I gaped at him, trying to make sense of what he was saying. I was confused, my mind grasping. His father?
“Your father?”
He gave me the gentlest of looks.
“Benno,” he said.
“My son? You’re talking about my son?”
“I’m afraid so.”
I wobbled and took an involuntary step to the right. He reached out to steady me and I flinched. The last thing I wanted was for him to touch me. This man who was delivering to me the worst news of my life.
My son, Benno, who I just saw yesterday? Who needed to shave his sideburns? Who’d taught his little sister all the words to the Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”? Whose dirty laundry sat in a pile back in Greengage, waiting for me to wash it on Sunday?
“I don’t believe it,” I whispered.
“I’m so sorry,” said Lucien.
I shook my head vigorously, as if I could shake out what he was saying. The gesture was all Vivi’s—she did this whenever I said no to her.
“But he was only eighteen!” I cried.
“Actually, he was ninety, Lux. And he lived a good, long life.”
“Don’t tell me that,” I choked out, as I realized the disassociation I was feeling was because we were talking about two different people.
We weren’t mourning the same Benno, because we didn’t know the same Benno. I could only speculate about the man Benno would become, as I’d done so often while he sat at the kitchen table doing his homework. Would he marry? What would his spouse be like? Where would he work? What would he name his children? What kind of a grandmother would I be? What city would he finally settle in? Would his favorite meal always be pot roast and mashed potatoes?
That this stranger standing in front of me held all the answers was unthinkable.
No, we weren’t mourning the same Benno, because my Benno was not even out of his teenage years. To my knowledge he’d never been in love, never had sex, never eaten Peking duck—never even been out of the country. My son and Lucien’s father were as unrelated as they could be. Neither one of us knew the one the other mourned.
I slumped to the floor. Benno was gone? Oh God, that meant my mother was gone, too! I wheezed, my breath shallow.
Lucien crouched down and put an arm around me.
“Breathe,” he said.
Breathing was an impossibility.
“Look at me,” he commanded. “Just look at me.”
I focused on his face.
I thought of that night when Benno was nine, when I’d come home in the wee hours of the morning from the Valley of the Moon. The way he’d clung to me on the couch. I’d promised him I’d always be with him. That we’d always be together.
And Rhonda and Ginger? The Patels? Mike Mulligan? My colleagues at Baytelco? All of them? Dead?
“It wasn’t your fault. You have to know that. It was nobody’s fault,” said Lucien.
“Why did he leave that night?” I cried. “We were supposed to stay through the full moon. I didn’t force him. He agreed. He’d wanted to.”
Lucien nodded. “He came back to go to a party. It was my mother’s birthday. She was turning seventeen.”
I looked at him dumbly. A party? I’d lost him to a party?
I thought back to the summer of ’64. How I’d sneaked out after my father had gone to sleep. How I’d flirted with the bartender who’d poured me drink after drink. I was bored. I wanted action. I couldn’t wait for my life to begin.
“They were kids,” said Lucien. “And he was cocky; he thought he could have it both ways. You had it both ways for a while, didn’t you? The fog came every month? He assumed that would continue. He went back the following full moon, but there was no fog. He went back every month after that. Nine hundred and forty times. He never missed a full moon; he never stopped trying to get back to you. I wasn’t surprised when I saw you on the doorstep, because he’d prepared me. He knew you’d come back someday. I’m only sorry it wasn’t sooner.”
When Lucien’s father died, he must have been sad, but it probably wasn’t unexpected. As he’d said, Benno had lived a good, long life. As pleasant as Lucien seemed, I couldn’t help but resent him. He’d had a lifetime with Benno. His grief was the clearest of lakes—you could see right down to the bottom of it. Mine was a waterfall with a hundred-foot drop that I’d just been shoved off involuntarily.
I searched for Benno in Lucien’s face, but I could find no trace of him. My grandson was a stranger.
I have no idea how long we sat there on the floor or how long I wept. Occasionally Lucien would pass me a tissue, urge me to drink some water. Finally the tears subsided. A younger man entered the kitchen. Alejandro. Lucien handed him a cup of coffee. “Come back in a little while, honey,” he said.
—
I thought, Okay, Lux. Sit up. Try to speak. Be kind. My mouth was so dry.
“You have some toothpaste here,” I said, touching my chin to show him.
Lucien dabbed at his chin with a napkin. I kept being bowled over by swells of disbelief: this man was old enough to be my father. I felt numb, my blood frozen in my veins.
“Karen? Your mother? Tell me about her.”
“They met in high school. She was an artist. A painter. They were in the same calculus class.”
Was this the girlfriend he’d wanted to take to the Smiths’ concert?
“Do you have siblings?”
“Two sisters. Iris, she lives on the top floor with her husband, and Mary, who lives in Walnut Creek. Iris’s son, Thomas, his wife, and their two kids, your great-grandkids, have the flat below ours. Mary’s daughter lives in the basement flat. Alejandro and I moved in when Mom passed. They’re going to be so thrilled to meet you.”
“They all know about me?”
“The adults do, not the kids. As soon as we were old enough to be trusted to keep the secret, Dad told us. I went with him to the Valley of the Moon hundreds of times over the years.”
I started to notice what my brain had refused to take in when I’d first walked in. The apartment was unrecognizable, furnished with a mix of mid-century and modern furniture.
“I had a futon couch there. You don’t know what a futon is, I’m sure,” I said.
“I know what a futon is. I slept on one all through college.”
“Where did you go to college?”
“Cal.”
“What did you study?”
“International relations. Minor in economics.”
“What do you do now?”
“I’m a lawyer. Immigration issues. Civil rights. I handle mostly pro bono cases for the firm now.”
I drank a glass of water and asked for another.
“Tell me the truth. Was he happy?”
He gave me a deeply empathetic look. “Come. You can see for yourself.”
—
“Sit here,” he instructed me.
I sat in a recliner in the middle of the room.
“Are you comfortable? I can adjust it. You’re much smaller than I am.”
“I’m fine.”
The recliner was no La-Z-Boy. It was made of the finest leather, and sitting in it felt like a warm embrace.
“Lights,” he said.
The lights in the living room went off.
“Activate walls.”
How can I describe what happened next? The walls seemed to burrow around me.
“It’s called a Timestream. My father—Benno—invented it. Sold hundreds of millions of them. They’re as common as TVs; everybody has them now.”
I felt uncomfortably weightless. I clutched the arms of the chair.
Lucien made a small adjustment, tipping me forward a degree. “Better?”
“Yes.”
“He made this stream just for you,” said Lucien.
An image slowly moved toward me. As it came closer the colors brightened and it sharpened into a photograph of an elderly man dozing in a chair, a book open in his lap. When it had enlarge
d to life size, it stopped and bobbed, like a seal poking its head out of the sea.
“This was him two days before he died,” said Lucien. “I took that photo.”
An ancient Benno. His face creased and weathered, jowled, age-spotted, wearing Joseph’s bowler hat and a Grateful Dead shirt. Seeing him as an old man felt unspeakably unnatural. He’d died and I wasn’t there. But of course I wouldn’t have been there; even if I had been back in San Francisco, I’d have been long gone. How many mothers outlived their ninety-year-old sons?
The image passed through me, or I passed through it, I couldn’t tell—it felt so real. Another photograph floated toward me.
“That’s my mother,” said Lucien.
Karen and Benno standing on the front porch, their children and grandchildren sitting on the steps in front of them. Their hands were clasped. Their faces full of pride.
“Thanksgiving, 2052. We all had the flu and didn’t know it yet,” said Lucien.
I sat spellbound as Benno and Karen slowly went from elderly to late middle age to middle-aged. Their hair from white to salt-and-pepper to blond and black. Their bodies from stooped and fragile to muscled and upright. I saw my mother’s eyes in Mary. My father’s chin in Iris. My grandchildren became young men and women, then they metamorphosed into children. Then my mother suddenly appeared, sitting in front of a computer in the basement apartment.
I cried when I saw her. The technology was so good, so crisp, I could almost smell her Aliage perfume. She’d been my ballast. She’d never, not once, given up on me. But at least she and Benno had had each other; at least they weren’t alone all those years. That gave me some comfort.
Now here was Sunite Patel in the kitchen chopping peppers. Iris and Mary playing on the floor. Ginger and the girls (the girls no longer girls, but women, with families of their own), and Rhonda, that old hippie, flashing the peace sign at the camera.
Photo after photo flew by. Here were the people I loved drinking cold Coronas, listening to bluegrass, swimming at Lake Tahoe. And here were the people I loved getting younger and younger. Shrugging off the years.
Then Vivi and I appeared. Standing in front of a circus tent. Eating cotton candy. She and I napping on my bed. All photos Benno had taken before our last trip to Greengage. Then abruptly Vivi was gone.
Then it was just me, sitting in a booth at Mel’s. The day I’d told Benno I was pregnant and he’d snapped my picture.
Still the years unwound. Benno at the seventh-grade science fair. The first day of middle school, Benno in the throes of a punk phase. Benno with my mother on Bowen’s Wharf, posing in front of a tall ship, Miriam in her Lilly Pulitzer shift. My father in his office at St. Paul’s, chatting with a student, leaning back in his chair. Benno standing in line for Del’s lemonade. My precious, dearest, sweetest Benno with the happy-sad feeling beaming out of his eyes.
“Shut it off, please,” I said. “I can’t take any more.”
“It’s almost over,” said Lucien.
Benno in Rhonda’s arms, eating a lime Popsicle. Benno snuggled into the couch, the afghan covering him, mesmerized, watching Love Boat.
Benno hadn’t been able to find his way back to me through my portal, the fog, so he’d used his portal, his camera lens. He’d done it so that I could go back into the past and find him, so that I wouldn’t miss his life.
I knew what the last photo was before it came into focus. The Polaroid Rhonda had taken of a five-year-old Benno at the airport, his mouth ringed Hi-C orange on his way to Newport. The first time I’d had to let him go.
I pressed my fingers to my lips, kissed them, and held them up as the image passed.
—
The next few weeks, Lucien kept me busy. Everybody wanted to meet me. My grandchildren, my great-grandchildren. Their wives and husbands and partners. Their dogs, their cats, and their hamsters.
If I could have, I’d have stayed in bed, where a continual Timestream of my own making ferried me into the past. I inhabited my memories like a house. Each day I visited a different room. Here was four-year-old Benno at the zoo, shrieking along with the monkeys. Here were Rhonda and I driving down 101, singing along to the radio. Here was my mother mixing up a glass pitcher of Kool-Aid on a hot summer day. Here was the sound of my father’s key in the lock.
I didn’t want to leave the apartment, but Lucien insisted I get up, and dress, and eat a proper breakfast. He was a firm believer in distraction. Each day he had some family event planned. He shuttled me from apartment to apartment. From house to house. Dinner with Iris. Lunch with Mary. Little Gary’s violin recital. Dolly’s gymnastic tournament. We traveled from San Francisco to Bodega Bay. From Orinda to Danville. It seemed we missed no corner of the Bay Area.
The truth? This was my family, but they were strangers. Kind, interesting strangers, but strangers nonetheless. I counted down the days to the full moon. All I wanted to do was get back to Greengage to be with Joseph and Vivi. There was no other place for me now.
When the moon was full, Lucien drove me to the Valley of the Moon, but there was no fog.
“I’ll bring you again next month, I promise,” Lucien said.
I wept my way back to the city.
—
“There’s something I want to show you,” said Lucien a week later. “Have you ever been to Lotta’s Fountain?”
“Yes, but it’s been a while.”
“How long?”
“Sometime in the eighties.”
“Ah, yes. Well, I think you’ll find it much changed.”
We walked down Market Street. I saw the golden glow of the lantern from fifty feet away. The lamppost in the snowy forest. The light flashing off a tin lamp.
“The entire fountain was completely refurbished,” said Lucien. “That’s an eternal light. It will never go out. No matter how big the earthquake, that light will shine.”
Water spouted out of the lion’s mouth. The copper-hued iron gleamed.
Lucien read the plaque out loud. “ ‘The fountain survived the 1906 earthquake, at which time it became a meeting place for people in search of their families.’ ”
He led me around the other side of the fountain to another plaque, which read GONE BUT NEVER FORGOTTEN.
What followed was a list of thousands of names.
“Look under the B’s,” he said.
Babineau, Baggett, Batteulo, Baumann, Bayliss, Bayne. Bell. Joseph Bell, Martha Bell, Fancy Bell, Vivien Bell.
“Benno did this?”
“He was on the board of the restoration committee. Keep looking.”
I found Dear One and Magnusson, Elisabetta and Matteo. Miss Russell, Friar and his wife, Sarah. I found all 278 of the original Greengage residents; my name was there, too.
Benno had remembered us all.
—
When three fogless months had gone by, it became clear I needed a more permanent living situation. Against my protests, my granddaughter Iris and her husband vacated the top-floor apartment and gave it to me.
Rose and Doro’s old flat was a gorgeous space, flooded with sunlight, the kitchen outfitted with all the latest appliances. Unfortunately, the only way to operate them was through the lenses, which I refused to wear. I did not want to be plugged into a feed like some robot. What I would have given for a simple coffee percolator, the kind my parents had in Newport.
Without a current social security number, I was unable to work. Anticipating this possibility, Benno had set aside money for me in a trust fund. This was good and bad. Good because I didn’t have to worry about how to support myself. Bad because I had nothing to do. If you tell a person they’re useless, they become useless: one of the first things Joseph ever said to me.
I forced myself to leave the house every morning with my family. They went to work and school; I spent my days at the San Francisco Public Library. The library had evolved, just like everything else. Instead of being issued a library card, I was given a digital reader. If I wanted to read a book, within se
conds all I had to do was download it to my device.
The library was furnished with long couches and comfortable chairs. There was a coffee shop and a bar. Floors filled with row after row of computers, but not a book to be seen anywhere, except in one room on the top floor. I spent almost all my time up there, inhaling the familiar smell of leather, paper, and dust while working my way through the library’s archive of magazines and newspapers. I didn’t belong here anymore, that was clear, but that didn’t mean I shouldn’t make an effort to understand what had happened in the years I’d been gone. Soon I’d be back in Greengage and Joseph would expect a full report.
—
Soon started to feel like a pipe dream. Every month I went to the Valley of the Moon and every month I returned, heartbroken. Was I doing something wrong? Perhaps if I tried to re-create the exact same conditions from before, I could somehow conjure up the fog again.
With Lucien’s help, I went online and found the exact same North Face tent I’d had back in the seventies. I purchased a Marmot sleeping bag and an L.L. Bean camp chair, also exact replicas of our old gear. Everything smelled pleasantly musty. The sleeping bag held the faint odor of weed. These items, touchstones from my past, felt imbued with magic, and they made me ache for Joseph and Vivi. That I had no idea how long it would be before I could be with them again was devastating. The only thing that comforted me was knowing it would be just a month for them. They wouldn’t suffer like I was suffering.
I couldn’t have borne that.
—
The gear was not magic, of course it wasn’t. It did nothing to change my fate. The fog did not return.
Despair was the most insidious of killers. A vampire, it drained me of energy and will. I stopped leaving the house. Stopped reading books or listening to music. Even Benno’s Timestream, which I’d watched constantly over the first few months I’d been in San Francisco, ceased being of interest to me.
A year passed. Two years. I became more and more reclusive. In the months leading up to my fortieth birthday, I started to drink. At first it was a nightly glass of wine, but soon I was polishing off an entire bottle by myself. I’d pass out and wake a few hours later, unbridled fury coursing through me.
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