother, and I’d almost forgotten how tall he was, and how striking the contrast between his cloudy gray eyes and his dark hair. He was the only one in the family who’d gotten my mother’s eyes. I’d been wildly jealous back before I realized it was pretty silly to be envious of an accident of genetics.
An amazing smell drifted out of the house as he opened the door. The burger I’d eaten was suddenly a long-distant memory. My stomach growled.
If Alex heard it, he had the good sense to remain quiet. Instead he reached out and took the bags from me. “Come on in.”
I stepped inside. A staircase that made an L-bend and then headed upstairs was directly in front of me. The place felt dark, probably because of the wainscoting that covered half the walls. A table lamp with a mica shade cast a warm amber glow into the entry. Even in the hallway there were bookcases. I could also see them lining the walls of the rooms to either side, which looked like the living room and the dining room.
“I’ll give you the tour in a bit,” he said. “Let’s get these in your room first.”
So I followed him upstairs to a bedroom at the front of the house. It had beveled glass windows that let in an amazing view of the sun as it began to dip behind San Francisco Bay. The furniture was simple but neat. I couldn’t really identify the period and supposed it didn’t matter that much.
Pieter would know.
The thought made my throat tighten for a few seconds, and I took a deep breath.
“It’s great, Alex,” I said. “Thank you for letting me crash here.”
“You going to tell me what this is all about?”
I forced a wan smile. “Later.”
He gave me an unreadable look. Was it of concern? I’d noticed an odd hesitancy in his voice as we’d spoken on the phone earlier, but I’d just chalked it up to my own nerves.
“Well, I’ll let you in on one of my secrets,” he said. “Maybe then you’ll feel up to spilling yours.”
After that remark he went back out to the hall and then down the stairs, with me trailing in his wake. I would have said he wasn’t the type to keep secrets, but actually, Berkeley had been a huge one back in the day. He hadn’t even told our parents he was applying, probably because he knew our mother would freak out about her baby boy heading off to the West Coast at barely sixteen. She’d been convinced he was going to try for Northwestern. Even when faced with the fait accompli of his acceptance—with full scholarships—she’d continued to protest that going to Berkeley was silly and that there were plenty of good schools much closer. Luckily Alex had been better about sticking to his guns regarding his educational choices than I ever was.
Even though that particular explosion had taken place when I was only ten, I still remembered it clearly. I didn’t know why Alex had felt the need to keep secrets from me—I hadn’t inherited our mother’s tendency to go nuclear, and I wouldn’t have gone blabbing to her the way Ellen might have.
He headed toward the rear of the house to the kitchen. That amazing smell just got stronger. “You really didn’t have to cook for me—” I began.
“Joyce, she’s here,” Alex said, cutting me off.
A pretty Asian woman turned away from the stove. I guessed she was around Alex’s age, maybe a few years younger. Her black hair was caught up messily in a clip, but it somehow managed to look elegant instead of disheveled. She smiled at me. “Hi, Katherine. Your timing is perfect—dinner should be ready in a few minutes.”
“Uh, hi, Joyce,” I managed, then shot an accusing look at Alex. So she was his big secret? And here I’d been thinking he was gay. “Everything smells great,” I went on. I didn’t want my brother to think he’d gotten o
ne over on me. “Do you need any help?”
She waved a hand. “No, I’ll get Alex to take care of the little odds and ends. You just had a long drive. But there’s an open bottle of pinot grigio in the fridge if you’d like some.”
I thought that sounded like a great idea. “Absolutely.”
Without speaking, Alex went to a cupboard and retrieved a couple of wine glasses, then pulled the wine out of the refrigerator and poured an equal measure for both of us. I noticed that Joyce already had a glass sitting on the tile countertop next to the stove.
She had what looked like a double boiler going, along with something in a large skillet that was probably doing overtime as a wok. As I watched, she sprinkled some cornstarch into the stir fry. “Almost there. Give me a couple of minutes, and I’ll meet you in the dining room.”
Since I knew how much my mother hated having people underfoot in the kitchen when she was cooking, I didn’t bother to protest or make false offers of help. I just followed Alex to the dining room, then glanced quickly down the hall. We were probably far enough away that Joyce wouldn’t be able to hear what we were saying.
“Why didn’t you tell any of us that you had a girlfriend?” I asked.
“I was planning to get around to it,” he said. He didn’t quite look me in the eyes as he circled the table and set his glass down at the head. “I just couldn’t think of the best way to broach the subject. You know how Mom is.”
And I did, unfortunately. No one likes to think of their mother as a racist, but…let’s just say she was very Middle America. I mean, she had a minor freak attack when Dennis Lopez took me to homecoming my junior year of high school. Never mind that Dennis’s family had lived in Billings longer than my own and that he had about as much connection to his ancestors in Mexico as I did to my Scottish and Irish forebears. At any rate, I couldn’t exactly see my mother doing the happy dance about her only son hooking up with somebody of Asian extraction.
“You could always try the ‘hey, Mom, I’m not gay!’ angle,” I suggested, and he gave me a very pained glare.
It felt a little weird, to tell the truth. Not that Joyce was Asian, but that my normally in-control brother looked so uncomfortable. That he’d felt compelled to keep his relationship a secret from his own family. All right, our mother was a little judgmental. But I couldn’t see our father as being anything but supportive.
Maybe if I steered the conversation toward something a little more innocuous. “So how did you two meet?”
“At work,” Joyce said unexpectedly, as she appeared around the corner with a big bowl of whatever she’d been stir frying. “Alex, can you get the dim sum off the stove?”
He appeared relieved by this reprieve and headed off toward the kitchen. Joyce smiled; she had a pretty lopsided dimple in her left cheek.
“Are you a professor, too?” I asked.
“No. IT department—database administrator.”
That made sense. I couldn’t imagine Alex falling for anyone who wasn’t as big a computer geek as he was. However, since I had no idea what a database administrator actually did, all I could say in reply was, “Oh.”
She laughed. “It probably doesn’t sound very exciting. But I enjoy it.”
At that moment Alex reappeared holding a platter filled with a bunch of heavenly smelling dumplings, which he set down in the center of the table. “Anything else?”
“The salad. Lower shelf in the fridge.”
He headed back out to the kitchen.
“Well, at least it looks like you’ve got him properly trained,” I commented.
The dimple made another appearance. “I try.”
Who could have imagined that someone might be able to domesticate my nerdy brother, the one who’d built computers from scratch just because he liked it and who’d never shown the least bit of interest in the girls back home? I told myself I should probably stop trying to compare Alex to the boy he’d been back in Billings. That was a long time ago. At a few months short of thirty, he’d lived in Berkeley almost as long as he’d lived in Montana.
He came back in, and we all sat down. The food really was marvelous. Joyce informed me that her parents owned a restaurant in Chinatown—“a cliché, I know, but it’s been in the family for years”—and that she was a native of San Francisco. It turned out she and Alex had been dating for over a year, although they’d just moved in together last spring. His move had been the subject of a good deal of speculation in the family when he’d traded up from the little Spanish-style cottage he rented to this big Craftsman. Joyce’s presence explained the house; however much Berkeley professors got paid, I hadn’t been able to see how Alex could swing a place this big on his own.
I sat and watched the two of them, watched as they laughed and joked and traded gooey glances when they thought I wasn’t looking. Part of me was happy to see my brother with someone he so obviously cared about. But I couldn’t help contrasting his happiness with the pain I’d suffered the past few days. I knew fairness had nothing to do with it, but it still hurt to think that he had everything going for him and I apparently had nothing. I didn’t even have a job to fall back on, something that might help me concentrate on something besides Pieter Van Rijn and the way he wouldn’t quite meet my eyes as he threw me out of his life.
Somehow I made it through dinner. Oh, that sounds wrong. I did enjoy the food and the conversation, but a little ache grew inside me all the while. I wished it were late enough so that I could just go up to the room Alex had prepared for me and cry myself to sleep. Maybe if I got some of those pent-up tears out of my system, my throat wouldn’t ache so much.
They wouldn’t hear of me helping with the cleanup, so I hung out in the family room and randomly flipped through the unfamiliar San Francisco cable stations until the two of them were done. Then Joyce excused herself, saying she had left a routine running on the test server in her office upstairs and wanted to check on it.
“Let’s go out to the backyard,” Alex suggested. “You haven’t seen that yet.”
This seemed like a pretty transparent ploy, but I knew he and I would have to have “the talk” at some point. I followed him outside. The yard was spacious, lit here and there by solar-powered lanterns. A brick area held a redwood patio set similar in style to the furniture in the house.
We sat down there. I found myself wishing I’d put on a sweater; the air had a damp bite to it quite unlike the mild September weather I’d left behind in Southern California.
“It’s this Van Rijn, isn’t it?” Alex asked abruptly.
“So you’re psychic now?”
He smiled, but his expression sobered almost at once. “Well, it was either that or you had a bunch of South American drug runners after you. Since I’ve never known you to use drugs, I figured it had to be something involving a man. And since you’ve only mentioned Van Rijn lately—”
“All right, Sherlock,” I cut in. “I get it. Great deductive reasoning there.”
Then I hesitated. After all, Alex and I had never been what you’d call close. We got along well enough, but the six-year gap in our ages and our widely divergent interests had pretty much guaranteed a dearth of what you’d call heart-to-heart talks.
“He fired me.”
“Why?”
Good question. “I don’t know for sure. He—he kissed me the day before.” God, that felt awkward. I was glad the dim light out on the patio probably wouldn’t show the flush that spread across my cheeks.
“Did he initiate it?”
Only my brother could sound so clinical when asking such a question. This was my personal life we were talking about, not a computer program.
“Yes.” Then I added, “But I didn’t try to stop him.”
For one long, agonizing moment, Alex didn’t say anything. He tilted his head to look up toward the sky. I couldn’t say why—fog had begun to roll in, and the air above us was heavy and dark gray. You couldn’t see the stars.
“Do you love him?”
Since he’d been brave enough to ask, I figured I should tell him the truth. “Yes.”
“Why?”
Another very good question. Why, exactly, did I love Pieter Van Rijn? How to explain the gradual transition from attraction to infatuation to the sort of longing ache that could only be described as love?
“He’s different from anyone else I’ve ever known,” I said. That sounded lame. So I just fell for the first guy who wasn’t like the boys back in Billings? How could I ever begin to explain my feelings?
Alex didn’t say anything. He waited, his face in shadow, unreadable. It might have been a stranger I was talking to, and not my brother.
“He’s passionate about what he does,” I went on. Somehow it was easier that I couldn’t see Alex’s expression. “He’s brilliant and educated, and up until the end he treated me with respect. He made me wish I knew more, that I could share more of his world with him. But I screwed it all up by falling for him.”
“Why would that screw everything up?”
The note of surprise in his voice was almost flattering. It had a trace of “what, my little sister isn’t good enough for you?” in it, something I hadn’t really expected to hear.
“He doesn’t want to get involved with anyone. Oh, he’s had a lot of…liaisons, for lack of a better word, but they weren’t actual relationships. I guess he got burned really badly once. And when he realized I was serious about him, he had to get rid of me.”
“Well, that was a chickenshit thing for him to do.”
“You don’t know all the details,” I said at once.
“You’re pretty quick to defend the guy who just managed to fire you and break your heart at the same time.”
I couldn’t argue with that. I just sat there in the chilly, damp darkness and hugged my arms to myself. I wondered how I had ever ended up here.
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