All Stories Are Love Stories (14 page)

“There's no way we can care for her, Vashti, even if we both take on several jobs.” He had knelt in front of her and taken her hands, which were resting as if in prayer on her knees, in his own. “We'd barely have any idea what to do with a child to begin with.” He wiped the tears from her face, his thumbs like flat moons on her cheeks.

“No one ever knows what to do with a baby to begin with,” she sobbed.

He waited, guilt and hope consuming his face. He let her cry, holding her hands still and looking into her face, and spoke again only after she showed signs of stopping, “We'll have another baby, Vash. Lots of other babies. This one was just never meant to be.”

She nodded so he would look away, but instead he kissed her, because he thought that nod meant she understood or, at the very least, agreed.

Out in the rest of the auditorium, the air was thickly quiet, particles of dust floating around and vying for a place to rest, as if every atom of the world were holding its breath.

“Well,” the priest said, “let's have another look at that leg.”

He flicked on a miniature flashlight that Phil had found in his backpack. The light it spread was eerily bright, focusing in such a way as to emphasize the dark. The priest didn't have to see much, though, to confirm what he'd feared. The break
needed to be set immediately, if they weren't already too late. He looked into the girl's anxious face, wondering how she'd found her way in there with only a testy older sister and no mother. How brave could he ask her to be?

“I don't want to go to the hospital,” Ally said, feeling his stare.

But it was her sister who reached out and grabbed him by the shoulder, stopping him just short of touching the injury. Phil moved in as if caught in a gravitational orbit, watching Tia, his hands at his sides, palms open, ready to receive whatever fell his way. Tia took a moment, visibly reconsidering the priest who had approached her sister.

He was dressed as normally as the nun—obviously the sort of person who dressed in such a way that made it clear she was not interested in the opinions of children—was not: a navy sweater with a white collar, pleated gray trousers, and black shoes with black socks. He wore glasses, and the bald part of his skull shone in the gathering dark. Tia had never quite understood that expression before—gathering dark—but that was exactly what the dark was doing, creeping up and around them, maybe on its way to creeping through them.

“What's your name?” she asked suddenly. “Your real name. None of this father stuff.” If he was going to hurt and help her sister, she wanted, at least, to be sure she could remember how to find him. After this, they all might scatter. It could be over very soon, like he said, people could come and lift all this up and away from them, like the top of a dollhouse coming free, and then this would just be a story, a bad memory.

“Jonathan,” he said.

“And what kind of priest are you?”

“We are both fully professed members of the order of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,” he replied solemnly. “Friar Schmuck and Sister Cock-a-Doo-del-Doo, at your service.”

“The what? Who?”

“Just call me Jon.”

Tia frowned. She didn't understand, but it was only one of many things she didn't understand, and she couldn't find a way to begin to ask.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Ally looked up at her sister, too nervous to listen to anything but her own needs. “And I'm hungry. Am I wet?” she whispered.

“No,” her sister said softly, kneeling down, “just cold.”

Ally bit her lower lip, her jaw tight with fear. Her sister placed both her hands on her arm, as if in benediction.

“May I?” the priest asked, deflecting, his hands hovering over the leg.

Ally nodded.

Starting at the ankle, he pulled back the thin left pant leg from the horrible, sparkly pants she kept pulling out of the dirty laundry and trying to wear every day. Her favorite pants. Tia wondered what time it was. Late. Probably about the time when she was yelling at her sister to change into her pajamas already, or trying to help her clean up her funky-smelling room, find that stupid doll she was always losing. She stared openmouthed at what the priest had revealed: the long bone above the ankle jutting out where it should have been straight. How could that be? Her eyes were showing her too many things she just couldn't accept. How could she trust them?

“Ally,” the priest said quietly. “I think we might have to set this. Do you know what that means?”

Ally shook her head.

“I do,” her sister said, swallowing the bile that rose in her throat. “It means,” she started brusquely, then faltered. “It means . . .”

“It means,” said Phil, stepping in, “that he can fix it, but it will hurt first.” He looked up at the priest, ignoring Tia's glare. “Right?”

Tia wanted to scream and push him away, close her eyes and open them again, confirm that this was all a nightmare. But instead she watched in horror as her sister nodded dutifully and the priest began to examine her leg as if it were a piece of meat, his small stranger's hands moving gently, quickly, over her sister's body, which was also her body—the rare sort of curiosity, another's body she knew as well as her own, the fact that it did not obviously belong to her just a technicality. Ally was watching, too, looking stunned.

“Are you also a doctor or something?” Tia spluttered, desperate to redirect his attention. What kind of training did they give a priest?

The priest looked up and smiled at her. “Actually, once upon a time, I used to be a nurse.”

Good Lord
, Tia thought.
Once upon a time?
“I think we should just wait for a doctor.”

The priest didn't answer. He was focused on Ally, checking her eyes and pulse with fixed hands before moving to her leg, asking her the right questions as he rolled up her pant
leg farther, checking her knee and foot and the surrounding areas for further damage.

“Are you going to need any help?” Phil asked, summoning his courage.

“Yes.” The priest spoke gently, watching Tia stare down the boy. He tried to keep his voice as even as possible. “I might need your help steadying her.”

“No,” Tia said quickly, startling forward. “I don't think that's a good idea. You don't know what you're doing. You're not strong enough.” Tia bit her lip even harder, tasting blood.

“I don't have to set it,” he said, watching her. “We can wait for help.”

She nodded, knowing he was just being kind. It had to be done. But everything in her did not want it to have to be done. Didn't that count for something?

The priest eased into her thoughts as gently as he could. “I'm afraid that if we wait much longer, it will need to be rebroken and reset, most likely involving a surgery of some kind. She's young, but it's a bad break.”

“Rebreak it?” Ally said, her voice lifting.

“Yes,” the priest answered, turning back to her, trying to balance both girls on his trust as evenly as he could.

“Won't it hurt?” Ally squeaked.

“Maybe,” the priest said. He looked from one small face to the other, the resemblance between the sisters striking. The older one was much taller and clearly filling out, but they had the same narrow ovals for faces, the same triangular chins, the same wavy hair and black eyes rimmed with
long, black lashes. “But it will also hurt more the longer we have to wait.”

“How bad?” Ally asked.

“It'll be quick,” he replied.

“OK, priest,” Ally said. Tia took her hand with a steely grip, and Ally squeezed back, sensing that her sister needed comfort, too. Tia held on tight, trying to keep her frightened mind from flying up into the rafters and hurting itself.

“Good,” he said. “It'll be over before you know it. And as soon as the phones work, we'll call the hospital and your mother, and we'll have you in a warm bed eating ice cream before you can say boo. Now here's what we'll need to do. You, boy. Phil. I'm sorry. Of course, Phil.” He hadn't forgotten his name, but Phil lurked as only a boy will. “You'll need to hold her leg firmly here,” he said, indicating an area over Ally's thigh, just above her knee.

Tia balked at the thought. “I can hold her leg.” She steeled herself. “I can hold it,” she said again, her voice coming out too loud.

“It's OK,” Phil said. “Let me.”

The priest put out a hand, holding it just in front of Tia's chest. “He's bigger,” he explained.
And less likely to implode
, he thought, watching the older girl's eyes grow wider by the second. “The more weight to steady her, the better.”

“It'll be quick,” he said again to Ally. She looked him in the eye and nodded. Just like that, she handed over her trust. And just like that, Tia's began to waver again, tilting like a top about to go over.

She sucked in her lower lip as hard as she could to keep
her mouth shut. The boy Phil stepped delicately in front of her, forcing her to cede her spot. She moved quickly to Ally's other side and took her hand there. “You squeeze when it hurts,” she demanded. Ally nodded, her eyes unblinking. Tia's bladder clenched right along with her stomach, the rising sting of anticipation unbearable.

The priest said a few more words to Phil that Tia couldn't hear and then, with one horrible, impressive effort, they yanked on her sister's leg like sailors pulling a rope, snapping the bone back into place. It was done before Ally could draw enough breath to scream, but still she did, so loudly she almost tore Tia's ear off and knocked her sister hard onto her back. Tia lay there, the wind flown out of her, her chest turning to iron. Staring up at the ceiling so far overhead and broken that even the loudest voice would get lost in it, she tried to inhale. Nothing.

Phil was suddenly at her side.

“Breathe,” he demanded in a voice she hadn't heard before.

Tia gasped, staring at him uncomprehendingly, the air in her chest gone. Just gone. Her ribs closed in on themselves painfully. She couldn't even cry.

In one swift move, Phil grabbed her under the armpits and stood her up like a doll, shaking her until she pushed him out and away, gasping. But then her breathing came too quickly, like hiccups, and her head started to feel dizzy.

“No,” Phil was saying, close by again, “slow down. Deep breaths. You're hyperventilating.” He put his hand on his own chest to show her. “Like this. In and out.”

She tried to do as he said.

Phil reached out and took her hand, putting it over his so she could feel him breathing. Instead she felt his heart beating, the thicket of movement under his rib cage. She left her hand there and didn't blink.

“Everything OK over there?” the priest asked loudly.

Phil broke abruptly away and stood back, his arms limp at his sides. “I was getting her to,” he said, hesitating, “she wasn't . . .”

“I wasn't breathing,” Tia stuttered, her lungs and mind releasing the last of their rigid grip on each other.
He saved me
, she told herself. A moment later, after Ally started to talk again and Phil peered down at the leg proprietarily, she said it to herself again, experimentally, as if she wasn't quite sure what it meant.
That boy, Phil, saved me.

The man was dying in his arms. Gene knew it, even though he was still fighting for him, walking as fast as he could. He had only ever held someone for love or its approximations, and the feeling of lightness, the loss of density, like a balloon filling toward flight, was unmistakable. It seemed to seep into him, as though toying with him, a force that could easily sweep him off his feet if it chose to. He tried to focus away from the aches in his shoulders and wrists that were building past pain and on to something else: a path, a plan. He forced himself to pick up his pace, even as his feet threatened to go out from under him.

The quickest way north would have been to take Eighth to Market, where he could head through the Tenderloin toward Chinatown. But the entrance to Eighth was blocked by the runoff of people and bricks and glass from the Zynga building, and Seventh was crisscrossed with downed power lines, so that Gene was two blocks down Townsend before he could make a left on Sixth, two blocks down the street that had been named for the town's end, back before the city had spread like an inkblot all around itself. Before now, he had never looked at a tall building as anything but a fixture; with so many of them tilting in the softened earth like gravestones in a muddy cemetery, he wondered how they had ever
come to be solid in the first place. All around him, the city was shifting before his eyes. Part of him still wished that this unfamiliar version of his world could shift again, this time in his favor, the way it might in a story—a portal opening up that he could walk through and find himself home. For the first time since he'd moved to the city almost a decade ago, he felt the sickening certainty of true loss settling in his belly.

“You live in an inn?”

“I own it.”

“But you live here, too?”

“Upstairs. I can show you if you'd like.”

Gene would like that, though he hesitated on the doorstep. Where he came from, an inn was a concrete block in “downtown” Stilwell with its name in neon lights on a post in the parking lot, a place for those unfortunate folks who passed through the rural suburbs of Wichita without any family to stay with.

Gene caressed the beautiful door in the entryway, glossy chestnut with the kind of heavy brass knocker he'd seen only in pictures. This one also had three diamond-paned windows, the cut glass in them blue and purple and green, cobalt and violet and jade. Gene was saturated with color, standing inside a doorway while a beautiful older man he'd just met invited him to step farther inside. He'd never seen anything so lovely, much less touched it. And he did not know if it would all fall apart if he got any closer, if disappointment would take him out of this pool where he was splashing around in wave after wave of unfamiliar beauty.

“Is the whole city this beautiful?” he asked Franklin,
standing on the other side of the threshold Gene wasn't quite sure was real enough to cross. The past month, his first in California, had been so full of wonders that he couldn't decide if he'd arrived in paradise or was beginning to lose his mind. He and his fellow graduate students had left Berkeley for San Francisco every weekend since their first, a new party or parties seemingly awaiting them as soon as they arrived. He wondered if life really could be like this, and part of him didn't think it could. The part that was waiting on the doorstep, afraid to take another step for fear the illusion would be broken.

“Fresh off the boat, are we?” Franklin murmured, reaching out to cup Gene's chin, a move so gently intimate, Gene felt it to his core. He blushed. Or so Franklin said he had. He liked to tell the story as if he were the wolf, Gene the lamb who came walking innocently into his path. For the longest time, Gene had been defensive about Franklin's side of their story. It had been important for him to think that, as the only Kansan in Berkeley's famed geology program, he wasn't as green as people suspected he was.

The man in his arms stirred, muttering. Gene had slowed without realizing it, the rhythm of the man's diminishing pulse creeping in on him unaware. He glanced down again into the man's fading face, each peek harder to take than the last. But why was he so anxious to see what he knew was coming? He would have thought that death's certainty would have been at least a little comforting the closer it got, that resignation would ease the fear of the unknown. The weight of the man in his arms was the only thing solid
about him. Gene thought of his mother, how many people she'd shepherded toward death. She would know what to do. If there was a chance at saving this man, she would have already recognized and taken it.

Had he missed something he should have taken from her? Had he never learned something he was supposed to know? Now that he loved someone who would need a level of care he'd never given, he feared he had. How sick Franklin was, really, was anyone's guess, but they both knew that the last stages of his illness, when they inevitably came, would be debilitating. The doctors reassured them both, but on the fringes of their lucky lives, Gene and Franklin had seen the untucked edges of friends whose partners were dying or had died of AIDS or cancer or old age—the things that, toward the end, they didn't have the energy or desire to hide from polite company. Franklin's doctors had mentioned none of that, though that didn't mean it wasn't coming. Gene hated modern doctors with their ability to diagnose so smugly, even when they knew they couldn't heal. As if knowing were the entire battle.

Was a geologist any better, though? Even now, he wanted so desperately to be able to offer something of himself for sure, to call this battle as a general might instead of limping through it like an injured foot soldier.

He readjusted the weight of the man to take some of the pressure off his back. Maybe he should ask for help. But help with what, exactly? And from whom? The others out and about in the black, broken night looked just as vulnerable and
animalistic, as if the earthquake had shaken the civility out of them, leaving their unguarded selves exposed. None of them walked or strolled; they'd devolved into a hodgepodge of skittering and plowing and limping, avoiding or obsessing over one another, many with a desperate, open-eyed stare that suggested their rational minds had driven them to project their thoughts elsewhere. He wanted to run, to race toward Franklin, but he couldn't release his load.

He looked up at the nearest street sign, surprised that he'd made it only to Howard. Usually he knew where he was and how fast he was going, and when he would get there and why. But being somewhere was suddenly unraveling into being everywhere, as if someone had shaken up the familiar parts of San Francisco in Gene's mind like a kaleidoscope, so they landed in upended fragments. And not knowing
where
he was felt too much like not knowing
what
he was. He knew that his work had been like the earth itself, stable and life-affirming, something he could stand on. But without the mantle of professionalism, he felt thinned, transparent, all too easily brushed aside. He had allowed his work to define him and, like any good devotee, he was spectacular when cast in its light, lost once he stepped away.

Franklin used to chastise him. “You're too pretty to have so much self-doubt,” he'd scold. Gene couldn't explain to him why such a statement was exactly the sort of thing that made him feel even more dispensable. In Franklin's world, beauty trumped all. Gene so wanted to believe in that world, to inhabit it. But he had been raised differently.

“It's so yesterday's news, though,” Franklin once complained, “to be a homosexual riddled with self-doubt! Especially in San Francisco. Gene,” he scolded, “it's simply déclassé.”

It was. And it wasn't that Gene doubted himself, really—it was just that he was unaccustomed to hoping he had anything more than usefulness to offer. He met Franklin when he was still so young, barely in his twenties, that he confessed on one of their early dates that San Francisco felt to him for all the world like Pleasure Island in
Pinocchio,
the place where mischievous boys went blindly to indulge their bliss, only to be turned into donkeys after an afternoon of candy and ribaldry. Franklin, comfortably into his forties and well into his third decade as a San Franciscan, had laughed aloud, his ridicule both stinging and comforting Gene, like the laugh of an older brother who's already discovered that the monsters under the bed are stuffed toys.

The man in his arms groaned again, straining against him, babbling nonsensically. Gene's arm slipped and he had to set the man down, not bothering to check more than his pulse. He appeared senseless to the fact that he was no longer being carried, no longer going in the direction he'd so eagerly demanded.

It was cold and dark now, the streets emptying. Those who remained were scuttling or running or calling out for cover. Gene shivered, a primal need to be inside raising the hair on his arms. Would it matter if he left the man where he'd laid him? Gene studied him, acutely aware that he was waiting for him to die even as he couldn't shake the
sensation that the man still deserved someone to hope for him. Gene placed a protective hand on the man's side, surprised by the comfort it lent him in return. He didn't even know this person. Who had he been, and did it matter now? Gene wasn't sure. He wasn't even sure if who he had been was gone yet. He was surprised that he had to watch so carefully for the end; he would have expected that a man's final breath would be as obvious as his first. But there wasn't a clear definition between the body's last moments of life and the early hours of death.

He wondered if his own family would hear about what was going on and think of him. His mother's aunt was the only one who'd bothered to keep in touch with him, but her e-mails were nothing but chatter about her dogs or doctors' visits; nothing she ever mentioned represented an attempt to truly attach herself to him. He heard sirens again in the distance, nothing close. Shivering, he tucked his arms in at his sides, and he wondered how long it would be until he was warm again.

A dusty memory shook itself off and rose to the occasion.

“I'm doing this for your own good.”

His father stood like a reed in water, their kitchen looking like it always did on any other day, right down to the usual accessories: his mother's dish towels and a box of Wheaties on the counter. It was messier than usual, maybe, but still bizarrely familiar, given that fear—that leaking, odorless gas—was seeping into the room and making it difficult to breathe.

It was the end of his third-grade year. A lot of boys he knew were still doing childish things, though he couldn't tell his
father this. He couldn't speak at all, his tongue as thick and clumsy as his heartbeat was fast. But he knew for a fact that Edwin still slept with a stuffed bear, and that Sam's bedroom still had one of those blue blankets with red trains on it and a matching rug: the sort of things Gene wouldn't have been caught dead with if someone came over. But all he could do was stand in the doorway and watch as his father wiped down the kitchen counters, setting his jaw and fighting against the tears Gene knew would only strengthen his father's resolve.

“It's for your own good,” his father repeated, his expression grim but determined, the expression of a good father delivering a tough punishment. Even then, Gene was confused as to whether or not his father believed that what he was saying and doing was good. Gene was too young to know the difference himself, yes. But he also sensed that his father's rigidity meant there was something absent somewhere, in judgment or love.

The day before, his mother's bed—for that was how he thought of it—released her scent when he leaned into it, watching her pack. He toyed with the embroidered bumps on the bedspread, the worn spaces in between so thin and soft, he was sure they might wear away completely one day under his touch.

“It's only for a few days, Gene,” his mother said, frowning into her suitcase, tucking things in that hadn't anything to do with him. She gestured for him to pass her the belt that lay by his hand, then a sweater and slacks that she refolded and packed after he passed them to her, all the while watching the deep downward lines near her mouth and hoping
desperately for something to happen that would make her stay. She put a hand on his head, kissing him. She wasn't a cupcake mother, he reminded himself. She was an emergency fund-raising mother, a task no other mother wanted that everyone was grateful she took on; an emergency nurse mother, even if it meant working the night shift at Comanche General, or taking double or triple shifts when the staff didn't show or were otherwise light, which was often. Sometimes he imagined his mother at work as the captain of a ship on a lonely ocean, standing at the helm come any weather or mutiny, probably able to steer the entire vessel herself should it come to that. He loved her for it, but he also wished she spent a little more of her life on land.

A few hours after she left, when Gene thought he was busy in the garage, his father had walked in on him again. It had been months, and the sting from his father's rage the last time he'd caught Gene had healed and faded. Or maybe the seduction of joy had muted the likelihood of threat, like music played during wartime.

But his father had not forgotten, and he felt disobeyed. Maybe even betrayed. Maybe he truly thought that by shouting enough insults and grabbing Gene by his collar and growling hateful words into his face—every physical intimidation short of actually hitting him—he could shake Gene's undeniable instincts out of him. He didn't understand that Gene's fascination with his mother's clothes came from a place that anger couldn't access, from a deep, private euphoria his father couldn't touch or even try to understand. Or maybe he did. Maybe he also wanted to be close to Gene's
mother when she was gone, felt lost without her. Maybe his father had joys, too, that he couldn't bear.

After a dinner heavy with suppressed rage, Gene hadn't slept much. He woke to his father's rifling through his drawers and closet, the muscles on his forearms taut. After he threw all of Gene's clothes onto the floor, he checked under his mattress, lifting it and Gene together so the boy had to hold on to its sides like someone on a capsizing rowboat. Gene was desperate for air, not knowing where his voice had gone or even what to say, sure that this horrible thing between them was nothing he could make better, and that one or both of them would have to be sacrificed to appease it. All of a sudden, dropping the mattress and turning on his heel, his father strode down the hallway toward his own room. After a while he was quiet in there, and Gene hoped it was over. But when he came out a few minutes later, he had a small blue dress balled up in his knobby-fingered hands, a dress from a hand-me-down collection his mother had kept of her own things when she was a girl. Gene trotted out to him like a boy on a fishing line, not wanting the hook to tear his mouth but unable to pull away. His father thrust the dress between them, staring down at it until Gene did, too, his final punishment sinking in.