The other car is twenty feet away, spun out on a crazy axis. A black woman is at the wheel, holding her head, checking herself for damage. I turn to Syd. There’s blood trickling down her forehead.
“I knew it. I knew you loved me.”
I slowly unclasp my seat belt. Metal scrapes and glass falls into the street from across the intersection.
“What happens now?” she asks me.
“What happens now? There aren’t many choices here. What happens now is the cops come, you get a DUI, and you go to jail. Or you can try to run, but that woman you just hit doesn’t look like she’s gonna let you get too far.”
The other woman is outside in shock at the wrecked metal of her sedan.
“No, what happens now between us?”
I want to wipe the blood off her forehead but I’m afraid to touch her. Now the other woman is outside Syd’s window. She has her phone in her hand. There’s a fight about to go down in the street. I know well enough how hard Syd can hit, but I don’t think she would win this one—the other woman is yelling already: “Are you crazy, woman? Girl, what the hell you doing? Get out the car!”
Syd undoes her seat belt and unlocks the child lock. I get out, making sure my ankle isn’t broken. One of the headlights is busted. Syd steps out on wobbly high heels. The woman in the smashed car is livid.
“Bitch, is you drunk? You better have insurance, bitch!”
Syd isn’t even looking at the woman, she’s got her eyes locked on me. “I knew you loved me. I always knew it.” Sirens are approaching from a few blocks away. “Help me.”
I can’t. I back up slowly as blue and red lights come around the corner. I’m fading into the shadows past the streetlight. I walk ten blocks, turn, and circle around, long enough to see Syd in handcuffs in the backseat of the cop car.
She leaves me a message from jail that morning, tells me she loves me, says her parents are flying back. She leaves another message the day she gets out. I stay away from the old bars. I don’t go to Van Kleef’s for a year—the game is over.
* * *
It’s ten years and three girlfriends later. I’ve been paying rent on a house at 53rd and San Pablo for a decade. A friend gives me a free pass to a yoga class. I usually train at a kickboxing gym but I blew out my knee during a sparring match so want to try an easier route. I’m stretching out my tattoos and scars on a mat, enduring the slow meditative music, ready to sweat out years of toxins. The clock hits eight p.m. and the instructor walks in.
It’s Syd, now impossibly toned and tanned, her hair cut short. She’s wearing all black. Our eyes lock. That smile comes across her face. She looks away, starts the class. I can see the scorpion tattoo faded on her arm. I follow her instructions up to the point where she asks everyone to close their eyes for deep breaths—I keep mine open and she stares at me in silence. The class ends, everyone rolls up their mats. I’m ten feet out the door when I hear her say my name. She’s standing there with her keys.
“Want a ride?”
I take a deep breath.
She smiles. “Nothing more than that.” She points at her car. It’s a station wagon with two child seats in the back, and she holds up her wedding ring. “Just kidding, there’s no room.”
I laugh. “Yeah, I live nearby anyways.”
“You still writing suicide notes on napkins?”
“No. Now it’s to-do lists.”
“It’s all a choose-your-own-adventure. I hope you get the ending you want.” She points at her tattoo. “Poison’s always labeled.”
I tell her I’m sorry; she was right. We were reflections of each other, and I’ve learned I can’t look away anymore.
“We were young. We just weren’t the right antidote for each other.”
She clicks her car open and I keep walking. I don’t look back as her headlights pull away behind me, just another car going the opposite direction.
PART III
A View of the Lake
SURVIVORS OF HEARTACHE
by Nayomi Munaweera
Montclair
I moved to Montclair in 2014. I was going through a divorce that had me gutted like a fish. Three years before I had married an artist. He was from Sri Lanka too, and finding him in San Francisco where I had not met another Lankan in years had felt like coming home. I had believed him when he said I was the only one who could save him from the demons: six ecstasy tabs on his thirtieth birthday, sex without a condom in the seediest parts of San Francisco after openings, and the like. He had been deadly depressed and courting death, he said, but then I had arrived like a princess in a flowing white dress and wrestled his life back from the dark. I had loved the idea of myself as savior, and then muse, and therefore I had believed him.
We had a large and expensive wedding in the fanciest hotel in Colombo. Then we returned to San Francisco, and for two years we built a life in the foggy city. At first he sketched me endlessly. I looked at the drawings and laughed, “I’m not this beautiful,” and he said, “To me you are.” He had rendered me perfect—the arch of my brows, the curve of my cheekbones, the angles on my hips far lovelier than the reality. A year later there were fewer drawings. When I snuck a look at his sketchbooks toward the end, I found myself a pendulum-breasted, hook-nosed hag.
That was around the time he realized I wasn’t his muse at all. The real angel of his salvation was a blond twenty-four-year-old nude model. After this revelation, we resided in hell. He didn’t know if he loved her enough to leave me; I didn’t know what to do with my life without him. One terrible midnight I held onto his ankles and sobbed, begging him not to go. The humiliation of this memory still scratches at my skin. Despite everything that happened, this is the only regret that lingers from that grotesque time.
What saved me? A few different things. Friends, of course. And a soft landing across the bay in a town called Montclair. When it was clear that the divorce was imminent, I tried to understand how to begin life anew. I couldn’t stand the apartment that had been the witness of my humiliation. I would leave it to him and therefore I needed a place to live. Friends said, Come to Oakland, it’s better here, the rents are cheaper, the people more diverse.
Oakland? I thought. The murder capital of America? I had lived in San Francisco for a decade and grown up in Florida before that. Oakland was just a few miles away, over the bridge flung across the glittering bay, but I had barely ever been there. There were guns all over the streets, people said. Young black kids were getting shot by racist cops all the time, we heard. From the soft, hilly embrace of San Francisco, Oakland sounded like a war zone.
My friend Chloe had lived in the Oakland Hills for more than a decade. Her house was impossible to get to without a car so I had never visited her. Instead, in the years of our friendship, she had always come to me, and every time I had opened the door of our San Francisco apartment to her, she stood there in shorts, a T-shirt, and sandals. I’d let her in and she’d say through chattering teeth, “It’s warm and sunny in Oakland right now, you know.” I didn’t really believe her. How was it possible that just miles away the sun was blazing?
Now, in the midst of my divorce ravages, she invited me to rent a room in the house where she lived. A roommate was moving out so it was perfect timing. She said, “You’ll love Oakland. Anyway, you won’t find a place you can afford in the city anymore.” She was right. I dragged my heartbroken self from open house to open house, but during the three years of my marriage, rents had skyrocketed. Tiny apartments with no light and moldy bathrooms were going for exorbitant prices; people lined up to fill every available vacancy; landlords could afford to be assholes.
The first time I drove to her house, across the bridge and into the hills, the sun burst through the fog and the temperature rose. I felt ridiculous in my jeans and thick sweatshirt as a misty sweat broke on my skin. I followed Chloe’s directions, winding higher and higher, thinking, What the hell is this place? The roads got narrower and snakelike, the foliage got thicker, there were hundr
eds of flowering plants. I glimpsed the bone white of eucalyptus, caught the scent of pine through the window. The trees were different, of course, but the place reminded me of nothing more than the upcountry of Sri Lanka. There was the same sense of driving precariously into the sky, of entering a place both magical and mystical.
There were houses set right on the cliff’s edges, and between them I caught slivers of the sea and the Bay Bridge. Even farther away the Golden Gate stretched into Marin. The city nestled between the bridges with a blanket of fog settling into its crevices. I drove past the address Chloe had given me, parked on a sharply steep climb, and walked back along the tree-fringed road to the house. She threw open the door and said, “Welcome to Montclair.”
Just like that I found myself in a new life. I lived in a room with red walls. Originally I had thought I’d repaint it a hue less intense, less womblike, but soon it felt like exactly what I needed to birth a new life. I had very little: a mattress on the floor, some clothing, and books on anatomy. This was everything I had salvaged from the shipwreck of my marriage.
* * *
I saw them from the window first—two little girls in the lavish backyard of the house next door. Around six and eight, though I don’t know much about kids and am terrible at estimating ages, so they could have been older or younger. Of course, later I would come to know everything about them, but at that time they were just two normal kids.
They were running around with their dog, a great fluffy white thing. They were blond, playing Marco Polo. The older girl was blindfolded, she reached her arms out, thin pale arms like the eucalyptus branches above, and stumbled forward blindly feeling for her sister who slipped just out of her grasp. The leaves crunched under their sneakers. I watched for a while. It was a lovely tableau of childhood joy. I felt a pricking under my skin, a terrible and fierce longing. Then I turned away and went back into my new life.
The house we lived in had five bedrooms. There were four of us—Chloe, Shahid, Dina, and me. Chloe had “inherited” it from a friend who had moved to Zimbabwe, gotten married, and settled there. The friend didn’t care that she could rent out the house for four times the price we paid. She didn’t want to bother with locating renters, and this is how we found ourselves able to afford a house in a neighborhood where Governor Jerry Brown lived a few streets away. We were the odd house out—a collection of ragtag, single people of color in a neighborhood of predominately rich white families.
One day at breakfast Chloe asked, “You’ve seen the neighbor kids? The dad’s name is Michael, he’s some kind of computer genius. Have you met the wife? She’s like a Romanian Marilyn Monroe.”
I didn’t tell her that I saw them often. Through a sliver of curtain I could watch the two children, the beautiful wife, and the computer genius. With the intimacy of people who have not met but who live in silent proximity, I knew which car belonged to him, which to her, the times they came and left, who picked up the kids on which days. I watched them in the summer months, him serving breakfast, her in wraparound glasses, the kids and dogs gamboling about.
* * *
It was some months later that we first noticed trouble. There were noises from next door; sometimes it sounded like shouting, sometimes screaming, sometimes his or her car would screech away down the hill. The kids barely came out anymore and when I did see them, they were pinched looking, as if what little color they had had drained away. They didn’t chase each other, didn’t play Marco Polo, they just sat on the bench and whispered to each other as if hatching plans, plotting. Sometimes they looked up and I could swear they were staring straight at me. I pulled away from the window, my heart thumping.
Then the dog started barking. At first it lasted only a short time and we were able to ignore it. But one night it went on and on, until the sound penetrated the very walls and ricocheted all around us. It felt like we were trapped in a cage of noise. At times the animal screams would stop and silence would fall, thick and welcome. But just when we had sighed and turned over in our beds, the agonizing noise would resume. At midnight, after the dog had been barking for three straight hours, we gathered in the living room.
“What should we do?”
“I called them. No one picked up,” Chloe informed us.
Shahid said, “What the hell? I have to go to work in the morning.”
“Let’s put a note on their door,” I suggested.
I wrote, Your dog has been barking since 9 p.m. None of us can sleep. Please make it stop. Your neighbors at 482, and offered to put it on the door. And then, in my sweats, armed with the note and bit of sticky tape, I walked out. It was November again. A year had passed since I’d moved in. The air was sharp, the trees dark and crowding overhead, the dog’s anguished voice filling the night.
I pulled my hoodie over my head and walked onto the street. Their door was down steps, shrouded, and no automatic light snapped on, so I was guided not by sight but by my feet on the steps, my hand on the railing. I felt my way to the door, my palms made contact, and with a sigh of relief I reached for the knob. Then there was a different, subtler sound. I spun on my heel and saw a figure towering at the top of the steps and coming quickly toward me. My blood screamed; in a quavering voice I said, “Hello?”
It was the wife, I realized in relief. But then her voice rose: “Who is it? Who’s there? I can see you! Stand right there or I’ll call the police.” A light shone straight into my eyes. “Fucking kids, you people come up from Oakland and think you can just break into our houses. I’m calling the police!”
“No! No, I’m your neighbor. Your dog was barking. I just came to tell you.”
A fumbling with her phone. “What?”
“I’m just your neighbor. Your dog was barking. Look, here’s my note!” I thrust it forth like a guilty school kid caught in the hall after classes have started.
She shone the light at it, said, “Oh . . . okay. I see . . . There have been so many break-ins recently. I thought . . .” Her eyes were still suspicious as they took in my skin, my black hoodie.
* * *
Thanksgiving arrived, the first one after my divorce. Chloe and Dina had both invited me to their family meals, but I said that I wanted to spend the day watching Netflix. It was only after they left that I realized I was terribly, awfully lonely. The house was empty, and my room felt claustrophobic, so I fled into the living room, which was cold, though I didn’t want to put on the heater because our bill was already too high. Then the doorbell rang, and somehow I knew it was Michael before he even introduced himself. He was taller than I had thought. He wore a red plaid shirt and was even more handsome up close.
“We saw your car in the drive, and we wanted to say sorry. For the dog. Will you come to dinner? It’ll just be Galina, the kids, and me.”
I saw then that as much as I knew their comings and goings, they too knew which of our cars was which and that I was alone on Thanksgiving. I nodded. “I’ll come. Thank you.”
I went at six, carrying the fanciest bottle of wine I could find in the house. Galina opened the door, smelling of jasmine and musk. When she leaned in close to pat me on the back, I inhaled deeply. She said, “Welcome to our home,” and swept me into the dining room. The floor plan was similar to ours, but this house was much bigger. While we had bits of furniture salvaged from thrift stores, things left behind by an endless succession of roommates, theirs was all luxury, light, and warmth. A fire danced. The entire back wall was huge windows opening onto the lovely garden and the woods beyond, past which was a glorious view of the bay. The children sat at the dining room table like stiff little adults. They seemed even more pale and thin than the last time I’d seen them. Their eyes recognized me, followed me.
Michael came in and said, “Ah, the conscientious neighbor.” He swept an arm toward the window, “Look. We have fixed the problem.”
I went to the glass. In the yard the dog circled and pawed at leaves. It opened its mouth and I got ready for the incessant cacophony. Instead it fl
inched and went mute, and I realized that its collar was shocking it. The muscles in my throat constricted. It had only wanted to express its primal loneliness and they had taken away its voice. Surely there was some more humane solution?
As if reading my thoughts, Michael said, “It was the only way. He was stubborn, and he refused to be trained.” I felt a flush of shame. Was it my fault that they had silenced the creature? Meanwhile, a blessed quietness fell around us. Michael said, “Enough of that, come. Galina has prepared a feast.”
We sat. Galina brought in the turkey. It was delicious and opulent, and everything was overwhelming. Later, when the turkey had been reduced to a cave of bones and the children had been dismissed, Galina sipped wine as dark as a gorgon’s blood. She looked at me and said, “Have you seen the wild turkeys that roost in the woods?”
I nodded.
“Beautiful, aren’t they? Big and ungainly but also beautiful. Prehistoric. You watch them and you know what the dinosaurs looked like. It seems such a strange thing to appreciate their beauty and then eat them.”
I said nothing.
“Living here, it’s like living in the midst of paradise. In the summertime we had the doors open and two fawns wandered in.” I must have given her a look of disbelief because she said, “No, really! The children were thrilled and we stayed quiet as they trotted all around the house. They must have been searching for water because it’s been such a dry year. But they came into the house so easily, as if they were curious. As if they wanted to know how the humans lived. They were like creatures out of the fairy tales I grew up with. They walked all around this room.” She spread her hands wide. “And then their mother was at the door and made this noise and they ran out. Their hoofs left marks but I had them erased.”
I asked, “How long have you lived here?”
“Fifteen years,” Michael replied.
Galina tapped her bloodred nails against the crystal of her wineglass. “Back then this was a safe neighborhood. Now there are all sorts of criminal elements coming up the hill—poor people, black people. They can’t find work so they resort to crime. The house at the end of the road got broken into last month. That’s why I was so upset when I thought you were one of them.”
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