Check in at the Pine Away Motel (ARC)

by Katarina Bivald

  On a shelf behind the couch, there is a small plastic figurine of the baby Jesus. It’s a cheap Christmas decoration, but Dad has had it out year-round for as long as I can remember. Next to the shelf is a portrait of Jesus wearing a crown of thorns, his face meek and downturned. The local artist who painted it has more religious zeal than talent, and it looks like Jesus is wearing a bird’s nest on his head.

  The sheriff turns resolutely toward Dad. Dad’s hands are clasped in his lap, and he seems defensive and confused before the sheriff even opens his mouth to speak. All his life, Dad has been obsessed with doing and saying the right thing, but nothing could have prepared him for a visit from the sheriff on an ordinary Sunday evening. He’s probably wondering what the neighbors will think.

  “Sir,” Sheriff Ed begins. “There’s no easy way for me to say this. I’m very sorry, but your daughter, Henny, died earlier this afternoon, in a traffic accident just outside the motel.”

  “The motel,” says Dad.

  Cheryl raises her hand to her mouth and says, “Oh, Lord.”

  “Yes,” says Dad as though that should have been his reaction.

  “If there’s anything I can do…” the sheriff continues.

  I pace back and forth across the living room floor. I shouldn’t be here. I should be back in the Redwood Cabin, with Michael.

  Strictly speaking, I should be at the reception desk to relieve MacKenzie from her shift. It’s several years since Dad’s old wall clock stopped, but I’m pretty sure I must be really late. MacKenzie has already worked all weekend because of me.

  “Henny was always such a good girl,” Dad says suddenly. “She always did as she was told. There wasn’t a child on the street as polite and well behaved as my Henny. It’s true. I’m not the only one who says so. You can ask anyone.”

  The sheriff’s eyes are drawn back to the baby Jesus. “Like I said, if there’s anything I can do, anything at all…”

  Dad looks helplessly from the sheriff to Cheryl and then back again. “I’m… You’ll have to forgive me, but I seem to have forgotten what to do.”

  “Sir?”

  “I’ve buried my parents and my wife and her mother. But I don’t seem to be able to remember what I do next.”

  “The funeral parlor will be able to help you with all that,” the sheriff reassures him. “I’m sure the state police will release the body shortly.”

  MacKenzie! I think. She’ll be able to fix this. I need to find her and explain what happened.

  “What…what does it look like? The body. Henny, I mean.”

  “She didn’t feel any pain,” says the sheriff.

  “She was always a nice kid,” says Dad. “Never caused any trouble.”

  * * *

  She didn’t feel any pain.

  Of all the idiotic things to say, I think as I walk quickly toward the motel. It’s definitely not true.

  I might not have felt anything as the truck slammed into me, but it definitely hurts now.

  MacKenzie isn’t at the reception desk. She isn’t in the restaurant. She isn’t in her room. I walk through the entire motel without registering anything else. Afterward, I can’t even remember who was in the reception area. All I could think was Nope, not here.

  We argued the last time we spoke, but now I have an intense longing for her. I want her to pat me on the shoulder in that encouraging and slightly dismissive way of hers. Dismissive of my problems, not my feelings. I’ll sort it out. It’ll be fine. It’s not so bad. Come on, Henny, are you going to let a minor detail like this stop you?

  MacKenzie has a joke for every occasion, so maybe she’ll be able to joke about this, too.

  Henny, have you been playing chicken with a truck?

  At least you can stop cleaning rooms at the motel now, Henny. Because you’ve gone to that big motel in the sky.

  You’ve gone to the place where Netflix can’t follow you.

  Once, when I had a hundred-and-four-degree fever and could barely even smile at her jokes, she pushed my hair back from my face. Gently, with her fingertips, a calming almost-movement. It sounds motherly, but MacKenzie really isn’t the motherly type. The fact she pushed back my hair was a gift. It was something unexpected, not something she does all the time.

  “How’re you doing, my friend?” she asked me. Cool fingertips against my forehead.

  I miss that now.

  That’s not what she said the last time we spoke, of course. On Saturday. Yesterday. It was the second time that weekend that I’d asked her to cover my shift at the reception desk, and now she knew why. I assume she had gone through the reservation system. She tried to make me see sense, but I refused.

  “It’s been fifteen years,” she said. “You’re not the same people you were. You don’t even know why he’s back, or how long he’s planning to stay. Last time he left without even saying goodbye.”

  “But you like Michael.”

  “That’s not the point. I don’t know him anymore. And neither do you.”

  “I don’t know why you’re so determined to stop me from being happy. What difference does it make if it eventually ends? He’s here now, MacKenzie. He came back.”

  “And what exactly do you think is going to happen? That he’ll spend one weekend here and then move back to a town he’s always hated? Or were you thinking that you could just have a nice weekend together and then stand here and watch him leave without having your heart broken again, like always? Do you really think you’re strong enough to handle a one-weekend stand?”

  “Can you cover my shift or not?” I asked.

  MacKenzie folded her arms.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll stay here at the desk. If that’s what you want.”

  “Henny…”

  And so I sat there, desperately unhappy and with nothing to do, while Michael, my Michael, was only five hundred yards away. But MacKenzie came back after half an hour and made a weary gesture with one hand. I snuck off immediately, before she had time to change her mind, pulling on my favorite jeans and my favorite blouse, the one with the red polka dots, and running over to the cabin as I tried to make my heart beat like normal.

  That was the last time I saw her.

  * * *

  I eventually find her car parked outside Timber Bar, the local dive where we always hang out. Darkness has fallen, and the streetlights are illuminating the deserted parking lot.

  I walk straight through the door without thinking about what I’m doing, then pause and blink in the gloom. The dark wooden tables are empty, and the room smells faintly of sweat and stale beer.

  Buddy and two of the other regulars are in their usual spots by the bar. All three look acutely uncomfortable and are staring straight down at their beers.

  Word of my death has already reached them. Catastrophe spreads fast in a small town.

  It’s about respect, too. Grief is raw and naked and revealing, so they show consideration by looking away. It’s like when our kindergarten teacher’s mother went crazy and started walking around town in her underwear. No one laughed. You looked away. You tried desperately not to see her shuffling down Main Street in her rabbit slippers and lace underwear—lace—while our teacher hurried after her with a jacket that she kept throwing off.

  MacKenzie is alone by the dartboard at the very back of the bar. She has a beer next to her, but she isn’t drinking. She is wearing one of those huge men’s shirts that she loves, a flannel one that has become silky smooth through years of wear. Even rolled up, the sleeves are too long for her. She keeps having to shake her arms to free her hands, an unconscious gesture so natural and familiar that, for a moment, it feels like everything is right again, everything is normal. I just need to buy a beer, and I can keep her company.

  But then I notice how tense she is. Like an animal frozen midflight: every muscle, every synapse, is utterly u
nder control. When she eventually throws the dart, it comes as a relief.

  It hits the board too hard and bounces back to the floor.

  MacKenzie doesn’t care. I’m not sure she even notices.

  She throws another dart.

  “I bought her a backpack when she was nine,” MacKenzie says.

  I don’t know who she’s talking to, but Buddy and the other regulars all jump.

  “Did you know that? It was the most pathetic backpack you could imagine. Ugly purple canvas. No Disney print, nothing. A real low-budget backpack.”

  I smile for the first time all evening. I remember it.

  “And backpacks were important back then. All the others got a new one at the start of the school year. Henny did, too, but I didn’t know that when I bought it.”

  The room is silent. It feels like everyone is trying to merge with the walls or become one with the bar’s dark counter. Not even Bruce Springsteen is singing. Buddy’s constant companion, an old CD player, is silent next to him.

  “I just wanted to give her a gift. Dumb, huh? But right as I was about to give it to her, I realized her dad had already bought her a new backpack. A big, fantastic one, with some kind of print on it, whatever was cool that year. I don’t remember exactly, Beauty and the Beast or The Little Mermaid or something. Anyway, there it was in the hallway, all shiny and new, and it made the backpack I’d bought look ridiculous. I’d already wrapped it up, so I couldn’t exactly pretend it was for myself.”

  She throws another dart. This one misses the board completely and burrows into the wall.

  I lean against the table, the one I usually sit at while she’s playing darts, right by the wall and out of her line of fire.

  “But do you know what the stupid woman did?” she says quietly, sounding almost confused. “She wore my pathetic backpack to school every day for years.”

  MacKenzie falls silent, as though she suddenly realizes that she’s standing there, talking, and doesn’t know why. When she picks up her beer, her hand is shaking.

  “MacKenzie…” I say, but she doesn’t react. No one does. They can’t hear me anymore.

  I walk over to her and place my hands on her shoulders. I want to shake her, force her to see me, to laugh again, to be the old, tough MacKenzie that I know so well.

  “I’ll fix this,” I say. “I swear. Somehow. It’ll be okay.”

  Then I turn away. I suddenly can’t bear to see her blank face.

  “I can’t be dead,” I say. “I’ve barely even started living.”

  * * *

  Buddy gives us a ride back to the motel. He’s six foot five and weighs at least 330 pounds, but he was still shaking a little when he refused to let MacKenzie drive herself home. “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk,” he mumbled as he stared down at his shoes.

  Buddy is a handyman in town and at the motel. Anything we can’t fix ourselves, we leave to him. He always knows a guy who can lend him the right tools. But he can’t fix MacKenzie. I can tell from his eyes that he is longing to put things right with a forklift truck or a steel saw, but there’s nothing he can do. MacKenzie doesn’t say a word the whole way home, and by the time Buddy drives away from the motel, he has broken out in a cold sweat.

  MacKenzie goes straight up to her room and slumps onto the bed, but she doesn’t fall asleep. I keep her company as she twists and turns.

  I’m sitting on the windowsill in a room that quickly becomes claustrophobic with anxiety. I abandoned her over the weekend; I can’t leave her now.

  I want to reach out and run my fingertips over her forehead. How’re you doing, my friend? Swap roles completely. As incomprehensible as me speaking and her not listening.

  My head feels like I’ve been battling with some kind of impossible puzzle for hours: If a train leaves… My brain feels swollen and overheated, as though it’s pressing against my skull. All I want is to switch it off and take a break. If a body is loaded into an ambulance going in one direction, and a soul grabs a ride in a police car going another…

  Eventually, I leave her there. My feet find their way in the darkness without any input from me. Suddenly, I’m just walking toward the Redwood Cabin. That’s where Michael is, and it’s where, only twelve hours earlier, I felt so unbelievably, intensely alive.

  I try to be brave, I really do, but it’s hard when you don’t even know what is going on. Everything seems worse in the mockingly familiar area around the motel. I can hear the wind rustling the silver birches, but I can’t feel it. I’m walking around in the middle of the night, wearing nothing but a thin blouse and jeans, and don’t feel the slightest bit cold.

  A silvery moon flashes on the dark surface of the creek. Beyond that is the complete darkness of what I know are the mountains.

  Michael is asleep; his breathing is deep and calm. The faint glow of the moon seeps in through the open curtains, across the bed. He is on his side, and all I can see are his left cheekbone, his eye, and his nostril. Half of his mouth, slightly open. He’s snoring, but he stops when I curl up against his back.

  I bury my face in the nape of his neck and feel absurdly grateful that I can still make out his scent.

  “You know, Michael,” I say. “The strangest thing happened to me today…”

  Chapter 3

  Once Upon a Time, Boise Was a Coastal Town

  In the beginning, we didn’t exist.

  Michael used to tell me about how everything began. Four and a half billion years ago, the earth was just a fiery ball of lava and smoke and darkness. Nothing could live here, he said, but he didn’t sound sad about that. In his world, rocks had always been most important.

  We were seventeen. Michael hadn’t gone off to college yet, and he hadn’t begun his nomadic existence as a field geologist. But he already knew everything there was to know about Oregon’s geology. Rocks were his first true love.

  And where were we? I asked.

  We?

  Oregon.

  There was no Oregon. In the beginning, we didn’t exist. Hundreds of millions of years ago, when all the land on earth was gathered together in one big supercontinent that stretched from pole to pole—Pangaea—there was only ocean where Oregon is today. One big ocean, Panthalassa, as big as all of our current oceans put together. Its waves rolled onto Idaho’s beaches. Boise would have been a coastal town.

  He only said Idaho and Boise to amuse me. He loved how stubbornly I tried to force our own insignificant geography onto the earth’s impressive history.

  Our enormous mountain ranges, from the Cascades to the West, to the Klamaths in southwestern Oregon, and the Blue Mountains over here by us in the northeast, were still just isolated volcanoes. Some of the land around here was still at the bottom of the ocean. If you walk around Pine Creek now, you can see traces of the volcanic islands we once were, surrounded by shallow bays and rivers and coral reefs.

  Were there trees? I asked, and Michael laughed. He might have loved rocks, but I wanted something living, something that changed over time.

  Rocks change, too, Henny.

  I loved listening to Michael talk about geology. I loved the double approach to time and space that he had; the way he could stand on the barren banks of Pine Creek, with the high mountains and tall pines behind us, and see coral reefs.

  I always wanted to hurry past the Permian-Triassic extinction event, past the dinosaurs and their extinction, to quickly skip over billions of years of history and get to our mountains and trees.

  Our?

  Pine Creek’s.

  I wanted to get to the mountains that had been worn down into sand to become the concrete that built the motel, the trees that had grown and been felled to become the cabins we built that summer.

  Chapter 4

  Flight HI1284 to Heaven: Delayed

  I’ve never been good in a crisis, and this whole dying t
hing is clearly no exception.

  I spend all night lying beside Michael, thinking about everything I should have done differently. I make a list, just as Michael would.

  Mistake number one: I shouldn’t have let my body be taken away without me. That was a rookie error. How am I supposed to hover above it in a hospital room, suddenly returning to it and opening my eyes?

  Although they might just have taken me straight to the morgue, and I really wouldn’t want to go there. I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to be in a hospital bed.

  At least, that’s what I remember from all those other side films. People in comas in hospital beds suddenly finding some way back to their rooms, and voilà! Everyone is happy and relieved. Some beautiful song starts playing, and then the credits roll. Like they did in Just Like Heaven.

  At the very least, I’ve never heard of anyone having a near-death experience and then coming back and talking about having been to the local bar.

  Speaking of near-death experiences. Mistake number two: I definitely should have started looking for the light immediately.

  Isn’t that what everyone who has been through something similar says? They die, they see the light, they come back and find themselves looking up at their nearest and dearests’ relieved faces. They don’t come back and say that they saw a weathered old motel sign where the e was missing from Vacancies.

  I’m not exactly longing for that light, but what if it’s a two-way system where you need to find the light in order to pull away from it and return to life?

  I’m looking for it now, beside Michael in bed, but I can’t escape the feeling that it might already be too late. Shouldn’t the light have been bright enough for me to notice it right away, even if I was in shock and distracted by all the police cars and sirens and the poor truck driver?

  I wrap my arms around myself and try to focus on the sound of Michael breathing.

  He doesn’t even know that I’m dead, I realize. He isn’t in touch with anyone in town, so unless MacKenzie called him as soon as she found out, I can’t see how he would know. And I don’t think she did. I don’t think she would have been able to say it out loud.