The Evolution of Love

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  Lily ran down Ridge Road. She knew which house was Vicky’s even before checking the street number. The place was sleek, a horizontal sprawl of three attached, module-like boxes. Someone, probably Vicky, had stripped the surrounding grounds of all landscaping and covered the area with gravel. A handsome array of solar panels covered the roof of the largest, middle module, tipped in orderly unison, looking like glassy ornaments. Even the colossal satellite dish on the garage fit the design of the house, an extravagant hat offsetting the elegant simplicity. The roof of the module closest to the street sloped up toward the west, allowing a big plane of windows to look out at the San Francisco Bay.

  Of course the place looked untouched by the earthquake. Vicky’s luck.

  Lily walked up the flagstone pathway to the front door. Her sister was probably sitting at the kitchen table eating a sandwich.

  Lily pressed the doorbell but didn’t hear any dongs or chimes, and so she knocked, and then pounded. “Vicky?” she shouted. “Vicky!”

  She walked around to the back of the house and tried the back door. Locked.

  Professor Vernadsky hadn’t seen her since the earthquake. Twelve days ago. What if a beam had fallen on her? Or a gas leak had poisoned her as she slept? Surely neighbors, ones more hardy than the old man, would have checked on everyone before fleeing from the area. Wouldn’t they have?

  Lily returned to the front, pried a loose flagstone out of the pathway, carried it back down the side of the house, hefted it over her head with the sharpest corner pointing forward, and heaved the rock into a window, shattering the glass. No alarm went off. It took several more bashings to make a big enough hole. She picked out the shards and climbed through.

  Books covered the basement floor. There were no bookshelves, so they must have been stacked in towers around the perimeter of the room before the earthquake. She looked at a couple of spines and found what she expected—gaming theory and neutrinos, quarks and gluons, the origin of mass.

  As Lily climbed the stairs to the first floor, she heard a series of faint thumps. Like footsteps. She stopped midway up the flight and listened. Would Vicky be hiding out in her own home? Afraid of marauders? Maybe no one answered doors. Maybe Lily was terrifying her sister right now, sending her scurrying into a hiding place.

  Was that a door shutting?

  When she reached the top of the stairs, Lily called out, “Vicky! It’s me! Lily!”

  All she wanted now was to see Vicky’s smile. She’d ask for nothing more in life, she promised herself, if she could just see her sister’s healthy zealous self. Vicky would probably scold her for coming all the way out here for “no good reason.” Anyone else would be angry about the broken window, but Vicky would double over laughing at the image of her little sister heaving a flagstone through the window in her rescue mission.

  “Vicky!” Lily shouted as loudly as she could. If Vicky had shut herself in a closet, who knew what she could hear. “It’s ME! LILY!”

  Lily walked into the open design of the top floor. A blond hardwood floor sat like a stage before two steps leading down into the white shag rug of the sunken living room. Floor-to-ceiling windows framed sunny views of Angel Island, Alcatraz, San Francisco, and the Golden Gate Bridge. Several large oil canvases, monochrome abstract pictures, had fallen off the walls. One frame had busted, crumpling the canvas. The massive, wall-mounted home theater screen, which had survived the quake, gleamed like a black mirror. The midcentury modern chair collection, nearly a dozen of them, was scattered randomly about the room.

  The place had Vicky’s name all over it, a kind of ostentatious ugliness, as if she’d aimed for lavishness but lost interest before finishing. Vicky always understood the ephemerality of her good fortune. That was the problem: she understood it too well. For Vicky, everything was fleeting, episodic, smoke and mirrors. At best, life was one good joke.

  Lily called out her sister’s name again as she stepped into the kitchen. Bits of quartz sparkled like tiny stars in the granite countertops. The stainless steel pulls, cold little bars that looked like miniature nuclear reactors, matched the appliances. The cabinets were a rich cherrywood. All of it was false evidence, like purposely placed decoys, planted to hide Vicky, the real Vicky. The Vicky who stood in her ill-fitting tux, looking up at the stars, slumped in sadness.

  Lily pushed a hand through the pile of mail on the kitchen table, mostly unopened bills. One opened envelope was propped against the toaster. Lily pulled the sturdy sheet of stationery out of the envelope. Printed in purple ink across the top were the words, “From the Desk of Sal Wieczorek.” Below, in an angry scrawl, was the message: “Fuck you. Don’t call, come by, text, or email me again.” The note was unsigned and there was no return address on the envelope.

  Oh, Vicky. She’d no doubt done something worthy of the anger. Sal was the first woman she’d ever spoken of more than once or twice. About a year ago she’d called to say she’d fallen in love. Then she’d laughed and laughed, as if she’d said something as absurd as she’d become a vampire. Tom said Vicky had intimacy issues, which was probably true. Some people said she was autistic. Lily thought it was probably just a healthy dose of Attention Deficit Disorder. Whatever it was, she didn’t stay focused on anything that wasn’t science-related for more than a few weeks, including lovers. Sal was different. Lily heard about their nights playing Scrabble (shockingly domestic for Vicky), the vintage Harleys they bought together, the wine storage system they’d designed and were trying to patent, and Sal’s hyenas. Sal sounded eccentric as hell, but who else would appreciate Lily’s sister? Vicky said she laughed at all her jokes and that they had “cataclysmic” sex.

  Many years ago, when Lily was fifteen years old and before she’d realized that her sister liked girls, she’d had the brilliant idea that Travis and Vicky should get together. The idea had been triggered by an unusually personal letter. Usually he wrote about the bonobos, but this time he told her about his breakup with a girlfriend.

  Dear Lily,

  How strange it is that my work explores questions of love and compassion, and yet I am not able to sustain a loving relationship. It rains today. The big glossy green leaves, rainforest fans, are dripping, dripping. My hair is soaked from walking for hours. I was looking for Candace and her baby Gillian. They’re doing so well since they left the sanctuary. I love finding them nested high in a tree bed or loping along the floor of the forest, the baby’s eyes wide with wonder, Candace watching out for danger. They know me. She smiles.

  Right before we released them back into the wild, Yannick had to bring his own little baby to work one day. His wife had a doctor’s appointment in Kinshasa. He was all out of sorts about this. I asked him why he didn’t think it was his duty to help care for his young ones. He never appreciates my “Americanized” remarks. But when he carried his little Monique into the nursery, a look of delight crossed Candace’s face. Her eyes just lit up. It was the most beautiful thing. Her baby Gillian was sitting on the ground a few feet away, gnawing on a mango pit, and Candace swept her up off the ground and carried her over to Yannick. She held Gillian up, under the armpits, for Yannick to see. Her delight was that they shared parenthood, that they both had beautiful daughters. Gruff Yannick couldn’t resist Candace’s charm and he laughed and laughed, and they both cuddled their baby girls, enchanted with love.

  This is what I live for. I can’t leave the sanctuary. I can’t leave the bonobos. And I can’t leave this dripping, wet, luscious forest. And yet.

  Can I tell you everything? Do you mind?

  Oh, yes, fifteen-year-old Lily practically panted as she read the letter. Yes, tell me everything.

  Louise left me. The pain of that loss wracks through every joint in my body. And yet, I can’t make myself do what she wants, which is go home. She doesn’t want to live in the Congo and who the hell can blame her? I told her when I came here two years ago that I would stay just one year. Af
ter that I’d come home and we’d get married. But I didn’t come home. I begged for another year.

  Last month she flew here to get me. We had a great week together in Namibia, staying at some resort she’d found. Everything went great until, at the end of the week, she gave me a deadline. A short one. She said I had to be home by summer, by June to be exact. Or it was over.

  I know she didn’t mean to manipulate me with the cushy comfort of the resort, but it felt that way. I wish she’d told me her agenda upfront, so I could choose. She said she hadn’t because if I’d said no—and here she paused in this heartbreaking way, the look in her eyes saying that she was pretty sure I would say no—then she wanted one last full memory with me. We would always have Namibia, she said, trying to be funny with the cliché.

  The only thing I’m proud of is that I didn’t ask for another year. I wanted to. I almost had to bite off my tongue to not say it. But the truth is, the poolside lounge chairs and fresh linens and fancy sauces over butterflied shrimp stirred an almost unbearable impatience in me. I can’t stand resorts. I can’t stand being idle. Most of all, I can’t stand being away from the apes. I’d be sitting there listening to Louise tell me about one of her students, and I could think only of Rosa’s leathery soft palms or Malcolm’s earnest round stare. Their pink mouths wide open in their hoarse, breathy laughter. I had won their trust and to leave now would be to abandon much more than a few creatures. It would be to leave the last of a species, our hope for understanding why people fight and more importantly, how they cooperate. What it means to care for a community.

  So Louise flew home. And I stay here in this crazed country where I have apes for love. I guess I’m crazy.

  No, no, no, fifteen-year-old Lily hotly defended her pen pal as she inhaled the imagined scent of ape off the sheets of international airmail tissue and pictured perfectly the slow drifting Congo River. You’re not crazy. You’re passionate. And right.

  Love, he wrote for the first time, Travis.

  Lily touched that word, over and over again.

  Still, she harbored no illusions. Lily knew that Travis was too old for her. Too smart. Too exotic. But, it dawned on her soon after receiving this letter, he would be perfect for Vicky, side by side with their brains and zeal. She carried the slim packet of letters, all the ones she’d received so far, to Vicky’s bedroom and asked her to read them. She did. She read every last letter, in order, and Lily was gratified to have found something that intrigued her sister.

  “This is very cool,” she said to Lily when she finished. “Are you going to go visit him?”

  Visit him? The thought had never occurred to Lily, but she pretended it had. “They’d never let me.”

  Vicky shrugged.

  “But you’ll be eighteen next year,” Lily said. “You could go.”

  Vicky turned back to her laptop. “Why would I go?”

  Lily knew her answers were ludicrous: because the Congo would suit you; because we have to do something with you; because she could imagine what might ignite between Travis and Vicky.

  She’d already written to him about her sister. He was the one person she could tell Vicky stories to without feeling disloyal. She wrote a new letter then, searching for words to express condolence but hardly finding them—she was only fifteen—and so resorting to describing Vicky in much greater detail than ever before, stressing her good humor and extreme intelligence, hinting at her vulnerability, and insisting on her kindness.

  Lily dropped the fantasy when later that year Vicky started carving girls’ names into her bed frame, launched her blog for girl physicists, and wrote a Social Studies paper on Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto. It wasn’t the lesbian content, the principal told their parents, it was the threat of violence in Solanas’s message. The parent/principal conference went nowhere. No one could accuse Vicky of behavior that even hinted at anything violent or threatening. In fact, this incident brought about Vicky’s first experience of peer support. A small group of kids, the ones who ran the literary magazine, including editor Brandie Gustafson, organized a protest when Vicky got an F on the paper while Brett Wadsworth, who wrote his paper about the men who had murdered abortion providers, got an A. Vicky smiled and held her own council.

  It became clear to Lily that Travis was not going to be the answer to the problem of Vicky. It also became clear that Vicky planned on solving the problem of herself on her own. Like that was going to work out any better than taking Brandie Gustafson to the prom. In fact, Lily hadn’t had an opportunity to rescue Vicky since her failure to do so that prom night. Until now.

  And this time was no dance.

  “May I help you?”

  Lily screamed and dropped to the kitchen floor, spinning around on her hands and knees to face the scratchy male voice.

  “Sorry,” said the freckled, sinewy man. “But who are you? What are you doing here?”

  He stared down at her, the blade-like Adam’s apple shifting up and down his throat, like he was nervous. Lily reached up and grabbed the edge of the kitchen table but she couldn’t get to her feet. “What are you doing here?” she choked out.

  “The bitch who lived here had some equipment that belongs to me.”

  Bitch? Lily rasped, “Where is she?”

  “For real?”

  Lily huffed to her feet. “Where is she?”

  “She’s gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  He squinted and stepped toward Lily. “Look, I’m sorry if she was a friend of yours or something, but she’s gone gone. As in, a lot of people didn’t make it.”

  “No,” Lily said, resisting the pull of an icy vacuum. “I don’t believe that.”

  “To be honest, neither did I. At first. But I heard she bit the dust. And every time I come by to look for my stuff, she’s not here. So.”

  “No.”

  The man cut his eyes to the side, scratched his neck, and started for the door.

  “Wait!” Lily shouted not so much at him as at the cold, black hole sucking her into its vortex. “I need to see her. I need proof.”

  “Proof? Good luck with that. In any case, Vicky is kaput.” He appeared to enjoy being the messenger of this news.

  Lily couldn’t stand another second in this awful man’s presence. Kalisha would know where they took people. As if life were a board game and she needed only to get to that room, that clanging hothouse of humanity, to be safe, Lily turned and ran out of Vicky’s house, down Ridge Road, and all the way to Trinity Church.

  9

  The rising sun was a bright orange ball of jarring light and Kalisha liked it that way. Let it burn away the ache. Distract her from the void.

  She sat on the cement stoop and watched daylight define Trinity Church’s parking lot. The sheet of gray became cracks and weeds. A trapezoid of sunlight showcased the graffiti on an exterior wall of the church.

  She knew that girl wouldn’t be back. Tall and pale, like a eucalyptus tree, a strong gust of wind would blow her right over. The way her earnest gray eyes warped at the sight of the devastated clients. Sponging, mopping, asking everyone about her sister, she shot her wad of courage in one shift. Probably even felt righteous, like she’d contributed something. No, she wouldn’t be back.

  It hardly mattered. Without money, Kalisha couldn’t keep the meals program going. She’d be out of food in two days. Her only option was Michael, and hard as she tried, she couldn’t imagine her way to him.

  She tossed the rest of her coffee out on the parking lot pavement and went inside to take a shower in the bathroom behind Pastor Riley’s office. After stripping, she stood looking at her skinny naked self in the mirror, unable not to care how Michael would see her. Well, shit, he knew what she looked like. No doubt he’d spied her on the street now and then, just as she’d spied him. Besides, he was married with children. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t beautiful anymor
e. After her shower, she put on a fresh shirt and pants and then took another look, squaring her shoulders at her image. “Hey, beautiful,” he used to say when she answered the phone.

  Instead of heading out the door, Kalisha scanned the bookshelf in Pastor Riley’s office and plucked the copy of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. Two hours later, she was still reading, as if she could make up for lost physical beauty by tuning up her brain, as if Michael would quiz her on ethical and spiritual questions before writing a check.

  For eight years, ever since she got out of prison, Kalisha had been avoiding actual contact with Michael. For each of those eight years, he’d sent whopping checks, once as big as thirty grand, usually more like ten or fifteen thousand, to the meals program. The checks came in December each year, his left-sloping handwriting as painfully dear to her as his face used to be. Every once in a long while, she’d see him on the street, but they didn’t exactly haunt the same urban geographies. He dined at Chez Panisse, took hikes in Tilden, bought clothes on Fourth Street. She stayed close to downtown, the church, or other shabby public spaces used for NA meetings. If she did happen to see him, she detoured quickly, and they never spoke. She deposited the checks each December and used the money to buy food, utensils, a new stove.

  It would have been easy to attribute the checks to his guilt, but she didn’t let herself be that petty. He had loved her. He respected her journey, even though he hadn’t been able to stay on it with her. And who could blame him?

  Sometimes she did. They started it all together. She lost control. He didn’t.

  Michael and she were the only two black students in Cal’s graduate program in Philosophy. They knew others expected them to hang out together, to have lots in common, and so they avoided each other at first. She thought he was a little pompous with his outsized Afro, high-water slacks, and persistent scowl, as if to make clear that he was always deep in thought. But she soon learned that he was always deep in thought. It took about two months for them to fall in love, and it was a love Kalisha had thought she’d never have—a man who respected her intelligence, who wanted to ask the biggest questions in the universe. Their most pressing practical problem was figuring out how they would find jobs at the same university because no one was going to hire two African-American philosophers in the same place.