Shelter Us: A Novel (20 page)

I am awakened by the
swish-swish
of broom against linoleum and the smell of coffee. I sit up with a keen pain in the side of my neck. Outside, the sky is lighter. The man from behind the counter is sweeping the floor a few feet away from me. A cup of coffee steams on the table next to me.

“Thank you,” I say. He nods and continues sweeping. “I don’t have my wallet, but I will send you money when I get home.”

He waves me off. “It’s okay. No problem.”

I sip the coffee. “I will send the money. With a big tip.” A thank-you for seeing me.

“It’s fine. It’s just coffee.”

“Well, it’s nice of you. I’m Sarah.”

“Amir.” He pauses, before adding, “They serve free breakfast at the Baptist church on MLK. I think you have to line up by seven thirty.”

“Oh, okay.” I am more flummoxed than insulted by his impression of who I am. He moves away with his broom. The sky waits for the sun to finish rising, suspended for a few minutes between charcoal and pale gray. Pixels of blue and pink emerge as I finish the coffee in small sips. The day has begun; I can go.

“Bye. Thanks again,” I say.

He waves with the back of his hand, relieved to be rid of me.

In the car, I roll my head from side to side. My neck and shoulders ache from the position I slept in. My stomach pops and fizzes, the sound of coffee mixing with air. I head toward Josie. I am about a mile away when my car finally runs out of gas. I’ve stayed in the right lane, so I roll to the side of the road. There is plenty of room to park; then I notice it’s because I’m in a no-parking zone. Of course.

I get out and begin walking, daydreaming of soaking in a bath and pulling a big, puffy comforter up to my neck in bed. After I’ve gone two blocks in my pumps, a blister that started yesterday becomes too painful to ignore. I take off my shoes, pull off my stockings, and hold them all in my crossed arms. The cold concrete stings the bottoms of my feet. I try to step around the black spots on the sidewalk. I give up when they become too many. Traffic speeds by me, and I keep walking. That’s when I discover how you know you’ve sunk your lowest. No choice but what’s in front of you. I walk on.

A
s I approach
the apartment, I scan the street for the men who terrified me a few hours ago. No sign of them. I walk up the stairs to the front door, praying to hear the sound of a twelve-year-old boy’s voice. It is quiet. The stain of his absence is still palpable. It shouts,
Something dreadful happened here
.

As though she’s been watching for someone, the screen door opens and Josie emerges. Her eyes widen at my disheveled state. “What happened to you?”

She couldn’t have a worse poker face. I look wretched. I have not brushed my hair or bathed since yesterday morning at the motel, not counting the face washing in the McDonald’s bathroom. My suit bears the disheveled look of having been stripped onto the floor, then worn again and slept in, and I am barefoot, carrying my shoes. I tossed out my stockings in a trash can along the way.

“It’s a long story.” Same thing I told Brian yesterday. Different story.

She looks at me with concern. “Come on in.”

I hesitate. I can hear Victoria calling Tyler to come eat. I don’t want to see her. And I don’t want to be seen looking this way. “I want to go home.” I say.

“Okay, we’ll get you home—don’t worry. Just come in.” She motions again for me to enter. I give in.

Victoria looks toward us as we come through her front door.

“Hi,” I say.

Her expression remains steady, as though my appearance is nothing unusual. She answers “Hello,” and turns back to Tyler. “There’s plenty of food if you’re hungry,” she adds in a low monotone. She’s worse today.

Josie goes into the kitchen. I stand in the living room, mesmerized by the scene of Tyler’s grandmother feeding him. Even though he barely knows her, their connection is set. He watches her eyes, she concentrates on his mouth. She picks up a morsel of meat and offers it to him. He takes it, puts it in his mouth, and she waits while he chews. It is wordless and intimate. Tyler climbs down from the chair. I guess he is finished eating. Josie comes back and takes his plate to the kitchen. Victoria goes to the recliner and sinks into the cushions. She closes her eyes. I’m still standing, my body locked in place. After a few minutes, with her eyes still closed, she says, “Josie told me you had a baby who died.”

I’m surprised by how easily I hear this. “Yes,” I answer, without the usual frog in my throat.

“I’m sorry for your loss.” she says.

“Thank you.” I sit on the couch, relishing the weight coming off my sore feet and tired legs.

“I’m so worried about Michael,” she says softly.

“I know,” I say. I wish I could tell her that he’ll be fine.

“Can I ask you something?” she says, opening her eyes and looking at me.

“All right.” I’m afraid of what she’s going to ask, afraid I won’t have the right answer.

“Does it get any easier, missing your baby?” She’s preparing for the worst.

“No,” I answer quietly. “But I wouldn’t really want it to.”

Josie slows her movements in the kitchen so she can hear.

I think about it some more. “It does change, though,” I add. “After a while, you’re not sad every single second.” I confess what I haven’t before admitted to myself: “I don’t think of her every moment of every day anymore.” As I unburden myself, my words accelerate. “At first I
felt horrible when I realized that I had forgotten to be sad for a while. Like I was letting her down. But then I thought it was better to think of her in good ways, not only about how much I miss her, or how I failed her. I wonder about who she would have become. I wonder about . . . well, where she is.”

She looks at me. “Don’t you believe in heaven?”

“Sometimes I do. I try to.” I don’t believe in the heaven I described to Oliver. But sometimes I hope that I’m wrong, that that place is real. “It helped that I had to keep going for the rest of the people in my life.”

“Your little boys.”

“Yes.”

“You have reasons to live.”

“So do you. Don’t give up, Victoria. You’re going to find Michael.” I said it. So what if I’m wrong. There’s nothing wrong with hoping. Hoping is all we get, some days.

She grasps my hand. Josie comes back in with a pillow and a blanket. She holds them out to me. “Here. Get some rest, Sarah.”

“Okay.” I lift my feet onto the couch, lay my head on the pillow, and plunge into a bottomless sleep.

M
y eyes
slowly open. I feel like 500 pounds of lead weight. My mouth is dry. I must have slept for a couple hours.

Josie is on the phone. “Okay, you got the address?” she’s asking. “See you in a little while.” She crosses to me. “Here ya go,” she says, handing me my cell phone.

I take it, perplexed. “Who was that?” I ask.

She is standing over me, looking down. A crock of something is simmering in the kitchen, filling the apartment with steam and garlic. “It was your dad. He’s on his way. He’s going to take you home.”

“What? You called my dad? Why didn’t you ask me if that was okay?”

She looks at me like she’s trying to determine if I’m kidding. She crosses her arms protectively and takes a step back, leans into one hip. “Sarah, you asked me to call him.”

“What are you talking about?” It occurs to me I might be dreaming. I pinch my cheek. I can feel it.

“You don’t remember?” Her voice is quieter now, concerned.

“No.”

“Sarah, about ten minutes after you fell asleep, you sat bolt upright and you were like, ‘Dad! Dad!’ so I asked if you wanted me to call your dad and you said, ‘Yes.’ Then you went back to sleep. I found his number on your cell phone, so I called him, and he said he would come get you.” She pauses, looks at me, worried.

I have no memory of that conversation. I must have been talking in
my sleep. I lie back down on the couch and try to make sense of this news. I sigh in disbelief and then let out a wild laugh. After all these years, after all the disappointment and fury and distance, I reached for him. “Well,” I say, “this ought to be interesting.”

Josie sits down next to me and we watch Tyler, who is rolling on his back and examining his upside-down reflection in a spoon. When the doorbell rings, my brain says,
Stand up and get the door
, but my body can’t move. Josie told me that when she called him, he was at LAX about to board a flight to New York, and that instead he ran to the commuter terminal and got on the next flight to Oakland. My hero. Josie gets up and opens the door. I see his figure framed in the doorway. His antennae sense the grief in the room. It is like a second language spoken intermittently over the years, a buried fluency that wakes up when you encounter it again.

“Hello. I’m David Stein. Is this . . . is Sarah here?”

“Yeah. Come on in. I’m Josie. We talked on the phone.”

He’s wearing a sport coat, a white shirt unbuttoned at the neck, and khakis. His forehead is creased, the permanent furrow in his brow deeper than normal. I thought I didn’t want to see him, so I’m surprised by the warmth I feel at the sound of his voice, familiar since before I was born.

He walks toward me. “Are you okay?” he asks. I can’t imagine what he’s thinking, seeing my sorry state.

“I’m fine. I want to go home.”

“Then let’s go.” He offers his hand.

Josie and her mom are watching. Tyler, too, observes with concentration. I reach for his hand and let him help me up. I turn to face Josie and all the moments of our friendship spread out before me, laced together like a story-quilt. I think of our ritual Monday lunches together, and I understand that they are finished. She’s home. She steps toward me and hugs me. Holding our embrace, she says softly, “Thank you for everything, Sarah.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“You brought me home.” That, I did.

“I’m going to miss you,” I say.

“Me too.” I mean it more than she does. She releases the hug, and I let her go. I look toward her mother. I want to say something wise, but nothing comes. I give her a hug and we hold the loss of our babies—different, but related—between us. “Don’t give up” comes out of my mouth, then we let go. Tyler stands behind Josie, peeking out from a safe spot. I look down at him. “Bye, Tyler.” This one feels the hardest, though it is the least reciprocated. I touch his head.

My father directs me out the door with a hand on my back. A taxi waits at the curb. I tell the driver to go to the nearest gas station, where we buy a gallon of gas. By some miracle, I am able to find the spot where I abandoned my car. My father drives it back to the gas station and fills it up the rest of the way. We start our journey home. I sit where Josie did. It’s my turn to stare out the window.

For a long time, we’re quiet. I don’t want to talk, and he doesn’t know where to begin. Maybe his presence, the fact that he’s here, bringing me home from my breakdown, says enough for now.

“I’m glad I was still in LA when your friend called,” he says after a while. He keeps his gaze on the road ahead. “I was really happy to see your number calling my phone.” He turns his face toward me. “Happy and surprised.”

“Surprised me, too,” I say, looking straight ahead. “Were you there for the same client as last time?” I ask, reciprocating his effort at conversation.

“Yep. That guy’s always in trouble.”

“Best kind of client.” I parrot his old joke.

“Yep, but don’t forget rich. They have to be both.” A forced chuckle fades to a sigh. One of my favorite things about my dad used to be his love of bad jokes. Before my mom died, we used to make up knock-knock jokes, and we would laugh at them no matter how unfunny they were. After she died, there was a lot less laughing. A lot more silences. There’s too much time to think on this drive. The highway starts out urban, passing billboards and funeral homes, through the southern suburbs of Oakland, then Livermore, past the cow ranches and their stench.

“You okay?” my dad asks.

“Mm-hmm,” I answer. I feel like crying but don’t want him to see. In an effort to suppress the tears, I end up making ugly convulsive sounds, which catch his attention.

“Sarah, what’s wrong?” He looks worried, like I’m having a seizure or something.

I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to tell him about my loneliness, my solitary drives, my friendship with Josie, or why we were in Oakland. I certainly don’t want to tell him about Brian and lying to Robert. It’s too much. I open my mouth to dismiss his question, and my subconscious boils it down to this: “I miss them so much.” Mom and Ella. A conjoined loss. I tighten my lips to keep my composure.

“Me too,” he says, and when I look at him, I see his eyes are red.

Long stretches of silence let other thoughts build. “I sometimes think that if Mom hadn’t died, Ella wouldn’t have either.” I feel like a boiling pot whose lid has been adjusted to let some steam escape. I realize that might sound like I’m indirectly blaming him for my daughter’s death. “I mean, I feel like maybe Mom being around would have made me a better mother. That maybe I would have checked the sheet or put it on better, or . . .”

“Sarah, I don’t know what to say,” my dad says, touching my leg. “I do know how you feel. I’ve thought about that drive a million times, thought that if just one thing had been different—” His throat closes around his words. “I would give anything to go back and do it differently. I’m sorry, Sarah. I’m so sorry.”

I’m so tired of “so sorry.” If I could, I’d live the rest of my days without hearing those words again. The tiny blood vessel of forgiveness that first opened when he sat at my kitchen table wants to expand. It’s petrifying to open my heart again. I take a deep breath. “I know. I . . . I forgive you, Dad.” In that moment, I can feel my blood flow just a little bit easier.

He clears mucous from his throat. “That means a lot to me.”

We drive on in wordless companionship, and I surrender to exhaustion. When I wake up, we are approaching the base of the long
incline that will lead us out of this wide agricultural valley. Brown mountains stretch into the distance on both sides of the highway. My dad steals a glance at me. I look him back in the eye. He looks like he’s deciding whether to say something.