The Last Flight(42)
Eventually they turned their attention toward the game. Vera kept score, talking about player statistics and upcoming trades, while the rest of them debated whether spitting sunflower shells was any better than tobacco juice. Eva cheered when the Giants scored, drinking a beer and eating a hot dog. It was a slice of life Eva thought only existed in movies, this idea that everything could be so perfect—the grass, the sun, the players in their crisp white uniforms, hitting home runs over the fence and into San Francisco Bay, where a cluster of people with baseball gloves in kayaks waited to catch one of them.
Right before the sixth inning, Emily leaned over and said, “I’m so glad you could come today, Eva. Liz has been talking about you nonstop for weeks.”
A ripple of pleasure passed through Eva, but she offered her shyest smile, the one she reserved for bank tellers and police officers. “Thanks for inviting me,” she said.
Liz was quick to jump in. “I’ve seen a lot of brilliant minds in my time, but Eva’s is one of the sharpest I’ve ever encountered,” she said. “The other night, she nearly had me convinced Keynesian economics might be better than free market.”
Emily looked impressed. “That’s no small feat. Where did you go to college?”
Eva hesitated, imagining the questions they’d have if she said Berkeley. What was your major? Who were your professors? What year did you graduate? Do you know Dr. Fitzgerald? And how quickly one of them would discover the truth—an innocent comment at the faculty club, someone quietly recounting her story. The chemistry department was small, and people didn’t move on from Berkeley to better jobs elsewhere. There were probably several people still there who would remember her.
Luckily, Liz must have sensed her discomfort. “She studied chemistry at Stanford,” she said, giving Eva a tiny smile. “Try not to hold it against her.”
*
“You didn’t have to lie for me,” Eva said later, after they’d said goodbye and were strolling along the Embarcadero, making their way back to the BART station. The evening air was gentle on her skin, faint traces of the afternoon sun still present.
Liz waved her words away. “They’re all a bunch of aunties. They would have given you a ton of unwanted advice about going back to school and finishing your degree. It wouldn’t have mattered to them that you’re smart enough to have figured out how to do that if you wanted to.”
Eva thought about what was waiting for her on the other side of the bay. Certainly not the possibility of going back to college. That would never be an option for her. Until Liz came along, Eva had been happy. But now there was a hunger rumbling deep inside of her, a desire for more time with Liz and her friends. But not as a visitor passing through. She wanted to be a part of it, to live inside of it. Eva wanted to complain about why women didn’t have the kind of grant opportunities that men did. She wanted to feel the thrill of announcing another article placed in a peer-reviewed journal. She wanted to be the one who burned popcorn in the office microwave.
The idea of resuming work—the hiding, the lying, the vigilance that accompanied her every time she left the house—descended, pressing her into a tight knot, and a grief she hadn’t felt since her expulsion from Berkeley swirled around inside of her, as a part of her brain began to map out what needed to be done. Buy more ingredients. Clean the equipment. Start setting the stage for her withdrawal from Liz. She’d have to start talking about picking up more shifts at the restaurant, or perhaps invent a boyfriend who would soon consume her free time.
But there, in the darkening twilight, the water of the bay lapping against the pier pilings, the lights of the Bay Bridge sparkling in a graceful arc above them, shooting like an arrow into the dark, Eva felt the urge to reveal something more of herself. To tell Liz something completely true. “My last foster home was just on the other side of that hill,” Eva told Liz, pointing west, toward Nob Hill.
Liz looked at her. “What happened?”
Carmen and Mark had been the closest Eva had ever come to having a family. When she was eight, the couple had come to St. Joe’s, interested in adopting a young girl. They were accompanied by her social worker, Mr. Henderson, a pasty man with wispy hair and a briefcase full of files. The woman, Carmen, was bright and vibrant. When Eva met her, she seemed to glow with energy. Carmen’s husband, Mark, was more reserved and deferred to his wife, keeping his eyes down. Eva wondered if he, too, knew that it was best to always hold a piece of himself separate from others.
“Carmen and Mark,” she told Liz now. “At first, it was great. They pushed to get me into the gifted program at school. Bought me tons of books, clothes, took me to museums and the science center.”
“They sound wonderful. What happened?”
“I started stealing. First money, then a charm bracelet.”
Liz gave her a sharp look. “What made you do that?”
This was the tricky part. Eva wanted to explain it to Liz, to help her see an essential part of who she was. That she had depended, from a very early age, on being able to hide behind a curtain of lies, never trusting anyone enough to let them see who she really was.
“Being unwanted is a heavy burden,” she said quietly. “You never fully learn how to engage with the world. To allow others to see you.”
A large group of people walked toward them, laughing and talking over each other, and Eva waited for them to pass. How could she explain the way it made her feel, to listen to the way Carmen and Mark bragged about how smart she was, how lucky they were to have her? It had felt like they were covering her in plastic wrap. People could still see her, but the essence of who she was got trapped beneath their expectations, and she worried about what would happen when the truth seeped out. “It was easier to push them away,” Eva finally said. “When they looked at me, they saw the child of an addict. Everything I did—good or bad—was viewed through that lens, and as long as I was with them, that would always be my whispered story. It’s amazing how much Eva has overcome in such a short time, or You can hardly blame her, considering what she’s gone through. I needed to show them they couldn’t fix me. That I didn’t want to be fixed.”