Valley of the Moon (41 page)

With Lucien's help, I went online and found the exact same North Face tent I'd had back in the seventies. I purchased a Marmot sleeping bag and an L.L. Bean camp chair, also exact replicas of our old gear. Everything smelled pleasantly musty. The sleeping bag held the faint odor of weed. These items, touchstones from my past, felt imbued with magic, and they made me ache for Joseph and Vivi. That I had no idea how long it would be before I could be with them again was devastating. The only thing that comforted me was knowing it would be just a month for them. They wouldn't suffer like I was suffering.

I couldn't have borne that.

The gear was not magic, of course it wasn't. It did nothing to change my fate. The fog did not return.

Despair was the most insidious of killers. A vampire, it drained me of energy and will. I stopped leaving the house. Stopped reading books or listening to music. Even Benno's Timestream, which I'd watched constantly over the first few months I'd been in San Francisco, ceased being of interest to me.

A year passed. Two years. I became more and more reclusive. In the months leading up to my fortieth birthday, I started to drink. At first it was a nightly glass of wine, but soon I was polishing off an entire bottle by myself. I'd pass out and wake a few hours later, unbridled fury coursing through me.

I'd stopped caring what happened to me. I'd walk in the most dangerous places in the middle of the night: Golden Gate Park, the Tenderloin. I courted violence, but it did not court me back. I was invisible. An exiled creature. I had the stink of alien on me. People kept their distance.

In the mornings, after my bender, I'd drag myself to Grace Cathedral up on Nob Hill. It was there, with the light streaming through the stained glass windows, the smell of wood and aftershave and incense, that I felt the presence of Benno, Joseph, and Vivi most strongly. There it was safe to cry.

“I see you,” said the man from the end of the pew.

He was a regular. He arrived at the cathedral promptly at seven every morning and left fifteen minutes later. He was younger than me, maybe early thirties. Always dressed impeccably in a suit.

I shook my head at him. I was so used to being ignored that the sound of his voice felt like an assault.

“I see you,” he repeated.

“Please don't talk to me,” I said.

The next morning I came at 7:45. The man sat in the fourth pew from the front. His head bowed. His neck exposed.

What was he doing here? He should have been long gone by now.

I sat in a folding chair to the left of the sacristy, deep in the shadows. A minute later he got up and surveyed the cathedral. I sank low in my seat, but there was no use trying to hide, he was on a mission, hunting me down. He approached, walking quickly, his heels tapping on the floor. He stopped at the top of the row and I held up my hand to ward him off.

“You've lost somebody,” he said.

“Shut the hell up.” I was furious he'd invaded my privacy.

He flinched but didn't move.

“Jesus. Why are you looking at me that way? Do I know you?”

He made a strange sort of croaking noise. “I lost somebody, too,” he said.

By then it had been four years. Lucien and the rest of my extended family were well intentioned and kind, but I knew they thought I should have moved on by now. They wanted me to put down roots in the present, move past Benno's death, past the Valley of the Moon, past my desperation to get back to Joseph and Vivi.

But this man's simple act of confession? The communal recognition of our loss? It made me feel like my grief was okay, maybe even appropriate.

“I can't shut it off,” I said. “They want me to, but I can't.”

“Some things can't be shut off,” he said, absolving me. “They can only be borne.”

My pain was bottomless. Benno was gone. My baby. My first. There would be no fighting it. No forgetting about it. No putting it behind me. I would carry it with me forever. This shattering truth. I walked this earth and my son did not.

The ride to the Valley of the Moon was the only time I felt free. It was time out of time. Past and present collided. I was twenty-five, having just sent Benno off to Newport, my backpack in the trunk, stuffed with Slim Jims, a copy of
The Hobbit,
and Rhonda's stolen peanut butter. I was forty-three, grooves around my eyes, my hair graying at the temples, and thin, so thin, whittled by loss.

I drove down the highway as I had every month for five years, spring, summer, winter, and fall. Nothing had ever stopped me. I'd come when Napa was burning. When the drought was at its worst and the price of water was as high as the price of oil.

Joseph, Joseph, Joseph. Vivi, Vivi, Vivi. Benno, Benno, Benno.

Their names were my open sesame. My prayer.

Lucien's car parked itself in the lot. The trunk popped open and I grabbed my pack and set out. A cool October day. The temperature would plummet at dusk. I'd need to gather firewood.

I'd learned not to have any expectations. So when I awoke in the middle of the night, freezing cold, needing to pee, and I unzipped my tent and the fog swirled around my head enthusiastically, like it had never abandoned me, never betrayed me, never exiled me from those I loved—I simply said, “Hello.”

I surrendered to it, relief flooding through me. It would bring me home.

And when I stepped into the sunlight moments later, hours later, 1,792 days later, there they were. Joseph and Vivi. In the meadow, waiting for me.

“Is that Mama?” I heard Vivi ask.

“That's your mama,” said Joseph.

I immediately began sobbing. I had years' worth of tears stored up. The wetness on my cheeks felt primal and life-sustaining, like milk letting down.

Vivi squinted. “Where's Ba?”

Joseph came striding toward me—the expression on his face a mixture of alarm, concern, protectiveness.

I fell into his arms.

L
ux started from the very beginning; she didn't leave one thing out. The bus that drove itself. Her escalating panic. The way the door to 428 Elizabeth Street had opened without her even knocking. The sound of her grandson's voice. The way Lucien's face had looked when he gently broke the news to her that it was 2064.

Her horror at hearing Benno was gone. The Timestream he'd left for her. The futility of trying to understand what had happened and what it meant. The duality of it all. The timely and untimely, the natural and unnatural loss of her son. Her desperation to get back to us. Her drinking. Her wanting to die. The man in the cathedral. The desperate measures she'd taken. The North Face tent, the Marmot sleeping bag.

The five long years she'd had to wait for the fog to return.

That I was not with her when she learned of Benno's death was devastating. I would carry that guilt forever.

Vivi was so young—she struggled to understand that her brother was really dead. For her, only a month had passed since she'd last seen Benno. It was virtually impossible to explain to her that in those four short weeks, on the other side of the fog, eighty-one years had gone by. Benno had married, had children and grandchildren. The last time she saw him, he still had baby fat. He'd barely had to shave.

“Ba's never coming back?” she asked as we were putting her to bed. She'd asked that question every night for the past three weeks.

“No,” I said.

“But Mama came back!” she cried. “Why can't Ba come?”

“Because he's not there anymore,” said Lux.

“Where is he?”

Lux and I exchanged glances.

“He's here,” she said, reaching under Vivi's pillow for the photo.

In the photo Benno was five. It had been taken at the airport, just before he boarded a plane for Newport. The look of anticipation on Benno's face must have hurt Lux deeply. She'd had no idea what was ahead of her, that later that night she would stumble into Greengage.

Um, hello.
The first thing I'd ever heard her say.

Vivi traced the outline of Benno's face with her finger.

“He looks like me,” Vivi said, her eyes filling.

“Yep, he does,” said Lux. “You guys have the same nose. And the same eyebrows.”

Vivi's face crumpled. “Ba,” she sobbed.

I remembered standing in my father's drawing room in London, telling him of my plans for Greengage. The last thing I could remember him saying to me was “Well, you've made your choice.” Meaning I'd chosen my dreams over him.

If only our heart's desires could be reduced so simply. My father had traveled so far from the life he'd been born into, but in the end he couldn't escape the binary mindset of a gardener's son. Water the plants and they would grow. Forget to water and they would die. If his son wanted to throw away his life, well, that son was not a son of his any longer.

We made a choice at that moment, Lux and I, and even Vivi. Benno was gone, but he would never be lost to us. He was an autumn wind that bent the trees. He was the soft polished wood of the kitchen table, the leafy smell of the creek on a warm October night.

We live because we are remembered.

Lux was forty-three, I was forty-six. I woke up stunned to find her there next to me in bed day after day. That we would be together now permanently was the bright spot amidst our sadness.

Slowly the months passed and slowly my family emerged from the cave of our loss. Benno's death had irrevocably changed us. We were rooted to the earth in a way we hadn't been before. This wasn't a bad thing. It was a reminder of our mortality. From this ground we'd come, to this ground we would return.

The nights grew cold. We picked the last of the corn, canned pumpkin and squash. Thanksgiving came and went. And two days before Christmas—snow. Five inches! In all my years at Greengage, we'd never even received a dusting.

We put on our coats and boots and stood in the yard, the three of us. Vivi's face was pink with wonder, her cheeks tipped up to the sky, her mittened hands outstretched as if in supplication.

“It's the first time she's seen snow,” Lux whispered to me. “She has no idea what to do.”

Lux grabbed Vivi by the waist and pulled her down to the ground with her. “Lie next to me, here,” she instructed.

I watched them, my daughter and my beloved, their sweet heads turned toward one another.

“Now do like this,” said Lux, waving her arms up and down.

Vivi imitated her.

“Do you get it? Do you understand what we're doing?” asked Lux.

Vivi shook her head.

A beatific smile spread across Lux's face. “We're making wings,” she said.

Four months later, just before dawn, Lux awoke me with a scream. “Joseph! Earthquake!”

She tore the covers off and sprinted down the corridor to Vivi's room. I followed her, the floors buckling beneath me. I heard a deafening crash from downstairs. The granite slab of the fireplace mantel cracking in two. Chunks of plaster falling from the ceiling. Crockery shattering.

Lux transferred a trembling Vivi into my arms. She'd already outfitted Vivi with the Walkman; music was the best way to calm her down. Vivi had spent much of the last months with those headphones clamped over her ears. She paid homage to her brother by listening to all his favorite bands: the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead. Queen and Prince.

“Daddy,” she whimpered.

“Everything's going to be fine,” I said. “Close your eyes and press Play.”

I held her close to my chest, shielding her head with the palm of my hand.

We made it down the stairs just before the staircase separated from the landing; it dangled from the second story like a loose tooth. We ran out of the house and stood in the yard, unsure of what to do. Other families stood in front of their cottages just as we did, similar stricken looks on their faces.

The earth groaned and creaked. Chimneys collapsed. Porches sagged. The full moon was a bone-white orb in the sky.

People staggered around us, making their way toward the meadow. We all knew the protocol. Earthquake, fire, flood—congregate at the dining hall.

The schoolhouse, the cottages, the dormitories, the winery, the barn, the cooper's shed, the workshop, every structure had incurred heavy damage. The grain silo had tipped over, crushing the chicken house. My mind immediately conjured up the earlier earthquake that had brought no damage. This quake was its polar opposite.

“Joseph!” shouted Fancy, catching up with us.

Vivi slid out of my arms and ran to her cousin. I embraced my sister. I hadn't realized until that moment that I'd been holding my breath. “Magnusson?”

“He's all right. He went to check on the horses. Dear God,” she said.

The earth rumbled again, an aftershock. Vivi threw herself back into my arms.

By the time we got to the dining hall, sidestepping debris, climbing over fallen branches, the sun had risen.

It took another hour or so for everyone to gather. We were lucky—other than a few minor injuries, everybody was fine.

Greengage, however, was in ruins.