The Evolution of Love
Page 1
Praise for The Evolution of Love
“Given our current seemingly endless string of natural disasters, this is a timely story and a compelling one. In the context of a twisting plot, in the company of appealing characters, Bledsoe asks us to think about the resilience of love and hate; what our responsibility to each other is; and who we really are, right down to our DNA. Highly recommended.”
—Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely
Beside Ourselves and The Jane Austen Book Club
“A magnificent, searingly beautiful book, as insightful as it is compassionate. Bledsoe takes our hearts in her confident hands and leads us toward an evolution of more than just love.”
—Elizabeth Percer, author of All Stories are Love Stories
“Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s The Evolution of Love offers a terrifyingly detailed and believable vision of life in the Bay Area after a devastating earthquake. But more than that, she offers us a vision of what is possible when individuals, even in the most desperate circumstances, refuse to give up on love and hope. The Evolution of Love is the book we all need these days: a post-disaster page-turner that’s also a blueprint for how we might live right now.”
—Naomi J. Williams, author of Landfalls
“This fast-paced nail biter of a novel uses a disaster in the near future to explore a basic question: can love save us from ourselves? I read ravenously to find the answer. Lucy Jane Bledsoe is a brave and brainy writer, and The Evolution of Love is a rare mix of erudition, adventure, and hard-won wisdom.”
—Summer Wood, author of Raising Wrecker
“Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s writing leaps off the page with striking clarity. Her characters take you by the hand and lead you through their freshly broken lives, and with them you’ll discover shelters of friendship and loyalty.”
—Shanthi Sekaran, author of Lucky Boy
“In a lucid, urgent novel driven by timely concerns and authentic feeling, Bledsoe’s characters reveal how our greatest hopes most often live in community.”
—Edie Meidav, author of Kingdom of the Young and Lola, California
“As a child growing up in California I created a dystopian fantasy world fueled by the visions of Margaret Atwood, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell. I worked hard to develop an internal GPS, which I was sure would come in useful once The Tempest was upon us and devised escape routes for every imaginable natural and man-made catastrophe. EVOLUTION was like reading from the pages of a book l lived, long ago. I was compelled to continue from the first pages, even when the going got tough and the realism felt a bit too real. I fell in love with and was frustrated by every flawed character, every new episode where every ounce of resilance was required. It is a gifted writer who can take me through a full range of human emotions and leave me wanting more. What happens next? I hope that Lucy Jane Bledsoe will make EVOLUTION just the beginning of a new beginning for our beleagured species.”
—Del LaGrace Volcano, artist/activist/educator
Praise for A Thin Bright Line
“Gripping historical fiction about queer life at the height of the Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement.”
—Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home
“It triumphs as an intimate and humane evocation of day-to-day life under inhumane circumstances.”
—New York Times Book Review
“A stirring and deeply felt story.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Empowering and bold….Bledsoe injects life and dimension through her often stunning dialogue. ”
—Publishers Weekly
“Berkeley author Lucy Jane Bledsoe shows the sexy side of the 1950s in her new novel, A Thin Bright Line.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
Also by Lucy Jane Bledsoe
Fiction
A Thin Bright Line
The Big Bang Symphony: A Novel of Antarctica
Biting the Apple
This Wild Silence
Working Parts
Sweat: Stories and a Novella
Nonfiction
The Ice Cave: A Woman’s Adventures
from the Mojave to the Antarctic
Childrens
How to Survive in Antarctica
The Antarctic Scoop
Hoop Girlz
Cougar Canyon
Tracks in the Snow
The Big Bike Race
This is a Genuine Vireo Book
A Vireo Book | Rare Bird Books
453 South Spring Street, Suite 302
Los Angeles, CA 90013
rarebirdbooks.com
Copyright © 2018 by Lucy Jane Bledsoe
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic. For more information, address: A Vireo Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 453 South Spring Street, Suite 302,
Los Angeles, CA 90013.
Set in Warnock
epub isbn: 9781947856707
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Names: Bledsoe, Lucy Jane, author.
Title: The Evolution of love: a novel / Lucy Jane Bledsoe.
Description: Includes bibliographical references | First Trade Paperback Original Edition | A Vireo Book | New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA:
Rare Bird Books, 2018.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781945572838
Subjects: LCSH Earthquakes—California—San Francisco—Fiction. | Survival—Fiction. | Natural disasters—Fiction. | Sisters—Fiction. | Homosexuality—Fiction. | Lesbians—Fiction. | BISAC FICTION / Disaster | FICTION / General
Classification: LCC PS3552.L418 E96 2018 | DDC 813.54—dc23
“Genes hold culture on a leash.”
—Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature
“‘Make love, not war’ could be a bonobo slogan.”
—Frans B. M. de Waal, Peacemaking Among Primates
Contents
Part One
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
Part Two
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
Part Three
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
Acknowledgments
Part One
1
Lily jumped down into the earthy crevice that split the freeway. The dirt smelled metallic and organic, like a grave, and she quickly hoisted herself out the other side. She began walking west. All the refugees had walked in the opposite direction, leaving the region. She’d seen them on TV, the network reporters flying low in helicopters, filming the streams of people carrying children, pushing shopping carts, rolling suitcases, lugging pet carrie
rs, and riding bicycles. Now, ten days later, the freeway was deserted.
She’d told herself, and her husband Tom, that she was coming to rescue Vicky. And she was. She would. She’d been rescuing her sister her entire life.
But she’d never done anything remotely this extreme. She knew the region had been evacuated yet somehow hadn’t pictured everyone literally gone. She’d greatly underestimated what she’d need for food and water. The stark, devastated landscape heightened all her senses, as if her fear made the colors deeper, the smells headier, the sounds crisper. She couldn’t give in to the terror; if she did, it might never end. She had no choice but to finish what she’d begun.
Lily checked her phone and confirmed the battery’s death. She was severed from Tom, Nebraska, home. She was entirely alone on the wrecked highway, with big green hills to the east and a giant bay to the west. Heat shimmered off the pavement. The air sat perfectly still, the hot blue sky a weight. The sun arced toward the western horizon, as if rushing away from disaster.
Not her. She scuffed along toward the devastation.
For courage, she’d brought the entire packet of letters from Travis. Twenty years’ worth, though they’d come infrequently enough, so the folder wasn’t that bulky. She still remembered the way, as a thirteen-year-old girl, her fingers had trembled holding the light blue, tissuey loft of the airmail stationery, her eyes had vacuumed up the thin, black chicken scratch of his handwriting, and her heart had gulped down his stories about bonobos and life in the Congo. Just a pen pal, she’d never even met him, but there were times she had lived for his letters, for his belief in what was humanly possible. As she walked now, the sweat from her back soaked through the nylon of her backpack and into the manila folder.
Lily’s pack also held a flashlight, toothbrush and paste, paper maps from AAA—on Tom’s insistence, but she was thankful since her phone was already dead—one more sandwich, two empty water bottles, and a change of clothes. She had a credit card, although it’d probably be useless, and a wad of cash. Hopefully, as soon as she found Vicky, they could get out the same way she’d gotten in.
After flying to Sacramento, she’d paid a driver, who seemed too young to have a driver’s license, let alone a car, to bring her as far into Oakland as he could. He’d honored their agreement, driving fast, swerving around the crashed cars still piled up on the freeway, having to stop when he reached the place where the pavement sheered apart. Without saying goodbye, he grabbed the promised cash, made a U-turn, and, tires screeching, fled back east.
Now as she walked, Lily heard helicopters droning in the distance and wondered if they were dropping food and supplies or just carrying more reporters, cameras perched on their shoulders. The freeway was littered with all the stuff that the evacuees had abandoned along the way: busted-open suitcases; a garbage bag full of stuffed animals; photo albums, the pages stomped upon and the pictures curling in the sun; an empty jewelry box; a life-size mannequin, left in a ditch; a full toolbox (through which Lily rifled, already acquiring a survivor’s mentality); an empty trombone case; a smashed guitar; a rodent cage. Books, lots and lots of books, more books than Lily would have imagined. People had grabbed what they thought could save them, and then they’d cast off even those items.
Lily’s feet hurt. Her adrenaline-induced verve waned. She began to realize that she wouldn’t get to Vicky’s house, wouldn’t get anywhere at all, before dark. Trees lined the broken freeway. She saw nothing resembling shelter. She’d have to keep walking, in the dark, through the night.
A deep, satisfied snarling, soft and guttural, brought her terror home and right to the bone. The low primal sounds were so much more frightening than strident barking.
She saw the two dogs. Pit bulls. Both hind ends—one liver-colored, with a pale covering of bone-white fur, and the other a deep beige, glossier and skinnier—worked back and forth as they shifted their positions, trying to gain purchase, at the open driver’s door of a crashed Miata.
The royal blue car had spun and hit a FedEx truck head-on. The impact must have been hard and at speed, throwing the driver into the windshield and killing him. He was slumped over the steering wheel, his head draped by the airbag, and the two pit bulls were gnawing him.
Lily vomited the tuna sandwiches she’d eaten earlier in the day. Her upchuck drew the attention of the dogs who pulled back from the dead body to look at her. The smell of vomit, much more enticing than a rotting corpse, lured them. Lily backed up slowly.
As the pit bulls lapped up her vomit, she climbed into the back of the FedEx truck and pulled the door shut. Pitch black inside, she stumbled over some boxes and fell onto her hands and knees. She stopped to listen for scrabbling at the door of the truck. Could they smell her remaining tuna sandwich? She crawled back toward the door and felt around for a latch. She found one, but it was too complicated to negotiate in the dark. She made sure the doors were securely pulled closed and then kicked boxes aside to make a space for herself. She lay on her back and closed her eyes.
Two days ago she was just Lily Jones, a tall thirty-three-year-old woman with a modest gardening business, living in the heart of the country in the small town where she’d grown up, strong-willed perhaps but not particularly daring, married to her childhood sweetheart. It was as if she’d jumped off a cliff. Though her spine pressed against the cold metal of the truck bed, the absence of light accentuated the feeling of free fall.
2
When Lily saw the small crowd in the Trinity Church parking lot, she dropped back to hide behind the south-facing wall of the building. People! What a relief. The long trek into town had been eerie and desolate. She’d passed more corpses and bigger packs of pet dogs gone rogue. Trees lay like giant toothpicks across vast hollows where mudslides had carried away the saturated earth. At the bottoms of the slides, she’d traversed the expanses of mud, now hardened like concrete, with housing debris embedded like tumors. The untouched streets shocked, too, with curtains hanging in windows and birds singing merrily in the canopies of trees, worse in a way than the wrecked streets. The destruction seemed so random.
She’d seen a few people lurking along the sides of houses or peering out windows, but the few remaining inhabitants ducked out of sight the instant they saw her, as if there were a social protocol she didn’t understand. A couple of National Guard soldiers told her about the meals program, and the sight of people gathered purposefully in the church parking lot, shouting and laughing, expectant, relieved her enormously. God, she was hungry.
She planned on picking out someone to ask for help: How did the food program work? Where were people sleeping? Did anyone know Vicky? But as she stepped out from behind the wall and drew closer, she couldn’t choose. Despite the laughter, everyone looked grizzled and wan. Most were dirty. Who could blame them? They’d been living in the earthquake zone for eleven days now. Water was scarce and power was nonexistent.
Some people stared, but no one greeted her. Well, it wasn’t a tea party. Of course people would be suspicious of newcomers. Suddenly she felt afraid, almost more afraid than she’d been of the dogs. Travis had once written that the best way to avoid being a victim was not to look like one, so she moved through the crowd with fake bravado, found herself at the foot of a short cement stairway, and climbed it. She heard a woman’s voice behind her shout that it wasn’t time for dinner yet, that no one was allowed to enter the hall early.
But now, standing on the small porch at the top of the stairs, she was practically on a stage in front of the crowd in the parking lot. If she turned to acknowledge the woman, if she walked back down the steps, they would know for sure that she was new. New and confused—and exhausted, thirsty, and hungry.
Lily pulled open the door and went on inside. The big community room reminded her of the one in Tom’s family’s church. Long folding tables, each spread with a plastic cloth, covered the beige linoleum floor. Folding chairs surrounded all the tables.
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“Finally,” said the only person in the room, a skinny woman with short hair so sparse that Lily could see her scalp. Her skin looked like that of a Bosc pear, a dull yellowish brown, badly in need of lotion. She might once have been beautiful with her defined jaw, high cheekbones, and sensual mouth. Intelligence, maybe too much intelligence, brightened her eyes, as if they could see right through Lily. She shouted, “Ron! She’s here!”
A tall, muscular man wearing chinos and a sleeveless white undershirt came out of the kitchen. Tattoos covered his arms, the blue ink like a subtle tapestry on his dark skin. Cowry shells tipped his cornrows. He nodded.
“Ron will train you,” she said to Lily and then shook her head with slow displeasure. “They said they’d give me someone five days ago. And this is what they send.”
Ron raised both hands in the air in front of his chest and pushed down, the gesture people use to slow cars.
“I’m just saying, it’s hard work. This skinny girl…” The woman shook her head again and headed for the kitchen, her gait bony and jerky like she was in pain, even though she didn’t look much older than Lily.
“I’m no skinnier than you,” Lily said to her back. Like rifling through the abandoned toolbox on the freeway, Lily was amazed to find herself deploying more survival tactics, in this case talking back to someone, speaking up for herself, as if her very life depended on it. Which it might.
The woman stopped, turned, huffed out a short laugh, and walked back.
Lily said, “I don’t know who you’re expecting, but—”
“Look, I shouldn’t have said skinny. But you look like the sensitive type and I don’t have time for that. I feed upward of two hundred people every day. Get here by four o’clock tomorrow. Earlier, if possible. Put this on.” She pulled a white apron off a hook and took a paper shower cap and latex gloves out of a drawer. She tossed all of it on a counter next to Lily. “Start with the drink cups, like this.” The woman dipped a ladle into a big metal vat of red drink and poured some into a paper cup. “Put them on the trays and stack the trays. Got it? I’ll be opening the door in five minutes. They have to take the first tray. The first tray. Don’t let anyone tell you they don’t like the looks of that one or want a bigger serving, and they will tell you that and lots more. They take what they get and they move along. One milk and one chocolate pudding per person. That’s it. No exceptions.”