Authors: Stacey Lee
THE SURGE OF ENERGY I FELT TOWARD Marcus drains away, and all my hurt rushes back with a laugh.
There is the pain of rising. I brush the gravel from my bloodied palms.
Mrs. Lowry says failure is not in the falling down, but in the staying down, and, Ma, I'm still upright.
There is the pain of forward motion. Joints crunch painfully together. Each step lights a fire in my knees.
There is the pain of memory. My eye sockets pulse, as if my brain is an overflowing vessel of injury.
His little fists grab me so tight. Why do you have to go?
There is the pain of dying.
Noble father, I'm sorry I wasn't there.
And there is the worst one of all. The pain of surviving.
I stumble forward, searching for a reason in the treacherous, broken earth. I hardly notice the people around me.
“âflew by. Never seen such a thing.”
“âsaw it all the time back in Virginia.”
“âenough hot air here to keep him aloft for hours.”
Hot air?
It takes me a moment to process what they're saying. I frantically look about. The same squashed houses, the same
desperate people. The same gray sky swimming in ash. Somewhere in my mind, a little boy points up and says, “Blue.”
Bah-loo.
Balloon.
I grab the arm of the nearest man. “Did you see a hot air balloon?”
He shakes me off, brown eyes peeled wide. “What the Sam Hill?”
“Did you?” I plead.
“It's not there anymore, but yes. Went that way.” He points. “I hope it didn't meet a bad end.”
I set off, not daring to hope. Past a crumbling church, over a nest of cables, through a corridor of houses that look like someone took a giant baseball bat to them.
People watch me hobble by, a strange parade of one.
“Did a hot air balloon pass this way?” I gasp more than ask a woman juggling two babies.
“I haven't the foggiest. Who has time to look at the sky?”
I ask a man the same question, and he shrugs. Onward I push, anxious for what I will find and dreading I won't find anything at all.
After another block, I fall onto my knees, panting. Nothing flies overhead but confused specks of earth, maybe wondering how they became part of the sky.
Tom, are you here?
A woman packing a suitcase on her front lawn brings me a cup of water. “Here, child.”
A blossom among ashes. “Thank you.” I glug it down in one long swallow.
My gaze falls to an object on the sidewalk a hundred feet ahead. I push the cup back at the woman, not sure I believe my eyes. It's the basket that bore me to the clouds a lifetime ago.
The Floating Island. And beyond it, two men fold the silk like a bedsheet.
Tom looks up. He is covered with the soot that baptizes us all, and his sleeves are rolled to the tops of his strong arms. His face tightens at the sight of me.
He says something to the other man, who looks up and drops the silk.
It's Ba.
As if in a daze, he walks toward me. His head is bare, and his face crimps with new lines.
I run toward him, not stopping until I feel his solid form in my arms. I catch a whiff of laundry soap and old cigars.
“But
 . . .
I saw you
 . . .
how are you alive?”
His graying eyes constrict, trying to keep the tears from spilling. His cracked fingers clutch at my arms, as if afraid I will disappear. “The morning of the earthquake, I heard dogs barking all at once. The birds were flying in all directions. I knew something was wrong. So I left the cart and went home, but it hit before I could
 . . .”
His voice grows hoarse, and he licks his lips. He shakes his head. “I am sorry I was delayed. I had to help the firemen. So many of our people were hurt.” He taps me on my bossy cheeks. “I was on my way to the park when a balloon dropped from the sky.”
My gaze wanders to Tom, quietly standing behind my father.
His usually clear eyes are bloodshot and puffy. I let go of Ba and fill my arms with Tom. It is not appropriate to show affection like this, especially in front of one's father, but for every rule, there is an exception.
Tom squeezes me close, and my emptiness leaves me.
“How did youâ?” I gasp.
“Captain Lu decided to visit your ma after all. She told him Monday would not be a propitious day for travel and to wait for Wednesday, so we overnighted on the ship.”
Ma. I stare into his watery eyes, stunned. Did she know she was giving this last gift to me? Like Ba, I always viewed her fortunes with a certain skepticism. But she was always right when it counted.
I imagine her in heaven, staring down at Ba and me with an ironic grin on her full moon face.
“Ah-Suk is okay,” I tell Tom. “He misses you.”
He blows out a shaky breath. Gathering up the silk again, he folds it briskly, hiding his emotions in the task. He removes his collapsible dolly from the basket, and lifts the Island onto it. Then he and Ba roll it along the street toward the park. I drift beside them, so light, it feels like my shoes are floating.
PEOPLE STARE AS WE WHEEL BY WITH THE strange contraption, though it's no stranger than the stuffed bird, the cello, and the painting of a mermaid we pass. When we reach our campsite, I gasp at the sight of a crowd gathered around a black horse as big as a barge. It's Winter!
Ah-Suk plants a foot on the horse's stirrup, and grasps the saddle as if to mount, but Tom cries, “Ba!”
The old man's face splits in astonishment, and all eyes converge on us.
“Mercy!” Francesca is running toward me. Her color is high, and when she embraces me, I can feel her trembling. “Thank God, you're okay.”
“What happened to Marcus?”
I don't hear the answer for, at that moment, Elodie, Harry, Katie, Minnie Mae and Georgina fly at me as well. Words wing about like bees in the marigolds.
“I'm so sorry about your father!”
“No need, he is fine. He is right there.”
“Well, grasshoppers!”
“Aren't you supposed to be on a train?”
“She's parched. Someone pour her water!”
“If you had told me
he
was coming, I would've put on my blue silk.” Elodie fluffs her hair, batting her eyes toward Tom.
Ah-Suk and Tom are locked in an embrace, and the old man's eyes are squeezed shut. Though no words are spoken, many things are said.
Ba smiles at me, an expression he wears so rarely that I can only stare back in wonder. And here at the edge of the park between ruin and order, lives begin to knit back together, one heartbeat at a time.
Harry pulls at the ends of her too-long army sleeves. “We're glad you're okay.”
Francesca presses a glass of water to me, and after a long draw, I give them an abbreviated account of what happened.
“Your turn now,” I tell Francesca. “Where is the noble lieutenant?”
Her mouth becomes a perfectly mischievous crescent. “He tried to lead Winter back to his quarters, but that sweet horse bolted and took us straight back to Dr. Gunn.”
Good ol' Winter, you know who's boss.
“Marcus followed, but that's when it hit me: If a horse can carve his own path, so can I. I told him that I changed my mind. And then Dr. Gunn told Marcus if he didn't leave me alone, he'd have him arrested for looting his animal.”
Headmistress Crouch approaches our camp from the lake, accompanied by a woman and a pug with a sooty face. The newcomer stands the same height as me, with gray hair just grazing her chin. A grosgrain ribbon and turkey feather give her cowboy
hat a feminine touch, and a pair of leather gloves dangles from the belt of her trousers. She marches right up to us and pumps my hand, her green eyes milky but strangely focused.
“Hello, Mercy. I'm Mrs. Lowry. Katie tells me you're the leader of this enterprise. It is an honor to meet you.”
Three days later.
A CROWD GATHERS BESIDE OUR RELOCATED Kitchen as Tom pulls up the stakes holding down the Floating Island. Using the heat from Tom's newly constructed ovens, the balloon is puffed up again like a proud mother owl.
Elodie, Georgina, Francesca, Katie, and Harry stand in a clump, army shirts and trousers tailored to fit using new supplies brought by the army. All the girls decided to stay camping in the park instead of moving out of the city.
Tom has promised to give everyone a ride, and I get the honor of being first.
Minnie Mae should be safe with her parents now. It took Mrs. Lowry all of fifteen minutes to find appropriate chaperones for the girls' trip to South Carolinaâan older couple with daughters of their own. Before Minnie Mae left, I gave her Jack's Indian head penny.
May it help her find her way.
The last stake is pulled. This time, the basket is tethered to a strong oak, so there will be no repeat of the flight of terror.
Elodie watches admiringly as Tom neatly swings over the basket. I can't fault her. Tom
is
rather hard to resist.
Katie claps her hands, and Harry smiles. She's been doing a lot of that lately. Francesca shades her eyes as we float higher.
Alone at last.
Tom lowers the drag and checks the lines. We rise in our bamboo elevator with its wings of silk. In Tom's capable hands and without a single wayward breeze, my stomach stays put. I sight our newly procured café tables, where Ah-Suk and Ba instruct Headmistress Crouch and Mrs. Lowry on the four winds of mah-jongg.
Ah-Suk and Headmistress Crouch are too absorbed in the gameâor each otherâto notice us floating overhead, but Ba glances up and our eyes meet. I show him the jar in my hands, filled with the paper I burned for Ma and Jack. He nods.
“I can see why you like walking on the clouds. You could keep track of everyone up here.” I give Tom my big eyes. “Maybe even me.”
Tom rakes a hand through his now-overgrown thicket of hair. “Why do you think I built it?”
I slip my fingers through his calloused ones. As oven maker, tent fortifier, furniture mover, and all-around handyman, Tom's hands have been busy these past few days.
Tents spread out at random below us. It looks as if someone in heaven upturned a basket of white lilies upon the park. People crook back their heads to watch us, some waving, some pointing, some even cheering.
If Francesca hadn't reminded me that I matter, I would be under a pile of bricks right now, instead of snuggled up with Tom. “Sometimes the only way to move forward is to be pushed by someone who cares,” I say.
“Did Mrs. Lowry say that?”
“No.” I polish up my best grin. “I did.”
Together, we watch the world spin under us.
The dragon and tiger have declared a truce and no more fires blaze. More than four square miles of San Francisco burned in four days, according to reports. But that number has lost its grip on me, because for every bad turn it throws my way, somehow I keep bobbing up to the surface again. It must be my magical floating shoes.
It will take years to rebuild San Francisco, but it will get done. And we will do our part, one meal at a time. More than a thousand people have passed through our Kitchen in the past few days. Georgina has been keeping track.
“You moved a mountain,” Tom says quietly.
“I wasn't the only one with a shovel.”
“No. But you were the one with the âbeautiful thought.'”
As the breeze tickles my nose, I think back to Ma's prediction that something propitious would happen for me this year. Did she mean the school? The feast? Or maybe the best is still yet to come.
Once the city stops crumbling, I have big plans. I will help Headmistress Crouch restore St. Clare's. We'll provide an annual scholarship in memorial to Ruby Beauregard. Then one day, I will help Francesca, Georgina, and Elodie start a restaurant of our own, maybe at the top of a hill, where meals will always be free to
those in need. I never backed down from a challenge before, and I don't intend to start today.
“I'm sorry about Seattle.” Tom has decided to stay and help Ba and our countrymen rebuild Chinatown, which will take a few years. He'll miss out on his big chance.
He shrugs. “Earth first, sky later. Maybe I'll build my own flyer, and then I'll take you anywhere you want to go.”
“Let's start with Texas. We'll visit Katie and Mrs. Lowry's ranch. Then maybe New York to watch Harry on the stage. After that, I want to visit the moon.”
“You never make it easy for me, do you?”
“Ma said you can't outrun it, but she never said anything about outflying it.”
We're high enough now to see the jade ocean gaze up at her lover, the sky.
Tom places a kiss on my head, one that trails down to my mouth. “We'll have to land soon. Now would be a good time.”
I let go of his hand and untwist the lid of my jar. Looking west, I imagine Jack and Ma as they were before death claimed themâdark jacket and pants on her, long johns on him. His hair sticks up, and a smile reveals a budding tooth. They look peaceful, even radiant.
The fragments of my letter float away, just a few more ashes in a city already covered with them. Salty ocean air rolls in on the breeze, and my soul lifts like a great blue heron.
“
Let's go, Mercy!
” I hear Jack's cheerful voice in my ear
.
Let's
go.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
After the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906, many community kitchens like the Kitchen of Mercy sprung up around San Francisco. In the wake of disaster, old divides fell away, and a wave of altruism swept through the city. Strangers collaborated to help those in need, without regard to class distinctions, race, or creed. It was a time of goodwill and inclusiveness.
It did not last forever. Walls were rebuilt, and people moved on. Yet, it is a testament to the indomitability of the human spirit in the face of disaster. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, “Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define
you.”