Claire and Richard went out the back door of their Sunset District apartment, and quietly looked for the Golden Gate Bridge against the San Francisco horizon. When perched on tiptoes in the rear corner of their backyard, halfway up the slope on Sixth Avenue, the uppermost pillars of the bridge could be seen, its red peaks cutting through the oaks and liquid ambers, a strong sight against a blue sky paled by fog. Richard stood behind Claire, peering over her shoulder. It had been nearly a year since the legal nightmare had ended. He watched her back rise and fall in steady breaths. Cocoa ran anxiously along the fence line, sniffing all possible spots, before she finally squatted near a patch of wild calla lilies, and then resumed her search, leaving behind a trail of steam. “It seems impossible,” Richard said. She didn’t need to ask him to clarify what he meant. “Yes,” she replied. “Completely impossible.”
They never did go to Montana. As the case had appeared to be heading to trial, Claire had taken a leave from the university with the intent of never coming back—a mutually satisfactory decision—and Richard had sublet his Cambridge apartment for the balance of the year, anticipating that they would be hunkered down in Providence for many stressful months to come. After a lot of deliberating, they decided to fire Ron Bernard and in his place hired a lawyer named Porter Smyth; he came down from Boston with a reputation, and an hourly fee that matched. Smyth spoke with a slight tick in his left eye, and he drummed his fingers against his thighs while he thought. He was not afraid to go to trial, something that Jack DiMallo didn’t need to be told—any lawyer in town could tell you stories during cocktail hour about Porter Smyth’s love of the courtroom—and all interested parties knew that the last thing Kennealy and DiMallo wanted was to actually go to trial with a case that lacked substantial evidence. He was willing to call their bluff. DiMallo initially had countered by trying to paper Claire to death, hoping to induce her into their settlement terms by increasing her financial burden with Smyth’s legendary fees. Smyth threatened a countersuit of harassment, and then barked at DiMallo that he hoped the judge saw past the obvious lack of evidence that the Kennealy case had, because he just wanted to go to court for the thrill of proving them wrong. What followed was a stressful month of give-and-take negotiations, resulting with Smyth finally convincing DiMallo to drop this whole thing, agreeing that he would broker a settlement with FreedomSafe to close the case for its nuisance value, coupled with a binding agreement that would allow everyone to walk away as though these negotiations had never happened. It ended up being a little more complex, with Claire owing a significant amount of out-of-pocket fees. But just like that, the case was over. Nearly eight months after the first brief was filed. And barely a story appeared in the newspaper.
Standing in the backyard, as the fog started to burn off, Claire could still remember the moment when Smyth had called to say that the legal battle officially had ended. She and Richard had just stared at each other. They hadn’t smiled or sighed, or even broken down into tears. They only looked at each other as if they were lost. And finally Richard had reached down and taken Claire’s hands. They were cold and sticky, and as he tried to grip them tighter, they only went limp. He asked her if she was glad that it was finally over, and she coughed, clearing her throat and looking for words, and then asked him if he honestly believed it really was all over. Richard tried to smile at her, as though implying something along the lines of a new beginning, but it came off cockeyed and awkward, and he stammered out “I mean” a few times before he stopped trying, and neither of them made any gesture toward the future. At the moment when they might have ordered an AAA travel plan to eagerly plan their escape to Montana, they stood motionless, as though encased in thin glass and overly cautious of the slightest movement. The idea of Montana had become as ridiculous as it should have been all along. The illusion of either of them living the outback life simply was laughable. These were two people who thrived on the energy of crowded streets, who were given purpose by trying to seek solace from the chaos. They would be out of their minds within days in rural Montana, perhaps only briefly comforted by the sight of watching Cocoa run freely (assuming that was what she wanted). They had dreamt up their whole sentimental fantasy of the wide open when they believed there was nothing left to dream, when they both believed that they would be ensconced in everlasting legal battles, anchored to New England until the last drop of blood had been spilled. When they had hired Porter Smyth, Richard bought a bottle of champagne in hopes of a victory celebration. A month after the case ended, it still lay on its side in the refrigerator, pushed to the back of the bottom shelf, and layered with Tupperware and cheeses in plastic wrap. Together, Richard and Claire had been wandering around Providence feeling lost. There no longer had been anything for them to hope for anymore. Richard found the bottle when they were packing to leave for San Francisco, nearly three long months later. When he opened it, the champagne had gone flat.
“It is amazing how quiet this city can be sometimes,” she said to Richard. Cocoa ran up and smelled her leg, and then scampered away, as though it was a game. “You can almost hear the fog rolling. It whispers.”
He just nodded, staring out as the sun started breaking in toward the top of the bridge. “We are lucky to be able to live here,” he said. “We are lucky.”
It had been more than two years since the accident. And the roads that Claire drove were different, and the air that she breathed smelled different (even tasted different, with a salty edge), and the history of where she lived was different—this dollhouse of a city that once was ravaged and destroyed, since reconstructed in elegance, and even expanded, where some of its most scenic points are built on top of the ruins of that very devastation, bringing to it a false sense of foundation. And yet there was still not a moment when Claire did not lose her breath when a shadow fell across the windshield, nor when she felt a sense of panic while reaching over to turn up the car radio or passing the boys who cheated into the crosswalk on Market and Castro as she veered up Seventeenth Street toward the Avenues. She considered that it was not as though every one of these moments served as a reminder, but rather that they were an extension of that moment on Route 111—a bubble that had trapped her, stretching with no dimension.
“I can just see part of it,” Claire said. She pointed. “Right there. Just the tip. Through the fog. Where the sun is breaking through.”
Richard stepped beside her, crouched a bit, and swayed some to his left. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
Aware of the time, they rushed back into the apartment, gathered their things set in the long narrow hall, and left through the front door. The furniture was laid out the same as in the Providence house, just more compactly.
Parnassus Avenue was busy this time of morning. The hospital staff and medical students and visitors and the infirm all made their way up the hill to the medical campus, as though the business of illness could be set to a clock. Richard had an interview with a neurologist who was coauthoring a textbook on the spine, and still not sure if he wanted traditional illustration or if he wanted to give in to the digital age. It had been harder here on the West Coast for Richard to sell his skills, since the proximity to Silicon Valley had pushed everybody’s expectations toward computerized images. But this doctor had seemed to value tradition, and based on the phone conversation they had had a week earlier, Richard felt confident about getting this job.
Claire was going to catch the 6, and then transfer downtown onto the BART train to get across the bay to Berkeley. She did this twice a week, where she taught two back-to-back classes at Cal as a distinguished visiting professor. There she could stand in front of her class in 308B Doe with no other identity than as a scholar of art history. Her only backstory was the research she had conducted and the books she had published. Her future was only presumed by the research she would continue on Crows over the Wheatfield, and its subsequent publication. (However her research still sat in an unpacked box with the illusion that she needed some distance on it before returning to the project.) Claire looked forward to her teaching days. She was able to leave the overwhelming ennui that was recalled when she sat alone in the quiet of their flat. Taking the train to the East Bay gave her a reason to venture out—minus the anxiety of having to be behind the wheel—and have the sensation that she was leading a different life. But sometimes when the train would be underground, Claire would catch her reflection in the darkened window, and for a moment startle at her face, as though she were seeing a long-ago acquaintance who she couldn’t quite place, but nevertheless had once held some level of intimacy. And it would just hang there, framed in the black, like a backlit museum mask whose aloneness is both haunting and powerful.
“Look back,” Richard said. He turned around and walked backward up the hill. “Turn around,” he said. “Come on, Claire, turn around.”
She kept walking forward, her satchel pulling down on her shoulder. The wind kicked up, as it always does going up the hill, and the air felt more damp and clinging. She pulled her collar up, and hunched a little, looking down at the ground to quicken her pace. Barriers blocked off the intersection at Third Avenue. Plastic sawhorses with calico stripes. The city was tearing up the street. It seemed as though they were always tearing up the streets around here.
“Claire. Just look. Right behind you. Turn around to look behind you.”
“I don’t need to see anything back there right now, Richard. I need to get to my bus, and you need to get to your meeting.”
Richard still did not give in. He took large backward steps up the hill, occasionally glancing behind to make sure that he was staying straight. “If we get up above the fog line you won’t be able to see what I’m seeing. Come on, Claire, turn around.”
But she didn’t turn around, and Richard walked backward for a few more steps before finally righting himself. Then he reached down and took her hand, and she held it. He didn’t tell her that from the side of this hill one could follow Parnassus as it descended the short distance down the hill where it turned into Judah, and then ran out its course for another mile or so until it dead-ended into Ocean Beach. There, the water was shining in its blueness, infinite as though there was no horizon—only the rise of the Farallon Islands breaking up the expanse—and that off to the right, if they kept going up and into the parking lot at the top of the hill, the entire span of the Golden Gate Bridge would be visible. He really wished she would turn around, and look to see the boundless beauty and the potential that was always available. Had the conversation taken place, Claire would have said that she didn’t need to see the whole bridge. Just a speck of it was good; enough to know that it was there.
They held hands as they walked onward, always aware of keeping forward because that was the only place that the past could never really be. His hand felt good in hers, it felt strong, and it somehow felt impossible. And sometimes she had to catch herself. She needed to turn off her mind, and feel the love that came from Richard for what it was. Because even three thousand miles away, where their histories were anonymous and they could walk as quietly as they wanted through the noise of the living, over a terrain that was as foreign as anything either had ever known, and where all should’ve been forgotten or at least forgiven, Claire could not help but link all the incidents in her life as though it was a collection of framed events, separated by thin white borders. It would be absurd to take Richard’s hand without thinking that this moment—walking up Parnassus Avenue in San Francisco, her legal troubles behind her, on her way to teach at Berkeley, deeply and unconditionally loved—was not possible without the tragedy. But she knew this thought would pass. Claire now lived fully aware that every day brought collisions of split-second decisions that could alter the course of your life forever. Most of the time they were barely noticeable. It was only the unlucky times when they made themselves aware.
And tonight, when the sun has set over the bridge, and the city turns even quieter, and Richard has turned in early when she wasn’t quite ready for sleep for another few hours, she will step over Cocoa, finally on the way to the bedroom. She will lie down next to Richard. His breath will float like the atmosphere. No matter what the consequences, she will know that together they are the keepers of the truth. What they know exceeds books and jobs and paintings and commercial ventures. They are the art. Both the exposition and expression of truth.
Claire will place her hand on Richard’s back and close her eyes. Let herself drift down this road. Willing to accept wherever they are going. But when she closes her eyes, Claire knows that she will see Ronnie Kennealy staring at her, peaceful and passionate, just as he had through her windshield. He is still there every now and then. Maybe one day, she hopes, he won’t be.