Part 5 of 5
She woke up to a Sunday dawn that was gray with rain. When she awoke again an hour later, still before the alarm, and poked her nose out between the curtains to see if it was still raining, she was surprised to find sunshine trying to chase away the clouds. She tried to remember if she’d ever seen a completely sunny day in all the times she’d been in San Francisco and couldn’t recall one.
It was early enough that, had she wanted to, she could’ve gotten ready and made it over to the Golden Gate Bridge for a hike before heading to the airport, but she couldn’t do it. There were only so many things they were going to do together that she could do alone, and she’d already done several of them this weekend. She couldn’t face one more. She couldn’t muster the false cheer and stiff upper lip required to do everything they were going to do; not today, anyway. Some things would end up just being mourned.
She’d slept with his face on her chest for the first time since he died, but of course it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t even close. But one is amazed by what one will accept in the absence of the optimum.
She washed, dressed, and started to pack up, determined to find breakfast and take a short walk to see the bay and her favorite bridge prior to leaving town. She turned out the last of the lights in the hotel room, feeling the same loneliness she always felt when leaving a place, as if she’d never been there. The wheels of her suitcase were loud on the cement, the noise bouncing off the corridor walls.
The advertised breakfast was barely subcontinental, a handful of plastic-wrapped muffins, a few pieces of white bread next to a toaster, and two partial pitchers of juice and milk. She passed, pausing only long enough to check out.
She parked half a block away from the Marina, already busy with Sunday morning exercisers taking advantage of a break in the rain. No dummies, they, and fit, too, these San Franciscans, walking and biking and wandering about with yoga mats.
To her left, the Golden Gate rose up until it was half-hidden in the cloud banks over the Marin headlands. It never ceased to impress her, this bridge, the fact that it could be built at all, the fact that it still stood after all these years, and possessed more beauty than one could reasonably expect from a collection of steel and cables. Any glimpse of it took her breath away, and the play of clouds and sunlight upon it this morning only added to its mystery. He had always been delighted by her delight in the bridge, seeing his world again through fresh eyes. She could not leave San Francisco without admiring it properly, if only from afar.
To her right, Alcatraz. She had never had a yen to tour it, certain the shades and the sadness would overtake her there. And to the east the city rose up in foggy silhouettes above the boats and the houses. It was a beautiful city. It was still a beautiful city, but lonely now.
This city, the entirety of Northern California they had explored together, had become a second home through and with him. But now every time she returned, it was to a dark house with no one home. All the stuff was still there, but the one who made it home was not. Everywhere she turned, she felt the heaviness of memory. The road signs. His sister’s eyes, the same color as his. She thought she spied the Bay Bridge, and began to cry, not because they’d ever been on that bridge, but because he had had hanging on his dining room wall a framed program his parents had gotten when the bridge had originally opened. She’d looked at it past the top of his freckled head, and at the blueprint of the Golden Gate Bridge framed nearby, during every meal they ever ate at his apartment. He was California; California is him. It can never be otherwise. And it can never be the same.