All Stories Are Love Stories (4 page)

Vashti bit her lip. She wouldn't even know what to begin
to say. Each time she thought about seeing him she remembered her guilt, and the hot shame of even hoping he might be open to seeing her flooded her face. “He could never forgive me.”

“Yes, he could.”

Not after what she'd done, and certainly not after what she'd kept from him.

“He
could
,” Javi said gently, knowing and arguing with, as sisters do, the hidden contents of Vashti's heart.

Maybe. To someone else, what she had done might be forgivable. A sister, for example, whose forgiveness is easily won. Even someone like Dale might have forgiven her. A person who was levelheaded and experienced and—they all knew it—rich enough and lonely enough to believe that he could change the heart of a woman who didn't love him, save the heart of a child unlikely to live. But Max, whose young and inexperienced heart she had, in her confusion and pain, so abruptly broken, could not.

“Are you traveling alone?” Vashti asked. The ache for her sister rose again in her chest, riding the wave of old anxieties about love and its aftermath. What if her plane crashed or was hijacked? What if the hotel in the next city was unsafe, populated by foreigners whose curiosities were aroused by a pretty young executive traveling alone? “Is it just you again?”

“I'm meeting colleagues there.”

Vashti didn't bother asking who such colleagues might be. She could never keep track of them anyway. Her sister's professional life was as mysterious to her as the moon. She
resented not only her sister's preoccupation with work, but also the opacity of international business law itself, how its purpose was encased in a lingo that made sense only to the ones who used it, how it stole a part of her sister's consciousness and rendered it unfamiliar. In her darker moments, Vashti thought that it wasn't enough that Javi had to be busy all the time; she needed to be busy with something those who loved her couldn't possibly dismantle.

“You've ruined me for Valentine's Day, you know,” Javi was saying, the efficient French voice over a microphone in an airport more than five thousand miles away making Vashti strain to catch her words, unsure if she'd heard what she thought she had. “I could be sipping champagne and prepping my coiffure for a candlelit dinner for two over the Seine.”

“You mean the Bosphorus.”

She could hear Javi's smile in her voice. “Just call him. Wish him a happy birthday. Who doesn't want to be wished a happy birthday?”

They both listened to the next warning. Javi had five minutes before she would be swept away, again, into the anonymous international sky.

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. They both knew their time was nearly up, and there was too much to say that would go unsaid. “You're OK, Vishy,” Javi said. It was what she said when she worried that neither of them was.

You're OK
, a ten-year-old Javi had told an eight-year-old
Vashti after discovering her sister shoveling dirt into her mouth on the morning of their mother's funeral. She'd taken one of her sweaty, tear-smeared fists in her own and kissed it.
You're OK
, she'd said in the days and weeks of Vashti's ongoing compulsion to eat from the earth as if it really were a mother whose soil could nourish her. Javi always knew where to find her, always tucked a tissue into her back pocket to wipe her sister's blackened mouth. In those moments, it didn't matter as much that neither of them was OK, because if they leaned into each other, it felt like they could both stand up straight.

Vashti nodded, choked with memories. “I miss you.” Her voice sounded thin even to her own ears.

The flight attendant's voice grew louder, the squawk of meaningless orders, as self-important as they were hollow, flying up and into the spaces between them: where to be and when and never why.

“Listen,” her sister began cautiously, “how about this?” Vashti strained to catch what she was saying over the background noise. “If you go to see him, I'll come home for Passover.”

Vashti sat up straight, fully awake for the first moment in weeks. “You're coming home?”

“I said I'd come if you went to see him.”

“But why wouldn't you just come home, if you can?”

“I'm supposed to be in New York for partner meetings, which I really shouldn't miss. But just this once, I
could
invent some family emergency.”

It was better than nothing. Unless—“Passover
with
Dad?”

If only there wouldn't be a Passover. Javi could come home just to visit, without duty and their father's watchful eye weighing them down. But they were adults with responsibilities to consider, no longer children scheduling play.

“Just go see him.”

“We'll talk about it later. You'll miss your plane.”

“The deal only lasts until I hang up this phone.”

Jesus
, Vashti swore silently.
Blackmail. Going-for-the-jugular sisterly blackmail. Damn her.

“I can't.”

“You can.”

Vashti dropped her head into her hand.

“Vishy. Just do it. You're going to make yourself crazy unless you do
something
. How long can a person go without sleeping?”

Vashti didn't answer.

“Let me ask you this: would going to see him be any worse than the dreams?”

“The dreams will stop eventually,” Vashti tried, halfheartedly.
Oh God
. She felt her heart in her throat.
What if they didn't?
“They couldn't possibly last forever,” she tried convincing them both.

“I hope not. But how much longer?” Her sister chose her words carefully. “Just go. Please, Vishy, I can't bear to hear you this upset for much longer. It's time you restarted your life, yourself, something. Go for me, if not for you. So you get a good night's sleep. So I can.”

She hated when Javi worried about her. If anything confirmed her worry about herself, it was her sister worrying
about her, too. She was worrisome, wasn't she? Stuck. Had she always been this way? She couldn't quite remember.

“OK,” she said quietly.

“Really?”

Vashti couldn't quite believe it either. Then she heard herself speak again. “I said OK.”

“OK,” Javi confirmed, unable to keep the surprise out of her voice. “I'm hanging up before you can change your mind. I'll call you when we land.”

Vashti stood with the phone still in her hand, gazing at the condensation on the windows over the sink: still raining. No rain forever, then nothing but rain. She felt wearied by extremes. Devastating loss followed by miraculous gain, the pendulum always threatening to swing.

Fear poured into her belly, already stiffening into regret. There had to be a way out of it; something taken on so easily could surely be dropped just as easily. Javi wouldn't really stay away if she didn't go see Max. Would she?

Vashti's heart leapt to a Valentine's Day years earlier, her mind too slow to catch it. After six weeks of dry rounds and grainy frostings, she'd perfected her mother's recipe for Persian Love Cake right down to the sugared rose petals, which she and Max found too lovely to eat at first. Vashti saw herself at sixteen, her face flushed from the hot kitchen, her apron smeared with flour, the pride and light from the birthday candles on her face. Max had loved it. She had never been more proud of herself, or happier.

She could just go
see
him. Get a glimpse of him somehow. He didn't have to see her back.

Max strode out of his apartment on Filbert and was down the block in seconds, glad for the wind tunnel around the corner at Taylor. He let the air take his breath away as he leaned into it, trudging uphill. Around him swirled the sounds of foghorns from the bay and early-morning children shouting from a passing school bus, the calling tones popping up like flowers as they passed. Every morning in San Francisco was a bit like waking up on the edge of the earth: beautiful and damp and wild, full of the strange music people make, open-armed, into the wind.

He passed Bernie, a fixture of a man covered in so many layers of filth and clothing that they were no longer distinguishable from one another. Max lifted a hand in greeting, but Bernie was thoroughly absorbed with the contents of a Folittière takeout box. His pet parrot, which on good days he liked to claim was one of the wild ones from Telegraph Hill, sat on his shoulder, peering in at the food, snatching the few scraps offered him. They were always together. Though on some days, the parrot tucked its head into its feathers while Bernie insisted to anyone who walked by that it had once been a cat that grew feathers and wings and painted itself.

Had Bernie left his family, too? Or had he been left? He was sockless again, wiggling his toes in the wet and rain
because, with the rueful delight shared by many of his fellow transplants, he figured that if he was going to be homeless in San Francisco, he might as well enjoy the weather.

Max put his head down and hunched into his jacket, bracing himself as the wind grew fiercer nearer the summit of Nob Hill. His chest burned as he climbed harder, his breath in his throat.

A letter. After eighteen years. Not even a letter: a card. Had his father just gone to the drugstore card section marked “Regrettable Life Choices” and plucked out the right mix of wit and chagrin to sign and toss into the mail, expecting his mother to receive it as casually on the other side? Or maybe it was a notification card: news of a slow death by a horrible disease. An inheritance he'd forgotten to mention, a sudden windfall that his life as an ascetic prevented him from accepting.

Trying to calm himself—to rid himself of the old unresolvable feelings threatening to rise like so many foolish, graveyard fears—Max stopped and took a breath at Ina Coolbrith Park, allowing for the voiceless protection of its lanky trees, grateful for the distractingly steep grade flanking it that made his thighs ache in protest as he resumed his march up Taylor, the peaks of Nob Hill's majestic buildings starting to make their appearance on the horizon just when you felt you were reaching the empty top of the world.

It was lonely to be faced with so much beauty and still feel bereft. When he was unhappy as a child in and around the dark fields and forests of upstate New York, he'd always felt he was in good company. But San Francisco corralled its
unhappiness to corners easy to avoid and neighborhoods easy to circumvent, encouraging the unhappy to stay small and keep to themselves. Even the current dismay over how new money was changing the city didn't stop people from lying down like children in parks during their lunch hours, talking about the future, identifying superheroes in the city's politicians who might save them all while dining on the latest artisanal fad. And sometimes—and here was where things became truly unbelievable—the politicians came through. Mayor Benioff's tax-break measure for working artists and 501(c)(3) employees had somehow miraculously passed, and over the past several months, it seemed that every political discussion had been underscored by the breathless hope that the city could, once again, claim its status as the only conscientious utopia in the country. Certainly, here on Nob Hill, watching the rain drip from the eaves of so many view-capturing windows, no one would guess that it was anything but a snow globe of a town, willfully picturesque, even if trapped in the invisible bubble of an endless storm.

Not that Max didn't love the city's warmth and spirit, its joie de vivre that waned occasionally but never faded. But before it was home, when his father had essentially dropped Max and his mother off there on his way toward a life without them, Max's sadness had only enhanced his sense of displacement. He ached for cold weather, months of being iced in before anyone expected him to walk around in public, skin exposed.

He used to fantasize about going back. Taking a bus or a train or even scrounging up enough airplane money to return to Altona, the last in a line of small towns where they'd
landed in their nomadic search for the most affordable rent. They'd moved too many times to know many people in any one place, and neither of his parents maintained much in the way of family ties, but the surroundings themselves—the woods and the green mountains, the cold streams and dusky gardens—would bring far more comfort than days filled with either dense fog or a piercingly bright sun, blocks and blocks of stucco houses washed pale by drought and salty air.

But he never did. Even in his worst moments—the ones when he thought that he, too, could leave his mother if it meant finding his way to a world that felt even a little more familiar—Max knew that he wouldn't find what he wanted there, that he wanted to return to more than just a place. His true wish was to find his way back to the old life they'd had, the last moment he'd felt sure that he and his mother were part of his father's future. Which probably would have been the night Max had helped him burn his rank, oil-stained trucker's uniform: a Yankees cap and a Coca-Cola T-shirt older than Max, heavy jeans shiny at the knees from wear. His father had always hated the dirt, coming first to the sink whenever he came home, scrubbing at the black stains in the creases of his knuckles. Yet even at the time, it seemed miraculous—and rightly so, as miracles are always tinged with suspicion—that all those things his father hated could simply be burned.

It was ceremonial, his father had declared, his face shining in the light of the backyard bonfire. They'd camped out beside it the night after he quit his job, and Max's father had told him about their new lives in San Francisco as if they
were already living them. He was never more open than when talking about his dreams. They would be living in the Sunset, a nice, family-oriented district where rents were cheap and the streets were wider and quieter than you'd expect in a city. The bustling, brilliant downtown was only a bus ride away, and they could go in on school breaks or the weekends his father had free. His father's stories had inspired a vision so clear, Max could almost see the little church where he would actually make a salary as a deacon instead of having to drive for YRC Freight to make ends meet; the high school within walking distance; the peekaboo view of the ocean from their new apartment.

But it hadn't been what his father had described. The salary that had been more than enough to cover the rent in small-town New York barely covered their tiny apartment in San Francisco, leaving not quite enough for food, never mind the sort of expenses that make life a little easier to live. His father grew demoralized fast, collapsing in on himself as if the air of his dreams had kept him whole, and without it he was unable to draw a good breath. Just a few months after they arrived, on Max's sixteenth birthday, his father wrote a note, left the rent money, and was gone.

There had been a time when Max thought he'd get over his father's abrupt departure—eventually. But that was when he was with Vashti. Loving someone that much led him to believe that the people you are born to are not always the ones who make you whole. Then, after he lost her, too, it seemed that the kind of pure recovery he'd once hoped for—to a certain extent, hope itself—flattened into something
two-dimensional, an abstraction, like a philosophy too beautiful and clean to apply to real life. Certain losses must be lived with, even if assimilation is too much to hope for. Once Max learned to live with it, the loss of his father gradually drifted to a place within him that he simply did not visit.

But his love for Vashti hadn't been so easy to corral. It behaved like a live and wild thing, impossible to tame or break. And unlike the dull and painful attachment he'd had to his father, his feelings for Vashti had lit him from within. For a while, Max wanted nothing to do with the bites and stings of love, and then he could think of nothing but them. He began to date again, but only in the manner of someone looking for something he'd misplaced. Coming home from the rare evening out at a bar or after an inexplicably poor date—during which nothing had gone wrong and nothing had gone right—he walked the city's streets, sure of an insistent, sinister drumbeat beneath the surface of his adoptive home, a foreign pulse driving him to seek what he couldn't have.

But time passed, as it does—eighteen years since he last saw his father, fourteen since Vashti had walked out—and its passing had brought far more contentment than he'd ever expected to have. He had learned to understand the city as his own, to live in a version of San Francisco that made sense to him; learned that one reason why the city was so magical was that it allowed so many versions of itself to coexist. In the quiet Sunset, Max and his mother rebuilt a life together, and after a while his father's absence mattered less. In the job and apartment he'd secured when he still hoped Vashti would stay, he learned to make peace with
the fact that he would never have the life he once thought he'd have there, and he somehow cobbled together another in its place. More than a decade later, he still had the same apartment he found after he was hired at the Masonic, and had advanced in his job enough to be able to get his mother the kind of care she deserved. A jolt of protective rage ran through him as he thought about her receiving that letter.

What an entitled, selfish ass his father was, thinking he could dash off a few lines and pop them in the mail. No one gets to leave that completely, that definitively, and then just decide to come back eighteen years later. What made him think he had the right to resurrection?

Now jogging downhill toward Broadway too fast, Max felt like his feet might fly out from under him. He forced himself to stop at the bottom to take a breath, surprised by the white-hot fury in his chest. He was no longer that child, he reminded himself, no longer in need of his father's care. What his father did or did not do hadn't been his concern for some time. But his heart was still racing—he wanted to kick himself, but it was still racing. Because while Max might have been pretty good at getting over things—the prospect of a more fulfilling job, maybe better money—he was never very good at getting over people. God, if this was the reaction he had to the father he was sure he had moved beyond, it was no wonder he didn't trust himself to get anywhere near Vashti.

What was she doing back in the city, anyway? Surely there had been plenty of great bakery jobs in Sonoma or Napa. He sighed. As angry as he was with his father for leaving him, the worst he could muster when it came to losing Vashti was
an old, deep sadness. If his father was the trickster of his heart, Vashti was its ghost.

Max took in the view to the east, the narrow spear of the Transamerica Pyramid barely visible through the mist, the smear of the Bay Bridge just beyond a blurry line of tiny white dots parading into the city. He pretended not to notice the curvy blonde in the yellow pants with the matching yellow spaniel coming toward him, even as he thought,
Why not notice her?
And just after she passed,
Maybe ask her out?
When was the last time he'd found a woman he liked well enough to ask out?

It's my birthday
, he thought, watching her climb the impossibly steep steps up Broadway, displaying strong calf muscles and a determined stride, the short-legged, long-eared dog keeping faithful pace at her side. He sighed to himself, the sense of countless moments he'd missed weighing heavily on his mind. The sky was so strange today: gray, but purple, too.

A bus drove by, splashing rain onto Max's trousers. He looked down ruefully. Not for the first time, Max found himself wondering if leaving them had been his father's plan all along, if all that noise about an old theology friend holding a place for him in a church across the country was only a ruse, if he were just waiting for Max to turn sixteen and “become a man” to walk out on them. A man. What kind of idiot saw a boy of sixteen as a man? The same sort of idiot who would leave his wife and child to take a vow of Benedictine silence in the twentieth century.

He had to get to work.

But for just a few minutes more, Max stayed staring out into the rain, into the city's freakishly stunning beauty, the view he glimpsed through the downpour a panorama of muted colors, tiers of quaintness and crowding and creative living. It was beautiful; he could enjoy this beauty. It could still be a great day, a good birthday. He had the San Francisco Children's Choir today, a gratifying afternoon of kids and music after being a good adult and finishing the work he was actually paid for. And he could call his mother back, insist that she at least go to lunch with him if dinner was too much to bear. Maybe a bar for dinner—no, a jazz club. Perhaps this birthday could even be the start of a new chapter in his life, one in which his father was available but no longer desirable, maybe one in which he finally reached that point where new desires could take the place of the old ones. He thought again of the woman climbing the hill. Maybe he'd hesitated just a moment too long. It was entirely possible that he had hesitated a moment too long lots of times, which meant that not hesitating might be the work of a moment, too. The thought inspired him, and as the rain picked up again, he took the last few blocks to the Masonic at a run, eager to reach shelter and begin the day anew.