All Stories Are Love Stories (20 page)

As the deeper night settled in around them, they held themselves like creatures in a cave, listening to the strange noises settling and shifting around them, petrified. The girls, tucked in around each other, drifted off together before long. Sister Coco had succumbed to the clonazepam while still sitting up in one of the few front row seats of the auditorium that were within reach and not demolished. Now, worried about his lover's back, the priest had Phil help him slide his lover's blissfully drugged body to the floor. “Call her Willie,” the priest told Phil affectionately after they'd arranged her as comfortably as they could.
As if she could answer to anything, knocked out like that
. Phil frowned. But the priest ignored Phil's doubtful look and proceeded to tuck himself in beside her as merrily as if he were in his own bed at home. Then Phil had found his own lonely spot near the girls, his back against the base of the stage. The priest opened one eye and thought Phil might be cold, but also knew he wouldn't say he was. Poor boy. The priest did not envy him his age, the creeping doubts and incessant desiring, the unmerciful and unreasonable demands of adolescence. Thank God for middle-aged love. He rolled over and into Willie—his very own saggy, sweet, high-strung addict—and for a few brief moments experienced that delicious surety that he'd be asleep in minutes.

Instead he lay awake thinking of the girls, how motherless they seemed. Fatherless he could take, but motherless seemed like a far more excruciating condition to navigate. He closed his eyes, praying for sleep.

“Shouldn't we be doing something?” Phil asked, suddenly at his side. He'd crept over and squatted down beside him, insomniac urgency written all over his face.

The priest took a breath of patience. “It's pitch-black, my dear boy.”

“Not that black. There's a little light. I'm used to it by now. I could just—”

The priest extended a hand toward the boy, feeling suddenly tender toward him, willing to state the obvious without making it sound like an insult. “Let's just wait until morning.”

The boy's body, poised to do anything but accept its immediate fate, sat back awkwardly on his heels. “I'm not sure I can,” he confessed.

The priest sat up a little, trying to explain things as soothingly as he could. “If you move any of this without knowing what it's under or over,” he lowered his voice, suddenly not wanting the girls to hear, “more could come down. Or you could be crushed.”
The earth has shifted underneath you
, he wanted to say.
These are not the blocks of your boyhood, moved without consequence. Go back to sleep. Enjoy sleep while you can.

But the boy was young, relentlessly so. “What about climbing over?” he went on. “Away from the girls? I could see what I could climb over. And if anything fell, it wouldn't fall on them.”

The priest sighed. Did he not know the value of his own life? Was he going to have to break the boy's heart to teach him? “Do you hear that?” he asked Phil after a moment.

“What?”

“Exactly. No sirens. No helicopters. Nothing. When the rest of the world is still, it's usually for a reason.”

“That makes no sense,” the boy said, ready to go without permission.

“It makes perfect sense, actually. If one cannot see and one is in danger and no informed help has come, it is best to proceed with caution.” He put a hand up to the boy's cheek; such simplicity in the face of such unimaginable complexity. “Of course you may try, if you want to,” he allowed, “but I am sure that such a capable, intelligent young man as yourself knows the difference between dark and light. That people lie low at night for a reason.” Phil tried to interrupt but the priest silenced him. “I know, I know. You dream of saving her.”

“I don't . . .” the boy began. Then, after a moment's pause to consider, “I'll be quiet. I won't wake the girls.”

The priest sighed again, the boy's tone a child's begging for permission, as if the only obstacle to risking his life was an adult's approval. The human condition, he decided, was practically fatal before the age of thirty. He sighed. “I don't know why you ask when you know I can't stop you.” Who was he to save youth from itself?

He closed his eyes after the boy skulked away, trying to ignore the sounds of his futile attempts to ascend
the treacherous debris all around them. When the boy paused for breath, the priest's ears rang with the silence. He guessed it wasn't just that any sound coming in from outside would be muffled, but that the city was unnaturally quiet. Even Willie was snoring softly for once. The priest lay for some time with his eyes open, listening as the boy's attempts grew fewer and more frustrated. He wanted to call out to him, comfort him, avoid the silence that would soon be complete again, filling his ears to bursting. He didn't, figuring with no inconsequential amount of affectionate acceptance that he was probably just a selfish old bastard. Moments later, he slipped gratefully into sleep.

“I'm going to have to stop you right there, sir.” Gene looked up at the voice that stood in his way. A young police officer in a dusty uniform held out his walking stick, his face a block of its own. Gene had just crested Nob Hill and was heading down its back side, no more than a dozen blocks from home. “This is a fire evacuation zone.”

“I thought it was to the east,” Gene stalled, taking his measure. “I'm headed north.”

The officer looked at him as if he hadn't said a word. Though it was more likely that nothing he said would make a difference to his instructions. “Sorry, sir. It's not safe this way. Please turn around.”

Gene felt the heat flush his face. “And go where, exactly?”

There was static on the man's receiver, which he wore near his collar. He leaned down to mumble something into it in the jargon of his trade. “Cross over Sacramento . . .” Something on his receiver kept squawking at him; he pulled it off and turned around swiftly, as if Gene might try to escape if he divided his attention a moment longer than necessary. He probably would have, given the chance. Gene took the interruption to gather himself.

“I've got to go home. You can stop me if you want, or you can just pretend you never saw me.” He hoped he was calling
the young officer's bluff. What was he going to do? Beat him? Shoot him?

“I can't let you do that.”

Had he really come this far just to be stopped by a rookie cop? Gene nodded, as if he was about to comply, then shoved past him, already at a run. Much to his surprise, the officer's hand shot out and grabbed Gene hard by the collar, bringing him down to his backside. The impact only fueled Gene's primal desperation, the urgent feeling that if he didn't get to Franklin now, he somehow never would. He struggled, ready to bite, ready to kick, fighting back for once. “Shit,” Gene heard the officer swear as he struggled, a new message shouting through on the receiver, louder than before. “Shit!” He held Gene with one hand and fished the device off his shirt. “Go do whatever the hell you want,” he barked, suddenly shoving Gene off. “The Masonic Center's caught fire,” he said, his eyes glittering in the orange light of a sky growing eerily brighter. “Nob Hill's as good as gone.” Without another word, he turned back in the direction Gene had come from and fled toward the disaster.

“Max.”

It had grown so quiet that her voice, reaching only between them, startled him.

“Yes?”

“Do you still play the trumpet?”

“Not too often,” he admitted. “I rented a practice room for a while.” But it was hard to go back to it after he'd turned in a different direction.

“You should go back to it,” she said.

Max could smell flowers in a garden. White flowers. What did white flowers smell like? He wanted to shake his head to clear it, but there wasn't room even for that.

“Max?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember that afternoon on Strawberry Hill?”

Yes, he did, though for the life of him he couldn't think why. He had been brooding over how he was going to pretend he was glad that his mother took a second job to pay the gas bill, even though they'd see each other only two days a week; wondering if there was a way to live without things like gas and electricity, if he would like such a life. Then Vashti had found him. He lied and told her he was upset over something at school, then tried to distract her when she started
sniffing him out by saying he was looking at the clouds for pictures, but she had pointed out that there was nothing but fog overhead. Then she laughed at him, at them both, until he did, too.

“You were such a grump that day.”

He laughed aloud.

“I used to think of you like that when I missed you the most.”

The quiet descended again, enveloping them, so that minutes later Max began to wonder if he had just laughed aloud, if he had missed some response he was supposed to give, something he was supposed to say. He drifted into the memories of playing the trumpet, the blare it gave off, a call that could be heard across mountains. When the world used to be like this all the time—with empty, great spaces ready to fill with sound—those animal horns must have been like foghorns, calling out to others whose existence the eye could not confirm.

He thought he heard Vashti's breathing change into something more even and deep, and he hoped she was asleep. He lay there for a long time, listening. He wondered how long they'd been there. Maybe it was already morning, or near it, but he guessed it probably wasn't. There was a weak lurching in his stomach, an emotional vertigo created by the rise of what he thought he should know against the descending spiral of what he didn't. Their surroundings kept up an uneven percussive dropping and settling, constant disturbances of sound that even the densest soul would find unnerving.

Max squinted into the blackness, wondering about bats
and blind men, both of whom could see with their ears. He had forgotten how stubborn darkness was. Not since he was a kid living near the northern woods had he experienced such total darkness. It almost had a texture, that thick absence of light, as if it not only contained hidden things but was a thing itself.

Before long, he began drifting in and out of a waking dream. Images he hadn't summoned introduced themselves as passing thoughts. First the few photographs he kept in his apartment on the table beside his couch: one of his mother and him in front of a cable car outside the Masonic, snapped by a tourist; one of Vashti from high school; a fading, stern shot of his father that reassured him he was no one worth missing. Then his old refrigerator, his kitchen, his apartment. Had he left the lights on anywhere? He turned away from that line of thinking, but there were so many equally niggling ones waiting to take its place. Then he thought of the problems he'd left behind in the everyday life he was ripped from indefinitely, feeling a curious detachment mixed with terror as to whether or not he would find his way back into that life or another like it. He thought of his mother again, lost the war with the part of himself that insisted he believe in her well-being, had a nightmarish series of visions in which she was struggling, trying to get to him, his father standing by holding out a letter. He thought of how prickly she could be. What if she started complaining and turning people off and didn't get saved in time? The thought seemed so very real and possible, it took
him a moment to realize he'd been clenching his jaw with the anxiety of it.

He exhaled sharply. The breath reminded him that he was still alive, a fact that amazed him. He always thought that if his life were threatened, he might panic and make the wrong choice, a choice toward struggling. But here he was, much closer to death than he'd ever been, and he could still feel his heart beating steadily in his chest.

Then he must have fallen more deeply asleep, because he remembered closing his eyes before he started hearing seagulls chattering overhead. Seagulls or some other birds. What kind of birds? His mother would know. What was his mother? No, where—where was his mother? Was that her, or someone else's mother? Maybe Vashti's? Yes. She was a lost mother. Vashti's mother was lost.

An old memory visited from when he was a young boy: they had taken a rare vacation to try to mend the rotted-on-the-inside marriage between his parents. They had gone to a motel on the Saint Lawrence River, near Barston, a forgotten town on the Vermont-Canada border where his mother had been born. Max remembered the taste of a horribly bitter chocolate his father had called pure; and he remembered his mother standing against the window, looking out at the river. Most of her small family had died or left by then, but he could tell that she had come home. When she showed him around, she dropped her shoulders and talked to him instead of watching the streets and shadows for things she didn't expect. He remembered the curious
way she stood by that window, leaning into the frame itself, as though it wasn't just the view she was experiencing but her place on the earth.

Why hadn't she just moved them back? Certainly they could have made it there on their own, together. Maybe he wouldn't have met Vashti, wouldn't even know that impenetrable layer of heartache. Wasn't a familiar place as important as a familiar person? Maybe one could even take the other's place. His mother had been as disappointed, as devastated by this city when they first moved. In those days, she seemed to have only glimmers of hope—they would live by the ocean—which were shortly extinguished by new practicalities—the coastline along San Francisco was almost always fogged in.

His father really had been the one who embraced upheaval, the dreamer, the one with dreams so big they could include a new place for all of them, or so Max had thought. Sure, his father had had the capacity to dream—but big as his dreams were, they hadn't been big enough to include his wife and Max. Max remembered a letter he should have read, though he wasn't sure what it was about, or if he was glad that he never got around to it.

Suddenly, he knew why they'd never gone back. They hadn't believed they could make the trip. Wasn't California riddled with cautionary tales of people trying to go home or make a new home or new life or find each other by crossing mountains or currents or parched valleys, only to die trying? Were poverty and discouragement any less
insurmountable? There was barely enough money to buy food and pay bills and maybe go to the laundromat before they ran out of clean clothes; barely enough energy in his mother to get up in the morning after working two jobs and sleeping alone, never mind having enough to think of a new life, never mind having enough desire to find a way back to a town that had once been full of family and now was not. But just because a person—or even a place—is lost doesn't mean it can't be found again. Somewhere else, maybe, in slightly different form, but rediscovered all the same.