Multitudes of others have headed to the telegraph offices, the doors of which are now being guarded by soldiers to keep people in line and in some semblance of order. Stacks of messages to be sent are piled high in the one telegraph office we can get to on foot. Belinda had thought she would send a telegram to her friend Elliot to let him know we are coming, but I don’t see how we will get that message to him before boarding a train that will take us first south along the bay to San Jose and then north again to San Mateo.

“But there will be no one there to meet us at the station,” Belinda tells me when we turn from the long queue outside the telegraph office nearest the pier.

I assure her that after all that we have come through the last few days, we will surely find a way to get to San Rafaela from the station, which she says is three miles away.

We leave, only to stand in an equally long line for three train tickets. By the time we get to the counter, though, there are no more seats available on south-going trains for the day. We are given tickets for a train leaving midmorning tomorrow. We are told by a kind woman at the door that if we wish, we can take shelter in the First Presbyterian Church tonight, as they have turned their pews into beds and the women of the church are preparing food for as many as the church can hold. So this is what we do.

There is little privacy inside the church sanctuary, but we find a back-row pew that offers the most we can expect. I can’t help but watch as Belinda nurses the child once we settle in. It is such a beautiful sight. My own breasts ache with how beautiful it is. All around is chaos, but the baby simply does what babies do. She nurses in her mother’s arms while Belinda sits on a hard pew in a crowded church full of displaced people. The baby would do the same if she were in a palace. Everything is just fine in her tiny little universe, and she will have no memory of all this. While Belinda, Kat, and the baby rest, I wash out the few diapers we have under a spigot outside and set them to dry on the limbs of a squat hawthorn bush. Supper is stew and dumplings and apple brown betty for dessert, and, oh, how wonderful the simple meal tastes.

We awaken in the morning, where, on any other Sunday, the room would be filled with parishioners dressed in their finest, but today the reverend simply moves through the pews of grime-covered refugees, greeting us and offering a prayer over those who ask for it. We head to the train station an hour after breakfast and wait in the crowded terminal for our train to San Jose. I have never boarded a train looking like I know I must look. I’ve not bathed in a week or attended my hair. I am wearing the same dirty clothes I wore four days ago when we fled the pavilion. But I look around at the other passengers, and most look the same as me. Some look worse. There are a few paying customers who are clean and kempt, and they look upon the rest of us with pity.