“Do you know from where he would have been returning?” the detective asks.
I don’t want the police anywhere near San Rafaela. Nowhere near it. “Daly City, I believe.”
The detective makes a note on the sheet with a slim pencil that he pulls from a pants pocket. “All right. I’ll have one of theofficers make a call down to Daly City to see if anyone remembers seeing him.”
“Thank you so much,” I manage to say.
The detective stands. Thank God he is finished with me. “We will be in touch if we have any news for you, Mrs. Hocking. And if you should hear from your husband or think of anything else that would be of assistance in finding him, please let us know.”
“Yes. Of course.”
The detective smiles politely. “Good day to you both.”
The man walks away from us and disappears into an office whose broken glass-paned walls have been replaced with sheets of plywood.
“Well, he was very nice, wasn’t he?” Libby says.
“He didn’t need to know all that about Martin and me.”
“And you needn’t be so ashamed of it. I was shocked at first when you told me, but look how everything turned out.”
“Indeed,” I mutter as I stand.
Libby rises as well and again links her arm through mine. “Let’s go find Chester and then head over to our new place. And then Chester can see about getting some men to clean up your old house.”
“Yes,” I answer.
Yes. The sooner the remains of my house are buried, the sooner the police will conclude that Martin Hocking, who was on his way home the morning of the quake, instead fell victim to it.
And the sooner I will be done here and can remake myself elsewhere.
Again.
28
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.
