All Stories Are Love Stories (16 page)

Dale was a longtime customer whom she probably wouldn't recognize outside her father's store, but who had been talking emptily about things like “sharing his wealth” and the “loneliness of overabundance” for far too long, and had found it hard to keep from noticing her. The marriage had, for all intents and purposes, been arranged. “Perhaps a practical marriage is the best marriage of all,” her father said, the sadness he felt over his own ill-fated choice sinking deep within her like a swallowed hook.

Indeed, Dale had offered to do everything he could—which was far more than most people could even imagine doing—with such warm generosity that she believed she might eventually begin to appreciate the marriage, not just the man who was offering it. He'd been careful to say that he did not believe the baby would live long, but at the same time he'd serenaded her with talk of doctors and developments and technologies, of science's triumphs over probability, of man stepping in to take over where God seemed to have left off.

And in all the despair and confusion, Dale was astute enough to recognize that one note continued to rise clearly above all the others, which was that Vashti believed there was a way to help her unborn and imperfect baby live, despite the fact that almost everyone did not think she would, and she would not—could not—listen to anyone who believed differently. Especially not Max, who thought that it would be best to move forward as if the baby had never existed in the
first place, to follow the doctor's implied advice and abort. That conviction was horrible enough, Vashti contended, without it coming from the very person whose support she most craved. Their separate arguments didn't really matter, though, toward the end. After a while, they were no longer discussing anything of substance. They were just hurting each other enough so she could walk away.

The younger girl was crying again. Her sister watched her, as actively distressed as a dog witnessing another's injury, unable to do anything but bark or whine in response. “What?” Tia demanded. “Is it hurting? Are you hurting again? You said it wouldn't hurt after.” She glared at the priest, her chest a vise.

As if he could control grief. As if the girl might be crying only about her pain. Oh, to be young and willfully in denial, to have that work for him again.

“It's not my leg,” Ally said between sobs. “It's Max. We forgot about Max! He's been up there all this time!”

Max. Max? Her sister tried to place the name she knew. “Oh my God,” she said aloud. “She's right. We forgot about Max.” She said the words slowly, as though she couldn't quite believe them.

The priest sighed. He hadn't forgotten the man and woman under the debris, he'd just chosen not to remind himself of them.

“He's dead, isn't he?” Tia asked, not as softly as she thought. Her sister gasped, ready to sob again.

“No,” the priest said quickly, desperate to avoid another breakdown. How to deflect from certainty to possibility? “We don't know that.”

Tia studied him as if trying to decide whether she was going to believe him. Though the priest sensed that what he had said was almost irrelevant. It was his character that was on the line; Tia looked like she was trying to decide if she was going to believe in him, too. Pulling her lower lip in with her teeth, she grimaced and squatted beside her sister. “He's right,” she added with surprising gentleness. “He might have gotten out.”

“He didn't,” Ally insisted, not so easily swayed, “he couldn't have. He's dead. He has to be.”

“No,” the priest said, unexpectedly buoyed by the older girl's confidence. He went to her sister's other side, “he doesn't have to be dead, does he?” He smiled sadly. “Who knows what a person can survive? Now take a deep breath and relax,” he said, placing his hand gently on the uneasy rib cage, “or we'll need Phil to save you, too.” But he, too, couldn't help but listen to the terrible stillness above them.

The first interview was going even better than Ellen had hoped. On a whim, the ever-resourceful Silas had snagged a city-planning expert who'd worked in San Francisco—drier than toast on any other day, but Si had a hunch he'd work an angle none of the other networks would have thought of, and that his plain, all-American looks would bring it home. And so far, Si had been spot on, not that Ellen couldn't take credit for steering the man away from too much technical speak and into the good stuff, the stuff people could understand.

Then he suddenly veered too close to being reassuring, to skirting the real picture. She understood why, of course: he was used to smoothing things over—it was an occupational hazard, just as hers was to rile things up. She'd have to nudge him in the direction of the story they needed.

“But seismic building codes are really quite sophisticated in the San Francisco Bay Area,” he was saying. “Anything that went up in the last few decades has an excellent chance of weathering even temblors of this size.”

“But what about all the other buildings?”

“You're right to ask, Ellen.” His hair had been parted on the side and combed smooth.
What a nerd
, she thought, not unsympathetically. “Unfortunately, the majority of buildings
in San Francisco were built before these technological advances were available.”

Bingo. “Was any retrofitting done on those structures?”

The poor guy had been made up to look brighter than he felt, but the lights and conversation were wearing on him, a fine sheen of sweat beginning to stand out on his forehead. “Well, that would be up to the owners. Retrofitting is quite expensive, and many of the buildings that need it most, what we call ‘soft story' buildings, especially those on landfill, are owned by landlords or homeowners who don't have the financial means or inclination to make improvements.”

“Soft story on landfill?”

He thought for a minute, knowing he didn't have much time to explain a pet topic. “Imagine, if you will, a sandbox. If you fill it with water, smooth the wet sand, and leave it to dry, you can probably place a board across it and—temporarily—place any manner of objects on top of that board. But the sand still remains underneath, no matter how much that board might look like solid ground.

“Now imagine you put two boxes stacked on top of each other on top of that board. That's our two-story house. But in many areas of San Francisco, the bottom level of that house is poorly supported, usually because it's a garage with only three walls, really. When the soil moves underneath, and the structure moves accordingly, the chances are unfortunately excellent that that first, ‘soft' story will buckle under.”

Ellen paused. Line upon line of houses in the entire western half of the city came to mind, their colorful garage doors facing out under homes.
Chance of a lifetime
, she reminded
herself. If she had to fill her veins with ice water to get the best story, she would. “It boggles the mind,” she said quietly.

“Yes. What most people don't realize is that the very things we prize about the Bay Area landscape—the mountains, the coastline, the canyons—are the result of a very unstable area of the earth's crust. All over the globe, impressive topographical features are really nothing more than road maps of catastrophic shifting.”

“I'm going to have to stop you, Peter. My producer is telling me that we've got some footage of the city, thanks to the ability of aerial cameras to get in a lot closer than we can from the ground.”

“Excellent.” Ellen would remember later the relief she saw on his face, the relief she herself felt, reluctant as she was to admit it, to at least be out from under the baking lights for a moment, to have some more information.

The first image was of AT&T Park, the closest helicopters could get to the heart of the city without crashing in its winds. Despite all the warnings, it spoke of a desolation no one there was prepared to witness. Information was one thing, the sight of it another. The landmark stadium tilted like a keeling boat into the bay, its overhead lights looming down into its rafters, its seats askew, the perfectly groomed grass not yet underwater marred with rivers of mud.

“Damn,” Si said through her earpiece. “Goddamn.”

The only other sound in the room came from the steady whip of the helicopter struggling to hover in the wind.

An hour after the shock, in the district between the Bay and Sansome Street, with rolling smoke above, and roaring, furious flames breathing hotly on our faces, I came upon a fire engine . . . about which firemen stood with idle hands. . . . “No water,” said the chief. “Mains all broken by the shock; can't do a thing.”

—HENRY ANDERSON LAFLER, 1906

I climbed to the top of Potrero Hill to view the conflagration. . . . A fierce and awful fire ate at the heart of the city and breathed up a suffocating black smoke. From eight-, ten-, and twelve-story buildings, supposedly fireproof, flames issued at every window, and gushed from the tops like the blast from a rolling mill. . . . It was too clearly apparent that San Francisco was doomed. That stupendous fire, and not a drop of water! Already the desert had followed the drought far in, where a great city stood.

—F. O. POPENOE, 1906

The fire, which had swept the wholesale district below Sansome, jumped Kearny Street and with a rattle of eagerness fastened upon Chinatown, with its carved balconies, its multicolored signs, its painted and gilded flimsiness. At the same time, doubling back, it came down Montgomery, San Francisco's Wall Street, and Kearny, fairly whistling down the deep, narrow corridors. By eight o'clock the Kohl and Mills Building and the Merchants' Exchange flamed like torches, and the destruction of the business blocks of the city was complete.

—JAMES HOPPER, 1906

“Max,” Vashti said, the way a person speaks in a dream, “Are you there?” She didn't wait for him to answer. “Are you sleeping?”

“No,” he said, though he had been, in a way, thinking of her.

Vashti began meditatively, still deep in thought. “Maybe it was foolish to get so attached to someone else the way we did. Maybe that's just a doomed way to try to go through the world. Sooner or later, one of you is going to lose their balance, don't you think? Maybe a love like that just isn't meant to last.”

He didn't answer. He didn't know how to. Who decided how long love was supposed to last? “But we didn't. We didn't drown, and the love lasted, even when we both wished it wouldn't. I used to think that something horrible had gone wrong with one or both of us because you could only think of how you wanted her so much, and I could only think of how I wanted you, and we couldn't find our way around those things—like the pregnancy was a pill we both swallowed that should have given us the same result, but instead it grew strange in me, became something I didn't know what to do with or how to manage, while you developed this strength around it that I couldn't touch.” Another thought of his mother bubbled to the
surface, but he caught it just in time, reciting what had already become a litany at that point: that she would be surrounded by caretakers, that she was stronger, now that she lived at Buena, that she'd always been resilient, at least in spirit. Was there any other kind of resiliency? Certainly a body couldn't survive if its spirit refused to cooperate, could it?

“Also,” he went on, “I was afraid I wouldn't really love a child who wasn't totally wanted. I thought maybe it was better not to be there at all, rather than be there only because I felt I had to be, or leave her feeling lonely.”

How could he think such a thing? Max had been left to feel lonely, and he had still found his way to her. But, Vashti reminded herself, he had never carried anyone so closely that her very presence became as vital to him as he was to himself. Also, she was surprised to realize, he might not remember being carried that way.

“Did your parents ever carry you, Max? To bed, when you were sleeping?”

“I don't know,” he said, trying to imagine how they might be carried out of there now. “But how would I? How can you remember someone carrying you if you were sleeping?”

I guess you can't,
she thought, a foggy memory of Javi's trying to wake her after she'd fallen asleep in the car, jarring her out of slumber so that she could walk on her own into the house. She supposed he was right, that it was better to be abandoned before birth rather than midstream, or in spirit. “I always thought it would be a good sign in a parent, to be able to carry a child in such a way that he doesn't even wake up.” She thought for a minute. “I bet your mom did
that, Max.” He had been thinking the same thing. “I bet you would have, too.”

He thought the sound of her voice was like being held and taken somewhere, though to where he couldn't begin to guess. He should have been preoccupied with railing against this terrible thing that had trapped them, leaving them most likely to die. He could not imagine a worse fate, and yet here he was, wandering into a reawakening he would have thought was impossible to find.

“I know it sounds ridiculous, but when you were gone,” he said, closing his eyes, remembering the blinding confusion, “all the things that usually made sense to me didn't for a while. Some days nothing made sense, then on some other days everything did. It got easier to make things up. All these unreasonable ideas—of your coming back, of how things could change back or be close to what they had been—didn't get shoved aside like they should have. It was so strange! To be separated from you physically but not emotionally, to have so much to say to you that couldn't be said, like turning to talk to a ghost half the time.”

Max knew he still had all those things to say, that they were threatening to let loose. Was it his imagination, or did he hear a change in her breathing? Was there enough space between them to carry such a delicate sound from her to him? He wanted to reach out and touch the jagged materials that formed the prison around him, but he could not move well enough to do even that. He listened again, but no new sounds introduced themselves. Still, it suddenly occurred to him, if he was not sure he heard her, they might not hear rescuers
making their way to them from far overhead. The thought made him feel hopeful. Though it was a giddy hope, like a drug. He wondered if it was just better to imagine the worst, though that, too, had never been his strong suit. And so he let his words go free, feeling them unravel from within him even as he spoke.

“After a while, I realized I had been asking questions you'd never answer. Still, I didn't want to stop asking, because if I did, it would mean I had accepted the way things were. I don't think I ever managed to do just that. I know. We were only nineteen. God, you'd just turned nineteen that summer! I knew even then that we were young and inexperienced. I knew that your father had good reason to step in. His reasoning made sense to me. It was yours I couldn't swallow.

“So I started asking myself the questions I could answer on my own. I started to try to understand your life as you'd chosen it, tried to imagine where you were and what you were doing. That's when I knew the anger was fading, because, to be honest, the anger got boring. I still wanted to know you. I had gotten so used to knowing you. I loved you. I wanted details. It wasn't enough just to know generally where you were and why. I wanted to know if you ever got to plant that garden you wanted and what you ate for breakfast. Then, after I got up the courage to track down Javi and she told me the baby had lived and died, I was bewildered for a while. The hurt of your having married someone else came back, but what could I do with my grief except wonder if you'd ever leave him, and if I could reach out to you, and if you'd cut your hair because I'd heard that babies grabbed their mothers' hair and
I wondered if you'd just chopped it off or pulled it back, and I wondered how you could live with someone you didn't love. I should have been angrier with you, but I missed you too much. Then I knew the curiosity would never end, because there were questions I could never find the answers to until I could stop imagining the person I loved. Still living. Still loved. Just a few hours away. It made me sad, knowing that distance wasn't keeping us apart, or love. If I hadn't loved you quite so much, maybe I could have forgotten you. Though I don't know how that's done. I don't know how people can forget each other.”

Long after he stopped talking, Vashti hoped he would continue, but he didn't, and she didn't know what she could say. She wanted to say she was sorry. From the moment she agreed to marry Dale, through her pregnancy with Anita, her daughter's birth, her exploding star of a childhood, her death, for countless moments after. How many times had she fantasized about finding her way to the kind of apology that would get them back to where they had been before she left, negating both time and injury? Or for the kind of wholesome regret she had ached to develop, to be able to come to him and say that she had been wrong about everything that hurt him. If only she could be so selfless, find a way to relieve him completely of pain. If only she regretted everything she'd done to hurt him as completely as she loved him.

But she had been compelled to choose a different battle than he had, and the hope and desperation that made her want to fight it were not things she could regret. They had been important. It was important to live a life you could
become desperate about. It was also important to know that no one can be completely sorry, protected from having to carry into the future the self that made old choices.

“I did love him, Max. He took us in. He allowed me my broken heart and stood by me when it broke all over again. How could I not—for that, at least?”

He took a while to absorb this information. It didn't hurt as much as he thought it would to know this, to touch it with his heart the way one might run a finger over a cut, gently, to see how deep it is.

“Is that why you stayed with him?”

“Yes,” she answered truthfully. “But I mostly stayed because I promised him I would. Sometimes it felt like a sort of backward fairy tale, you know? Like the one where a magical creature promises the girl something she needs if she promises him her firstborn. Except I promised myself in exchange for Anita. We never spoke about it like that, but there wasn't much we spoke about. It made stories too easy to invent, anything to fill in the blanks.”

“How did he die?” Max asked, thinking of his own heart failing.

She had known Dale was about to die a few days before he did. It wasn't just his waxy skin or the fiery blush coming into his cheeks and igniting something in his eyes; she had seen these things before, and they'd only been signs of fever or his weakened heart's overtly desperate attempt to get through a few bad days—which it had done until then. She couldn't have said why this new light in his eyes made her believe that his spirit was rising to the surface before making
its final exit—though she'd never believed anything like that before—or why the waxiness of his skin was something she suddenly wanted to touch, felt suddenly compelled to memorize. We cannot speak to the unsystematic, the knowing older than science that creeps in surely and soundlessly at times of birth and death. Vashti had felt it just before her mother died, and her mother had guided her through it with the tone of her voice and the way she ran her palms over the crown of her younger daughter's hair; the way she smiled wryly at the secret they shared; how she told Vashti, for the first and last time, that some of the strangest stories she'd told her daughters had also been some of the truest.

“Let's talk about something else. Let's talk about getting out.”

“Why?”

Because it felt too close in there. There wasn't enough air to stir up all those old demons that were crowding them. The past was running into the future, which made the present impossible to understand. Her head felt odd and light, her heart leaden.

“I can't. Let's just, let's just talk about something else, Max. Anything else.” He heard a noise, as if she might have tried to move.

“Don't move,” Max said. “It'll make things worse.”

“How do you know?” she asked. He thought he heard tears in her voice.

“Vashti. Just talk to me. It's the only way through.”

He could hear the tears in her voice. “I can't, Max. I can't. It's too much.”

“You can,” he said. “Think of what you have to tell me! Just tell me everything I don't know. Tell me about taking care of him toward the end,” he said after a moment, knowing he'd never stood by and watched anyone die, that there were probably countless brave things she had done that he would never even know to ask about.

When she and Dale were married, and Vashti was still daydreaming about the possibility of falling in love with him, she used to fantasize about how they might have met. At a grape-stomping party, the kind everyone thinks Californians are beyond, but they're not—so a grape-stomping party, one that started in an afternoon that fell into an early evening with lavender skies threaded by orange-gold strips of cloud, one where a quietly elegant man came to talk to her, she with her purple-stained feet, the whole thing as colorful as a painting no one has any business inhabiting. Or maybe they'd have run into each other week after week at the farmers' market, he selling his wines, she wandering among the goods, the two of them noticing each other, coming to a natural affection.

Instead, Dale had approached every problem in life as he did his business. So finding a spouse, when it didn't happen right away, had been shaped into an exercise in expediency and efficiency. He waited until he was old enough to no longer be expected to father a large family or form any romantically naive attachments to his wife, then he put out feelers among his business contacts. A man of like mind, her father had reached out to him almost immediately, as Dale had hoped he would because he'd noticed Vashti already. He
was, after all, not above beauty. The deal was almost done before Vashti agreed to it, her father and Dale having convinced each other that it would be hard for her to refuse such a satisfactory offer.

“I'm not a cow to be sold,” Vashti had spat out, suddenly regretful and as angry at herself as she was at her father. “This isn't the nineteenth century.”

“I don't care what century it is. You think you're above old solutions to old problems? And who's selling anything? You have as much to gain as he does. Many people would say even more!” A telltale vein stood out in her father's neck, his face almost purple with frustration. He'd have a heart attack before all this was done, she was sure of it.

“So why bother with me?” she'd challenged him, unable to keep the terrible bitterness inside.

“A man needs a wife!” he shouted. Vashti suddenly felt paralyzed, irretrievably tangled up in multiple unhappinesses, and she saw her father struggling right alongside her. It constricted her throat. And ultimately, it silenced her.

The next morning, she agreed to meet with Dale, and while she told herself she could still walk away easily, she was growing more pregnant and entranced by impending motherhood every day, more tormented by Max's persistent belief that the baby wouldn't live, more guilty knowing that if she told him she intended to have the baby, he'd stay with her anyway, limp along until they all inevitably crashed. That would mean none of them—not she, not Max, not the baby—would have a chance. Almost overnight, she felt desperate to escape it all, to be focused exclusively on her daughter's
well-being. If her own life was falling to pieces, at least there was another, more precious one on its way. She grabbed it by its slippery tail and held on to it like the lifeline it was.