When they got knee-deep, Lily stopped. She cupped water from the still-sun-warmed top layer of the lake and doused Annie’s legs. Next she washed the pine needles off her back. Annie wouldn’t let Lily touch her belly or her chest, but she splashed these herself and then she did her face. Lily bent over and stuck her own head back in the water and scrubbed her scalp again. She righted herself and shook like a dog.
“I might fall in, though.”
“Here.” Lily got behind her and put her arms around her middle. “I got you. You can bend down now and you won’t fall.”
Annie washed her hair and then surprised Lily by dunking her entire head. When she came up, she was scowling, but probably felt better.
By the time they got back to camp in their wet clothes, Wesley had returned and Sal had a nice fire going. She and Kalisha had placed logs in a circle around the blaze. Wesley unpacked cans of baked beans, a loaf of bread, and a jar of peanut butter. They all drank lots of fresh water with their supper. The stars came out bright and plentiful, a million sparkles on the lake.
Sal said, “I just hope Vicky keeps her mouth shut, wherever she is.”
“That would be a miracle, if she did,” Lily said.
“I can see her telling some prison guard to fuck off. That, or that she liked her ass.” Sal thought for a minute and then added, “It’s hard to say what the worst outcome of that would be.”
“She has my driver’s license. If they arrested her, they’ll think they’ve arrested me.”
Sal laughed. “You’ll have to go into hiding. We’ll have to construct a new identity for you.”
Lily didn’t think that was so funny.
Kalisha poked the fire with a long stick, sending a flurry of sparks into the air.
“Both my mom and dad were killed in the war,” Annie announced. “My best friend Binky was murdered on Telegraph Avenue. Plus, I’m a girl.”
Wesley reached into the backpack behind his place on the log and brought out a chocolate bar. He held it out to Annie, but she got up off the log and walked away from the fire, into the darkness.
“So, like, there’s this huge bottomless depth,” Wesley said. “It’s impossible to navigate. It’s like an endless swim to the surface. But then, after what feels like an eternity, you do surface, for bits of time anyway, and you start seeing, in the distance, other people’s stories. They’re like islands. Landmarks that help you navigate. Something to swim toward, a place to rest.”
A muffled sob came from Annie’s dark pocket outside the firelight’s reach.
“Annie,” Lily said. “Come back.”
Kalisha poked, causing another miniature explosion of sparks.
“Anyone else want chocolate?” Wesley broke up the bar and handed out pieces.
“What if we were the start of a new tribe?” Lily said. “We could be the turning point in human evolution. A whole new species branching off. Right here, right now. Homo sapiens becoming Homo compati.”
“What’s compati?” asked a sniffling voice from the dark.
“I like that,” Kalisha said, poking the fire again. “From a species of know-it-alls to a species of care-it-alls. Except I’d want to keep in the knowing part. They aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“What’s mutually exclusive?” Annie called out.
“If you come sit down, I’ll tell you.”
“To start a tribe, someone would have to reproduce,” Sal said, and then she hooted.
“It’s not crazy,” Lily said. “Imagine people getting love right.”
“Lubh,” Kalisha said.
“I’m just saying.”
“We need to find Vicky,” Sal said.
“What we need,” Kalisha said, “is money.”
44
By dawn, Annie was gone.
Lily sat up from a deep sleep and counted only three other bodies under the pines: one sprawled, voluptuous, with a thick auburn mane tousled across her head and shoulders; another with black hair, skin the color of bleached bones, and a long, rail-thin body; the last curled into herself, protective, her also-skinny limbs held close, her dark scalp showing under sparse hair. There was no honey-colored fat child sleeping anywhere nearby.
Lily splashed lake water on her face, trying to clear her thinking. She was probably in the woods relieving herself. Lily waited. Annie didn’t appear. So Lily walked south along the beach until a logjam blocked the way. She turned around and walked much farther in the other direction. When she returned to camp and Annie was still missing, Lily started shouting, which woke up everyone else.
For over an hour, all four adults scoured the shoreline and treed areas around Whiskeytown Lake. At nine o’clock, Wesley stripped off his clothes and dove into the lake. At first Lily thought he’d given up and was just going for a swim. But when she saw him dive and surface, dive and surface, she understood what he was doing. In between dives, he did a gentle breaststroke, facedown, scanning the lake bottom.
Lily collapsed on a log next to the still-smoking fire pit and finally cried. Travis was dead. Vicky was missing in action. Annie was gone.
With lake water streaming down his face and chest, Wesley crouched in front of her and took her hands away from her face. His brown eyes were clear, his lashes dripping. “Hey,” he said. “We’ll find her.”
“How?”
Wesley had a scar down the center of his chest. He’d swum in only his white Fruit of the Loom briefs. His skin, despite the heat, was covered with gooseflesh.
“If she drowned,” Sal said, “she’d be on the surface. This water is too warm for a body to sink.”
Wesley pulled on his jeans and T-shirt.
“Where?” Lily asked.
“Town, I’m thinking,” Kalisha said.
They took both bikes. Lily and Wesley checked the café where the Greyhound bus stopped three times a week, but the waitress hadn’t seen a chubby, biracial thirteen-year-old. They searched the library and grocery store while Sal and Kalisha asked at the motels.
At noon, the four met up on Main Street and decided that the most likely scenario was that she’d hitchhiked out of town. After all, she specialized in running away. Lily slid off the Harley and sat on the curb.
“The little shit,” Kalisha said. “At least she didn’t steal one of the bikes.”
“Annie’s not a thief,” Lily said dully.
“You’re forgetting the chocolate puddings.”
“You’re not serious, are you? You are! Jesus, Kalisha. That was pudding.”
“Just saying.”
“She’s a kid. She was hungry. Her friend was hungry.”
“I got a couple hundred hungry people in Berkeley who all wait their turn and take their share.” Kalisha looked into the distant south, as if searching for her flock.
Lily sighed. “Well, she’s gone. So you don’t have to worry about her taking any more of your pudding.”
Kalisha broke down, crumpled right on the hot sidewalk pavement, and freed two long shuddering sobs.
“Oh!” Lily cried. “Jeez. I’m sorry.”
Kalisha wiped the tears from her face with her forearm and shook her head hard, already back in control. “I fought so hard for that program. And now it’s gone. Completely, totally ransacked.”
Lily felt foolish for thinking they’d been talking about puddings.
“That was my family,” Kalisha said.
“I know.”
They all waited in the hot sun for inspiration, their next move.
“Speaking of pudding,” Sal finally said. “I’m hungry.”
“You want to buy some food?” Wesley asked. “Go back to camp?”
“Yeah,” Sal and Kalisha said at the same time.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll meet you there by dusk.”
“Where’re you going?” Lily asked.
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“Hop on, if you want.”
She climbed on the bike and wrapped her arms around Wesley. He pulled away from the curb. Lily put her cheek against his back and tried to cry again, but she couldn’t now. So instead she let the vibration of the bike’s tires on the pavement stir her. At the end of Main Street, he turned onto a residential side street. When they reached the end of that, where the houses petered out into open fields, he turned and toured down the next parallel residential street.
This was definitely a needle-in-a-haystack strategy. What would Annie be doing on a sidewalk in a tree-filled Weaverville neighborhood?
Lily didn’t stop him. She liked holding onto him, pushing her face against his damp white T-shirt. He smelled like the pine needles he’d slept in last night. They rode slowly, moving into pockets of cool shade and then back out into melting pools of hot sun, and back again into shade. Wesley swung his head, searching, while she buried her face in his ribs. She wondered how it would be with both of them so very skinny, their essences barely housed by bodies.
After they had covered all the streets they could find in Weaverville, Wesley began again. This time he drove randomly, riding up and down the paved roads, turning when he wanted, banking the bike more steeply than he needed for the turns. Sometimes he made figure eights in the middle of a quiet intersection for no reason at all other than the sumptuous feel of the movement. They used the tank of gas as if they weren’t broke.
The sun hung low and golden, blinking through the leafy neighborhood trees, when Lily saw a round, bare-chested person in tan madras shorts pushing a lawn mower across a big green field of grass. The lawn belonged to a small red house. Wesley saw, too, and as he slowed the Harley to a putter, the person with the lawn mower disappeared into the parallelogram of shade on the right side of the house, next to a rotting wooden deck.
It couldn’t be Annie. Why would she be mowing a lawn in Weaverville?
Wesley parked next to the curb. Lily climbed off the bike and together they crossed the expanse of green.
Annie stepped into the last of the sunlight to meet them and smiled a huge, delighted smile. “Hi!” she called out.
Lily detonated. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Wesley took hold of Lily’s elbow.
Annie looked shocked, and then angry. She scowled and reached into her pocket. She pulled out a roll of cash. “This is my third yard. We need money.”
Wesley let go of Lily’s elbow and grabbed Annie in a restraining hold.
No, Lily realized, it was a hug. A big, long hug.
Annie thrashed in Wesley’s arms, throwing the beginning of a tantrum, furious at being unjustly accused. Annie sputtered the word “she” over and over.
Lily leaned against the rotting wooden deck and fought the urge to yell more, to cry, to explode. Trying to calm herself, she hefted her butt up on the deck and let her legs swing under the wood planking. Breathe, just breathe. Annie is safe. More than safe—taking action, figuring out the next steps before any of the adults had. Breathe, just breathe. As she swung her legs harder, dissipating the anger, taking in the relief, Lily’s heel hit something soft and papery. She heard a muted thunk as the object fell to the dirt below.
Yellow jackets surged out from under the deck. A crazy silent pause, like a dream bubble, inflated the moment, as if she had hours for reflection rather than a moment. Lily thought: Feral dogs, men with guns, dehydration and hunger, epic saltwater journeys—these I survive, only to face, in the end, tiny stinging insects. She thought: I don’t want to die. She thought: Life isn’t fair, not even close to fair. She thought: Wait! Where is Vicky? She thought: Not even bees, her sweet honey-making, pollinating coworkers; no, these were yellow jackets, paper-making menaces in striped uniforms, and yet every bit as lethal to her as bees. She thought: I want to live. In that time warp, where a moment blossomed into a lifetime, an adrenaline-fueled fervor for more, more of everything—food and love and sex and beauty and stories and trees and soil and song—kicked in. As the army of stinging insects swarmed in confusion, a blur of yellow and black, she writhed, kicking and swinging, as if she could individually fight off each one.
They landed, all over her arms, throat, and face. Dozens if not hundreds of them buzzing onto her pale skin. The first sting zapped away her protracted bubble of reflection. Her mind went blank as the venom entered her arm. More yellow jackets stung her hands, neck, cheeks, eyelid, each invasion bringing acute pain. As the poison flowed into her bloodstream, Lily abandoned her body. She floated over the deck, the big grassy field, and watched herself succumb to the attack.
“Uh,” Lily wheezed. The nausea swelled in her throat and she couldn’t breathe. “Uh,” she gurgled.
“Bees!” Annie shouted.
Lily funneled back down into her body, with its swollen throat and thick tongue and aching limbs. She felt her stomach heave, as if vomiting, as if expelling all her inner organs. Someone—she recognized Wesley’s pine scent—lifted her off the deck. Annie screamed, as if yellow jackets could hear, as she flapped her shirt at the swarming hive, trying to protect Wesley as he carried Lily away. Lily felt grass against her back, heard Wesley ask her questions, though she couldn’t understand the words.
What happened next felt exactly like an injection of epinephrine into her thigh. Lily returned to consciousness with a cold washcloth on her forehead. She opened her eyes to see Wesley and Annie kneeling beside her. A man with kinky gray hair tied in a ponytail, a handlebar mustache, and red-rimmed eyes stood behind them.
He said, “She don’t look so good.”
“Was that an EpiPen shot?” Lily wheezed.
“Yeah,” Annie said, holding up the used auto-injector. “I saw it in your pack yesterday. My mom was allergic, too.”
“Well,” the man said, biting his mustache with his lower teeth. “Don’t sue me. I don’t have nothing but this house. I was just trying to do the kid a favor.”
“Don’t worry,” Wesley said. “We’re grateful to you.”
“She still needs to go to the emergency room,” Annie said.
“I guess I can take you,” the man said.
A few hours later, though covered with hives, Lily walked out of the hospital breathing and talking. She’d given the hospital administrators her health insurance card, but without ID, they said they couldn’t process the claim. The bill, surely for thousands of dollars—this was the emergency room, after all—would go to Tom. Lily was sorry. She didn’t want him responsible for her anymore. But truly, the idea of thousands of dollars to save her life seemed ludicrous. Shouldn’t people have their lives saved? She’d done nothing other than anger a swarm of yellow jackets. She shouldn’t find it funny—Tom certainly wouldn’t—but she did. Thousands of dollars for wasp stings and a saved life. Walking from the hospital to the parked truck, she had to stop, bend over, and grab her knees from laughing so hard at the absurdity and from the sheer joy of being alive. Her companions looked at her with sympathetic smiles. They didn’t know the exact joke, but everyone was happy.
“He’ll sort it out,” Lily told them, told the universe at large. “That’s what he’s good at. I’m sure I’m still on his health plan. I mean, if he vouches for me, won’t the insurance pay?” Then she doubled over all over again and laughed so hard it hurt.
The man drove them back to his house, parked the pickup in his driveway, and walked them to the Harley at the curb.
“Nice bike,” he said. “That’s the first year of the Shovelhead engine.”
“Yeah,” Wesley said. “She’s a beaut, isn’t she?”
“Hell, yeah.”
“What’s your name?” Lily asked.
“That don’t matter,” he said, maybe still afraid of getting sued, maybe just humble.
As Lily tried to thank him, he cleared his throat so loudly and continuously she couldn’t make herself heard. W
esley straddled the bike, and Annie got on, followed by Lily. Wesley started up the engine and, with that roar obliterating the possibility of more conversation, the man reached into his back pocket and withdrew his wallet. He took out all the bills he had and handed them to Wesley.
Wesley shook his head, probably said something like, “We can’t take this,” but the man turned his back and walked toward his house. Lily, Annie, and Wesley watched him open the front door, go inside, and close it without ever looking back.
On their way back to camp, Lily asked Wesley to stop at the big box store. She took Annie to the girls’ clothing department and told her to pick out whatever she wanted. Annie chose a lavender camisole, a sea-blue blouse, and a pair of white Capri pants.
“What about shoes?” Lily asked.
Annie shook her head vehemently and they both looked down at the Air Jordans with the sparkly red laces.
“Yeah,” Lily said. “Those will look good with what you picked out.”
Annie checked her face to see if she was making fun of her. She wasn’t. So Annie nodded in agreement, and they carried the purchases to the checkout stand. There were three people ahead of them, and Lily used the wait time to be grateful for each breath. She tried to not think about the hives that still ached and itched. Wesley milled just beyond the cash register, looking at some power saws on sale, and Lily wanted to know what he was thinking.
Annie nudged Lily out of her daze, pushing her forward when the line moved. Near the cash register, Lily picked up a copy of The Trinity Journal to look for news about the Bay Area. A front-page story covered the new earthquake, the fire at the Chevron refinery, and the new influx of National Guard troops to “secure the region.” The soup kitchens and other community organizations that sprang up after the first earthquake had led, according to this story, to de facto governments that slowly overstepped their missions and eventually battled for control of the region’s remaining resources. Lily huffed at this gross oversimplification, this media reach for drama. The reporter totally missed the vast numbers of people who selflessly helped others. But maybe every story lied by omission. Maybe every story had many true faces.
The Evolution of Love Page 28
