When he saw Peter and Fran, he didn’t hide his pleasure that they were still there, waiting for him. He had that wide smile from the cube of pictures in the living room. He led them off campus and down a side street to a tiny shop. He disappeared inside and came out with a bag of sandwiches. Then he turned up a path off the crowded sidewalk and soon the street was far below them. It was a steep incline, with thick tree roots bulging up out of the damp earth which smelled like old flowers and toothpaste.
“So who was she?” Fran asked.
“Who?”
“The girl you were talking to.”
“Her name’s Mary. She’s in my Mandarin class.”
“You didn’t want to introduce us?”
“That was our second conversation ever. It might have seemed a little odd to her.”
“You’re worried what she’ll think of you. You like her.”
“I do.”
“Of course her name’s Mary.”
“Me and Oedipus.” He crossed his fingers. “We’re tight.”
They kept walking.
“Your mother’s not stringing my father along, is she?” Fran stopped and turned back to face Peter. “I mean, he really believes what she writes.”
“What does she write?” He wanted to keep moving, but Fran sat on a boulder.
“I don’t know really, but he goes around humming and giggling after he gets a letter.”
“My mother,” he began, but he suddenly felt too dispirited to continue.
“What do you mean, Fran, ‘you don’t know really’?” Stuart said.
“I don’t read them. I swear I don’t. I’m dying to. But I don’t. He reads parts to us. The funny parts. But I think there are definitely juicy parts because he’s always trying to cover up the back of the page he’s reading from.”
Peter started walking again, and after a little while he heard them following behind. He wasn’t going to try to explain his mother to them anymore.
They came abruptly to the top, which was a patch of grass overlooking the cities: Berkeley, then Oakland, then San Francisco across the glossy water. They sat in a line facing the view. Stuart passed out the sandwiches.
“This should be interesting,” Fran said as she unwrapped hers.
Peter took a bite. The flavors were unrecognizable, but not awful. It was the texture that was challenging, so dry and mealy it sucked the moisture from his tongue.
“Gross!” Fran spat her bite out on the grass. “That is definitely the worst yet.”
“I’ve been stretching her palate since she got here.”
“‘Stretching my palate’? You’ve been trying to kill me. Can we get a jar of this stuff for Caleb? God, Peter, you’re not actually eating that, are you?”
He shook his head and spat his out, too. “I think it was trying to eat me.”
They all laughed.
Peter noticed that Stuart’s sandwich had regular lettuce in it. He snatched the other half and opened it. “Ham and cheese!” he yelled.
“Bastard!”
Peter split the half with Fran.
They ate and looked out at the foreign landscape, the valleys and hills covered in buildings and asphalt, the sea vacant.
“What do you think our real purpose is here?” Stuart said.
Fran groaned. “Can we have one day when we don’t have to talk about the meaning of life?”
“I don’t think we ever talk about anything else. It just depends how honest we want to be about it.”
“I want to ask Peter about his life out here, about Vida, about when my father is going to get to see her.”
“You want to know how much meaning Vida finds in her correspondence with Dad.”
There was something different in the way they said Vida, something more hopeful.
“I bought my mother The Thorn Birds.”
“You did not.”
“I did. And she read it and she cried like a baby when Ralph died.”
“You have to be lying,” she said, grinning.
“I think she’s hoping Tom will come out in January.”
He could feel Fran relax beside him. “Good.”
There had been talk, if visits went well, of Tom’s moving out here with Fran and Caleb by summer, but Peter saw they didn’t know that yet. They were all ready for a change, Tom had said.
They shoved their wax paper back in the bag and stretched out on the grass. There were insects gnawing on something nearby.
Stuart, placing his hands on his bony knees, said, “Heaven and Earth and I were born at the same time, and all life and I are one.”
Chuang Tzu, Peter guessed. “I’ve missed you,” he said. He hadn’t meant to. It just blurted itself out, and he blushed.
“I’ve missed you, too.” Stuart put his arm around Peter’s neck and didn’t take it off until they all stood up.
Before they left, they went to the edge of the drop down to the city. They stood close with their arms brushing and Peter smelled Fran’s hair again and heard Stuart’s familiar deep slow breaths in and out. It felt good to be with them, but it would feel good to be on the bus in a little while. His mother would be waiting at the stop for him and she would know the effort it had taken for him to see them and he would know the courage it had taken for her to be there, standing in the dark with strangers.
FIFTEEN
January, 1981
SHE WAITED FOR HIM OUTSIDE. IT WAS POINTLESS TO TRY AND BE ANYWHERE else. At first she sat in the orchard, as Gena called it, which consisted of the four fruit trees they’d planted last spring: a lemon, a lime, and two avocados. For her birthday, Peter and Gena had given her a wrought iron table and chair and she’d placed it between the avocados. She’d written to Carol at that table finally — without notes or quotes, just her own small words. And all her letters to Tom.
From the kitchen window, Peter watched his mother wander in the grass beside the driveway. Occasionally she stopped without knowing it, her mind caught on some snag. He could tell she was nervous from the way she scratched the inside of her wrists.
“I can’t remember what he looks like,” she’d said last night. “All I can picture is the mustache.”
“Sometimes I can hear it against the receiver,” he’d said.
“Yes! Scritch scritch.” The guinea pig in her lap had leapt off at the sound. “I feel like I never really looked at him.”
“Tomorrow’s your chance,” Gena had said. She’d tried to sound cheerful about it, but she knew that change was afoot, and she liked things the way they were.
A silver rental car pulled in the driveway. Vida stood in the grass in her lucky dress, barefoot, her wrists scraped red.
Tom didn’t bother parking properly or shutting the door when he got out. He just went to her as if she were dying, the way Peter himself had gone to her that morning in the field, leaving his pencil and his history books on the desk. And when Tom reached her they sank into each other like neither could have taken another step without the other and even Peter felt weakened by watching, a bit like he’d felt two nights ago when they’d seen the fifty-two hostages come off a plane and fall into the arms of the people who’d waited for them. They’d been given parkas with enormous fur-trimmed hoods and they came down the set of metal stairs in groups of twos and threes, then separated as their families found them. A little girl in a red coat leapt into the arms of her big brother; a mother kept kissing her middle-aged son’s hand over and over as they walked away. “What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get home?” a reporter asked a man on the tarmac. “Take my wife in my arms.” They’d been sitting down on the new couch, but by the time all the hostages had disembarked, he, Gena, and his mother were all standing a few inches from the screen, clutching hands without knowing it.