Human Sister (26 page)

“Please don’t be upset,” I said, hugging Michael in our accustomed way.

“I want Elio to like me.”

“Elio will like you. I’m sure he will. Just relax.”

“But I don’t know how to become a friend. People meet many others, but only a few become friends. What is the process? What if Elio doesn’t pick me?”

“The probability of Elio’s liking you is extremely high.”

“How can you know that?”

“I know both of you intimately. Each of you wants to like the other, and each of you wants the other to like you. Just look at yourself right now. I’m sure Elio has similar anxieties about your liking him.”

“But what is the process of becoming friends? I don’t know what to do.”

“There’s no formal process. It happens naturally. You both share many of the same interests. All you have to do is relax, be yourself, treat him kindly and with respect, as Grandpa said, even if some of what he does seems strange or misguided to you at first. If you do those things, I’m all but certain he’ll become your friend.”

“But look, we can’t even figure out how to hug.”

Concern welled up in me: Would these two very different people whom I loved like each other? There was, I knew, an elusive ingredient in the feeling one gets when one first meets another.

“Of course, we’ll figure out how to hug,” I said. I let go of him and stepped back, trying to remember how Elio hugged Luuk. “That’s it! Each raises his right arm over the other’s left shoulder. Simultaneously, each wraps his left arm around the other’s midsection—and they hug. Let’s try.”

First Brother

T
he gate in the fence surrounding the house is open. She breaks the pace of her walk as the dog runs through the gate ahead of her. She walks to the door of the house and presses on a button. No sound associated with that of doorbells is detected.

She raps on the door with the knuckles of her right hand. She pauses. She again raps on the door four times, though with approximately 50 percent more force than before. Seventeen seconds pass. She shouts: “Hello! Anyone home?”

She turns the doorknob and pushes. The door turns on its hinges. Through an approximately 10 centimeter opening she calls: “Hello! My name is Sara Jensen. Are you okay?”

She waits 8 seconds. “I don’t see or hear anyone anywhere. I’m really frightened.”

She waits 11 seconds. “The front door is unlocked. I’m coming in to see if you’re all right. Is that okay?”

She turns, leans her back against the doorframe, closes her eyes and moans, then looks out over the yard, the estuary, and beyond.

Sara

S
hortly after Grandpa returned from his trip to see Aunt Lynh and Elio, he was told that Berkeley’s chancellor had attended a party that was also attended by a woman, Diane Dorner, who was an elder of the ERP and also a university regent. The chancellor had made a remark about special admission for a bright young man related to Professor Jensen. Regent Dorner had replied that it would be inappropriate for the State of California to give special privileges to “such godless people, rich and intelligent though they may be.”

Grandpa hastily made a few appointments with old friends and former students who were on the faculty at Stanford, and Elio was accepted there. When we called to tell him the good news, Elio was elated—until Grandpa said that, as a Stanford freshman, he would have to live in a dormitory where he would have at least one roommate.

“You’re joking,” Elio said. In the background was his unmade bed that I missed.

“No, I’m not. If you go to Stanford, then you will respect and honor their rules.”

“But the whole idea was for Sara and me to live together.”

“Well, your idea is just going to have to expand a little. You may come home on the weekends, and I suppose it’ll be all right if you visit once during the week, as long as you are back in your dorm by midnight.”

Elio arrived on an Air France-KLM flight on 3 September, Grandpa’s ninetieth birthday and Michael’s seventh. At Grandma’s suggestion, she and Grandpa waited in the parking lot while I went to the arrival lounge to greet him. “When you see Elio walk out of Customs,” Grandma said, “you’ll be glad we’re not there.”

I didn’t fully appreciate what Grandma had said until about a half-hour later when the doors on which was printed “No Admittance” parted, and there he was, dressed in a light-gray pullover and charcoal pants, pushing a cart on which lay a suitcase and a carry-on. Had Grandpa or Grandma been there, I probably wouldn’t have jumped up and down with joy, probably wouldn’t have laughed and cried at the same time, probably wouldn’t have melted so completely into him when he finally held me still and kissed me.

On the way to the car, Elio spotted Grandpa and Grandma leaning against the passenger side of a new gray-blue Mercedes. Elio ran to them and exchanged hugs, kisses, and cheery greetings before he finally noticed the car. “I thought you had an old white Mercedes,” he said. “Did you get a new car?”

“No,” Grandpa said. “We borrowed it for the day. Here,” he added, reaching into the glove compartment and pulling out a white card. “Let me show you the registration.”

“But… that’s my name!”

“Of course,” Grandpa said. “It’s your car. How do you like it?”

With the sweet stunned expression of a child who’d just been given an unexpected gift, Elio ran his fingers along the edge of the car’s roof before ducking into the open door. A frond of jet-black hair fell over his gleeful face.

 We spent most of the morning driving around the Stanford campus, acquainting Elio with the buildings in which his courses would be held. For lunch, we drove up to the Claremont Resort in Oakland, where the first of the day’s three festivities to celebrate Grandpa’s birthday was held. Berkeley’s chancellor gave a moving speech in which she described a bio-implant that had been put into her mother’s brain after her mother had suffered a nearly fatal stroke. She credited Grandpa’s work for the implant’s success and for giving her mother many additional happy and productive years of life. I felt proud of Grandpa and hoped Elio and I would be able to measure up to him in our working lives.

At 1430 we departed for home, where the banquet hall adjacent to the winery’s tasting room was being prepared for a birthday dinner. One of Sonoma County’s renowned chefs had planned a menu around the many fruits and vegetables then ripe in our garden. In attendance would be neighbors and many of Grandpa’s close personal friends, including Senator Franklin. Fortunately, the senator planned to fly to Los Angeles immediately after dinner, so Michael didn’t have to spend his birthday immured within my bedroom wall on the chance that the senator might ask to see what he’d been told was now my private part of the house.

As we exited the A101 at River Road, Grandma remarked that we were in wine country, just a few kilometers from home. Elio wrapped his arms around me, and with the back of my head resting on his chest, I gazed out at the vineyards and the roadside fruit and flower stands, wondering what Elio was seeing and feeling on his first journey to his new home.

Did he notice the flat Russian River basin and the gently rolling hills covered with neatly cultivated vineyards? Did he observe how the rows of sunburst honey locust trees form a yellow-green archway over the long drive leading up a hill to our winery? We turned right about a hundred meters in front of the winery, and as we drove through the gate opening in front of us, I wondered what his thoughts were about the huge, verdant yard.

On our left, Grandpa’s tiltrotor sat on its pad, its proprotors pointing forward as if prepared to mow down a section of the ivy-covered security wall. On our right, over the broad green blaze of lawn, hovered plum and apple trees, and Japanese maples modeling their crimson and purple-bronze summer dresses. And in the garden frolicked late summer flowers, magnificent that warm, sunny afternoon, their colorful sex organs oozing fragrances full of desire.

Straight ahead, the drive appeared to end in a tropical-looking profusion of rhododendrons, palms, tree ferns and a dense wall of Hinoki cypress. This lush, green screen lay at the foot of a knoll covered with large rocks, ornamental grasses, and salvia, their purple blossoms erect in the still air.

At the top of the knoll was an English laurel hedge, behind which stood part of the security wall encompassing the nearly two-and-a-half-acre yard. Zigzagging up the center of the knoll were limestone stairs, which led up to a deck complete with bench and table. There, in the shade of the English laurel, I often studied on mild afternoons. Beyond the hedge and wall at the top of the knoll lay rows of chardonnay vines (unseen by us from the car windows), the roots of some having reached down through meters of soil to explore the outer surface of the ceiling of Michael’s rooms.

I asked Grandpa to stop the car. “Let’s get out here,” I said to Elio. “I want to show you the yard. But first”—I put my hand over Elio’s eyes—“tell us what you remember seeing on the way here after we exited from the automated tollway.”

“Um, I guess that must be Lily barking outside.”

“Yes, that’s Lily. But what did you see and feel on the way here?”

Keeping my hand over his eyes, I glanced at Grandma, who had turned around and was now smiling a knowing smile.

“I guess I was just looking at you,” he finally answered.

Grandma chuckled and turned back away from us.

“Oh, I can’t believe it!” I said, pushing my head against his chest. “It’s so beautiful around here.”

He kissed the top of my head. “Well, then, let’s get out, and you show me, okay?”

“Okay, but wait here. I’ll bring Lily around to greet you.”

I opened the car door, and as my right foot began searching for the ground, I experienced one of those strange feelings one gets while on the cusp of something new, that sense of a feral world between was and is, as when the solution to a problem is about to reveal itself, but just before the resolution erupts into consciousness. The two main threads of my life are coming together, I thought. I’m bringing Elio home, and my life—our lives, and Michael’s, too—will be new and wonderful.

Lily barked, jolting me back to the present. Harvest hadn’t yet begun, but everywhere the dry brown hills gave off a fragrance of hay, and near the vineyards hung the distinct scent of grapes ripening. Soon the little orbs of sweetness would bleed profusely into tanks and barrels and there metamorphose into wine.

Lily barked again. I knelt down to greet her. She licked my face and hands and sniffed curiously. “Come. There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

She pawed and nipped at my ankles as I walked around the car to Elio’s door. I opened the door and knelt beside him. She barked and growled. I took his hand and kissed it. She watched attentively. I intertwined our hands and offered them to her. She sniffed. I slowly turned his pinkish tan palm up to her. She sniffed, hesitated, sniffed again, then licked.

“Good girl!” I said, reaching to pet her.

Elio got out of the car, and Grandpa and Grandma drove on.

“Watch the car,” I said as it approached the giant, green feathers of the tree ferns at the end of the drive, turned left, and disappeared under a promontory of the knoll.

“That’s amazing!” he said. “From here I’d never guess there’s a garage or house or anything else there except the top of a hill. The house must be to the right.”

“Yes. The house and garage face perpendicular to each other. There’s an arborway of flowering shrubs and vines leading from the right side of the garage to the house entrance, but even if you watch carefully, you won’t be able to see Grandpa and Grandma walk through it.”

I knew Michael was eager to meet Elio, so I tried to hurry through a tour of the yard. But Elio wanted to take photographs to send to Aunt Lynh of the deck’s magnificent view: the tree-lined drive, the winery, the ribbons of vines coursing up and over and down the vineyard hills. Then, back down in the yard, he asked to see his father’s gravestone, beside which daisies and lavender blue asters bloomed. The dark gray granite, polished on one side, was inscribed: