Ellen set the bundled mail down on the stained formica of the kitchen counter and worked one of the rubber bands loose. Bank statements. Mail order catalogues, bright with spring dresses and shoes. A sale flyer from an art supply dealer. The second rubber band snapped as Ellen slid her fingers beneath it. The unexpected sting filled her eyes with tears. They spilled over and ran down her cheeks. She sobbed once, clutching the stupid, useless envelopes, fighting the tide that would rise up if she let it, and sweep her away.
Mail. It meant that Rebecca was dead. Ellen’s tears made round, wrinkled spots on a glossy sportswear catalogue. All these endless weeks, she had told herself that Rebecca had survived, had cowered in the safety of some doorway or park while San Francisco dissolved in rubble and flame. She had told herself that Rebecca was in some schoolhouse shelter, frantic with worry because she couldn’t call. As long as Ellen believed this—as long as she really—believed—then, Rebecca was alive.
How could you believe in a miracle, with a sportswear catalogue in your hands?
I have never lived without Rebecca, Ellen thought in terror.
That wasn’t quite true. She had passed through childhood without Rebecca, had only met her in college. Rebecca had been struggling through art-majors’ bio, as it was called. Ellen had helped her, because she was a bio major and Rebecca’s outraged frustration made her laugh. You need someone to take care of you, Ellen had said lightly. They had moved in together a month later. Fifteen years ago. Ellen looked up at the cupboard above the sink.
The bottle of pills was up there, on the top shelf behind the glasses, with the aspirin and antacids. Sleeping pills, prescribed for Rebecca years ago, after she hurt her knee skiing. Would Ellen die if she took them all? She had a hard time swallowing capsules. They would stick to the back of her throat; hard, gelatinous lumps of oblivion. She would have to drink glasses of water to get them down.
Someone knocked on the door.
Rebecca? The traitorous rush of hope made her dizzy. “Coming!” Ellen flung the door open.
“Mom’s sick.” A girl stared up at her, dirty-faced, tousle-headed; a stranger. “Please come.”
Not Rebecca. “Who are you?” Ellen said numbly. “Where did you come from?”
“I’m Beth. Our car ran out of gas and we got lost. Please hurry.”
Ellen blinked at the girl. Eleven? Twelve? Gawky and blonde, but you noticed her eyes first. They were a strange color; depthless blue, like the sky after sunset.
“All right.” Ellen sighed and stepped out onto the porch. “Take me to your mom.”
The girl turned unhesitatingly inland, trotting up through the scraggly spring grass toward the forested ridge above the cottage. “Wait a minute,” Ellen called, but the girl didn’t slow down, didn’t even look back. Ellen hesitated, then ducked her head and broke into a run, was panting after only a dozen uphill yards, because Rebecca had run every morning and Ellen hadn’t.
The girl crouched in the tree shadows, cradling a woman in her arms.
The woman’s face was flushed and she breathed in short, raspy breaths. Her hair stuck to her face, dark and stringy, as if she had been sweating, but when Ellen touched her cheek, her skin felt hot and dry.
“How long has your mother been sick?” Ellen asked the girl.
“A couple of days. It rained on us and it was cold. Mom let me wear her jacket, but then she started shivering.”
“We’ve got to get her down to the house somehow.” This was a crisis and Ellen could handle crises. She’d had fifteen years of practice, because Rebecca didn’t handle them. She squatted beside the sick woman, shook her gently. “Can you wake up?”
Miraculously, the woman’s eyelids fluttered.
“Come on, honey. Got to get you on your feet.” Ellen slid her arm beneath the woman’s shoulders.
Another miracle. The woman mumbled something incoherent and struggled to her feet. Ellen kept her arm around her, frightened by her fierce heat, supporting her. Step by step, she coaxed the woman down the slope, staggering like a drunk beneath her slack weight.
It took forever to reach the house, but they finally made it. Ellen put the woman into Rebecca’s empty (forever, Oh God) bed. The rasp of her breathing scared Ellen. Pneumonia? In the old days, before antibiotics, people had died from flu and pneumonia. The Quake had smashed the comfortable present as it smashed through the California hills. It had warped time back on itself, had brought back the old days of candles and no roads and death from measles or cholera. Seal Cove had no doctor. Big chunks of the California coast had fallen into the sea and you couldn’t get there from here.
“I’ll walk down to the store.” Ellen poured water into a bowl from the kitchen jug, got a clean washcloth down from the shelf. “Jack can call Eureka on the radio. They’ll send a helicopter to take your mom to the hospital. I’m going to give her some aspirin and I want you to wipe her all over while I’m gone.” She handed the washcloth to Beth. “We need to get her fever down.”
“Okay.” The girl looked up at Ellen, her eyes dark and fierce. “She’ll be all right. I love her.”
She’ll be all right. I love her. That incantation hadn’t saved Rebecca. Ellen swallowed. “What’s your mom’s name, honey?”
“Laura Sorenson.” The girl dipped the folded washcloth into the water. “She’ll get well. She has to.”
Her hands were trembling as she wiped her mother’s face. Ellen groped for reassuring words and found only emptiness. “I’ll be back in a little while,” she said.
* * *
Clouds were boiling up over the horizon again by the time Ellen returned to the house. The wind gusted onshore, whipping the waves, snatching wisps of spume from the gray curl of the breakers. There had been a lot of storms lately, as if the Quake’s terrible power had been absorbed into the atmosphere, was being discharged in raging wind and waves.
“Jack called the relief people up in Eureka.” Ellen flinched as the wind slammed the screen door behind her. “They’ll send the helicopter for your mom, just as soon as it gets back in.” If the weather didn’t stop it. She closed the wooden door against the building storm. “How is she?”
“Asleep.” Beth hovered protectively in the bedroom doorway. “Better, I think.”
Ellen edged past her and bent over the bed. She was worse, struggling to breathe, burning with fever. The woman’s eyelids fluttered and Ellen shivered. There was a disinterested glaze to her eyes; as if the woman was on a boat, watching a shoreline recede into the distance. She is dying, Ellen thought and shivered again. “Beth?” Distract her. “Come have something to eat, okay? I don’t want you getting sick, too.”
“If you want.” Beth sat reluctantly at the kitchen table. “What a pretty woman.” She nodded at the watercolor on the wall. “Did you paint it?” she asked with a child’s transparent effort to be polite.
“No.” Some art student had painted it, years ago. Rebecca was smiling, head tilted, one hand in her dark, thick, semitic hair that had just been starting to go gray. The student had caught the impatience, the intensity that kept her up all night working, sent her weeping into Ellen’s bed in the dawn, full of exhaustion and triumph and doubts. Tell me it’s not awful, she would whisper. God, El, I need you. “It’s a picture of my friend.” Ellen busied herself peeling back shrink-wrap and slicing the yellow block of salmon-boat cheese. “Is a cheese sandwich all right?”
“Fine.”
Silence. The rasp of the dying woman’s breathing filled the kitchen. “She was an artist,” Ellen said too loudly. “She did collages. When they started selling, I quit my job and we moved out here.” You supported me, Rebecca had said, grinning. While I was a starving artist. Now you get to be my kept woman. “I took care of her. She needed a full-time keeper when she was working.”
Beth nodded politely, eyes on the bedroom door. “Where is she now?”
“She’s dead.” The words caught Ellen by surprise. “She was in … San Francisco. When the Quake happened.
” She set the plate of sandwiches down in front of Beth with a small thump, aware of the pill bottle up on the top shelf. “I’ll get you some water.”
“I’m really sorry.” Beth touched her hand. “That your friend died.”
“Me, too,” Ellen whispered.
Storm wind whined around the corners of the house, banging a loose piece of gutter against the eaves. Shadows were creeping into the corners. She switched on the fluorescent lantern, hung it on its hook above the table. The shadows cast by its gentle swinging made the watercolor Rebecca smile, but her eyes looked sad. “In a hundred years, we’ll have forgotten how California looked before the Quake,” Ellen murmured. “Everything will seem so normal.”
“We lived in Berkeley.” Beth lifted a corner of bread, stared at the yellow slab of cheese beneath. “We had an apartment near the doctor’s office where Mom was a nurse. I was across the street telling Cara about Mr. Walther’s giving me a referral at school and all of a sudden we fell down. I saw our building sway, like it was made out of rubber. Pieces cracked out of it and started falling. Cars were crashing into things and Cara was screaming. Her voice sounded so small. All you could hear was this giant roar. I thought … Mom was dead.”
“She wasn’t dead.” Beth had won that terrible lottery and Ellen had lost. Outside, the wind rattled the screen door against its hook. Beth was trembling and Ellen’s twinge of anger metamorphosed suddenly into sympathy. “C’mon, eat.” She put her arm around Beth’s shoulders. Eat, she had said a hundred times a week to Rebecca. You can’t live on corn chips and pop, you idiot. “Take your time. I’ll check on your mom,” she said.
The lantern streaked Rebecca’s bedroom with dim light and shadow. Beth’s mother—Laura—lay still beneath the light sheet. She didn’t react as Ellen wiped her hot face with a washcloth. Her breathing was shallow and uneven. Outside, wind fluttered the shingles with the sound of cards riffling in a giant hand. No helicopter would land to save her.
“Ellen?” Beth’s butterfly touch made Ellen jump, raised gooseflesh on her arms. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t lie to me.” Beth’s face was pale. “You think she’s dying.”
Ellen opened her mouth, but the lie wouldn’t come.
“She can’t die,” Beth whispered. “She can’t. I need her.”
Need couldn’t save the one you loved. “Your mom’s sleeping and you need some sleep, too.” Ellen steered Beth firmly out of the room. “You can sleep in my bed tonight. I’ll sit up with your mom.”
“She’ll be better when she wakes up.” Beth’s shoulders stiffened. “She has to be.”
“I’m sure she will be,” Ellen said, but Beth’s eyes told her she knew the lie for what it was.
Ellen found an extra nightshirt and tucked Beth into her own bed. Such bitter, bitter irony, to survive the Quake just to die from the busy breeding of invisible bacteria. “Go to sleep,” Ellen whispered. “Your mom will be fine.”
“She was making fudge.” Beth looked up at Ellen, golden hair spread across the pillow. “She always makes fudge on Wednesday, because Wednesday’s her day off and fudge is our favorite thing in the whole world. The corner where our apartment is cracked and just fell down. This big chunk of concrete landed on a man and you couldn’t even see what happened to him. Just dust, lots of dust. It hid everything and then there was smoke and fire and Cara was screaming that everyone was dead, that Mom was dead. She ran away, but I waited for the firetrucks. They didn’t come and then the whole building fell in and Cara’s building was on fire and I had to run away after all.”
Terror filled those depthless eyes. “It’s all right, honey.” Ellen stroked her face. “Your mom got out, remember?”
“Cara was lying,” Beth said shrilly. “She always lied. I knew Mom wasn’t dead, but I couldn’t find her. I saw a body lying in a pile of bricks. It was a man with black hair. He didn’t have any pants on and one of his legs was gone. Some firemen in yellow coats told me they’d help me, but they didn’t. They took me to this park and it wasn’t even in Berkeley. There were tents and lots of people. I told them I couldn’t stay, that I had to look for my mother, but they wouldn’t listen to me. There was a fence around the park. And soldiers. They wouldn’t let me out. They said that Mom would come look for me there, but how could she know?”
“She found you. She’s right here, Beth.” And dying. Ellen put her arms around the shaking girl, held her close, rocking her gently.
“I found her,” Beth whispered. “We’re going to Grandpa’s house, up in Oregon. We’ll be safe there. You think she’s dying.” Beth pushed Ellen away. “She’s not dying. I won’t let her die.”
“There, there,” Ellen soothed, but tears stung her eyes. “You sleep now.” She kissed Beth gently on the forehead. “I’ll take good care of your mom.”
“She won’t die.” Beth turned onto her side and closed her eyes.
* * *
But she was dying. Ellen sat beside her bed, wiping her fever-hot body with the wet cloth. Had Rebecca’s last moments been full of terror and pain? Had she bled to death, trapped under fallen ceilings and walls, or had she burned, screaming? Outside, the wind hurled itself inland, slamming against the house with the Quake’s absorbed power, shaking it to its foundations. Ellen rinsed the cloth. It was warm with the woman’s heat. She didn’t look like Beth. She had dark hair and an olive tint to her skin. The lantern cast long shadows across the floor and something creaked in the main room. Rebecca’s ghost?
Need shapes our lives, Ellen thought dully. Need for food, for attention, for power. The need for love. That’s the foundation, the rock on which we build everything. “How can I live without Rebecca?” she whispered.
The woman’s eyelids twitched. “Joseph?” she whispered. “Have to get back … Love … don’t worry…” The feeble words fluttered to silence.
Joseph? Ellen wiped the woman’s forehead. Beth’s father? Beth hadn’t mentioned a Joseph or a father.
* * *
Ellen woke to gray dawn light and the morning sounds of surf. Her head was pillowed on the sick woman’s thigh and the wash cloth made a damp spot on the quilt. Afraid, Ellen jerked upright.
“Hello,” Laura Sorenson whispered.
Still alive! “Good morning.” Guilty and relieved, Ellen stifled a yawn. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep. How are you feeling?”
“Tired. What … happened?”
“You’re in my house. You’ve been sick.” Ellen touched the woman’s forehead. No fever. “Beth’s here, too, and she’s fine. Your daughter’s a brave girl.”
“Beth? I … don’t have a daughter.” She clutched weakly at the sheet. “Why did you call me Laura? That’s not … my name.”
“Just take it easy.” Ellen patted Laura’s shoulder, hiding dismay. “You had a high fever.”
“Oh.” Fear flickered in the woman’s dark eyes. “Did I hit my head? What day is this? I feel as if … I’ve been dreaming for a long time.”
“You were just sick,” Ellen murmured. “It’s March 25. Don’t worry about it now. I’ll get you some water, or would you rather have some orange juice?”
“March?” the woman whispered brokenly. “It can’t be. Why can’t I remember?”
In the kitchen, Ellen spooned orange crystals into a glass from a white can, trying to recall the effects of a prolonged high fever. Seizures, she remembered, but Laura hadn’t gone into convulsions. Amnesia? Ellen shook her head, stirred the fake juice to orange froth. She carried the glass back to the bedroom and found Beth already there, her arms around her mother.
“Mom, it’s me,” Beth was saying in a broken voice.
“It’s … coming back.” Laura stroked her daughter’s back. “Beth. Honey, it’ll be all right.”
There was a tentative quality to the gesture and a frightened expression in her eyes. “Here’s your juice,” Ellen said, holding out the glass. “How are you doing?”
Beth almost snatched
the glass from Ellen’s hand. “I told you she’d get well,” she said.
Voyeur, outsider, Ellen watched Beth help her mother drink. Side by side, they looked even less alike. There was a protective possessiveness to Beth’s posture; a confidence that was lacking in Laura. Beth might be the mother; Laura the fragile child.
“Thank you.” The woman sank back on the pillows, trying for a smile. “Thank you for taking us in. We must be a horrible burden.”
“Not at all.” Ellen collected the empty glass. “I’m just glad you’re better.”
Laura stroked her daughter’s hair. “Beth said I was in our apartment when it happened. I’m … starting to remember.” She spoke hesitantly, like an actor groping for half-learned lines. “What about … Joseph? Oh … God, Joseph!”
“What’s wrong? Who’s Joseph, Mom?” Beth stroked a strand of hair back from her mother’s face. “Someone at the office?”
“No. I … don’t know. I don’t know a Joseph, do I? It was a … dream, I guess. From the fever.” She squeezed Beth’s hand, her fingers trembling.
“You’ll sort it out.” Ellen touched Laura’s shoulder, moved by the anguish in her face. “I’ve got to run into town.” She had almost forgotten the helicopter. “I’ll be back in an hour. There’s more water in the jugs beside the kitchen counter.”
Laura nodded weakly, but her eyes never left her daughter’s face. She is afraid, Ellen thought.
Of what?
At the store, Jack eyed her over the fake tortoiseshell rim of his glasses as he called Eureka and canceled the helicopter. “They were busy anyway,” he drawled. “Guess the storm hit real bad up there. Your visitor wasn’t too sick, huh?”
Dumb woman, his expression said. Don’t know just sick from dying.
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 88
