The light streaming through the stained glass window spilled across the first landing. How she had loved the effect this made, the way it cast gold and rose here. She threw open one door after another, but each room was empty. Still, the sight of David’s study with the heavy mahogany desk littered with papers, the maroon leather cigar box she’d given him for Christmas, the crystal paperweight and gold fountain pen, all of these familiar items, made Vivien pause. She took deep breaths, as if she might catch his scent. But the room smelled of nothing, as if it had not been used in a very long time.
She continued up the stairs to the third floor. There was the sitting room, its door already opened. And across the hall from it, her bedroom. Hers and David’s. That door was open too.
Ruth had arrived first, and she stood at the door like a sentry.
“He’s very ill,” she said softly.
Vivien took a step inside the room. The air smelled like rotting fruit. Like death, Vivien thought. Of course everything inside looked different. Vivien had taken the bed and armoire, the lamps and rug, with her when she moved to Napa. Her furniture had been replaced with Oriental pieces: a dark red bed, an ebony trunk with an ivory carving of elephants and tigers on its front. That trunk looked familiar to Vivien, yet she was certain it had not belonged to David.
In the bed lay a man so thin he hardly made a silhouette beneath the saffron duvet. As Vivien neared, she saw wisps of white hair against the embroidered pillow.
“David?” she whispered.
The man’s eyes fluttered open.
Vivien looked into them, and instantly she knew.
“Duncan MacGregor,” she said, her throat suddenly dry.
Disappointment filled her with such intensity that she sunk to her knees. Not David after all, but his old law partner.
He gave her a wan smile, showing long, yellowed teeth.
“Ah, Vivien,” he said, each syllable an effort.
She grabbed his hands in her own.
His hands were so thin she could feel the bones in them pressing against the skin.
Duncan closed his eyes as if to gather strength. When he opened them again, he began to speak in a voice so low and hoarse that Vivien had to lean close and place her ear to his mouth in order to hear him.
“You’ve come to write my obituary, have you?”
“I don’t know,” Vivien said. “I suppose so.”
“Just in time,” he said with a trace of his old humor. “How do we begin?”
“Tell me about yourself,” Vivien said, trying desperately to hold back tears.
“I grew up in India,” he said softly, “on a tea plantation.”
“Yes,” Vivien said, nodding.
Duncan continued to haltingly tell Vivien about his education, and how he came to San Francisco and when he met David. She listened, nodding at the familiar stories, until he finally arrived at the day of the earthquake.
“That morning,” Duncan continued, “April 18. David and I met in our office at 5 a.m.”
“I remember,” Vivien said.
He took a few wheezy breaths. “David, my law partner. My friend. In the middle of this dazzling life with you. A lucky bastard, he was. Until the shaking began and everything fell down around us. A support beam gave way and crashed in front of me.”
Vivien raised her head to look Duncan in the eye.
“Is David dead?” she managed to ask him, even though she knew the answer in her heart, knew it deep inside her.
“Right in front of my eyes,” he said. “An image I see every day. One moment he stood there, so bright and handsome. So full of life. And in an instant he was dead. There was no doubt. It was terrible, Vivien, but mercifully swift.”
The weight of all the years of hope made her weak. Vivien clutched the edge of the bed.
“I went to Lotta’s Fountain every day,” she managed to say, and the words brought back those awful days spent searching the city. At the fountain, survivors—their eyes red and swollen, their faces full of desperation—gathered, all of them hoping to see a loved one, to get information. All of them, like Vivien, hopeful.
“Every day,” she said again, her mind now tumbling over the past thirteen years and the lonely hours she’d spent living in grief. Strangers’ grief and her own.
“I’m sorry,” Duncan said. “I always thought you knew.”
“I was told you died. Of a head injury,” Vivien said.
“Rumors flew during that time, so I’m not surprised. ” Duncan said. His face was so gray and gaunt it seemed to disappear into the array of pillows beneath it. “I did get hurt, quite badly. I was in the hospital for almost a year, then I was sent to Arizona to recover more completely.”
Duncan closed his eyes. His breaths came out long and shallow.
“He needs to rest,” Ruth was saying. “Don’t you, darling?”
Duncan lifted one long finger and opened his yellowed eyes. “With his wife dead too, as his business partner I inherited his estate. Please. Take anything you want.”
Vivien’s gaze left Duncan’s face for a moment and took in all of the things that used to be hers.
“I don’t want anything,” she said.
She had to get out of that room, that house. She had to get fresh air.
“You’ll write it?” Duncan whispered.
“Yes,” Vivien said. “Of course.”