her office, Lena lights her candles, holds her book in her hands. It is hard to see through the tears that splash onto the yellowed pages. The thin threads of similarity between her life and Tina’s are always in her head: their birthdays, a little insecurity, and deference to men. Creativity. For years Lena’s art has been limited to the preservation of family posterity: anniversaries, birthdays, holidays, vacations. Time to step it up. If, she wonders, psychics gave Tina clues about her future, then shouldn’t she consider the clues Vernon gave her?
f f f
The parking lot outside the camera store overflows with cars and the men and women who rush in and out of them. Lena sits inside her car watching people watch her rip the cellophane from the digital SLR camera she purchased minutes ago. Drizzle collects on her windshield, blurs the sharp edges of the megastore’s grayish facade, the sky, and the people in a way she would like to capture in pictures.
The chunky silver camera hides between layers of molded styrofoam, cardboard, plastic wrapped cables, a laminated quick reference chart, a 1GB compact flash card, batteries, and quarter-inch-thick instruction booklets in Spanish, English, and Chinese, all of which Lena tosses back into the limp plastic bag. She slips four batteries into the chamber. The camera emits an electronic, susurrant whine. Lena rolls down the window and points to the huge electronics store. Click. Points to the sky. Click. Points to the little girl passing by pointing at her. Click. Turns the camera lens around to her own face. Click. Camera in hand like a newborn, she sets it back in its cardboard cradle on the passenger seat, turns on the ignition, and backs out of the lot.
The city of Emeryville used to be an obscure industrial city on the edge of the entrance to the Bay Bridge. In the sixties and seventies, the mudflats were blank canvases for artists and rebellious hippies from UC Berkeley to build wooden sculptures and Vietnam protest signs in the slushy marshes alongside the freeway. Now the steel factories are gone, replaced with biotechnology headquarters, a mall, and a movie complex; only the train tracks remain. Lena drives to an empty lot next to a new condo building where anise grows wild, and the air smells of licorice.
Out of the car, into the street and the lot beside it. She takes the camera and snaps picture after picture. Click. The rusted iron tracks, the rocks and gravel, the feathery weeds between the jagged stones and splintered wooden ties, the cracked brown beer bottle and discarded keychain beside it. Click. The back of an abandoned warehouse, its dock covered in graffiti, discarded grocery carts, the wrought iron gate of the condo complex. Click. She shoots at every angle she can imagine: upward looking down, downward looking up.
She wishes that she had someone to hug and to hug her back, because she is so filled with the thrill of creating, the thrill of knowing that this old love will be the foundation that roots her to herself, especially if Randall no longer will.
Chapter 13
This lake in the middle of Oakland is only odd because it is not in the middle of the city. But that’s what Oaklanders say: Lake Merritt is a lake in the middle of the city. Actually, Lena thinks, it’s kind of cool. Like the canals in Paris. Or Central Park, if there is a lake in Central Park.
A photographer focuses his camera on a bride and groom in front of a pillar covered with rambling ivy. That is not the picture she would shoot, Lena reflects, pleased that her old passion fulfills the possibilities of Vernon’s prediction. She would pose the couple in front of one of the thick, gnarled trees near the western side of the lake to accentuate the opposites: the couple’s loving intimacy and the bare-trunked tree’s solitude.
With both arms extended above her head, she leans to her left and the bushy-haired man with seventies-style headphones coming her way. She prays he can’t hear himself sing, knows that James Brown never sounded so bad. Arms to the right and away from the man who speed-walks in a kelly green Lycra bodysuit. If only her buns were that tight.
Most runners take the path to the right from this exact midpoint of the lake; there is the option of the higher cement sidewalk or the lower dirt path. A tree-lined grassy knoll between the two paths is filled with