“I knew it. I knew you loved me.”
I slowly unclasp my seat belt. Metal scrapes and glass falls into the street from across the intersection.
“What happens now?” she asks me.
“What happens now? There aren’t many choices here. What happens now is the cops come, you get a DUI, and you go to jail. Or you can try to run, but that woman you just hit doesn’t look like she’s gonna let you get too far.”
The other woman is outside in shock at the wrecked metal of her sedan.
“No, what happens now between us?”
I want to wipe the blood off her forehead but I’m afraid to touch her. Now the other woman is outside Syd’s window. She has her phone in her hand. There’s a fight about to go down in the street. I know well enough how hard Syd can hit, but I don’t think she would win this one — the other woman is yelling already: “Are you crazy, woman? Girl, what the hell you doing? Get out the car!”
Syd undoes her seat belt and unlocks the child lock. I get out, making sure my ankle isn’t broken. One of the headlights is busted. Syd steps out on wobbly high heels. The woman in the smashed car is livid.
“Bitch, is you drunk? You better have insurance, bitch!”
Syd isn’t even looking at the woman, she’s got her eyes locked on me. “I knew you loved me. I always knew it.” Sirens are approaching from a few blocks away. “Help me.”
I can’t. I back up slowly as blue and red lights come around the corner. I’m fading into the shadows past the streetlight. I walk ten blocks, turn, and circle around, long enough to see Syd in handcuffs in the backseat of the cop car.
She leaves me a message from jail that morning, tells me she loves me, says her parents are flying back. She leaves another message the day she gets out. I stay away from the old bars. I don’t go to Van Kleef’s for a year — the game is over.
It’s ten years and three girlfriends later. I’ve been paying rent on a house at 53rd and San Pablo for a decade. A friend gives me a free pass to a yoga class. I usually train at a kickboxing gym but I blew out my knee during a sparring match so want to try an easier route. I’m stretching out my tattoos and scars on a mat, enduring the slow meditative music, ready to sweat out years of toxins. The clock hits eight p.m. and the instructor walks in.
It’s Syd, now impossibly toned and tanned, her hair cut short. She’s wearing all black. Our eyes lock. That smile comes across her face. She looks away, starts the class. I can see the scorpion tattoo faded on her arm. I follow her instructions up to the point where she asks everyone to close their eyes for deep breaths — I keep mine open and she stares at me in silence. The class ends, everyone rolls up their mats. I’m ten feet out the door when I hear her say my name. She’s standing there with her keys.
“Want a ride?”
I take a deep breath.
She smiles. “Nothing more than that.” She points at her car. It’s a station wagon with two child seats in the back, and she holds up her wedding ring. “Just kidding, there’s no room.”
I laugh. “Yeah, I live nearby anyways.”
“You still writing suicide notes on napkins?”
“No. Now it’s to-do lists.”
“It’s all a choose-your-own-adventure. I hope you get the ending you want.” She points at her tattoo. “Poison’s always labeled.”
I tell her I’m sorry; she was right. We were reflections of each other, and I’ve learned I can’t look away anymore.
“We were young. We just weren’t the right antidote for each other.”
She clicks her car open and I keep walking. I don’t look back as her headlights pull away behind me, just another car going the opposite direction.
Part III
A View of the Lake
Survivors of Heartache
by Nayomi Munaweera
Montclair
I moved to Montclair in 2014. I was going through a divorce that had me gutted like a fish. Three years before I had married an artist. He was from Sri Lanka too, and finding him in San Francisco where I had not met another Lankan in years had felt like coming home. I had believed him when he said I was the only one who could save him from the demons: six ecstasy tabs on his thirtieth birthday, sex without a condom in the seediest parts of San Francisco after openings, and the like. He had been deadly depressed and courting death, he said, but then I had arrived like a princess in a flowing white dress and wrestled his life back from the dark. I had loved the idea of myself as savior, and then muse, and therefore I had believed him.
We had a large and expensive wedding in the fanciest hotel in Colombo. Then we returned to San Francisco, and for two years we built a life in the foggy city. At first he sketched me endlessly. I looked at the drawings and laughed, “I’m not this beautiful,” and he said, “To me you are.” He had rendered me perfect — the arch of my brows, the curve of my cheekbones, the angles on my hips far lovelier than the reality. A year later there were fewer drawings. When I snuck a look at his sketchbooks toward the end, I found myself a pendulum-breasted, hook-nosed hag.
That was around the time he realized I wasn’t his muse at all. The real angel of his salvation was a blond twenty-four-year-old nude model. After this revelation, we resided in hell. He didn’t know if he loved her enough to leave me; I didn’t know what to do with my life without him. One terrible midnight I held onto his ankles and sobbed, begging him not to go. The humiliation of this memory still scratches at my skin. Despite everything that happened, this is the only regret that lingers from that grotesque time.
What saved me? A few different things. Friends, of course. And a soft landing across the bay in a town called Montclair. When it was clear that the divorce was imminent, I tried to understand how to begin life anew. I couldn’t stand the apartment that had been the witness of my humiliation. I would leave it to him and therefore I needed a place to live. Friends said, Come to Oakland, it’s better here, the rents are cheaper, the people more diverse.
Oakland? I thought. The murder capital of America? I had lived in San Francisco for a decade and grown up in Florida before that. Oakland was just a few miles away, over the bridge flung across the glittering bay, but I had barely ever been there. There were guns all over the streets, people said. Young black kids were getting shot by racist cops all the time, we heard. From the soft, hilly embrace of San Francisco, Oakland sounded like a war zone.
My friend Chloe had lived in the Oakland Hills for more than a decade. Her house was impossible to get to without a car so I had never visited her. Instead, in the years of our friendship, she had always come to me, and every time I had opened the door of our San Francisco apartment to her, she stood there in shorts, a T-shirt, and sandals. I’d let her in and she’d say through chattering teeth, “It’s warm and sunny in Oakland right now, you know.” I didn’t really believe her. How was it possible that just miles away the sun was blazing?
Now, in the midst of my divorce ravages, she invited me to rent a room in the house where she lived. A roommate was moving out so it was perfect timing. She said, “You’ll love Oakland. Anyway, you won’t find a place you can afford in the city anymore.” She was right. I dragged my heartbroken self from open house to open house, but during the three years of my marriage, rents had skyrocketed. Tiny apartments with no light and moldy bathrooms were going for exorbitant prices; people lined up to fill every available vacancy; landlords could afford to be assholes.