“Hey,” they all said back.
“You hungry?” he asked Lily.
She hesitated, stalled by a mix of confusion and curiosity. “I just ate.”
Travis picked up one of the three camp stoves sitting on the floor next to the built-in bookshelves. He grabbed a lit candle, too. “Let’s go upstairs.”
“Whose house is this?” Lily asked, her hand sliding along the polished wooden banister as they climbed to the second floor.
“Dunno. We’ve been using it for a while now, but we probably need to move on soon. It’s best to not get too attached to any shelters. You never know when you’re going to get busted. Moving often is the best way to stay safe.” He motioned for her to step into one of the bedrooms.
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“I’m with the San Pablo Reservoir Cluster. Here, hold the candle for me.” He crouched to fiddle with the stove. “We have a couple of houses down here in the flatlands that we use for various purposes. Like, new members stay here until we accept them as permanent residents.”
“Permanent residents?”
“Up at the reservoir. We vet people before accepting them.”
A blue flame hissed to life on the camp stove. He told her to hold on a second and went downstairs to get a pan of water and some tea. When he returned, he handed her a book of matches. “Light the others?”
There were six fat candles sitting on the dresser. Her hands shook as she held the match flame to the wicks. For so many years, Travis Grayson had been her Land of Oz, a brightly colored place beyond her reach. And now here she was, in his presence, in his niche, as if they were two inhabitants of a new ecosystem. He shut the bedroom door, and they sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the stove, their campfire. The shadows and light shimmied on the walls.
Travis stared at her for a long time, then slowly shook his head. “I had no idea you…”
“What.” She bit off the question inflection, not sure she wanted to hear what he’d had no idea about.
“You’re just beautiful, that’s all. I didn’t know.”
He lowered his eyes, as if to show he didn’t mean anything other than an observation. But the kindness of his comment blew right into the vacuum sucked out by her loneliness, hunger, and exhaustion. She wanted to move over next to him, lean against him, fall asleep with him. All at once she was glad he was just a man, human, contained by skin and bones like everyone else. Still, she stayed where she was: the hiss of the stove, the closed door, the trembling candlelight all made Lily feel as if she were dreaming, nothing she could trust.
“You first,” he said. “Tell me everything. How did you get here?”
She told him everything: the flight to Sacramento, the car ride to the edge of Oakland, the hike along the freeway, the pit bulls and corpse in the Miata, the night in the FedEx truck, thinking Vicky was dead and then finding her, being harangued by Annie, and her eviction from Joyce’s flat. She told him about finding and burying Professor Vernadsky’s body. She couldn’t stop talking once she started. He laughed out loud at her description of Angelina.
Until she said, “He’s leaving me for her.”
“No,” he said, sobering up quickly. “That’s not possible.”
She tried to swallow down the hard knot in her throat.
“You’ve been so solidly married. He was your childhood sweetheart. Like, the boy next door.”
She nodded.
“So…why?”
Because of you, she wanted to say. But no, not Travis Grayson, the flesh-and-blood man sitting here now. Tom was jealous of him, true, but that was wrong. It had never been the man himself. And yet, Travis had been smack in the center of that biggest fight of all, the one about Tom’s DNA and Lily’s world of children who needed love. His letters, the bonobos, had shown her a way forward.
“You don’t have to answer that,” Travis said.
“I’m not sure I can.”
“How’d you get this scar?”
His fingers on her chin felt too potent. She took a sip of the mint tea. “When I was eight, I tripped on a hose at a gas station. I fell face-first onto a broken bottle.”
“Ouch.”
“It was a long time ago.”
Lily glanced at the warm, clean bed. Was it his? His glance followed hers. Then he asked, “Where are you living?”
People didn’t ask that question. She had, a few times in the beginning, and noticed how people scowled slightly, as if she’d been rude. Now she understood. She’d been in her camp for five nights and hadn’t told anyone where she was sleeping, not even Vicky.
But this was Travis Grayson. If anyone could understand her plan, it would be him. First, she’d find a way to reunite Vicky and Sal. That would take routing Vicky out of East Oakland. It would take finding a way to make Sal acknowledge Lily. All that had to happen before she could engineer their reconciliation. Kalisha might want to join them, and maybe even Ron and his girlfriend. Vicky said there was a stream near Sal’s toolshed, although Lily hadn’t yet found it. She’d been hauling water from the church to her campsite. They could build another couple of shelters. None of it would be permanent, but they’d be stronger together. Maybe Wesley the motorcycle guy would want to join them. She’d even thought of a name: the Hyena Cluster.
She sipped her tea and carefully chose her words. “I love my job at the church. I want to keep feeding people. So—”
He nodded hard, admiringly. “You’d fit in our Cluster really well. You’re exactly the kind of person we need. Letting that hungry girl into the flat was the right thing to do. People shouldn’t lock up resources they aren’t using. In our Cluster, we share everything.”
Lily touched the bulge at her breast, her thin packet of money. Travis mistook the gesture, thought she was touching her heart.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s devastating what’s happening.”
“I’m sorry. About the sanctuary. About the bonobos.”
“That’s the past. I’m exactly where I want to be.”
“Your turn,” she said, “to tell me everything.” She thought he’d start where everyone started, with the earthquake.
But he didn’t. “You probably gathered from my letters that I was in love with Renée.”
Actually, Lily hadn’t gathered that.
“She wasn’t in love with me. She never had been. But years ago we had a little thing. It ended. I knew it was over. It’s not like I didn’t give up hope. I did give it up. But I stayed and stayed and stayed anyway.”
“You stayed for the bonobos.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that’s true. But I never had the kind of flawless dedication Renée had. No one could possibly match her devotion to them. Yannick hated me for wanting her. He saw it every day and scorned me. Renée saw it, too, but for her, desire is just part of the human condition. It didn’t bother her that I loved her. If she could use my love for her to benefit the bonobos, she would. She did.”
The flash of bitterness, maybe even anger, surprised Lily. She drank more minty tea and rallied to his side. “Why did Yannick care if you loved Renée?”
“He thought it was vulgar, an American wanting a Congolese woman. He had very strict standards of marriage and family. She was royalty to him and I was common, a nobody. He thought that I thought I was important because of my nationality. He believed that the only reason I stayed at the sanctuary all those years was because of her.”
“He knew about your research!”
Travis shrugged. “He always thought I’d fail. When I did, he saw me as a virus that had been infecting them for years. He and Renée had a shouting match about me, in front of me, and her defense weakened. I saw it weaken. I saw her give up on me.”
“No one cared about the bonobos more than you.”
He gave her a crooked smile. “Maybe. But it’s true that I
caused the end of the sanctuary.”
Lily shook her head. “No. No, you didn’t.”
“So here I am. Getting on with my life.”
“Back to your teaching job, when the university opens again.”
“Actually, I feel really lucky to have landed here now. Yannick is right, in a way. I need to take care of the mess in my own backyard. Where I can be more effective. There is so much work to do.”
“Travis?” She touched his hand, as if gently waking him from a nightmare. “Where were you for the earthquake?”
His right eye twitched and he reached up a knuckled fist to rub it. “A dog and a baby,” he said. “They got me through.”
“What do you mean?” She resisted the urge to touch him again, but wished there were a way to calm him.
He sat up straighter and squared his shoulders. “First order of business is getting control of the region. The troops need to go. They’ve killed at least a hundred innocent people, calling them looters or squatters. FEMA still hasn’t sent the promised trailers. And really, trailers? I mean, is that the best they can do? The feds have always hated California and they always will. We’re on our own, that’s a fact. But that’s also a good thing. I want them to leave us alone.”
“You’ve never before sounded cynical like this.”
“I’m not cynical. I’m the opposite of cynical. I’m practical. Above all else, I’m practical. I want people to have food and shelter. Washington is filled with cowards, and so is Sacramento. This is an opportunity for true rule by the people, for the people. An opportunity for us to take care of ourselves. And the exciting part is that we’re doing it.”
“That’s what Vicky says.”
“So she’s with the Hegenberger Cluster?”
Lily nodded.
“Where exactly is she living?”
Lily hesitated only for a moment. “She’s on Eighty-First Avenue. She’s doing electronics for them.”
“Ah!” Travis’s eyes brightened. They were green, she decided. “Yeah! See? It’s like that. People have what we need to take care of ourselves, if only the authorities didn’t interfere. We have the complete toolkit to make food, to make clean energy. All the tech is there. What’s not there is the political will. The collapse of the infrastructure means we don’t have to fight against the machine anymore. We’re on our own. We’re organizing to make it work.”
“Things are getting better, though,” Lily said. “Power is back in some places. Lots of people have water now.”
“Sure, the wealthier neighborhoods are doing okay. But it’s mainly poor people, people who were living in multifamily buildings, who lost their homes. Those structures are not being rebuilt.”
Lily knew this was true. The number of clients at the Trinity Church free meals program had increased, not decreased.
“What’s worse, the government is targeting those of us who are trying to make it work for ourselves. Increasingly, refugees are having to hide. They’ve sent in troops to actually close down a few of the camps. It’s becoming illegal to try to live.”
“You haven’t had any of your tea. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Ah,” he said and blew out a long breath. He looked at the darkest corner of the room. “Yeah. Pretty much.”
He seemed stunned. But who wasn’t? She felt off-kilter, too.
“It’s you,” he said shaking his head in slow disbelief. “I can’t believe you’re sitting here with me. My Nebraska girl. I told you everything, didn’t I?”
“Probably because you thought you’d never meet me in person.”
“Yeah, actually. I think that is probably what I assumed. And now here you are. A real person, after all.”
Lily laughed. “I think I’m real. A bit hard to know for sure lately.”
He touched her scar again. This time she let her chin sink into his hand. Why not? His warm palm. The ancient light of six fat candles. The clean, cushioned bed. The man to whom, for twenty years, she’d written her most deeply felt sentences. Those words, candles, sheets, and hands spun a silky web.
“Tell me,” she whispered. “Where were you for the earthquake?”
Travis shook his blond mane and then got to his feet, pacing to the dark window. “People don’t get what’s happening. They’re getting crushed by the system every day. The earthquake is one giant metaphor. One giant wakeup call.”
He wasn’t going to answer her questions. Not now, anyway. The withholding felt like bait and she rose to her feet, too, joining him at the window. She put a hand on the small of his back. The fabric of his worn T-shirt was soft, and she lifted the hem of the shirt. The muscles on his back spasmed, as if her touch hurt him.
“You seem sad,” she said, purposely using a much softer word than the one she meant.
He nodded but looked away.
She was scaring herself. Touching Travis felt like another survival behavior, like hoarding tools, like eating found fruit rinds, like sleeping on hillsides. She was still married. She wasn’t a bonobo. There were rules in place, and yet she felt as if there were no gravity in this dark room, as if she were in suspension, and all that mattered were touch and hunger. And truly: Why not?
As she stepped around to face him, he looked surprised. She tried to see the surprise as warning but only wanted to soothe his devastation. Her devastation. She traced his collarbone, ran her fingers down his ribs, held him at the hips, began to pull him toward her. Until she felt the edge of a hard object in his pocket.
“What’s this?”
Travis withdrew the gun and tried to hand it to her.
“Why?” she asked, stepping away. “What are you doing with this?”
“You’re so innocent,” he said softly. “You really don’t get what’s going on here, do you?”
Lily searched his face for meaning. In the candlelight, she couldn’t see much more than small caves of shadow and the glistening white of his eyes. “I need to go,” she said, backing up slowly, afraid to leave, afraid of stepping into the abyss of loneliness just outside that door, but even more afraid of the gun.
23
Lily fled the candlelit bedroom and the Craftsman bungalow, but she couldn’t get free of that whirlpool of feeling. His intensity, his listening, his convictions; it was as if Travis and Tom were two different countries. Was that the choice? Frightening zeal or bland disconnection?
She wanted her own country.
Lily hiked up the hill, not paying attention, forgetting to walk with intention and confidence, trying to fathom why Travis would have a handgun, an object that negated everything she thought he stood for.
She needed to get back on track with her plan. The loneliness had gouged her out, left her empty and vulnerable. She’d been alone on her hillside for five nights, the solitude interrupted only by the few hours in the church and a couple of phone calls with Vicky. The loss of Tom was a tide sucking her out to sea. She needed to act rationally. Take steps. She would make Sal acknowledge her and convince Vicky to move back to Berkeley. Tomorrow she’d talk to Kalisha about her plan.
The band of ferals circled Lily near La Loma Park, the place where the two National Guard soldiers, Eduardo and William, were usually stationed. She’d been sneaking the guards snacks from the church and sometimes sat in the park with them exchanging news. Both were from Texas. Tonight they were nowhere to be seen. The kids corralled her, the way humpback whales do prey, moving her toward the jungle gym. They pushed her against the bars of the structure. Some of the ferals couldn’t have been older than six, but there were at least seven of them, and they stuffed their hands in her pockets, yanked off her sneakers, reached into her bra where they found the last of her cash.
The children didn’t even frighten her, not now after that womb of candlelight with an armed man at its center. Not now with her husband leaving her, or her leaving her husband, and her
life a gaping maw before her. A bunch of hungry children. That at least was something she understood.
“I’d like to keep my sneakers,” she said. But they walked off with them anyway, shouting at one another, beginning to brawl over who got the cash. Then one little boy, inexplicably, snatched one sneaker from each of two other ferals, retraced his steps, and hurled them at her. Maybe she looked like his mother.
Lily sat on the ground and tied on her shoes. Luckily she’d left her bicycle at the church, though it made for a long walk out to her campsite. When she got to Grizzly Peak Boulevard, she took a right, passed the turnoff for Ridge Road, and continued on to the fire trail. She walked out through the forest of eucalyptus and bay laurels and stopped at the place where in daylight she could see the toolshed on the hillside high above the trail. Sal did a good job of making herself scarce. Every time she passed, Lily looked for signs of life: movement, drying clothing, an open door. Twice she’d stood here at the fence and shouted Sal’s name, but she’d never gotten a response. The place looked uninhabited, and maybe it was—maybe Sal had moved on. Lily hoped not. Despite everything that had happened between them, she was pretty sure that Sal was the key to Vicky. And Lily needed Vicky.
When she got to her camp, Lily sat on the big stone in front of her tent and looked out into the night, like some kind of twenty-first-century pioneer. Parts of the cities below were lit, but there were whole pockets of darkness. The bay was a giant black amoeba, a harbor of exceptional proportions. The Hayward fault, the one that had slipped so dramatically twenty-seven days ago, ran under the northern end of the bay. The mayor of Fair Oaks, a not particularly compassionate woman, had actually joked, one morning in the café a few days after the quake, about how it was too bad the entire state hadn’t snapped off from the rest of the continent. It was true what Travis said about some people not liking California. The place was uncommon with its crashing coastline and too-warm winters, with its tendency to reject the status quo and its arrogance about doing so.
Her own arrogance had drawn her out here to California. A belief that she could save someone. A desire to be a part of something bigger than marriage and work. Those letters from Travis had started coming when she was thirteen years old, a little girl, and she’d devoured his outsized hope. The letters had kept coming, too, for years and years, like some parallel stream to her real life, one in which she was still thirteen and could dream massive dreams. How foolish she had been. How foolish she still was: she’d just tried to kiss Travis Grayson!
The Evolution of Love Page 15
