Libby and Chester’s rented house near Lafayette Park is ten blocks away and on the other side of Van Ness, the side that did not burn. Chester apologizes that he was unable to secure a carriage, and I assure him that walking, even when it’s uphill, is not troublesome to me. After a quick stop at a Western Union office near the makeshift police station, we head west to reenter neighborhoods that I walked through weeks before when smoke and despair hung heavy in the air. But now it is June and the sun is out and homes and businesses that needed repair are being repaired. It does not feel hopeless here.
Libby’s new place is situated two blocks across from the beautiful Whittier Mansion, a massive structure of Arizona sandstone that apparently the earthquake could not wobble. Their rented cottage is far smaller than their home on Polk was, but it’s quaint and well-appointed, and I’m sure thousands of other homeless San Franciscans would be happy to occupy it.
“This house belongs to a tutor friend of Chester’s who’s in Seattle for a spell, taking care of his mother,” Libby says as she gives me a tour of the inside. It is fully furnished, two stories, with three bedrooms upstairs and a guest room off the kitchen that might have been the housekeeper’s bedroom in the home’s earlier life.
Chester leaves us to find a work crew for me that can, I hope, start in the morning. Libby and I settle in first to tea—the nanny is also her maid—and then playtime with Timmy, who has indeed grown taller in the couple of months since I’ve seen him. Libby fills the time with talk of their travels, of discovering she was with child when she vomited all over a banqueting table in Boston, and of how hard it was to hear of the disaster that had befallen San Francisco while they were away and to know her home had most likely been destroyed.
“It wasn’t completely destroyed, of course, but everything inside that didn’t burn reeked of smoke afterward. We were hardly able to salvage anything,” she says, as we sit on the floor with Timmy and a basket full of new toys. “And yet looters are still sneaking their way into the house at night to comb through the ashes looking for valuables. It’s so ruthless, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” People can indeed be ruthless.
She asks about the friends I am staying with and how I made it out of the city and what I’ve been doing all this time.
I keep my answers short and simple and vaguely truthful. “Kat and I took a ferry to Oakland several days after the quake and then a train down to San Jose to get to my friend’s place near San Mateo. We’ve just been recovering from the shock of the last few weeks. It was hard on Kat, as I’m sure you can imagine. And my friend just had a baby, so we’ve been helping.”
“I am surprised you’ve made a friend who lives elsewhere than in the city,” Libby says, curiosity clinging to her words.
“Belinda and I have a mutual friend in San Francisco. Kat and I were fortunate to have somewhere else to stay besides here. So tell me. How will you decorate the new nursery?”
Libby spends the rest of the time until Chester returns telling me every detail of her plans, not just for the nursery but for the inside of her soon-to-be-repaired house. She stops twice to ask if she should stop, if sharing her ideas is making me grieve too much the loss of my own house, and I tell her to keep talking. It is therapeutic to hear talk about all the new things that will emerge out of the dust of the destruction.
And it helps pass the time.
When Chester arrives, he tells me luck shone on him today; he found a four-man crew that was finishing up hauling away debris from the remains of a business on Leavenworth and who can be at the site of my house at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.
“It’s not necessary for you to be there, Mrs. Hocking,” Chester says. “If you think someone needs to watch over the workmen, I can be there. The academy is on a term break right now for the summer. I’m happy to do it.”
“Thank you so kindly,” I reply with forced calmness. “But I want to be there. They might find my grandmother’s lapel watch or something else of sentimental value. I just want to be there.”
He nods and tells me he will see if in the morning he can find a carriage to take me there. The rest of the evening passes too slowly for me. I awaken the following morning at sunrise, well before the rest of the house. Chester is in fact able to locate transportation for me. When a carriage comes at half past eight, I bid Libby good-bye and thank her for her kind hospitality but explain that if all goes well, I will catch an afternoon train back to San Mateo and will no doubt see her again soon.
“I need to get back to Kat,” I tell her, knowing she will understand this. We do have that in common, she and I. We love our children.
“I’m so very glad I saw you standing there yesterday,” she says as she hugs me good-bye. “And we were very nearly finished at our own place, and I would have missed you. It is so fortunate that we were both there at the same time.”
“Quite so” is all I can say in return, but then I think maybe it is fortunate that Libby saw me. Maybe it is good that I didn’t just attempt to disappear, but that now the police think Martin Hocking did not come home as expected the day of the earthquake and is perhaps missing within the disaster, as are many others. Rather than feeling like I need to be invisible, I feel that I will instead soon be liberated. It is only a matter of time.
“You will let us know the minute Mr. Hocking is found, won’t you?” Libby says, releasing me.
“I promise.”
“Don’t give up hope, dear Sophie. I’m sure he will turn up.”
“Of course.”
“And do please tell Mr. Hocking to rebuild. Almost everyone on the street is going to. You will tell him, won’t you? I want you for a neighbor again!”
I smile, nod. I think I understand why Libby would like me to return to San Francisco. I am the kind of friend to whom she can count on feeling sweetly superior. Her affluent friends probably make her too often fear that she doesn’t quite measure up. But not me.
“I’ll tell him,” I say.
She sends me out to the carriage with a boxed lunch and a parasol because, she says, there are no more leafy trees on our street to provide shade. She stands at the door to her cottage, waving good-bye with one hand and the other holding the tiniest mound at her waist.
I arrive at the ruined house just as the workmen pull up.
It is no small feat hoisting up the slabs and chunks of broken fireplaces and placing them onto flatbed wagons. Each time the workmen lift another section I stand as close as I can to see if Martin’s crushed body is lying underneath. There are indeed charred remains beneath the heavy stone, but I don’t know what any of it is and no one shouts that they have found human remains. While they are dragging away a piece of marble from what had been the dining room, and where Martin could have possibly dragged himself if he had tried to crawl out of the house, I see a blackened shard sticking up out of the mess and I’m thinking it could be bone. I kick at the rest of the debris and I see another sliver of something that resembles the first, but surely no one else would think it was bone—only someone who thought there’d been a body there before the fires would think that. The workmen come back from the wagon to find me poking about the piles of ashes and spreading them thin, and they’re no doubt thinking I’m looking for something precious. I look up at them and shrug as if to say that I can’t find what I’m looking for when in fact I think I have. I pocket the first shard to bring home with me and show to Belinda and Candace. I toss the other one.
It takes the rest of the morning and half the afternoon to clear and haul away the shattered, burned remains. When the workmen are done, there is nothing left of my old house except for the foundation and the stone steps leading up to where the front door used to be, which one of the men says he’d like to come back later to remove and take to a salvage yard to sell, if I am amenable to that. I am. I send a telegram to Elliot’s shop from a Western Union office that I pass on the long walk back down to Townsend Street that I will be returning before dark.
It is late afternoon when I get to the station and buy a ticket for the next train south. When I arrive at the San Mateo station at dusk, it is Belinda who has come for me with Elliot’s carriage. She waits until I am inside the cab and we’re pulling away to ask me if I found Martin.
“There wasn’t much left of the house or what had been inside it,” I answer. I explain to her about the intense heat and how the second story’s heavy fireplaces fell to the first floor as the house burned, crushing whatever lay beneath. I pull from my pocket the shard, and she glances at it.
“Is that him?” Her voice is tinged with an emotion that I don’t recognize, a variant of grief, perhaps.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” And then I tell her about Libby seeing me poking about the ashes and my unplanned trip to the police station and then Libby and Chester offering to help me clear away the remains of my house.
“That’s not the way you wanted to take care of this,” she says when I am finished.
“I know, but perhaps it was unrealistic for me to think I could disappear completely from San Francisco and never be missed. At least now I have gone on record as saying my husband is missing.”
She nods once and we are quiet for a while. “Kat asked about you,” Belinda finally says.
“I’m glad to hear you say that.”
“It was nice to hear her voice.” Belinda nods toward the shard in my hand. “I suppose you are not going to be telling her about any of this.”
“No.”
“She might be thinking that at some point he will come back into her life, you know. To hurt her or you or me—or to take her away from you. I can’t help wondering about that, too.”
“I know. I’ll wait until Martin is officially declared a casualty of the earthquake and then I’ll just tell her he probably died. That might not happen for a year or so. I don’t know when exactly. But I do know Candace will die first. And soon. Kat doesn’t need to lose both parents so close to each other.”
“What if he did get out, though? What if he does come looking for us? For her?”
“He won’t. Why would he? I have all those documents. He can’t risk it. And, besides, he . . . he couldn’t have gotten out. Not the way he looked when I left him.”
I have to believe I am right about that. Martin is dead to me. Dead.
“So we just wait, then, for this to truly be over?” Belinda asks a moment later.
“I think we check in with the authorities from time to time to see if there’s any word on our husbands—you with the San Mateo County Sheriff and me with the San Francisco Police. That is what concerned wives would do if their husbands went missing. And while we wait, we get up each morning and take care of our children and the inn, and we go to bed each night. We live.”
All of us except for Candace.
When we get back to the Loralei, I have to wait until Kat is in bed to tell Candace what I told Belinda on the way home. I show her the shard I brought back with me. She reaches out with one hand to hold it.
“You think this is bone?” she says.
“Could be. Might be.”
“It’s lighter than I thought it would be,” she replies. And then she hands it back.
“What do you want me to do with it?” I ask. “He was your husband.”
“I don’t care. Bury it. Burn it. Throw it into the sea. I don’t care.”
The next day I make the long trek to the mine and I shove the shard in between two large boulders blocking the entrance. A fragment of the shard splits off and falls into the dirt. I grab a rock at my feet and hammer the shard farther in. Fragments continue to fly off, but I continue until the diminished shard is firmly embedded in between the boulders. I don’t tell the others what I’ve done when I return to the inn; I just tell Belinda and Candace that what I brought home from San Francisco has been properly disposed of.
A week later I use Elliot’s telephone and I ring up the San Francisco Police Department and ask to speak to Detective Morris. I ask if there is any news on the whereabouts of my husband. There isn’t.
Belinda rings the county sheriff and officially reports her husband as having deserted her. For the next month and a half we inquire about our missing husbands on a regular basis. In those six weeks Sarah grows cuter and fatter, Belinda looks less and less like a grieving widow and more like a woman in love with Elliot, and Kat begins to say a word or two every hour. As the weeks pass I find that I no longer startle when an automobile pulls up outside the inn or when the door to the inn opens and the first thing I hear is a man’s footfall. Martin would be a fool to come back if he’s somehow still alive.
And Martin is no fool.
I write my mother that Martin—the quiet man I married for convenience—was sadly a victim of the terrible quake and fire, but that Kat and I are safe and now living south of the city with friends. I tell her that she needn’t worry about a thing, that everything she’d wanted me to have and sacrificed for me to have, I have.
Candace is the only one of us who seems to be waning rather than gaining strength. When the first day of August approaches, she calls me to her bed, which she rarely leaves now. She is as pale and thin as she was when I first met her, perhaps more so. We have had the doctor from the village to see her twice, and both times he has told us she needs to be sent to a warmer, drier climate. Both times Candace declined to follow his advice.
When I arrive at her bedside, she reaches for me with a weak arm and takes my hand. I sit down next to her.
“I want to go to my cousin’s in Texas,” she whispers.
The words hit me hard. “But . . . you said you wanted to be here! You said you wanted for you and Kat to be here. With me!”
“I do want Kat to be here with you,” she murmurs. “But I don’t want to be here. I don’t want Kat to watch me die. I want to say good-bye to her while I’m alive. I want her to remember me alive.”
Relief and concern immediately twist themselves inside me. Candace doesn’t want to take Kat. But still. How can she possibly travel in her condition? “You are too weak to go such a great distance by train, Candace.”
“I have the money to hire a private coach and a nurse.”
“But it’s so far and . . . and what if you die along the way?”
“What if I do? It would be a blessing to go so quickly. I want to go. I’m ready to go.”
“Candace—”
“Let me go to my family. Let them see to it that I’m buried next to my mother and father. Please, Sophie. I’ve asked you for nothing. Please help me to do this.”
Hot tears are sliding down my face. “But Kat . . .”
“Kat will be happy here. She already is happy here. She has you and Belinda and her sister. She already has more than I ever gave her. You can’t stop what is happening to me. I will die. Let me choose where.”
When I say nothing, she goes on. “I’ve already taken care of the documents appointing you as Kat’s legal guardian when I am deceased. I will make sure my family understands no one is to contest it, not that I think anyone will. My lawyer has already contacted the bank in Los Angeles that disperses the money from the trust. The monthly amount is substantial, Sophie. Kat will never want for anything. And I expect you to use that money in whatever way will secure for her a good home. Do you promise me you will do that?”
I nod as more tears trickle down my face.
“Say it,” she breathes.
“I promise.”
Candace leaves by private coach two weeks later, on the thirteenth of August. Belinda and I stand back from the four-horse carriage to give her as much time alone with Kat as she wants to say her final good-bye, but Candace keeps her last words to her daughter brief. I hear her tell Kat through the open carriage door that she is soon going to heaven to be with her mama and papa, just like she told her, but that she will watch over Kat all the years of her life, and that if she ever needs to talk to her or touch her, she need only go to Belinda’s peach tree and put her arms around it, and Candace will whisper to her through the branches that all is well.
Candace then motions for me to come to the open carriage door to stand by Kat.
“Miss Sophie is your mama now,” Candace says from where she reclines on the seat inside. She nods to me and I put my arm around our little girl.
“I am so proud of you, Kitty Kat. You’re such a brave girl,” Candace says to Kat. “Be happy. I love you.”
Next to me I feel Kat shudder. No words are coming out of her mouth, though. Not one. I start to bend down to encourage Kat to say farewell, but Candace interrupts my movement with three words to the nurse sitting across from her that stop me.
“Close the door.”
The nurse leans forward and pulls on the handle, and the carriage door clicks shut.
Candace doesn’t say good-bye, and I know ’tis so our dear Kat won’t ever regret not saying it, either.
The driver slaps the reins. We watch as the carriage heads down the gravel drive and then turns south. When we can no longer hear the jingle of the harnesses and the clopping of the hooves, Belinda, Kat, and I turn to go back inside the inn.
Over the next two weeks, I can see Kat retreating into silence to work out her mother’s absence; I have learned this is her way of coming to terms with events she cannot control. We all have to find a way to do that, don’t we? She has found this one. Who of us can say it isn’t a good way? We imagine together each night before bed—me with words and she with thoughts—where Candace’s carriage might be. We picture her on the desolate landscape of Arizona and New Mexico and then maybe finding the gateway to heaven on her journey. I think it brings Kat comfort to think of her mother as skyward bound, like Elijah in a chariot. She has drawn several pictures of a carriage pulled by winged horses flying into the sun.
I don’t know if she fully understands she will not see Candace again, but I find her often at the peach tree, looking up at its branches and listening to the rustle of its leaves.
On the tenth of September we receive a telegram from Texas and learn that Candace died three days after arriving.