The Evolution of Love

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  But that was Tom. There was so much he didn’t want to know. Lily didn’t understand how he could be a good lover yet have no curiosity about what love was. When Lily asked him, he would say, “Love is what I feel for you.” Or if she asked him why people fight, the question at the heart of Travis’s research, Tom would shrug as if the answer were obvious and say, “People fight because they’re confused about what they need.”

  Tom was always so clear and accurate. His opinions came across as airtight. Surely, though, there were deeper, more complex answers, too. Surely love is more than a marriage, more than a matrix of family holding a person in place. And fighting encompasses wars that sweep across entire nations, countless body bags and raw graves. Can we really attribute that to confusion?

  “Your Hahvard man,” Tom sometimes called Travis, pretending good-natured ribbing. He’d shake his head at the parts of Travis’s letters that Lily read to him; as if Travis’s research was some kind of self-indulgence, a grown man playing with pets; as if trying to understand our relationship to other species were a way to avoid getting down to real work.

  On the morning of the earthquake, Lily was telling Tom about Travis’s latest letter and the bonobo slaughter. She’d just said, “It’s devastating. I can’t bear it,” and he’d looked at her for a long time. The handsome planes of his face twitched in sadness, so she knew he felt it, but what he’d said was, “How can something that happened on the other side of the world be devastating to you?”

  She’d been about to explain—to try, anyway—when the doorbell rang. The lock shop’s only employee, other than Tom and his dad, plunged through the back door. “Turn on the TV,” Angelina said, nearly hyperventilating. “Vicky’s in Berkeley, right?”

  Lily pointed the remote and the TV blinked to life. Tom got Angelina a cup of coffee, adding sugar and lots of cream.

  Thirty minutes earlier, at 5:26 a.m. Pacific time, a 7.4-magnitude earthquake, on the Hayward fault with an epicenter just south of Berkeley, rocked the Bay Area. A reporter cruised the city on a mountain bike, transmitting his breathy dispatches by satellite phone.

  Most people had ridden the twenty-three seconds of ground shaking in their beds but now gathered in the streets in case their buildings failed. One woman claimed that the quake started with a series of vertical jolts and finished off with horizontal jerks that threw her off the mattress and onto the floor. Another informant actually laughed—maybe she didn’t yet know the extent of the disaster—and said that the quake felt like riding a galloping horse.

  “My goodness,” Angelina offered and grasped the small gold cross that always hung between her large breasts. She made that annoying clucking sound in the back of her throat.

  The networks reported that hundreds, and probably thousands, of chimneys had crumbled. Houses had slid off their foundations. Apartment and office buildings with weak ground-floor parking levels had sheered and buckled. Glass panels exploded shards of glass onto sidewalks. The landfill supporting the Oakland airport had turned to liquid and the runways twisted and broke. Due to several weeks of rain and the thoroughly saturated soil, sections of many streets and highways washed away with mudslides. Houses tumbled down hillsides on gushes of wet soil. The earth, for those few seconds, became as viscous as blood.

  Lily punched and repunched Vicky’s number, eventually screaming at the recording that said the system was overloaded.

  “Towers are probably down,” Tom said.

  Angelina reached for the remote, held it out with a straight arm, and punched the button hard, as if she could change the course of the news by changing the channel.

  “If anyone is fine out there, it’s Vicky,” Tom added.

  As if he hadn’t seen the collapsed buildings and hysterical grievers! The fact of the matter was he couldn’t bear thinking of the tragedy, especially if it might be touching their lives. Lily knew it wasn’t coldheartedness. Tom cared about Vicky. But any challenge to the status quo presented a wall.

  “Besides,” he carried on, “there’s good news: they’re saying there are hardly any fires due to all the wet weather. That’s the worst danger in an earthquake.”

  “True,” Angelina said.

  Lily grabbed her jacket and pulled on rubber boots. She slammed the back door and tramped through the tangled garden out into the fallow field. She walked fast, kicking at the clumps of frozen weeds. The owner of the field had been trying for years to sell it. She’d tried to talk Tom into buying it; a few years of alfalfa would feed the soil back to life. This once had been prairie and she loved imagining the native grasses undulating in summer winds, the hot smell of green. Now the field was nothing but cold and dead. Lily grabbed a couple of frozen dirt clods and threw them as far as she could. Then she turned and looked at the house she and Tom lived in. It was the one he grew up in, the one his parents had before they built their new one. A hard gray sky framed the house, sealing it in place. Lily’s heart beat too hard, too fast, and she threw more dirt clods trying to dispel the charge.

  When she got back to the house, Tom and Angelina still sipped coffee and stared at the TV, as if binge-watching a thriller series. How could he seem so detached? The networks burst images of California like buckshot, anything the producers could get their hands on to go with the recorded voices. They interspersed these with cell phone videos showing survivors clutching their children, speaking in rapid, anxious voices, or keening as they pointed at rubble that trapped loved ones. Next came footage of the Bay Bridge snapping apart, as it had done in 1989, but with worse results. Three cars hurdled like toys off the roadway and into the bay. Lily could see the passengers, the earliest commuters, inside the cars.

  A teary reporter announced that she’d just learned that the Transbay Tube, which ran underwater from Oakland to San Francisco, had broken free from its ground attachments due to liquefaction. There were thought to be two trains trapped in the tube. At first the tube slowly bobbed to the surface, leaving open the possibility that passengers could swim out the ends before drowning, but then it quickly filled with water and sank to the bottom of the bay. Over and over again, the networks showed the same woman’s body floating near Oakland’s shore as the rising sun turned the water a hard copper color. The skirt of her business suit billowed around her thighs and her dark hair veiled on the surface of the water.

  By suppertime the networks showed people on the move, looking for clean water or family members. Refugees were leaving the region, walking in small groups, heading east and south and north to communities that were still intact and could offer shelter. Because of the damaged roads, no wheeled vehicles were able to get out or in, but helicopters had begun airlifting injured people and dropping supplies. The hospitals, running as well as they could on backup generators, were already overwhelmed to the point of treating people in the parking lots.

  “I need to go out there,” Lily said.

  “Where?” Tom asked, as if the place, the actual geography, no longer existed. As if she were crazy.

  “Berkeley. To see if Vicky is okay.”

  Tom looked at Lily in a way he hadn’t looked at her in months, maybe even years. For a moment, he seemed to really want to see her. And he did. He saw her concern for her sister, for sure, but Lily saw him see even more: the way her longing for her sister triggered everything else. Launched her. His brown eyes went opaque. He looked away. “Vicky will be fine. You know that.”

  Over and over again, they watched the woman’s skirt billow on the coppery water of the San Francisco Bay. They watched the bridge buckle and entire hillsides slide. They listened to the people’s screams.

  8

  Lily pretended to be asleep as Joyce wheeled her bicycle out of the flat. Then at dawn she washed her face, buried the key in her jeans pocket, and set out. The most direct route to Vicky’s house crossed the university campus, but when she reached the northwestern entrance, she encountered strands of plasti
c police tape and large signs forbidding admittance. The signs were painted over with graffiti in three languages, and she decided that even if there were anyone on campus enforcing the closure, she could claim to have not been able to read the signs due to the vandalism. She stepped over the plastic tape and walked up the tree-lined creek.

  The deserted campus, with its half-toppled buildings, looked sinister, as if all the ideas had been set loose and now swirled in the cold, bright air like ghosts, knowledge severed from people. Fissures had torn apart lawns and felled giant oaks. A buck, two does, and a spotted fawn grazed in front of the Biology building. She tried to distract herself from the spooky vacancy of the place by reading the names of the disciplines carved into the stone facades. Travis had taught here after finishing his degrees at Harvard and before going to the Congo. Which building would be his? She realized she didn’t even know his department. Biology? Cultural Anthropology? Psychology? He’d never said.

  “Halt!” The voice came from behind. Lily turned and saw the three National Guard troops, guns drawn, inching toward her as if she were a known terrorist. “On the ground! Now!”

  She flattened her belly against a broken chunk of concrete, the edge shoving painfully against her ribs. Her mind went white blank, blotto. She didn’t know if she could breathe. The voices seemed to come from down a long tunnel.

  “It’s just some girl.”

  “She’s not supposed to be here.”

  “Put your gun away.”

  The last words nibbled into her blasted-out consciousness. Gun. Put it away. Yes.

  As she slowly regained the ability to think, she remembered a trick Travis had told her about. He’d been trying to get back to the sanctuary and got stopped by a couple of guys in the Congolese National Army. He hadn’t known what they wanted and hadn’t wanted to find out. So he’d flashed his library card and said, “New York Times.” The guards had waved him through.

  “Omaha World-Herald!” Lily shouted to the troops. She reached around to her pack, but one of the men shouted, “Don’t move!” They didn’t let her off the ground until they were ten feet away and then ordered her to get up very slowly.

  “Keep quiet.” The guard shook out a pair of handcuffs.

  Another one looked at his watch. “You taking her in?” he asked. “’Cause it’s almost our break time and I’m hungry.”

  “She doesn’t exactly look dangerous,” said the third.

  “What kind of pussies are you?” asked the guy with the handcuffs. “We’re supposed to—”

  “I’m just looking for my sister,” Lily said.

  “I thought you said you were a reporter.”

  “I did. But...I meant to say I’m from a small town in Nebraska. I flew into the Sacramento airport day before yesterday. My sister lives on Ridge Road. I’m going there now. I’m sorry I trespassed on campus.”

  “You’re not allowed up in the hills, either. Everyone’s been evacuated.”

  Lily knew from what she’d seen on TV that in fact not everyone had left. Some had refused to leave their homes. That would be Vicky.

  The chunk of cement beneath her sneakers jolted hard to the left. A breath of wind rustled through the live oaks, making the dry leaves clatter.

  “Shit,” said the hungry one, looking around quickly at the stone buildings, as if the aftershock might topple them. “Shit.”

  “I’m leaving,” she told the troops, her stomach queasy from the aftershock. “I’m just going now.”

  The rumble of the day’s first helicopters drowned out her last words. Two Black Hawks scudded overhead, their undersides dark and menacing, the blades slicing the sky. She and all three National Guard soldiers craned their necks to watch them fly over.

  The guard with the handcuffs took hold of her elbow in his big hand and jerked her forward. She felt the fear in his grip.

  “Where’re you from?” she asked, stumbling along at his pace. She didn’t expect him to answer. She just wanted to establish their mutual humanity. She was scared, too. Maybe he was also far from home.

  “Arkansas.”

  She said, “Tornadoes.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You?” she asked the hungry one.

  “San Diego.”

  “Wildfires.”

  The third one laughed. “North Dakota. Fucking blue balls.”

  When they reached the edge of campus, the man loosened his grip but didn’t let her go. So she threw her other arm around his neck and hugged him.

  “Stay safe,” she said, as if she were the one tasked with guarding the public. Then she disengaged her elbow and walked away, heading down the hill, toward downtown. The men at her back remained completely silent. They let her go.

  Once out of sight, Lily circled back and headed up the hill, staying clear of campus, taking any road that had a walkable surface. She scaled up-sided slabs of pavement and stepped over downed phone poles. She passed collapsed carports and crumbled chimneys. Because they’d evacuated the neighborhoods in the hills, and because the people who lived here were generally wealthier and therefore had places to go and the means to get there, these streets were even more deserted than the ones in the flatlands. An unnatural silence swarmed the abandoned homes. At least until the Black Hawks circled again. When they did, she hid under cars or behind piled rubble.

  Following routes on her map was impossible. Entire streets were missing. Others were impassable. Time and again she got lost and had to turn back or look for alternative routes. The sun burned high in the sky, hot and brazen, when she saw a couple more National Guard soldiers. They were playing baseball on the brown grass of a park, using a two-by-four for a bat and dirt clods for balls, laughing each time one of the clods exploded. She kept a wide berth of the park and they never saw her.

  Finally, after too many wrong turns, she reached the top of the ridge. She headed south along Grizzly Peak Boulevard until she saw the sign for Ridge Road. Vicky was two blocks away.

  Lily had spent her childhood protecting her older sister. One summer evening, when the girls were ten and twelve years old, they were shooting baskets on the school playground. Vicky rattled on about the physics of a perfect shot, the math of the ball’s arc. She had gotten too hot that morning and shaved off her hair. The bald-headedness had put her in a particularly happy mood. She’d said it made her feel free. Two boys who shot baskets at the other end of the outdoor court kept up a running commentary about Vicky’s head. She flipped them off. One of the boys asked her to do that again. So she did, in that blind-to-consequences and good-natured way she had. The boy shoved her to the ground and cocked back a leg, getting ready to kick. Lily threw what was left of her warm Coke on the attacker, but he kicked Vicky anyway, so Lily hurled herself onto the boy’s back and clamped her small hands around his neck, squeezing hard. As skinny as she was, with her legs wrapped around his torso, the bully had trouble loosening her hands. The tactic worked. After he managed to throw her, he and his friend ran, spitting and shouting. Lily liked to think she’d had one of those endorphins-drenched moments when people perform superhuman feats of strength to rescue loved ones.

  By the time she got to high school, people started noticing Vicky’s remarkable luck. Good stuff just happened for her, like the time she won a few thousand dollars at the dog races, or when she found Mr. Selby’s gold watch and collected the finder’s reward. Senior year she asked Brandie Gustafson to the prom, and Brandie said yes. Vicky liked to say, “It’s all in the math,” which maybe would have made sense except that she applied that even to Brandie. When Lily asked how she could use math to convince someone to be her date, her sister only wagged her eyebrows like Groucho Marx.

  Lily and Tom were sophomores then, so they weren’t allowed to go to the dance, but Lily made him bike out to the Marriott anyway. All evening they sat outside in the dark, cross-legged on the lawn, where they could see a lot of
the dance through the floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows. Vicky prowled around the big room, drinking Cokes and talking to some of the other kids. She appeared to be laughing a lot. Once, near the end of the evening, she stepped outside, by herself, and looked up at the stars. She wore ill-fitting tux pants, too tight in the crotch, the suspenders entirely unnecessary. She hadn’t ironed her white shirt and had the sleeves rolled up. She wore a rose-colored bow tie and no jacket. She wasn’t smiling and her body slumped, as if she were beyond weary. Lily wished she’d just keep walking and go on home, but she turned around and went back to finish out the prom. Nothing happened that night, except that Brandie danced with a lot of boys but never with Vicky.

  Vicky left Fair Oaks right after graduation, and most people predicted she’d be back by the end of the summer. Her luck wouldn’t hold in the world at large. Her grades had been barely passing and she wore boys’ clothes. People were kinder then, but they spoke of her as if she were prey. Only her math teacher knew that she could do large square roots in her head and explain the theoretical possibility of time travel. Only her family knew that she could take a computer apart and put it back together. The math teacher convinced her to be tested, but the school principal dismissed the results. He told the family that there was nothing even remotely useful about doing square roots in one’s head, and he described her test scores as being some kind of fluke—or maybe a form of mental illness.

  In the Bay Area, Vicky landed well-paid jobs in the electronics sector, where she could do just about anything as long as no one made her dress up or come to work at a certain time. She made a fortune designing a popular computer game called Ziggle, based on string theory, in which players could travel to and colonize not just other planets but other universes, and over the years she’d become a legend in Fair Oaks. Now even her former tormentors claimed a hand in nurturing her gift. People were always asking Lily if it was true that Vicky owned an Alfa Romeo and homes in both Aspen and Maui. Now folks said that Vicky had needed to leave Fair Oaks, that they had encouraged her to do so. California, they liked to say, was perfect for Vicky.