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 explainthat 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 doorused 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 shardin 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.”
