They hadn’t had tickets yet when they left Vallejo—maybe they had never gotten tickets. Maybe, upon arriving in San Francisco on the afternoon of the sixteenth, they had changed their minds entirely. Mrs. Early was a woman of strong impulses and good instincts. Equipped, Andrew said, to survive. Once, when he was a very little boy, but old enough to remember, he had been sitting in a wagon and the horses had bolted. At the very instant the horses lifted their heads and pricked their ears, before the wagon even started to move, Andrew’s mother had stepped over to him and lifted him off the seat, easy as you please, then stepped backward as the wagon slid by her. It was a frightening thing when you thought of it—she could have been looking the other way, or not been quick enough and gone under the wheel, or been distracted by the thought of trying to stop the horses, but she had done just the rightest, safest thing, purely on intuition, so gracefully and quickly that no one had been afraid until later.
They did not sleep that night, or even go to bed. All there was to do, really, was to walk down to the ferry building and back to the house, talk to neighbors and sailors and officers, watch that glow on the southwestern horizon, and discuss whether it was brighter or dimmer, and all of these things they could no longer stand to do. At one point, Andrew, who was pacing from the front door to the back door, said, “I bet I could get to Oakland. They could well be in Oakland, and it’s hard to get from Oakland to here right now. But Mother is enterprising….” This for the hundredth time.
Margaret’s manner with Andrew until this point had been agreeable and submissive—she was too shocked to behave in any other way, for one thing, and, for another, he had an answer for every doubt. She thought her own doubts—her own doubts that were shading into convictions—were best left unspoken. It was bad luck as well as unloving to say what she thought, especially what she thought when she found out that the Palace Hotel was down. But now, finally, she said, “Yes, Andrew, your mother is terrifically enterprising, which is why I think that she would have gotten a message to us now, somehow, if she—I mean, they did find Mr. Devlin’s little girl yesterday, and she’s only three and a half, and they did find that Mrs. Devlin was killed. Lots of news, one way or the other, has—”
She could see by looking at his face that this very doubt, the doubt that came from Mrs. Early’s everlasting silence, wasn’t far from his thoughts, even though he hadn’t expressed it. He shook his head. “I’m sure it’s something else.”
“I am losing hope.”
“But I am not.” He walked out the front door. A minute later, he walked back in. His eyes were bright and his hair was standing on end, as if, while outside, he had torn his hands through it. He said, “It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense that they came out here to California on impulse and therefore died. It makes sense for us to have died, or people who have lived here for years and years to have died, but not this, this doesn’t make sense.”
“Life and death never make sense—”
“I know you think that.”
“How can I think otherwise? My brother’s friends found a blasting cap down at the railyard. What made sense about that? The universe makes no sense.”
“It does!” He said this so pugnaciously that she nodded in spite of herself, then reached out and took his hand. She said, “Then I will just say that I don’t know what sense the universe makes, though I might someday, I admit.” He glared at her as if accusing her of making a joke. She said, “I want your mother to turn up somehow. I’ve offered all the bargains.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I’ve cried. I’ve prayed. I’ve stared down the street until I thought I could see her coming. I’ve opened the door to every room in the house just when I was most clearly picturing her on the other side. I’ve imagined a broken arm or a broken leg, if that’s the price we would have to pay. I love your mother, especially now, after her visit.”