7

Andrew closed his eyes and dreamed of his father. Or more probably it was a memory emerging from the far distant past. There was a gray zone that surrounded some moments like layers of fog, the kind of San Francisco fog that rolled in at night and crouched there, hovering around the place where the land met the sea, ready to pounce on the morning and hold it hostage, sometimes all day long.

It was there in the great miasma of remembrance that Andrew lost himself. Or sometimes it felt as though he found himself in that space, the person he’d been at another time. He found a young boy, running along the lido, calling out to his father as they flew a kite or plied a catboat in a sheltered part of the bay. Afterward, a treat of sugared nuts from a vendor’s cart.

Papa was the best person in the world. That was how he knew the story about the treasure was true.

“Tell me about when you were a little boy,” Andrew used to say. He never tired of hearing the tale, and he heard it a little differently each time Papa told it.

Sometimes Papa recited the story at bedtime, speaking slowly and thoughtfully, as if trying to parse through his own memories. Then he would hold Andrew close and kiss him ever so gently, every single night, same as he did each morning before Andrew went off to school.

Although Papa never said so, Andrew came to understand the reason for this. You never knew when you were seeing a loved one for the last time.

Papa owned that this was so, because long, long ago his entire world had changed in a single moment. His world had been a small basement apartment with his beloved mam, who worked upstairs all day and in the evening smoothed her chapped hands with oil and drew lovely pictures and told him stories. Sometimes she’d take out her prized bird books, teaching him to recognize birds by sight—grebes and cormorants and quail.

His sparse recollection of that last day was that he and his mother had been jolted from bed in the dark. As the whole building trembled, Mam scooped him into her arms and spirited him up the stairs while screams came from the other residents. Timber and glass flew everywhere, horses and dogs adding to the noise. They choked on dust and smoke.