Sister Noon (33 page)

Lizzie arrived at the Ark with her things in a rented wagon. Neither Jenny nor Ti Wong had anything of consequence to add to it. They stood in the sandy lot saying good-bye to everyone. Mrs. Lake was in tears, as was, to Lizzie’s surprise, Nell. “You come back and see us,” Nell told Jenny, over and over. Her round shoulders shook. She held Ti Wong. “First Maudie and now you!”

Ti Wong hopped from foot to foot, so excited was he not to be drowned this morning. He knew about Lizzie’s financial worries and discussed them as he lifted Jenny into the wagon. They could start a detective agency, he suggested. People would pay them to solve cases. “I’m not much good at sneaking around,” Lizzie told him, although the ridiculous idea did appeal to her for a moment, she couldn’t deny it. Her own detective agency!

Ti Wong argued that he
was
good at sneaking. All he had to do to go unnoticed, he said, was pretend to be Chinese.

His plans were interrupted by Mrs. Wright. She had not spoken a word during Lizzie’s good-bye. She’d sat, her eyes stonily turned to the curtained windows as if Lizzie
weren’t in the room. Then, after Lizzie left, Mrs. Wright had gathered her clothes into her grip and made her way down the stairs alone. “I’ve decided to join you,” she said, “so there will be no need to worry about money. I’ll inform Mr. McCallum at my bank.”

Lizzie saw her careful budgets disintegrating. She added the grip to the wagon. Then she knelt and hugged the dog so tightly she came away with fleas. Well, why not? she thought, lost for a moment in the heady smell of dog. They could all be different people. Ti Wong could be a detective. Mrs. Wright could be rich. Lizzie would learn to be a mother if she had to grow wings and a tail. She felt an optimism best explained by inexperience and a serious failure of imagination.

“What would you like to be?” she asked Jenny.

“Going,” Jenny answered.

Lizzie helped Mrs. Wright climb aboard and scrambled to her own seat. “We’re off to see some ducks, then,” she said gaily, giving the reins to Ti Wong. He was now the man in the family, so he drove.

The next day all the newspapers were talking about the Doom Sealers. People as far away as Sacramento had scrambled into the capital dome for safety. Believers in Santa Rosa had climbed Taylor Mountain. Noted daredevil Sarah Pike had made a balloon ascension; the morning of April 14 found her aloft over Ocean Beach at just that time, the local papers observed, when the real daredevils were on the ground.

“Mrs. Woodworth All Wet!” the headlines read.

A colored evangelist named Mrs. Simmons had also predicted destruction. The date she’d chosen was 1898, and the method earthquake. Who cared? San Francisco would stand forever. The beautiful weather was compared with the Great Disappointment of ’44, when Christ failed once again to appear to the Millerites.