The Evolution of Love

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  “You have a flashlight in your pack,” Annie said. “Or do you enjoy running into walls?”

  “Food. Light. You’re a miracle-worker, Annie.”

  Lily switched on the flashlight. The dim beam lit the hallways and at last Lily found the sanctuary at the heart of the church. A cluster of candle stubs burned on the altar, and the flickering light made the place feel primitive. Bats whooshed like tiny black phantoms.

  The three of them walked up the aisle between the pews like a devastated bridal party, slowly and reverently. Lily hesitated at the steps to the altar, but then climbed them.

  Behind the big wooden pulpit she found a little camp. Blankets had been hastily stuffed into the pulpit’s cavity, along with a half-eaten sandwich on a plate.

  “Please,” Lily said to Wesley and Annie. “Could you please wait for me outside?”

  Annie scowled. “I know what you’re doing.”

  Lily held a finger to her lips and shook her head hard, managing to silence Annie.

  Wesley still wore an expression of shock, a look that said, This is a dream, right?

  She wanted to reassure him. He had come to the library. He had waited for her. He had accepted Annie.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. “I’ll just be five minutes.”

  Annie grabbed a fistful of Wesley’s T-shirt and tugged. “She’s stubborn as a cow. She won’t take no. Come on. I’ll come get her if she’s not out in five.” Halfway down the aisle, he turned and Lily tossed him the flashlight.

  She waited, her eyes adjusting to the candlelit cavern. The round stained glass window above the apse brooded wine-red and blood-blue and mustard-ochre, the gloomy colors nearly indecipherable at night, and yet concentrated, like a serum.

  “Kalisha! Where are you? I want to see you.”

  She sat down in a front pew. People came here to talk to God, to bridge their biology to the unknown. Who could blame them for trying? That bridge was so very long.

  Lily considered saying a prayer. After all, when in Rome. It surely couldn’t hurt.

  Maybe just the idea of saying a prayer delivered an answer. Sal’s matching Electra-Glide! It was even on their route out of town. Lily didn’t know if God had spoken to her, but just in case, while the channels remained open, she quickly put in a word for Vicky, too. That’s when she saw movement in the corner of her eye, a figure approaching from behind.

  “It’s you,” Kalisha said.

  Lily jumped to her feet. “Kalisha! I’m so glad to see you. Are you okay?”

  “Where have you been?”

  “I’m so sorry I disappeared!”

  “I guess I knew you’d never stick it out.”

  “That’s not fair. You know me. You know—”

  “What I know is that the day you didn’t show up, we were raided. Now a whole lot of people don’t eat.”

  Lily’s mind staggered. “You couldn’t possibly think—”

  “What was your relationship with Travis Grayson?”

  “Travis? Are you saying he raided the church?”

  “His goons.”

  Lily dropped back onto the pew. “Oh, Jesus. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “So. You and Travis.”

  “No! I mean, I did sleep with him, sort of. Just once.” As if the number of times helped ameliorate anything.

  “Sort of.”

  “I know that’s something you wouldn’t understand,” Lily said. “You with your philosophy PhD and your work ethic. But yes, I made a big mistake.”

  Kalisha’s expression shifted, maybe eased, in the candlelight. “I do understand mistakes.”

  “Well, that surprises me.”

  “And I don’t have a PhD.”

  “You lied?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Look, I don’t know anything about the raid. His goons beat up my sister, too. I can’t believe you’d think that of me.”

  “I don’t know what to think anymore.”

  “After everything we’ve been through together.”

  “Trust is hard for me sometimes.” A palpable tenderness roughened her voice. She sat down on the pew beside Lily. “But you’re right: I do know you. I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you.” Then, still reeling, “I don’t understand why he’d raid the church. He had a thriving Cluster at the reservoir. Tons of resources.”

  “What I heard on the street? Pretty much everyone in the Cluster had moved on to other camps. It was just him and a couple of boy scouts gone round the bend. I doubt he even knew what his henchmen were up to anymore. Anyway, he’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “You didn’t hear?”

  Lily managed to shake her head.

  “Travis shot himself.”

  Lily pressed her fingertips to her temples and closed her eyes. The cheese and crackers and raisins churned in her stomach. She felt the blast, a sharp pain in her own skull; saw the side of his head explode, the flying chunks of flesh, spraying blood. It was as though having slept with him forced her to fully imagine his last corporal act.

  “When?”

  “A couple days ago.”

  “Where?”

  “Over at the reservoir.”

  She pictured the place where he’d painted her face and breasts with mud. She remembered the emptiness of the camp, his claim that everyone had been “deployed” for the day. Early this morning, when the goons beat up Vicky, Travis was already two days dead.

  The candles sputtered. Their dimming light splotched across the dark wood of the pulpit and altar. Above their heads, the flap of bat wings displaced air, making tiny puffing gusts. Lily thought of Suzette, imagined her posed, wings folded, up on the rafters. Wesley and Annie were waiting.

  “It’s time to leave,” Lily said, squelching back her monstrous and inappropriate grief. She had loved Travis, or at the very least, she’d loved the idea of him. “Come on.”

  Kalisha ran a hand, fingers spread, over the top of her head. She looked around her sanctuary.

  “I think I can get us out of here,” Lily said.

  “How’d you know where to find me?”

  “I didn’t know for sure. I hoped.”

  “Hello? Lily! Come on.” Annie barreled down the aisle of the sanctuary, swinging the dull beam of the flashlight around like a sword.

  “Jesus,” Kalisha said. “You have that kid with you.”

  “Fuck you,” Annie said.

  “I’m not going anywhere with her,” Kalisha countered.

  “Annie,” Lily said. “Light the way out for us.”

  42

  The moon backlit the fog, making it glow, as their caravan inched up Grizzly Peak. The tiny droplets in the foggy wrap soothed. Wesley drove as slowly as he could while keeping the motorcycle, with its three passengers, upright. He pulled to the side of the road and stopped every few minutes so that Lily, riding the bicycle, could catch up.

  When at last they pulled onto the fire trail next to the Space Sciences Lab, Kalisha asked, “What makes you think she hasn’t already left with her bike?” It was a good question, but how could Lily explain Sal’s love for a pair of escaped hyenas? The others waited at the trailhead while she rode the bicycle out to the compound. She climbed the fence, dropped to the other side, ran up the hill, and pounded on the shed door. It had been nearly eighteen hours since she’d talked to Sal this morning. Any reasonable person would have left. She pounded again and heard a loud thud, like a big piece of furniture being shoved against the inside of the door.

  “Sal! It’s me, Lily!”

  A rough scraping sound was followed by the door opening. “I thought you left.”

  “Get the bike. We’re all leaving together.”

  “Do you have Vicky?”

  “Come on. Hurry up. This is it.”

&
nbsp; Her face convulsed and she raised her voice. “Do you have Vicky?”

  “I’ll tell you everything later. Get the Harley.”

  “Just tell me if she’s safe.”

  Lily nodded, unwilling to take time for the more elaborate truth.

  Sal’s slow gait as she walked to the Harley told Lily that she wasn’t coming with her. “Move aside,” Sal said. She nudged up the kickstand and pushed the bike out the door. “Take it.” She wiggled the handlebars.

  “They’re wild, Sal. They can look after themselves.”

  “If the public finds out…”

  “There no longer is a public.”

  “I’m responsible.”

  “Vicky is waiting.” It might not be a lie. “You need to…” Lily almost said, choose people, not hyenas, but realized that might backfire.

  Sal looked up the hillside and then down the fire trail, as if looking for them one last time, as if they lurked in the woods, watching, and might emerge and beg her to stay, declare their reciprocal love. Like a fairy-tale gone awry: Sal’s unleashed beauty, her excessive devotion for the perverse beasts.

  A few minutes later, the five of them—Sal and Annie on one Harley, and Lily, Kalisha, and Wesley on the other—crested the summit of Grizzly Peak, heading out the same route Lily had ridden with Wesley last month. It was after midnight and the fog had rolled back. The stars were dim but visible, the half-moon a bright beacon. They had a grand view of the brooding cities hundreds of feet below.

  Sandwiched between two new friends, Lily felt like she was migrating, moving on to new, more habitable locations. Hadn’t people been doing that for all their years on earth? She pictured the world map, with the arching arrows, showing how people left Africa first, pushed north into Asia and west into Europe. Hunger, cold, fire, drought—all manner of calamities—had been driving people to new places for millennia. She liked to think of herself riding one of those arrows, part of a migration, the new exodus.

  Somewhere on the mountain below, the two hyenas, continents away from their homeland, were also on the move.

  43

  First, they slept.

  Sal had thought of Whiskeytown Lake, west of Redding, and sometime in the morning they found a trail leading to a private stretch of the red-soil shore. It was hot, well over ninety degrees. They all said they were going to splash into the lake. But when Annie lay on the ground under a pine, the rest flopped nearby, on their backs, splayed.

  Lily hadn’t lain down since the earthquake more than twenty-four hours earlier. Then too she’d made the soil her bed, pressing her breasts against earth’s naked skin. The ground had begun shuddering, then rocking hard. She had liked it, had felt pleasure in the rumbling interface. Now, with every muscle in her body aching, the memory of that pleasure was surreal.

  Travis was dead. She tried to admit that information, but it too felt surreal, as if it belonged to another life entirely.

  Lily rolled onto her side and found Wesley a few feet away, also on his side, looking at her. She scooted over, the pine needles and dry dirt clods scratching her arms, and touched his hip bone. It jutted out between the top of his black jeans and the bottom of his white T-shirt like a fossil, a clue to the history of humankind. She left her hand there as waves of sleep washed her away.

  Lily awoke at dusk. The air was a bit cooler, but not much. She sat up and looked west, across the huge lake, at the snow-dusted peaks of the mountains called Trinity Alps. She tried to get up, but everything hurt. She took off her shoes and examined the raw patches and bubbled skin. She could barely move her arms; every muscle seized with pain from the hours of paddling the kayak. Her hip joints, too, ached from the long cramped hours on the motorcycle. She wanted the cool water of the lake, but she’d have to stand and walk to get there.

  Sal was collecting firewood, wandering slowly into the forest and returning, just as slowly, bringing one stick at a time to the shore camp. Kalisha paced the beach, as if she were planning her future. Wesley and Annie were both gone. Lily forced herself to stand and staggered over to Sal.

  “Where’s Annie?”

  She shook her head.

  “Wesley?”

  “We pooled our money. He went to town for food and gas.”

  The faraway ping of a stone hitting the lake water drew Lily’s attention, and there she was, down the beach, throwing rocks. Lily hobbled toward her, wincing with every step.

  Annie pretended she didn’t notice her approach, kept bending to pick up stones and tossing them into the lake. Her tan plaid madras shorts stuck to her thighs. Pine needles and dirt plastered her bare back. She scowled.

  “I was thinking of taking a swim,” Lily said nodding at the lake.

  “Go ahead. Why are you telling me?” Annie fired another rock.

  Lily walked back to the edge of the trees and shed her T-shirt and jeans, panties and bra, leaving them in a pile on top of her sneakers. She walked, naked as the day she was born, right by Annie and waded into the cool water. It hurt, same time as it soothed, the cold on her hot raw skin. She dove in and flipped onto her back, closed her eyes, and floated face to the twilit sky. Water and air. Safe, she thought, and alive. She righted herself and, standing on the lake bottom pebbles, flicked the droplets from her hair.

  Annie sat on a big stone at the water’s edge, watching. Lily swam out to a deeper part of the lake and scrubbed her hair. With her legs dangling in the depths of the lake, she washed the rest of herself. Then, dog-paddling back toward shore, she shouted for Annie to come in.

  The furrows on Annie’s brow deepened.

  Lily waded in and pulled on her clothes. As she sat dripping next to her, Annie stood up and walked away, in the opposite direction of camp.

  “Annie!”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about!” she shouted. “Leave me alone.”

  She looked like a big bear charging down the beach, away from Lily, a bundle of fury and wildness. Lily remembered the leggings she liked to wear in Berkeley, the rhinestone bobby pins and gardenia lotion. She must be uncomfortable covered with dirt, pine needles, sweat, and road grime, with nothing to wear but boys’ shorts. She must want to feel the relief of the lake water.

  Lily pushed herself up and made her way down the beach after her. They walked like this, with Annie several yards ahead, for at least five minutes. Finally, she wheeled around and opened her mouth for another verbal attack. Lily guessed she’d silently rehearsed something much worse, but all she said was, “You don’t have any idea!”

  Then the tears came, fat rolling ones. Her lips trembled and her cheeks shook, but she didn’t break eye contact. In that moment, in the periwinkle light of dusk, Lily saw all the babies she and Tom thought they’d made, and the shattered hope each time she got her period. She saw the three babies from that first day at the church, especially Herbert, whose mother had been crushed by a support beam. She saw the baby who flew from the window of Travis’s apartment building and got caught. She even saw Angelina’s baby.

  Here, Lily realized, is mine: a big thirteen-year-old.

  “You…” Annie spat. “You…you think it’s just easy. To take off your clothes. To go in the water. I told you: I CAN’T SWIM.” She wrapped her arms around herself, covering her chest.

  Annie had been so brave yesterday, but now, with some sleep, with the prospect of safety, maybe her courage was imploding. Maybe the wilderness, night falling on this massive lake and the surrounding mountains, scared her.

  “I’M NOT PRETTY LIKE YOU,” she shouted. “I’M FAT. I HAVE UGLY SKIN.”

  Annie was right: Lily didn’t have any idea. She’d have to make it up. She put her hands on her hips and said, “Annie, you’re a big strong girl with a beautiful body. Your skin is the color of autumn sunlight.”

  Annie stood perfectly still. She looked as though she were memorizing Lily’s words. The
n she disassembled again. “I HAVE HAMBURGER FACE!”

  “Yeah. You have bad acne. That’ll go away eventually. And right now you have those gorgeous glossy black curls.”

  That was maybe the wrong thing to say. She, or someone, had sheered them short and boyish. Annie resumed rock-throwing.

  “They’ll grow out, too,” Lily said, as though that had been where she was going all along. “We’ll get you some pretty barrettes.”

  “Boys don’t wear barrettes.”

  “But you do.”

  Annie dropped the rock in her hand and stood facing Lily, her arms dangling at her sides, her eyes wide, as if she were waiting for a full, plausible, and acceptable explanation for everything.

  Lily scrambled for something to say and came out with, “I learned a new word not so long ago. Philtrum. It’s the groove in your upper lip. It’s from the Greek, meaning “to kiss” or “to love.” I’m thinking of that word now because your philtrum is one of the prettiest ones I’ve ever seen.”

  Annie whispered, “I’ve never kissed anyone.”

  “You will. Some day.”

  “Nobody kisses fat people.”

  “Not true. People kiss fat people all the time. Take Sal, for example. She’s kinda fat. My sister kisses her a lot.”

  “Vicky?”

  “Yeah. Vicky.”

  Annie’s eyes blinked in rapid comprehension, the kind of understanding that only young people have, where the truth isn’t stopped by multiple filters. She appeared to accept everything Lily said about kissing.

  “Where is Vicky?”

  “I don’t really know.” Lily held out her hand. “Come on.” The sun was long gone. Darkness hovered over the lake, swirled around the mountains. “We’re safe. No one can see us.”

  Annie took her hand, and they walked to the water’s edge. Fully dressed in her sneakers, jeans, and T-shirt, Lily started wading in.

  “Wait,” Annie said. She sat down and pulled off Binky’s Air Jordans. She arranged them neatly, side by side, on the shore. Then, leaving her shorts on, she took Lily’s hand again. She was shaking.