All Stories Are Love Stories (21 page)

Half-asleep, Ally opened one eye. A pair of silvery ones stared back at her. She yelped, trying to sit up and back away, but the movement made her screech in pain.

“What? What is it?” Her sister's hands were cold and she shrugged them off, unwilling to be consoled.

“A dog,” she cried. “There was a dog! Right there!”

Everyone turned to look in the direction where the girl was pointing. There was nothing to see.

“It was there, Tia,” Ally insisted, weeping now. “It was there.”

“Maybe it was your imagination.”

“It was not! There was a dog.”

The words were barely out of her mouth when the ground trembled slightly, the feeling of a train passing by. Everyone held their breath. Willie stirred, as though about to wake. Phil held his place, and when the earth settled again, leapt to his feet, sniffing around the place where the girl had pointed.

“If it was a dog,” the priest said, thinking of his mother's bulldog and its constant need to be around at least one other soul, “it wouldn't have run away. Or at least we'd hear it sniffing around. Come,” he said, trying to take the little one's hand, “let's listen. Phil?” Reluctantly, the boy held still.

But although they heard nothing, Ally kept her face
pressed into her sister's chest. “She's afraid of dogs,” Tia explained unnecessarily. Together, she and the priest remained quiet, listening still on her behalf. Phil watched them both, waiting until he could move again.

“I don't hear anything, Al,” Tia whispered into her ear.

“It was there,” the girl insisted, crying now, but softly, as if afraid to wake someone.

“We'll keep watch,” the priest said. He rested his hand on her back. “We'll stay up and look out for it.”

“I'll help,” Phil announced. “I'll take the first watch.”

“I can,” Tia said sharply. “I will. You don't have to do that.”

Phil ignored her, settling in near where he thought the girl had seen whatever she'd seen.

“No,” she corrected him. “There. A little over, yes, there.” She beamed at him when he lit upon the spot and sat down, crossing his legs and checking with her to be sure he was exactly where she wanted him.

Her sister looked away pointedly during this exchange. The priest held back. For a while, no one spoke. The younger girl began to fall back asleep. Her sister curled around her again, trying to warm them both, trying not to think of the boy keeping watch instead of her.

When Tia was a little girl, she had a terrible habit of climbing into things, of hiding. She could get into spaces only the lithest and most timid of animals would think to fold themselves into, and the anxious moments her father spent looking for her during these escapades seemed to drain him as if they had been days. After he died, she wondered sometimes if she had contributed to his shortened life. She hadn't felt guilty,
exactly, or at least she didn't place any more blame on herself than she did on the rest of the people in his life—all of whom she blamed collectively and thoroughly—but she did see herself in the odd, complicated equation her imagination had created to explain why he'd lost the battle with what they'd all been told was a relatively simple cancer to cure. At first it had looked so simple, too, just some spots on his arms and back, but then instead of healing, they'd become angry and vicious, and her father's face sunk in on itself from the pain. Closing her eyes, Tia let herself travel to her hiding days, that blissful state of sheltered anonymity, the peaceful power of withdrawal. But not for long. She was cold. She tried to wrap herself even more tightly around her sister, but she couldn't get warm. And she was hungry. Terribly hungry. It was like something tugging on her sleeve, not letting her rest. She wanted to yell at it, yell it away.

Ally shouted, sitting straight up from her sleep.

“What is it?” Tia demanded, but Ally pushed her away, crying.

“The dog,” Ally choked out, weeping.

“I'm still here, Ally.” Phil's voice broke through the dark with a gentleness that made it sound as if he were sitting right by her. “On lookout.”

Ally tried to right herself, sniffling and wiping her eyes. A light scrabbling interrupted her work. She went rigid with fear.

“That was nothing,” Phil said, lying, looking nervously at the hole he guarded. A single silver eye this time. He shifted his body to block it. “I was just making myself more comfortable.”

Tia and the priest held their breath, watching Ally for signs that she might have seen through Phil's bluff. There was a sickening moment when she started to frown, but her tired young mind took over, protecting her from seeking the truth, and she turned and relaxed once more in her sister's arms.

The rest of them, though, were left with the adrenaline of looking out for her, the new knowledge that what she had seen was real.

Phil wished he hadn't volunteered so quickly, but he had. He pulled his knees up to his chest, resigned to an untold number of sleepless hours. The priest saw this and crawled closer to the girls, sitting by Tia to keep her company while her sister slept. For a while, the three of them were quiet, almost comforted by the uninterrupted nearness of one another, listening to the girl's sleep sounds, the gentle scratching of whatever it was in there with them settling into its own makeshift nest.

“Do you think she'll be cold?” Tia asked a while later, looking at the nun.

“Nah, Willie?” he asked, surprised she'd even noticed her. “She's thick as a horse.”

He could see Tia smile in the dark, the way it drew her lips up and pulled her forehead back.

“Are you really a priest?” she asked him, the voice in the dark seeming to come out of a younger, softer child.

“Well, no,” he said carefully. “I can't perform any rites or blessings. I'm not ordained. And this getup is really for show more than anything.”

“So you're not a real priest?”

He closed his eyes. “No. More of a mascot, really, especially in this order. But if a priest is someone who helps others to live a fulfilling life, no matter what that might look like on earth, then I'm a priest. But the terminology doesn't matter much, my dear. It never does.” He thought a minute before saying something else that had been on his mind, “You can call me a brother instead of father. I never liked ‘father,' anyway. A brother in the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.”

She seemed to accept his concealed apology, or at least be willing to let her curiosity take over. “What's that?”

“It's an order, I suppose. A local institution.”

“So it's not a real religion.”

“Of course it isn't, my dear. This is San Francisco.”

She seemed to consider this. “My grandma was Catholic,” she offered.

“Right. The sisters take care of anyone who isn't Catholic. And I help take care of the sisters. The novice ones in particular.”

Tia thought about that. “That's a lot of people.”

“True,” the priest admitted. “And we even take care of some Catholics!”

“So you haven't explained anything.”

“Tia, my dear.” He had grappled with this sort of child before, one who, as the result of one extreme of parenting or the other—neglect or its opposite—had managed to enter adolescence without losing her childish ability to recognize
and call bullshit. And he chose what he wanted to say next to suit her rare strength and delicacy. “How old are you?”

“I just turned fifteen.”

“So she was the first person I took care of.” The priest looked over at Willie, still sleeping soundly. “But when I met her, she was a year younger than you are now, kicked out of the house, earning money by selling whatever she could. And all she had was herself, you understand, or the boy she used to be but didn't recognize as herself. She sold him so she could get food and a warm place to sleep. Then she earned enough to have the care she needed to become the person she needed to be. And now she's forty-four. Thirty years of struggle, and she still wears a pink wig to work. That's who I take care of, Tia. And the fact that the minute she got her feet under her she turned around to help others like her—well, that's what I call a miracle.”

Tia was not accustomed to expressing what touched her. “Doesn't sound so hard. It would be easy to sell yourself, if you didn't want to be the person you were anyway.”

The priest thought about that. “Maybe. Or maybe it's even harder, because you know that it's all you are at the time, and that it would be all too easy to just let it go. Sell it away until there was nothing left.”

“It must have been awful,” Ally said. They hadn't realized she was awake. “I can't sleep anymore,” she added. “I'm scared.”

“Don't be scared.”

“What's going on out there?” she whispered.

They all considered the question, finally asked aloud. “I don't know,” Tia said honestly.

“Why doesn't anyone come? Where are the police and the fire trucks?”

“They'll be here soon,” Tia said shortly.

“Do we still have a home?”

“Of course we do.”

“It didn't come down? In the earthquake? The earthquakes?”

Tia shook her head vigorously, crowding out the thought. “Of course not.”

“Why do you always say that?”

“What?”

“Of course?”

Tia didn't have an answer. She did always say that.

“You don't really know, do you?”

Tia sat up and pulled her sister back down with her, trying to warm her to sleep.

“Please go back to sleep.”

“Sing to me.”

“I can't sing, Al, you know that.”

“Doesn't matter. Sing anyway.”

“Go to sleep.”

“My leg hurts too much,” she argued. “Pretty please?”

“No,
mija.”
The word echoed a tenderness someone Tia's age would not have come to on her own. It must have originated elsewhere, in someone else's voice. Tia had been loved. Was loved. Had it been their father? Whatever it was or had been, that person was gone. The priest could see that the
word hung in the air between them, too important for a single utterance. After a moment he crept away, thinking that he, too, might try to close his eyes.

But sleep eluded him. He continued to wonder, the longer he felt separated from it, about the outside world; though he knew it was best to fight wonder just now, to suspend disbelief for as long as he possibly could, no matter how unreasonable doing so felt. Reason had no place in preserving sanity.

He'd been through earthquakes before. But he didn't have to be on the outside to know the difference between a tremor and a real, honest-to-goodness shifting of the earth. He knew he should be glad that the kids could not possibly be aware of this. So why was he hounded by the desire to rouse them, prepare them, protect them for or from something, anything? How could you prepare anyone for the possibility of starving to death? Or smoke, the very real likelihood that they might just fade away into headaches and nausea. Death preceded by suffering, being hurt and trapped or thirsty and starving, not just facing fear but watching its slow and agonizing approach.

He sighed, turning on his side, something hard digging into him as he did, making tears spring to his eyes. His own childhood was rising to the surface in the midst of such muted deprivation. The least he could do, the best, was to keep it together and remain an adult for them. Wasn't it? He was no longer quite sure.
What an inheritance
, he thought, picturing the vulnerable city around him. What did its ancestors mean to teach their children about starvation and fear and loss and certain death? What had possessed them to bring children here in the first place?

Finally,
finally!
, the usual communications began to blink awake, their sparks seen and reflected locally and then nationwide. The newsroom was a flurry of short phone calls, each one exploding before long into a cacophony of story collecting. Si forced Ellen into a ten-minute nap on the grimy newsroom couch, then came in seven minutes later to stare at her until she woke.

“Do I need to call in Jerry?”

She opened the other eye and sat up. “No.” She put her hands over her face, waking up. “I slept, actually. I feel better. What's up?”

Seated, he pressed his palms into his knees. “They can't contain the fires.”

She shook her head, trying to clear it. “Where?”

“North Beach. Chinatown. And spreading.”

She was awake now. “What do you mean, they can't be contained?”

Si stood up and shoved his hands into his pockets. “I mean, the streets on those hills are blocked with God knows what, debris and people and worse, the dams are out and the cistern supply was limited as it was, and the fire department is currently operating, as it has been for the past several years, with a twenty percent reduction of personnel. Not that it matters,
really. Even if they had a hundred percent, they're fucked up there. Where the hell would they even get the water?”

“I don't understand.” She did, but she needed time to process. No matter the news, Si was so quick to deliver it, never imagining that she might have trouble swallowing it.

He acted as if he hadn't heard her. He knew the difference between her real questions and hedging. “They say, the experts say, that with all that wind and all that fire, the firestorms are bound to be starting, El,” he said, dropping his voice. His comforting tone only put her more on edge.

“Firestorms?”

“Fire-generated wind, storms of wind and fire.” He sat down heavily, as if he'd been pushed.

“Are they getting this from the sky?”

“Some aerial,” he said, rubbing his index finger and thumb together, studying them intently as he did. “Helicopters still can't get low enough for details. Or to help. And the increased wind only makes it worse for them.”

“What about the bridges? Can they get through?”

“Bay Bridge, eastern span only partially down, no one hurt, but no one can get in. And the Golden Gate, well, you know the news on that.”

She'd kicked off her heels and her arches ached, but it was her hands that were shaking, trembling. She made fists of them and pressed them to her thighs. “So what's the plan? What are they going to do?”

Si shrugged, rubbing his eyes. Under the bright lights from above, the bald part of his scalp shone. When he took his hands away, his bloodshot eyes had turned from a faint
pink to an angry magenta. She wondered if the rumors about his having been a drunk were really true. She could understand it—anyone in this business had every reason to turn to alcohol. He'd been her mentor for two years, constantly in her face, but he'd been at KSRO for fifteen years, and the rumors came from those who'd been there just as long. She hid her trembling hands behind her back.

“Boats. Whatever the hell they can do, I guess.”

She felt sick, but kept it to herself. A journalist has to be like a doctor, Si once told her, able to remove herself from the situation when there's a job to do. The knot in her stomach wrenched in on itself a degree tighter.
Think
, she demanded of herself.

“Anyone get hold of the mayor?”

Si shook his head.

“Damn.” She sat down across from him. “You would have thought that with all the planning, all the warning . . .”

“What do you expect?” Si insisted. “When you build a city within shouting distance of major fault lines, then crowd it down to the square foot, there's only so much that preparing's gonna do.”

“Right.” She stood up, smoothing her trousers and shooting her cuffs. He didn't need to see her doubts. “What's our plan?”

He shifted back into go mode. “We're going on air. Well, you are,” he said, glancing up at the clock on the wall, “in about six minutes, once we get makeup in for a touch-up.” He frowned. She must look like hell after her nap. She tried not to squirm under his stare. “We lead with a few lines
about the firestorms, but keep the emphasis off the stuff that creates panic. Make sure to play up the poor suckers fighting up there, lay a good firefighter story on thick, emphasize the evacuations that are sure to happen—somber but not desperate; you know the drill. At this point, you've got to win their trust with how you spin the story: they want to feel like they're getting the truth but not drowning in it. Information's what catches their attention, but a good story's the way to keep it.”

She nodded slightly, mechanically, efficiently. “Got it. No panic, bookend with the firestorms, zoom in on rescue efforts. Not too scary. Anything else?”

“That'll be good for now. We'll manage the rest as it comes in. Don't want to plan too far ahead. People like it when the news seems spontaneous.”