Lily handed her two milks.
An hour later, she wiped down the tables and mopped the floor. Then she interrupted Kalisha, who was dressing down Ron for cooking too many hamburgers.
20
The news knocked Kalisha down. She landed in a chair. Knowing it was coming had not prepared her. She looked around her dining room, trying to stabilize herself by taking inventory: chairs, tables, four walls, floor, and ceiling. This sanctuary of need and nourishment was a direct result of his kindness to her.
“Let’s go now,” she said to Lily.
“Go where?”
“To bury him.”
Lily shook her head.
“If we don’t, who will?”
“We should call the authorities.”
“You’re kidding, right? I don’t know who cleans up your shit, but—”
“Nobody cleans up my shit.”
“The ‘authorities’ are a fiction. At least for people like me and Professor Vernadsky.”
“Hey. L-l-l-l-l-l—” Ron tried to articulate. He finally got out, “Lily’s not the enemy. Not even close.”
His stuttering gave Kalisha time to breathe, and the moment softened. “I know,” she said. “But that doesn’t change the fact that he has to be buried.”
“Y-y-y-y-you need some r-r-r-rest,” Ron told her, clearly glad to have the subject changed from his mistake with the hamburger meat. “B-b-b-b-bury h-h-h-him t-t-t-t-t-to-m-m-m-m-morrow.”
“Professor Vernadsky was good to me.” Kalisha threw off her apron. “We’ll go now.”
“It’ll be dark soon,” Lily said.
“We’ve got time.”
They walked up the hill in silence, Lily sagging in reluctance and Kalisha staving off memories, unsuccessfully. She hadn’t been to the professor’s home since she dropped out of the doctorate program. Back then, on Sunday afternoons, he always had his small cadre of graduate students over for wine and cheese. His wife, a small, wise woman with a deeply ironic sense of humor and a fondness for martinis, was still alive then. Kalisha and Michael had loved everything about her, including how she spotted instantly the pretentious students and ignored them wholly, even though she was the hostess at these gatherings. The professor himself was always too immersed in his world of ideas to notice, or care about, the social jostling among his students, but his wife did. Mrs. Vernadsky had stared at Kalisha that first year with transparent admiration. She and Michael wanted a house just like theirs, lively with comfy sofas and good food and lots of talk, red-tailed hawks swooping by the big windows.
“Sweet Jesus,” Kalisha said once they reached the front porch, shocked by the degree of dilapidation.
“You should see the inside.”
“I’ll go on in. That looks like a gardening shed. Why don’t you see if you can find a shovel?”
Kalisha put her palm against the door, but she couldn’t make herself push it open. Instead, she waited while Lily pawed through the tools and then emerged with a rusty shovel. She stood on the patio, holding the long-handled tool as grimly as the man holds the pitchfork in American Gothic.
“We may as well dig the grave before going in,” Kalisha said, trying to hold onto a slim thread of sense. She wished her anger would come back, anything at all that might fortify her. “Backyard?”
Lily nodded and followed her down the side path. Kalisha stopped halfway, turned, and took Lily’s hand. “I’m glad you’re with me. Thank you for coming.”
They picked a place under a lemon tree. Lily started digging, but Kalisha took the shovel after just a couple of minutes. It felt better to be doing physical labor. She struck the soil over and over again with the tip of the blade and tossed the clods every which way. After a while, Lily eased the shovel out of Kalisha’s hands and took a long turn. She also seemed eager to sweat, to punish her muscles, and they nearly fought over who got to dig the most. By the time they finished making a big enough hole, night had fallen. Lily clicked on her flashlight and shined it into the grave.
Kalisha leaned on the wooden shaft of the shovel. “Wheelbarrow?”
They found an ancient rusted metal one in the garden shed and by tipping it on its side were able to get it through the front door. They both took off their T-shirts and tied them over their noses and mouths. Lily stood the flashlight on its end on the coffee table, and it cast a ghoulish cone of light.
Kalisha couldn’t look at him, not yet. The room, even in its wild state, flooded her with memories: wine and cheese; Aristotle and Diderot; the belief, no, the conviction, that life could be understood, that meaning could be excavated from the ruins of human endeavor, language, and history. Here, in this room that was in the process of returning to Rousseau’s paradisial nature, they had talked and talked, and laughed and laughed. Most of all, they had believed in their own powers.
How utterly Kalisha had failed. The worst memory of her entire life was of the day Mrs. Vernadsky came to see her in prison. Her gray hair in that messy pixie cut, the penetrating gray eyes, the full mouth that loved to smirk, all transformed into a tableau of confusion. Kalisha saw how she struggled for compassion but felt something more like outrage. She shifted in her chair on the other side of the table as if she could hardly sit still with her disappointment. She did extend her hands toward Kalisha, but they were closed together, a knot of fingers. For her, even more than for her husband, the waste of a mind was the greatest failing. Kalisha wished with all her heart that she had refused to see her.
“Please don’t come again,” she said at the end of the short visit, and she didn’t.
Now Kalisha was making the final visit, and strangely, the salon of ideas turned wildly verdant soothed her. We all come to the same end.
Maybe nature was paradise.
Maybe the mess she’d made of her life wasn’t such a mess after all. Michael, who’d also inhabited this room, young and earnest with his too-big hair and too-short pants, had thought she’d accomplished something. He’d said so with his checks. That’s all Kalisha had ever wanted—to do something half-worthy.
She walked around to the other side of the coffee table and looked at the professor. She felt a flood of love for the old man, and for his wife, too. Death is a kind of forgiveness, and this one saddened Kalisha but also released her.
“Let’s get you buried,” she told the corpse.
Kalisha shoved her hands under his butt, and Lily lifted from under his armpits, and they managed to jimmy the rigid old man into the wheelbarrow.
Unfortunately, they hadn’t thought about getting the load back out the front door. They ended up having to dump him onto the floor, his body frozen in the sitting position, and then sidle the empty wheelbarrow through the opening. Kalisha dragged the body by the legs, while Lily protected his head with her hands, out to the porch. They tipped the wheelbarrow onto its side, lugged him in, and then righted the load. The body shifted to the bottom. By now they were handling him as if he were a bag of cement, but even so, Kalisha was glad to be doing it. Handling death is a lot easier than ignoring it.
Lily lifted her T-shirt mask so that she could carry the flashlight in her mouth. They bounced him down the stairs at the side of the house and then tilted the wheelbarrow at the edge of the fresh grave. No wonder there was a whole industry surrounding death. Making it look graceful was a lot of work. They didn’t even try.
Together they tugged the professor into the pit. Then Kalisha crouched on the edge, her elbows on her extended knees, and looked at her philosophy teacher. When she accidentally fell back on her butt, she and Lily both laughed. The flashlight shot out of Lily’s mouth and into the grave. “Shit!” she cried, and then they laughed harder.
“Oh!” Lily cried, uneasy about laughing. “Sorry! Sorry!”
“It’s okay,” Kalisha said, and somehow it was okay. The laughing didn’t feel disrespectful. It felt just the opposite, li
ke a form of deep appreciation.
“Love is love,” Lily agreed. “Irreducible.”
Then Lily lay on her belly and reached down to retrieve the flashlight, snatching it quickly, as if afraid that she might be sucked into the hole with Professor Vernadsky. She scrambled to her feet, and they both stood, looking down, two women in their bras, T-shirts tied around their faces like bandits, staring at the body they’d just dumped in a grave. Neither of them wanted to shovel the dirt back over him.
Lily used the side of her foot and kicked in a few clods. Kalisha didn’t join her until Lily had pushed in an entire layer of soil. Then she picked up the shovel and, taking turns, they got him buried.
Kalisha stood up straight, on the side of the fresh mound, with her hands behind her back. Vernadsky hadn’t believed in God, but she prayed anyway. Then, out loud, in a firm and steady voice, “Thank you, Professor Vernadsky.”
Lily said, “I lubh you.”
21
Lily bought another night in the motel, and then in the morning pedaled up Grizzly Peak Boulevard with her tent and sleeping bag strapped onto her handlebars. She could go stay with Vicky, but that was nearly twenty miles away. She’d have to give up her job at the church, and Lily wasn’t willing to do that. She guessed that Sal would not be interested in meeting her, but it occurred to Lily that maybe there was a good camping place near the hyena compound. People stayed away from that area because it was rumored that some of the hyenas had escaped after the earthquake. It might be perfect: close enough to the church and away from the dangers of the city.
As Lily neared the turnoff for the fire trail that led out to the hyena compound, she heard a motorcycle gaining on her from behind. It passed, a burst of sunlight glinting off the chrome, and she recognized the lank curve of his body. Wesley leaned into the bend in the road and disappeared around the corner. A quick memory of her ride with him, that dilated joy, shimmered inside her.
So he was back from Oregon.
Besides The Earthquake Chronicles, she’d read all the installments of Wings on Fire. Wesley had invented a newly evolved hominid species that could fly. These humanlike creatures not only had wings, some freak genetic mutation gave them spectacular endurance. His protagonist, Suzette, could fly from the Amazon River to New York with as few as three resting stops. In one episode, Suzette alighted next to a gargoyle on the north tower of Chartres Cathedral and held very still, poised with her wings folded, to see if the tourists would notice her. She flew off at dusk, her wings black expanses against a violet sky, and found a quiet place in Paris for dinner where she humored herself by ordering Crêpes Suzette. Later, on a mountain in Uganda, she perched in a tree and tried to speak with a silverback gorilla, who grunted at her but of course didn’t speak any of the eight languages Suzette knew. She wanted to hug him, to console him, because she knew his country was war-torn and his habitat ravaged, but the silverback would not acknowledge her beyond the grunts. This broke Suzette’s heart, but at the same time, she understood, and so she flew on. In another installment, she got caught in a hurricane in the Caribbean. Wesley spent too many paragraphs describing her screaming battles against the blasting winds, the ripping of her wings, and her terrible fear. But Lily loved the part, after the storm had ended, where she floated on her back in the warm Caribbean water, her battered wings spread to their fullest, and rested.
Wesley thought stories could save people. Maybe. Stories and food.
Lily needed Kalisha’s bracing realism. Ron’s stuttering compassion. She needed all the clients who came for dinner every afternoon: the teenage boy who always held up his thumb, forefinger, and baby finger to sign “I love you”; the elderly woman who sang her a few lines of a different song everyday; the painfully shy man whose greeting warmed up incrementally week by week but who still couldn’t manage eye contact; and, of course, Herbert and his dad.
Standing at the steam table and serving up plates of hot food in Trinity Church felt the opposite of being homeless. She hadn’t felt this awake in years. If Wesley could choose to stay here in the heart of disaster to tell survivors’ stories, couldn’t she stay to serve them dinner?
Lily turned off the paved road and onto the fire trail that began at the university’s Space Sciences Laboratory. The lab looked like a prison the way the building had been secured with giant sheets of plywood and endless strands of barbed wire fencing, though she saw no guards. No one stopped her from heading out the fire trail. She wended through a mile of university-owned wilderness: eucalyptus and bay laurel trees, with an occasional Monterey pine. A long chain-link fence, topped with more strands of barbed wire, followed the trail on the left-hand side. The fence belonged to the Berkeley Field Station for the Study of Behavior, Ecology, and Reproduction, where Sal worked. Or used to work, before the earthquake.
Lily’s bicycle bounced along the dirt and rock road, jarring her hands and arms and loosening the bundle tied to her handlebars. About a mile out, she saw the toolshed, a small rustic building situated behind the fence and a good distance up the hill. So that’s where Vicky had her bonus days with Sal. Today she saw no sign of Sal, nor any other people. Lily continued on another half-mile, until she came to a faint trail leading down to the right. She took this and soon entered open chaparral. She braked and stood with a foot on either side of her bicycle, perched on the top of a small knoll, looking out on a sweeping view of the entire Bay Area.
Home, she thought. Her life was in as much shambles as the cities in the earthquake zone below, and yet she felt a little buzz of hope. She dropped her bike and unfurled her tent.
Part Two
22
Lily stepped out of the Trinity Church community room into a purple twilight. She paused at the top of the steps and breathed in the damp air. She thought she could smell the bay, just there, on the edge of the city. Or, actually, in the center of many cities, connected to the ocean and other continents by that delicate red bridge. Of course, it wasn’t delicate at all. It had survived the earthquake. But from her tent, perched high on the hillside, the Golden Gate Bridge looked like a piece of jewelry strung across the throat of the Bay Area.
The community room had been especially stuffy tonight—they were feeding a record number of people, the big room jammed with chairs and voices—and she’d needed a quick breath of fresh air after finishing the cleanup. She was about to go back inside to retrieve her bicycle when she saw the man emerge from the shadows on the other side of the parking lot. He strode toward her, slowing when he noticed her standing on the stoop watching him approach. Thirty yards away, he lifted a hand and called out, “I’m looking for Lily Jones. I think she works here.”
Lily wished she could pretend, for just a minute, that she wasn’t Lily Jones. She wished she could observe him from a distance, how he walked, talked, gestured, smiled.
The man now standing before her was shorter, and handsomer, than Lily expected him to be. His smile was complicated, an expression of will mixed with dread, a here-for-better-or-worse smile. She couldn’t see the color of his eyes in the dusk light, but his teeth were perfect, bright white and straight. His longish blond hair made him look younger than his forty-four years.
“Lily?” he asked.
She nodded, too overwhelmed to speak.
“Travis Grayson.”
He held out a hand and she managed to shake it.
“Look at you,” he said, emotion thickening his voice.
Lily glanced down at her chest and the tops of her thighs, foolishly following his directions.
“Lily Jones,” he said. “A real person.”
It’d been nearly two weeks since she’d written to him. She’d figured that either he’d never gotten to Berkeley or he’d meant what he said about not contacting her again.
“Of course you’re real,” he carried on. “I mean, I don’t know, I just didn’t expect…”
“Wow,” Lily finally s
aid.
“Yeah. Wow.”
There was something alarming about him, both fervent and vulnerable, as if he’d just stepped across a railroad track moments before a train whooshed through. She reached out a hand but didn’t touch him. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Yes. I’m good. I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner. It’s been crazy. I’m sorry about Vicky.”
“Oh! I found her! She’s fine. Totally alive.” Lily tried to laugh. “Although I almost lost her again. It’s all so complicated here.”
Travis was saying, “Oh, good. Good. Good,” all while she bumbled her explanation of Vicky. Then, “It is. Yes, it is. Complicated.” His smile. His eyes. Just a man. If he’d wanted her to be the holder of ordinary, she’d wanted him to be the holder of extraordinary. The one who would tell her about the possibility for human salvation. Not just a guy with a hundred-watt smile and devastated eyes. She almost wished he hadn’t come.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked.
“I’m so glad you found your sister.”
“She’s living out by the Oakland airport now.”
“The Hegenberger Cluster?”
“You know them?”
“Come on. Let’s get a cup of tea. There’s a lot to talk about.”
“Tea? Where?”
“I know a place.”
Leaving her bicycle inside, Lily cantered down the steps. How so very strange to be walking alongside Travis Grayson! All these years he’d been airmail tissue and lofty ideas, and now so quickly he was reduced to a limping gait and a hyper smile.
A few blocks away, he used a key to open the front door to a Craftsman bungalow. Lit candles stood on all the ledges and the wooden paneling glowed warm reddish brown. A few young people sat on the floor of the front room, dipping pieces of bread into a central pot.
“Hey,” Travis said to the young people.
The Evolution of Love Page 14
