“You know I would if I could, Viv,” she said. Again she seemed to hesitate, but this time she indeed set off, Pamela still in her arms.
Vivien watched Lotte walk down the street. Before she turned the corner, her friend lifted her hand in a halfhearted wave.
The sight of San Francisco, her beautiful city, broke Vivien’s heart. How well she knew these streets, the hills she and Lotte used to roller-skate down as children, the North Beach corner where they would go for Italian ice. Vivien always got lemon, enjoying the way it made her mouth pucker, the tartness both painful and pleasant at the same time. Lotte liked the sweet fruity ones, strawberry or peach. If she closed her eyes, her own personal map of the city appeared on the back of her lids. The house where she lived so briefly as a child with her parents before they died, just a day apart, from the Russian flu when she was a child.
Of that house, and that couple, Vivien only had the blurriest memories: a swing tied to a tree branch in the yard, being lifted by her father’s strong hands, the rustle of her mother’s skirts, a Douglas fir so tall that Vivien had to crane her neck to see all the way to the top, where a foil star perched. Her mother had hand-sewn an entire wardrobe of clothes for a doll Vivien had named Melody. She vaguely remembered sitting on a rug in a parlor with her mother, carefully dressing Melody in her new clothes. The doll’s porcelain face and soft blond hair remained clearer to Vivien than the face of her mother.
But of course Melody had been with her longer. When Vivien’s aunt took her to live with her in the big house in Pacific Heights, Vivien first dressed Melody in the forest green coat with the black buttons her mother had made just a few weeks earlier. Even as a teenager, Vivien had kept Melody on a shelf in her bedroom, a reminder of some elusive time she could not quite recall. Standing here now on Market Street, Vivien clearly saw that room where she grew up. The high four-poster bed with the hand-tatted bedcovers and pillows; the tall windows that opened out onto the city; the fainting chair covered in pale gold silk where Vivien would sit, a blanket over her lap, and read on rainy afternoons.
Her city.
Vivien opened her eyes to see that she was standing almost exactly where she first met David on the day she bought the ridiculous blue hat. There, just ahead, was the restaurant where he took her. Vivien watched as a streetcar came to a stop, its doors heaving open. She should run to catch it, but the weight of her trunk combined with the weight of her memories kept her in place, unable to move forward.
She did not like being here. She did not like seeing the ghost of her own self everywhere she looked. But the train to Denver left in the morning, requiring that Vivien spend the night in the city. All these years, she had avoided coming back. After those weeks of searching for David in the rubble, at hospitals, on the streets, she had taken Lotte up on her offer to stay in Napa with her and Robert for a while, until she felt stronger. A while had turned into months, and those months into years. Oh, she’d left the vineyard that summer, and moved into her apartment.
At first she would sit by the window and watch the world pass in front of her. People who walked with purpose, who seemed to have somewhere to go. Mothers pushing prams, adjusting their babies’ blankets, beaming down at them or fretting over them. Boys on bicycles. Couples holding hands. An entire population of people who continued living their lives even though Vivien’s had come to such a sudden halt. They seemed audacious to her, those people with plans and appointments and futures. How could they parade in front of her? How could the world, in fact, keep spinning?
One day, a man knocked on her door. Short and squat, dressed in a bright red jacket, he stood nervously twirling a straw hat in his hands.
“Is this the newspaper office?” he asked her.
Vivien shook her head. She wasn’t even sure where the newspaper office was in town. By this time it was late autumn, but she only ventured into the grocer’s and the pharmacy, the places where she could get necessities and then return home.
“Could you please direct me to the obituary writer?” the man said as if he really did stand on the doorstep of the newspaper office.
“This is a private home,” Vivien said. “I’m sorry.”
She began to close the door, but the man stopped her.
“I need the obituary writer. It’s for my wife.”
At the word wife his voice cracked. Eventually, Vivien grew accustomed to that, the way a word, a name, could break a grieving person. But that day, she felt embarrassed by the man’s emotion. She recognized herself in that instant, remembering how often she’d cried as she repeated David’s name to Lotte. At times, those two syllables seemed to carry all of her grief.