Yerba buena

by Nina LaCour

After Sara’s mother died, they returned to the house, three of them now. A little boy, hardly more than a toddler, who could not be consoled after the tiniest sadness: milk gone curdled and dumped out of the glass, a hole in his sock, a missing toy. A man who joked and laughed with his friends but howled in his bedroom at night so fiercely he woke his children. A twelve-year-old girl, every part of her tender and ragged. It hurt to eat and it hurt to be hungry. To be awake was to be in despair, but her muscles grew sore from inertia.

Annie was gone and Sara didn’t understand how the world was still the world. How could she be sitting in a diner with this plate of food, how could her feet rest on this floor, how could she unroll her paper napkin to discover a clean set of silverware inside? But she’d already lived through that particular shock once, so she knew it meant nothing when she took a bite and it tasted good. It would taste the same whether or not Annie was alive.

she found herself wondering if this was something she actually wanted. Yes, his attention made her feel special. Yes, she enjoyed their mornings together. In fact, she enjoyed them too much. She ached for the idea of more with him but she didn’t, she realized now, actually ache for the reality of it.

How pathetic it was to let someone she rarely saw have such a hold on her life.

she couldn’t continue to splice her life into the Jacob and the not-Jacob. She craved one life, a whole one.

She wanted him so badly. “It feels like you,” she said. By which she meant it felt like something miraculous but tenuous. Something too precious to be hers forever, but something she would hold onto as long as she could.

She existed outside of her life and she knew it. When faced with danger, she couldn’t even shout. She barely heard a word people said, too busy making her face appear eager, nodding her head, and saying, “How interesting.” Early in the new year, Emilie walked into an Echo Park sandwich shop and there was Colette. She was with a friend, Emilie noticed with disappointment. She’d thought maybe this would be their moment.

Sara had wanted a moral from the old man’s story. But in its absence, she created one for herself: she belonged there, just as much as any of them did.

Danger was everywhere, all of the time, and they were making it worse. That glittery whale, the art above his mantel, the way the faucet ran and ran right before he’d leave her. They were doing something terrible. Something was bound to catch up to them, even if it was only themselves.

All this time, she’d only wanted to feel special. But seeing his life—with his restaurant and his bungalow and his family, his car and his vacation house and the café he surely stopped at each time he visited the canyon—showed her how much smaller she’d made her own. She’d had so little when they started. Now, somehow, she had even less.

She’d thought her life was on the verge of changing, but it wasn’t. Thought she was a complete person, discovered she was mistaken. The incompleteness lingered and expanded until she could barely open her eyes.

There was only so much grieving allowed when it was over someone who was never really hers.

“You guys know that feeling, where it’s like … you’re moving through fog? Except it has more mass than fog? You can barely get out of bed. Forming words is hard.”

She thought of how she’d stayed up all night writing her paper after the trip to the canyon. All the meaning she’d found in its pages when her life had felt empty. She wanted to know what it meant to Sara. “What’s it about, to you?” Sara leaned back. “I guess, how they both come from the same place but end up with completely different lives. Just based on their choices. It’s fascinating. You?” “I think it’s … like, when you’re a passing person, other people believe what they want to about you. Whatever is easier or better for them. They see what they want to, in you. So if you don’t really know what you want—or if you know what you want, but it’s bad for you—you can veer off in the wrong direction.” Emilie closed the book, set it back on its shelf. “But if you do know, then, I guess, you have a lot of freedom.”

Her eyes stayed open for all of it, her jaw unclenched, the pleasure felt pleasurable for the first time in ages. The first time since she was a teenager, since before she ran away. And yet it frightened her when it was over. No emptiness this time. It frightened her, how open her heart was. Emilie slept soundly, and Sara stared at her for a very long time. She was trying to figure out what had just happened. She was trying to trust it.

Sara had been right to be afraid. Right to distrust something that felt so good. As punishment: her old life, the old heartbreaks, following her into this one, here to drag her back.

She laughed. “Oh yeah,” she said. “I needed to cheer up.” “Oh,” he said. “Was something going on that I didn’t know about?” She looked at his expression—concern, curiosity. How could she change her major so many times right before she was set to graduate, and have no qualms about moving out of her studio on a week’s notice, and, to the best of their knowledge, have had no love life whatsoever for the last three years, and have none of this be the cause for any concern? Maybe to them she was someone content to give rides and show up for dinners. Maybe they didn’t think it mattered to her whether she was arranging flowers or sorting pills, as long as she was keeping busy.

At points throughout the day, she found herself wondering if she could have had this, with him, all along. Had he always been willing to spend hours and days with her? Was he only waiting for the right project or reason?

Had she asked, would Bas have helped turn her apartment into a happier space? A place that filled her with confidence, so that when Jacob said, I want to see where you live, she would have been enough of a whole person to have known better, to have said, Sure, bring your wife, I’ve been wanting to meet her.

So this was how it felt—to be dealt a blow, to pause, to keep going in spite of it. Not to start over but to continue.

Hey, Ulan, what made you leave your home? Back when you came to the U.S.?” “Opportunity,” he said. A single, definitive word. So much certainty in it. “Did you have to give up a lot to come here?” “Nearly everything. But that’s the way it goes. I lost nearly everything, and then I built something better.”

And even though, when Emilie thought of her sister, she felt the sting of rejection—the starkness of the choice Colette had made, to leave them all, to not offer a phone number to reach her, to disappear from everything on only her own terms—Emilie felt a rush of gladness, of love, upon hearing Colette’s voice.

I just keep thinking about it. We do a lot of visioning here? Like of our right paths? And every time I do one of the meditations, it keeps leading to you. I don’t want to pressure you at all. But I thought I’d ask.”

Sara, the layer of stone over her face. No, not stone: resin. Just under the hard surface was a pain so deep it made Emilie’s chest ache thinking of it. Unclear, if she was pulled over and staring into a courtyard (the wrong one, she realized, fountainless and quiet) out of lust or love or anger. Curiosity or desperation.

Emilie knew it was a risk, allowing herself to hope for closeness that would last. But Colette had chosen her over the others, even though it meant living in an unfinished, cavernous house, and Emilie, despite her fears, was glad.

She felt Sara watching her as she rolled the wallpaper up and returned it to its box. Felt her gaze like a warm light, wanted it to last. The day was slipping away already, and then what would await them? She wanted Sara to stay and stay.

Sara leaned back, listening. And Emilie liked how it felt to be listened to. Liked the sound of her own voice telling the story. New to her, all of it. This confidence, this openness. She told Sara more.

Emilie saw that it was true—there was a lighter feeling to Sara. She drank her coffee faster, seemed more awake. Emilie wanted to be happy for her—was glad for her, of course—but there was something she couldn’t shake. A memory of Colette, teaching her the guitar before shutting her bedroom door. Of Bas, tearing down walls with her and then leaving. Emilie knew that things could be good—beautiful, even—and then, without warning, they could be over. Sara had been hers for these weeks. Yes, she still created recipes and trained bartenders. Yes, she saw her friends. But more than anything else she’d been with Emilie.

And now her brother was coming home. Emilie steeled herself for it, decided to get ahead of it. “I know you might not be around as much,” she said. “For a little while.” Sara leaned toward her, kissed her collarbone. “I’ll still be around.”

and returned to the kitchen. Colette was there, waiting, turning the pages of the cookbook. Emilie had the feeling that the book might hold answers for them, as though it were more than a collection of recipes. A manual for existing, perhaps. Step-by-step instructions for how to move through the world. Her sister turned another page. “Do you ever think about being Creole?” Emilie asked. “Like is it ever on your mind?” “Sometimes,” Colette said. “I wrote so many papers about it. All through college. I was trying to figure out what it meant. How I fit.” “I want to read them. Can I?” Emilie shook her head. “I found a whole stack of them when I was moving out of the studio. They were so revealing. I was embarrassed for myself just skimming over them. I had to throw them away.” “Oh.” Colette’s brow furrowed. “But you were just learning.” Emilie shrugged, but her sister’s compassion disarmed her. Maybe she needed to be gentler with herself.

When she finished explaining it all, she held her arms out and it was like … like I was an organ she’d been missing, and now I was back inside her body. And it felt like we’d both be able to survive as long as we were together.”

Incredible, how these facts she’d never spoken came out in sentences that made sense. All her life they’d felt too terrible. As though the speaking of them was what would make them true. As though they hadn’t already been true all that time.

“How old were you?” “Fourteen.” “Fourteen. So sweet.” They weren’t the words Sara was expecting. Everything with Annie was cast in loss for her, but now she saw them in a different light. In a before time, still innocent. She and Annie in the forest, their young bodies, their hunger. So sweet—yes. But then.

“She’s a bartender in LA,” Spencer added. “Want one of these?” Tina asked. “No,” Sara said. “No thanks.” She watched Tina as she poured, felt herself exposed. Not a symbol of celebration. Nothing beautiful about it. Maybe she’d been tricking herself all this time, thinking what she made was special. Maybe she was a glorified version of this kid she was watching. Maybe she was just like her father, selling drugs. Only she dressed them up and made them sweeter.

“People like Eugene…” Lily began, locking eyes with Sara. “Men like Eugene. They rarely suffer for the things they do.”

Dad and those guys—they didn’t kill her. You know that, right?” She shook her head. “She asked for the drugs,” Spencer said. “She paid for them.” Sara saw herself in Eugene’s house, taking off her clothes. Three hundred dollars in cash in her hands, exactly the amount they’d agreed to. “He could have told her to go home. He could have thought, ‘This is my daughter’s best friend. Might be better if I don’t.’” “Yeah,” Spencer said. “He could have done that. That would have been the better thing to do.”

Together, Sara and Dave walked back down the forested block, past the onlookers who’d turned away from so much in their lives already. Who would turn away again, she knew, from this small thing.

She knew how this worked, had been through it before. Someone she loved would leave her. Her job was to stay quiet and still and out of the way. To wait, to not need anything, to trust they’d come back. All those nights Jacob had disappeared as she slept, and then reappeared in the mornings at the restaurant, or in the evenings with his knock at her door. All the years she’d thought Colette was lost forever, until the morning she arrived on Emilie’s front stoop with all her possessions. The afternoon she waved goodbye to her father from her grandmother’s house, certain it was over, but then found him with her again, months later, stirring gumbo on her stove. Even Sara, after the first time, had caught Emilie’s eye from across the restaurant, had found a moment to talk to her alone, had told her she wanted her back.

“I didn’t know what to say when you were leaving because all I wanted was for you to stay. I thought I needed to act like it was fine that you were leaving, and fine that you didn’t need me, but I want you to need me. I shouldn’t be saying any of this right now—I know. Your father died, you’re back in a place that you hate, you have so many terrible things to do and here I am being a mess, but I can’t keep not saying it. I had this horrible nightmare. I got up and got in the car like I could just drive to you, like I knew where you were or if you’d even want me. Did you mean it, when you said I could come? I thought you were just saying it for my sake, like you could tell I was afraid of being left behind. I am afraid of it. I hate it. I hate that you drove away yesterday. I want you to need me but you’re fine on your own.” She barely recognized her own voice—loud and plaintive—but speaking each word was a relief. As embarrassing as it was, as pathetic as she must sound, she felt the unveiling of herself. Like taking off her clothes on the night they first went home together. Here she was, all of her. “I try so hard to be good. To be easy. To not be a mess. But maybe it’ll be okay with you if I’m messy. If I fuck up and do the wrong things. If I care about myself even when you’re going through too much already. Or maybe you’ll hear this and think I’m ugly and needy and selfish. I don’t know. I wish I could drive to you but I don’t know where you are or even when you’ll get...

Emilie walked past the cut flowers to the shelves of vases. So many more now than the shop used to carry. Glass along the upper shelves, ceramic in the middle. On the ground clustered stone and concrete and terra-cotta. All of them waiting to be filled. I was a vase. The thought struck her as she gazed at the wall of them. She had been a vessel; it was true. She’d stepped into this shop, introduced herself, asked for a job, hoped it would fill her. And then, for a time, sitting with Jacob at the community table, she’d been a flower. Snipped from the root, quick to wilt, temporary. She’d existed to be lovely and to be chosen. No one had expected her to last. But she hadn’t been a flower when she’d gone to live with Claire, had she? Emilie traveled deeper into the shop. She was in the addition now, its ceiling higher, its rows of tables laden with houseplants. Water, she decided. That’s what she’d been with Claire. Shapeless, colorless, but necessary. She’d done what she had to. She had been there for her grandmother. She’d kept her family afloat. But what was she now?

They would understand each other, make room for each other. Each of them driven, each of them in love. But then, something would go wrong. The pain inside of Sara would rise up again. Emilie would fall silent instead of fighting. They’d lose one another for a time, and what would they do, then? Sara off, searching for her brother, tending to her wounds. Emilie, craving something of her own. A new house to flip, maybe, and months sunk into it. Lunches with Alice and Pablo, a trip to San Francisco to see Colette and Thom and Josephine. Hands in plaster, head in plans. Time of her own, no one to tend to, until Sara returned, and Emilie took her back, and they continued the dance. So right while it lasted. So sweet, and bitter, too. Emilie had suffered enough heartache already. Surely, there were wiser choices. Surely, she knew enough to know better. But here was Sara, now, on her doorstep, just as Emilie had hoped. Here was Sara’s hand, reaching for hers. How warm, how right. “Let me in?” Sara asked. And Emilie opened the door.