The Last Time We Met

7

"Earthquake!" I gasped as I launched into wakefulness.

Only I was in my bedroom in 2019, and Cedric was squinting up at me, having been disturbed from his slumber.

I waited a beat, thinking it was the kind of dream that was based on reality, like the time I dreamt I was at a hospital getting my arm amputated and woke up to find that my arm had been pinned beneath me and fallen asleep. I hoped that there was an actual earthquake here in 2019 causing my dream to end on such a terrible note.

"You okay?" Cedric asked, dancing his fingers up my spine. My bare spine. I was naked. I looked down. He was naked. We were naked, and all that we had done before that memory transported me away crashed down over me.

I grinned at him. "Yeah. Just a dream, I guess."

"Hmmm." Cedric nodded sagely. "Yes. Earthquakes and explosions. All metaphors for sex—"

Swatting at him, I moved off my bed, with a pause when I realized that when I stood the sheet would fall away and I'd be naked. I bent over and collected my boxers, then tugged them on.

"Awww," Cedric said.

"My mom will be home soon," I explained. Then I lifted myself up and pull the boxers all the way up. Cedric tugged at them. I leaned down and kissed him. "We should do this every day."

"Oh really?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." I sighed and pushed myself up, knowing that this conversation was going nowhere and I would allow it to go nowhere into eternity if I didn't stop. "Come on. I need your expert vegetable chopping skills."

I wished I were one of those people who could stay in the moment, but between sex with Cedric and these new memories I was having a hard time. Cedric did his best to keep me with him, bumping into me on purpose and then "apologizing" with his lips on my neck, my cheek, my chin. When Mom finally flung open the front door, she was hauling this thing that looked like a bicycle seat on top of two legs that stuck out the front and back. It gave us plenty of time to pretend that we hadn't been making out for the past ten minutes.

"What is that?" I asked after hearing a series of crashes as she maneuvered it through the door.

She wrestled it into the living room. The main problem was that she was also carrying her yoga mat and a bag full of foam rollers. She set it down. I noticed that the two legs ended in wheels.

"It's called," Mom started, then whipped out a paper from her bag, "Horse Riding Fitness Ace Power." She shrugged. "It's from Korea."

"What do you do with it? Is it like, a bike?"

Mom dumped her bags and sat on the saddle. Cedric and I watched, me with increasing horror, as she moved not only up and down on it, but in a strange hip thrusting motion.

"Uhhhh," Cedric said.

"It looks like you're, uhh..."

Mom dismounted. "Yeah." She stared at it. "I don't know how I'm going to do this without getting a thousand gross comments from internet trolls."

"Is it really a workout?" I asked. "I mean..."

"I suppose. Honestly, I think we're just scraping the bottom of the barrel here. There aren't enough new fitness fads to review." She sighed, then smiled at me brightly. "What's for dinner?"

"Shrimp tacos."

"Sounds heavenly," she said. "I'll change and be right down to help."

"It's almost ready. Just finishing grilling the shrimp."

Mom bounded up the stairs, and Cedric wrapped his arms around me from behind. "That means we have about five minutes to make out," he whispered in my ear.

Needless to say, I was effectively distracted until Cedric left later that evening to get home before his ten o'clock curfew. I drove him home, then nearly fell into bed once I got back, until I realized I'd need to change the sheets and clean up before I could sleep. And when I did finally lay down, Cedric was all I could think about: his hands on me, him inside me. I missed him with an empty ache in my gut.

Saturday morning dawned cloudy, and I lay there enjoyed the peace until the realization struck me: I hadn't written down any part of my dreams from the day before. I hauled out my notebook and wrote down the significant names and dates that I recalled: Theodore Shaw, Henrietta Walters, San Francisco, 1906, Golden Gate Park. I had a sinking feeling when I wrote down that year. Everyone knew about the San Francisco earthquake; I just couldn't remember the exact year. I held a thread of hope that what I'd remembered was some tiny little earthquake, the kind we had all the time here, as I opened up my laptop and typed in a Google search.

"The 1906 San Francisco earthquake struck the coast of Northern California at 5:12 a.m. on Wednesday, April 18," began the Wikipedia entry, and I struggled to breathe as I skimmed the article. Three thousand dead. Eighty percent of the city destroyed.

I gnawed on my thumbnail as I scrolled through a few articles. Golden Gate Park became a refugee camp for people whose homes had been destroyed by the quake. I tried another search that landed me on the website of the Museum of San Francisco. I was looking for a list of victims, but what I found was called the 1906 List of Dead & Survivors. What did that mean? The list had barely 1,000 names, and 75 unknowns. Where were the other 3,000 names? And had all these people died?

The list did not include anyone named Walters. There were two Shaws, neither of whom were named Theodore. Then I realized I could look up obituaries. My library had a subscription to Ancestry, so I logged in and began my search.

First, I looked for Henrietta Walters. I found a census report for 1900 that listed a 10-year-old Henrietta Walters, along with her parents Frederick and Mary. There were tons of other results, but the dates were all wrong. I did find an obituary for her father, dated May 1906, once I searched local newspapers:

Frederick A. Walters, of San Francisco, died in his home on May 2, after suffering a heart attack. He was the son of Arthur and Elizabeth (Cosgrove) Walters of Stillwater, Oklahoma. He was a top financier for Pacific Crest Bank, which was destroyed in the Great Quake. He leaves behind a wife, Mary, and a daughter, Henrietta. Funeral services will be held at the Methodist Church.

So, it appeared that Henrietta had survived the earthquake, even if her father had been devastated financially and never recovered. But I couldn't find anything further about her life. She wasn't mentioned in the society pages of the newspapers, and there was no record of her death.

I turned my searching to Theodore Shaw. My shoulders sank as I scrolled through the list of search results. The name was too common, and I couldn't quite pinpoint the year. I knew I – he – had been eighteen at the time of the earthquake, which meant he had been born around 1888. I found him in the census, again for 1900, listed as "Theodore S. Shaw." That helped narrow down the results, and I eventually found a possible obituary for him by backing out of the library databases and searching Google. At least, I thought it could be him. He had died in 1967, still in California, though he had moved down the coast. "Theodore passed away after a short battle with cancer. He enjoyed photography and could often be seen walking the shore. He is survived by his nephew, Louis Shaw, and several great-nieces."

Sitting back, I tried to figure out what had happened. In my vision, I had thought Henrietta and Theodore had just fallen in love. And if Henrietta did not die tragically in the San Francisco earthquake, then I assumed she and Theodore would have continued to see each other. But this obituary didn't even mention a wife.

One final search led to the discovery of a small advertisement in the San Francisco Chronicle:

"Theodore S. Shaw, Portrait Photography," it said in plain lettering, with the address underneath. No telephone number, I noted – then remembered that in 1906, if he even had a telephone, all anyone had to do was phone the operator to connect them.

I printed out the census stubs for both Theodore and Henrietta, Frederick Walters and Theodore's obituaries, and the ad. It was proof that the people I had dreamt had existed once. I pasted them into my notebook, then picked up my phone and called Cedric.

"Want to go to Golden Gate Park?" I asked him.